Designing Sustainable Services
You might have heard that we’re running a new course called Designing Sustainable Services. We’re getting together with friends Ness Wright and Lucy Stewart to run a course that equips designers with the tools and questions to take action on climate change.
I sat down with them both for a chat on what the course is about, why it’s important and what people can expect to learn.
(Sarah) What’s the course called and why are you delivering it?
(Ness) Designing Sustainable Services is a seven module course that equips researchers and designers with the right questions to ask in the pursuit of improving service design to incorporate environmental, social and economic impacts.
It is the result of our 5+ years of exploration into what it means to consider climate change in the design of services. As a result, it touches far more on the completely un-glamourous parts of service design and delivery - the influencing necessary to achieve organisational change and the perspective needed to keep trying even though it's hard.
The course is;
A method to arm people with the right questions to ask
An introduction to tools and methods that help to spot opportunities for sustainable service design beyond the user experience
The course isn’t;
This course is not focused on improving digital services and/or interaction design. There are folks who know a lot more about this and do it really well.
We won't talk about the carbon contributions of networks or servers or touch much on data
We are delivering it because we want to see all designers taking action on climate change through their work (and by designers we mean anyone who makes decisions about the design of something). Designers are a massively untapped resource in the climate crisis. Everything is designed, from your kitchen table to public services and the structure of multinational organisations. Imagine if designers questioned the environmental impact of every design decision they are involved in, what an impact that could have at scale! We see designers as a networks of ninjas woven across all sectors and organisations, with the ability to influence design decisions and challenge business-as-usual.
In an ideal world, we would make all designers retrain in climate change to gain an in-depth knowledge of the science and how they can apply this to their work. However, not everyone has the privilege of the time and money to do this, and we certainly don’t have the luxury of time when it comes to the climate crisis. We need to up-skill designers at scale.
This course is a great way for designers who want their work to have a positive environmental and social impact to quickly get up to speed on the basics of climate change and the main things you need to think about when designing a service.
Lucy and I have developed this training over 8 years of working together on climate-related design projects. We quickly learned that you can’t be a sustainability expert in all aspects of a service across all sectors, such as ‘should we have a digital or paper-based interaction?’. It is all so context-specific. The most important thing designers can do is ask the right questions at the right time.
Our training saves you starting from scratch. Use our knowledge to leapfrog. We will tell you the main things you need to think about and the questions you need to ask at each stage.
(Sarah) Why does the course feel relevant now?
(Lucy) It’s clear that every industry, every job, every role and every person needs to confront this issue head on, be ambitious in terms of what it means for our livelihoods and challenge norms that many of us are benefitting from as design professionals. There’s honestly so much at stake.
Most people are now aware of the climate crisis but feel a bit helpless in what they can do due to its scale. Designers are waking up to the fact their work has environmental impacts; services use raw materials and energy, and create waste and emissions.
“We need to improve the resilience of our services so they can function and withstand predicted environmental impacts such as extreme weather events or power cuts.”
When we met working together at Snook, we wanted to know that the services we were designing were going to have an overall positive impact on people and planet. We put so much effort into our work, what if in the bigger picture we were making climate change worse? Especially when you are designing services that are used at scale, such as healthcare services or government digital services such as ordering a passport. If you make a design decision that is going to use unnecessary materials or energy, that impact is scaled by millions based on user numbers. Similarly, we need to improve the resilience of our services so they can function and withstand predicted environmental impacts such as extreme weather events or power cuts.
This course has taken so many twists and turns in its development as we learned more and delved into different environments. We both actually dropped service design job titles as we didn’t think it was the right discipline to address the catastrophe beholding us. Ness has since gone on to apply her extensive studies in systems design and I have pursued more of a participatory practice but we have both ended up circling back in around service design because we realised that services touch everything and it's challenging to figure out how we can improve them to include consideration of their environmental impact.
The course feels relevant now as designers want to understand the impact of their work and seek opportunities to have environmental as well as social and economic impacts. The service design industry is just waking up to its impact. But our methods and tools are not fit for purpose. In fact, many do not include environmental impacts and externalities at all.
This is an exciting time to come together as an industry, up-skill ourselves and up-date our methods so that they are fit for designing services in the climate crisis.
(Sarah) Some people might challenge the title ‘Sustainable Design’, why did you settle on this name?
(Ness) We struggled with this ourselves as we desperately want to move into designing beyond sustainability. On a practical note, we chose the term ‘sustainability’ as this is widely used within the organisations that deliver large-scale services and we have found this helps sustainable service design be understood.
But we too want to fix what is completely broken as suggested by one of our go to references Daniel Wahl in his article Beyond Sustainability?: We are living in the Century of Regeneration. Here he mentions his move away from the term sustainability because it has been co-opted and it's now difficult to even know what we’re sustaining. We acknowledge the term sustainability has become a buzzword, is often used to greenwash and has negative connections to ‘sustainable development’.
“We are consuming too much and the speed we are living at is out of balance with the earth’s natural processes and ecosystems”
However, when we think of the term sustainability we refer to ‘only using resources at a rate that can be naturally replenished and only creating waste at a rate that can be naturally absorbed’. This definition was at the heart of my MSc in Sustainability and Adaptation and has changed the way I see the world. For us, this neatly sums up the imbalance at the heart of the climate crisis that we are consuming too much and the speed we are living at is out of balance with the earth’s natural processes and ecosystems. This is the imbalance we have in our services too, they are using more resources and creating more linear waste than is needed.
The term sustainability also connects to the triple bottom line, and the environmental, social and economic sustainability. Obviously, we need to be constantly thinking about the balance between these three factors to deliver good services, rather than just optimising them for good environmental impact.
In the training, we also dig deeper into the underlying causes of the climate crisis in terms of inequality, exploitation and dominant mental models.
In this training we are not talking about sustained growth or profit, or sustainable development. We also aren’t suggesting all services need to be sustained (see the work of Anne Dhir). But some services (like much of healthcare) do need sustaining especially as we move through transitions forced upon us by the impacts of climate change (like climate shocks, mega events and migration patterns). We’re also very clear that there’s no such thing as a truly sustainable service - this isn't about perfectionism but awareness.
Instead we’re honouring the effort needed to even get us to some basic level necessary to incorporate the significance of climate change in our work. Every service will be impacted by this crisis. And therefore every service has a responsibility to understand its contributions and identify where in the depths of service design (beyond the user experience) are their opportunities to influence.
It's clear that most services and most service designers want to address this elephant in the room but don’t know how. Many are probably already questioning how the services they design contribute to the crisis or how they might be at risk from the fallout.
So with the development of some simple tools, questions and importantly confidence to raise the impacts of climate change in discussions about service design and delivery we hope to build collective understanding and interrogate what we’re delivering and at what expense.
(Sarah) So the course is expansive, what does it cover and who is it for?
(Lucy)Yes. It’s a chunky course, but one that's full of a lot of reflection and also (we hope) an acknowledgement of the necessity of community building.
The course will support participants to:
Understand services in the context of the climate crisis
Learn how to identify opportunities to design sustainable services.
Make sustainable design decisions.
Measure, monitor and learn from sustainable service adjustments
Learn to identify climate risk and establish ways to build service resilience.
Make the business case for sustainable service design within your organisation.
Build personal resilience in a forever changing climate
Due to its focus on the layers of service design beyond the user experience (think policy, governance, intent), we believe the course will support designers to spot opportunities to develop sustainable services. Where we feel we’ve been stuck in the past is because of the focus on the user experience when the layers that sit below to deliver that are really where the opportunities are.
(Sarah) What experiences as designers have you brought into this course?
(Lucy) Together at Snook we developed and launched ‘Planet centred design training’ which we delivered to the user centred design team at Defra in 2021. The aim of that training was to further develop design teams’ abilities to ask questions and spot opportunities that benefit the planet. The feedback was really positive and praised for its abilities to provide “practical ideas and methods designers could add into their practice quickly and easily. Within days of completing the training there was a clear impact on day-to-day design work.”- Tom Frankland, Defra UCD team.
(Ness) Together we ran the #designandclimate community which at one point supported over 200 designers in exploring the questions we’re now formalising in this training. Our ‘mastering remote workshops’ guide blew up during Covid and at its height it received over 200 contributors and has been translated into multiple languages. A recap of some of that work of that community can be found here.
I have supported the Design Council to develop their systemic design framework and published guidance, including authoring the Principles for Designing Sustainable Services.
Who are Ness and Lucy?
Make it stand out
Lucy has over 10 years of experience as a researcher and strategist and an MSc in the Bioeconomy, Innovation and Governance.
Lucy has worked to influence the collective practice of designers to be more climate conscious. She is an expert in designing learning spaces to support individuals and teams to adapt design methods and was the lead curator of the UK Design & Climate community.
Lucy led design agency Snook’s Thriving Planet team together with Ness Wright, developing subject expertise in renewable energy services and sustainable fishing.
She worked as a Service Designer and Participation Lead at Adur & Worthing Councils where she is led projects on nature regeneration as well as working with service managers to embed sustainability into strategy and services.
As a freelance designer Lucy has contributed to nature recovery strategies and products to develop sustainable financing with NatWest.
Lucy is currently at Arup where she works as a lead designer to merge service design and participation with innovation management and a heavy dose of reality in the pursuit of designing a built environment that works for people without wrecking the planet.
Make it stand out
Ness is a Design Lead who has refocused her career around the climate crisis. Her work focuses on making the changes needed in response to climate change real.
Ness has 15 years of experience working in service design and innovation. In 2015 she undertook an MSc in Sustainability and Adaptation and has worked in climate-related contexts ever since. From co-designing low-carbon transport services to prototyping circular service offerings for SMEs and reducing inefficient processes on UK Government services.
She is a pioneer in designing for the climate crisis. She established the design agency Snook’s Thriving Planet team with Lucy Stewart and led user-centred design methods on the Scottish Government’s Climate Action Towns pilot. Ness has adapted design thinking methods to include climate impacts and published guidance, including authoring the Principles for Designing Sustainable Services and contributing case studies to the Design Council’s Beyond Net Zero Systemic Design Approach.
Over the past three years, Ness has been a Senior Designer on the Climate Action Towns pilot at Architecture & Design Scotland, supporting communities to take climate action at a town scale.
In 2024, she joined the environmental organisation Sniffer to work on the Scottish Government’s Adaptation Scotland program. This will involve helping public services, businesses and communities to adapt to climate change and build their resilience by preparing for climate impacts.