I’m very interested in sustainability and have been exploring ‘human energy used’ by services as a proxy for social sustainability, alongside measures such as carbon emissions used (environmental impacts) and time use (financial/ economic impacts).

I started with the methods I use as a design researcher and service designer – mostly because getting data was easiest and offered the quickest way to learn.

As you point out, I’ve noticed my conventional design research methods have a lower bio-cost and higher carbon emissions – because this configuration is easy in our culture.

And as I’ve evolved into more collaborative, socially sustainable methods, the initial effort clearly comes with a higher bio-cost and lower carbon emissions. It also comes with higher immediate gains for client and stakeholders. On balance, the ‘cost of change’ seems to be in favour of change (from the client’s view anyway).

The hope (gamble?) is that clients will be motivated by the higher gains to apply the collaborative methods more fully, so moving into lower bio-cost/ lower carbon emission/ higher gain approaches.

But it’s early days and the results are mixed.

On the one hand, a favourite client is using the above work to develop a ‘collaborative design’ template for sharing with similar organisations – a good result.

On the other, as you’d expect, it’s often hard to capture the bio-value of ‘simplicity and time saved for users’. It’s not just a case of data capture, but also a case of capturing the value to the organisation.

To put this another way, business models tend to treat bio-cost (and other user ‘stuff’) as an externality, so the background challenge is to capture its value within and to the organisation.

I love this stuff and believe it is a profoundly useful way of approaching service design. Please keep working with and developing this approach!