Give the responsibility to the right scale

There is this weird thing that sometimes happens when we talk about sustainability. We speak a lot about the personal responsibility and forget to talk about the responsibility of whole organizations or industries. 

Sure, it’s important that we all do our part, but when we say all this shouldn’t just be individuals. This should also include organizations and industries. 

So while we, as individuals, do our part, it’s smart to also remind the things at the bigger scale that then have a responsibility too. 

Action question

What trade organization or larger organization is your service part of? How can you remind those organizations of their responsibility about sustainability?

Inspiration behind this

This principle was inspired by a piece of a conversation with Samuel Huber. In this conversation Samuel shared the following story:

I think it was the petrol industry in in inventing the personal footprint pushing all the responsibility on single people. We do a similar thing with human centric design, which is very on the Individual decisions of users.

And I think the big shift that we're doing with planetary perspectives or planet centric design is taking away that responsibility on a single user and we take it or bring it back to the organizations. Because they're the only ones that can deal with that.

Move from quantity to quality

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?

Inspiration behind this

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)