The Blueprint #17
This week I talk about my retro of the London Climate Action Week & what I'm taking forward from the couple of events I attended. + Dutch rail company NS, Google rising emissions, & UK's agriculture.
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!
Looking back at London’s Climate Action Week
A couple weeks back I attended a few events during the London Climate Action Week. Thought it’d be interesting to retro a bit what I learned there. I didn’t go to as many events as I would have liked unfortunately, but the couple I went to were especially interesting. Here are the events I managed to attend:
Monday:
“How will the environmental crises affect people in poverty and experiencing health inequalities in the UK?” – By New Philanthropic Capital – recording is here
ReLondon’s “It’s the (circular) economy, stupid" - Why circularity is good for the economy, not just the planet” – recording is here
Tuesday:
“The Importance of Tackling Racism in a Climate Crisis (for White People)” – By Sustaining All Life, a Co-counselling workshop about racism in Global North countries and its relation to the climate crisis.
Wednesday:
Carbon Trust’s “Navigating the Net Zero transition for cities and regions” – A webinar about place-based interventions, showcasing the benefits, impacts and examples of addressing Net Zero transition through local policies and activities, rather than blanket national and international ones. recording is here
Thursday:
“How to Become a Regenerative Business” – A workshop by The C Collective as a taster of their program to support organisations transition to a regenerative model.
All very different events topic wise, but all fall in either of the following categories:
Structural issues driving planetary crisis needing to be addressed;
Current manifestations of the planetary crisis to address;
Potential approaches and solutions to tackle or adapt to the planetary crisis;
To me these 3 categories are important to understand the scope of the issue, beyond green innovation and sustainability as usual. The first two points look at the problem, one from its root cause, the other at the consequences. The third is about solutions, offering alternative approaches to address the root case through radical change or compensate symptoms through adaptation.
I wish I could have attended more, so if you happen to have attended other events and want to discuss, let’s have a chat!
From a planetary crisis & service design point of view
Things I want to take forward from these few events I attended:
There are multiple points made during these events that I think are important to take forward if we want to adapt and mitigate the planetary crisis. I’ll start from the most structural ones and walk my way down to the most practical of them.
Not new, but reinforcing it, the climate crisis is only the symptom of a deeper issue. It goes along with racism, colonialism, and therefore extractivism, as well as I’ve covered a few editions back, offsetting (going hand in hand with extractivism). Therefore, designing for sustainable ways of living isn’t only about using new tools and eventually new design processes, but it’s about changing mindsets and objectives in the very first place, therefore changing the way we approach problems. Some tools are still useful (such a design blueprint), but the way we use those changes.
Talking about changing approach then, Wednesday’s Carbon Trust webinar is great to start thinking about approaching problems differently. It invites us to think of more localised scope of actions, instead of national blanket solutions that do not account for local specificities. The data that struck me during the webinar (±24min) comes from an Innovate UK/PwC research from 2022 about the different return on investment from a national Net Zero approach compared to a place based one. They estimated that a local approach could save £137bn in investment, while generating an additional £431bn in energy savings and wider social benefits. This comes from better community engagement, building local job markets, improving local air quality, among others.
This ties in with the point above. Not surprisingly, one efficient approach to reach Net Zero is to move away from a standardised global model in lieu of a locally relevant one. This is a direct example of the way changing mindset and approach leads to different outcomes.So, after changing the mindset, and our approach, we move into more tactical applications. ReLondon’s Circularity webinar and C Collective’s Regeneration workshop offer glimpses at different operating models for society, economy and therefore organisations. The former focuses on activities catered by ReLondon and their partners to foster circularity within London organisations. The later offered more hands-on approaches to think about ways to scope and transition towards regeneration as an organisation.
Both are interesting concepts, I’ve written about circular service design to reduce our impact on the planet a couple months back, but not yet about regenerative design. The former being about reducing the usage of raw material by ensuring we maintain them in the loop as much as possible, while regenerative design is about moving into an active state of informing decisions to enable positive impact on the planet, so living more in a mutually positive symbiosis.
These three points are important one to frame a practice that foster sustainable ways of living and services. We can start with practical change in the operating models we use, looking at designing circular systems, and eventually regenerative ones, but ultimately throughout our practice we need to also change the way we approach problem solving, from blanket solutions to locally relevant ones, and most importantly we need to change foundational mindsets anchored in colonialism so we do not displace problems to other locations, such as exporting waste we can’t recycle, nor we displace them in the future.
Other noteworthy news:
[Case Study / Koos] Service design consultancy Koos has published a case study on their project with the Dutch Railway (NS) about the transition from a train company to a mobility service. The case study focuses on Journey Management, a practice of organising an organisation around the different journeys it serves (or not), rather than the technical capabilities. It helps to bring a more consistent view of the user throughout the organisation, a key pillar in building a more encompassing and consistent end to end user experience.
→ Read on Koos' website
[AI / Emissions] Google has reported an increase in emissions as the company is scaling its AI capabilities. Over the past 5 years, its Greenhouse Gas Emissions have climbed 48%. AI is far from being dematerialised, it requires loads of data to be trained on, and to operate on a regular basis. This data is stored on data centre, which require energy to be turned on. Some companies are seemingly using “AI usage” as part of their service and product portfolio KPI, turning a potential solution into an objective. This type of practice is customary biasing meaningful progress through the lens of technical solution.
→ Read on The Guardian
[Local Farming] Extreme weather and Brexit deregulation are affecting potato farming in the U.K. This impacts supply, price, and of course farmers. 49% of horticulture companies surveyed by Riverford fear imminently being out of business. Down the line, this will require customers to either adapt their diet, or have companies to source elsewhere, negatively impacting the climate by increasing supply chain length.
→ Read on the London Economic
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