The Blueprint #13
This week I follow up on last edition to explore the potential impacts on design if the practices of offsetting waste, costs and responsibility were to be hampered by new regulations and lawsuits.
What’s The Blueprint About?
The Blueprint is a newsletter exploring service design topics in light of 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!
Towards the end of design to offset ?
Last edition I talked about the way we design to offset, and until this is tackled, circularity will just be a feel-good term for offsetting. Couple of news from recent days are signalling a pushback towards the practice of offsetting responsibility and costs onto others:
At the company scale first: A group of lawyers published an opinion in which they state that directors could be liable for failing to address the impacts and dependencies of a business on nature leading to financial loss by the company. Similar conclusions have been drawn by similar initiatives in Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines.
At the scale of the U.K., Gina Miller, among others, is calling for damaging the environment to be made a criminal offence. Such crime would directly make directors liable for harming the environment as well as responsible for the clean-up. Similarly, DEFRA is reported to be working to axe the cap on penalties the Environment Agency is allowed to issue. The agency has also just launched a whistleblowing portal amid a crackdown on water pollution.
At the continental scale now, France, Denmark and Sweden are supporting a proposal to ban exports of second-hand textile outside of Europe. The EU exports 1.4 million metric tons of used textiles every year, most of it to Africa and Asia, some of it helping local economy (we’ll come back to that later), but also overflows local waste management systems, ending up polluting local nature.
And finally, at the international scale, with campaigners calling for the International Criminal Court to recognise ecocide as a crime. The goal is to review the interpretation of the Rome treaty in regard to harm done to nature in war-time so it’s applied to peace times too.
From a planetary crisis & service design point of view:
Unfortunately, recent usages of design have been focused on designing solutions to offset problems rather than solving them. Biased scopes and objectives result in “unattended consequences”, these consequences will now have to be accounted for and the processes and services we design will have to be designed accordingly.
Out of sight out of mind no more?
One of the first positive impact in these initiatives are the reduction of the retroaction loop. Lengthy supply chain and waste management chain are perfect to bury responsibility from public scrutiny and regulations. However, if Europe is to ban second-hand textile exportations, the stress on waste management systems and pollutions will be a lot closer to home, therefore tangible for people to grasp.
The second positive impact is the unified legal system to prosecute polluters. While regulations differ from a country to another, the EU is designed to build a common ground for regulations to be applied. While there are limits to it, it’d be easier to sue organisations for their failure to prevent pollutions in the first place.
Which brings me back to the impact on local economy in countries receiving textile waste. As mentioned, this system also provides some lifeline for local communities. Betterman Simidi, Clean Up Kenya Founder and Patron, would have preferred an Extended Producer Responsibility to not curb the local economy around second hand textile management, but ensures producers are liable for their responsibility in driving the waste and pollution crisis.
How it’d change the way we design: WCAG & ADA vs A11Y
I think a good way to understand the impact of such signals on the services we design, and the way we design them, is to use an analogous example about how such conversations unfolded to improve accessibility.
As explained in this thread, what is compliant isn’t always accessible, not inclusive. On one hand, WCAG and ADA are standards to use to get project approved, and that people can use to file complaints against companies providing a product or a service that they find not accessible. On the other hand, A11Y is a set of best practices, patterns, and community knowledge to design inclusive services and products. The former focuses on the output and its compliance, the latter focuses on the approach to design and the questions we need to answer to reduce the barriers in using a service or product.
I can see a similar setting happening with sustainability, in which legal requirements will influence design considerations, decisions and outputs, but that’ll might fail to consider outcomes and be too binary, such as negatively impacting local economies (but that’d also stop some form of green colonialism).
No solution without a fair transition
While legislations are useful for short term results (and political wins), they can deliver weaker results and not be sustainable in time. Recent de-regulation of EU farming laws show that without proper support and transition plan, policies won’t hold through the transition period and could also cause sever damages to the people impacted at the same time, as highlighted by the case of EU exports ban on local African economy.
We therefore need to reframe our approach to design. I’ve already mentioned that to me design is about facilitation, not creation. Similarly, we need to facilitate the transition to “new normals”. Just like we’re learning that services do not happen out of thin air, we need to expend the design mindset and methods we use to facilitate decisions:
Tapping into systemic design:
Maybe the most obvious and most popular at the moment, systemic design provides tools and methods to understand how the things we design are intertwined one with another. Understanding dependencies is crucial to frame problems and assess the consequences of decisions.
When we talk about offsetting for instance, using a systemic approach is useful to understand from whom we’re offsetting, and to whom. Albert Heijn for instance has trialled a carbon price a few years back, to factor the carbon footprint in the retail price of a product. While this is great to highlight how some costs are offsets onto the planet, the initiative itself offsets the industrial responsibility onto the customers.Tapping into transition design:
Transition design is about understanding From What, To What, and designing a set of solutions to support this transition in a way that the transition to a new paradigm is itself sustainable. This requires bringing onboard the different stakeholders identified through the system. Indeed, currently people and organisations design strategies to adapt the best to the situation they find themselves in.
As the situation changes, for instance by stopping EU second hand textile exports, actors will find themselves in a totally different situation they’ve adapted to by gearing their businesses, services, and therefore local economy.
We can’t do the same thing and expect different results, as the saying goes. Interaction, Product, Service, Business, Organisational Design practices need to change themselves for the results to change. We’re likely to see new regulations and business requirements impacting the things we need to consider as part of the design activity. But ultimately that’d just offsetting the responsibility onto regulations. To really solve the problems and having an edge over competition, we need to change how we design. We need design that takes responsibility and design that delves into complex problems and conversations. If we offset responsibility ourselves, so will the solutions we design.
Other noteworthy news:
[Podcast] BBC Radio 4 Analysis’ team has produced a great 30 minutes report on the relationship people have with cars in England, the social and political history around it, and why today’s initiatives to reduce their presence in our society can be so contentious.
→ Listen on BBC Sounds (28min)
[EVs] As I recently talked about in this newsletter, reducing our impact on the planet isn’t only a question of new technology and products, but also a behavioural and therefore service one. This article about the lack of consideration female EV drivers needs in the electric infrastructure is a prime example of this.
→ Read on Electrify News
[Recycling Infrastructure] Not that I wanted to focus this week on designing for compliance, but only 10% of vape retailers and producers complying with vapes recycling requirements.
→ Read on Business green
[Cost of Heatwave] The Committee for Sydney has released a report on the cost of heatwaves on the city; from health threats, to business disruptions, to impact on food productions.
→ Access PDF
[Adaptation effectiveness] Just like research happening later in the process has a lower ROI, climate adaptation strategies become less effectives as the climate warm.
→ Read on Carbon Brief
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