Weaving the planet perspective into the fabric of Service Design

Evolving the Service Blueprint to include a planet lane

Welcome, fellow green design thinkers! This is a long-read article describing the evolution of the Livework Service Blueprint Planet Lane. Are you short on time? Hop over to the condensed edition for a quick eco-fix!

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen companies of all stripes pledging to do their part in a shared effort to take better care of our planet. Almost every large company now reports on ESG, has set targets for Net Zero, and has begun some environmental initiatives. But at the same time, companies are still spewing out record amounts of emissions and have yet to find new business models that disconnect corporate success from the need to produce and sell more stuff. As it turns out, just setting a target is not enough; you have to actually understand how to get from where you are now to your future ambition.

Unfortunately, we don’t really have the luxury of time to figure that out. Our window of opportunity is closing in — we have little time left to change our ways before some critical tipping points in Earth’s ecological systems reach beyond a point of return. Even though the deadline to hit Net Zero is still some decades out, science tells us that the peak in our global emissions must not extend beyond 2025. So we have to figure it out on the go. We have to imagine a future that is fundamentally different whilst at the same time learning about approaches to get there by trying imperfect things in the here and now. 

Service design is a practice with mental models, methods and tools rooted in the extractive paradigm that got us into this mess in the first place. We have always focused on serving the few who use our services without understanding (or even paying attention to) the impact on the many and on our planet. This is most noticeable in the tools we use — our journeys and blueprints literally put humans at the top, so it is the first thing people see. Whether it is the customer’s, user’s, patient’s, employee’s or citizen’s experience, we zoom in on it, dissect it into smaller steps, plot it along a timeline and use this as the central spine to (re)structure the entire operation. We have to recognise that this focus (or obsession, if you will) on human experience has resulted in a myriad of unintended consequences for the world around us. 

However, our fault is potentially also our strength. In the pursuit of bridging the gap between corporate climate ambitions and an operation that actually delivers on these, the service design skill set might prove very valuable. Services are the connective tissue between the whole offer to the customer and what is needed to deliver it operationally. Like no other, a service designer knows how to align operational activities, business objectives and managerial practices to a desired new future. 

So yes, the service design practice should challenge its fundamental assumptions and undergo some tough and deep introspection. But let’s also not waste time and start actively contributing our strengths to deliver on climate ambitions in parallel—even if we don’t know exactly how.

This article is a pragmatic attempt at integrating a planet perspective in one of our most beloved and well-thought-through tools: the service blueprint. A tool to knit together a range of operational elements (like activities, people, (digital) infrastructure and material components) to deliver start-to-end customer experiences. In the paragraphs below, we’ll take you along on our journey of trial and error. We’ll reflect on everything we tried before we ended up with a service blueprint set-up that worked for us: a service blueprint that weaves the planet’s perspective into the fabric of a service. 

Our first attempt: Experimenting with Environmental Impact Measures

Our initial idea was to add a swimlane to the blueprint reporting on the environmental impact of each step of the service. Having an overview like that, we thought, would help us redesign services for reduced impact. So, we set out to understand the world of environmental impact measurement and learned about the two most commonly used impact assessments: the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and the Carbon Footprint analysis. 

Environmental Impact Measurement Tools 101

If you’ve had training in product design, you might have heard of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and everyone has a vague idea of what a carbon footprint is. However, if you are anything like us, you might not be fully familiar with the intricate workings of these two methods for measuring environmental impact, let alone ready to incorporate them into a service blueprint. So, let’s do a mini-course on ecological impact measurement and introduce you to these two models. Skip ahead if you are already familiar with them.

The Carbon Footprint in a Nutshell

A carbon footprint is most commonly used to measure an organisation’s environmental impact. It has a somewhat narrow definition of impact as it only considers the greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted by a business and neglects other forms of impact (e.g. water use, soil acidification etc.). However, this simplicity makes it faster to execute and easier to interpret. It is a useful tool for businesses to understand the most significant areas of improvement in a relatively short time frame. The carbon footprint structures the GHG emissions into three groups or so-called “scopes”:

• Scope 1 covers all emissions from sources or activities the company owns and controls and is therefore directly responsible for. Here, you’ll find the direct emissions from any industrial or manufacturing processes.
• Scope 2 concerns the energy used to power company-owned operations. By using electricity, gas, or other forms of energy, the business is indirectly responsible for the greenhouse gases emitted during generation.
• Scope 3 includes all other emissions the company is indirectly responsible for. Think, for example, about all the goods and services it purchases (e.g. laptops, software, cleaning products, coffee, etc.), the distribution and use of the products and services it produces by its customers, the disposal of its waste, employee commuting, business travel, and so on. 

All emissions are measured in “mega tonnes of emitted carbon dioxide equivalent” (MT CO2e). This metric converts the impact of other gases emitted to the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide with the same global warming effect.

A life cycle assessment (LCA) is a method used to analyse the environmental impact of one (digital) product rather than that of the entire company. It looks at every stage in the product lifecycle, from extracting raw materials to manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal. The goal is to get a complete picture of all the ways the product leaves a mark on the environment so that you can redesign it to be more environmentally friendly. Compared to the Carbon footprint, the LCA is more holistic; it measures all sorts of impacts, not only GHG emissions. Things like:

• The water used throughout the lifecycle
• The land use — both quantity and in which way it was used
• The depletion of natural (non-)fossil resources
• The potential of ecosystem damage — through, for example, acidification of soils & water
• The potential for damage to human health
• … (and more)

Environmental Impact Reports in the Blueprint

We started by trying to fit a Life Cycle Assessment-type reporting structure into the Service Blueprint. We chose the LCA because our ambitions were grand, and we wanted to understand the full impact of our services rather than “just” the GHG emissions. But we soon discovered that that would be really hard. 

Unlike the standard LCA that singles out just 1 product to analyse its impact, services include myriads of (digital) products and activities spanning infrastructure, logistics, communication digital or physical, people, and material components. These are all part of delivering the end-to-end journey. Each of these components has its own lifecycle with a different timeline and different kinds of impact. Take, for example, a government service like applying for a new passport:

• Do we include the full LCA of the passport itself?
• Or the bank card that you might use to pay for it?
• Or the electricity that is used to heat and light the location where you pick it up? 
• Or the cleaning products to keep it neat?
• And what about the digital systems that allowed you to apply for it and that orchestrated the logistics?
• Or the transportation services that brought it to a location close to you?
• Etc.

There are many components and activities involved in delivering a customer journey, each with its own impact. The service blueprint could be a good tool for making an inventory of them but is not suited to report on each of these LCAs. The model would become so wieldy that it would not be possible to see the leverage points for change, especially because most of the decisions driving the impact of all these service components happen outside of the part of the organisation focused on the delivery of the service. 

So we tried again, this time using the “more simple” carbon footprint. A similar problem occurred: We usually focus our attention on everything that happens just before, during and just after a product-service journey. But, environmental impact starts before and ends way beyond. Think of the GHG emissions of procuring raw materials, generating energy, or the production and distribution process — this all happens before our customer journeys start or goes on beyond. If we really want to understand and change the material impact of a customer journey, we have to traverse outside of the customer realm. Not only focusing on the customer lifecycle but also on the product or even on the organisational lifecycle. The service blueprint doesn’t offer any room for that as it is confined to the experience of the customer. 

Conclusion Trial 1: Blueprints are no reporting tool

Our first hunch turned out to be unsuccessful. Trying to integrate environmental impact measurement tools into a service blueprint template revealed that the customer journey is not the right structure for impact reporting. Reflecting on this, we realised that blueprints aren’t typically utilised for reporting purposes in any other context either. Just as we don’t try to shoehorn an organisation’s profit and loss calculations into the business and operation swim lanes — it just isn’t the right tool for that. The service blueprint does a brilliant job helping us to imagine, design and communicate the organisational and business set-up needed to deliver a desired customer experience. But that is a fundamentally different purpose than reporting on emissions or material use. 

Trial 2: Exploring a Circular Service Blueprint

With the realisation that Service Blueprints are meant to help operationalise futures that currently don’t exist, we pivoted our approach towards operationalising circular business models. Ultimately, we want a future with little to no environmental impact from our products and services. A future in which resources are used efficiently and kept in constant circulation and waste is minimised. So, our second trial focused on redesigning the Service Blueprint to make it better suited for circular services.

The challenge of going circular

We knew from working on multiple circular projects that operationalising circularity is different from operationalising “normal” or linear services. Unlike other innovations, new circular solutions don’t automatically fit into the fabric of our value chains, organisations, economy or even our lives, as these are tightly knit to fit a linear system that benefitted decades of adoption and optimisation. The only road to circular success is about thinking through circular needs at each level and then setting out a path (of quite often small steps) from linear to circular, keeping in mind the many path dependencies of the organisation, value chain set-up and larger socio-economic context.

From a linear to a circular blueprint

Currently, the set-up of most blueprints is too narrow to capture these dependencies or discover that path. They usually focus only on the customer experience and the organisation delivering it. So we expanded it, to also include swim lanes covering the dependencies embedded in the product design, the value chain set-up and broader socio-economic ecosystem. We found that if we had a vision for a new circular service, this new format did indeed help us plot needs (functional, legal, cultural, etc.) on different levels and did enable a first look through a window of what a circular operation and corresponding value chain should look like. It helped us highlight gaps in infrastructure and capabilities. The expanded blueprint did become quite large, making it more difficult to use as a tool to generate ideas to improve the vision displayed at the top. Nonetheless, it was very useful, so that felt like a handicap we could live with. Another handicap, however, we could not.

Upon showing this updated blueprint to multiple clients, we realised that circularity is only a subset of the solution space. For each industry or business type, the ecological strategy is different. Whereas for manufacturing or consumer goods companies, circularity is a logical move, for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), banks, insurers or government services, it doesn’t make any sense. Depending on the material reality of a company, the focus for sustainability is different. For some, it makes sense to focus on reaching Net Zero instead of circularity or on changing the dynamics of the system(e.g. insurers can change the conditions to whether you get insured or not). Our circular blueprint template didn’t facilitate all these different directions, it was too rooted in just the circularity paradigm.

Conclusion Trial 2: A circular blueprint isn’t industry-agnostic

Knowing about the hurdles companies face when they endeavour to circular business models, we think the adapted or expanded version of the service blueprint can be a useful tool for thinking through and implementing circular services. However, the singular focus on circularity limits the applicability across industries, which left us feeling unsatisfied. Preferably, the blueprint stays industry agnostic like it is today. So, we decided to continue our quest for a service blueprint that embeds an ecological perspective and works for all types of companies. 

The final trial: A pragmatic attempt in our own realm of influence

For our third and final attempt, we revisited one of the fundamental principles of service blueprinting: guiding customer-centric decisions while aligning with business and operational objectives.  Our approach pivoted towards integrating ecological goals into the blueprint, akin to how we translate broader business strategies or operational objectives to the customer experience. Most companies today have corporate sustainability goals and even publish about them on their website. So we wanted to try and see if we could take those as a starting point and find solutions on the cross-over of these ambitions and the interactions a company has with its customers. Basically, bringing these goals to practice in our own realm of influence. 

Conclusion trial 3: A blueprint to help make ambition reality

A Service Blueprint Planet swim lane, incorporating Moments of Planet Impact, Planet Knowledge Gaps, and Planet Opportunities, revealed a simple yet valuable tool. Trying out this new format helped raise the right questions and sparked creativity in the teams we worked with. It helped bridge corporate sustainability ambitions to our work and empowered us, and the designers we worked with to meaningfully contribute to their realisation. It’s easy to implement, and as we are often the owners of service blueprints, we also have the power to do so without having to change the entire set-up or focus of the team.

The Planet Lane: A Pragmatic Tool To Create Tangible Change

As we conclude our learning journey, we encourage everyone to try it themselves. The Planet Lane, as described in our final trial, is user-friendly and versatile and requires nothing more than a healthy dose of curiosity to produce results. The teams we tried it with found it seamlessly integrated into their existing workflows and felt encouraged to contact the teams in their organisation responsible for actioning sustainable strategies. 

While the Planet Lane might not address the underlying systemic assumptions, it does help our profession move forward with pragmatism and tangible outcomes. As we continue to comprehend how the service design practice should change its ways, the Planet Lane is a testament to our commitment to start in the here and now — one blueprint at a time.