Here are some of our favourite tools and resources to help with considering the planet as a stakeholder in service design.
Understanding our role and approach should be as service designers in tackling climate and ecological crisis isn’t always straightforward.
A lot of projects or services we work on, don’t seem directly connected with, or impacting the environment (health or care services, local authorities services, government digital services, banking, etc.), but when we scratch the surface we can make interventions that have a big ripple effect by changing an organisation’s operation, culture, or simply changing a feature on the digital service.
The NN group describes Service Design as “the activity of planning and organising a business’s resources (people, props, and processes) in order to (1) directly improve the employee’s experience, and (2) indirectly, the customer’s experience.”
Service design, through the variety of touch points it impacts, and the organisational and user-centred design practices it encompasses, provides many opportunities to transform organisations and influence stakeholders and user’s behaviours towards planet-centred ones.
Aside from making small changes to make our day-to-day work “low carbon”, service designers can sustainable solutions or approaches become more widely adopted by making them accessible, desirable, viable, but also by facilitating, convening, and aligning stakeholders around a vision for change.
– Aurelie Lionet, from Futurice and behind the Design for Life toolkit
Join efforts and thinking with other designers will help you think through how you may adapt your practice, identify opportunities for interventions through the work or projects you focus on, and also put pressure on your organisation to prioritise this.
At Snook our Thriving planet working group meet on a weekly basis to share inspirations and learnings around the area, and discuss actions and projects to push our mission area.
When framing or planning a project’s approach or proposal, make sure that you factor in enough time for your team (and client/stakeholders) to step back and reflect on your wider impact on people and planet. This could be at the start when framing the vision for the service, scoping the project, when planning a roadmap, considering and testing options, or when introducing a new feature.
For example by: