Designing Sustainable Services is a one day course that provides tools and key questions to embed sustainability within service design processes and help influence wider organisational change

Who it’s for

The course is for anyone who feels the urgency to confront the climate crisis in their service design work and wants to ensure their designs have an overall positive impact on people, planet and business

This masterclass is suitable for people who are delivering a service, who are doing service design as part of their role, or for experienced service designers looking to develop their practice

What you’ll learn

• How the design and delivery of services contributes to the climate crisis
• Where the key opportunities are to design sustainable services
• How to adapt your design tools and processes to make sustainable design decisions
• How to measure, monitor and learn from sustainable service adjustments
• How to identify risk and build service resilience
• How to make the business case for sustainable service design
• How to build personal resilience in a forever changing climate

Course modules

Understand services in the context of the climate crisis

Understand the root causes of the climate crisis

Learn about the contributions of services to this crisis

Evaluate the contributions of the services you design

Establish what this might mean for your users

Identify opportunities to design sustainable services.

Identify possible future alternatives to current dominant models through the application of full-stack service design

Identify places to start to make positive change

Make sustainable design decisions

Techniques to adapt current design tools and processes

Apply these tools in practice to design with the planet in mind

Measure, monitor and learn from sustainable service adjustments

Learn about sustainability metrics

Identify how to apply sustainability metrics to your service context

Establish patterns of learning and reflection

Learn to identify climate risk and establish ways to build service resilience

Understand climate risk

Identify climate risks

Make the business case for sustainable service design within your organisation

Establish who holds service risk

Learn how to influence those that hold the risk

Learn how to use climate risk to influence organisational change

Build personal resilience in a forever changing climate

Apply the three horizons model to sense check application of tools and frameworks

Learn and share strategies for building personal resilience

Establish a learning community

How it works

All classes are delivered live and online in small classes that are a mix of taught tuition, individual exercises, and group discussion

Participants work on a service or case study of their choice so all course takeaways are able to be put into action immediately

Your trainers

Your trainers are Lucy Stewart and Ness Wright

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.

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.

Private courses

This masterclass can be delivered privately for your organisation. Drop us a line here to discuss.