Climate Adaptation and Service Design with Lucy Stewart

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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 about Service Design Principles:

Climate Adaptation: A conversation with Lucy Stewart a design researcher and climate adaptation consultant who helped me explore the question: How can you do first steps towards climate adaptation?

1 webinar from the Swiss Service Design Network:

Branding and Service Design: A talk and Q&A with Valentina Röschli a swiss creative consultant working at Futureworks.

2 Service Design Principles drafts:

Audit: Make an audit for the things you don’t understand fully
Energy: Switch to green energy

1 Backstage Blog articles:

Writing: Should writing a book be a huge effort?

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.

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.

Climate Adaptation and Service Design with Lucy Stewart

How can you do first steps towards climate adaptation?

That’s what we chatted about with Lucy Stewart in an interview for my next book on how to create services that serve both humans and planet.

Lucy is a design researcher for climate adaption, a community organiser and an urban food grower. She helps organizations to collaboratively identify, define, build and test ideas that confront the climate crisis and enable a just transition.

Lucy is also an educator at The School of Good Services where together with Ness Wright she leads the course “Designing Sustainable Services”.

From this conversation with Lucy I stole 10 early Service Design Principles that can help you adapt your service to the climate crisis. Here are my five favorites:

Be clear that shit will hit the fan: Accept that every part of life has always changed and will continue to always change. Be it climate, social life, economic life. Learn to work with the change.
Don’t leave people behind: Make sure that even when you adapt your service to work in tough times that it doesn’t make it harder for people in vulnerable or marginalized groups to access your services.
Map inputs and outputs: Discover that your intangible service is in fact very material by looking at all the things that you need to run it.
Don’t just learn the tools, use the tools: Don’t get lost in exploring and finding the latest and best sustainability tools, choose one or two, use them, see if they work and adjust.
Make your space more welcoming for small creatures and life: Make your workspace and surroundings friendly for things smaller than humans: bees, birds, and other creatures. And remember, kids are also small creatures.

On the website of the book you can find the transcript of the conversation, the full audio and links to recommended resources that Lucy mentioned.

Thanks so much to Lucy for this lovely conversation.

Listen to the full conversation

An illustration of two people going over documents with a calculator and a laptop

Make an audit for the things you don’t understand fully

Privacy, sustainability, diversity, all of these things can be pretty fucking hard. And when something is hard and we don’t get it all, it’s kind of nice to ask someone else, or a tool to show us what would be the most important things to change. That’s what an audit is for.

When it comes to making services nicer for humans and the planet, we have a good sense for the human side. Just using our service ourselves and speaking with people who use does already a lot. But for privacy, sustainability and all these words that end in y, we can use some extra help.

That could be an energy audit to see where in our buildings we need to change a few things to use or lose less energy. It can be a website audit, to see how we could reduce the amount of code to make websites load faster and use less energy. Or it could be a climate risk audit, to see what parts of our service would get kicked in the nuts when the weather and climate go nuts.

##Action question

What aspect of the ethical sides of your service is overwhelming you? Who could you ask or what tools could you use to get an audit that makes the issues and things you can do clearer?

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 an electric vehicule charging with renewable energy: solar and wind

Switch to green energy

In short: Change energy plan to get renewable electricity and see if your partners (like your hosting company) do the same.

Read the full principle

Swiss Service Design Network

The Swiss Service Design Network is a community of volunteers who work hard to put Service Design on the map of Switzerland and Switzerland on the map of Service Design.

An illustration of a hotel seen from outside

Webinar and Q&A on Branding and Service Design

What happens when a service doesn't deliver the promise made by a brand?

Do you adapt the promise?
Do you change the service?

That was one of the many smart question that was covered during the Q&A of this webinar on Branding X Service Design by Valentina Röschli

My personal take?

Often we oversell what we are doing and just adapting this in the marketing already makes a big difference.

Another moment that inspired me:

How Valentina describes what Service Design professionals can learn from copywriters: bringing more surprises instead of going for flat experiences.

Thanks a lot Valentina Röschli for these and the many other inspirations of tonight 💚

Get full access to the webinar

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:

An illustration of a person bookmarking a page in a book

Should writing a book be a huge effort?

In this article I share why I'm not precious about book writing and why for some it might make sense to use AI tools to help them in writing their first draft.

Read full 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.

Suicide rates down worldwide: "According to an analysis, suicide rates fell by almost 30 percent on average in 102 countries between 1990 and 2021. In high-income countries, the decline was even slightly higher, as the research team writes in the journal "Nature Mental Health". (Blue News)
Mexico slashed its poverty rate: "More than 13 million people have been lifted out of poverty in Mexico since 2018, according to new figures that have been hailed as “extraordinary”." (Positive News)
Green energy approvals smash records in the UK: "A record amount of renewable energy capacity was granted planning permission in the UK between April and June, analysis by the Financial Times suggests." (Positive News)

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