The Blueprint #12
This week we talk about the systemic roadblocks to circularity and the way solutions designed are "feel good patches" offsetting accountability rather than tackling issues.
What’s The Blueprint About?
The Blueprint is a newsletter exploring service design topics in relation with the planetary crisis and vice-versa, under 10 minutes.
If you have any questions, comments or recommendation, you can contact me at hello@sidneydebaque.com. In the meantime, bonne lecture!
Do we design to solve, or simply to offset?
In the last edition I wrote about fostering a circular economy through service design. However, two recent news demonstrate a bleak reality: the solutions we design and the way they’re designed are more offsetting responsibility and costs, rather than actually fostering circularity in the economy.
First, an article published in The Conversation about the way second hand markets and apps fuel clothing production, thus waste. The authors identify 2 main reasons to this. One comes from the customer side, whom having given or sold their clothes, feel relieved from guilt and can crack-on with buying something new, while only 10% to 20% of donation are suitable for sale. The second from businesses and charities themselves under-pressure to be more profitable. The formers are developing their own second hand shops and offer, in an effort to keep original buyers from coming again. On the other hand, charities are reported to be using tactics taken from for-profits organisations to increase sales to deliver against profitability objectives.
The second article explores a similar pattern, but for recycling. In an article for Salon, Matthew Rozsa covers a report published by the Center For Climate Integrity denouncing the recycling fallacy pushed by Big Oil & the wider plastic industry. Worldwide, 9% of the plastic wasted has been recycled in 2019, that number falls to 4% in the US. The reason for that? It’s expensive. At least more than burning it or leaving it in landfills. As a result, plastic is being shipped to countries to be disposed of, offsetting the pollution, and the costs that come with it, to the Global South.
And finally, an article from The Hill, covering a new publication stating that the best way so far to avoid drinking micro-plastic would be to boil tap water before drinking. The three compounds studied, polystyrene, polypropylene, and polyethylene do not fully disappear, ever. They breakdown into nano-plastics, the size of viruses, the perfect size to enter the organism and wreak havoc by killing red-blood cells for instance.
From a planetary crisis & service design point of view:
Reading those news brought me back to high-school’s chemistry lessons where we learned about Lavoisier’s famous maxim: “in nature nothing is creating, nothing is lost, everything changes”. We live in a closed loop system, yet we do not design for the end of the lifecycle. Which begs the question, what problems are we actually solving when we design solutions?
Last year Amy Westervelt published a post exploring why accountability must be the first climate solution. Looking at the way the services and systems around us are designed, I couldn’t agree more. It seems one of the key objectives is to offset costs and responsibility. As a result, services are scoped and designed as such, treating symptoms as an opportunity to leverage, without considering the implications that’ll be passed-onto another actor.
The switch to user centred design hasn’t revolutionised design as often claimed, it simply shifted the focus from back-end optimisation at the expense of users, to front-end optimisation at the expense of back-end (stretching supply chain, delivery chain, workers, etc.) Instead of companies offsetting shortfalls onto users by having them to adapt to processes, processes are now bending to users who are often studied only as customers. This however is only at a vertical level, from front-end to back-end.
We need to consider a second level, a horizontal one, to understand the processes throughout the journey or the lifecycle, and the ways costs and responsibilities are thus offset. This requires expanding the scope to understand the bigger picture and how the decisions we take at our level go on to impact upstream activities and downstream ones. This comes back to the business model again: Benefits are privatised, costs are shared if not offset.
To me, a way to approach that is to reframe design as a practice anchored on facilitation instead of one based on creation. In a medium post I published 2 years ago, I explain that the purpose of design is to make sure that all stakeholders benefit from collaborating together, or at least do not leave them worst off. Instead of handing over hot potatoes to other stakeholders, we can design services, products and general situations that we all mutually benefit from. Through collaboration and system thinking, we can foster accountability towards one another and create services that are each responsible for the success of others, so at scale the failure of one (to recycle for instance), is accounted as the failure of all.
Other noteworthy news:
[Podcast] Gaël Duez has Sylvie Daumal and Thorsten Jonas to talk about systemic design as a toolbox to tap into for tools and concepts to foster sustainable design.
→ Listen to episode 32
[Landfills] Organic waste that could have been composted or used to feed livestock is landing in landfills, leading to massive methane emissions, one of the most potent greenhouse gases in the short term.
→ Read on The Guardian
[AI] A new report from Climate Action Against Disinformation explores the fallacy of AI as a climate solution. Two key elements to sustain this claim: the impact of AI itself, which requires enormous amount of energy to be trained and to operate, and the potential use of the technology to spread misinformation.
→ Read on The Guardian
[Research] Climate doomerism is great if you want to get shares on social media but won’t get the needle moving. You want to engage people into action? The best approach is to talk about consensus, morality, and get people to “write a letter to future generations to talk about their own actions”.
→ Read more on The Power Of Us
I’m a freelance service designer who helps public and private organisations intervene to mitigate the impact of the planetary crisis on humans and vice-versa.
You can contact me about for questions, comments or consulting at hello@sidneydebaque.com