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.