Bringing it Together with the Ecosocial Service Blueprint

Following site assessment, tracing associations and multi-species ethnography, the findings and insights of the donut centered research process must be made available to teams of stakeholders. For permaculture designers, the primary work product is the site map (Bane 2012), while for service designers, the service blueprint is a common deliverable (Stickdorn et. al 2011). I propose incorporating elements of both into a master plan called an ecosocial service blueprint.

Service blueprints generally include the people, processes, services and products of a business arranged in a way that makes their inter-relatedness apparent. A common way of visualizing this arrangement is to depict a user journey, with physical evidence and interactions flanking it. The interactions are grouped by those that actually touch users, ones that are visible, and ones that are invisible, but still within the confines of the company’s walls. An ecosocial blueprint expands the aperture. On the upper side, the sourcing and ultimate fate of the physical evidence is tracked, along with its immediate relationships. The user’s journey contains what might happen personally, socially or communality if many of these journeys are completed. On the bottom side, the ecological and social impact of the company’s internal operations appear as a foundation, thus cataloging effects that were previously invisible externalities. This an ecosocial blueprint takes cues from the traced flows and carefully placed elements of permaculture site maps and service blueprints into a master plan which hypothesizes the flows (essentially causes and effects) in a whole systems matter.

While ethnographic research and market assessments provide excellent starting material for an ecosocial blueprint, it is unlikely that ethnographers would possess the various expertises necessary to ideate and craft a plan. In both permaculture design and service design, teams of multi-disciplinary co-creators tend to make the most innovative, most durable designs. This holds even more true here, for without people who know about customer service, product design, sustainability, technology and research a realistic master plan may not be achievable. Many individual methods for ideating and designing services exist and would be useful for creating and implementing an ecosocial design. Many methods would remain nearly unchanged, and therefore are beyond the scope of this introductory article.

Holistic Metrics

After developing a plan, how will you measure success? This returns to the fundamental charge of the donut–growth is essential and good, but perpetual growth is not. As much or more than research and design, target metrics can drive strategy and decision-making. Most ethnographic practitioners are aware that tethering goals to metrics can be a powerful behavioral motivator. In many large organizations, annual goals trickle down through departments to teams to individuals, where quarterly performance goals operate as microcosms of annual corporate goals. Salaries, bonuses, promotions and retention are often calibrated to these goals. Thus, they heavily influence individuals to achieve relative to chosen metrics as the expense of other metrics. A similar phenomenon operates on the national and international level–when GDP (or stock market indices, another growth-centric indicator) is fetishized and pursued at the expense of other metrics. Thus establishing desirable metrics is an integral part of donut design.

While perpetual growth is not an effective metric, proposing other metrics can be fraught with debate. Any metric can be subject to reification and maximization, at the expense of a more holistic assessment. However, metrics are necessary to track progress and make decisions. The donut describes some physical and social measures that can be useful, but often may not apply to a product or service.

Indeed selecting which metrics are relevant will depend heavily on the particular design, as well as the maturity of the firm producing the product or service in question. The emerging field of social impact metrics seeks to define standard or custom metrics to track progress and change that organizations effect. Establishing relevant metrics that map to the mission of your organization, as well as the resource and interaction flows in the ecosocial blueprint, is largely a custom, iterative process, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Yet despite the contingency of social impact metrics, defining metrics changes the goal of the system, and is thus unavoidable for designing for the donut–itself an alternative set of goals set in place of totalizing perpetual growth.

WHERE TO START?

Like the scale of the problem, implementing a solution can seem like a daunting, even futile, task. This is especially true if you are a sole actor within a large corporate apparatus that is not aligned with the ideas or ideals of donut centered design. For those working in a service design capacity already, begin by conducting the research outlined above and assembling an interdisciplinary team of designers. Proceed from research, to ideation, to co-design, to metrics selection, iterating recursively as needed. An excellent starting point is the application of the permaculture design concept of zones to your professional life. In permaculture, zones are used to represent the level of intensive management of a feature or area. Zone 0 is the living area. Zone 1 contains that which is used daily, like an herb garden. Zone 2 contains features that are visited every few days, like a patio. Zone 3 contains features that are visited weekly, and Zone 4 monthly. Zone 5 is totally wild area. As an ethnographer, you can determine which areas of practice you touch daily, weekly and monthly. Your influence on the design of those areas is highest in Zone 0 and least in Zone 4. You can change what you are habitually tasked with creating, so beginning in the highest zone of agency is a way to effect change immediately. We all have some agency in our lives, and in the workplace, to practice donut-centered design.

CONCLUSION

The theme of EPIC 2019 is agency. The conference theme asks, “What does it mean to have agency in an increasingly automated world?” I would argue that the world has been automated for longer than digital technologies have been automating it. Our economic systems and their components are automated–designed–for growth via extraction. The fundamental question of agency is then, “do we have agency to determine the goals of an economic system?”

Economic systems include the ways that societies derive subsistence, protect themselves from threats, create infrastructure, solve problems and pass on culture. In the anthropological literature, some societies grow rapidly (like the Mongol Empire), while others do not (!Kung Bushmen). All must have grown for a period of time. Most have collapsed and no longer exist. Growth is certainly not a given. In fact, it has only ever been a phase through which societies pass before reaching equilibrium or going into decline. Is it within our collective agency to reflexively determine when the growth stage of a product, business, sector, corporation, region, country or species is over and equilibrium stage should be considered the ideal in place of growth? To answer in the negative is disempowering, while to answer in the affirmative smacks of centralized planning. To abstain is to wait for environmental limits, intra society competition or crippling complexity to curtail growth “organically.”

However, the stakes could not be higher. Regarding the ceiling of the donut, many of the natural resources, living and nonliving, used to stoke growth are non-renewable. As for the donut’s social floor, the negative outcomes and externalities of perpetual growth are disproportionately felt by marginal or disempowered members of global society. Not only this, but the structures of power and production exert overwhelming inertia to change.

In a narrow individual sense, most of us have little agency to pursue professions that are growth agnostic. The structure (typically the yin to agency’s yang) of businesses within the economic system is so rigidly prescribed that alternatives exist only on the margins, though this is changing in part. An illustrative case of agency and change comes from the story of digital marketplace Etsy. When Etsy began, its founders incorporated as a B-corp, a corporate structure that places social and environmental value as the heart of a business’s decision making process, and is designed to protect the values of the firm from the wishes of shareholders in the event that the company goes public. Etsy was one of the first companies to conduct a public IPO as a B-corp in 2015 (https://qz.com/work/1146365/etsy-made-mistakes-from-which-other-b-corps-can-learn/). Its IPO was mixed, and eventually, due to the pressure to generate shareholder value, Etsy allowed its B-corp certification to lapse in 2017 (https://shift.newco.co/2017/11/27/why-we-need-more-etsys/). Etsy’s story illustrates that a company can be conceived, designed and grown while retaining a commitment to people and planet. Yet it cannot be grown indefinitely without subordinating those concerns to profit. In essence, the design of publicly owned corporations, whose valuation is assessed by the millisecond, and whose growth goals are rolled over quarter to quarter, is antithetical to the agency a company (or the people within it) .

Etsy’s story also illustrates the potential agentive power of various groups to enable future outcomes to diverge from past outcomes. To apply the service design lens to Etsy, they existed in a web of associations with consumers/users, communities of practice, shareholders, governments, the physical environment and other corporations. Like the resource flows that permaculturists track, the flows of power in and out of Etsy reveal a design that caused them to compromise their values. Coerced by stakeholders, alienated from their consumer/community base, and replicated by competitors like Amazon, Etsy was forced to compromise.

But as always, individual agencies conspire to collectively remake outcomes. Other B-corps (e.g., Patagonia, Allbirds) have not gone public, but continue to be vibrant and profitable. Users and communities want to patronize firms with good ethics. Some governments are passing legislation to incentivise socially and environmentally responsible businesses. Talent wants to work for them. Thus, a service design process that focuses on people and planet is a critical feature of a currently forming future. Importantly, donut-centered designers (ethnographers) are crucial for such a production process.

In conclusion, the social and ecological challenges of the 21st century require a design process that matches viable economic solutions. I’ve proposed donut centered design as a hybrid of service design and ecological design, with an emphasis on how private and public sector ethnographers can serve to weld the best of two processes by providing a holistic, empirical research foundation. From the research foundation, it becomes possible to change the KPIs that organizations use to guide their actions and establish their successes. Rather than employing human-centered growth as a measuring stick for success, the donut economy with its goldilocks optimum above the floor of social impoverishment and below the ceiling of ecological overshoot provides a novel beacon for action. When they founded Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin installed the phrase “Focus on the user and the rest will follow” to imbue the nascent company with the customer focus necessary to win search market share and achieve success. To adapt the words of Google founders for a new century of technological innovation, perhaps instead of focusing narrowly on the user needs to guide out endeavors we should focus on the nexus of society and environment. “Focus on the donut, and the rest will follow.”

Christopher Golias, Ph.D. is a technology ethnographer, currently with Google, who has conducted applied anthropological research across various areas including retail, healthcare, indigenous rights, substance use, ecommerce, governance, machine learning, localization and information technology. He holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Citation: 2019 EPIC Proceedings pp 605–624, ISSN 1559-8918, https://www.epicpeople.org/epic

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