This one is a hard one for me. I’m someone who has always been better at pushing for quantity over quality. Even this series of Service Design Principles is all about quantity; there are 500 of them. 

But in many cases, if we want to move towards more sustainable services, it can be pretty smart to move from a focus on quantity to a focus on quality. 

There is a simple mathematical side to this: in many cases, producing less will need fewer resources. This is especially true when we realize that even intangible services have a very tangible impact (1). 

Action question

Where in your service or work are you focused at the moment on quantity over quality? What if for a week you tried to switch to a focus on quantity? What would need to change for making this happen?

The inspiration

This principle is inspired by a conversation with Samuel Huber. The specific part of our conversation which inspired this is the four movements of planet-centric design. Here a few excerpts from this conversation:

I've written, these four movements, and I called them movements for a reason because it's you have to, first, you actually have to move your practice from one way of operation to another one.

(...)

The second one is moving from quantity to quality. So we're obsessed with quantitative measures and quantitative ideas, like the cake that's always getting bigger. But the thing is, we can also just make the cake tastier, right?

The single piece, why does it have to get bigger? So really understanding the quality instead of more customers, can we have deeper relationships with customers is an example.

Footnotes

(1) 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.

Material footprints - details by final use of products, Eurostat (ESTAT)

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.