The untapped potential of service design to support people adapt to the climate crisis
The services we design and the way we design them can help alleviate the impact of climate crisis events on people
This past few months have given us a taste of what 1.5ºC warming looks like, with climate-related events across the world, from Canada to Libya, from Europe to Andes Countries, from Pakistan to the whole north of the Atlantic Ocean, to name just a few. Not only does the frequency of the disruptions increase, but their intensity too. The climate crisis exacerbates natural risks, social risks, and economical risks, threatening people’s living conditions and safety as a result.
These new risks require us to adapt by changing the way we live and operate our societies. Different design fields are stepping up to address these new risks, trying to mitigate climate crisis’ impacts on people, from architecture to policy design. Unfortunately, except in some marginal cases, I feel service design struggles to position itself as an effective tool to help our societies and people adapt to the climate crisis.
Yet, services and the activity of designing them are key elements in shaping the way we live. Therefore, services and the activity of designing them are key opportunities for our societies to adapt to the climate crisis. To understand how we can leverage service design, we need to understand why we are adapting in the first place (spoiler alerts, we adapt to mitigate risks), and to identify the two key strategies to adapt: pro-active and reactive.
Before I start, a clarification: I’ll only talk at the service level here. Services need to be designed in a way to cope with more structural issues. For example, until all work can be done remotely, or we get paid “climate days off”, people will need to commute during a heatwave. I’m talking about how services can support people coping with systemic shortfalls through services. Ultimately, the more structurally we solve problems, the better it is.
Risks = Vulnerabilities exposed to events
To adapt is to reduce the risks and their impacts on people. So, what constitutes a risk? A risk is the result of vulnerabilities being exposed to events. In other words, risks increase when at least one of the three factors vulnerability, events, and exposition, increases.
In the case of the climate crisis, we know the current disruptions we’ve caused, and are continuing to cause, have already set the course for near future events we’ll have to go through. So, for the purpose of this specific article, I’m not going to talk about events much (but might do in a later one eventually). The key information is that both events’ frequency and intensity are rising. This leaves us with vulnerabilities and expositions as two factors we can leverage to mitigate the impact of the climate crisis on people. So, what hides behind these concepts?
Vulnerabilities are endemic to a person, a group of people, a community, an organisation, a country, etc. For instance, people with a weaker immune system or who are dehydrated are more vulnerable to be impacted by an event, say by a heatstroke if exposed to a heatwave. Vulnerabilities are the results of conditions, understanding the cause of the vulnerability is essential if we want to cater for it in the right ways. Conditions can be financial, environmental, social, or medical, to name just a few. The more systemically we address a condition (or set of conditions) the more efficient and sustainable the solution(s) will be. We can address the condition at an individual level (e.g. reminding people to drink water), or at the systemic level (e.g. lifting people out of poverty to improve eating habits). Regardless of the level you decide to approach conditions to reduce vulnerabilities, it needs to be done through an intersectional prism.
The second leverage we can use is the exposition to an event. As its name suggest, it’s the likeliness a person, a group of people, a community, an organisation or a country could be hit by an event. There are multiple types of expositions: structural (e.g. the geography or built environment not providing shade); conditional (e.g. a job requiring someone to be outside); and situational (e.g. a delivery truck breaks down and the driver is stuck unable to get fresh air in or use the AC.) Just like vulnerabilities, understanding the different types of expositions and most importantly, why do people need to be exposed in the first place are important elements for us to identify the right tactics to adapt. Just like the vulnerabilities, the higher in the system you work to reduce exposition, the more efficient and sustainable it’ll be. But before jumping to solutions, we need to identify the strategies to employ.
Proactive and reactive strategies
I tend to explain both types of tactics as a before and after. A proactive approach tackles vulnerabilities and expositions to reduce the impact of an event before it hit. For instance, to build a dike to protect a coastal zone from the ocean is a proactive strategy. A reactive strategy is made to deal with the aftermath and cope with the consequences, such as having processes in place for when the dike breaks and the shore is flooded. Ideally, we’d look at designing for both strategies, proactive and reactive.
Proactive service level strategies in the case of the climate crisis
A proactive strategy aims to develop population’s and services robustness. The goal being the reduction or compensation of the vulnerability and exposition factors. For instance, following the 2003 heatwave in France, community-based movements sprout for people to visit or directly live with elderlies during summers. These visits create social bonds, ensure people look after one another, bring groceries when needed, or simply help people who live alone to cope with the loneliness without having to go out. This solution aims to address some of the vulnerabilities underlying conditions such as isolation for instance.
On the other side, in the case of COVID 19 for instance, the services focused a lot more on the exposition factor. For instance, during the peak of COVID lockdowns in the UK, some grocery delivery services reintroduced plastic bags, or stopped recycling scheme, to limit contacts. Some other assigned opening hours dedicated to people most at risks if exposed to COVID. Public services of the likes of public transports and health services adapted by reducing the capacity in the transports or in waiting rooms. Similarly, pubs and restaurants operated with a booking only policy when they finally were able to re-open.
To develop proactive solutions to the climate crisis, we need to understand the factors we’re designing for, so we can assess their impact and design accordingly. Understanding events and their consequences allows us to know how they can impact people and services. For instance, a heatwave creates a stress on people who will seek fresh air for instance.
In the case of work, some of the most fortunate might go away from the city and work remotely, some might work in the office or in any air-conditioned place, and finally some will have to brave the heatwave because their work requires them to. Each scenario generates different stresses: some on the transportation systems creating traffic before and after the heatwave, or surcharging trains, some on the daily public transport as more people go to the office, and some directly on the people as they need to brave the heatwave. Each case creates different exposition, which will impact people differently depending on vulnerabilities.
From a service point of view, the adaptation is two-fold. The first is to ensure the service is ready to cope with a surge in usage, by increasing the frequency of public transportation for instance, to avoid these being overloaded. As a result, we need to consider the people operating the service itself and adjust the way the service is catered rather than relying on business as usual operations. For instance, to reduce the exposition of people operating and driving public transports, we’ll need to look at adapting the working condition, by reducing the length of shifts for instance. As we’ve learned from COVID, in case it wasn’t already clear enough before, we can’t put the onus on the people to maintain a service.
Unfortunately, regardless of any proactive adjustments we’ve made, some impacts can’t be avoided. In that case, we need to have plans in place to cope with the consequences. This is why it’s important to develop reactive service level strategies in parallel.
Reactive service level strategies in the case of the climate crisis
A reactive strategy at the service level aims to develop resilience. Its goal is to cope with the effect of an event once it has manifested and hit people to ensure the situation doesn’t worsen. This is unfortunately a rising trend. The requests for emergency assistance in Europe raised by 400% and the US have already broken their record of costs engendered from climate disasters, for instance. The infrastructures that make up our society aren’t ready to cope with the threats arising from the climate crisis. As a result, services break and put people in danger. I believe the process of escaping a building is a great analogy for us to wrap our head around the way services could be designed to help in this situation.
During the evacuation procedure, we need:
1. People to be made aware of the event,
2. To provide a way to exit and let people know how to exit,
3. To find ways to account for people impacted to direct rescue,
4. To provide care for them,
5. To support people so they’re actually out of risk or not even more at risk because they have to sleep in the street for instance
I especially like this analogy as it encapsulates everyone in the building: the residents of the building, the staff managing the building and potential visitors, such as delivery workers. This is important as often with user centred design, we shed the light on the end users, and leave staff members in the shadow, only considering them as a resource. So, I’ll be exploring some examples of both here: developing services to help people, as well as designing services in a way they support staff in case of emergency.
The track and trace service set-up in the UK is a good example to make people aware of an emergency. The service has been set-up to support the countries effort out of lockdown. It’d allow people to get back to some form of in person socialisation, while helping to contain the spread of the virus by making people aware when they’ve been exposed to the virus. There are some limits to this approach. First, the fact that it was mostly destined to people without known health condition, and who felt safe to risk being contaminated in the first place. Secondly, the system was badly designed from a data privacy point of view, up to the point of actually being unlawful. If we do not wait to design complex services in emergency situations, we’d hopefully not have to cut corners and respect people privacy.
Still on the COVID19 front, the pandemic highlighted the lack of contingency plans for frontline workers for instance. As a result, people with COVID symptoms were forced to go back to work, contaminated colleagues or faced disciplinary sanctions when they refused to. While this can be attributed to the corporate culture too, contingency policies and processes are required to offer alternatives solutions to putting people at risks and alleviating the pressure on workers to continue their shift.
We often design for unhappy paths at the front-end experience, by designing password retrieval processes for instance. Why aren’t we designing unhappy paths for the back-end experience too? Doing so would ensure people operating a service can work in safe conditions, accommodating for absence or longer breaks, for instance? Failing to do so will result in service disruptions, as people can’t keep up working in such conditions, and will either stop before being sick, won’t be able to continue because they’ve become ill, or die as it happened in France during this early september heatwave.
Hurricane Katrina is probably the most infamous example of the traumatic experience following the aftermath such an event. Report showed the lack of organisation and intervention to save and most importantly host people after the hurricane hit New Orleans. The lack of preparation has also tremendously affected the reconstruction period. The impact of a climatic event doesn’t stop when the event stops. It spans over months or years, and the least prepared we are, the longer it’ll run. Therefore, need to design services to support people getting their life back to some normal. These services need to be simple, accessible, inclusive (ideally with a minimum of technology required) and make sure they are designed with trauma informed principles.
The combination of both strategies provides the best results. Proactive solutions to the crisis are the most effect as they develop robustness. However, even with the best preparation, some solutions will fail to contain the full impact of an event, and this is where we need to develop resilience. The resilience helps to deal with the repercussions, preventing to trigger a chain of reactions we won’t be able to contain.
Adaptation beyond resilience
We know that no matter if we put in the best efforts, the course for the next couple decades is set, requiring us to adapt. The climate crisis and the risks arising from it are fundamentally unequal, focusing only on building up resilience is designing a game we do not all have the privilege to play. If we only focus on resilience, we’ll design our adaptation strategy in a way that is putting the onus on people.
We do need to build up resilience in our societies to deal with the consequences of the climate crisis. However, when it comes to adaptation, our primary focus should be to build robustness at scale and adopt a proactive strategy to reduce people’s and societies vulnerabilities and exposures to the events. The services we design and the way we design those are key in the way we adapt to the climate crisis.
However, we can’t just rely on adaptation and accept this to become a new normal. Adaptation is only a short-term solution that won’t be sustainable and will bring its own lot of repercussion. What we really need is to reduce our own impact on the planet. And for that service design can help too.
Hi 👋🏻
I’m a London based service designer, focusing on the way we can alleviate both the impact of the planetary crisis on people and our own impact on the planet.
You can contact me on LinkedIn & subscribe to The Blueprint, a newsletter about service design & the planetary crisis I publish every 2 weeks.
