Recommended Course: Designing Sustainable Services

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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 recommended course

Designing Sustainable Services: organized by the School of Good Services and taught by the smart and lovely Lucy Stewart

2 Service Design Principles:

Spirituality: Bring mindfulness and spirituality in the workplace.
Do good: Help people do and track daily good deed.

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.

1 day course: Designing Sustainable Services

Recommended course

In this course, Lucy Stewart, who I interviewed last week will show you how to reduce the impact of your work on the planet and design sustainable and climate resilient services.

I don't get any kickback if you register, I just appreciate Lucy's work and approach.

Check the course

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 tiny stones put one above the other as a meditation and mindfulness practice

Bring mindfulness and spirituality in the workplace

I came to a client to facilitate a workshop. Something pretty businessy. But before we got started, I started with a bit of a mindfulness guided practice. Why?

Research tends to show that people have better ideas when they first had a bit of a meditation session before coming up with new ideas.

But more importantly from a personal experience, doing something like meditation just calm you the fuck down! It makes you jump of your getting shit done tunnel vision and grind mode, and get’s back into a “I’m a fucking human mode”.

Back when I worked for a church, there was this tradition to either start or end a meeting with some prayer time. A lot of the time, this create a bit of zoom out moment, where you would come out of the usual problem and then see things from a bit more far away. (1)

Action question

What practices, like meditation, mindfulness, yoga, spirituality, could you bring in your workplace or even service to help people be humans and not robots?

Footnotes

(1) Having more distance with what you do and see the wider implications of your work and what’s really important is definitely something we need more of if we want to make our services nicer for humans and the planet.

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.

Share feedback

Another principle I shared this week:

An illustration of a person in an office offering a donut and a coffee to a colleague

Help people do and track daily good deed

In short: Help people do a lovely tiny thing everyday within your company or service. Small things over a long time make a nice impact.

Read the full principle

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.

Helsinki went a year without a road death: "The milestone follows a years-long drive to make the city more accessible for pedestrians and cyclists, including lowering speed limits, laying cycle lanes and improving public transport." (Positive News)
Another country called time on smartphones in schools: "The country’s government passed a bill this week outlawing the devices in schools. It comes after research from the Netherlands suggested that its ban on smartphones in school has made students more sociable, improved their focus and boosted academic performance." (Positive News)
Record season for southern right whales off Australia: Nearly 200 endangered southern right whales have been recorded off South Australia this season — the highest count in almost a decade. Scientists hail the rebound as a hopeful sign of recovery, even as long-term growth slows and climate threats loom. (The Guardian via Good News)

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