Empathy Square: An Aid for Service Design for Behaviour Change to Support Sustainability

Service Design for sustainability requires an integrative intertwined approach for interventions addressing economic, environmental, and social concerns. These design interventions are socio-technical in nature where human beings play a crucial role. To contribute to the larger cause of sustainability, people may have to change their behaviour according to a complex pattern: behaving in a desirable manner once, for a short duration and eventually sustaining the behaviour for a long time. Inducing behaviour change in people often poses an ethical dilemma. Assuming that services trigger new behaviours, designers need to achieve a delicate balance between the concerns of the service- user, human-touchpoints (service staff), service organization and the society or environment as a whole in order to foster more sustainable habits. When designers attempt to address the concerns of all these four stakeholders represented as the Empathy Square, it enables them to facilitate a balanced and ethically appropriate service design solution.