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If you have a job and live in a city, you may be sheltered from evidence that profound change is under way. But things you can’t see can be all too real. City centers bustle, restaurants are full, and shop windows sparkle, but like ghost images on the television, other realities impinge—eerily empty railway stations, newly built malls that never open, well-dressed people lining up at soup kitchens.

These small signs are the visible evidence of a global system under extreme stress. One cause of that stress is the amount of energy needed to keep it all going. A New Yorker today needs about 300,000 kilocalories a day once all the systems, services, networks, and gadgets of modern life are factored in. The difference in energy needed for survival in the preindustrial era and our own complex lives is 60 times—and rising.

Another cause of stress is the remorseless drive for growth. When the new Italian prime minister, Mario Monti, gave his acceptance speech to the Italian Senate at the end of 2011, he used the word growth 28 times and the words energy and resources zero times. This supposed technocrat neglected even to mention the biophysical basis of the economy that had been put in his charge. He did not see fit to discuss the fact that cars, planes, and freight; buildings and infrastructure; heating, cooling, and lighting; food and water; hospitals and medicines; and information systems and their attendant gadgets all depend on a continuous flow of cheap and intense energy. And this flow is under a duress that can only intensify.

Could economic growth be decoupled from energy growth and expand to infinity that way? Why not grow a service-intensive economy of high-priced haircuts, storytelling, and yoga lessons? This would be a pleasing solution—Service designers save the world!—were it not for one thing: multiplying money always expands an economy’s physical impacts on the Earth somewhere down the line. Indefinite GDP growth on a fixed energy income is not going to happen.

Rather than wait for a global switch to renewables that is not going to happen either, a multitude of communities are exploring how to meet daily life needs in ways that do not depend on the energy throughputs that we have become accustomed to in the industrial world. For every daily life-support system that is unsustainable now—food, shelter, travel, health-care—alternatives are being innovated. These innovations can all benefit from service design expertise.

In the radically lighter economy whose green shoots are now poking above the ground, we will share all resources, such as energy, matter, time, skill, software, space, or food. We will use social systems to do so, and sometimes we will use networked communications. Local conditions, local trading patterns, local networks, local skills, and local culture will remain a critical success factor—and so will service design.

This book is timely and welcome for all these reasons. It will be invaluable for practicing professionals—but also, one hopes, for clients everywhere. Service design is a collaborative activity; everyone involved can benefit from the skills and insights in the pages that follow.

—John Thackara

Marseilles, France, October 2012

Author, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World