I did a bit of math to figure out how much more resources me doing videos instead of written articles has. The short answer, a lot (1). 

But that answer frustrated me. I had fun doing these videos. And I felt people resonated well with them because they were pretty good at expressing the emotions and the human side behind the words.

I was blocked because I felt it was a choice between having a way of communication with lots of emotions (video), and one that was dry (text). 

But then I started playing with the constraint and asked myself: how can I get the same level of emotion and visual richness but not in video? 

That’s when for social media work I started to playing with tiny visual sliders of 3-5 images. I was able to have the same type of visual craft alongside the words, but with way less resources needed to send that message out (2).

Action question

What part of the world of sustainability makes you feel blocked? How could you turn it into a creative constraint?

Footnotes

(1) If you want to read more details about it, here you can find the blog article I wrote about this calculation: Daniele Catalanotto (2024). Why I might do way less video in the future. Swiss Innovation Academy. Available at https://swis.ac/less-video accessed 24 November 2024. 

(2) The fun part? These sliders touch even more people than the videos that I did before. Turning a sustainability problem into a creative constraint had a double impact: it lowered the resources I use and touched more people.

The inspiration

We discussed this principle with Service Design and sustainability nerd Haley Anderson. Watch that part of the interview here.

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.