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.