A decade ago there was this idea, that if we could move people from products to services, that would make things a lot more sustainable. Today, a lot of things have become services. But the world isn’t really much more sustainable.

As service owners, creators or workers, we sometimes thing that we’re not really in the problem. We’re not producing mass market shit like fast fashion clothes that get put in a trash as soon as they are worn once. We’re dentists, accountants, office workers. What we create is intangible. So it can’t break the planet, right? Sad news. Services also have a negative impact on the environnement.

Karin Fink made me aware of a publication by the European Environment Agency called « From data to decisions: material footprints in European policy making ». In this report, you can find a graph that clearly shows that even services have a material footprint on the environment.

From what I understand, that report seems to show that Services have a worth material footprint than clothing and footwear, with 11,3% of shares of consumption domain in the EU material footprint compared to 1,3%.

Ness Wright in her course Designing Sustainable Services, shows the many place services can have a negative impact on the climate crisis. She lists (1):

1. Where our service is delivered: Building and estates

2. The physical movement of things in services: Transport

3. The processes that run our services: Data and digital processes

4. The physical material of our services: Physical good and devices

5. The supply chain of our service: Suppliers and procurement

6. The behavior within our services: User and staff behaviour

Footnote

(1) This list comes for a preview of Ness’s courses that she shared on Linkedin

Action question

Do you still think your service doesn’t hurt the planet? Who could you ask to show you where your service sucks for the planet?

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

In some countries, people use the word “Risk reduction” to explain what Service Design is all about. With the fact that the climate will go crazy working on risk reduction is definitely something we as service owners, workers or creators need to think about.

Adaptation Scotland is helping businesses do that in the country of Nessy. They have on their website a “SME Climate Resilience Checklist” (1) which helps companies think about how they’ll handle floods, storms, droughts, heatwaves and all the shit that will hit the fan (2).

For example it asks: as a service, what can you do to protect staff members and customers during extreme weather? Or how might your service be impacted by climate change and more extreme weather?

Action question

When could you block time in the next month to go through a checklist to better prepare yourself and your service for extreme weather events? Who would be the people to invite to such a session? What questions do you want to ask? Maybe some from the SME Climate Resilience Checklist?

Footnotes

(1) For example their document "Climate Resilience Prompts for Business Advisors” has good questions around Products and Services, People, Premises, Processes and Place that you can ask yourself.

(2) Thanks to Ness Wright, a Service Design nerd and climate expert you definitely should follow, for sharing about that work done by great Scottish companies.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

You can do good with your money, without using your money. I know that sounds strange. But when you have your money in a bank account, your bank basically lends it to others. And depending on your bank, that money can go to help people pump out more petrol out of the ground, or fund startups and companies that work on doing good.

So changing bank (1), or credit card (2), or even pension fund can make your money work for things that you care more about.

Action question

Where is your personal or company money sitting? How can you check if the companies handling your money are doing it in a way that fits your values? Who within your company could you nudge to make a change about pensions or bank accounts?

Footnotes

(1) There is a website called bank.green that helps you see if your bank is climate responsible, meaning it doesn’t finance fossil fuels, finances low-carbon technologies, etc. Thanks to Nick Lewis and his website One small step for Earth for helping me find this nice resource

(2) For example, in a few countries around the world, the WWF has partnered with credit card companies so that each time you make a payment a part of the commission instead of going to the bank goes to the WWF.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

We can’t be perfect. But we all try. There are things we do, like taking an airplane to visit relatives far away, that we can’t really do in other ways. For things like that, we don’t have to just say: shit happens, but even then we still can do something.

For example we can offset the carbon use we can avoid for now (1). So for a plane travel that pollutes by putting some carbon shit in the air, we can give money to people who will plant trees, do research, that will in some way eat that carbon back over time.

For this, I use the service Wren. It’s a tool that lets you get a sense of your carbon footprint, gives you tips on how to reduce it, and a way to fund climate solutions (2) for the parts you don’t know yet how to fix yourself.

Action question

What are the things you can’t do well according to your values today? How can you find alternative ways to at least start doing something in the direction of your values?

Footnote

(1) This doesn’t mean because we can offset it, it’s a free buffet. It’s more like a last resort band aid. Nobody likes to have a fucking band aid on his face. But sometimes you don’t have a choice. That’s what carbon offset are there for.

(2) I’ve started using the service in April 2022, and from there to today (August 2025) I’ve offset 1.5 tonnes of CO2 per month which is a total of 62.8 tonnes which they say is like avoiding 65,3 flights from Los Angeles to Paris or 2 886 pine trees absorbing CO2 for a year.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

One thing that made Google pretty famous and exciting back in the days, was there idea of a 20% time of your job that you could use freely to explore something that you were passionate about. Apparently, that’s how Google News or Google Translate started. (1)

What if we took this idea, but instead of using the time for something we’re passionate about, we would use that time to serve others (2).

In the coding community, there is a thing called Five for the Future. It’s a commitment that some website developers take to give back 5% of their time or resources for the development of Wordpress, one of the main tools they use.

Giving the time, during work hours, and even expecting it, to employees to do good outside of the organization is a nice to support sustainability programs, social causes, etc. Plus, it makes you a pretty interesting employer.

Action question

How can you give time to your team members during the year to do some good outside of the organization? What’s the minimum you expect?

Footnotes

(1) I thought Gmail was on that list, but according to Coby Skonord, Paul Buchheit’s one of the guys behind it started is within his regular role. I know I break some trivia myths here.

(2) That’s what the HR guys call a VTO policy or Volunteer Time Off

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

Thinking long term is one of the thing that makes you take decisions that don’t suck for society and the world in general. But it’s kind of hard to remember to do it.

For that, Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and one of the creators of Wordpress (1) has a tip: add decades in your dashboards and performance tools.

For example in one of the dashboards that the company uses, it shows what’s happening within the company in the last 24 hours, the last year and… the last decade!

As Matt said it “every time someone [looks] at one of these stats pages (…) they [are] reminded that we’re building for the long term”.

Action question

Where in your tools and HR processes could you add a long term view as a way to measure the impact and work done? What time-frame would be relevant for you: a decade, more?

Footnote

(1) You know, the tool that runs most of the websites on the internet.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

Imagine this. You have a huge house that’s old and really needs to be repaired. Before you get started, you make a bit of budget with different approach. You look what would it cost, to just rip it off the ground and start from scratch versus doing some serious repairs and remodeling. The end result: bringing it all down costs way less.

Way less… money! But in terms of energy use and trash created, it’s definitely to less.

This is the typical issue that architects have today when they want to push for re-use of existing spaces. It just makes no sense in the budget. Because the budget just looks at money.

But what if, in the budget we would also have a “price-tag” for the energy use, the trash generated?

Action question

Where in your service or projects can you add in the cost calculation other elements that just money? Which elements would make sense to be included? Would it be useful to translate all of that into one number?

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

When friends tell me: “Hey would you like to travel with me in the car with your son, so you don’t have to take the train?”, my answer is always: “Hell no!”. But not because of what you think.

It’s not that I’m a great environnementalist. It’s because my son fucking hates it! He hates being strapped in a car without being able to move, play, jump.

And that’s the fault of the Swiss Rail company. In Switzerland many trains have family-wagons. Some of them have games on the tables, some have full playgrounds in them with a slide, places to hide. And some are themed around Globi (1) with lots of children books.

The alternative to the car is just better for my son: it’s way more fun.

The same happens to me with a restaurant chain called Tibits. I love to get there, because it’s a buffet and every thing is super tasty. But truely tasty, like in everything has a total different flavour and rich profile! And that comes from someone who for years just loved burgers and pasta! It’s one of my favorite restaurants.

And it so happens that it’s a vegan restaurant.

It’s not better because it’s vegan to me (even if that’s pretty nice) but it’s better just because the buffet is so tasty!

Action question

What are parts of your service, that are ethically wonderful? How can you make them better outside of the ethical element?

Footnote

(1) a sort of Swiss Mickey Mouse figure, but it’s a parrot.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

My wife is a pastor in an organization where they like to move pastors around. Just like ambassadors. She gets assigned to a location, and we all move there. It’s pretty nice, we get to see many places. When you live like that you quickly learn to set some limits on your physical stuff. I’ve decided to have just one big box for souvenirs. Once it’s full, I have to take something out of it. Because otherwise, I’ll have to move that thing, around and around.

Strangely, we live a world where there are no limits: unlimited music, unlimited files in your cloud, unlimited growth and scaling of businesses.

I feel that sometimes, just like with my souvenir box, it makes sense to set a limit. It could be: “We won’t serve more than X customers”. Or “We won’t have more than X giga of hard disk space”. Or “we won’t run more than X projects within the company”.

Those limits, are nice, because they force us to think about what we’re saving, who we’re serving, how much is humanely mangeable, etc.

Action question

For which aspect of your service or the way you work would it helpful to set limits?

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

Many therapists and doctors in Switzerland prescribe to patients… a walk in nature. Not pills. A walk in nature.

The doctor of a a good friend of mine, who was going through the start of depression, prescribed to my friend… cooking. Cooking is something that brings a sense of calm to that person. And because the doctor said it, it didn’t feel like doing something that was not necessary, but something to get well prescribed by some serious person.

In coaching sessions with students, I have prescribed to students to take a break where they are not allowed to work on their project. (1)

As service creators, service worker or owners, we are sometimes seen as authority or serious figures. And sometimes it’s our role to use that little authority or influence we have to remind people to be… people. Not machines.

Action question

Where in your organization or service could you use your influence to prescribe actions that make people more human?

Footnotes

(1) Speaking with other coaches and psychologists I’ve often heard they prescribe similar things. This was made even clearer to me in the Thesis of Tetyana Kalyuzhna who wondered why nature walks are so much prescribed in Switzerland.