Creating a Service Design for Planet Guide

When we brought the Service Designers 4 Planet (SD4P) Collective together for the first time at Imperial College London in March 2025, we didn’t quite know what we were building.

We knew Service Designers cared about the planet. We knew the tools and frameworks to act were missing. We knew the conversation was overdue. What we didn’t know was how much energy was waiting to be released.

Fifteen months on, the collective has grown, done its homework, and made progress on a Service Design x Sustainability guide. Here’s where we’ve got to.

What we learned from listening

Before building anything, we asked the community what they actually needed. In Summer 2025, we sent a survey to service designers across Service Design Network, LinkedIn, and the Design Declares community. Thirty-two people responded – a mix of juniors, mid-weights, and seniors, with the majority in senior or management roles, working across the public and private sectors.

The picture that emerged was honest and we could all recognise our own challenges in the answers:

• Most designers are already trying to bring a planet lens to their work — but doing it quietly, informally, on their own initiative, squeezing sustainability in between the lines of a brief that wasn’t written with it in mind. When possible.
• Individual motivation is carrying what should be a collective and institutional responsibility. It is done opportunistically, not structurally.
• The techniques exist (respondents already use systems mapping, non-human personas, customer journeys with environmental impact swimlanes, ecosystem mapping, circular thinking) but they are scattered, unstandardised, and not being shared.
• And the single biggest blocker, named again and again? (drum roll, you guessed it)The client. External clients, as much as internal stakeholders. Lack of interest, inability to make the business case, no clear metrics to show impact.

What would help? The ask was consistent and specific: real-world evidence. Ie. Case studies. Modular frameworks. Sector-specific examples. Plain-language tools that help designers convince their organisations to care. And proving there is value in embedding sustainability.

The job, in other words, is to build the credibility layer that individual designers currently have to manufacture alone.

What we made at the February 2026 meetup

In Winter 2026, we came together again — this time at Accenture Song’s offices in London with 50 people in the room. It was our biggest session yet. The ideas that came out of the room were sharper than before, because the problem is now better understood.

We started with an intro of the Design Council Skills for Planet Blueprint by Joe Shaffery and Justine Carrion-Weiss, helping us connect the dots between our work and the wider design ecosystem, and celebrate successes on our sustainability journey.

It was then followed by a Case Study Showcase with multi-talented Maria Elges, who presented her work at ARUP designing for water-resilient communities. The work demonstrated how Service Design and Design Thinking bridge different scales (from users to cities and from physical to digital). She presented 2 projects where Design helps draw and deliver value for both businesses and local communities from sustainable water solutions in complex challenging socio-economical ecosystems (Defra’s Sustainable Drainage System) and Ofwat’s integrated water management programme.

Through vision setting, problem framing, stakeholder alignment, people validation, opportunity mapping and piloting, Maria shared how Service Design 4 Planet is a powerful multi-faceted approach to answer 3 types of briefs:

• How you make (existing / new) services sustainable
• How services make something sustainable
• How you use service design to intervene at the system level

After this invigorating intro, we formed breakout groups, with the aim to ideate on what a genuinely useful common resource or knowledge base might be like, from what we had learned of existing challenges, collective successes.

What came out? Against all assumptions, it’s less about the tool itself, but the ability to tap into proven-and-tested approaches, and a speed-dial to other designers in the community.

Lots of ideas emerged, which can be grouped in 3 categories:

• Knowledge sharing
• Business case and empowering metrics
• People and network prevalence

On knowledge sharing:

One group developed the concept of a “Plug n’Play Resource Database” — a living, cyclical repository of case studies and downloadable assets, built on strong data, organised so designers can dip in at any stage of a project. Crucially, it’s designed to work both ways: designers contribute their own success stories, embodying the principle of reciprocity the collective stands for. It follows a key principle of ‘Make Me Look Good’ – for both designers and their bosses — not vanity, but practicality. Designers need to walk into a room with their leadership and have something that lands.

Whilst another one imagined a “Knowledge Commons” — part static resource, part living space, structured around the double diamond so knowledge meets designers where they are in a project. Most importantly, it connects people to authors and to each other, not just to content.

On business and metrics:“Metrics for Planet” is an AI-powered solution that could advise designers on relevant metrics (to the project brief, client and area of work), and how to measure them, building on skills for planet framework, SDGs and common ESG parameters. E.g., If you’re working on circular business models, here are the metrics that matter. If you’re in social design, here’s what impact looks like.

Then it went deeper on the business case challenge. The concept: a “Success Metrics Forecast Translation Machine” — a solution that ties measurable business performance indicators directly to specific green skills and design activities. The ambition is to create something that can support designers bringing tactical language and communication strategies to craft proposals and project plans that successfully resonates and converts decision-makers.

On people and network prevalence:

One group brought a different angle entirely. Sustainability work is not a solo discipline, and it cannot be confined to design. Their two ideas — Cultural and Economical Value Maps and a Member Directory Chat Roulette with community rituals — are about the conditions that make the work possible: understanding positionality and bias, and building multi-disciplinary connections, not just knowledge repositories, and creating the regular encounters where ideas can spark.

Last but not least, one of the group raised something that stayed in the room long after it was said: one participant hadn’t previously realised that Service Design can indirectly or directly influence sustainable practices. That moment of recognition, surfacing the strengths of SD for the whole sustainability narrative, with their skills and activities (user research, journey mapping, dot connecting, team alignment, multi-Touch point experience definition, storytelling, …) Service Designers contribute and enable ‘designing for the planet’ by essence, defining the best shape between business agendas and user benefits, in the context of bigger and wider wicked challenges.

What comes next

The themes from the 2025 survey and the February 2026 meet-up are pointing in the same direction. Service Designers (and all the related disciplines in the field) need the tools that make the invisible visible and empower them in business conversations: the evidence base, the metrics, the language, the connections.

Not a single monolithic resource, but something modular, practical, and genuinely usable on a Tuesday afternoon when you’re trying to convince a sceptical client to embrace non-human personas.

We, at Design Declares and the SD4P Collective, are currently preparing the next gen discipline-specific guides. Experimental, messy, learning as we go, holding space for both the people who want to be kept in the loop and the people who want to roll their sleeves up. If you’re either of those things, you’re welcome here.

More soon. In the meantime, if you want to get involved, DM Sandrine.

A huge thank you to Sophie Liu, Caitlin Robinson, Oliver Lloyd, Sruti Gidugu, Joe Shaffery, Justine Carrion-Weiss, Alice Stauss, Lara Rodgett, and Marina Stavrinides.