Strategic Creativity Series #07: Value Pursuit

Strategic Creativity series

VALUE PURSUIT The Readership in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven

Karianne Rygh

Collaborating with: Delft University of Technology, Design Academy Eindhoven, STBY, Connect to Innovate, Exact, Oce industries and Zuidzorg In the CRISP project PSS101 Research period October 2012 - September 2014

VALUE PURSUIT Karianne Rygh

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Contents

Value Pursuit 5 Preface, Dr. Bas Raijmakers

Defining Values Through Collaboration 9 Introduction, Karianne Rygh

Changing collaboration into valuable efforts 13 Conversation with Klaas Jan Wierda, (Océ)

Value Pursuit

Explanation of workshop tool

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Case Studies

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VanMorgen, Design Academy Eindhoven, Province of North Brabant

Designers As Key Stakeholders 39 Karianne Rygh

The challenge of Complex Service Systems 42 Lia Patricio, Daniela Sangiorgi

Does making things visual and tangible help?

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Berit Linquister

Designer as Connector 53 Interview with Froukje Sleeswijk Visser

The designer as instigator in networked collaboration

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Interview with Dr. Pieter Jan Stappers

Divergent role players Interview with Désirée Majoor

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The contribution of Value Pursuit to CRISP 67 Dr. Bas Raijmakers

Contributor Biographies 71 Glossary 75 Colophon 78

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Value Pursuit Preface Dr. Bas Raijmakers

Within the global economy the service sector is growing at a rapid pace, consequently, design is called upon by society, culture and the economy to help address complex problems and to build bridges between previously separate disciplines.

Designers are expanding their traditional roles, in part because they find their designs cannot be successful without, for instance, also addressing complex restructuring of the organisations that have to implement the designs. ‘Design Thinking’ is perhaps the most used term for how designers are providing added value to firms trying to innovate, and to societies that are attempting to create change[1]. Within this new field of work, how can practitioners from different disciplines find a common language and common ground? What can designers bring to management thinking for instance? And in turn, how can designers make use of, and further develop, tools and methodologies from other professional disciplines?

As organisations are building bridges between previously separate disciplines, their networks expand to include professionals from fields that are different from their own. The more complex a service is, the more multidisciplinary the network becomes, which increases the challenges for those who must necessarily collaborate in order to deliver these services. To build a thriving network and to develop more innovative PSS it is necessary for organisations to work together and incorporate other network-partners’ expertise during the early, developmental stages of their independent solutions.

For instance, technology and the humanities have to link up, and this may result in artists entering into collaborations with engineers, or sociologists with architects.

As Roberto Verganti[2] has noted, designers are often well positioned to make these collaborations work – he talks about design-driven innovation as an alternative to technology-driven innovation – in areas where technology-driven innovation has often failed because it did not acknowledge the human factor beyond ergonomics.

In health care for instance, but in many other fields as well, the design-driven innovation alternative is now slowly being welcomed. This does not, however, mean that we already have a proper understanding of how to innovate in a design-driven 5

way. Bringing many more disciplines to the forefront of the innovative process raises the question as to how they will cooperate. A top-down managed team in a hierarchical organisation will not work because too many diverse disciplines and working methods are involved, and their approaches are too different – these range from the process-driven precision of engineers to the intuition-driven, free-flowing approach of artists. Networks seem to be a more appropriate way to organise this diversity than tightly knit teams – networks between organisations as well as individual experts.

Networks are the new teams, but we do not yet understand particularly well how these networks operate and thrive. We do know, however, that they are important for innovation. Such shifts require all parties involved to build partnerships instead of some being clients who commission work from suppliers, doing nothing until an assignment brief is handed to them. They require designers working with clients rather than working for them. Collaboration is required to create meaningful undertakings together. This is equally relevant within governmental and educational organisations, because they need to understand they can no longer operate from a dominant, hierarchical position that others have to abide by. That position of dominance is deteriorating partly because government at all levels no longer has, for instance, the financial power to spend their way out of problems and conflicts.

Instead they need to bring different stakeholders together and negotiate or collaborate with the entire network in order to find solutions to today’s worrying problems.

In this environment, Value Pursuit offers a practical, hands-on intervention based on a deep understanding of the dynamics at play in networks, whilst taking into account issues such as trust between network partners, and keeping a balance between contributing value to the network and gaining value from it. When the nature of the collaborations needed to make service innovation successful evolves from team-work to networks, this poses the question how the role of designers in such collaborations changes with it. Karianne Rygh’s work on Value Pursuit provides some clear answers to that question, which will certainly also be beneficial to those who find themselves working with other people in networks.

References [1]

Kimbell, L. – Rethinking Design Thinking: Part 1, Design and Culture volume 3 issue 3,

pp 285-306, Berg, 2011

[2]

Verganti, R., Design-Driven Innovation; Changing the rules of competition by radically

innovating what things mean. Harvard Business Press, Boston, MA, 2009

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Defining Values Through Collaboration Karianne Rygh

More often than not, designers are trained to follow briefs, to solve problems or to redefine the problem itself – but what happens when designers are called upon when there is no clear problem to solve? In order to position themselves in more strategic roles, designers also need to help define not only ‘the problem’ but also the opportunities within complex contexts. But just how designers find their footing in new territories and how they determine where their interventions will be of most value, often becomes a question for the designer as well as the organisation or client. ‘PSS 101 questions how designers can support such complex networks based on the research conducted as a part of the PSS 101 project, under the ­Creative Industry Scientific Programme (CRISP).

CRISP is a Dutch national research programme spanning eight research ­projects, in which Design Academy Eindhoven collaborates with three ­Technical Universities, two Universities in Amsterdam and over 50 industry partners, design companies and service providers in the Netherlands. PSS 101 is one such project, where researchers (from the Technical University of Delft and Design Academy Eindhoven) and partner companies (Océ, ZuidZorg, Exact, Connect and Innovate, and STBY) provided the context for Value Pursuit. The PSS 101 project aims to develop a framework of methods and tools that will improve networked collaboration across industries. Looking beyond the idea of products as just products and services as only services, the project’s focus goes beyond the traditional paradigms of product design and service design and works towards a combination of the two: Product Service Systems (PSS).

As a Research Associate at Design Academy Eindhoven, I have contributed a year of research to the PSS 101 project, focusing on how networks can be made more understandable for the people working within them, how resources within these networks can be exchanged more efficiently and how trust can be built and maintained between stakeholders.

For networks producing PSS, adopting new solutions and new services requires moving people beyond their traditional compartments as well as meeting the needs of an often diverse group of end-users. As Klaas-Jan Wierda of Océ (a team 9

member of PSS 101) mentions in his interview (page 13), large organisations often struggle to deliver new services that address complex problems because these services rarely fit into existing organisational models .

Using my background in product design, I have researched how designers can support networks by aligning the expectations and goals of diverse stakeholders through the use of tangible tools. The outcome has been the workshop tool Value Pursuit (page 19) which uses an actual game-board and objects to align expectations and goals amongst stakeholders, whilst aiming to disrupt the standard means of communication within complex networks. Value Pursuit was co-created with the PSS 101 team, taking our own multi-disciplinary team as a starting point and then applying this tool in a number of case-studies (page 27).

Berit Linquister, researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture, describes how designers can support networks through taking on a strategic role of ‘visualiser’, emphasising that this role moves beyond simply visualising information or making appealing aesthetics. Other more strategic roles are further discussed by ­Froukje Sleeswijk Visser, design researcher and assistant professor at the Technical U ­ niversity of Delft, (page 61) and by PSS 101 project director Pieter Jan Stappers (page 38). In her interview (page 61), Desiree Majoor from Topteam Creatieve ­Industrie elaborates on how education can provide support in preparing designers for these new roles.

The skills of designers using intuitive exploration, whether through form or through design thinking, can generate knowledge that in turn creates meaning within networked collaboration. As the complexity of challenges grows, a ‘compass’ is needed for designers to navigate through these ‘wicked’ landscapes, and knowing where to intervene in complex issues is key in determining whether the designed solution or the design thinking will create the ‘tweak’ or the change that is needed.

In the PSS 101 project, I have had the opportunity to work within a multidisciplinary group where team members have contributed a great deal of experience, knowledge and case samples from their own research or from the companies they represent, in order to define a framework and guidelines for people and organisations operating within complex networks. The real value in this project is embedded in the interactions which ensued from such diverse and passionate team-members and project participants, and we hope that this value can be gleaned from the research, interviews, articles and case-studies that are presented to you in this publication.

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Partners of Design Academy Eindhoven in discussion during a Value Pursuit case study workshop

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Changing collaboration into valuable efforts A conversation between Klaas Jan Wierda (System Developer at Océ-Technologies B.V.) and Karianne Rygh (Research Associate at Design Academy Eindhoven), led by Dr Bas Raijmakers (Reader at Design Academy Eindhoven)

Klaas Jan Wierda became a member of the PSS 101 research project through the ­industry partner Océ-Technologies B.V. Focussing on disruptive innovation, ­Wierda investigates how we can understand and apply innovation processes within new and existing organisational models.

In a large organisation like Océ, collaboration between departments is often based on tried and tested procedures, many of which have even been documented in manuals and templates. However, when trying to develop something that is new to the organisation – something that requires new ways of working – the existing ways of working efficiently may actually hinder evolution. Value Pursuit is a tool designed to facilitate and improve the results of collaborations; it can enable the founding of collaboration between different stakeholders in (large) corporations.

Bas Raijmakers talks with Klaas Jan Wierda and Karianne Rygh about how collaboration can be established and how a company’s structure and the individual skills of the employees are important elements in supporting communication, collaboration and innovation.

At Océ, there are set routines for the procedures that matter most – how to, for instance, start a project or how to transfer a project from R&D to the manufacturing organisation. These procedures are not easily changed. Every change may require the involvement of a large number of stakeholders from a range of disciplines, such as the financial, legal, purchasing, manufacturing and logistics departments.

Klaas Jan – “We can implement something relatively easily when it already fits our systems, but transforming our financial systems to a completely different business model, for example, would be very difficult to implement because of all the stakeholders involved”.

Set routines can inhibit employees from collaborating in new ways. Klaas Jan – “We found that people in separate rooms find it more difficult to collaborate.

However, when employees are located in different rooms but do know one another, 13

they will strive to find ways to collaborate. If they are not located in the same room and they also don’t know one another then it can be very challenging. When constructing a team or hiring new people, we really seek out people who are naturally drawn to collaboration – it’s a particular quality. Going outside the company to find opportunities for collaboration has similar challenges, you have to work with very busy people you don’t know, and it can be so frustrating that people give up persevering”.

On curiosity

It is important for employees to ask why they have to perform a certain task, to ask what the key problem is at the heart of their design task. Stakeholders tend to get uncomfortable when asked such questions. Often people don’t have the answer to hand but when you prompt them a little you can discover a lot of new information which can have a huge influence on your project.

Klaas Jan – “Asking a lot of questions can be disruptive, nonetheless, I urge people to do this anyway – to talk to each other. Again, a lot of this is down to personal skills and the support of the surroundings. Karianne is a new colleague so she can easily ask many questions – she can be a naïve outsider. When we do field work, I tell the field workers to act as if they are inexperienced interns – even though they may have worked in the field for 30 years they should pretend not to know anything. In order to gather all the right information and create the right solutions for the project, it’s necessary that people feel free to be open about what they need.

Designers can have a key function in formulating questions and asking why. But is formulating such questions a skill typical to designers? It’s a skill of people with a natural curiosity, who enjoy talking to others.”

Visual cues

“When working for the government in Norway, I noticed how departments can work in silos”. Karianne describes her experience working in large companies, “It’s actually easy to go between departments. Visual cues and making things tangible works well – this creates a different kind of communication. Designers can make abstract things tangible – to do so, they have to know the processes within a company as well as the routines, behaviour and mind-sets of people. Klaas Jan adds, “Having tangible objects or prototypes at a meeting, preferably something people can physically and emotionally connect with, works well, better than having bullet point lists in Microsoft PowerPoint”.

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Creating value networks by collaborating

“We have worked on value networks. I would describe something as turning into a value network when I learn something I could not achieve on my own”, explains Karianne. “When collaborating, there is quite a big gap between the initial meeting and the moment when a real collaboration is established. The problem, and what to do about it, cannot immediately be formulated – first you have to get to know each other, to understand and value one another before value networks come into being. It becomes a connection of value when you are able to pinpoint exactly where you got something from the collaboration”.

Value Pursuit

Value Pursuit promotes a conversation that is open to asking why. Before Value Pursuit can be beneficial for a team of colleagues or for a group of partners collaborating, participants need to trust each other. Participants should know what to expect and should arrive with a willingness to be honest. Klaas Jan – “If you know what is important to you in collaboration, and what you struggle with, then Value Pursuit can help you express that – it structures conversations. It helps to have a tool like Value Pursuit that gives conversations more credibility, which in turn enables colleagues to have more in-depth conversations. It is a tool to facilitate collaboration, and any cooperation benefits from knowing what drives the different stakeholders”.

Karianne explains the role of Value Pursuit, “It is valuable to have a tangible tool on the table, it really makes a difference that the tool visualises the discussion. It documents the conversation and this is very helpful, plus you can look back afterwards and track the discussion. During the workshops it’s inspiring to look at other people’s answers when writing down your own answer. Value Pursuit helps create a model for collaboration, it helps you understand what people want”.

Klaas Jan – “Value Pursuit is a facilitator that helps collaborations evolve into valuable endeavours. Normal communication between people is different from that which Value Pursuit helps generate. Value Pursuit takes you much deeper into the topic – it’s quite a powerful way to direct the people in the conversation. Calling it a ‘facilitator’ is actually understating its influence on the process, it’s more than just ‘good coffee and a good meeting space’. We need a different word to describe it – perhaps ‘instigator’ is a better word”.

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Educating design students

Karianne – “After my previous experience working for the Norwegian government it was great to come into a company where someone is able to inform you on the procedures within the company. If you don’t find such a person to help you, then getting your bearings can be much harder. I’ve been focussing on what could or should be in place before the designer is brought in. Often, when a designer is brought in, she first has to find out what she can contribute to the project. There is a role there for the client when receiving the designer”.

Klaas Jan – “In such collaborative processes, designers should realise that there are more stakeholders than you might expect. Realising this helps broaden the designer’s scope, especially when working with a new Product Service System, in which many people are involved in a holistic approach to the project. Are such skills developed at the Design Academy Eindhoven?”.

Bas replies, “The kind of design research you are talking about revolves around attitude and personality. It is not something that suits everyone. It would be great to find students who would like to learn about these methodologies. It would be great to start constructing a form of education about how to prepare students for these roles – steps to prepare designers (and design students) for roles other than those in which they have traditionally been working. They could start by working in strategic, collaborative, long-term projects, which do not necessarily have a tangible end result. It’s an exciting new field for both clients and designers”.

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Value Pursuit - a tool for structuring dialogue on expectations, contributions and struggles within networks of stakeholders producing Product Service Systems.

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Value Pursuit Networks producing Product Service Systems are highly dynamic environments mixing people and factions, interests and goals. Healthcare organisations such as ZuidZorg, for instance, work together with stakeholders, including telecom­ munication experts and software developers, to make services more accessible for recipients of care, thereby not only improving the healthcare of these patients, but also increasing their general well-being.

In each specific PSS network, every PSS stakeholder adds value in the form of experience and knowledge with regard to the development and roll-out of new service concepts. In theory these networks can be a reservoir of expertise from different professional disciplines available to all network partners. Unfortunately, due to a lack of common language and an understanding of each other’s goals and interests, organisations often remain in independent ‘silos’ – cooperating but not collaborating through the sharing of their independent values. To build a thriving network and to develop more innovative PSS, organisations need to work together and incorporate the expertise of other network partners in the early stages of developing their independent solutions.

‘Value’ and common goals can have different meanings for different stakeholders.

One organisation might seek examples of similar roll-outs of new concepts, whereas another might be in need of products that solve a specific problem within their service. Individuals within an organisation may wish to learn other methodologies and ways of doing business which are immediately applicable to their daily work.

By collaborating in a network, individual stakeholders represent a resource and therefore a ‘value’ for other network partners.

One project partner in Océ pointed out during a PSS 101 workshop that they have learned that when creating PSS in networks, whether inside or between organisations, success crucially depends on three factors: 1 — Each stakeholder involved has an understanding of the value to be

gained from the networked collaboration.

2 — They can express their needs clearly.

3 — They understand the other stakeholders’ expectations.

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A current tool that relates to these factors is a stakeholder map, which gives an overview of network relations. These maps, however, do not convey which relations are of actual value, nor do they supply the necessary basis to indicate where new connections can be made. As networked organisations communicate through email, for instance, there is nothing on their screens which indicates how they bene­fit from a network nor what others bring into it. This lack of information prevents the development of better service experiences for the end user or of ­increased economic value for the stakeholders involved.

It is important to realize that relations of value within networks producing PSS are created by individual people as extensions of the companies they represent. Trust within a network affects a person’s ability to convey experience and communicate how this expertise can be used. This, in turn, affects how resources are shared within a network. One approach to building trust in networks is by expanding the stakeholders’ overview and understanding of how their individual efforts contribute to the success of a PSS. Together with the PSS 101 partners, we have designed and developed the Value Pursuit tool, a game board that can be used in workshops to clarify how stakeholders in a specific PSS can be of value to one another, and which thereby helps identify shared goals within the project.

On the Value Pursuit board, each participant must write down their contributory value and what challenges they face. Their potential value is then connected to other partners’ challenges. These connections are counted and represented by playing pieces on a second game board (resembling a radar) which visualises how much each partner gains and contributes to a network. For a network to thrive and trust to be maintained between network partners, these playing pieces should be aligned as much as possible – how much people gain from a network has to be balanced against their contributions.

This workshop tool has been tested in a series of case-study networks where, in each workshop, the role of facilitator has been different. One workshop was instructed and moderated by an employee of the organisation hosting the workshop, another was moderated by the service design agency participating in the workshop, and the third was conducted by the designer (myself). In order for people other than the designer to moderate the workshop, sufficient instruction and preparation is necessary, this can easily be provided through a manual.

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Moving from the outside and in towards the center, participants write their ­expectations, contributions and struggles on post-it notes and place them on the board.

After filling in the board, ­participants are encouraged to place their contributions on other participants’ ­struggles, making new connections between ­stakeholders.

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The new connections of value are counted and placed on a real-time ‘radar’.

Each participant has a large playing piece, which represents the number of potential contributions they have received from other participants, and a small playing piece representing how many contributions they offered to other participants.

The PSS 101 research team testing the Value Pursuit workshop tool.

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The advantage of the designer moderating a workshop is that their role can be that of an outsider, they have no conflicting agenda. This often facilitates participants in being more willing to open up and answer the questions posed. In the case of networks with internal stakeholders within a company, it can be beneficial for the workshop to be conducted by a person within the company who knows the team well, as they are already familiar with the team’s existing challenges.

How It Works

Moving inwards from the outside on the Value Pursuit board, participants are asked to write down on post-it notes what their expectations, contributions (experience, expertise, solutions) and struggles (challenges or obstacles) are, in developing a specific PSS, or in reaching the defined common goal.

After placing their answers on the board, participants are encouraged to take the notes with their contributions on and stick them on other participants’ struggles, showing how they can be of benefit to one another within the network. (In some cases this is also done by the use of stickers.) It is these connections that, through the use of this tool, become the new relations of value.

In order to gain an overview of the potential status quo of the network, these connections are then counted and placed on a ‘radar’. Each participant has a large playing piece, which represents the number of potential contributions they have gained from other participants. The small playing piece represents how many contributions they have offered to the other participants. The large and small playing pieces should be as much in balance as possible, as people should gain as much as they contribute.

The first game board is meant to collect information about how participants in a network can benefit from each other. The second game board visualises these gains and contributions, and uses the ‘radar’ to visualise the balance of contributions and gains in order to trigger further discussion. Through this combination – giving participants the opportunity to express their needs clearly and also visualising how these needs can be covered – stakeholders are provided with an overview that gives them a greater understanding of the value to be gained from the network.

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Value Pursuit – Accessible online

In response to the positive demand for the workshop tool, it has now been developed into a ‘Fab-lab’ version that can be easily downloaded and laser-cut, lessening the production time and making it more accessible to networks that wish to implement the tool. For more information please visit the CRISP platform: www. crispplatform.nl.

Furthermore, a prototype of an online Value Pursuit Platform has been developed together with the PSS 101 project partner and design research agency, STBY. This platform makes the information and connections gained through the Value Pursuit workshop accessible in an interactive, visual way, to all stakeholders who ­participated in a given workshop. In this way, the designer (facilitator) has ­designed themselves out of the activity, so that the participants can continue their collaboration independently through the use of this online value map. In this manner, the Value Pursuit platform continues to build and maintain trust within the network by providing stakeholders with a clear overview and understanding of the connections of value that exist within the network.

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Workshop participants interact with the Value Pursuit real-time radar to visualise the balance of contributions and gains in their network.

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Case studies

The Value Pursuit workshopping tool was developed on the basis of particular success factors of networks producing PSS. To see if this tool could furnish positive results in providing stakeholders with an overview and understanding of other stakeholders’ needs – tools which are necessary in order to express their needs clearly and have an understanding of what value is to be gained from the network – three case study workshops were conducted. The aim was to see how a tool such as Value Pursuit could provide a structure for dialogue to take place between stakeholders on topics such as – expectations, contributions, and struggles, and how this could contribute to a thriving network.

The three case study workshops targeted a range of different sized networks of stakeholders – they took place at a health care company, an educational institution and a regional government. One case study e ­ xplored an ­internal network within a company, whilst the o ­ ther two were concerned with more complex networks of ­stakeholders outside the different organisations. ­The number of participants varied from 7-9 people. In ­certain case studies the participants were prepped in advance while in one case study the participants arrived without preparation.

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Case study #1 –

internal stakeholders within a company VanMorgen (Service innovation company of care organisations ZuidZorg and Proteion)

How can the internal team at VanMorgen improve on the topic of acquisition?

VanMorgen: Team leader and team of eight employees

The aim

VanMorgen is a health service agency under the auspices of healthcare company ZuidZorg. As with most companies, acquisition of new projects is an important task that employees must excel at in order to keep the company in business. At VanMorgen those who were given this task experienced several challenges, and the company wished to explore how they could improve as a team in this area. There had previously been meetings/workshops concerning this subject, but it had not been possible (timewise or due to lack of participation) to pinpoint the more deeply rooted struggles lowering the quantity of acquisitions. Value Pursuit was therefore used to target deeper, underlying issues that created obstacles, with the aim of finding out what kind of support the team needed.

Methodology

Monique Kemner, (adviser of service innovation and distance care at VanMorgen), is a member of the PSS 101 research project and she moderated the Value Pursuit workshop that was hosted at VanMorgen. Prior to the workshop, Kemner sent out a questionnaire for all colleagues to answer and bring with them to the workshop.

This gave the participants a foundation for answering questions which could otherwise have been percieved as difficult. It also sped up the process of filling out post-it notes and starting to fill in the board because people were more decisive in writing down their answers since they had already thought them through to a certain extent.

Findings

Through using the Value Pursuit tool everyone had a ‘piece of the pie’ and everybody’s voice was heard. People who rarely spoke up in regular work meetings 28

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began to open up and express their expectations and struggles. The expectations and struggles targeted professional skills, but also skills that related to them on an individual level. Certain people were good at communication for example, but struggled with the aftermath (reports etc), whilst the next person was the ­complete opposite. Finding these individual skills can help build better teams and use qualifications more efficiently. During the workshop, people were able to express what intimidated them or made them stressed. These topics were then discussed, making it possible to find who within the team could help them with these obstacles.

VanMorgen were considering hiring outside expertise for certain tasks, but through Value Pursuit it was revealed that these skills already existed within the team.

Through the visualisation of contributions on the board it became easier for everyone to see that each person had their own way of doing acquisition, and that everyone had a particular area in which they excelled. After the workshop each person had gained a new understanding of who, within the team, they could go to for help/ advice, since these issues had been discussed openly and people had offered their assistance. In this way, Value Pursuit lowered the threshold for approaching others for help. As every person in the meeting had aired their opinions, the team felt they had gotten to know one another better. Some people had named many contributions while others only stated one. These were good points for discussion and for helping people realise what more they could contribute depending on where others were struggling. One person’s struggle was another person’s strength. The team found that using the tool facilitated conversation as it made everyone’s input equal.

The goal and the three questions were important to them and provided enough content to align their expectations. In several meetings following the workshop, whenever there has been a project meeting requiring their collaboration to be in alignment with one another, the team has used the Value Pursuit tool.

Value achieved

“We haven’t managed to talk about these things in previous meetings.

I’m surprised that a simple piece of paper on the table could make this happen.”

“Certain people who rarely speak up suddenly had a lot of important things to say.”

“It’s difficult to know what you can contribute if you don’t know what people are struggling with. You don’t usually admit your weaknesses, but here we see that one person’s struggle is another person’s contribution.”

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Case study #2 –

external stakeholders Design Academy Eindhoven and its ‘Friends’ (external partners)

How can the bonds between Design ­Academy Eindhoven and external ­partners be strengthened, and how can these partners benefit from these connections as a n ­ etwork?

Participating friends: Forbo Flooring Systems (a global market player in linoleum, vinyl, textile and flocked floor coverings) GGZE (a mental health care company in Eindhoven and ­ De Kempen), TAC (Temporary Art Centre in Eindhoven) and Woonbedrijf (a social housing organisation in Eindhoven).

The aim

Design Academy Eindhoven works with a range of industry partners and sponsors in order to offer students the practical experience and support of their talent that can give them more insight into their further development as designers. These partners are known as the ‘Friends of the Academy’ and it has been an aim of the Academy to explore how this network can be supported and made use of in a better way.

Looking beyond the partners as merely business connections, the Academy wished to explore how their connections with ‘Friends’ could be strengthened, but also how the connections between the partners themselves could grow. Creating and sustaining a network such as this calls for an open discussion on what value can be gained from participating in the network. How could these partners, from very different fields, connect and what value would be gained from the network? The partners were introduced to the Value Pursuit tool and were asked to address their expectations, contributions and struggles in relation to conducting projects in collaboration with DAE and its students.

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Methodology

The Friends of the Academy were invited to have a round table discussion on the above mentioned topics. They were prepared in advance with a short summary of how the Value Pursuit tool works but they did not prepare answers for the activity.

The workshop was conducted as an informal lunch discussion.

Findings

Forbo Floorings were eager to see how new networks could be utilised in relation to future products and concepts, and to gain insights into the designer world, but they wanted to see a return on their investment. In order for the network to be beneficial there has to be a balance between the costs and the gains of participating. The workshop is a nice first step in creating new connections, but how can we maintain and grow these?

GGZE brought up the topic that mental health issues are stigmatised. As an organisation, they wish to change this stigma by opening their doors with the aim of educating the wider public about how mental health conditions are experienced – both by the patient themselves and by their families and communities. GGZE would love to learn from other partners of the Academy, how designers can be brought in to support this.

Woonbedrijf, being a social housing organisation, are well informed about the living situation of their tenants through their maintenance staff who frequently visit the houses. This knowledge, however, is difficult to access because it remains in the minds of the maintenance employees – how can other partners gain from tapping into this knowledge? How could it benefit, not only health care organizations such as GGZE, but also the tenants, families and communities?

How can we build further on developing new projects connected to such findings and contributions from the other participants? Some common struggles that were discovered through the Value Pursuit tool were: How is it possible to access the knowledge of partners in the network, and gather together the people involved?

How can partners more easily connect to DAE and involve design students? And, how can partners actually work together on projects at DAE? There is a need for common goals to be communicated and made clear to all the 33

partners involved, this, in turn, would help the networks thrive. The topics that came up during the workshop were on different levels of importance and timing.

There is a need for these different levels to be clarified and easily communicated.

What possible solutions are there for communicating the outcomes of Value Pursuit meetings?

Value achieved

“I’m surprised at how quickly we went to the core topics that are really important and that these could be discussed openly.”

“I wrote down as a goal – connect with new friends. That’s a new one, I just figured that out today” “My goals were the quantification of result, return on investment, but [the value of] knowledge is not easy to quantify.”

“The difficulties are also opportunities.”

“Don’t put too many stickers or we’ll have too much work!”

“If you want to work more as a network, it takes more than just a one-on-one conversation with the Academy.”

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Case study #3 –

external stakeholders

Province of North Brabant with external stakeholders

How can current stakeholders collaborate within their network to develop a new five-year water management policy that will ­facilitate the expansion of responsibility ­ onto an increased number of stakeholders?

Participants: Provincie Noord Brabant (regional government), Brabant Water (regional water supplier), Brabants Landschap (nature charity), Breda City Council, Waterschap de Dommel (regional water board), ZLTO (regional farmers association), facilitated by design research agency STBY.

The Aim

The aim of the workshop was to explore how stakeholders can collaborate in new ways in order to develop a new Provincial Water Plan for 2016-2020. The regional government of North Brabant, responsible for developing the plan, invited other stakeholders to a round-table discussion and exercise in aligning expectations and goals before the development of the new plan. This plan must sanction joint responsibility and enable a joint force to put policy into action. Whilst previously the responsibilities were concentrated on a few key stakeholders, the making of water policy and its execution will now be spread over a wider number of stakeholders.

How will they collaborate in a network and what new relations between the stakeholders can be established?

Methodology

The workshop was hosted by STBY who, prior to the meeting, mapped out the current situation of the network by interviewing existing key stakeholders. Then, 35

in order to make it possible to share and discuss the input, these interviews were visualised in the form of profile posters. The information collected was also placed onto the Value Pursuit board by STBY, and the data arranged according to expectations, contributions and goals.

Then the workshop was held with stakeholders, the participants were able to read one another’s profile posters and the information was also placed on the VP board.

The participants were asked if they agreed with the information presented and also to add additional information where required. By having this data readily available, the participants could immediately start to make connections between the contributions and the struggles, discovering new opportunities for collaborations. The real time radar board was used to visualise the balance between the contributions and the gains in order to spark further discussion. The clusters of connections were translated onto a flip-chart and discussed, making the potential collaborations concrete.

Findings

The Value Pursuit tool provides a clear overview of the network, the issues to be debated, and the expectations and agendas of the different stakeholders involved.

A key insight from the workshop was that the Value Pursuit tool assumes that propagating openness and transparency is good, which is not necessarily true in policy making. In networks such as these, the stakeholders have to negotiate certain ­elements of the policy that are familiar to all, but in negotiations, transparency and openness can work against you and can be wise to keep your cards close to your chest. Stakeholders who know each other very well, give and take in a controlled way during negotiations, and they don’t want to say something that can work against them later.

STBY identified other instances where Value Pursuit is well suited for the future development of networks – particularly where design thinking is needed in order to address an unfamiliar topic or theme; when dealing with a larger complex problem that requires the aspects that urgently need change to be identified; when innovation is greatly needed; or when new stakeholders come into the network.

The Value Pursuit approach works very well in these situations because openness and transparency are valued and required. The tool gets new stakeholders up to speed on the current situation of the network they have entered. Furthermore, 36

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by structuring their conversation and stimulating reflection, the Value Pursuit tool ­assists stakeholders in gaining an overview when new themes come into the ­picture or when new themes need to be identified.

Value achieved

“The new-comer stakeholder didn’t receive any ‘dots’ to start off with, but towards the end of the workshop this changed. After it became apparent through the visualisation that they had not received any potential contributions, that prompted everyone else to see what they could contribute.”

“As a new stakeholder, this workshop provided us with an overview and easy access to the key topics of interest of the other stakeholders.”

“Normally, this information would not be as accessible to me since I’m not yet ‘one of the boys’ in the network’” “We have never been able to get so ‘deep’ into the important topics in such a limited amount of time.”

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Designers as key stakeholders Karianne Rygh

Together with the industry partners in CRISP we have defined three strategic roles that designers can adopt in networks collaborating to create Product Service Systems: making ideas tangible and understandable; facilitating the connections between people or parties; and instigating change.

Visualiser

Making ideas tangible and understandable often includes some kind of visualisation, but analysis and synthesis are always an integral part of the role of the designer and underpin it[1] The making of these visualisations is often a part of the conversation between the stakeholders, but visualisations that are almost too perfect, may hinder discussion, and so a rough sketch can offer tremendous space for debate and may be very useful as a first step towards developing a greater understanding on the part of the stakeholders of what is valuable, and also in clarifying the role of the designer[2]. Berit Linquister, a researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture, describes, (in her article on the use of tangible models to aid a strategic conversation between leaders), how designers can support networks through taking on a strategic role of ‘visualiser’, but that this role certainly moves beyond only visualising information or making appealing aesthetics. According to Linquister, designers have the ability to design tools that enable others to visualise what they are saying, encouraging understanding across silos.

Connector

The goal of the designer who takes on the role of connector is to enable people to connect beyond their own disciplines and organisational silos, and to then broker collaborations between them. Once such connections are established, designers have the ability to instigate change by making new insights, opportunities and ideas tangible, and by creatively and positively disrupting traditional methods of presentation and communication. Through knowing where to intervene and which elements to make concrete, it is possible to assist companies in adopting new ­approaches that don’t immediately fit into their pre-defined models, as is often 39

the case with new services. But in order to be able to intervene, designers need the assistance of the client/company to facilitate proper research and to enable an understanding of the internal processes, behaviours and mindsets of the people working there.

Instigator

In order to connect with the company and its stakeholders, to build a relationship of trust, and to know where change or disruptive innovations might be beneficial, designers in the previously mentioned roles needed to become key stakeholders taking part in the conversation from the start. No expertise, theory or single approach alone can solve the wicked complex problems of today, instead, the ability to re-invent new methods of creating knowledge through intuitive ex-plorations serves a vital role in the development of the future of innovative services.

Designers are particularly well positioned to deliver a vital contribution to this effort by making ideas tangi-ble and understandable, facilitating the connections between people or parties, and instigating change. However in order to do this successfully they need to be involved in the project from very early on in order to connect with all the stakeholders involved and build a network of trust. By operating on this more strategic level, the CRISP programme believes designers have the power to facilitate better collaborations and create value that will help to serve the creative indus-try in the future.

On the following pages, these three roles are further explored with academic researchers Berit Lindquister, Froukje Sleeswijk Visser and Pieter Jan Stappers all of whom work on related topics.

References [1]

Kimbell, L. – Rethinking Design Thinking: Part 1,

Design and Culture volume 3 issue 3, pp 285-306, Berg, 2011

[2]

Raijmakers, B., Van Dijk, G., Lee, Y., & Williams, S. Designing Empathic

Conversations for Inclusive Design Facilitation. Include Conference 2009, London, 2009

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By becoming key stakeholders in a network, designers can take on more strategic roles.

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The challenge of Complex Service Systems1 Lia Patrício and Daniela Sangiorgi

Services on offer today are enabled by complex service systems – these can be defined as configurations of people, processes, technologies, tangible objects, and other resources that enable value co-creation[1]. This piece discusses the implications for Service Design practice and research when approaching this complexity at both an organisational and at a network level.

At the organisational level, customers can now co-create their service experiences by interacting through multiple channels with various combinations of people and interactive devices – such as an actual sales location, the internet or mobile devices. In contrast with traditional services provided in a person-to-person tangible environment, customers can now co-create their own personal journey across multiple channels and touch-points, in a dynamic way. This raises new challenges for service providers, who must now design their multi-channel service system such that customers can co-create smooth, inclusive experiences across the different touch-points. In this context, integrated design of the different channels, is required, but this must also take backstage operations into account.

The complexity of the service environment is reflected, not only at company level, but also at the level of the wider network. On the side of the service provider, organisations increasingly form value-networks to collaborate in being able to offer more complete solutions to their customers. These value-networks are also increasingly the result of collaborations across public, private and third sector parties, challenging existing ideas of innovation networks and models[2]. On the other hand, the emergence of social networks have created a space for customer and citizen networks to co-create value through information sharing and service provision. Designing for the customer experience within the network setting, represents a new challenge for service design.

This is a reprint of an original essay by Patrício and Sangiorgi in the ‘Mapping and Developing Service Design Research in the UK’, an AHRC funded research report available at http://www.servicedesignresearch.com/uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Mapping-and-Devloping-SDR-in-the-UK.pdf 1

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A smooth customer experience requires not only consistency of integration within the organisation’s service system, but also consistency and integration across multiple network partners that together form the service on offer. Moreover, companies are able to design their service system to create value within the network, but this is an open environment where they have less control over the service process and outcomes.

Designing for service within this network context therefore requires not only the design of what the organisation has to offer, but also of the inter-connections with other partners and customers within the value-network. Service design has traditionally focused at the level of the company, although it takes into account the ecology of the service as a context for design. However, when services are offered by a network of partners, the service ecology then becomes part of the design space.

Service design methods and tools therefore need to evolve in order to provide support for design decisions at the network level.

As an example, the multilevel view of a Service Science systems approach can help when designing services in the context of such complexity. Systems thinking ­enables a holistic approach to designing service systems, recognising that the system as a whole is more than just the sum of its parts, and that system behaviour depends both on its components, as well as on the interactions between components[3]. This is crucial for service providers – that they design each touch-point without losing sight of the overall customer experience across the service.

Systems thinking also enables service systems to be addressed at different levels[4].

Starting at the company service system (designing the service across multiple channels and touch-points), service designers can direct their perspective broadly, to design services for the value network as a system of systems, or they can pinpoint their focus on designing each touch-point in detail. The systems approach enables designers to focus on one level while understanding the impact of decisions there on the other levels. Design approaches already address the creation of new services from a holistic perspective, but systems thinking can help to deal with complexity by enabling different, interrelated levels and perspectives: a system of systems, a system and its parts; and both system components and interrelationships.

Service design has traditionally focused on the front stage area of service systems and on customer experience. However, designing for great customer experience also requires well-designed backstage operations and supporting technologies.

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Only when operations are well-designed can the customer co-create experiences that are reliable and efficient. Service operations research has addressed the issue of service design, but mostly in regard to the service delivery process, the impact of technology and customer contact intensity[5]. As such, further integration is needed between these two streams of research - service design, and service operations - in order to address complex service systems.

Ultimately, designing complex service systems requires the integration of multiple perspectives and competences. Service marketing contributes the design of the service value proposition and how the service offered by the organisation is positioned within the value constellation of other provisions to co-create value with customers. Interaction design concerns the design of multi-channel interactions between customer and service provider, with a strong focus on enhancing the customer experience. Operations management is concerned with the design of the backstage service system and processes that enable service promises at the public interface to be fulfilled in an efficient and reliable way. Service engineering and ICT contribute the development of technology-enabled solutions comprising both interactive systems and backstage systems.

Multidisciplinary teams are needed to address the different components used in designing service systems in this integrated way. However, multidisciplinary team-members still struggle to understand, and work with, the other fields. Further work is needed to integrate the concepts, language and methods of the different areas in order to create common ground for service design.

Service Design Research has only partially dealt with these topics, and has mainly considered the role of designers as facilitators of conversations and to co-design processes to enable novel service configurations and collaborations between different partners. There is therefore considerable scope to further extend these initial studies to increase the potential for Service Design contributions within contemporary complex service systems development.

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References [1]

Maglio, P. P.,Vargo, S. L., Caswell, N. & Spohrer, J., The Service System Is The Basic

Abstraction of Service Science. In Information Systems E-Business Management 7,

pp 395-406, 2009

[2]

Gallouj, F., Rubalcaba, L., & Windrum, P. (2013). Public-Private Innovation Networks in

Services. Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. 2013 [3]

Jackson, M. C., Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers. John Wiley & Sons,

San Fransisco, USA. 2003

[4]

PatrĂ­cio, L., Fisk, R. P., Cunha, J. F. E. & Constantine, L., Multilevel Service Design:

From Customer Value Constellation to Service Experience Blueprint.

In Journal of Service Research, 14(2). pp 180-200, 2011 [5]

Froehle, C. M. & Roth A. V., New measurement scales for evaluating perceptions of the

technology-mediated customer service experience. Journal of Operations Management

22(1): pp 1-21. 2004

[6]

Verma, R., Fitzsimmons J., Heineke J. & Davis M., New issues and opportunities in

service design research. Journal of Operations Management, 20(2). pp 117-120, 2002

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Fig 1. Tangible models to aid a strategic conversation among leaders. AHO student project Flight 2020.

Image: AHO students SD2 2013

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Does making things visual and tangible help?

The tricky intersection between design and business Berit Linquister

As a teacher of MA students in service design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, I have had the pleasure of seeing how the students use their design skills to take on quite complex challenges. As they mature as service designers and become more experienced with real-life business projects, the complexity of it all becomes more apparent to them. They begin to realise that it is not sufficient to be able to design the perfect service – they need not only to understand, but also to be understood by those on the other side of the table, namely, the business people.

In my previous practice as a design counsellor for the Norwegian Design Council within a wide range of businesses, we found that too many innovative and well-crafted design projects did not reach the point of successful implementation. Particularly in the case of services, this seems to be especially challenging.

Any form of change in a service impacts on multiple parts of the organisation – everything has an impact and that makes changing a service very challenging.

A new role for the service designer

The more a designer understands an organisation, its structure and the people working within it, the more likely they are to be able to have an impact. As one of my students remarked a few weeks into a project for a Norwegian postal service, “A service designer should really know something about everything, especially about the logic of businesses”. So, should designers become experts in business as well? I would argue not, preferring to place the focus on choosing the appropriate design approach. The designer’s work processes and methods can challenge established mindsets, which is where the opportunity for innovation lies. I do, however, believe that designers could take on a more strategic role towards businesses and even within a business. “This is particularly true for service design, since design for service (Sangiorgi, 2012) is closely related to the design of the organisation itself.

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Service designers are therefore increasingly participating in strategic discussions (Gloppen, 2012), and leadership insights, will in the future possibly become as important as customer insights” (in Clatworthy, van Oorschot, Lindquister, 2014). In such a new role for the designer, we also need to look at the design methods used and how they could be further developed to match a more strategic context.

To a service design student, and perhaps also to the professional, the perception that one must have capabilities in every field can be rather overwhelming.

Reflecting upon the service design oriented projects that have really made an impression on me, I see that they have concerned projects where the designer has incorporated their own experience and methodologies to fulfil strategic roles.

Tangible tools in a strategic setting

This question is of great interest to service designers, as well as for the service design research team at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. My colleague professor Simon Clatworthy initiated and led an explorative five-week study as part of an MA service design course in the spring of 2013. It was run in collaboration with the Customer Care research project (Clatworthy et al, 2014), which looked at new organisational approaches to improve customer experience. The student project was called, How to get a leader to talk: Tangible models that aid strategic business conversations about scenarios. The following year we ran a similar project, and this time we wanted to explore how physical objects could aid a discussion about the implications of change to become more focused on customer experience. We wanted to discuss business strategies for a specific situation, to map the leaders’ perceptions of the implicit challenges for their organisations. To do this, we wanted to see if tangible objects and metaphors would aid a conversation at this high level. “Mitchell and Buur (2010) focus upon tangible models in the field of participatory innovation with a strong focus upon business models. They show how tangible model sketches help to:

Facilitate thinking in systems, create simplicity, express the vivacity of the business, make it easier to think big, provoke new connections and associations, support story telling, work across language barriers, and provide easy-to-recollect experiences. In addition, the interactive and collaborative nature of tangible business models show potential as catalysts in co-constructing new possibilities for innovation. (Mitchell & Buur, 2010)” (as referred to in Clatworthy et al. 2014).

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Below I will focus on the use of tangible objects as a designer’s tool to facilitate a business conversation at a strategic level. The use of metaphors in this study is discussed in the paper, How to get a leader to talk: Tangible objects for strategic conversations in Service Design presented at the ServDes2014 conference (Clatworthy et al, 2014).

Making metaphors tangible

When we evaluated the tools, it became clear that the tangible objects which the service design students had developed were relevant for the desired task – aiding discussion about strategic challenges. The models were all tested in real life situations, and all the test persons found that the conversations quickly got to the point in question, and also that it was useful to interact with the model by physically moving the objects.

An interviewee from a bank commented on the quality of the discussion and the efficiency of the tool, “The model allowed us to quickly move to very interesting parts of the discussion. It would have taken hours to get to the same result without it”.

The use of physical objects in our tests seemed to support the integration of many aspects into a new whole.

Fig 2. An engaged bank manager is responding to the challenges the model presents to him. He stated ‘If I had called a meeting and said we would make ten strategic ­decisions within an hour, then everyone would have said it was impossible, but that’s what actually happened.” AHO student project Flight 2020.

Image: AHO-students SD2 2013

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Another of our business partners from a postal service commented that he found it very useful to physically build the relevant elements of the organisation as the discussion proceeded. I observed that he and his colleague started building t­ o­gether – they discussed what the next step could be and tested out the possible consequences by interacting with each other and moving, removing, replacing or adding objects to the model. It was also helpful to think large scale, as he stated: “It is useful to use a physical model to discuss the theme. You see everything in one picture and you get to visualise how big the distance is from top level to front service.

You also see how many layers in our organisation a strategic decision goes through before we finally meet the customers.” Interviewee from Norway Post/Bring.

Figure 3: The model MindSpace was tested with Norway Post/Bring. “To be able to move the objects as part of the discussion makes the meeting more dynamic. It is useful to be able to illustrate different approaches and it makes an impact to see your different actions materialised in this way.” Interviewee from Norway Post/Bring.

Image: AHO students SD2 2014

Finally, I would like to highlight the aesthetic and visual aspect of using physical models and the impact this aspect had on the end result. My observation is that a high quality finish of the physical objects and a relevant visual language do a lot more than just ‘make things look nice’ – physical form and visual choices should 50

have a purpose. Such a purpose could be to lower the threshold for engaging with the objects or to encourage understanding across silos. Visual qualities can, for instance, make the business model more inviting to the participants and make people feel safe and comfortable. It would appear that the application of colour, shapes, materials, space, size and mobility has an impact, and in my opinion they can be applied intentionally as design material.

Within strategic design there is a need for the designer to move beyond the limited boundaries of a defined service. The designer now takes on a role within the company which involves collaborating with leaders and creating mutual understanding in alignment with stakeholders. This new role demands an increased organisa­ tional understanding, whilst ensuring that the internal ‘end user’ is also listened to.

References: [1]

Clatworthy, S., van Oorschot, R. & Lindquister, B. How to get a leader to talk:

Tangible objects for strategic conversations in Service Design. ServDes 2014

[2]

Gloppen, J. Service design leadership: Shaping service innovations

at the intersection of design and strategic management. Unpublished PhD,

Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), Oslo, Norway. 2014

[3]

Sangiorgi, D. Value co-creation in design for services. in Miettinnen, S. &

Valtonen, A. (Eds.), Service Design with Theory. Vantaa: University of Lapland.

pp 96-104. 2012

[4]

Mitchell, R. & Buur, J. Tangible Business Model Sketches to Support Participatory Innovation.

Paper presented at the DESIRE ‘10, 16-17 August 2010, Aarhus, Denmark. 2012

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Designer as Connector Froukje Sleeswijk Visser interviewed by Bas Raijmakers, June 2014

“Roles emerge out of interactions: people do things, talk, see, experience, and while doing so they create mutual understanding on who does what (Luckmann and Berger 1966).

The patterns become habitual in implicit roles. Once the patterns are explicated inside an ­organisation, i.e., described in role-descriptions, roles become formal organisational roles (Weick 1995: p.72).” (Stompff, 2012) Getting people connected beyond their own disciplines and organisational silos, opens up the opportunity to broker collaborations between them. Through her interview with Bas Raijmakers (reader in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven), design researcher and assistant professor at the Technical University of Delft, Froukje Sleeswijk Visser, discusses how designers can take on this role in practice.

A new, still undefined role

Froukje Sleeswijk Visser confirms that designers’ roles in particular are changing.

The involvement of designers as stakeholders in projects within larger organisations is evolving as more and more organisations are becoming aware of the value of having designers on board, yet it is difficult for organisations to know exactly how they should involve designers. Sleeswijk Visser recently worked with the municipality of Eindhoven and thinks this collaboration is a good example. “They are increasingly involving designers to connect people (from civil servants, to service providers to citizens) and to guide complex processes. This wouldn’t have happened five years ago.” According to Sleeswijk Visser, this is due to people high up in the city council having a strong belief that design skills and design attitudes can make valuable contributions beyond the traditional range of design. Particular individuals promote those ideas and include designers on different levels within the organisation.

If companies and institutions wish to incorporate designers in new roles in order to introduce what is often called ‘design thinking’, then connecting the different stakeholders is crucial. In Sleeswijk Visser’s experience, the municipality of 53

Eindhoven seems to value designers’ abilities to cross boundaries and to connect people who were previously separated, in such a way that they can start to collaborate. “With the tools that designers bring and the ways of working that designers employ, they see that designers can bridge that connection better”, explains Sleeswijk Visser.

Connecting through ambassadors

One example she brings up is the activity of hosting workshops. A common obstacle in organising workshops is finding the right people to participate in order to achieve the desired results. Visser points out that an efficient way to get the right people on board, is to look at who is already participating in the project and see how they can be of support. “The best thing is when people themselves take responsibility. For example, the designer could communicate to the participants in the project what the aim is and give them the role of inviting others. It should not be the designer who is deciding everything because then you are just another leader.

That’s not the role of the designer”.

In this way, participants can become ‘ambassadors’, taking part in determining who could or should be involved in the network. Visser stresses that the designer’s role is, in this case, to provide very clear communication about the workshop to the ambassadors, and to make sure that all participants are informed in the same manner.

To do this the designer could prepare a brief, where s/he also emphasises the goal of the workshop. According to Visser, it is always good to actually over-emphasise the goal, otherwise participants don’t always understand why they are sitting there together, and start to spend the workshop time for meetings instead.

Making change less threatening

As networks participating in larger complex projects are highly dynamic, the need for involvement from different stakeholders may also vary, but being an inactive stakeholder for a certain period of time can be perceived as something negative within an organisation. Visser points out that, “designers have an important role in visualising these changes and possibilities. If you make it more explicit that it’s okay to step out for a particular phase then I think people would collaborate better”.

As designers take on more managerial tasks, such as organising workshops and connecting people, what is then the difference between a designer and a project 54

manager? Project managers often deal with the ‘what is?’ whilst designers have the ability to question ‘what could be?’ Sleeswijk Visser states, “The project manager usually gets the brief and manages, while the designer often wants to develop things further in a different setting, get people together, ‘shake them’ and see what new ideas come up. Designers see connections that aren’t there yet, they get people to meet and create these potential connections – not just saying hello or exchanging emails, but actively engaging in a situation where they can work towards ‘the new’ in a playful way. That’s not a role for the project manager.”

The imagination of the designer is a skill that makes a substantial contribution to team cognition. Stompff (2012, page 210) found: “(The) ability to imagine the consequences of choices for the ‘intended’ system has a particular contribution to team cognition: it moderates cross-disciplinary reflections. […] Through ‘imagining consequences’, designers distinguish themselves as, in comparison to others, they respond more often to the ongoing dialogue, bringing about many decisive shifts in the discussion and subsequent team activities. The skills of designers have two aspects: ‘Seeing’ what is said, and seeing the ‘intended’ system. (…)

The imaginative skills of designers moderate team perception, as the ‘intended’ system serves as a platform for cross disciplinary discussions.”

Educating connectors

At the end of the interview, Visser points out that education has an important role in preparing designers for situations such as the ones mentioned above.

Multidisciplinary work, she suggests, teaches designers how to design collaboratively with others. Law students, or students studying medicine, could for example, assist design students in innovating departments within a hospital. By working in multidisciplinary teams, designers learn to take on new roles, and start to see shifting roles as a natural part of their design practice. With change being the norm in product service system design nowadays, that is a good skill to cultivate.

Reference: [1]

Stompff, G. (2012). Facilitating Team Cognition, how designers

mirror what NPD teams do. PhD thesis Delft University of Technology, NL. 2012

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In multidisciplinary research projects, collaboration is crucial. What is the role of designers within these teams? Are they the ones who orchestrate, or do they initiate collaboration? What kind of tools and methods could they use? And how should we educate designers so that they excel in these roles? Dr. Bas Raijmakers, Reader in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven, interviewed professor Dr. Pieter Jan Stappers, revealing some interesting insights.

The designer as instigator in networked collaboration BR: To create innovation in product service systems, experts from different disciplines, each with their own different approaches and reflexes, are brought together. There is no set way for them to collaborate well together, but one could instigate the innovation in such a way that it creates the beginning of change – not necessarily in a subtle or discreet way, it could also be done provocatively. What is your opinion on this?

PJS: One could differentiate between the roles which designers could play – between the orchestration of the collaboration, and the initiation of the collaboration. Either of which might concern different people, not necessarily designers.

Often we think of designers as orchestrators because, in general, they have been trained to deal with multi-facetted problems, work with multidisciplinary teams, empathise with the needs and abilities of all the stakeholders, and so on. Whereas initiation is the ability to get things started – perhaps something has already been decided by the powers that be – in which case the designer could orchestrate, following the direction of the train that has already been set in motion, even though they may not necessarily have been the one to provide the initial impetus.

In some cases, a number of parties come together before a clear goal has yet been defined. This needs someone who will propose the dream that will bring people together, or someone who poses the question that elicits the dream. This skill often belongs in a designer’s skill-set.

BR: This evokes two images – ‘orchestration’ suggests that you have quite a bit of control, like a conductor of an orchestra – that you can create harmony with all the 57

voices that are there. Whereas the other role is perhaps related to an ability to bring people together in a less predictable way.

PJS: It’s a wide spectrum – imagine orchestrating a dinner party. You might be the person who determines that x should sit next to y. Alternatively, you might lay the table such that people will arrange themselves in groups of two or three or four.

That’s less explicit than saying exactly ‘who’ and ‘what’, directing people or dragging them off their chair if they are on the wrong one. It’s a more subtle way of creating the conditions for fruitful collaboration to take place. And between these two is a whole spectrum of possibilities. Personally, I think that the more subliminal way – of being there first and setting the stage so that everyone who enters is spontaneously steered in a particular direction (hopefully producing a constructive arrangement) – is most fruitful. It’s certainly a more sympathetic way of directing everybody. It’s about providing opportunities and circumstances. Of course it is also a mode of control, but control is too often exerted based on the assumption that we know beforehand what different people’s abilities encompass, however it’s my belief that, in the complex situations we deal with, especially concerning product service systems or complex system design, all one can do is to shape the conditions – unless, of course, you already know everything yourself, but then why do you need all those other people?

BR: I think that what we discovered with Karianne Rygh’s work on Value Pursuit is that even aiming to shape those conditions is quite an ambitious thing to do.

Conditions in organisations are already so engrained, plus there are huge cultural components involved as to how people relate or respond to one another.

PJS: It’s a huge challenge – especially because, often, many of the constraints concerning such projects are decided by people who are not directly involved.

For example, in a large company it may be pre-determined that the project team members work on the project on Mondays and not on Tuesdays, and that they have to be at their desk at certain times and not at others. And, whereas it may well be more useful for the project dynamics to disrupt those things, it may be difficult to access those responsible for making such decisions. So in large organisations the challenges will probably be greater than in SMEs, where the lines are shorter and only a small number of people need to be prevailed upon, people who may themselves also want to be involved. Within the larger companies, involvement is limited to only part of the company, and that’s also an indication for me that a lot of the capacity for innovation lies with the small companies rather than the large 58

ones. Innovation increasingly requires flexibility rather than the ability to predict the future. In complex systems you cannot predict the future.

BR: This unpredictability also seems to reflect the way in which people have come to relate to one another within teams.

PJS: Less predictable and possibly much more reliant on the personal qualities of the people involved – that’s another big challenge for the big companies.

Large companies are accustomed to exchanging one team member for another because, on paper, they have the same skills, but in complex systems, successful collaboration relies on personal backgrounds and personal relationships within the project. Simply replacing man-hours is not going to be fruitful.

BR: If you look at the type of interventions an instigator could make, what types do you consider would be more successful?

PJS: Well, for getting people on one track, creating something that you can place on the table can be very important. It gives people the impression that forward movement can be achieved, and thus provides an impetus. Something tangible can be really valuable, especially when all those present can relate to and interact with it. It could be a three dimensional object, but sometimes a good visualisation that allows people to point things out or, possibly, cross things out, helping to get their minds into imaginative mode, can be a great help. Probably it takes some skill to know what to use at what time – when to use images, when to use words, when to diverge and when to converge. Luckily, diverging and converging is a basic premise of design, but there is also a need to recognise the moment when an intervention is likely to be productive. This has some connection to facilitation skills – one has to be very attentive to what is going on: who is picking things up, who is lagging behind, is the group cohesion working – those sensitivities are needed concerning the people involved. We found that designers are typically good at asking the question, ‘Are we progressing toward the common goal?’

BR: The making of the thing that is put on the table, is that also part of the job of facilitation, or does that fit into another role?

PJS: For the sake of coherence, there is obviously an advantage in having one person exhibit all these skills, but there might also be an advantage in having different people, so that the person who is orchestrating the play is able to take some 59

distance, making it easier for people to criticise the artefact that has been put on the table, without feeling that they are criticising that person directly. Sometimes you have to elicit the destruction of the artefact so that something better can be produced afterwards.

Some designers come to a session with multiple concepts rather than with just one, the most interesting reason being that it’s then possible for criticism to be directed at the artefacts rather than the maker of the artefact. When the maker puts multiple things on the table he or she makes clear that there is no commitment to any particular one. Presenting more than one thing is one of the tactics of the instigator, and relinquishing ownership – often you want to delegate ownership to the other participants too. Imposing too much of your own order, your own signature on it, can actually repress them or push them away, and what you would like is for them to take initiative – preferably in a direction that you have orchestrated – so you have to sketch a way forward whilst leaving room for other people. These are the tricks of the trade of designing which I consider very valuable in these provocative processes.

BR: Does that also mean that you sometimes need to disappear as an instigator for a while, and leave the team to go it alone?

PJS: I can imagine that being quite valuable, yes. The primary act of initiating could be either to bring the team together or to lure people toward a team – which might actually be two very different ways of organising. In a big company you can see that they have a strategic goal – someone high up defines this goal and people are ­delegated, tossed into a team, given a goal and told to get on with it. Whereas in these network services, someone, or a small group of individuals, envisions a possible goal, and then others buy in, and are brought into that circle. This is where the artefact can play an important role as a kind of bait, leading someone to have the spark of an idea heading in a particular direction. The artefact is a kind of designer’s bait, created to lead them there.

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The Dutch Government believes that in order to play a leading role in innovation, a strong focus needs to be placed on educating the creative talents of the future. For this reason, nine Top Sectors were installed, each consisting of a board of professionals from the fields of science and industry, advising the government on knowledge development, innovation or export policies. For the Top Team Creative Industry the explicit challenge is to design the creative innovation process. We interviewed Désirée Majoor, Top Team Creative Industry member and vice president of the board of the Utrecht School of the Arts, on the role of designers in the creative economy of the future.

Divergent role players Interview with Désirée Majoor

“It is primarily the higher educated creatives who are being called upon to stimulate the creative economy. They need to make those crucial connections between the knowledge economy and the products, services and applications that are required to feed into it”. That is the opinion of Désirée Majoor, who was invited to join the Top Team last year. Majoor considers that education has a crucial role to play in achieving this.

The Top Team has defined a skill-set, the so-called 21st century skills, that are considered to be crucial in order to excel. “These are the very general and basic skills such as collaboration, creativity, ICT knowledge, communication, critical thinking, and social and cultural skills. The challenge lies in the need for a team of creators, scientists and entrepreneurs who can jointly and collaboratively tackle these issues, in order to deal with the complex issues of our time. So we strongly believe that skills relating to collaboration need to be at the top of the list”, says Majoor.

Until recently, designers were primarily trained as ‘problem solvers’. The ‘creative’ aspect was considered to come in at the very end of the project, simply to polish it off with a nicely designed surface layer. “This position for the designer is definitely over”, Majoor points out. “Designers now operate within teams and in different roles, involved in all phases of the process. They could be an instigator, but could equally well be the one who manages the project or visualises it. Which role the ­designer takes on depends on the people they’re working with as well as the c­ ontext 61

they’re designing for. Some designers can easily combine project management with being a visualiser, others have difficulties with that and stick to a single role.”

Majoor considers it crucial that during their education, designers discover what roles fit them best in regard to their personal interests and skills, and how these can be an asset within multidisciplinary teams. “This makes it important for schools to offer interdisciplinary programmes. The triangle of design, business and technology is a very important one. We are already seeing how, in business education, they are looking at the way that design institutions and technical universities incorporate business skills – understanding one another requires quite some effort and, in my opinion, the best way to acquire mutual trust is to start building these relationships”.

In a recent publication, The Power of the imaginary[1], Paul Rutten, a Reader in Creative Business at Hogeschool Rotterdam, elucidates on the way that creative professionals­ can be found everywhere within the context of the creative economy. The success of the creative economy should, in his opinion, not be related to the number of jobs within the creative industry, but on the success of the innovations for which creative skills have been essential. According to Rutten, the recent development of the area of creative technologies within higher education illustrates this point perfectly. Within such institutes, students are trained to become ICT literate, to know how to design, and to have a basic understanding of human needs and behaviours.

These creatives don’t need to be experts in any of these fields, but they need to be able to define essential new combinations, to organise, and to design new hybrids.

Rutten therefore considers it important that, within the creative industry, we do not only focus on the companies but also on the creative talent and on how the ­imaginative can be stimulated.

“Imagination is their strength”, Majoor stresses, “it is crucial for designers to hone their visual skills”. She also suggests that we need to get rid of the rather pretentious notion of professionalism. “I believe that in the near future we will not primarily think in terms of jobs or positions but rather in qualifications and how to best connect these to the right context”.

In our current educational system there is not much room for the use of the imagination – Marty Neumeier emphasises this in Metaskills, five talents for the robotic age[2].

Neumeier says that students should have the space to diverge and ‘make’, but that most of the educational institutes are primarily interested in quantitative learn62

ing goals. With this in mind, Désirée Majoor explains her belief that educational institutes should leave more gaps in the curriculum. “The programme shouldn’t be overloaded. This is why, at the Polytechnic College of the Arts, we are not only working towards multidisciplinary programmes, but also making sure that the programme offers possibilities for students to create their own path and potentially make new cross-overs”.

For Majoor, it is also important for creatives to become more visible. They have to become more aware of their unique talent and how it can be valuable in creating meaning in various contexts. Some companies are very well aware of that, Shell, for example, has for years already been active in involving creatives in multidisciplinary teams. They are very aware what divergent thinking can bring to their organisations. Other organisations are still in the process of finding this out, but I’m convinced that it will not take very long before cross-overs in industry and education become far more commonplace”.

References: [1]

Rutten, P., De Kracht van de Verbeelding, perspectieven op de creatieve industrie,

Public lecture. Hogeschool Rotterdam Uitgeverij, NL 2013

[2]

Neumeier, M., Metaskills, Five Talents for the Robotic Age. New Riders, 2012

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Value Pursuit The idea behind Value Pursuit was to create a tool to share and discuss struggles, contributions and expectations.

Therefore, we are also sharing the actual tool through open source and it can easily be downloaded and produced at any local FabLab.

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The contribution of Value Pursuit to CRISP Dr. Bas Raijmakers

Value Pursuit is part of one of the eight main projects within the CRISP programme called PSS 101 – the 101 of product service systems – and its results steer the overall goals of CRISP ever forward. CRISP, which started in 2011 and will end in 2015, is a four-year project, with many smaller, connected projects contained within it. Through these project contributions, CRISP, as a vehicle to make design more strategic and render society more resilient through design, also becomes more concrete.

CRISP aims to strengthen society and the economy by making them more creative

A more creative economy does not automatically result in more competitive product service systems, nor does a more creative society always result in more resilient product service systems. These results will only be achieved if people start to work in different ways when developing these new product service systems. In particular, more people with a wider range of diverse expertises and backgrounds have to be involved. Even large multinationals like Océ-Canon, who participate in this CRISP project, need to collaborate with new disciplines, sometimes even with new partners. When, for instance, customers want to shift from buying copiers and printers to a service that allows them to simply make prints and copies at a fixed price, the company has to adapt. Making such a shift, however, is very difficult for large organisations. New collaborations within the organisation need to be set up internally, parts of the workforce have to be retrained (selling copies is very different from selling copiers), and business models have to be redrawn. The emphasis here is on collaborations, because the ways in which different departments work together have to change in order to achieve such shifts. Designers can make a valuable contribution by facilitating such innovation processes. Karianne Rygh’s Value Pursuit offers an approach and a tool to make the connections which are necessary for these new collaborations, in particular in the form of networks.

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Designers have a strategic role to play in this

Karianne Rygh has explained in detail in this publication, the strategic roles designers can play in helping organisations to build networks. In short, there are three: making ideas tangible and understandable; facilitating the connections between people or parties; and instigating change. Value Pursuit contributes most directly to the second role, but the first and third are equally important because the ideas that emerge from those connections can only be successful in a diverse network if they are made tangible and understandable for all. If that is achieved, the penny usually drops for everyone involved and the first step to instigate change has been made.

Organisations must learn about the strategic role design can play

For the organisations we worked with for Value Pursuit, the fact that a designer would engage with them in such a role was mostly new. As the section with the case studies shows, this new role was nevertheless valued by a wide range of organisations, from industry to government. Unaware of the potential of contributions by strategic designers, organisations need to be introduced to what these designers can do to help build the networks that the organisations require in order to deliver complex services. Commissioning designers for projects at these early stages is generally very difficult, because there are no clear briefs to design something this early in the service innovation processes. Instead of being commissioned to design a specific service, designers should be involved as partners, to help the strategists and analysts involved, to work and think in new ways with other, and often more numerous, people than they are used to. The strategic role of the designer here is to bring people together in meaningful activities that help all of them to collaborate across their departments and organisations.

How can design education prepare designers for such roles?

The best way to prepare for the strategic role of designers described here is by bringing collaborative work into design education. This might start through collaborating with other design disciplines, as is fairly common, but should move beyond that. At Design Academy Eindhoven the departments themselves are multidisciplinary, and students are already encouraged to develop as multidisciplinary designers. This greatly helps in collaboration with other designers, but strategic collaboration requires more. Collaborations with other schools and universities, 68

for example business schools, or humanities departments such as anthropology, are the next step towards practicing multidisciplinary collaboration. The interesting thing about collaboration is that it not only teaches you what others do, but can also be a great help in understanding what your own true strengths are from the perspective of others without a design background. Understanding all these perspectives and being able to switch between them, is what Value Pursuit helps to do, and what makes it a strategic tool that can be used already in education and in professional life later.

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Biographies Drs. Daniëlle Arets

Drs Danielle Arets is Associate Reader (Associate Lector) in the Readership ­(Lectoraat) Strategic Creativity. She also possesses a key role as a Knowledge Transfer manager for Design Academy Eindhoven, disseminating the knowledge that results from CRISP to creative industries and educational establishments.

Daniëlle has a strong record in organising debates for a wide array of public, educational and commercial institutes, and through this experience she has ­ ­become a strong advocate for inter-disciplinary research and design. Daniëlle aims to bridge academic and design thinking through strategic, creative tools and ­techniques, and of course, many debates.

Berit Lindquister

Berit Lindquister is a service design researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) within the research project Customer Care 2015. She is also the course leader of a master class in Service Design, tutor, and diploma supervisor at AHO. She is an experienced business advisor and has worked for the Norwegian Design Council and Innovation Norway with a wide range of Norwegian b ­ usinesses.

She has developed tools, methods and work processes for design advisers working with private businesses. What she finds most inspiring is when service ­designers and business people come together in a really successful collaboration. Lindquister trained as a product designer and holds an MBA in management. She also runs a small consultancy bureau.

Désirée Majoor

Désirée Majoor has been the vice-chairperson of the Executive Board of HKU since September 2012. In February 2014 she became a member of Topteam Creatieve Industry, whereby she pays special attention to the Human Capital Agenda. She is also, among other things, a member of the board of the Immovator Cross Media ­network, and chairperson of the supervisory board of Het Huis Utrecht. Désirée Majoor has been active as a manager and administrator in higher education for more than 25 years. Her own studies were in Theatre, Film & Television at the University of Utrecht.

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Dr. Bas Raijmakers

Dr Bas Raijmakers PhD (RCA) is Reader (Lector) in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven and leads the in-house CRISP research team. Bas has a background in cultural studies, the internet industry, and interaction design. His main passion is to bring the people for whom we design, into the design and innovation processes, through the use of visual storytelling. He holds a PhD in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art, in London. He is also co-founder and Creative Director of STBY in London and Amsterdam: a design research consultancy specialising in service innovation. Bas works for clients in the public sector and industry, around the globe.

Karianne Rygh

Karianne Rygh is a Research Associate in the PSS 101 and Incubator 2.5 projects within CRISP, combining her research with design work at her independent design practice, Studio Rygh. After completing a Bachelor of Industrial Design at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, Karianne went on to pursue a Master in Social Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven, where her graduation thesis was entitled, Choice within the Making, a thesis on converting carpentry skill-training in prisons into a tangible tool fostering reflective thinking.

Karianne has a background in governmental institutions in Norway as well as professional design experience in large organisations, and her interest is in how designers can take on new roles and change mindsets by designing on a systemic level.

Dr. Daniela Sangiori

Dr Daniela Sangiori’s research focuses on Service Design, which was also the topic of her PhD. She has investigated services as complex social systems, proposing holistic and participatory approaches to Service Design. Daniela was a researcher for the SDI Agency at the INDACO Department of Milan Polytechnic until April 2007. During this time, she participated in several national and European research projects, mainly dealing with the role of design in the innovation and development of the Italian industrial system.

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Dr. Froukje Sleeswijk Visser

Dr Froukje Sleeswijk Visser is an independent design research consultant (www. contextqueen.nl). She is also assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the changing roles of designers and users, concerning design processes in the delivery of products and services. Froukje holds a PhD in Industrial Design Engineering (Bringing the everyday life of people into design, 2009).

Prof. dr. Pieter Jan Stappers

Following his education in experimental physics (MSc in 1984), Prof. dr. Pieter Jan Stappers made the switch to Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft, and followed a research path that led from human perception, spatial imagery, and Virtual Reality (PhD in 1992), to design tools, and participatory design techniques. His current activities include being director of the Graduate School and carrying out research in the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, a design research programme with 140 PhD candidates. Key elements in his work are ‘research through design’, ‘experiential prototyping’, ‘context-mapping’ – more on these can be found on his webpage http://studiolab.io.tudelft.nl/stappers/.

Klaas Jan Wierda

Klaas Jan Wierda M Sc works as a solutions developer for Océ Technologies R&D, in Venlo. Trained in applied physics and cultural anthropology, he has worked in various innovative projects on developing new products and services. Klaas Jan’s main concern is understanding and applying innovation processes in large organisations – a topic which has more interesting angles than one would at first imagine.

Klaas Jan works with Karianne in the Crisp PSS 101 project, identifying and visualising stakeholder values. They both hope to deploy this work in a current study – the development of exciting new print applications for the architecture market.

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Glossary Creative Industry Scientific Programme

The Readership is embedded in CRISP (Creative Industries Scientific Programme, see crispplatform.nl). CRISP is a Dutch national research programme of more than 60 organisations, in which Design Academy Eindhoven collaborates with the Technical Universities of Delft, Eindhoven and Twente, VU and UvA in Amsterdam and over fifty design companies and service providers in the Netherlands. CRISP is supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. For details about all CRISP projects, see www.crispplatform.nl.

PSS 101

The project, Methods for Conceptualising Product Service Networks (PSS 101), is about developing a framework of methods, techniques and tools that can improve conceptualisation and communication between all those involved in design and development, across industries. Products are no longer just products, services not only services. Take Océ for instance – once they used to sell printers, and now they ‘support document management across different departments.’ Exact, well known for its financial and administrative software, now produces business service systems for SMEs, enabling them to support and manage their business integrally, including relationship management. This type of thinking requires new design and development structures, moving people out of their traditional compartments, meeting the needs of an often diverse and evolving group of end-users. Product Service Systems (PSS) are designed in highly dynamic network environments, mixing people and parties, models, interests and goals.

Scientific partners in this project are Delft University of Technology, and the ­Design Academy Eindhoven. Industry partners are STBY, 4C-MG, Exact, Oce industries and Zuidzorg.

Open Design Spaces

Open Design Spaces is an initiative of the Readership Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven. The team of Research Associates of the Readership works on collaborative projects within CRISP. Open Design Spaces extends this collaboration to students and tutors at the academy to introduce them to what 75

academic design research entails. These short workshops are a way for students to participate in this research programme, a bridge between the Readership in Strategic Creativity and the educational programme of the academy.

The Readership in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven

The Readership explores how design and creativity can play a strategic role in society and the economy in general, and in service innovation in particular. In the strong design culture of Design Academy Eindhoven, academic knowledge is created through designing. The results of the programme are used within the educational programme of Design Academy Eindhoven by way of Open Design Spaces – a four week design research module for students around a topic related to the research of a particular Research Associate. Further to this, results are disseminated through public debates, conferences, workshops and publications – the work can be followed via several digital channels. For more details see www.designacademy.nl/strategiccreativity.

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Colophon Value Pursuit The Readership in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven Editor:

Karianne Rygh

Editorial team: Daniëlle Arets, Bas Raijmakers, Ellen Zoete Writers:

drs Daniëlle Arets, Berit Linquister, Désirée Majoor, Lia Patrício,

dr. Bas Raijmakers, Karianne Rygh, Daniela Sangiorgi, Pieter Jan Stappers,

Guido Stompff, Klaas Jan Wierda, Froukje Sleeswijk Visser.

Proofreaders:

Jane Hardjono & Jimini Hignett

Graphic design: HeyHeydeHaas Printed by:

Lecturis, Eindhoven

Edition:

500

CRISP PSS 101 research group:

Scientific partners: Delft University of Technology Creative partners: Design Academy Eindhoven Service Providers/industry partners: Connect to Innovate, Exact, Océ, STBY, ZuidZorg (VanMorgen) CRISP [project] partners:

Guest moderator Value Pursuit Workshop at Design Academy Eindhoven: Tessa Blokland Participating ‘Friends of the Academy’ – Value Pursuit Workshop:

Design Academy Eindhoven: Daniëlle Arets, Tessa Blokland, Tonny Holtrust, Bas Raijmakers Forbo Flooring: Josee de Pauw, Edo Rem GGZE: Janneke van Kessel TAC: Joyce Hijdra, Rob Veldhuijsen Woonbedrijf: Wilbert van Bakel Special thanks to:

The PSS101 team, Monique Kemner (VanMorgen), Marie de Vos, Ingrid Wendel, Patrique Beaupain (STBY) and Tessa Blokland (DAE) for implementing and contributing to the further development of the Value Pursuit workshop tool.

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Images:

Patrique Beaupain, Heather Daam, Rieneke Sterken, AHO Service Design students, spring 2013-2014, VanMorgen Publisher:

Design Academy Eindhoven Emmasingel 14, Eindhoven, the Netherlands www.designacademy.nl/strategiccreativity email: opendesignspaces@designacademy.nl ISBN/EAN: 978-94-91400-19-3 Price: € 10 Readership Strategic Creativity, 2014 Reader (Lector): Dr Bas Raijmakers PhD (RCA) Associate Reader (Associate Lector): Drs Daniëlle Arets Visiting Research Fellow: Ré Dubhthaigh MA (RCA) Research Associates: Michelle Baggerman BA, Alessia Cadamuro MDes,

Heather Daam MDes, Maartje van Gestel BA, Susana Cámara Leret MDes, Karianne Rygh MDes, Mike Thompson MDes, Jonathan Wray MDes The Readership Strategic Creativity is partly funded within the Creative Industry Scientific Programme (CRISP). CRISP is s­ upported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. www.crispplatform.nl

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-­ NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. © 2013 Karianne Rygh and the authors

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Designers are usually trained to follow briefs and solve problems, but what happens when the contexts they work in become so complex that there is no clear problem to be solved yet it’s obvious that some kind of change is needed? These so-called ‘wicked’ problems need to be tackled at both an organisational and a network level in order for designers to become the instigators of the change that is required. This publication aims to shed some light on what kind of support, approaches and mindsets designers require in order to do so.

Value Pursuit is a project by Karianne Rygh, Research Associate at Design Academy Eindhoven and part of the PSS 101 project within CRISP (Creative Industry Scientific Programme). CRISP focuses on Product Service Systems, requiring designers to think and work more broadly and more strategically in response to largescale societal challenges. These contexts require multidisciplinary approaches, but people within different professional fields often struggle to work together as a team, so the strategic role of the designer is to bring these people together in a way that enables them all to collaborate, in networks, and across and between organisations.

This book is part of a series of publications by the Readership in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven. The Readership explores how designers trained at Design Academy Eindhoven can create academic knowledge through design.

Bas Raijmakers PhD (RCA) Reader in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven