Introducing “Planetary” to (Service) Design
Since I got back to my daily service design practice after The Terraforming, where we had a very deep dive in what “planetary” means, I couldn’t help noticing how much the word “planet” became more and more common in design discourse getting used by the leading consultancies up to the point that the latest issue of Service Design Journal Touchpoint was named “Design with the Planet in Mind”. So I’ve realized I couldn’t miss such an opportunity and submitted my article suggesting how we need to be careful in using new terms in our practice and how we need to understand them correctly. Later I was invited to a panel during Service Design Global Conference to introduce the article and wanted to share some thoughts from it also in a written form, as I can’t share the article directly with public who won’t buy that journal issue.
My concern is that “planet” as a word is often used as a kind of more fresh way to talk about sustainability and substitute “nature” and “environment” in discussions. While I believe that “designing with the planet in mind” requires proper understanding of all implications of “planet” as a concept.
We currently see the consequences of building human-centered design approach on a flawed picture of a human as a static rational separated individual mastering ‘nature’, — instead of the scientifically correct image of an interconnected, dynamic, constantly changing entity whose actions are impacted by myriads of other species and events from micro to macro scales.
Not to repeat the same mistake I think we need to learn more on how to approach the ‘planet’ in a way that can advance our discipline and minimize consequences of its misunderstanding.
In the article I talk a bit about history of something we can call “planetary awareness” — or understanding the true nature of our relations to the physical reality of planet and substituting the idea of earth as just a ground for our subjective worlds or abstract uniform “globe” of past centuries of capitalism, and then focus on some points to consider when designing for planet.
To summarize it very briefly I want to point out first of all that “planetary” doesn’t always mean planetary-scale as also the globalism is planetary-scale, but becoming planetary is more about the new “human-planet configurations” in which we fully perceive our embeddedness in the planetary system.
As any other organism on earth we are literally made of planetary matter and are transforming it with all activities throughout our life simply by breathing, eating, and performing all other metabolic processes, but as a humanity in its whole we also got to a level of a geologic force that nowadays has the biggest impact on the planet. And a call to action to take a stand here is for us to become not just any, but a responsible part of a planetary system.
It requires to stop thinking of a planet as a synonym to “environment” or something external to us to which we can relate to from aside, but see how we’re fully immersed in it. I personally think that it is not much constructive to apply our old paradigm of necessarily getting centered on something and talk about “planet-centric” design as it implies that design is somewhere apart from the planet and can get centered on it, but I would suggest a “planetary-embedded” design approach instead. An approach that acknowledges the depth of our interconnectedness with all the systems and the disorienting perspective of the absence of any arbitrary center. Rather than getting back to geocentric perspective we need to look from our planet outwards to understand its own cosmic context of, so far, apparently lifeless universe — which makes the perception of existential risks that we’re causing to life on Earth far more scary and hopefully mobilizing.
We need to learn to use the power of humanity as a geological force in a deliberate way that doesn’t focus only on sustainability for human race, but on inhabitability of the planet for complex life in general. There are people who like Erle Ellis believe that “the prospects for anthropocenes much better than the one we are now creating are very real” and so we need to direct our design attempts to implement them.
When I was writing the article I still haven’t a clear vision of what all this could mean for service design, but now I believe that we can start by designing services that first of all respect the reality of closed system of resources that we have available, that respect the heterogeneity and diversity of all kinds in different places on Earth instead of applying unified “global” solutions everywhere, and that are helping us to reconfigure the relations with other actors in the planetary system making them more horizontal and equal and not just serving the human needs.
You can find more in the article and please feel free to contact me for any discussion on the subject.
