Workshop on Service design in a climate emergency - What do digital services in a world of net-zero look like ?

[nadia]

hi @mrchrisadams @Kathryn and all

I am putting together this repository of materials that we can use to post on the event page and our edgeryders as well as our individual social media channels - to give would be participants a sense of what we are exploring. As well as entry point to join various relevant discussions already happening in different parts of the platform. I am updating it continuously but I thought it is good to post what is there already and add so we can start already…

Workshop on Service Design in a Climate Emergency

150 word description of the event in the form of an invitation to join us adapted for email

Our climate is changing, and kids are striking for the future every Friday and put simply, our house is on fire.

How can we respond as practitioners designing and delivering the services people rely on? And what skills will we need that we don’t have, and need to invest in learning?

We’ll need more than hope and courage if we want to rise to the scale of the challenge facing us - we’ll need to invest in specific skills, and learn to use an expanded vocabulary that includes concepts related to climate, carbon, and equity.

Join our workshop in Berlin on Friday 29th to figure out what service design might look like in world of net-zero, and identify what we’ll need to know as professionals to get there.

A summary article, also not more than 150 -200 words combining the insights/overview and good quotes from theses sources:

• How do we weave together the threads of various conversations we are having around a “deep green” transition, and what are our next steps?

• Living greener as therapy: how I stumbled upon plasticless, trees and diy protein - #3 by noemi

• Best of article #3

3 quote banners: Visual Materials here.

• What do digital services in a world of net-zero look like ? Workshop on Service design in a climate emergency - What do digital services in a world of net-zero look like ? " It’s also relatively simple to shift from measuring cost in money to cost in carbon.For example the Office of National Statistics in the UK already measures things like carbon intensity for different sectors, to have proxy figures for CO2 emissions.If by law you are compelling to reduce emissions, and you know that expenditure in a given sector emits a set about of emissions for every 10k of spend, you have implicit budgets already set. There’s a danger in this approach, that we end up leaving great swathes of people behind - while this approach is easy to measure and manage, it’s also a very blunt instrument, especially when within industry, we know that our knowledge about how to do almost anything in a measurably low carbon way* is so poor."

• What do digital services in a world of net-zero look like ? Workshop on Service design in a climate emergency - What do digital services in a world of net-zero look like ?

“Also, while user-centred design is increasingly common, we have few tools for designing for people who are not the primary users of services, a key consideration when designing for the wider environment. For example, Airbnb is a great example of user-centred design for the end user. It’s a less successful example of design for the neighbour of a person hosting an apartment, or less visible people, like the cleaners and other workers who are also part of the supply chain…”

• What do digital services in a world of net-zero look like? Workshop on Service design in a climate emergency - What do digital services in a world of net-zero look like ? This would help understand which questions the tools and frameworks we have available are suited to answering, which ones they aren’t. Being able to check these common tools we know against the key challenges identified in the first output would let give us an idea of what new tools might look like.

3 Call-to-action Status updates: Visual Materials here.

Which skills would we like to have in the room?

• Service design skills, particularly working in public sector in Europe, and private sector

• Policy design and experience, particularly for delivering carbon reductions in government services

• Digital skills, for implementing digitally mediated aspects of a service, like building digital platforms designed to support a channel shift away from manual ones that relied on paper

• Skills and experience at working with vulnerable groups (or people from those groups themselves), often impacted by the unintended consequences of people taking steps to ‘green’ a service.

Are there specific organisations whose contributions would be helpful?

• Do you know service designer who has experience facilitating events? Send them to us for a gig

• Do you know anyone at TU Berlin who is working on “sustainable digitalisation”?

• Do you know anyone from who has experience working with groups who are often vulnerable, and marginalised? Come join us at this workshop

• Know anyone who is helping organisations understand how their efforts might unintentionally harm the people they are trying to help?

• Do you know anyone who is building digital services that displace more polluting alternatives? Can you talk about the trade-offs you have to make when operating commercially?

• Do you know anyone who is working at a mobility services company like Coup, Emmy etc. Join us!