Imagine this. You have a huge house that’s old and really needs to be repaired. Before you get started, you make a bit of budget with different approach. You look what would it cost, to just rip it off the ground and start from scratch versus doing some serious repairs and remodeling. The end result: bringing it all down costs way less.

Way less… money! But in terms of energy use and trash created, it’s definitely to less.

This is the typical issue that architects have today when they want to push for re-use of existing spaces. It just makes no sense in the budget. Because the budget just looks at money.

But what if, in the budget we would also have a “price-tag” for the energy use, the trash generated?

Action question

Where in your service or projects can you add in the cost calculation other elements that just money? Which elements would make sense to be included? Would it be useful to translate all of that into one number?

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.