Service design in energy advisory services supports Helsinki’s climate work

Emma Berg, a service designer working at the City of Helsinki’s Building Control Services, develops energy advice for housing companies. In her blog post at design.hel.fi, a website describing the City’s design activities, Berg talks about her work and discusses the connections between service design and sustainability work.
Developing the customer experience and effectiveness of the City’s energy guidance service helps promote the City’s sustainability goals. Service design has a lot to offer to the sustainability transition. Photo: Jussi Rekiaro
Developing the customer experience and effectiveness of the City’s energy guidance service helps promote the City’s sustainability goals. Service design has a lot to offer to the sustainability transition. Photo: Jussi Rekiaro

From the City’s perspective, the most important goal of our service is to reduce emissions in Helsinki. This can be achieved if we make the customer experience and effectiveness of our service as good as possible and help housing companies succeed in improving their energy efficiency. The basic activities of service design are very useful for achieving our big common goal, Berg writes.

Service design supports sustainability work through activities such as analysing different players and customer experience. On the other hand, Berg highlights how sustainability thinking also adds value to service design. Service design methods are human-centric, and the sustainability perspective emphasizes systemic, broader and longer-term impacts. In her blog post, Berg asks what our stakeholder analysis would look like if we included future generations and other species in it – or a customer path that would continue over three generations.

Read the full blog post at design.hel.fi(Link leads to external service)