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.

Since my parents produce their own electricity with solar panels they started to really feel and see how much electricity they use. It changed tiny things like using the washing machine only on sunny days.

The same happens for many other things that we do ourselves. Once you do backups yourself, instead of using a cloud tool, you notice how much stuff you are hoarding. As you don’t want to buy another hard disk, you just delete what you don’t need anymore (1).

Action question

Which parts of your service or work could you do yourself to get a better sense of how much resources it really uses?

Footnotes

(1) Or as I showed in another principle Use on device tools using on device AI made me really see how much AI uses as I could see it in my macbook battery and feel the heat under my fingers.

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.

Computers really rock. Yes I’m a nerd, and I love my computer. One thing has changed from when I started using computers. Back in the days, my god I feel old when writing this, your tools would be on your computer. Now there are in “the cloud”. That comes with a lot of nice things. Everything is backed up. You don’t have to think about your disk space. Nice.

But it also comes with it’s issues: you don’t know what electricity is used to run that cloud, you tend to put much more on it than what you did before (that’s what happens with “unlimited” space), and it seems that in general it’s less energy efficient.

That’s why, when it comes to AI, I really like when it’s possible to use these tools locally on my machine (1). I know what energy it uses. I even see how much energy it really uses because I see how it drains, or not the battery of my laptop (or even if it goes hot under my fingers).

Action question

Which of your tools or files really need to be in a cloud? Which one could you have on your machine or just in a hard-drive?

Footnotes

(1) A simple way to do that is to use an app called Ollama that let's you install and use AI models on your device.

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.

Boy scouts have that lovely idea of doing a good deed per day. As an ex boy scout it’s something that I really want to bring back in my life.

For a few months I did this with a habit of tacking out a piece of trash out of the floor per day. Suddenly in 150 days I took out 3542 pieces of trash in trash bins that would have otherwise ended up in the mouth of baby, in the belly of an animal or in the water.

Such ideas are even used by service providers. BVB, the local transportation company of Basel, a city in Switzerland, had for a time a thing called Karma Rider which would motivate people to do good deeds in public transports.

Action question

What would be a daily good deed you could implement in your personal or work life? How can you track and celebrate the good deeds to make it a true routine?

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.

I came to a client to facilitate a workshop. Something pretty businessy. But before we got started, I started with a bit of a mindfulness guided practice. Why?

Research tends to show that people have better ideas when they first had a bit of a meditation session before coming up with new ideas.

But more importantly from a personal experience, doing something like meditation just calm you the fuck down! It makes you jump of your getting shit done tunnel vision and grind mode, and get’s back into a “I’m a fucking human mode”.

Back when I worked for a church, there was this tradition to either start or end a meeting with some prayer time. A lot of the time, this create a bit of zoom out moment, where you would come out of the usual problem and then see things from a bit more far away. (1)

Action question

What practices, like meditation, mindfulness, yoga, spirituality, could you bring in your workplace or even service to help people be humans and not robots?

Footnotes

(1) Having more distance with what you do and see the wider implications of your work and what’s really important is definitely something we need more of if we want to make our services nicer for humans and 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.

As I’m someone who moves from city to city, each time I get in a new city, I switch the contract of our flat to the more sustainable energy package. It’s a few clicks and then it’s done and I don’t have to think about it again.

You can do the same for the website hosting provider you choose (1) and ask your partners and suppliers if they could do the same on their side.

Action question

Which services do you use that use energy? Ask them if you can switch to a renewable plan.

Footnotes

(1) If you’re in Switzerland a company that is pretty nice for that is infomaniak

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.

Privacy, sustainability, diversity, all of these things can be pretty fucking hard. And when something is hard and we don’t get it all, it’s kind of nice to ask someone else, or a tool to show us what would be the most important things to change. That’s what an audit is for.

When it comes to making services nicer for humans and the planet, we have a good sense for the human side. Just using our service ourselves and speaking with people who use does already a lot. But for privacy, sustainability and all these words that end in y, we can use some extra help.

That could be an energy audit to see where in our buildings we need to change a few things to use or lose less energy. It can be a website audit, to see how we could reduce the amount of code to make websites load faster and use less energy. Or it could be a climate risk audit, to see what parts of our service would get kicked in the nuts when the weather and climate go nuts.

Action question

What aspect of the ethical sides of your service is overwhelming you? Who could you ask or what tools could you use to get an audit that makes the issues and things you can do clearer?

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.

I was in holidays with my son and wife. As usual we like to go visit the local natural history museums. Because that’s the place where my son can see some dinosaurs! This time we were in Aarau, Switzerland. There at the Naturama (1) there was of course some nice big animals. But there was also a lovely exhibition called “Cool Down Aarau”. In it urban planners and other nerds explained how we can change or cities to better cope with higher temperatures, floods and all the shit that will hit the fan in the future.

One of the recommendations that stayed with me was the idea to bring back more greenery and grass. Be it in little holes in the concrete of a parking lot. Or on a roof. Or trees next to roads. Or just as little park within the city.

This additional greenery does a lot of good stuff: it reduces heat, avoid that the rain directly creates floods, looks nicer, just brings a bit of nature back in our cities and apparently can even save lives (2).

Action question

Where in your buildings and service could add more greenery?

Footnotes

(1) The local natural history museum

(2) That’s at least according to a study reported by the World Economic Forum and published by The Lancet that says that “Planting more trees in European cities could reduce heat deaths by 40% by providing shade for people, pavements and buildings”.

Other than that, this reminds me of the principle I wrote a few years ago: “Put some stupid plants to make your workplace better” that showed that having plants indoor reduces fatigue and improves productivity.

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.

I grew up in a Christian context. There is one story of my childhood that to this day impresses me. A Christian community mobilised to write to a prison. There a pastor was emprisonned because of his faith. The prison and the state got so many letters that they felt public pressure. This wasn’t a guy to let die. The stories says because of the letters he got free.

To this day, I’m not totally sure if this was a myth or a true story, remember I was a kid.

But years letter, reading the book “The Future we Choose” (1) this same idea of writing to the ones in power to show what you care about came back in the end summary with the top recommendations of what to do.

We can do the same within the organizations we work in. If we care about an important issue, like privacy, diversity, sustainability, we can write to our bosses. From time to time, we can remind them what feels important to us.

Action question

For what topic would it makes sense to write to the higher ups to let them know what’s important to you? Who are the others colleagues you could bring on to send reminders about that issue?

Footnotes

(1) A book on what to do for a better future with the climate crisis, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac who are two lovely humans that did the negotiations for the United Nations during the Paris Agreement of 2015.

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.