Focus on No- or Low-Tech Solutions

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Swiss Innovation Academy

Hi lovely human 👋

Here is the overview of all the new Service Design content I've worked on in the last few days:

1 interview on Service Design Principles

With Michel Sterckx (in French) on how to move a project on sustainability without a large organization. The video is in French, but the early titles of Service Design Principles uncovered are available in English.

4 Service Design Principles:

Simplicity: Focus on No- or Low-Tech Solutions
Long term view: Do the Deathbed Test
Endings: Celebrate Ending Things and Not Doing Things
Zoom out: Ask yourself What Would God Do?

1 Service Design Q&A

Education: How Can You Use AI for Academic Writing?

An experimental app:

Workshop Planner: you can try out this alpha and buggy version of an app that turns a workshop plan into slides in one click.

1 Backstage Blog article:

Canva new features: Why I'm excited about Canva Code and Canva Sheets?

As a bonus you'll also find at the end links to 3 positive news from elsewhere to end on a high note.

Greetings from Basel, Switzerland,

Daniele 🧔🏻‍♂️

p.s. As always, you'll find more details below 👇
for when you have the time to read this newsletter.

Remote Info Event

You can still register for the info event of the Master Service Design to see if a master is for you.

Save your seat

Service Design Principles Series

I'm writing the fifth book in the series Service Design Principles, where I explore simple tips, tricks and provocations that can help us make services a little bit less shitty for the people who use them and the planet that hosts them.

An illustration of a person in vacation with a laptop in front of a beautiful island landscape.

Focus on No- or Low-Tech Solutions

These days, everyone wants to slap some AI on a project. A few years ago, it was all about making a mobile app. Before that, it was Web 2.0 tools. But what if we stopped defaulting to tech for every damn problem? What if we asked ourselves, How can we solve this with as little to no tech? And even better, How can we do this with minimal carbon usage?

Imagine the possibilities. Instead of building complex tech, we could focus on human-to-human experiences. The kind of stuff that actually makes a difference.

Action question

Who do you know who does great work without using any tech? What can you learn from them? And could you meet with them to learn even more?

Written with AI help
This principle draft is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand. I know how ambivalent it is to have this footnote for this principle.

Share feedback

Other principles I wrote this week:

An illustration of two grand parents with their gran kid

Do the Deathbed Test

In short: Ask yourself: what would the story you'd be proud to tell your gran kids about the hard decision you need to make now?

Red the full principle

An illustration of a person holding a birthday cake and another one blowing the candles

Celebrate Ending Things and Not Doing Things

In short: Ending projects or not even starting a project should be something we celebrate as it means we won't use resources for it.

Red the full principle

An illustration of people from different religions

Ask yourself What Would God Do?

In short: Trying to see your decisions from a much larger perspective, like the Universe or God changes what you might decide.

Red the full principle

A photo of Michel and the book cover with the title in french saying: Sustainability in a big organization, expert interview

How can you push a sustainability project further within a large organisation?

I've interviewed my good friend Michel Sterckx who works on a big sustainability project for the Salvation Army here in Switzerland.

In this conversation, we uncovered 12 early drafts of Service Design Principles:

This is just another project: Sustainability and Service Design is a project like any other: use your past project management experience
Give the tools to people to self assess: use an eco-bilan that can be done on multiple sites
Separate the organizational layers: organizational, site and individual and give the right power at each level (individual has power on what)
Use the change culture that already was there: look how big change happened before
Look for the smart ones who already know:
find the people who already are motivated and did some stuff
Look for those who act: Seek less those who say "this is what needs to be done," and rather look for people who say "this is what we're doing!"
Adapt to the different speeds: Accept that there are people further on the process and don’t make them come back: instead make them share their expertise.
Mix top down and bottom up based on the different entities and departments
Show the people who already do the work: so that others see change is possible in their context
Make people exchange what works for them instead of you sharing how it should be done
Get a partner to help you: if your organization is large but has a focused service or product portfolio get help from an external partner
Give multiple projects to decision makers: so that they can pick and choose instead of making it all a big thing that can be refused in one big block

For the curious ones who speak French and want to learn more you can check out the conversation here:

Watch the interview in French

Workshop Planner App (Alpha)

A tiny and pretty buggy experimental app to create the schedule of your next workshop and turn it into one click into a minimal presentation.

This tiny app does two things:

Schedule mode: Plan your workshop by the minute. Map your whole workshop activity after activity. Set a time and description.
Presentation mode: One click workshop presentation. Automatically turn your workshop schedule into a minimalistic presentation that also includes a countdown timer.

It's a shitty first draft

This tiny experimental app is an alpha version. This means it's pretty buggy and it's pretty minimalistic.

It's also important to note that this app works saves the data with your local browser data. So you'll see the data you add in this app only within the specific browser you used to enter the data.

How I built this?

This tiny app was built using Canva Code. Canva code is a tool that let's you tell an AI what type of app you'd like to create and the AI creates the code for you.

My goal in sharing how this was made is to motivate others to create their own tiny tools by showing them how easy it is to do it.

Get it for free

Service Design Q&A

I'm slowly building a library of answers to the most common questions about Service Design. Here are the new ones:

An illustration of a tablet with code and algorithms

How Can You Use AI for Academic Writing?

In short: When you use AI, be smart about it:

Check institution rules: Check your institution's guidelines.
Say you've used it: Be clear about how you use AI.
Be radically transparent: Share links to AI conversations.
Don't use it only for text generation: Use AI to interview you, or to write while walking.

Read the full Q&A

Backstage Blog

I love to explain how I'm building educational content. I'm trying to be as transparent as possible so that it might motivate others to create such content too. These are the latest blog posts I've written:

Why I'm excited about Canva Code and Canva Sheets?

In this tiny article I share the two new features that I'm really excited about in Canva and how I plan to use them.

Read post

Positive news from elsewhere

I’m an optimist and as there is so much bad news out there at the moment, I want at my scale to rebalance things by sharing also some positive news for service owners and creators.

Less waste on Australia's beaches: Plastic waste pollution on the beaches around Australia's six metropolitan regions has fallen by almost 40 percent in ten years, according to a study. Bans on plastic bags and collection systems for drinks containers have made an impact. (Oceanographic via Good News)
Four-day week in Iceland - a positive review: In 2019, Iceland was one of the first countries to introduce a four-day week pilot project. Almost six years later, the results show positive changes: stable to increasing productivity, better mental health and well-being of employees.(WECB Radio via Good News)
North America got its first national park city: A city once dubbed “the dirtiest in the US” has been designated North America’s first national park city. (Positive News)

If you want more positive news make sure to checkout the website positive.news that offers more in depth articles.