Touchpoint Vol. 2 No. 1 - Service Design and Behavioural Change

volume 2 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro

May 2010

Touchpoint the journal of Service Design

Service Design and Behavioural Change • Designing motivation or motivating

design? Exploring Service Design, motivation and behavioural change Fergus Bisset and Dan Lockton

• Design and behaviour in complex

B2B service engagements Ben Shaw and Melissa Cefkin

• Charging Up: energy usage in

households around the world Geke van Dijk

service design network

touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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Touchpoint Touchpoint

Proof Reading

Volume 2, No. 1

Lektorat Rotstift (Kirsten Skacel)

May 2010

Minka Rössner

The Journal of Service Design

Katrina Rundic

ISSN 1868-6052

Printing

Publisher

Heider Druck GmbH,

Service Design Network

Bergisch Gladbach

Editor

Fonts

Birgit Mager

Mercury G3 Whitney Pro

Editorial Board Shelley Evenson

Service Design Network

Craig LaRosa

Köln International

Ben Reason

School of Design Prof. Birgit Mager

Coordination

Ubierring 40

Minka Rössner

D-50678 Cologne

Germany

Design

www. service-design-network.org

Continuum Carolina Garzón Mrad

Contact

Johannes Schott

Minka Rössner journal@

Cover Picture

service-design-network.org

Alexander Gischler, »nette street fighter«

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Pictures

Touchpoint, please visit

Unless otherwise stated, the

www.service-design-network.org/

copyrights of all images used for

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illustration lie with the author(s) of the respective article

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contents

May 2010

Service Design and Behavioural Change 06 From the editors

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08 News 10 Setting the Frame How Service Design influences the human behaviour

10 Where ‘outside in’ meets ‘inside out’ David Hicks

14 Designing motivation or motivating design?

Exploring Service Design, motivation and behavioural change

Fergus Bisset and Dan Lockton

22 On the design of standard and relational

service encounters

Carla Cipolla and Fernando Secomandi

26 Research in practice: Bringing behavioural change

from lab to studio

Nick Marsh and Dan Lockton

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contents

30 Save Resources What impact our behaviour has on the environment and what can be done to protect natural resources

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30 Imagining behavioural change Camilla Masala and Jan-Christoph Zoels

34 Charging Up: Energy usage in households

around the world Geke van Dijk

42 Re-defining comfort: Making energy conservation

less painful

Aislinn Dewey

46 Rethinking behaviours: Beyond persuasion Franco Papeschi

54 Live Healthy On the different possibilities of engaging a healthy lifestyle in an easy and adaptable way

54 Look outside the box Ingo Frobรถse, Birgit Mager and Minka Rรถssner

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58 Designing behaviours for health Craig Lefebvre

62 What Service Designers can learn from

policy designers

Gyuchan Thomas Jun, Kathleen Beniuk and John Clarkson

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66 Crossover Learnings Interdisciplinary crossroads of Service Design

66 Design and behaviour in complex B2B

service engagements

Ben Shaw and Melissa Cefkin

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74 Service design meets social marketing Mary Rose Cook

78 Unearthing action catalysts in community

development and design Kira Adams

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82 Mobile ethnography Marc Stickdorn and Anita Zehrer

86 The music of service: Drawing from improvisation Liz Danzico

90 Service Design Snapshots from around the world

90 Understanding migrant workers' health behaviours Mary Rose Cook

90 Charity donating through interactive technologies

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Sanna Borg and Sara Mpumwire

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Motivating young & healthy adults to get the flu shot Steve Selzer

92 Empirically yours: Designing the customer

experience Sandy Ng

96 Costumer Profile Darby Thomas, Nicholas Remis, Izac Ross, Jerome TavĂŠ and Chris Wronski

100 Dos & Don’ts 102 Member Map touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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from the editors

Letter from the Editor

Birgit Mager Editor Touchpoint

Isn’t life always centred around influencing the behaviour of other people?

Shelley Evenson is a principal, User Experience Designer at Microsoft. She has been an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Design, where she was also the director of graduate studies. She teaches in the area of Interaction and Service Design.

In education, psychology, economics, politics: influence is taken to make people behave in the interest of others. Social values and norms are to be accepted or at least to be respected in terms of behaviour. Elections for political parties or products are to be made. In all kinds of interpersonal relations, the game about influencing behaviour holds a central role. As one of the most prominent representatives for this ‘love’ could be mentioned.

Courting and seducing, obliging and supplying, demanding and punishing – behaviour is influenced with honest and dishonest means.

The social sciences have been the basecamp for the systematic exploration of behaviour and behavioural change. Psychology, sociology, pedagogics were the gralekeepers for scientific knowledge. Who will ever forget the Milgram experiments, the Montessori revolution of education, the Freudian model for understanding behaviour – Adlers approach to mass psychology or the behavioural approach of Skinner and all those that built on his concepts?

Politicians and their consultants have always been profoundly interested and informed in means to influence and change the attitudes and behaviours of people – and some of them will never be forgotten due to their fatal skills in doing so. Ever since Ernest Dichter published his ‘Strategies in the world of wishes’ marketing has successfully explored strategies to influence the behaviour of consumers on conscious and unconscious terms. And last but not least it is the nature of design to influence the behaviour of people through information, interfaces, environments, interior designs, products and – last but not least: services.

Within the multitude of knowledge about behavioural change I see three major challenges for Service Designers. First of all: Since we are continuously designing systems around the behaviour of people we need to provide deep insight into the theories and methods on influencing the behaviour of people. Service Designers should be aware of existing knowledge from different disciplines, they collaborate with experts and use existing knowledge in the most transparent and informed way.

And: Service Design should reflect the ethical implication of what we are doing. For good reasons all models and strategies of influencing the behaviour of people have been subjected to radical criticism. Manipulation is the shadow of influencing – and it is a dangerous cliff to climb. But: influencing behaviour is inevitable. In reference to Paul Watzlawick one could say “You can not not influence” – and this raises the question, how a reasonable influence on behaviour that is ethically and morally risen above all doubts can be designed.

Third point: Service Designers should use their specific design skills in improving the systematic approach towards behavioural change. Service Design will use existing knowledge from different disciplines to connect the right people and apply the right framework. But it will also add innovative insights to the existing theoretical

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knowledge about behavioural change. What do Service Designers contribute to behavioural change? “The key lies in the systems nature of Service Designing. Service designing is a meta design activity for intentionally integrating (not accidentally falling into) systems of interaction with people – via human systems, information systems, and physical systems – to create value and differentiate providers. In addition, because we are developing resources for interaction – or the service medium – we are providing things in the world (people, places, products and processes) that can work together to influence behaviour. Because behaviour is so hard to change, it may take many interactions across elements to change it. A system has more power than an individual element …” says Shelley Evenson.

Craig LaRosa is principal at Continuum, he is charged with creating brand experiences that connect the emotional needs of user with the functional needs of an organisation's brand. Craig is passionate about designing services, orchestrating the material and aspects of a customer's brand journey to build positive long-term relationships.

Ben Reason takes a slightly different perspective: “Designers bring a focus on the material side of behaviour.

We are both best placed to a) look into how people interact with the things that shape our world and b) shape those things to enable new behaviours. We naturally understand human behaviour as an interaction with both other people but also with human constructs that afford particular behaviours. We see how the constructs are affecting people and empathise with their problems and motivations and we have the urge to change things for the better.“ This issue of Touchpoint gives insight into the diversity of theoretical models and practical projects dealing with behavioural change. The boarders between social marketing and Service Design and the role motivation plays in behavioural change are being explored. The relationship between policy making and Service Design is reflected.

Ben Reason is a co-founder of live|work and over the past eight years has directed his passion for social impact projects into delivering successful change for the public sector. He graduated from Liverpool John Moores University with a BA in Fine Arts, following this with an MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice from the University of Bath.

The health sector is one strong focus of projects that are or have been conducted: making people get their flu shot or improvement of the wellbeing of migrant workers.

But also the issue of energy consumption has been explored with the Service Design approach and challenging questions like reduction of energy consumption or visualisation of the carbon footprint have been subject to design. Using Service Design in order to change behaviours on complex B2B relationships is a challenging research for IBM – and it will inspire others!

Interesting cross-fertilising studies come from the Sports University in Cologne: a very precisely designed and measured research opens the doors for collaboration with design.

Birgit Mager Editor in Chief touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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news

Service Design Network Germany

We are happy to announce that the Service Design Network Germany has come alive! As part of the International Service Design Network the German chapter will have a special focus on pursuing the interests of the German Service Design community. We want to bring Service Design on the top of the agenda of policy makers, industry, institutions, media, academics and professionals. We want to channel the energy of Service Designers in Germany in order to let Service Design grow successfully!

The first official meeting of the SDN Germany ‘The Service Design Reception’ will be held on May 14, 2010. Afterwards we will invite to the ‘Service Design Reception’ where drinks and snacks will frame informal exchange between Service Designers and those interested in Service Design.

By Minka Rössner

The Guardian supplement on Service Design

Service Summer in Karlsruhe (Germany)

The British newspaper The Guardian

The Service Summer consists of a

has released a ten page supplement

four-day Summer School for PhD

on Service Design on Monday, 15th

students and the Service Summit with

of March. In co-operation with the

renowned speakers from academia and

Service Design Network The Guardian

industry. Karlsruhe Institute of Tech-

has produced a supplement themed

nology has recently become member

on Service Design and Innovation. In-

of the Service Design Network and

cluded are many interesting case stud-

will soon establish a professorship for

ies and best practices with perceivable

Service Design. From July 18-22 there

business impact – enjoyable and easy

will be the Summer School and on 23rd

understandable examples. 10 Pages,

the Service Summit. Prof. Birgit Mager

350,000 copies … great stories!

will hold a lecture and give a workshop on Service Design on July 21.

www.guardian.co.uk/service-design

The founding of Service Design Network Germany is part of a process to strengthen the Service Design community worldwide. The SDN has grown a lot during the last year and the need of building national chapters has come up to represent the Service Design community all around the world.

Find more info about SDN national chapters on the SDN website soon. www.service-design-network.org

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All the events will bring together international experts in the field of Service Research with PhD students, young scientists and practitioners from industry. www.service-summer.org

Betacup Design Competition

Servicedesign by Søren Bechmann

Service Design Network Conference Boston

Servicedesign is the first Danish book

The Service Design Network gladly

about the discipline of Service Design.

announces another event within the

58 billion paper coffee cups are thrown

Not only therefore the book is in many

Service Design Network community!

away unrecycled each year. The

ways a ‘basic textbook’ that introduces

On October 29th 2010 a one day SDN

amount of waste resulting from con-

Service Design to the Danish market,

conference will be held in Boston,

sumer packaging every year is mind-

where the discipline is still very new.

USA. It will be hosted by Microsoft.

boggling. So reducing the number of

The book describes what a service

The core planning team is Shelley

paper coffee cups consumed is the

actually is and what the consequences

Evenson, Jamin Hegeman, Birgit

initial attempt for this competition.

are when it comes to service evidenc-

Mager and Mark Jones - more details

The coffee cup was chosen because

ing, quality measuring, customer

coming up soon!

it's a symbol of how consumerism has

management, handling variability,

got completely out of control. The

service marketing etc. A number of

betacup differs from most contest

Service Design models are described

formats, because it is open. The aim is

including some of the methods and

that with this feedback process ideas

tools that can be used in working with

will become even better, so you are

developing services that are attractive

SCAD Savannah seeks candidates for a

encouraged to submit ideas early and

to the consumers and efficient to the

full-time senior-level faculty posi-

benefit from the feedback. The top idea

companies.

tion in Industrial Design and Service

www.service-design-network.org

SCAD is hiring

Design to strengthen its investment

as decided by a jury will earn $ 10,000 and the top five ideas as decided by

www.klamamse.wordpress.com/ser-

in an energetic, robust and growing

community ratings will have $ 10,000

vicedesign

industrial design program. The ideal

divided amongst them! The Betacup

candidate for this need will be driven

team invites you to submit ideas but

to develop cutting-edge content and to

also to comment and rate others' ideas,

establish a leadership role in the field.

and engage in discussions with other

The successful candidate will possess

betacup community members and

classic industrial design competency

contest jurors.

as well as the ability to contribute to

This international contest starts on

a progressive platform of programs

April 1st 2010 and ends on June 15.

that includes Service Design, Interaction Design, Design Management and

www.thebetacup.com

Design for Sustainability.

To apply online, please check the SCAD job webpage. https://scadjobs.com/applicants/ Central?quickFind=51998 touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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By David Hicks

Where ‘outside in’ meets ‘inside out’

Designing superior services by designing in behavioural change There appears to be a new design industry self-evaluation in progress with practitioners, academic institutions and students questioning themselves about what to do next, what direction to take and what new value they can add to organisations. Identifying what they can do specifically to influence wider organisational (strategic) agendas appears particularly important, as new opportunities start to emerge from the current period of recession. Service Designers appear to have the skills and ability to gain wider influence within organisations and their capacity to understand, integrate and communicate the internal and external dynamics that make any organisation work. In turn, influencing the beha-viour of stakeholders could pay dividends for them personally as designers and for Service Design as a practice.

Increasingly, organisations seek to develop and implement effective and elegant services as a value-driven way of differentiating themselves from their competitors. This means Service Design strategy looks like becoming the new design ‘kid on the block’ and there is a real and present opportunity for ‘Service Designers' to position themselves as trusted advisors within their organisations and for their clients.

Not all designers are made equal and not all designers have the 10

breadth of skills to participate in what can be viewed as ‘strategymaking’. It can be contended, however that Service Designers may be the breed of design professionals who have the skills and perspective to influence organisational behaviour, a prerequisite for participating in strategy development.

However, the current focus of Service Design practitioners appears to be on the tools and methods to develop ‘outside in’ approaches to service development. This scope

touc hp o in t | the jo u rn al of s ervice d es ign

may pay too little attention to influencing the internal behaviours and capabilities that will serve to direct how any service gains traction and how the broader organisation can be engaged. We argue that a balancing ‘inside out’ approach must also be taken.

The ability of Service Designers to utilise and integrate ‘internally focussed’ tools that can be used to help influence an organisation's resources and behavioural capabilities appears to be vital if Service Design is to be allowed to impact organisations more widely. Having the ability to impact on behavioural change from front-line staff to the senior management teams is as central to being a trusted advisor as it is having a newly designed service delivered to a customer's expectations.

The willingness of Service Designers to adopt additional tools to influence organisations capabilities and how these are applied to facilitate employee behavioural change is becoming more important. Senior managers within organisations also view the ability to influence

setting the frame

Internal resources & capabilities

Senior teams (action learning)

Informal networks (forums)

Big picture perspectives

Space

Teams (operational reviews)

reation Co-c

Solos (coaching)

Pairs (mentoring)

Customer / user data

External

Meaningful models & frameworks

environment

Service vision

Service strategy

Service implementation ‘infinity’ model (SIIM)

behavioural change in a pragmatic way as a route for them to increase their sphere of influence within the organisation and its stakeholders.

So what are the specific skills that a Service Design approach brings and what needs to be considered to allow Service Designers to integrate these tools and techniques with the internal dynamics of an organisation?

Whilst working with a new client, a challenger brand within the leisure and entertainment industry, we developed the service implementation ‘infinity’ model (SIIM) to guide the client through a complete approach to developing and implementing their newly designed services.

This model suggested one integrated view of how our skills and

perspectives as Service Designers and strategists could be integrated with the client's internal teams, to inform, design and develop the organisation's behaviour generally, and specifically influence the behaviours of people, within a virtuous ‘loop’.

The right hand side of the model shows the skills and perspectives Service Designers work with on a daily basis and those that form the core approach to designing services from the ‘outside in.’ Two elements that, although present in designing services, must take a more dominant role in influencing organisational design and impacting on people's behaviours within the organisation are ‘big picture

perspectives’ and ‘service strategy’.

The starting point for the virtuous loop is about building compelling big picture perspectives that will be effective at influencing stakeholders within the organisation. This was critical for the client, enabling them to set a foundation for internal stakeholder engagement and creating initial alignment at a local level, whilst keeping commercial realities in sight.

The basis of this step includes combining commercial, design and other perspectives that form the environment in which the organisation exists. It must take into account the commercial realities of the organisation and articulate what is

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where ‘outside in’ meets ‘inside out’

By David Hicks

happening in consumers, technology and social landscapes. The challenge here is to start illustrating a business case for how the service will deliver benefits in practice and also act as a platform that illustrates the broader aspects of where Service Design can play a legitimate part in transforming the business.

Presenting these perspectives to stakeholders gave a departure point and context within which the client placed Service Design as an influencing practice.

Locating and communicating hard ‘business factors’, such as customer/ user data were used to develop hypothesis for building and utilising meaningful models and frameworks (such as customer journey mapping or user segmentation maps). This was critical for our client, as they required a strong business case to ‘sell’ to other stakeholders ahead of any other design-led activities.

Having this information allowed an informed service vision to be established and one that was robust and clearly communicable.

Once this was completed, a broad service strategy was designed together with the client, one that would be an influencing factor on the behaviour of the organisation and the service behaviours of the people within it. This strategy piece started to identify the organisation's behavioural barriers and enablers to implementing the services and highlighted what needed to be done to engage stakeholders.

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We found after various mapping workshops, that included the client's management and front-line staff, they were able to identify these barriers and enablers, detail the organisational levers which could be utilised and develop their own team mini-manifestos for change.

At this point in the process we can start to see that effecting behavioural change within an organisation requires Service Designers to blend their traditional tools with the various needs of stakeholders, particularly the internal stakeholders.

This goes beyond the tactical role Service Design often plays, yet the leap to playing a more strategic role through influencing behaviours may not be as great as it seems.

Implementing any change is not easy, however Service Designers appear to have a particular skill set that allows them to be more aware than most of the need to prepare for change by taking into consideration how any impact may affect the stakeholders it effects.

Following the SIIM process ‘over the border’, from the external environment through the co-creation space, to consider the internal capabilities of the organisation, we first need to consider how we, as Service Designers can influence the behaviour of the individuals, whether front-line staff or senior managers.

One of the roles Service Designers can play is in coaching individuals (solos) within the organisation on the impact and opportunities that they can create during their involvement in delivering a new service. The individual's involvement in co-creation activities can serve as a foundation to develop a personal statement for change, outlining the performance behaviours they see being required. There is also an opportunity to build understanding around the role Service Design is taking in helping to shape the organisation's wider capabilities and behaviours.

Our client viewed this transformative approach as one key lever in bringing about real organisational change.

Our client saw the effective use of co-creation workshops was a vital part in engaging people from within the organisation. It allowed them to make sense of the current situation whilst giving an opportunity to be the change they wanted to see through their participation in creating new realities.

Having the client identify what pairs of individuals would work well together, even on an informal basis and up-skilling them in the use of different tools played real dividends. An example illustrated in the photograph at the next page shows how, during an informal meeting with the client, two man-

touc hp o in t | the jo u rn al of s ervice d es ign

setting the frame

»Having the client identify what pairs of individuals would work well together, even on an informal basis and up-skilling them in the use of different tools played real dividends.«

agers worked their way through a difficult operational issue of gaining traction for one of their key projects using After Action Review tools. Using this approach they highlighted how involving senior stakeholders would result in both a change of perspective and a change in behaviour.

Aligning the behaviours of those within client senior teams can be the most problematic. Service Designers, however possess the knowledge of collaboration tools which can help change ‘stuck’ behaviours as collaboration is often a route to generating new perspectives, thinking through service innovations and the leadership required to deliver

the unifying actions for the organisation for the benefit of customers.

Remembering that senior people within organisations often seek to influence their own peer group by having new behaviours implemented is important.

As Service Designers, we can shape behavioural change within operational and senior teams through facilitating collaboration. We can also assist these teams to do more to stimulate innovation and service development by helping them tap into the informal networks that exist within and on the border of the organisation. This could be done through the Service Designer as ‘innovation agent’ using the co-

creative space, with the outcomes being fed into the ‘big picture’ activity. This starts the next iteration of designing services from the inside out and the outside in.

The Border Crossing Co. www.crossingtheborder.co.uk

David Hicks, Managing Director of the Border Crossing Co., Glasgow, Scotland

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By Fergus Bisset and Dan Lockton

Designing motivation or motivating design? Exploring Service Design, motivation and behavioural change Motivation researcher Edward Deci has suggested that if we want behavioural change to be sustainable, we have to move past thinking of motivation as something that we ‘do’ to other people and see it rather as something that we as Service Designers can enable service users to ‘do’ by themselves. In this article, Fergus Bisset explores the ways in which Service Designers can create more motivating services. Dan Lockton then looks at where motivating behaviour via Service Design often starts, with the basic ‘pinball’ and ‘shortcut’ approaches. We conclude by proposing that if services are to be sustainable in the long term, we as Service Designers need to strive to accommodate humans' differing levels of motivation and encourage and support service users' sense of autonomy within the services we design.

Visualising motivation Designers have historically tended to view motivation as something that they cannot directly influence: a complex component of human behaviour influenced by many diverse philosophical, social and physiological factors. More traditionally there has been a belief that if the aesthetic of the design were sufficiently consistent with users' expectations, people would be attracted to it and in turn change their behaviour. Motivational research shows us that this analysis is largely self-fulfilling and that such

‘extrinsic’ or superficial design interventions do indeed motivate behaviour and encourage engagement with a product or service, but only in the short term. The same motivational research shows that such short term ‘aesthetic’ motivational pick-me-ups, much like a sugar-rush or a caffeine hit, quickly wear off.

The challenge in designing for behavioural change is supporting users to internalise the values of a service so their engagement with the behaviour demanded is more than skin deep. Zappos,

Fergus Bisset

Designer and Researcher, Brunel University, London, UK

Dan Lockton

Designer and researcher, Brunel University, London, UK

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designing motivation or motivating design?

By Fergus Bisset and Dan Lockton

»Designers have historically tended to view motivation as something that they cannot directly influence…«

the American clothing company have been very effective in empowering their employees to embody their organisational values in this way, largely by employing people who already embody the values of the organisation. However, the concept of ‘design for motivation’ is perhaps something of a Catch-22 – design to control user behaviour too closely and you'll constrain users' sense of autonomy.

On the other hand, design with too many options or encourage responsibility in users too early and without sufficient support, and you'll create an equally demotivating experience.

Models of the natural ‘motivational’ progression of users throughout an experience or service encounter, informed by research, might help guide our understanding of what motivates us. Luckily, the motivational psychology literature doesn't let us down: Reeve (2005) summarises ways that we can conceptualise how best to energise behaviour, not just in the first instance of a user-product interaction but throughout the lifespan of a user-service relationship: Let's explore these frameworks with reference to the artefact we hold in our hands. If our copy of Touchpoint fell through the letterbox in a way that grabbed our senses, visually or aurally, perhaps the increased salience of its arrival might increase the immediacy of our awareness – this is ‘the aesthetic’ we mention above – high on impact, but low on sustainability. Mobile phones are prime examples of service touchpoints that encourage engagement by giving users with a number of auditory, haptic

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and visual signals – such as ringtones, vibrating alerts or the screen lighting up.

Indeed, exploring sensory perception to increase engagement is very much the strength of Volkswagen's Fun Theory (www.thefuntheory.com) marketing campaign – a viral Internet phenomenon, demonstrating how enhanced sensory interaction can positively energise behaviour.

For designers, who more traditionally have been responsible for shaping sensory experiences through manipulation of materials and form, this is an interesting point of reflection. How we understand such sensory stimuli – cognitive representation of signals around us – determines both how we mentally organise the experience and our perceptions of its relevance to us. Our ability to organise these signals and affordances also affects whether we can effectively internalise the experience – whether it resonates with us – and whether we are motivated to continue engaging. If we can't understand why our phone is making a noise or we can't make sense of our phone bill our experience becomes a demotivating one. In this instance we are more likely to take steps to distance ourselves from this negative interaction rather than continue to approach the challenges it presents us.

Our ability to persist with a task requires that we can visualise the underlying cause and effect structure of the experience, or that we adhere to the values of the experience sufficiently to offset the interim negativity. As the above dia-

setting the frame

“I don’t know and I don’t care about reading Touchpoint“

“I’m reading Touchpoint because I just found it here ...“

“I’m reading Touchpoint because I have to ...“

“I’d feel guilty if I didn’t read this copy of Touchpoint ...“

“I’m reading Touchpoint because I think it’s important for me to do so ...“

“I love reading Touchpoint, it completely absorbs me ...“

User behaviour Casually observable

Disengaged

Engaged behaviour

Motivational state

Amotivated

Extrinsically motivated

Flow state

Apathy

Anxiety

Intrinsically motivated Confident

Satisfied

Stavou, (2009) from Csikszentmihayi, (1982)

A

ARCS Model Keller (1983)

Motivational design Bisset (2010)

Unmotivated

Awareness

Sensory

Cognitive

Line of service engagement

R

Relevance Organisational

Line of conditional personal engagement

C

Confidence Relatedness

Competence

S

Satisfaction Autonomy

Line of unconditional personal engagement

Frameworks of motivated behaviour from the motivational psychology literature.

gram indicates, if you wish for users to interact cognitively at even a basic level with a service you are designing – that's to say, engage with the values, benefits or knowledge structures of the service experience – sensory manipulation of affordances alone is not going to be enough. As Service Designers we need to help users see the underlying structures of the services they use.

The underlying structure of your Touchpoint experience Indeed, how might the information contained in Touchpoint (or any service touchpoint) be organised to motivate our continued interaction? To engage users we need to help them understand the personal relevance of the services we design. When we pick up our copy of Touchpoint, colour coding directs our attention to the various groupings of content within the journal – thus gener-

ating sensory awareness. But how do we assess the value of the content it presents us – progressing from left to right in the illustrated frameworks? Do we flick to people we know – relatedness – a social connection, the equivalent of the “other users who bought this item, also bought these …” feature on Amazon.com? Or do we flick through the journal by subject, based on our own interests? If this is the case then we might be motivated by the opportunity to assess our own levels of competence and how well articles challenge or support our knowledge.

With more time, do we simply start at the front of the journal and read from cover to cover as if the very concept of participating in this experience already resonates with our self-image and expectations? In this case it is possible to say that you are intrinsically motivated – in other words, not reliant on any extrinsic touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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designing motivation or motivating design?

By Fergus Bisset and Dan Lockton

»Of course, our personal internalisations and expectations of an experience do not always mesh with reality.«

nudges or prods towards the goal of consuming the contents of the journal.

Of course, our personal internalisations and expectations of an experience do not always mesh with reality. If the view of motivation in this article clashes with your existing conceptions of it, what is your response? Is it to assess the authors' competence by Googling them? Or looking us up on LinkedIn or Facebook to assess our social relatedness and credibility? As these frameworks help elucidate, our ability to sustain motivation is a critical component of human behaviour and a key factor in determining how successfully we engage with services we encounter in our daily lives.

As Service Designers we are already equipped with many tools to help us gain user insights such as these. These tools also help us assess which of these sensory, cognitive, organisational, relatedness or competence needs will help users successfully internalise the services we are designing. We can also, through co-design, involve users in the design of services, allowing us to see what it is that motivates our customers and embody those values ourselves (at least for the duration of the project).

Motivation is thus a reciprocal process and perhaps less about what we ‘do’ to other stakeholders and perhaps as much about how we visualise, interpret and design for our own behaviour. Designers do not, however, always agree on where or how users' engagement with a service should start. In many service situations, what's often required, is a kind

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of behavioural specification, outlining predictably how people will interact with the service via each touchpoint.

There are two approaches here (though they're probably part of a continuum): modelling people as either shortcut users or pinball users.

Pinball users In ‘Designing for Interaction’, Dan Saffer notes “designers have to give up control (or, really, the myth of control) when designing a service process.” Nevertheless, many services have aspects where a degree of control is desired, often for safety or security reasons. If a bank has a row of ATMs, it doesn't want customers at adjacent machines to stand too close together, so it spaces them far enough apart for this not to happen: the actual affordances of the system are designed so that only certain behaviours occur. In 2009 Nepal's Tribhuvan Airport issued staff with trousers without pockets, to reduce bribery by making it harder to hide cash, as part of a scheme to improve the airport's international reputation and reduce travellers' complaints of intimidation.

An approach like this models users as ‘pinballs’ to shunt around, ignoring the finer-grained process of internalisation that is a prerequisite for sustained motivation. The interlock on a microwave door prevents using the oven with the door open, yet does not try to educate users as to why it is safer. It just silently structures behaviour: users follow the designers' behaviour specification without necessarily being aware of it.

setting the frame

This view of influencing human behaviour can lead to poor user experience, when the priorities of the service provider and users conflict. Disabling the fast-forward button on your DVD player, to force you to sit through trailers and copyright threats, provokes significant discontent. However, where interests align, better experience can result. A hospital which fits medical gas bottles and hoses with error proofed ‘indexed pin’ connectors – keyed to fit together only in the right combinations – is restricting nurses' behaviour, but making the job easier and providing a safer patient experience. So, the pinball approach is not always as user-unfriendly as it might initially seem, but does risk challenging people's autonomy, and so reducing reciprocal, motivated engagement.

Shortcut users While people are not fully predictable, there is enough psychological evidence that we are predictably irrational (Dan Ariely's term). There are recurring patterns of decision-making heuristics and biases, and designers with an

understanding of these have a powerful tool for influencing behaviour. In an economic context, this is the premise behind Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's bestseller Nudge, but designers can apply many of the same insights, with the benefit of a wealth of user-centred research methods to test our assumptions.

The basic theory is that people take shortcuts. We make decisions based on how choices are presented to us, and cannot devote the same mental effort to engage with every decision we face. If something is the default option, whether print quality in a dialogue box or presumed consent for organ donation, we probably stick with it. If a bank's service staff are helpful, we start to attribute that attitude to the brand as a whole. If a restaurant always looks empty, we assume the experience it provides is poor.

Individually these acts might not bear analytical scrutiny – and none of us acts like this all the time – but shortcut decisions do determine how many people behave when interacting with a service.

We can use this to help people navigate choices in a mutually beneficial way: e.g.,

Pinball user

ARCS Model Keller (1983)

Motivational design

»In many service situations, what's often required is a kind of behavioural specification, outlining predictably how people will interact with the service via each touchpoint.«

Shortcut user

A

Unmotivated

Awareness

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Bisset (2010)

Line of service engagement

Shortcut and Pinball users, a way of conceptualising a basic first stage of user engagement with a service you are designing. touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

19

designing motivation or motivating design?

By Fergus Bisset and Dan Lockton

if your research shows that a segment of your customers makes purchasing decisions based purely on price, it makes sense to present your choices in a way which makes it easy to determine which is cheapest – using price as a construct around which to help users internalise the service value.

As expressed previously, the decision comes down to whether your service

can help users transition from being uninterested ‘shortcutters’ (“I stick with X electricity company because it's too much hassle to switch”) to engaged and motivated customers (“I signed up with Y because they're doing really great things with renewables, and I care about my children's future”). While designing shortcuts might be necessary to ‘acquire’ customers in the first place, without engaging them with the values and pro-

»The literal shortcuts pedestrians take – desire paths – can be observed and then formalised (paving the cowpaths) to meet users' needs better.« 20

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setting the frame

cesses of your service proposition, it is perhaps only inertia that is going to keep them doing business with you.

Final thoughts Ideally, mass customisation of services would allow us to meet users where they are – and perhaps move them where they (and we) would like them to be.

Realistically, and despite the constraints of real world projects, the psychology literature indicates that there are clear opportunities for Service Design approaches which both accommodate individuals' differing levels of motivation and which can support humans' innate and learned responses.

It is apparent that how you envision, model and relate to your service users will largely determine the design strategies you use to motivate and engage them. It is also apparent that how narrow or empowered your perceptions of human behaviour are, as a Service Designer, will be reflected in the character of your service – and the subsequent short-term motivation or long-term engagement of your service users.

• Saffer, D. (2007), Designing for interaction: Creating smart applications and clever devices (1st ed.). Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

• Thaler, R. & Sunstein, C. (2009), Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, NH: Yale University Press.

Fergus Bisset has until recently been a design researcher at Brunel University exploring the relationship of motivation and design. This research has been inspired by and influenced his recent work with the Design Museum, London, FutureGov Consultancy and NHS London and continues to inspire his ongoing work with the British Olympic Association and the Youth Olympic Games.

Dan Lockton is a researcher at Brunel University, exploring how design influences human behaviour. His evolving »Design with Intent toolkit« (http://designwithintent. co.uk) is a attempt to put the research into a form useful to designers working on projects where influencing user behaviour is important.

•

References • Ariely, D. (2008), Predictably Irrational: The hidden forces that shape our decisions. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

• Pink, D. (2010), Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. Edinburgh, UK: Cannongate.

• Reeve, J. (2005), Understanding motivation and emotion (4th ed.).

Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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By Carla Cipolla and Fernando Secomandi

On the design of standard and relational service encounters Face-to-face interaction between providers and clients is one of the marked characteristics of service production. At times, services are produced almost exclusively through such personal interactions. Innovation in services therefore largely depends on changes in the way people interact. But how to approach Service Design aiming for behavioural change?

Throughout the years, this concern has instigated researchers from several disciplines, such as service marketing, operations management and engineering. The writings of Shostack (1982), an influential thinker and early advocate of Service Design, provide a good example. Shostack pointed out that services are ultimately experienced by clients through peripheral cues, or tangible evidences. Service evidences are basically everything related to the provision of a service which clients can perceive through their bodily senses, including the built environment, graphic signage, physical equipment and so forth.

Because in many cases people's experiences of a service are overly influenced by their contact with the company staff, Shostack observed that these too may be seen as part of service evidences. As she 22

[for service co-production]”. To ensure that, numerous actions can be taken, among others, to devise attractive jobs, to hire and train the right staff, to create a stimulating work environment and to set appropriate reward systems for the staff.

The implications for Service Design of either approach introduced above may be evaluated on basis of Martin Buber's philosophy of interpersonal encounters (Cipolla and Manzini, 2009). Following such philosophical background, service encounters could be classified into two categories: standard and relational.

In standard service encounters, providers and clients perform according to clearly defined roles Another perspective to the parand, to a certain extent, following ticipation of people in services up a pre-determined script. The was discussed by Edvardsson and encounter between participants is Olsson (1996). These researchers also realized that many services are thus mediated by a certain designed ‘apparatus’, which may be intenco-produced by clients in their interplay with the company staff. For tionally devised by Service Designers. In such cases, interpersonal Edvardsson and Olsson, the staff is encounters will often take place in a key prerequisite to be controlled during service development; they combination with several touchshould be knowledgeable, motivated points and will not be considered and committed. The design task for the most essential requirement for a service companies “is to develop satisfactory service experience. the best and right prerequisites argued, “the way a service renderer is clothed and speaks can have a material impact on the consumer's perception of a service.” For Shostack, when designing new services, companies should always consider and carefully orchestrate all types of service evidences, humans included.

touc hp o in t | the jo u rn al of s ervice d es ign

Photo: Andrea Mendoza

setting the frame

Âť Manipulating the concrete behaviours and outward appearance of people has been the usual focus for the design of interpersonal encounters. But other service models are emerging.ÂŤ

Standard services represent the most usual focus for the design of interpersonal encounters.

Shostack's approach, as well as Edvardsson and Olsson's, tends to conceive service encounters as standard, as long as both seek to gain more control over the specific interactions between providers

and clients. In the case of Shostack, this is sought by advancing a way to manipulate the concrete behaviours and outward appearance of people, manifested at the moment of personal interaction. And in the case of Edvardsson and Olsson, by proposing that interactions can be influenced indirectly by creating

supporting conditions and imbuing individuals with the competences to act accordingly.

However, standard encounters might not represent every possible way of interpersonal encounters in services. Research on design for social innovation (Cipolla, 2009;

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23

on the design of standard and relational service encounters

By Carla Cipolla and Fernando Secomandi

occurring interactions between participants, which are mostly unmediated by technical apparatuses or predefined rules and scripts. Here, the roles of producer and consumer, provider and client, become blurred.

Mutual responsibility, intimacy, trust, and personal engagement are some of the terms regularly used to define such services. Attempts to control how interpersonal encoun-

ters should occur tend to prove inadequate, even damaging to the delicate relationships needed for the proper functioning of these services. Relational encounters raise real questions about the possibility to purposefully design at least some aspects of services.

The classification of service encounters under standard and relational

Meroni, A: Creative Communities. People inventing sustainable ways of living. Milan, Polidesign, 2007.

Meroni, 2007) has shown that for some types of services standard encounters seem hardly applicable.

Students living in elderly houses' empty rooms, living room restaurants, ‘rented’ grandparents, are some examples.

These services ¬ based on relational encounters ¬ rely deeply on qualities that emerge from naturally

»Mutual responsibility, intimacy, trust, and personal engagement are some of the terms regularly used to define the relational services.« 24

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Meroni, A: Creative Communities. People inventing sustainable ways of living. Milan, Polidesign, 2007.

setting the frame

»Students living in elderly houses' empty rooms, living room restaurants, ‘rented’ grandparents, are some examples.«

types presents a framework to typify interpersonal encounters and to investigate the limits and potential for design interventions in each case. Service Designers require interpretative frameworks that enable them to deal with the interpersonal relational qualities in services. In our view, frameworks that indicate how these qualities can be understood and nurtured by designers can greatly complement current approaches that seem centred on standard encounters only.

References • Cipolla, C. (2009), Relational services and conviviality. In: Satu Miettinen (Org.), Designing Services with Innovative Methods.

Helsinki: TAIK Publications/University of Art and Design Helsinki, p. 232–243.

• Cipolla, C. & Manzini, E. (2009), Relational Services. Knowledge, Technology & Policy (Springer), v.

22, p. 45–50.

• Edvardsson, B. & Olsson, J. (1996), Key concepts for new service development. The Service Industries Journal, 16(2), p.

140–164.

• Meroni, A. (Org., 2007), Creative Communities. People inventing sustainable ways of living. Milano: Polidesign.

• Shostack, G. L. (1982), How to design a service. European Journal of Marketing, 16(1), p. 49–63.

Carla Cipolla, Associate professor in the Graduate Program in Production Engineering at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Fernando Secomandi, Doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

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By Nick Marsh and Dan Lockton

Research in practice: Bringing behavioural change from lab to studio Design influences behaviour, whether it's planned or not.

Service Design has a great opportunity to lead the emerging field of design for behavioural change, helping guide and shape experiences to benefit users, service providers and wider society.

In this article, presented as an evolving conversation between research and practice, Nick Marsh (EMC Consulting) and Dan Lockton (Brunel University) discuss and explore design patterns for influencing behaviour through Service Design, and how Service Designers and academics can work together for social benefit.

Nick: Hi Dan, thanks for agreeing to take part in this conversation.

Maybe we should start with you outlining a bit about your research interests? Two interlinked questions then; firstly, what do you mean by ‘Design with Intent’, and secondly why do you think this is a valuable approach to interrogating and describing the way that ‘designers’ (which of course includes lots of ‘silent designers’ that never went to art school) act on the world?

Dan: Thanks, Nick. I use ‘Design with Intent’ to mean design that's intended to influence or result in certain user behaviour. It's an attempt to describe systems and touchpoints across lots of 26

disciplines – services, products, interfaces, even built environments – that have been designed with the intent to influence how people use them. Everything we design inevitably changes people's behaviour, but as designers we don't always consciously consider the power this gives us to help people, and, sometimes, to manipulate them.

It's this reflective approach that can be valuable: being aware that we're designing not just experiences, but actually designing behaviour at one level or another. Whether we mean to do it or not, it's going to happen, so we might as well get good at it.

Nick: It's certainly an ambitious thesis! Of course pattern libraries

touc hp o in t | the jo u rn al of s ervice d es ign

are common in lots of different design disciplines. Examples include things like grid systems for graphic designers or ergonomics manuals.

However, the thing that gets me excited about your work, and what makes it so relevant to the design of services and systems made of many different touchpoints is its magnificent scope. I love that you are trying to create a universal taxonomy for describing all aspects of how designers try to shape and change user behaviour. At this point I think it would be good to introduce the ‘lenses’ that you've created that help us to navigate the vast terrain of this field. Could you briefly outline these lenses, with a quick example for each?

Dan: Many people have thought about influencing behaviour in different domains: this isn't a new field by any means, but the terminology and principles haven't often been presented in a form useful to designers. The lenses are a way of explaining some of these design patterns via different ‘worldviews’ so they can serve as concept inspiration, and as a way of challenging or extending preconceived ideas

setting the frame

the eight lenses of the design with intent toolkit – a collection of patterns for influencing behaviour through design Architectural: Patterns from architecture & planning, also applicable to system architecture: basic affordance patterns such as segmentation & spacing, breaking a system up into parts which users interact with separately rather than all together – e.g. fast food restaurant drive-through split up into multiple windows to prevent one customer blocking it. People: Christopher Alexander Error-proofing: Sees deviations from a target behaviour as ‘errors’ which design can help avoid. Often found in medical device design and manufacturing engineering (as poka-yoke) – patterns such as the Interlock on an ATM which makes sure the customer removes the card before the cash is dispensed. People: Don Norman, Shigeo Shingo Interaction: Patterns where users' interactions with the system affect how their behaviour is influenced – some core HCI & IxD patterns such as kinds of feedback, progress bars, previews, etc. but also BJ Fogg's work on Persuasive Technology, such as Kairos (context-sensitive suggestion of behaviour at the right moment, e.g.

Amazon's ‘often bought with’ recommendations) Ludic: Patterns drawn from games or modelled on more playful forms of influencing behaviour. A great non-profit sector physical example is the type of spiral charity donation wishing well that provides an exciting, engaging experience for ‘users’ (often children) while encouraging donations, but lots of digital examples too.

People: Amy Jo Kim, Ian Bogost Perceptual: Ideas from product semantics and ecological & Gestalt psychology about how users perceive patterns and meanings. A nice physical touchpoint example is the use of different shaped apertures on recycling bins to suggest which types of rubbish should go where.

Cognitive: Draws on behavioural economics & cognitive psychology, understanding how people make decisions, and using that knowledge to influence actions. Example: Get Up & Move (http://getupandmove.me) employs people's desire to reciprocate socially to encourage people to ‘barter’ exercise commitments with each other. People: Richard Thaler, Robert Cialdini Machiavellian: Patterns embodying an ‘end justifies the means' approach. Often unethical, but nevertheless commonly used to influence consumers through advertising, pricing structures and so on. E.g. provoking consumers' worry about a problem they didn’t know they had (chronic halitosis), and then offering to ‘solve’ it (Listerine). People: Vance Packard, Douglas Rushkoff Security: Represents a ‘security’ worldview, i.e. that undesired user behaviour is something to deter and/or prevent through ‘countermeasures’ designed into systems: examples such as the threat of surveillance built into environments, digital rights management on music, DVDs & software touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

27

research in practice: bringing behavioural change from lab to studio

By Nick Marsh and Dan Lockton

clients might have about how to influence users.

They've evolved based on designers' feedback through running workshop sessions; the latest set of eight are shown in the table. In total there's about 100 patterns spread among the lenses.

The whole lot's available at http://designwithintent.co.uk as a card deck and a wiki, with plenty of examples.

Now it seems as though Service Design, by its multidisciplinary,

people-focused nature, has a great opportunity to lead this emerging field of design for behavioural change. As someone with significant experience, Nick, how do you see this sort of thinking manifest itself – do you see any patterns being used intentionally in services?

Does the drive come from clients or designers themselves? What kinds of behaviour are you trying to influence, and have you got any thoughts on what works and what doesn't?

Nick: Well, the first thing I think I should say is that the degree to which Service Design exploits the kinds of techniques described in your lenses depends to an extent on what you consider Service Design to be. Crudely speaking, I've been involved in two different types of Service Design that operate at different levels of influence over the behaviour of people engaged in the design programme, and I see application and implications in both of them.

ÂťThe Design with intent method has been developed through a series of workshop sessions with designers and design students working on behavioural change briefs.ÂŤ 28

touc hp o in t | the jo u rn al of s ervice d es ign

setting the frame

The first type of Service Design, which is the closest to most other design disciplines and is essentially an aesthetic challenge, is the design of connected user experiences of different touchpoints. For more spatial/interior design projects I've been involved with in airports I've used the Architectural and Perceptual techniques to enforce compliance with queuing and engage passengers in processes by lowering visual clutter. For more digitally focused designs I've used Ludic and Interaction techniques to engage users in otherwise boring tasks like filling out forms by making them game-like and providing rich feedback and so forth.

The second type of Service Design, which is a conceptual step onwards from the first, as it's primarily an organisational challenge, is using design-led methods and techniques to develop strategies for service organisations, and to teach other people how to use design to improve how their organisations work and the quality of the services they deliver.

I think at this level, the lenses are a great tool for opening up the conversation with clients and co-designers about how users are treated by the organisation. Are they inputs into a system, or are they people? Do we think of them as stupid, or smart? Do we use Security or Machiavellian techniques to force customers and citizens to do stuff, or is it better to use Ludic and

Cognitive approaches that play to people's enthusiasms and sense of fun?

When you start applying these questions to social challenges, which is where a lot of Service Design practice in the UK is focused, you start to get some really big ideas! Have you thought about how to focus the toolkit on design-led social programmes?

Academic design research is of limited use without connection to what designers actually do, so my aim has always been to produce something that's useful to designers, and I hope that – together with others doing research in this area – we can help Service Design tackle the social challenges of behavioural change with valuable ideas, insights and evidence.

Dan: Many social challenges do involve behavioural change. I suppose it's a concept that is more naturally familiar to people trained in social science than (most) designers are, and the idea of influencing public behaviour, albeit mainly through laws and taxes, is well-known to the policy makers who fund many projects. It's important that designers are able to contribute to these initiatives with confidence that what we do is understood by those who make the decisions.

That may mean that academic research on behavioural change, how to do it, what works, when, why, etc, needs to be made more easily available to designers. Academia itself can be seen as a service to society, and as such its interactions with the public would often benefit from being ‘designed’ with as much thought as goes into Service Design practice: when should it be responsive, doing research the public wants, and when should it lead and guide governmental decisions and public debate?

Nick: I agree, although I think it is also up to designers to take the initiative and reach out to the academy. There's a huge amount of inspiration to be found there, and lots of opportunity for collaboration. I suppose that the important thing is to build the conversation and look beyond your current frames of reference, and I've certainly enjoyed doing that here!

Nick Marsh, Senior Practice Consultant, EMC Consulting, London, UK Dan Lockton, Designer and researcher, Brunel University, London, UK

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By Camilla Masala and Jan-Christoph Zoels

Imagining behavioural change

Service touchpoints to impact our carbon footprint Experientia describes some of the behavioural change concepts that were part of the C-LiFE team's winning competition entry to build a low-to-no carbon district in Helsinki. Acknowledging that top-down, passive and hidden solutions rarely work and do not result in long-lasting behavioural change, Experientia set themselves the task of conceiving a series of integrated and embedded products and services, to be designed participatively with district residents, putting control and power back into people's hands.

Carbon emissions in Helsinki top all other large urban areas in Nordic countries. Because a substantial percentage of these emissions are generated by private consumers, it is vital to understand how services can encourage a way of life that makes low-carbon habits not just a technical or legal necessity, but socially desirable.

Low2No carbon emissions district for Helsinki Harbour. In September 2009 Sitra, the Finnish innovation agency, selected the winning team out of 74 initial entries, for the ‘C_LiFE – City as a Living Factory of Ecology’ project. The aim is to construct an urban zone with low or no carbon emissions in Helsinki, Finland, by mid 2012.

How can we create such a cultural response? How do we shape a new Helsinki district that inspires innovation in energy efficiency, ages well, and attracts future generations? We believe that designing low-carbon buildings is not enough.

These questions guided Arup, Sauerbruch Hutton and Experientia's current collaborative project for a

While other team members devised the architectural, engineering and financial strategies for the project, Experientia's responsibility was to address the delicate theme of how to initiate behavioural change to support a sustainable style of living in this completely renewed urban district. Starting with the concept that people, their contexts, social networks, habits and beliefs are

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crucial tools for creating sustainable change in behaviour, Experientia explored ways to offer people control over their consumption and to see the affects of their actions on the environment.

Using their expertise in designing valuable user experiences, Experientia's strategies to empower people's change include: developing engagement and awareness programs, by designing services aimed at creating social actions based on green values; using adaptive technology to assist people in making decisions, such as smart metres and dynamic pricing systems; producing positive reinforcement loops (with incentives and benefits) for people who live, work and visit Jätkäsaari; and using the community as a knowledge network to share best practices. The project highlighted the need for stakeholder participation and replicability of selected ideas.

Experientia's initial strategy included ‘50 ideas to change behaviour’ – 50 tools and services aimed at promoting behavioural changes by encouraging people to participate in

save resources

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Picture 1: Clear Energy Source Selector. The selector allows people to shift to greener, more expensive sources of energy and gives an indication of extra costs and savings in CO2.

designing and adopting sustainable living conditions.

The current and common approach to energy demand management tends to be product- or infrastrucThese ideas range from systemic to ture-oriented while a service vision individual approaches. They include is often lacking. Most initiatives are incentive and tax benefits systems, focused on individuals – yet energy co-operative and communitybehaviours are also influenced by based services along with demand interpersonal and social patterns. management solutions, energy Moreover some of the current enload sensors and urban informatics ergy demand tools and products do aimed at effecting individual carbon not provide a rich user experience, footprint reductions, community instead creating a sense of frustraactions and policy changes well betion and helplessness in people. yond the boundaries of the renewed To obtain long-lasting behavioural urban district. change, people must be empowered,

as this is crucial in building a sense of responsibility and awareness.

They should be able to clearly understand options and benefits related to the new choices. (picture 1: Clear Energy Source Selector). In this context, Service Design, supported by strong user understanding can play a key role in enabling and supporting people's behavioural change.

C2C services can expand the energy demand management offerings

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imagining behavioural change

By Camilla Masala and Jan-Christoph Zoels

beyond current B2C services. These could be services managed and provided by individuals or groups of citizens to other citizens. One example is the ‘Barter bank’ idea, a second hand goods exchange platform aimed at reducing waste and favouring reuse. In another C2C paradigm, citizens take on an active role in a service by an external provider, by becoming either a sort of mediator between the provider and the final user or joining the staff in the service management. For example, by becoming ‘Community Mediators’, people take official or unofficial roles within the community by coordinating local activities related to eco-responsibility, such as selecting products, materials or

providers for homecare or cleaning activities. By mediating between official organizations and community movements, they become reference points for other people (building administrators, caretakers, and community representatives, etc).

local contexts of living and working.

Designing ‘open platforms’ also allows aggregation and integration of services, by creating flexible and systemic offerings which support people in the different everyday activities.

Services should not be considered as turnkey offerings but as open platforms – with decidedly local features. Thinking in terms of ‘open platforms’ means some service aspects (e.g. touchpoints or stakeholders) will be defined only at requirements level. Indeed, the territorial, cultural and social contexts will drive which actors are involved and how the touchpoint designs are finalised. Services will need to fit the

Several real estate ideas focus on this approach. ‘Green mortgages’ associate commuting distance to mortgage payments, incentivising living arrangements closer to people's workplace. ‘Residential starting kits’ aims to provide residents with service packs offering particular services in addition to the rental or purchase agreement, such as car or bike sharing subscriptions or an annual public transport card. The packs could be offered on a free trial basis and refined based on feedback, then replicated in the rest of the city. ‘Sustainable real estate’ services assign a tangible value to ecological behaviours, by increasing the market value of a house based on sustainable property modifications (e.g. buying more energy efficient appliances or installing energy load sensors).

Picture 2: Eco Reflection. The mirror surface located in semi-public spaces displays slowly ascending bubbles with various sizes and colours showing the carbon emission of an average person's activities.

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Such services mean rethinking the concept of real estate, setting up a complex platform of services which support not just the buying and selling, but also the sustainable management of a property.

Other tools will include smart meters and urban informatics solutions showing individual and community-

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related energy usage and carbon emissions. (picture 2: Eco reflection). Comparison tools among individuals will modify the current privacy paradigms, by encouraging people to share personal data related to resource consumption.

These tools will definitely change the perception of resource usage, by transforming them from personal details into social issues, highlighting both direct and indirect costs that affect the entire community.

In this context it is clear that technology plays a key role, but only if embedded in everyday life, as part of integrated solutions enabling individuals to be real performers of change. (picture 3: Home Assistant).

Technology should be adaptive and assist decision-making and behavioural change. Passive and hidden technological solutions rarely work and do not generate long-lasting behavioural changes.

The program of suggested ideas should create a platform of shared knowledge, both tacit and explicit,

on CO2 status and related risks. In this way, the community can assess the degree to which it adheres to its core values by increasing the individual level of control over consumption. The community itself should play the role of knowledge network to share best practices and promote mutual support, encouraging a sustainable circle of reciprocity.

By thinking in terms of systemic offerings, designers can start from people's everyday lives, creating options which easily lead people towards the adoption of more sustainable choices.

The C-life project is in the planning and design stage. Current activities include involving stakeholders and future inhabitants in a needs analysis and co-design appropriate solutions, by validating existing ideas and developing new ones. The design of services and demand management solutions will be finalised by the end of this year.

Camilla Masala, Service designer, Experientia, Turin, Italy Jan-Christoph Zoels, Partner in charge of user experience, Experientia, Turin, Italy

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By Geke van Dijk

Charging Up: Energy usage in households around the world Charging Up is an international study of people's practices and motivations in relation to everyday usage of energy in households. In the domain of energy many things are changing for consumers. Costs are going up and discussions on environmental aspects are becoming more frequent. Energy usage has increasingly become an issue in people's daily life. At the same time however, it is an area that is fairly abstract, difficult to monitor and for many people not a favourite subject to spend time on. This study investigated the interest and willingness people have to review and potentially alter their daily routines in energy usage, and in this respect explored how energy providers may support their customers with new services and tools. By doing a parallel study in nine countries around the world many similarities and some differences between households across cultures were identified. The results inform the development of Service Design strategies.

Energy provision: A common problem A naive observer might think that energy companies couldn't care less if their customers do not understand or monitor their energy usage. They are in the business of selling energy, aren't they? The more energy people consume, the better for the company. However,

Geke van Dijk

Co-founder and Strategy Director of STBY London, UK and Amsterdam, Netherlands

this is not completely the case. Energy companies are facing a problem that has relevance for society as a whole. At peak moments of energy usage during the day, traditionally in the early mornings and evenings, when many people are using a lot of energy at the same time, the regular stocks of energy companies are insufficient. They need to draw energy touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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charging up

By Geke van Dijk

»One of the main challenges was to find the trigger point for consumers to reconsider their daily routines in energy usage.«

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from resources that are more expensive (hydro) and more polluting (nuclear) then their regular stocks (gas and coal).

They would actually rather avoid doing so and deliver energy in a more steady, inexpensive and unpolluting way.

behaviour and engagement of consumers is also needed.

In business terms energy, like other utilities, belongs to a low-involvement service category. People don't tend to spend much time thinking about it, let alone figuring out how to monitor and Initial conversations with the internationally operating energy company EDF manage their energy usage. It is therefore a fairly difficult area to raise the revealed that in their terms this issue is called ‘load balancing’. They need to bal- awareness on and to trigger behavioural change. The study ‘Charging Up’ aimed ance the load of energy requested from them. If they under-deliver, there will be to discover wether there might be scope social and economic uproar, if they over- for services that enable consumers to be more involved in this issue in an easy deliver the network will ‘melt down’. A accessible and non-obtrusive way. One of fascinating illustration of the urgency the main challenges was to find the trigof this issue can be found online in the ger point for consumers to reconsider video ‘Tea Time Britain’, a fragment of their daily routines in energy usage. the BBC program ‘Britain from Above’ (www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stoEnergy consumption across cultures ries/people/teatimebritain.shtml). This fragment shows how the operators of the In a parallel study in nine countries the National Grid Control Centre in the UK research explored people's every brace themselves each day for the end of day energy usage. What are their the popular tv program Eastenders, as it daily routines around the house? What triggers millions of people to put on their understanding do they have of their energy usage? What aspects of energy kettle for tea, causing an enormous and usage do they care most about? What dangerous peak in energy usage. are their needs and concerns? Do they These daily recurring power surges are discuss these things in their households? a real concern to energy providers. Not The secondary focus of the study was to only because of their need to run an investigate people's attitudes towards efficient business, but also because of the wider context of costs and environpressure from new government regulamental issues related to energy usage. tions and social demands. In this era of How aware are they of these aspects? general awareness and concerns about How much do they care? Does it drive the use of limited natural resources and their practices and discussions? Durclimate change it should be considered a ing the preparations for the fieldwork common goal to avoid this situation. The we decided to trigger the conversations energy companies cannot simply solve with the participants around the charging of mobile devices, as this is one of this issue on their own. A change in

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the aspects where people might be most actively engaged in everyday routines and considerations around energy usage.

The charging of mobile devices was used as the entry point to speak with participants about wider issues related to energy usage in their households.

This research was conducted as a joint study with the nine main partners in the Global Design Research Network REACH. The partners in the network have mixed backgrounds, some primarily in research (social or computer sciences), and others primarily in design (industrial, interaction or product design). The rich experiences and skills that come with these backgrounds inform and inspire our joint area of expertise, Design Research. An additional internal aim of the study for the network was to better align our methods

and research process. For many clients we work with specifically relevant, and often smaller, selections of partners from the network. This project was an opportunity to work with all partners and better align our methodology.

Design Research is a crucial aspect of the Service Design approach, as it feeds the framework of thinking about how services can be beneficial for both the people using them and the organisations providing them.

The ethnography-based design research approach used a mix of techniques.

Through home visits by local research teams to households in nine countries a rich collection of observations and interview data was elicited. The guidelines for the semi-structured in-depth interviews were developed in close collaboration with all the participat-

These estimated bills are not a good measure of our actual day-to-day energy use. I usually just scan the numbers and don’t read the additional information coming in with the bills. figure 1, Example from Netherlands. touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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charging up

By Geke van Dijk

ÂťThe fast pace of typical US households, particularly those with kids and both parents working, often makes it difficult for people to be environmentally responsible as they feel they should be. "It's a frenetic lifestyle, and it's charge this up and go, go, go"ÂŤ figure 2. Example from USA

ing partners from the Reach network.

On average we spent about two hours in each household, including both an interview and a guided tour around the house. These guided tours were documented with photography and video, capturing not only people's remarks about their daily routines and considerations but also the visual context of their daily environment. After the data collection each local research team clustered their data in a previously agreed format, illustrating their preliminary insights with pictures and quotes from the interviews. This way of sharing insights and evidence allowed for a structured comparison across local samples in the next stage of the analysis. By sharing and co-analysing the clustered data sets we jointly identified a series of shared 38

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insights, based on both similarities and differences across the full sample of participants.

For behavioural change a better understanding and easy accessible support is needed One of the findings that came out strongly across all local samples was that energy usage is an abstract matter to most people. For instance, the actual volumes consumed are very difficult to grasp. Most people did not know what devices were using the most energy in their household. When asked, they tended to mention the devices they use most (e.g. tv, computer, hair dryer), not the ones that actually have the highest capacity (e.g. devices for heating or cooling). Although people don't need a deep

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understanding of the energy usage for their day-to-day routines, many participants did express an interest in being able to monitor and manage their energy usage. This would enable them to better control their costs and the impact on the environment. Many people expressed that the current communication and services from their energy providers did not sufficiently support them in building up this better understanding or monitoring their actual consumption (figure 1). This clearly indicates an opportunity space for energy companies to provide new services.

Another finding that came up across various local samples was the fact that complex and dynamic circumstances in households make it difficult to pay much attention to everyday energy consump-

tion. Especially in households with children there are so many things that call for immediate attention that energy consumption is often one of the last things to get it (figure 2). In some households individual family members are taking care of charging their own devices, often in various places in the home, while in other households the charging of devices is concentrated in a few places (figure 3). Various participants expressed that despite their lingering interest in better monitoring and managing their energy usage, they find it difficult to spend the time necessary for it. This finding calls for services and tools that support consumers to monitor and manage their energy usage in an easy accessible way; another opportunity space for energy companies.

ÂťSome Japanese houses have social sockets for guests to use. "My sons' friends often bring their PSPs here, and they are free to use our chargers"ÂŤ figure 3. Example from Japan touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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charging up

By Geke van Dijk

ÂťI usually plug them in to charge in the evening and leave them overnight. If I wake up in the middle of the night, say to go to the bathroom, I might see that they are fully charged and unplug them.ÂŤ figure 4. Example from Hungary

One of the aspects wherein the findings across the local samples differed was related to home infrastructure. In many countries the traditional infrastructure in houses does not sufficiently support the charging of various mobile devices.

People often have to make do with too few sockets in awkward places in the home (figure 4). Most houses are not built with the amount of electric devices we now use in mind. An exception to this are Japanese homes, where the infrastructure seems to be better in tune with the amount of electrical devices used. Even though the homes are very compact, people tend to have sufficient facilities to store and charge their devices.

Services to support understanding and translation to actionable results In the Immersion and Insights stages of this study some interesting opportuni40

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ties for energy providers to offer new services to their customers were identified. The most important opportunity is to give customers more control over their daily energy consumption through better facilitation of their understanding. It seems key to provide a higher level of transparency of individual energy consumption, for instance through an in-house monitor with a clear visual representation of usage feedback and options for self-tracking and comparisons over time. This tool will need to be paired with easy accessible services that reward consumers for being actively involved in managing their energy consumption, such as local community or school programs. Various energy suppliers are currently exploring the possibilities of smart metering, but often the main focus is on the technology involved and on internal implementation procedures. This approach is fairly top-down

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and device-focused. From a Service Design point of view it would be more effective to widen the focus to a more two-way and engaging relationship with customers. This study helps energy companies to broaden their focus to include the customer perspective and make a clear link to people's daily practices and understanding, as this is a precondition to potential behavioural changes.

people's initial interest may be triggered in relation to their most personal electric devices.

In terms of Service Design processes, this study contributes to the early stage of developing a strategic framework of thinking that guides the design and implementation of new services. The results of the study provide a shared reference point that is firmly grounded in the perspective of the customers and clearly marks out opportunities and measures for successful new services.

This is a relatively new approach in the utility sector, so the effects may take a while to materialise in various projects.

An extensive list of opportunities and ideas has been discussed with EDF, and a selection of the insights is available to energy providers in other countries as well. As the results from this study may also be relevant to other service providers in related domains, such as domestic appliances, architecture and electric transportation, we are keen to share the results of the study in this wider context.

Finally, we expect the research methodology and process to be of interest to the international community of Service Designers, because of the collaborative approach among the REACH partners with backgrounds in both research and design.

Dr. Geke van Dijk is specialised in social research for Service Design and innovation, and works for clients in industry and public sector. She has a background in ethnographic research, user-centered design and services marketing.

The participants in the study indicated to welcome new services and tools that will support them in gaining a better understanding and adapting their routines. In this light it is useful to connect to top-of-mind moments and practices, such as the charging of mobile devices.

These are not the devices that use most energy, but the ones people are most personally involved with. They offer a starting point for raising awareness and behavioural change. Although the use of mobile devices does not put a big strain on the peak loads of energy usage, and changing people's behaviour around the use and management of these devices may not be the most effective way forward to balance the load, mobile devices seem to be an entry point into people's awareness and understanding of energy usage. In the study mobile devices were the trigger for conversation during data collection, but the data and findings were clearly more general. People are interested in a wider understanding Acknowledgements and more control over their energy This research was conducted in a close usage, but they require easy accessible collaboration between the partners of information and support. Future serthe REACH network. More information vices need to be geared to enable more on the network can be found at www. general monitoring and managing, while globaldesignresearch.com

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By Aislinn Dewey

Re-defining comfort: Making energy conservation less painful Future projections of increased stress on the power grid in the United States have forced utility companies to come to terms with the fact that sooner than later, there must be efforts to encourage behavioural change in households. This recent effort has led to roll out of home energy monitoring solutions, creative pricing incentives to reduce peak demand energy usage, and information recommendations and conservation tips across all utility websites. Without an advocate for what truly drives behavioural change in the long run, most of these efforts are proving ineffective at making lasting change. They often ignore important considerations such as presenting impact in terms people understand, not disrupting their existing habits and norms, and providing actionable and personally relevant information so that a person feels in control of their household impact. The following represents learnings from working in this space that can be applied to similar and analogous efforts around behavioural change and energy efficiency.

In the U.S., it has been the trend of late for utility companies, large and small, to re-think how they engage people around energy use. Why the sudden focus? With projections of increased stress on the utility grid in the coming years, memorable instances of blackouts in the Southwest of the United States, and the fact that the cost of scaling to meet 42

household usage projections would make a substantial impact on a utility company's livelihood, behavioural change efforts around energy consumption are needed now more than ever. Who do you reach out to if you are a utility company with this need to motivate people to re-examine what comfort means to them? Someone that understands

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behavioural economics and human behaviour, someone that can synthesize data-driven information and trends to provide the nugget that will make a person re-think what they are about to do and consciously decide to do something else. For utility companies, this role is often filled by a third party, sometimes an energy start-up eager to tap into the ubiquitous exposure of products and services in this space, sometimes a design firm, and for those not ready to make a commitment to address the inevitable, their internal marketing and management teams.

What current approaches are hoping to rouse people's consciousness around energy use? Two main tactics: financial incentives (rebates for reducing usage and increased pricing during peak times) and transparency (in-home energy monitoring). These two elements are most powerfully used together to raise motivation to and evoke a response. In conjunction, these two approaches provide actionable information when and where it is needed, and an obvious consequence for inaction – peak-time

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charges. People are all of a sudden empowered and in control of both their bill and their home's impact on the their community and the environment. Sounds like a great strategy, right? Unfortunately it's easier said then done. Financial incentives, although proven to lower usage during what utilities define as ‘peak’ or high demand times, rarely equate to lower overall consumption outside of these high demand times. Simply providing real-time usage and pricing information, through in-home devices such as ‘Smart Meters’ (see image 1) still ignores the need to re-frame usage information in order for people to be able to effectively understand and act upon it. The complex matrix of kilowatt hours, tons of CO2, air quality, dollars spent, degrees, usage behaviour, contributors, etc … can be a cumber-

Image 1: ‘Smart Meters’

some synthesis challenge, especially without the time or expertise to work through it. It not only requires the communication of an overwhelming amount of information, but also requires confronting the fact that the majority of homeowners and renters across the United States have a severely fractured or nonexistent mental model of how their homes and appliances use energy. Did you know that if you live in the United States, the electricity your home uses probably comes from coal that your utility plant has to burn to generate electricity? If you’re like a lot of Americans, this basic fact of where your energy comes from is unknown.

The problem is part education and awareness, and part making a person care about something they

are unengaged with. The former can be tackled by not only providing transparency of information that currently is inaccessible but also translating it from the technical form it is collected in, to the behaviours and actions that people can relate to. Talking about the impact of common household activities like running the dryer for an hour, or overriding your thermostat's program, as opposed to using total kilowatt-hours when most people have no mental model of how big that unit is and where it is derived from in relation to their household environment. Unless a person can clearly see the effects of their day-to-day actions on their overall energy use, will they be able to make changes. A nice example of reframing energy information comes from global design firm IDEO's Shift Focus (see image 2) strategy for the United States Department of Energy (D.O.E.). Tasked with formulating approaches for engaging people around energy efficiency, IDEO developed a point of view, set of guidelines and inspirational concepts for the D.O.E. to reference when creating educational campaigns and funding initiatives around energy efficiency. After conducting qualitative research, some of the main findings were to make energy efficiency personal, interactive, positive, and in-line with existing behaviours and needs for energy use – essentially, to ‘fit the way we live’. The concepts ranged from

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re-defining comfort

By Aislinn Dewey

engaging children to help monitor home appliance output with a magnetic field detection gun and online game, to accessing energy planning information alongside local newspaper weather forecasts. It's evident that the more people can build a routine around monitoring and adjusting their energy usage, the more likely incremental behavioural change will occur.

The latter part of the challenge, making someone care, gets a bit tricky. That's where the current social norm, generally stuck at ‘don’t care’, becomes a resistant force a designer must resolve. With creativity, exploring analogous forms of engagement, leveraging proven findings in the field of behavioural economics around human motivators like competition, peer pressure, and rewards, sustainable solutions for shifting behaviour are achievable. One significant opportunity here is helping people understand what ‘normal’ consumption is for their household. By providing people with a use or spending baseline of households similar to their own (in size, occupancy and lifestyle), people are forced to re-examine what comfort actually means to them compared to increased money and energy savings. Exposing social norms within a community can effectively encourage small steps towards increased efficiency. As economist Richard Thaler argues in his book Nudge, “One of the most 44

Image 2

important influences on people's behaviour is what other people do … with the right prompting we’ll change our behaviour to fit in with what we see around us.” Even further, Robert Cialdini, Chief Science officer at OPOWER, an energy information software company, ran experiments in San Diego around presenting community usage information in context to individual's energy statements. He found that “the most effective [communication] was ‘the majority of your neighbours.’

That's how you decide what's possible for you: what people in your circumstance are able to do. Even though our prior survey indicated that residents felt that they would be least influenced by information regarding their neighbours' energy usage, this was the only type of door hanger information that led to significantly decreased energy consumption, almost 2 kWh/day”

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(see image 3). That said, what is the right level of disclosure to most effectively catalyze behavioural change? What information is most impactful? Does it have potential to turn someone away out of a feeling of individual entitlement over what they are paying to use versus what is best for the whole?

As a senior interaction designer at IDEO, working in the energy space, an important learning thus far has been that actionable information – such as how community members are achieving increased energy efficiency and savings – is what people are looking for. There is an openness to experiment with new definitions of ‘comfort’ if it is shown that others are doing it and gaining value, whether it is the self-gratification of wasting less, achieving a lower energy bill, or altruism as the motivational driver. People

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want information that is personal, clearly mapped to their everyday activities, and that is complimented by personally relevant recommendations based on their goals and motivations. It is the role of designers to help utility companies

have empathy for these needs and to come up with original ways to reframe, educate and empower people to change their behaviour.

Image 3: Consumer utility bill by OPOWER in partnership with utility provider National Grid that compares a person to their 'neighbors'.

ÂťIt is the role of designers to help utility companies have empathy for these needs and to come up with original ways to re-frame, educate and empower people to change their behaviour.ÂŤ

Aislinn Dewey, Senior Interaction Designer, IDEO, Chicago, US

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By Franco Papeschi

Rethinking behaviours: Beyond persuasion

Questions and ideas on long-lasting change, environment and Service Design How can we promote more sustainable behaviours? How can design encourage and support the different phases of behavioural change? These were some of the questions that emerged in the first days of a project – by Vodafone's User Experience team – to develop concepts for services that can help people understand their impact on the environment, and to take action to lessen that impact.

On a sunny Sunday, a family is having a picnic in a park. A couple in their 30s and two children, lying on a blanket spread on the grass.

Their car – a new model with the typical 1960s design ¬ is parked on the street, doors open. After a while, they decide it's time to go home; they take the blanket, get in the car and leave the park.

Abandoned there, all the picnic's leftovers: cans and napkins remain as a visible trace of the family's lovely lunch.

This is a scene from the TV series MadMen 1, but I remember seeing similar things happen when I was a child. After I saw this scene on TV, I realised how much my behaviours – with regards to ecology – had changed over the years.

As designers, we often create products knowing that they can modify the way

people think and act. Human behaviours are an important component of the system, but they have a peculiarity: they can’t be designed. They aren’t a constant of the system, and at the same time it's impossible to intervene directly to ‘design’ them. Just as Robert Fabricant says that behaviours are designers' medium 2, I think services and products are a medium through which behaviours can evolve. A design approach to foster behavioural change should be systemic, and include as many touchpoints as possible: the likelihood of a change in behaviours increases when the various components of a service reinforce each other, and foster the adoption of new actions. This is where the Service Design approach becomes of pivotal importance.

Reuse, reduce, recycle … and rethink These considerations were thrown

Franco Papeschi

User Experience team of Vodafone Group, London, UK

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rethinking behaviours: beyond persuasion

By Franco Papeschi

»…the likelihood of a change in behaviours increases when the various components of a service reinforce each other…«

into sharp focus when Tory Dunn and I (as part of Vodafone's User Experience team) started working on projects about design and sustainability, at the beginning of 2009. We asked ourselves (and others) questions like: What does it mean to be sustainable? How do we know how sustainable we are? How can people act in more sustainable ways?

How can services facilitate a long-term change in habits, rather than a superficial response? And how can we use technologies to their best advantage?

While it is outside of the scope of this contribution to find a universally- accepted definition of ‘sustainability’, the United Nation's Brundtland Commission gave a good summary, describing sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” 3. Three types of capital – human, natural and financial – need to be kept positive, all together as an intertwined system.

In every industry, sustainability is a multi-facetted issue. It can be seen as a matter of functional practices: more efficient processes or company-to-company collaborations to optimise consumption.

It can be approached as a matter of new technologies for energy generation and storage; new materials; cradle-to-cradle product design. Eventually, it can be conceived as a way to involve customers to change the way they engage with the products and services offered.

In our case, we decided to focus on people's engagement: not only by providing

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tools, but in the creation of the services as well. We limited our initial field of action to environmental sustainability, given the broad range of communities and individuals interested in this aspect of the subject.

We shaped our projects in an open and collaborative way, by including experts and activists in the problem definition and in the concept creation through co-design sessions. We made all ideas and materials available on our blog 4. We defined some of the concepts in more detail and offered them as inspirations for a 24-hour dev camp (codename: EcoMo09), where developers created tools to help individuals and communities understand their impact, and act upon this. They agreed to release the code under Open Source licence.

A model to foster behavioural change Along the way, we found that most individuals are not quite able to understand their environmental impact. Even for those who are most motivated and with access to the variety of tools available, it's difficult to understand what effect their actions have on the environment.

It's even more difficult to compare them to other people's actions, companies' activities, or interventions at a policy level.

Together with our participants, we identified the main components of a service which can foster a change in behaviours: getting data, making it understandable, and generating triggers to change actions. It's also important to close the

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loop by monitoring actions, so that new data and information become available to the individual and to others – so creating a virtuous circle.

Ubiquitous technologies such as mobile devices (and the growing number of connected objects) are uniquely positioned to read activity data and deliver information to individuals directly in context of activity; they can become important elements of a system that needs to be granular, personal and contextual.

The creation of a virtuous cycle that connects data, understanding and actions is the starting point of our reflection on how design can help change behaviour. The body of knowledge and experiences accumulated in the past fifty years by social scientists and communication researchers has given us a multi-faceted perspective 5 on how people change their actions: inspiration, information, motivation and support are

Inspire

different parts of the evolution in behaviours, and they require different design solutions. These facets represent possible effects that the service components can generate. Let's see them more in detail.

Inspiration is what makes people move their attention to certain issues. Stories are one good way to inspire: they give a feeling of the desired outcome, examples to follow. Movies and games are examples of stories that attract interest.

Stories also exist at a smaller, local scale: who is, for instance, the more ecofriendly person in my neighbourhood, among my friends? Other examples of local stories are those that Foursquare generates when they nominate the ‘mayor’ of a place.

»The creation of a virtuous cycle that connects data, understanding and actions is the starting point of our reflection on how design can help change behaviour.«

These inspirational elements can become closer and closer to people's lives. It is at this point that people start gathering information on what they are doing and what is happening around them. Infor-

Data

Inform

Stories Understanding

Support Action

Motivate

Service framework for behavioural change: Framework for services to foster behavioural change – components and desired effects.

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rethinking behaviours: beyond persuasion

By Franco Papeschi

»It is at this point that people start gathering information on what they are doing and what is happening around them.«

mation is not a general description of the issues anymore: it becomes measurable, contextual, derived by the elaboration of real-time, personal data. Services such as Dopplr, Wattson and Carbon Diem are good examples, as they provide information of a person's current impact on the environment, starting from raw data. Other smaller projects highlight an evolution in this direction. Carbon. to (one of the participants at EcoMo09), for example, converts and compares between different carbon emissions in a way that is easy to understand; if you want to know how many cups of tea would I need to spare to offset the CO2 produced in one hour of flight? You can find the answer on: http://carbon.to/.

Once people start acting in a different way, then it's time to give more support and feedback to help maintain their new behaviour: keeping people engaged through supportive social pressure comes natural to us as social animals.

But sometimes we forget about it, when we design services. There is something to learn from products such as OPOWER, where a graph shows and compares subscribers' energy consumption with the one of their efficient neighbours, and from the group-based motivation of organisations like Weightwatchers.

When people engage with a service that keep them motivated, they start a path to become experts, and eventually inspire novices to try and participate. In this Understanding the information gathered way, the system closes the loop and cre– however – is not enough. The chalates a virtuous cycle. lenge for designers is to generate curiosity and motivation in taking different A concept as an example: Ultimate-G paths of activity. Possible solutions to The ideas of a path to participation are such challenges are: behind one of the concepts that came out of our project: Ultimate-G, a game• propose just-in-time, relevant alterlike system that allows people to assess the impact on the environment of their natives; activities, and compare them with those • introduce them in ‘actionable’ chunks; of other participants. The system challenges existing behaviours by highlightmake them easy to try; ing a better ecological performance obtained by other people in similar ac• make the new actions fun to do. tivities. Players can monitor other users Finding the right balance is difficult: to discover what makes the difference symptoms of ‘fun fatigue’ may emerge in performance, and investigate how to rapidly; replicate it. Participants seek to move up through levels of expertise, from novice • create a ‘sandbox’ environment, through simulations and reversible deci- to master, to become the Ultimate-G in one or more areas of the sustainability sions. In this way, new behaviours can be experimented safely for the first time. spectrum, and to be acknowledged

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Peers & Friends Impacts assessment and evaluation

Technology usage Products Places Movements Interaction Communication Manual input

Activity

Reputation

Ultimate - G

Activity

Investigations

Activity

Trading Tracking/ Monitoring Information exchange New behaviours‘ recommendation

Community creation

Experts & Advocades Ultimate-G Service Model

within the community for this excellence.

Once people join Ultimate-G, the system gathers information about their consumption patterns, through a combination of explicit input (manual data entry, barcodes, etc), and sensors available in devices (mobiles, cars, etc) or in the environment. Data such as: • usage of tools, devices and communication routines; • products purchased and used; • places, transports and movements; • energy usage; are aggregated into activities (e.g. having breakfast, commuting, working), according to time, location and frequency of certain patterns.

These activities are monitored to track the evolution of a person's environmental impact; they are also compared against those of other users: participants can follow others' performances on similar activities, and investigate how to replicate their eco-friendly performance.

Data gathered is private by default, and users can decide to what level of granularity to make them visible.

The dynamics of the game are based on three main principles: • Compare with the community: envy and the pressure of keeping up with ‘greener’ friends are what generate engagement, more than the typical do-good-because-it's-good attitude.

Once a person has found someone who is performing better on an activity, he/ she can request to follow the person touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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rethinking behaviours: beyond persuasion

By Franco Papeschi

leader’ dynamic, small groups and tribes are likely to emerge (e.g. the tribe of ‘super-green car-sharing commuters’ vs. the ‘tenacious cyclists-to-work’).

closer, giving something in exchange (information, points, etc), or to challenge him/her.

• Foster adoption of new behaviour: once people achieve a ‘master’ status on an activity, they are asked to reveal some information on their ‘secret’.

These will be available for the other participants as a ‘tip’ to improve their green performance, suggested at the time when people most need it.

• Generate niches: people can adopt more sustainable behaviour in specific sets of activities (e.g.: eating, managing home, travelling …). By dividing activities into categories, it's much easier to generate communities of interest.

Moreover, by enabling a ‘follower vs.

Assess

Connect

Eating Traveling Working Recycling

Sensors NFC Mobile Transports

Follow Experts Friends

How can I start?

Path to engagement

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Track Activities Routines

Compete

In this way, data is aggregated and used to generate not only information, but participation and engagement, and therefore increase the set of data available.

The ways to capture these data already exists, and they are available through different services. A missing component is the ability to seamlessly connect them together and close the loop.

In a nutshell The design of services that help people live in a ‘greener’ way is a complex challenge: there are so many facets that it would be unattainable to try and find

Propose

Boost

Mentor Communities of interest

Profile New behaviours

Peers Neighbours Competitors

How can I improve?

I‘m the Eco-King!

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an all-encompassing solution. This is why the more contextual and real-time a service is, the easier it is for people to tackle the issue: they can start where they think they can be most effective, and then appreciate the consequences before committing to a greater change in their habits.

The availability of real-time data that capture the consequences of a person's behaviour allows us to measure actions, and put them in context. Now we must create services that bridge the separated silos, and make the aggregation of these sources more human-friendly: meaningful, attractive and social.

collaboration on one side, and selfishness on the other.

Where from here?

We have presented here a small part of our take on design and sustainability.

Concepts, prototypes and a community of interested people is what we generated. All the documentation is available on the Betavine 6 Sustainability community.

The concepts proposed should evolve in the future, through open and distributed collaboration. Also, a new generation of services must be designed to help communities, companies and institutions in changing their behaviours, by using similar principles to those highlighted above.

Franco Papeschi is a human being, curious about the way we act and think, especially when technologies have an effect on it. He works in the User Experience team of Vodafone Group, using user-centred design techniques to envision meaningful experiences.

Prior to this, Franco has worked for design agencies in Italy and UK as a Human Factors and User Experience consultant, leading projects for web sites and applications, mobile services, IPTV, change and knowledge management.

The social aspect is particularly important: game designers know very well that a key aspect for the success of their ecosystems is the tension between open

footnotes 1 MadMen, series 2, episode 7. Minutes 31 to 34, approximately.

2 Fabricant, R. (2009), Behaviour is our medium [online]. Retrieved February 25, 2010, from http://library.ixda.org/node/3 3 Brundtland Commission (1987), Our Common Future. Chapter 2 [online]. Retrieved

February 25, 2010 from: www.worldinbalance.net/intagreements/1987-brundtland.php 4 http://tinyurl.com/betavine-sustainability 5 See B. J. Fogg's work to describe different types of behavioural change [online]. Retrieved

February 25, 2010 from: www.behaviormodel.org 6 Betavine is a project from Vodafone Group R&D, aimed at providing a platform for

developers to share knowledge and ideas. It was fundamental to increase participation in our project.

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By Ingo Froböse, Birgit Mager and Minka Rössner

Look outside the box Despite clear evidence of a positive health effect of physical activity the practical implementation of an active lifestyle is hard for many people. Apart from a lack of sports, opportunities for exercise in our daily life are hardly or never perceived. However, the increase of activities in daily life can provide a significant contribution to the maintenance of health. For this reason it is especially important to show how to incorporate physical activity into everyday life. One such opportunity displays the use of stairs instead of escalators or elevators.

A study at the German Sports University Cologne in the year 2009 under the direction of Prof. Dr. Ingo Froböse has specifically dealt with this topic. It is not a Service Design project – but an interesting inspiration for the value of strict quantitative research design.

The aim of this study was to take stock of the usage of stairs in a shopping mall in Cologne and measure the effect of two different posters that invited to use the stairs. For more than eight weeks the usage of stairs in shopping malls was counted. Incorporated facts were particularly gender, age and weight. Several counter dates were chosen at different times and 54

throughout the study 17,277 people were counted. The first two weeks of the examination period served for the basic survey. After that period a two-week intervention with the poster “Take the stairs” was tested, followed by a break of one week without any poster. The next two weeks affiliated with the help of the poster-intervention “Taking the stairs keeps you fit and healthy, let's go” and were completed by a final week of inspection.

The result of the action is clearly visible: due to the poster interventions, the percentage of stair users increased significantly (p <0.001).

Within the first poster phase 9.5% of the counted people took the stairs

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and within the second phase even 10.4%. During the initial survey, there were only 6.6%.

The posters for “Take the stairs” and “Taking the stairs keeps you fit and healthy, let's go” both have a significant influence on the decision whether to use the stairs and increase the chance by 50% for the first poster, and by almost 70% for the second poster.

We talked to Ingo Froböse about the experiences in such a project with a focus on behavioural change.

What is the revelation of the research question?

Ingo Froböse: The main findings within this project are particularly two things. Firstly, we were able to take stock to determine the actual usage of stairs in everyday life, that this is on a dramatically low level – for only about 6% actually take the stairs. This reveals a clear need for action in health promotion. Secondly, we found out that the usage of stairs can be positively influenced already in very simple ways as e.g.

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on posters. This again provides future issues for health promotion.

Can this knowledge be transferred to other behavioural contexts, such as nutrition?

Ingo FrobĂśse: Yes, we think so.

Basically, our pilot project aimed in the second phase at creating a sensitivity for the health behaviour, in this case for the usage of stairs, and to influence through simple low-

threshold indications. In principle, this can as well be transmitted to other areas of health improvement, such as nutrition, e.g. by diverting interventions in the canteen, etc.

ÂťThe increase of activities in daily life can provide a significant contribution to the maintenance of health.ÂŤ touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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look outside the box

Ingo Froböse, Birgit Mager and Minka Rössner

What role do you think does Design have within the context of behavioural changes?

Ingo Froböse: Design and therefore that, what “jumps into the eye”, has a decisive influence on the success of an intervention. For example, if an intervention is based on posters and should appeal to the

total population to sensitise one's behaviour and change it at best, it should turn out appealing designed specifically for the target groups.

The first barrier in such kind of health promotion action is to awaken the attention of the target audience and for that design plays a very important role!

Have there already been collaborative projects with designers?

If so, what was particularly interesting or striking in the collaboration?

Ingo Froböse: Within this pilot project, there was no cooperation with designers. But we know from other areas how helpful a skilled ap-

»Within the first poster phase 9.5% of the counted people took the stairs and within the second poster phase even 10.4%. During the initial survey, there were only 6.6%.«

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20%

16%

15% 13% 12% 11% 10%

10%

8%

8% 7%

7%

7% 6%

5%

4%

8%

6%

Children

4%

60 Years 60 Years 0%

Baseline

1st Poster

1st Intermission

2nd Poster

2nd Intermission

»Within the first poster phase 9.5% of the counted people took the stairs and within the second phase even 10.4%. During the initial survey, there were only 6.6%«

proach is, especially in the context of communication and appreciate this very much.

Could you imagine building on the existing research cooperation with Service Design?

Ingo Froböse: In principle, yes, of course, because we are always open to an interdisciplinary way of working and appreciate professional enrichment with new innovative and joint approaches. Thus we are open to first conversations and mutual brainstormings and would be very pleased.

Prof. Birgit Mager, Professor for Service Design at KISD, Cologne, Germany Prof. Ingo Froböse, Director of the »Centre for Health« of the German Sport University Cologne, Germany Minka Rössner, Project Manager at Service Design Network, Cologne, Germany touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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By Craig Lefebvre

Designing behaviours for health Designing behaviours for healthier living is a people-centred approach that starts with a perspective of helping people learn new behaviours rather than trying to change them. We use the challenge of increasing daily fruit and vegetable consumption to illustrate how new behaviours can be relevant in people's lives and also help them to solve problems that stand in the way of adopting new ones. We offer a list of learning principles that can be used as heuristics to guide efforts in designing behaviours.

In the world of health care and public health, there are thousands of variations on the themes of what to do to Be Healthy, Stay Healthy and Get Healthy! Most of these admonitions concern behaviours we should do less often or avoid (Don't use tobacco products, binge drink alcohol), do more often (eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, be physically active), do to detect diseases early (get a blood pressure or mammography screening) and to get well (take medications as prescribed, attend rehabilitation sessions).

In many instances, these recommendations are based on scientific studies that link certain behaviours to an observed reduction in the risk of disease or injury. Yet, because 58

these studies are done on large groups of people and patients, the behaviours they recommend are really quite vague. Let's explore how one “eats five servings of fruits and vegetables a day?”. How much is a serving? Can I do it all at once? What if I am too busy to prepare them? Or don't know how to shop for them? Or cannot get to stores that stock fresh produce on a regular basis? Can I use canned or frozen instead? What about fruit juice – is that cheating? Rarely does science provide us these answers – and rarely do the communications that come from governments, health care providers, public health advisors, or many other sources. Or if they do, it is a long litany of suggestions that are overwhelming.

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A primary reason that public health efforts fail to help people live healthier lives is that they do not design behaviours and messages from an audience point-of-view.

These programs often produce materials that state the scientific finding and observed benefit (eating more fruits and vegetables may prevent certain cancers) and leave it at that. How that evidence translates into behaviours that are relevant for various groups of people in their everyday lives is rarely acknowledged or explored.

Designing how to eat more fruits and vegetables When we began looking at how to encourage people in the United States to eat more servings of fruits and vegetables a day, we spent a great amount of time understanding fruit and vegetable consumption from their point-of-view rather than only sifting through the scientific evidence. When we asked people in our priority audience to describe people who eat five servings a day, they frequently used words such as ‘sensible, healthy, disciplined and fit’ while they described themselves (people who ate far fewer serv-

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meals, that some described themselves as ‘finicky’ eaters, found it inconvenient or too time-consuming to prepare and cook fresh vegetables, did not know how to pick and store ripe produce, and usually overestimated what a serving size actually was (thinking “how could I ever eat THAT much?”).

reflected their busy and hectic lives.

We respected their limited attention and focused on times, places and states-of-mind when they were most likely already thinking about food choices and making these decisions rather than trying to interrupt their day at inconsequential times to listen to us.

These and other consumer findings led us to emphasize the design of specific, relevant recommendations for behaviours to add two or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day ‘the easy way’ – what was seen In focus group sessions we further found that many people were put off by people as an achievable goal. by what they called ‘boring’ presen- We established an empathy and tations of fruits and vegetables at link with them in our work that

And we focused from the beginning on things they really wanted to know, and that were relevant and useful for them to try and increase their fruit and vegetable consumption. Rather than giving them expert advice on all sorts of things to do, we designed our messages and offerings to solve their problems of

ings a day) as ‘dependable, capable, sensible and careful.’ The differences they drew between the model and the status quo reminded us that the behaviours that work for some people are perceived as very different from what we do ourselves or how we think about ourselves.

Simply borrowing from what the positive deviants (5 A Day Masters) did had to be tempered by which of their behaviours fit with our audience's sense of themselves and their daily life patterns.

»Simply borrowing from what the positive deviants (5 A Day Masters) did had to be tempered by which of their behaviours fit with our audience's sense of themselves and their daily life patterns.« touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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designing behaviours for health

By Craig Lefebvre

“how do I fit fruits and vegetables easily and conveniently into my day” (try a glass of fruit or vegetable juice before you leave the house/ apartment in the morning), “how do I get more fruits and vegetables into meals or when eating out” (add frozen vegetables to soup or stews, have a ready list of places to eat

that offer a lot of choices) and “who has the time to cook vegetables” (here are some easy and attractive ways to prepare vegetables using a microwave oven).

Learning principles and designing behaviours In designing these behaviours and

how we presented them, we also paid attention to core principles of learning. This focus on helping people learn new behaviours, rather than changing them, reflects a design approach that respects the individual rather than attempting to overpower them in some way (for example, through persuasive

learning principles to shift from changing behaviours to designing alternative ones Learning to behave in a new way is important to us at the moment (fits aspirations, preconceptions, interests).

The behaviour is not too complicated.

We can convert information to images and easily used words, phrases, slogans.

We can create ‘rules’ – “do this when …”

We can see ourselves doing it.

We have opportunities to practice it (get better at it).

We find the behaviour useful to solve a problem or cope with our environment.

Performing the new behaviour results from three types of incentives: • The allure of direct, tangible rewards; • Observed or vicarious rewards – experiencing it through others; and • Self-produced ones.

Distinguish between what's the (scientifically) desirable or ideal behaviour versus what's relevant and possible in our life.

Create contours and context for behaviours to occur in.

Be slightly ‘off’ – help us learn the rules and shape the behaviour (focus on showing us people coping with learning new behaviours as opposed to ones who have already mastered them).

We act in ways that are consistent with how we think about ourselves.

We act in ways that are consistent with how people we respect and trust want us to.

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»How do I fit fruits and vegetables easily and conveniently into my day«

or emotional appeals with vivid imagery).In combining a design approach to behaviour with principles of learning theory, we suggest the previous items as a set of heuristics to guide our efforts.

In public health and healthcare settings, focusing on people or being patient-centred is more often a rhetorical priority than a guide to action. Moving from the relative safety of nonspecific exhortations to carefully designed and tailored behaviours aimed at specific groups of people who share certain characteristics can be perceived as risky, expensive and time-consuming.

It's especially risky because science doesn't know if adding a glass

of fruit juice, a bag of vegetables to soup, having a vegetarian meal once a week or many other individual acts that help people solve the problem of adding more fruits and vegetables to their diets are the ‘correct’ ones or not. It is here where we also need to take into account our client's ability to tolerate ambiguity and to take bold steps to solve problems (rather than continue to describe them as “people not eating enough fruits and vegetables and should be doing more” – and leaving it at that) that will nurture and support a design approach to people living more healthy and productive lives.

Craig Lefebvre, chief maven at socialShifting, Florida, US touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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By Gyuchan Thomas Jun, Kathleen Beniuk and John Clarkson

What Service Designers can learn from policy designers Successful implementation of evidence-based healthcare policy is a function of three core elements – the level and nature of the evidence, the context or environment into which the policy is to be placed and the method or way in which the implementation is facilitated. Can the same be true in Service Design? How can an understanding of these three elements help Service Designers achieve successful behavioural change? In this paper we discuss how to find the right balance between these core elements, and how this can lead to more successful Service Design.

It is a challenge to ensure that Service Design leads to the intended behavioural change of frontline employees. While tangible elements of Service Design, as new resources, space etc, can inherently change the behaviour of service users and providers (for better or worse), intangible elements of Service Design, as new procedures, processes etc, do not so easily result in behavioural change.

This is an all too familiar story to healthcare policy makers.

Healthcare has tried to transfer standardised evidence-based health policy into clinical practice, often unsuccessfully. A plethora of literature has been published identifying obstacles to the successful deployment of evidence-based health policy and mechanisms to overcome them. The successful implementation of healthcare policy

is suggested to be a function of the interplay of three core elements – the level and nature of the evidence, the context or environment into which the policy is to be placed and the facilitation approach adopted for implementing the change (Kitson, Harvey et al. 1998).

We believe that Service Designers may learn some lessons from this prior research in healthcare policy implementation and this paper would like to summarise what they can learn about behavioural change from the function of successful health policy implementation.

Evidence The term evidence is commonly used to represent many different things, and indeed evidence comes in many different forms. In health policy design, evidence is derived from research, clinical experience

successful implementation = function (evidence, context, facilitation) »Successful implementation of health policy is a function of the relation between the nature of the evidence, the context in which the proposed change is to be implemented, and the facilitation approach adopted for the change.« 62

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core elements conditions Evidence:

• Rigorous, systematic research

• High level of professional consensus

• Systematic feedback to and input from patients

Context:

• Culture of supporting the use of evidence

• Clear roles and leadership with effective organisational structure

• Routine monitoring of systems and services

Facilitation:

• Characteristics of openness, supportiveness, approachability, reliability, lateral thinking and non-judgemental behaviour

• Clear understanding of roles regarding access, authority and change agenda

• Style-sensitive towards the various groups and subgroups needing support to help them accept change

»Service Designers may learn from the following conditions for successful implementation of evidence-based health policy«

and patient preferences. For successful implementation of health policy, evidence needs to be based on rigorous systematic research, high level of professional consensus and systematic feedback and inputs from patients (Kitson, Harvey et al. 1998).

Studies have shown that a common criticism of a new health policy is the credibility (and perceived lack) of its supporting evidence. General Practitioners in reviewing clinical guidelines often evaluate the supporting evidence with respect to its overall social and economic implications. If they perceive the evidence to be weak, or feel that it can be easily disputed, they often

dismiss the guidance as irrelevant or unconvincing, and are less likely to adopt and implement the guidance into practice (Rashidian, Eccles et al. 2008). Consequently, guidance is more likely to be adopted if supported by a strong, relevant evidence base.

There is a question as to what types of evidence are being and should be used in Service Design. Greenhalgh et al. reported that in a whole-scale service transformation, the types of evidence that should be used are published research evidence, data about local needs and services, experiences of staff and users and knowledge gained from observing

similar systems in action elsewhere (Greenhalgh, Humphrey et al. 2009).

Our recommendation to Service Designers is to be open to different types and sources of evidence, including rigorous and systematic research evidence; experience and inputs from service providers and users; reliable data about local needs and service performance; and benchmarking of other services.

The design team needs to have skills, capacity and commitment to collect, critically interpret and apply evidence to Service Design. In addition to the inclusion of various forms of systematic evidence, the consideration of context and

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what service designers can learn from policy designers

By Gyuchan Thomas Jun, Kathleen Beniuk and John Clarkson

facilitation can further improve the chances of behavioural change.

Context The context is the environment or setting in which the proposed health policy is to be implemented.

Context is subdivided into three core elements: culture, leadership roles and measurement. The successful implementation of health policy is contingent on a context that has culture of supporting the use of evidence; clear roles and leadership with effective organisational structure; and routine monitoring of systems and services (Kitson, Harvey et al. 1998). To summarise, the context needs to be receptive to new changes.

recommendation, it was made fully acknowledging that within the current system there would be a lack of available pharmacists, especially out of hours (i.e. the majority of the time). What the committee noted but failed to resolve was the lack of compatibility with the existing practice and the lack of receptiveness. They also failed to present any recommendations for developing a supportive culture and strong leadership towards these changes.

fective facilitation, implementation is less likely to be successful even with strong supporting evidence and within a receptive context.

How appropriate facilitation can overcome poor contextual conditions to successfully implement health policy is exemplified in the following case â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the routine use of rectal examinations of all older people on a ward as a way of monitoring constipation. This intervention was strongly supOur recommendation to Service ported by facilitators while being Designers is to be aware of the implemented into poor contextual importance of context when design- conditions (Kitson, Harvey et al. ing a new service. Although Service 1998). The culture of the ward was not patient-centred and there was Designers might find this quite time-consuming, a good undergeneral lack of respect for patients standing of context can help Service and for staff who were expected to In 2007, the National Institute for Designers make appropriate efforts perform such tasks. The facilitation Health and Clinical Excellence to provide necessary evidence and style was highly directive with high (NICE) and the National Patient facilitation. educational input. The external Safety Agency (NPSA) in the UK facilitator worked with staff one collaborated on a pilot project Facilitation day a month for 12 months and the for the production of a technical Facilitation is a technique by which internal facilitator reinforced the solution to address patient safety a facilitator (or facilitators) promotes facilitation through supervision of problems, specifically to improve action by aiding and encouraging practice, role modelling and role set medicines reconciliation before paothers to achieve particular goals. development. Results of the evalutient admissions. This joint NPSA/ The following dimensions for ation showed significant improveNICE assessment recommended successful facilitation have been ments in the quality of patient care. pharmacists involvement in obtain- identified: personal characterising medicines information within tics of openness; supportiveness; Our recommendation to Service 24 hours of patient admission. This approachability; reliability; and self- Designers is to be aware of the had been shown to reduce medicaconfidence. Clarity around the facili- essential role of facilitation for tion reconciliation errors (NHS tator's intended purpose and role are successful behavioural change. The National Institute of Health and vital, and being sensitive and flexible role of designers as facilitators and Clinical Excellence & National Pato the various groups involved is communicators has been highlighttient Safety Agency 2007). Although important (Kitson, Harvey et al. ed, particularly in the co-designing there was evidence to support this 1998). If there is a lack of or inefprocess of new services. During this 64

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process, it is vital for Service Designers to have a clear understanding of their roles as facilitators, and to appear open and supportive with a sensitivity and flexibility to the various stakeholders.

Conclusion We believe that an acute awareness of the interplay between the three core elements for successful health policy implementation can help Service Designers play a key role in influencing behavioural change. Equal recognition should be given to the level and types of evidence, the context into which the evidence is being implemented and the methods of facilitating such change. Although the balance between these three core elements is important in all situations, it is noteworthy that the nature, focus and duration of facilitation can overcome and alter poor contextual conditions to successfully influence behavioural change.

Recommendations to Service Designers for successful behavioural change • Be aware of the interplays between the three core elements for successful implementation: the level and types of evidence; the context into which new Service Design is being implemented; and the facilitation approach adopted for implementing the change.

• Be open to various types and sources of good evidence: rigorous

and systematic research evidence; experience and inputs from service providers and users; reliable data about local needs and service performance; benchmarking of other services.

• Be attentive to the receptiveness of context to new changes: a good understanding of culture; leadership and monitoring mechanism can help Service Designers make appropriate efforts to provide necessary evidence and facilitation.

• Be mindful of the important role of facilitation: open, supportive and persistent facilitation with a sensitivity and flexibility to the various stakeholders can overcome poor contextual conditions to successfully influence behavioural change.

References • Greenhalgh, T., Humphrey, C., Hughes, J., Macfarlane, F., Butler, C. & Pawson, R. (2009), How do you modernize a health service? A realist evaluation of whole-scale transformation in London. Milbank Quarterly, 87(2), pp. 391–416.

• Kitson, A., Harvey, G. & McCormack, B. (1998), Enabling the implementation of evidence-based practice: a conceptual framework.

Quality in Health Care 7(3), pp.

149–158.

• NHS National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence & National Patient Safety Agency (2007), Technical patient safety solutions for medicines recon-

ciliation on admission of adults to hospital – Guidance. London, p. 16.

• Rashidian, A., Eccles, M. P. & Russell, I. (2008), Falling on stony ground? A qualitative study of implementation of clinical guidelines’ prescribing recommendations in primary care. Health Policy 85(2), pp. 148–161.

Dr. Gyuchan Thomas Jun, Research Associate in the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge, UK Kathleen Beniuk, PhD Research Student in the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge, UK Prof. P. John Clarkson, Professor of Engineering Design and Director of the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre, UK

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California Governor Goodwin J. Knight receives model of IBM 702 computer from Sacramento Branch Mgr. Ralph Dow, 1957

By Ben Shaw and Melissa Cefkin

Design and behaviour in complex B2B service engagements Complex business-to-business (B2B) technology services challenge us to consider the impact of design on aspects of human behaviour on a number of levels. B2B services often encompass multiple lines of business, involve hundreds of participants and entail months if not years of effort. Effective Service Design brings together the right people at the right time to create opportunities and solve problems that allow each business to focus on what they do best, achieving more by working together than they could have otherwise. We approach the relationship between Service Design and human behaviour in such settings along four interdependent dimensions: affordance, awareness, activity and identity. Design is inherently holistic, and when things go well, all four of these dimensions reinforce one another.

Introduction: service system design Over the years, IBM's business has migrated from hardware to become increasingly dominated by software and service. Service now accounts for more than 50% of the company's revenue and employs a large proportion of its nearly 400,000 employees worldwide. Offerings include technology outsourcing, business process outsourcing and business consulting services, in a truly global enterprise operating in over 170 coun-

tries. Engagements frequently unfold over years and involve a bewildering array of touchpoints between individuals, systems and organizations distributed across time and space. Such complex engagements make a mockery of the notion one could specify in advance every detail of how services should be performed, or exactly what the client might like to see â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in essence, a more conventional notion of design.

Ben Shaw

Design researcher and post-doctoral fellow in Service Science and Service System Design at IBM Research ÂŹ Almaden, San Jose, California, USA

Melissa Cefkin

Workplace ethnographer in Service System Design at IBM Research ÂŹ Almaden, San Jose, California, USA

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complex b2b engagement

By Ben Shaw and Melissa Cefkin

ÂťIBM maintains global delivery centres throughout the world â&#x20AC;&#x201C; this one is located in Manila, Philippines.ÂŤ

We begin by proposing a simplifying abstraction, that service can be thought of in terms of the integration of resources.

Service systems bring together resources and capabilities of clients and providers to achieve shared ends. In the business context, in a perfect world, service systems are designed to allow each part to do what it does best to co-create value.

Very often we find, however, that there is considerable room for improvement.

We see design as a process of transforming existing situations into preferred ones, and service as the deployment of specialized skills, knowledge and other 68

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resources by one party for the benefit of another. While some business services involve highly specialised expertise, many others are fairly mundane. While it is certainly true that entirely novel business services are formulated from scratch in some instances, it is far more common for improved efficiency, reliability and effectiveness, as well as reduced cost, to be the keys to viability in business service offerings.

Service is the act of satisfying needs, fulfilling commitments and delivering experiences; in our world, design

crossover learnings

involves the configuration of technological and social systems that enable people to do this more quickly and easily. The Service Design we describe is much more an approach to designing for service – specifically design for improved, more efficient, effective and productive service – than design of novel services per se. We focus particularly on the ways in which design interventions play out across four dimensions to shape the behaviour of employees enacting service. The result is the integration of resources, nurtured and grown to enhance employee actions, to deliver positive service experiences for the client and positive results for IBM.

or hundreds of calls each day, providing support for multiple products – each of which may be subject to periodic updates and changes that introduce novel problems and unexpected customer situations on a regular basis. Add to this the need to customize the support process itself in thousands of ways, as dictated by each customer's support contract. All this takes place in an environment that emphasizes handling calls quickly and efficiently, making stress and turnover relatively common problems.

»Excellent service, even in the technology business, often boils down to interactions between people.«

Colleagues of ours at IBM Research set out to improve this situation with a custom software application that allows call centre employees to visualize and Affordance: toward a smarter call dynamically modify the scripts that are centre used to guide CSRs in handling and routExcellent service, even in the technology ing calls and troubleshooting problems. business, often boils down to interacThe application provides visibility into tions between people. How do we make call flows so that problems can be more it easy for people – in this case, IBM em- readily detected and includes an authorployees – to do what they think is right ing environment that allows CSRs and under the circumstances at any particu- managers alike to record, modify and lar point in time? ‘Affordance’ is a term upload scripts to a central repository. that's commonplace in human-computer This allows new information to continuinteraction, used to refer to the latent ally percolate into revised and updated possibilities for action presented by a scripts, comprising a resource that tool, artefact or situation. We suggest enhances the collective intelligence of that one of the most basic ways in which the call centre. design can shape behaviour is through the actions and responses afforded by Awareness: mapping touchpoints and the tools and environments the service modelling interactions is delivered within.

Complex B2B technology services involve a bewildering array of contacts.

Take call centres, for example, where Imagine that, in addition to running a work is challenging for a number call centre as above, the provider is also of reasons. Here, Customer Service handling IT desk-side support, running Representatives (CSRs) answer dozens the client's data centres on more than touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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complex b2b engagement

By Ben Shaw and Melissa Cefkin

Organisational structure

Organisational structure Business divisions

Business divisions

Global locations

Global locations

Client

Incentive systems

IBM

Processes

Incentive systems

Processes

Expertise

Expertise Culture

Culture

Zone of interaction People, settings, artifacts & technologies

»In effective IT service engagements, IBM and the client's organisation are woven together in a complex manner creating a myriad of touchpoints. This interaction zone is the focus of our touchpoint mapping and modelling activity.«

one continent, managing their networks, and maintaining the numerous applications that run across all the client's different lines of business. With the many contacts occurring between members of the provider and client organisations over time, how can we help service providers be more attentive to meeting clients' needs and providing satisfying experiences across multiple interactions? This kind of ‘big picture’ is one of the things we refer to when we speak of ‘awareness’.

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For example, to enhance awareness, we are working on a tool and methodology with which to construct a comprehensive overview of touchpoints between client and provider – from strategy reviews in the executive suite to trouble tickets logged by end users. What is going on? Does the client's sense of what is happening in one place affect, even indirectly, their sense of what happens elsewhere? Not only does this allow the provider to organize and engineer touchpoints to guarantee that exceptional service is delivered without being

crossover learnings

undercut by missed signals, crossed lines or failure to align priorities, it presents the opportunity for client and provider to engage one another over a shared representation on where and how they interact to ensure that winwin outcomes are obtained.

Activity: scaffolding value-creating patterns When tools and systems are joined with the knowledge and capabilities of people working to achieve an objective, the resulting pattern of unfolding actions can be described as an ‘activity’. This notion allows us to ask how to scaffold and support practices that engender constructive engagement and valuecreating patterns of interaction.

Many companies present a sleek exterior, but take a peek under the hood and you’re likely to find a rat's nest of intersecting (even interfering) processes that result in inefficiency, miscommunication, poor performance and lost opportunity. Component Business Modelling is a practice wherein IBM Business Services consultants work with clients to understand and categorize this complexity, teasing apart the tangles to find where critical dependencies and opportunities for strategic improvement lie.

At the heart of this practice are designed artefacts (developed by Services Research colleagues) that include the software and algorithms, the methodologies, formats, templates and reports that consultants use in working with

clients. However, the real beauty of this infrastructure lies in the virtuous cycle that it sets in motion. The expanding library of models created by our consultants over time allows for the development of benchmarks and key performance indicators against which companies can compare their performance to understand what they do well and where things could be improved.

This ensures that each engagement not only helps a particular client understand how to improve their business, but also grows the knowledge available to consultants for subsequent engagements. It is the creation of this resource – enabled by the tool, enacted in practice and providing ever greater value to IBM as well as its clients – that propels the activity forward.

»In services we frequently think in terms of the client and the provider.

Complex B2B services remind us that so often things are not that simple.«

Identity: who is ‘we’?

In services we frequently think in terms of the client and the provider. Complex B2B services remind us that so often things are not that simple. Both parties are in fact composed of a morass of individuals from numerous divisions, across many geographical, cultural and linguistic boundaries, performing in a range of roles, trying to meet varied (and sometimes competing) targets with diverse perceptions of what counts as good service, a satisfied need, and appropriate behaviour.

Collaboration is essential to bring diverse resources to bear upon solving clients' problems. To fulfil the promise of a global service provider, how can we touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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complex b2b engagement

By Ben Shaw and Melissa Cefkin

Ben Shaw, Ph.D. is a design researcher and postdoctoral fellow in Service Science and Service System Design at IBM Research ¬ Almaden. His research focuses on visualization and shared representation in collaborative work. His prior work is in engineering design and organisational knowledge management consulting.

enable people to share knowledge and collaborate effectively in such challenging contexts? Our notion of ‘identity’ recognizes that people's actions are guided by who they understand themselves to be. In working with service delivery teams, we found that identities related to company division and tenure, for instance, significantly affect collaborative behaviour. For example, newbies tended to ally with other newbies upon joining an account. We also witnessed heated conversations peppered with “do you mean ‘we’ IBM, or ‘we’ your division?”. We set out to formulate mutually reinforcing programs and practices to help team members manage varying identities, reinforcing aspects that accord with the attainment of both the client's and the provider's business goals.

We first engaged members of delivery teams to determine what barriers to providing effective service stemmed from strained collaborations. We then worked

in a participatory mode to design and implement a methodology for integrating new team members, bringing them up to speed quickly while, at the same time, enabling their prior experience to contribute value to the rest of the team.

We introduced a model and an approach for teams to design for themselves the form of their collaborations given the task at hand, leading to more effective and satisfying collaborations. These lowtech, relationship-sensitive solutions targeted the core of service system functioning, improving the conditions that enable each part of the service system to do what it does best to co-create value.

Conclusion Looking back over the topics we’ve covered, we hope you can see how each dimension of Service Design in complex B2B contexts builds upon preceding ones: awareness presumes that tools and environments afford seeing and understanding – whether across the room or

»IBM seeks to leverage new team members' senses of themselves as unique, as indicated by these 72

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crossover learnings

Acknowledgements across the business. Activity presumes We gratefully acknowledge the help the ability to act (afforded by tools and and contributions of our colleagues environments) on the basis of knowlwhose work, in addition to our own, edge and awareness. Identity not only is described above: Joel Bethea, Jeahelps people decide what to do in a given nette Blomberg, Neil Boyette, Ankur situation, it is shaped by the rewarding Chandra, Isaac Cheng, Vikas Krishna, experience of working together, fluidly Yolanda Rankin, Susan Stucky and and effectively, to co-create value.

Jakita Thomas.

These ideas put a finer point on what References practice theorists like Bourdieu and • Cheng, I., Krishna, V., Boyette, N. & Giddens have long suggested, that relaBethea, J. (2007), ‘Towards an Agtionships and identities are produced, ile Service System for a Global Call reproduced and transformed through Centre.’ Business Process and Services everyday practice in the context of Computing, BPSC, September 25–26, interaction. Design then, in the context 2007, Leipzig/Germany, pp. 125–137. of complex B2B service, is not about get• Ernst, M. & Nisavic, J. M. (2007). ting any one of the pieces perfectly right, ‘Adding Value to the IT Organization it's about getting all the pieces rightwith the Component Business Model.’ enough so that a virtuous circle can IBM Systems Journal, July–September be closed and become self-reinforcing, 2007, 46(3), pp. 387–403. generating positive results for individuals and businesses alike.

Melissa Cefkin, PhD. is an anthropologist and workplace ethnographer focusing on Service Practices in Service System Design at IBM Research ¬ Almaden. She has prior experience in professional services consulting and cross-disciplinary learning research. She is also the editor of »Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research In and Of Corporations« recently published by Berghahn books.

public advertisements outside malls in Manila, Philippines.« touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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By Mary Rose Cook

Service Design meets social marketing Reforming public sector services and reducing inequalities in UK society have been two of the Labour Government's main agendas since it came to power in 1997. During this time, Service Designers have been commissioned to help achieve these plans and have worked on a range of projects from reducing worklessness to designing new health- and social care services.

There has also been another specialism commissioned to help deliver the agendas: social marketing focuses more on changing the behaviours of people using services, rather than the services themselves. This article provides an overview of social marketing, the similarities and points of difference to Service Design, and what the two specialisms could learn from each other to ensure services are reformed and inequalities reduced.

Social Marketing Social marketing is defined by the National Social Marketing Centre as “the systematic application of marketing concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioural goals relevant to a social good” and works by “influencing specific groups of people to take focused incremental actions which benefit them, their communities and wider society”. Social marketing fundamentally applies techniques from commercial marketing practice (i.e. how to make a product or service 74

appealing to a particular group of people) to influence public behaviours for social good and reduce inequalities.

Social marketing is most commonly used to improve public health behaviours, for example to encourage people to quit smoking, drink less, eat five fruits and vegetables a day, etc. Although social marketing is a process which can be applied across subject areas, in the UK it has primarily evolved in the field of health, due to the National Social Market-

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ing Centre (which is essentially the equivalent of the Design Council to the design industry), being funded by the Department of Health.

Social marketing is mainly associated with promoting health messages and therefore the deliverables of a social marketing project tend to be promotional material – brand strategy, TV adverts, posters, flyers, etc. However the practice has been steadily evolving and many agencies have realised that promotional material alone is not enough to achieve sustainable behavioural change. The services the public interact with are the systems that must adapt to changes in public behaviour and therefore need to be present, appropriate and of a high standard. For example, if people are told that smoking is harmful to them, that they should quit and that they can receive support from the NHS to help with the challenge, the smoking cessation services must be easy to access and well-run to ensure people have the greatest chance of change. Support systems and services to help people change have to pick up seamlessly where the awareness materials left off.

crossover learnings

ÂťA collaborative approach was taken to generating ideas.ÂŤ Due to this, social marketing finds itself more and more involved with designing or redesigning public services. Although this is an outcome that the two practices share, the starting point for the projects remains very different. Social marketing focuses on understanding a target group's behaviours and attitudes towards an issue before designing specific solutions (which may include a service) to address them, whereas Service Design starts with a service that could be improved in terms of quality,

efficiency and user experience.

Agencies from both practices could learn from the other approach and incorporate new techniques in their own work. An example of how the two can be combined follows.

Case Studies Uscreates is a behavioural change agency which uses both social marketing and Service Design techniques in changing public behaviours. Recently we worked with an NHS Primary Care Trust to increase the number of 15 - 24 year

olds being screened for Chlamydia.

The brief was ultimately to change the target audience's behaviours to screening and develop new services to do so. It was delivered using a mixture of social marketing and Service Design.

The work began with a large phase of insight work with 15â&#x20AC;&#x201C;24 year olds designed to understand the exact behavioural barriers to being screened. Uscreates spoke with 65 young people, through a range of in-depth interviews, insight work-

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service design meets social marketing

By Mary Rose Cook

»Free glow in the dark glasses were given to anyone who completed a screening kit.«

shops and focus groups. Undertaking a phase of insight work at the start of a project is an activity shared by Service Design and social marketing. However in the field of social marketing the insight tends to include a larger, more representative sample of people in order for the information gathered to be used in segmenting the target audience into behavioural and attitudinal groups. It is these groups that the rest of the project is based upon, designing a strategy specifically for each target group.

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With the segments formed, briefs were written to address the behavioural barriers identified. A collaborative approach was taken by working with groups of young people to generate ideas. This collaborative approach is lifted from the design world and is something in which social marketing as an approach is lacking, and Service Design excels in. Too often a social marketing approach involves agencies working closely with the target audience to identify the issues, but then working in isolation to come up with potential solutions.

Through using a collaborative

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approach and guiding participants through a number of creative exercises, a range of innovative ideas to increase screening rates emerged and a number of them went on to be piloted. These included a range of awareness materials and changes to the existing service: • A free cinema screening night, at which Chlamydia screening kits were handed out in the toilets.

Completing a kit got you a popcorn and drink voucher as reward.

• Outdoor advertising through billboards and bus shelters an-

crossover learnings

nounced the different methods of accessing self-test kits. Local young people featured in the photo-shoots for the advertising materials.

• A Facebook page was set up to support the programme by addressing the stigma around Chlamydia and transforming it into a public topic to challenge negative stigmas.

• A competition which invited young people to capture their experience of getting tested through film. The winners, voted for at Free Cinema and on the Facebook Hub by their peers, spent a day in London producing their films with a professional film production

company. The films are currently circulating on the Facebook Hub and are planned to be screened within Cinema adverts.

Learning from each other This project demonstrates the benefit of using Service Design and social marketing approaches in projects which have a behavioural change element. Service Design provides a collaborative and innovative approach which is well complemented by the robust rigour social marketing brings to research and insight.

For Service Design practice to continue to grow and develop in the improvement and reformation of healthcare, a more physiological

»Awareness materials to support the campaign.«

approach must be developed. This would identify and address the attitudes and behaviours of service providers and service users that are often at the root of problems in healthcare, rather than focusing on improving the systems and services in place to cure. On the other hand, social marketing needs to utilize the collaborative methods and designled approaches used by Service Designers when developing ideas to support behavioural change, to ensure that they are innovate and well received by the users.

Social marketing and Service Design are methods well equipped to moving society and the public sector towards fulfilling government agendas on reform and reducing inequalities. By combining these two new approaches we can help to create a fairer, better society.

Mary Rose Cook, founding partner of Uscreates, London, UK touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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By Kira Adams

Unearthing action catalysts in community development and design Design for a local context prompts for an intimate understanding of and interaction with community-level relationships. This paper presents a case-based exploration of the potential for dialogue between design processes and existing social networks within a rural Canadian resource community. Reframing the service ecology from the perspective of community health serves as a guide for understanding local relationships, behaviour patterns and the mechanisms that shape behavioural change and healthy environments.

There are many mechanisms used by designers to understand, emulate and forecast the relationships intended users will have with their designs. The tools and processes of design practice are shaped by experience, the object of design, the client and end user. For design to support the social and cultural needs within local contexts, an understanding of individual and collective interests and capacities is required. This prompts interaction in community-level relationships as the interactions and innovative solutions to everyday problems of local citizens are intimately linked to their geographical and cultural context (Morelli, 2007).

Design plays a complimentary role 78

Community behavioural patterning Passing through the deep valleys of the interior of British Columbia it is easy to become awe struck at the immense beauty of the bold mountains and beautiful farmland.

Settled at the confluence of the mighty Kootenay and Columbia rivers is Castlegar, a town that is too easy to pass through. At first glance this place might easily be passed off as just a strip scarring the beautiful to community development by landscape, when in fact it conceals putting our knowledge, skills and an interesting blend of cultures dreams into action through the cre- and ideals that have adapted and ation of products and situations that changed while knowledge, habits, mediate our interpretation of, and customs and beliefs sought common interaction with, our surroundings. ground.

The methods and process of Service Design are uniquely situated to The region has a past embedded in understand local contexts with its the resource sector which profocus on â&#x20AC;&#x153;observing and interpretvided employment for immigrants ing requirements and behavioural from Portugal, Italy and the rest patternsâ&#x20AC;? (Mager, 2008). Reframof Canada; meanwhile geographic ing the service ecology from the isolation offered refuge for Doukhobours, draft dodgers and outdoor perspective of community health serves as a guide for understandenthusiasts. These various groups ing local relationships, behaviour settled in pockets, all connected patterns, and the mechanisms that like a string of beads by the flow of shape behavioural change and the rivers. Amalgamation and time healthy environments. have diluted the divisions between nationality, occupation and ideals,

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Big box stores Volunteerism Alternate lifestyles Local craft artisans Large proportion of elder citizens

Health services Economic diversification Shared identity Community pride

Mixture of cultures Resiliency Equality

Resilience

Trade knowledge Improved air quality

Creativity

Community pride

Adaptation

Healthy community

Lifelong learning

Resource protection

Familiar with area

Access to 24/7 care

Self-sufficiency

Access to healthcare

Cultural emphasis

Attract young families

Communication

Self-sufficiency

Strong connection to environment

Skill development Affordability

Kootenay mountains

Concern for community Increasing senior population

Narrow economic base

Crossroads

Art culture

Youth emigration

No connection to river

Dispersed amenities

Minerals

Dependence on driving

Limited senior housing options

Tight-knit social activities

Easy to pass through town

Isolation Large distances Amalgamation of communities Fertile land

Trade skills Hydropower Timber Fertile land

Suburban development Loss of jobs Loss of respect for community

AWAR EN ESS

History of self-sufficiency

PAT T ER N S

Confluence of rivers

R ESO RC ES

GE OGR AP H

Natural environment

IS IONS

Bedroom community

Mutual support

Accessibility

Natural amenities Generic malls Streets inhospitable to walking Mobility issues

Sustainability action planning Volunteer time & resources Developing walking trails Community garden Seniors cooperative Harvest rescue Compost education Rebranding municipality

I N I T I AT I ES

Resource economy

Connectivity

C A PACIT

Outdoor enthusiasts

A L ES

Blend of cultures

NEEDS

SOCIA L C LT RE

crossover learnings

Social organisation of Castlegar. Conditions shaping community health S oci al O rgani z ati o n of C a st l e g ar Co n di t i o n s Sh a pi n g Communit y Health

and regional highways now link the neighbourhoods. A dynamic cultural heritage and intimate connection with the environment have been masked with generic malls and streets that are inhospitable to walking. Behaviour has evolved in response to these conditions; resulting in a dependence on driving, disconnected pockets of amenities and isolated community groups.

Life as a healthy community â&#x20AC;&#x201C; metrics The health of a community is a subjective characteristic defined by the values and aspirations of its citizens. The small size, remote location and cultural heritage of Castlegar have generated self-sufficient community values balancing a tenuous relationship with the resource economy.

The lack of value-added industries, combined with technological advancements and environmental

restrictions in the forestry and mining industries, have led to loses in jobs and respect for the region as the youth seek out more viable livelihoods elsewhere. As such, the community members are primarily concerned with the means to care for their growing senior population, connectivity to the natural environment, and accessibility to their urban amenities within their distributed municipality.

Social organisation mediates behaviour and interaction, forging

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unearthing action

By Kira Adams

relationships that lay the foundation for communication, exchange and reciprocity (Mancini, 2009).

Mutual understanding, respect and interaction develop relational qualities over time that feed into healthy community development.

According to Meroni (2008) the conditions supportive of replicating good practices within communities include: • convenience and appeal, • fit with different tastes, capabilities and willpower and • support in balancing individual and collective interests.

A senior's housing cooperative serves as a reference point within Castlegar to hone in on the local tacit and explicit knowledge and capacities that shape behavioural patterns and social networks aimed at improving the health of the community.

Learning local systems of innovation About seven years ago, a group from the Castlegar Doukhobour community recognised that there were limited appealing options for senior's housing. They envisioned an old age together, retaining control over their living situation, or when the time came, relinquishing

control to those they trusted. This vision developed into the Kootenay Columbia Senior's Housing Cooperative now 500+ members strong, building a campus style neighbourhood designed specifically for and by seniors, founded on the values of equality, affordability and mutual support. All members are invested financially and socially, and most sit on one or more of the decisionmaking committees. Active participation and engaging the skills and knowledge of the members build community capacity by producing “observable results associated with resiliency”, a cornerstone for change through social organisations (Mancini, 2009).

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crossover learnings

This senior-oriented community will eventually consist of about 300 residents; 100 housed in bungalows encircling the rest in a 4 storey manor with apartments, assisted living, common spaces and a café.

Design considerations of this initiative are representative of greater community issues. Physical isolation hinders connectivity and accessibility to the rest of the community as Grandview Heights looks much like a suburban development and is located on a steep hill at the south end of town, connected only by four kilometers of busy highway. Within a service ecology of a healthy community, this neighbourhood provides a concentration of people, with specific needs, resources and skills, that can stimulate service creation by being a critical mass for action and implementation.

Positive feedback loops Social exchanges founded on communication and reciprocity form the basis for a value-exchange model defining a healthy community environment. The greater community of Castlegar was initially not very supportive of the Kootenay Senior's initiative, yet the group drove ahead with resolve in their vision. Despite the lack of institutional support the seniors have made significant contributions back to the community. These contributions range from simple design gestures like welcoming toddlers onto their flat streets to learn how

to cycle, to major master planning References achievements of a large community • Mager, B. (2008), Service Design. In: Design Dictionary: garden, park space, nature paths Perspectives on Design Terminoland land donations for an affordable ogy. housing project. Since the develop• Mancini, J., & Roberto, K. ment broke ground and physically proved their capability and resolve (2009), Pathways of Human Development: Explorations of to the rest of the community, they Change. Lanham, Maryland: have increasingly been offered more Lexington Books. support, and more importantly • Meroni, A. (2008), The Netrespect and admiration. work of Schools. In: Jegou, F. & Manzini, E. (2008), Collaborative For a service ecology to be sustainServices: Social Innovation and able over time the value exchange model must balance expectations Design for Sustainability. Milano, Italy: Edizioni POLI.design. and value in a mutually beneficial • Morelli, N. (2007), Social Inway. In order for the Kootenay novation and New Industrial Seniors to contribute to the healthy Contexts: Can Designers ‘Indusdevelopment of Castlegar the value trialize’ Socially Responsible Soluwithin their initiative needed to be tions? In: Design Issues, volume recognised, accessed and recipro23, number 4, autumn 2007. MIT cated in other parts of the commuPress. nity. The Kootenay Seniors have a rich bank of skills and experiences, which will result in a myriad of innovations as they address problems associated with moving into an unfamiliar home, changes in physical ability, death and new community dynamics. The extensive time and energy invested is of value not only for the physical results, but also for the wisdom of experience attained through the collaboration, execution, success and failure of their ideas. This leaves ample room for the exploration of Service Designs to feed into the ecology of this healthy community environment.

Kira Adams, Graduate student in the Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Canada touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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By Marc Stickdorn and Anita Zehrer

Mobile ethnography

How Service Design aids the tourism industry to cope with the behavioural change of social media The competitiveness of any product or service ultimately depends on its customer satisfaction. In tourism however, the product is a complex bundle of services that customers perceive in their pretrip, trip and post-trip customer journey. The new tourists, the so-called prosumers, no longer only consume products, but also produce information when they share their experiences via social media tools. Though, the dispersion of modern communication technology also provides new opportunities for Service Design research: Mobile ethnography.

The phenomenon of tourism Customer satisfaction is determined by the congruence of a consumer's expectations with a certain product or service and the actual experiences with its delivery process. The model behind this process leading to customer behaviour in terms of customer satisfaction is called ‘Expectation-Disconfirmation-Paradigm’, which implies that customers purchase products or services with pre-purchase expectations about their anticipated performance.

Their expectation level then becomes a standard against which the product's performance is ultimately judged. That is, once the product or service has been consumed, each consumer will compare outcomes 82

against expectations to make a judgment regarding his satisfaction.

However, the tourism product is not one single service, but rather a complex bundle of services, consisting of multiple service touchpoints which customers perceive prior, during and after their holidays.

Hence tourists experience a service process as a sequence of touchpoints, provided by various actors.

Following the customer journey of tourists, they seek information about their destination prior to their holiday and thus raise certain expectations towards it. During their holiday, lasting from their departure until their arrival back home, they experience various ser-

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vices and compare these with their prior expectations. This comparison results in an evaluation of the destination after the holiday, often driven by a few critical incidents.

This is nothing new that tourism as a service-intensive industry ever since strongly depends on the customers' service experiences.

Hence, various approaches have been introduced within the tourism industry to improve service orientation and performance.

Social media changes behaviour The customer journey is a bottomup approach to illustrate the service process from a customer perspective. Thus it is the customer who defines which touchpoints are notable and which ones to ignore – intended or unintended – and it is also the customer in his role as a socalled prosumer who is not longer only consuming, but also producing when he shares his experiences with an open community. Today, given the emergence of the web 2.0, strangers are providing recommendations to one another which are often accepted as reliable and trustworthy as traditional word-ofmouth sources. A customer journey

crossover learnings

The prosumers' online evaluation of service touchpoints can have a positive or negative influence on the expectations of potential future customers. It has been acknowledged from both academics and practitioners that online recommendations and/or reviews are myServiceFellow website with online video tutorials: becoming the information source www.myservicefellow.com for tourists and hence, profoundly changed consumer behaviour.

Thus, the behaviour of these ‘new therefore includes not only direct touchpoints between customers and tourists’ is considered to be more quality-oriented, but also more service providers, but also indirect flexible, experienced, unpredictones, such as review websites; and able, etc. The rapid expansion of it is a considerable number of such social media in tourism however recommendations being published challenges today's tourism industry on virtual travel communities (e.g. to remain competitive and meet virtualtourist.com, realtravel.com) customers' needs (Stickdorn/Zehrer or on specialised customer review 2009). sites (e.g. tripadvisor.com, holidaycheck.com).

Mobile ethnography There are various methods how to study customer behaviour and gain genuine customer insights.

‘Ethnography’ is a method of participant observation, originating from the field of anthropology, which increasingly becomes common as a research approach in Service Design. It provides different methods such as diary studies, observational protocols, video recordings, photo observation, probes and directed storytelling (Segelström/ Raijmakers/Holmlid 2009). Today the method is used within many social sciences and has spread in many design disciplines with all disciplines sharing a strong focus on the experience of people in their own context during all stages of the service delivery process. A weak-

»Using myServiceFellow to explore the tourism service journey of a zoo in Innsbruck/Austria« touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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mobile ethnography

By Marc Stickdorn and Anita Zehrer

ness in ethnographic studies based on observation of people's behavioural interaction with services is that they do not immediately yield data that can be analysed. Furthermore, considering the complexity of tourism service bundles regarding temporal and geographic dimensions, these methods permit only fragmentary exploration or involve enormous costs in terms of time and resources.

Therefore, for the tourism industry mobile ethnography becomes of interest, which can be described as geographically independent ethnographic research for a specific subject matter, such as tourism products or destinations. The proceeding dispersion of smartphones, such as iPhones and respective apps, provides a new opportunity

to gather time- and location-independent user-centred information.

Such a user-centred approach must keep the user's view in mind and argues for the user as an integral, participatory force in the service process.

Tools for mobile ethnographic research ‘myServiceFellow’ is the result of a publicly-funded research project and represents one of the first prototypes of a mobile ethnography tool. It is a mobile phone app, which enables customers to capture touchpoints by themselves.

The application allows adding and assessing touchpoints from -5 to +5.

Furthermore, these touchpoints can be documented with text, audio, photos or videos, which can be each

Fergus Bisset using myServiceFellow during a prototyping session in Kuopio/Finland, Sept. 2009

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individually flagged as positive or negative to reflect different aspects of each touchpoint. The caption of date, time and geographic position of each touchpoint allows the construction of a customer journey based on either route or time sequence of the user even for complex tourism products. The data of each user or probe is then uploaded to a database and aggregated for further processing.

The analytical back-end tool ‘ServiceFollow’ visualises the touchpoint sequences of the different probes as a touchpoint matrix.

While the rows visualise each customer journey as a horizontal sequence of touchpoints, columns represent the same touchpoints of different probes. Hence, if sequences differ between the probes, blank fields occur. The touchpoints can be arranged simply by drag-anddrop – just as if they were digital sticky notes. The users' touchpoint assessments are aggregated to mean values which helps to identify critical incidents immediately.

These critical touchpoints (positive or negative) and its consolidated documentations can be the initial starting point for further in-depth research and a subsequent Service Design process. Furthermore, not only customers can use mobile ethnography to capture their customer journey, but also staff and other actors within service processes can use it to document their ‘ser-

crossover learnings

»Working with the captured service journeys illustrated as ‘digital sticky-notes’ on a smartboard (i.e. a large touchscreen for projectors) during a workshop«

vice journey’. Hence, interactions between different probe groups become evident. Future mobile ethnography tools will include further features like geographic touchpoint-sequence illustration or mood-mapping.

Future prospects The management of service quality is of crucial importance to the tourism industry; indeed, it is becoming increasingly important as a result of an evident behavioural change within society. The industry is affected by the development of social media, and likewise are customers, which are becoming more affine to new media and thus more likely to take part in mobile ethnographic studies. Thus, also research is af-

fected by this evident behavioural change towards new-media and the presented prototype exemplifies only a first attempt of how to utilise this recent development for Service Design research. Though, the presented prototype may not only be used in the field of tourism, but can equally be applied in other servicerelated industries such as public, financial or healthcare services.

References • Segelström, F., Raijmakers, B. & Holmlid, S. (2009), Thinking and Doing Ethnography in Service Design. IASDR 2009: Rigor and Relevance in Design, Seoul.

• Stickdorn, M. & Zehrer, A. (2009), Service Design in Tourism – Customer Experience

Driven Destination Management.

Proceedings of the First Nordic Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation [Internet]. www.aho.no/servicedesign09.

Marc Stickdorn, lectures Service Design at the M.A. programme Entrepreneurship & Tourism of the MCI – Management Center Innsbruck, Austria Dr. Anita Zehrer, deputy head of the B.A. and M.A. tourism programme of the MCI – Management Center Innsbruck, Austria

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By Liz Danzico

The music of service: Drawing from improvisation Specifying services can be challenging, as part of the design often needs to be left open. This article puts forth patterns in the performance arts, specifically in improvisation, that might inform designers as they create their own service performances with meaning. It suggests that the constraints of improvisation lead to creativity rather than to force, and putting forth that framework is part of the responsibility of the design of services.

Whether in public or private, in social or individual spaces, people adapt their behaviour to encounters as they happen, relying on prior knowledge and etiquette. And with the emergence of tools that allow them to create alongside designers, consumers have taken on a new role. Relinquished from the passive role of consumer, people are coming forward as co-creators across all forms of media to introduce their own content, stories, and values.

And with that, people are largely making it up as they go along.

People are improvising.

Improvisation – a performance art that leads to real-time creation in response to the environment – results in a new set of behaviours, patterns, and ideas. Often thought to be free form and without con86

straint, it is quite the opposite. It is the very constraint of improvisation as a performance art that gives way to the creative and collaborative acts. And it has – from music to dance to theatre even to the oral tradition. If we look back, we might understand how specifying services might draw from to improvisation for inspiration.

readily, while jazz music, traditionally, allows for more improvisation, a model that parallels services in its dynamic and real-time attributes.

Jazz is a framework that allows for an experience to unfold in the moment and collaborators to create and respond in real time. Not unlike the design of services.

Perhaps the best example of this framework is from Miles Davis, who in the late 1950s, introduced ‘modal jazz’ – a new framework for improvisation – to record the Kind of Blue album. In contrast to the complex chord progressions of the Bebop era in preceding years, modal jazz was a simple scale, a framework for participation. Instead of control being dictated by the author, Seeing patterns in music modal jazz holds back in order to Music has a tradition of a composer let go. It presents very little, and expressing intent and a performer through its open framework, allows translating that intent without its participants to create together in interpreting it too broadly. Notareal time. When Davis introduced tion, measure, dynamic, tempo, modal jazz, the result was the and more dictate a systematic way best-selling jazz record of all time, of playing that allows little room Kind of Blue, which was recorded for collaboration in the co-creative in a single day, a result of the new sense. Collaborators create together, collaborative framework. but not of their own devise. ClassiBill Evans, the pianist on the album, cal music follows this patterns most said (1959) of the frameworks Davis

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crossover learnings

authored that they were “exquisite in their simplicity and yet contain all that is necessary to stimulate performance with sure reference to the primary conception” (liner notes). Their loose constraints gave way to a free flow of ideas without trading authorship.

Increased creativity There may be a further benefit to considering improvisation in designing services: the free flow of creative ideas. Research shows that when musicians improvise, their brains turn inhibition down and creativity up. Particularly with musicians who are performing jazz solos, they found the part of the brain responsible for monitoring performance shuts down completely, where the part of the brain

Photo: IDEO Brainstorming session ©2009 IDEO/Hillary Carey

Designing services can be challenging because a part of them often needs to be left open. ‘Open’ becomes a shared responsibility

between creators and consumers to define, much like the composer and musicians collaborating on a jazz piece. A more traditional perspective of the designer would consider a more fixed model whereby all the attributes are accounted for. Yet, in improvisation, the loose framework becomes important to define such that collaborators are free to be creative and the free flow of ideas can happen.

»Improve everywhere, a comedy improvisation troupe in New York City rehearses for an upcoming musical improvisation. Their complex acts are more scripted and must be more rehearsed whereas simpler acts are more improvised.« touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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the music of service: drawing from improvisation

By Liz Danzico

responsible for telling stories and being novel turns up. The brain (Limb, Braun 2008) becomes a creative space where it tunes up novelty and decreases inhibition.

Consider the possibilities if we can inspire soloing in our co-creators.

Improvisation as a performance art, in this way, parallel services in that they’re collaborative, responsive, and occur in the present. Whether jazz or methods in Service Design, there are common constructs at work that we can draw on when considering specifying services in our own work: 1. Present Improvisation allows for an interactive relationship with the audience. Interpretation and creation happen in the present and at the same moment.

Photo: Andy Polaine

2. Detectable Improvisation doesn’t require pre-determined knowledge to participate in a scene. Whether musicians or co-creators in a service experience, people can participate because the ‘props’ and cues are readily available.

»Experience prototyping a tourism service for Luzern by MA Design students at the Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland.« 88

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3. Responsive Improvisers work together responsively to define parameters in the process of co-creation. With each word or action, the improviser or co-creator defines some element of a collaboration.

crossover learnings

4. Additive Perhaps the best-known pattern of improvisation is known as “yes, and …”. Improvisers accept every offer and build on new ones in order to support partners and build up ideas. This means that improvised systems exist because they can be added to.

Awareness of and reliance on these patterns signal a shift. Consumers are shifting their behaviour and are improvising, framing their own experiences, detecting these patterns to co-create products and services. And with the emergence and adoption of a new set of tools and services, the line between creator and consumer has narrowed and, in many places, blurred completely.

The opportunity for designers (or creators of any kind) is to create room for this sort of free flow of ideas in our process and the services we specify. We can plan for improvisation. If we anticipate it, plan for it, we create opportunities for people to use. It's our responsibility to create the larger framework.

We’re simply writing the notes, and the audience is improvising the symphony.

References • Braun, Allan R., Limb, Charles J. (February 2008), Study: Prefrontal Cortex In Jazz Musicians Winds Down When Improvising: Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance. An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation [Online]. Retrieved March 20, 2010, from www.plosone.org/article/ info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2 Fjournal.pone.0001679.

• Evans, Bill (1959): Kind of Blue, liner notes.

»The opportunity for designers is to create room for this sort of free flow of ideas in our process and the services we specify.«

Liz Danzico, chair and co-founder of the MFA in Interaction Design Program at the School of Visual Arts, New York, US

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service design snapshots

from around the world

#1.

understanding migrant workers' health behaviours Uscreates is a behavioural change agency that uses collaborative and creative approaches to change public behaviours. In 2009 they were asked to work on the insight gathering phase of a project to improve the health and wellbeing of migrant workers in Mid-Essex.

The objectives of the projects were to: 1. gain insight into the experiences of migrant workers in accessing local healthcare services; 2. identify the behavioural barriers and incentives to accessing local healthcare services.

To meet these objectives, Uscreates deployed a range of pre-existing primary and secondary research methods in addition to interviews with stakeholder professionals.

Uscreates also designed the Touring Café Caravan that visited different workplaces in Mid-Essex offering 90

#1

#2

free refreshments during breaks or shift swaps in return for a conversation about the migrant workers' attitudes towards health services.

The insight was analysed by bringing together the barriers identified with the attitudes and behaviours of the migrant workers. Four distinct barrier-based segmentations arose: • The Indifferents Migrant Workers who are not interested in their health. Work and money is a priority.

• The Self-sufficients Migrant Workers who deal with health problems themselves without going through NHS services.

• The Controllers Migrant Workers who have high expectations for health services and do not trust NHS. • The Over-anxious Women with children who sidestep GPs to get direct access to specialists.

• For the Indifferents – touring NHS caravan to bring health services to them.

• For the Self-sufficients – a range of DIY health toolkits.

• For the Controllers and the Overanxious – a myth busting campaign about the NHS.

Mary Rose Cook, founding partner of Uscreates, London, UK

#2.

charity donating through interactive technologies

A co-design event was held which brought together different stakeholders and members of the migrant worker communities in Mid-Essex, to generate ideas and recommendations that tackle the specific barriers and perceptions identified for each segment.

There has been an evolution regarding interactive technologies which has developed services with new ways of donating, for example donation by the Internet and text messaging. The act of making a contribution to a charity organisation is an emotional way to show that we are conscious and helpful towards our fellow man. With the new interactive charity services, one can question, does the act of donating achieve the desired effects and rewards?

Ideas which emerged and are now being reviewed by the NHS in MidEssex, include:

Services for donation through the Internet can, from one point of view, make the donation process easier

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for both the giver and the charity organisation. Yet, the process can be seen as more intangible than for example the traditional donation boxes on the streets.

behaviour in relation to giving by creating an equal reward system.

For further information: sara.mpumwire@gmail.com sanna.borg@gmail.com

Sanna Borg, currently a student in a one-year master programme in Business and Economics, Stockholm University, School of Business, Sweden

The Swedish Red Cross has designed a website, as a part of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Save the mothers campaignâ&#x20AC;?, where the giver can pay for, and pull and drop different items representing for example a first aid kit or a mosquito net. It is also possible to purchase paint and put your mark on a world map, and by this highlighting your name and location as a reward for your action. Please see the pictures at http://www.raddamammorna.se/.

We see this as an attempt from the Red Cross to make the interactive donating service more tangible and rewarding. Regarding the item that is purchased, does the symbolic mosquito net represent an actual one that ends up with the receiver?

This raises the question whether the service is credible enough. Does the giver receive a sufficient amount of feedback and how important is this actually for the giver? The task is to design a service, which is trustworthy, tangible and appeals to human

Sara Mpumwire, purchase assistant at Brandit, Stockholm, Sweden

#3.

motivating young & healthy adults to get the flu shot In 2008, GlaxoSmithKline, the world's second-largest pharmaceutical company, turned to Pittsburghbased Service Design firm Pink* to help increase adult immunisation rates at large US corporations.

Our research revealed that eliminating logistical hurdles and providing incentives could increase rates incrementally; but to radically increase immunisation rates, we focused on the young and healthy adult demographic, a large group where immunisation rates are extremely low.

Our resulting concept Ginger, a

web-centred health management service system, helps people manage their own health, take care of their family, and reach their personal goals by connecting a healthy lifestyle with the actions they must take to achieve it.

In essence, the flu shot becomes an integral part of a larger health plan.

Here's how: Make it meaningful.

Preventative health measures are more meaningful when they are personally relevant and support aspirational goals. Bundling immunisation with other personalised doctor-recommended activities, for example, will resonate more than a stand-alone free flu shot. Similarly, nudging individuals toward preventative care by providing offerings that support the whole family will resonate more than just incentivising generally positive health choices.

Make it actionable.

Designing service systems that facilitate action and empower the decision-maker can also encourage participation. Reframing personal goals as concrete doable tasks, organised within a trusted personal health management system and linked to insurance benefits to automatically cover costs, better supports individuals than generic health suggestions. Additionally, designing your service to be there

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service design snapshots

from around the world in the moment of choice can help operationalise feedback and comparison data.

Make it social.

Creating opportunities for social obligation, and open communication, gives people even more compelling reasons to participate. Providing a service that enables an individual to support their family and friends, while strengthening communications with their team of healthcare providers, is far more relevant in facilitating preventative behaviour.

Our client leveraged this service concept to pitch for organisational support within GlaxoSmithKline.

While transforming this pharmaceutical giant into a service provider will take time, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re glad we could help start that conversation.

Steve Selzer, researcher and interaction designer, Pittsburgh, USA

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#3 #4.

empirically yours: designing the customer experience The Service Design principle states the importance of addressing the form and functionality of the service from the customers' perspective.

Thus, for a blueprinted service to be optimally effective, the Service Designer at first has to identify and understand the relative importance of the experiential cues the customer is exposed to during the service encounter. In all hedonic services, the evocation of positive emotional and affect-driven responses is critical to a positive customer evaluation.

Despite the commercial importance of hedonic services, these cues, their relative importance, and most importantly the customers' emotional responses and behavioural outcomes have received almost no research attention.

This paper develops a hedonic customer experience model and empirically validates it across three contexts in which customer affect plays an important role, namely, sporting, theatre, and concert events.

To begin, the eight service factors found to drive customer affect were identified. These are entertainer performance, social surroundings,

touc hp o in t | the jo u rn al of s ervice d es ign

#4

ambient elements, exterior appearance, food/beverage, souvenirs/ merchandise, parking facilities and customer support service. We propose that the impact of these factors on positive and negative customer affect is asymmetric based on satisfier-dissatisfier theory, motivation-hygiene theory, and the total product concept.

The results indicated that different service factors drive positive and negative affect, with some factors having no influence.

Furthermore, customer affect was found to influence satisfaction level, perceived value of the service and subsequently, their behavioural intentions. These findings signal the importance of understanding the type of service factors and their relative impact on customer affect and underscore the critical role affect should play in designing commercially successful service experience outcomes.

Managers can use these findings to re-design their service, set priorities and more efficiently allocate their resources to effectively improve the customer experience, leading to positive customer behavioural intentions and profitability.

Dr. Sandy Ng, postgraduate lecturer at the RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

join

why service design network?

The Service Design Network is an internationally aligned forum for practitioners and academics to advance the growing field of the young discipline Service Design. Our purpose is to develop and strengthen the knowledge and expertise in the science and practise of service innovation and to improve services generally. specifically, sdn exists to…

• offer Service Design as a tool to answer contemporary social, economic and environmental challenges.

• create demand for Service Design excellence among service organisations, customers and educators..

• identify research needs and key issues for the development of Service Design projects programmes and research nationally as well as internationally.

• develop and share Service Design knowledge & practise.

• consolidate a common Service Design culture and language.

• establish and maintain a network of researchers and practitioners in the field of Service Design.

• integrate Service Design within design, technology & business education.

• promote good examples and best practises of applied Service Design

• regular updates of the SDN website and member pages

The Service Design Network is rapidly growing – more than 90 members from all over the world have joined, representing academics, agencies and industries. About 800 have already signed in for Insider, the Service Design Newsletter, and the sdn community website provides a platform for collaboration and communication among network members.

• free newsletter

what’s on offer?

To become a member, companies, private firms or institutions must work professionally in the area of Service Design. Membership benefits include:

• free posting of job advertisements in the Service Design Journal, in the newsletter and on the website •free posting of professional papers in the Service Design Journal • the periodical Service Design Journal »Touchpoint« as PDF download join now!

To learn more and to register, visit www.service-design-network.org or contact the Service Design Network Office.

• web space to present your institution or company and its activities (employees/staff, events, projects, publications, job openings).

• access to the sdn interactive community platform, where members can meet and talk to leading professionals and experts from the field of Service Design, present their company and work to other Service Design practitioners, establish interest and discussion groups, share events and news from the world of Service Design and post job offers, announcements and discussion topics

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Save the Date October 29, 2010 Save the date for the one day SDN Conference in Boston on October 29, 2010. hosted by Microsoft

By Darby Thomas, Nicholas Remis, Izac Ross, Jerome Tavé and Chris Wronski

Customer Profile keith new york, usa

»I jumsted assu ything everld show wou n one up o.« bill

Keith is a 32 year old American events coordinator living in New York City. He is a busy professional who had limited access to his schedule while traveling, found he had too many apps to manage, and didn't like the confusing mix of personal and professional contacts on his phone.

My name is Keith. I’m 32, single, and I work as an event coordinator at EventsCorp, an event planning company. We’re based in New York City, but we handle events across the country. Our business handles everything from small, intimate gatherings to large-scale corporate parties. I’ve been the project lead a few times, but generally I work as an assistant to the owners, Terry and Matt.

Immediately after I graduated from NYU, I worked for a marketing firm and did most of their in-house event planning. I discovered I really loved the high-paced nature of the work. I found I had strong project management skills, and I could project combine my love for design as an combine event coordinator. I left that company event four years ago to do event planning four full time at EventsCorp. full EventsCorp has a holistic approach to events. I go through an extensive amount of research to understand the client's vision so that when the day arrives, they can enjoy their event in an environment that's customized for them, that captures their style. The pay-off for me

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is seeing the client relax and have fun in a world they’ve helped create.

A large part of my job involves scouting out locations for events. During our busy season I’m never at home. We do a lot of destination events, which means I can be in Miami one day, in Los Angeles the next, and back in New York two or three days later. I spend more nights per month sleeping on the plane than in my own bed.

Even when I’m home, my evenings and weekends are normally spent at venues, supervising events and fixing problems as they happen. That means I don’t have much time outside of work. When I want to see my friends, I’ll grab lunch with them and chat for a couple of hours. I have to squeeze in errands whenever I can.

I bought an iPhone a couple of years ago because I liked the applications and wanted to use it for both work and home. I already have my cable and DSL service through AT&T, so I thought it would be an advantage to have the same carrier for my wireless service. I just assumed everything would show up on one bill.

I do love my iPhone, but I’ve had problems with the service. When I purchased the iPhone at the AT&T store, it took an hour and a half for the only customer service representative on site to help me through the process, and that was after waiting 20 minutes for him to finish with the last customer. I was late to a client meeting because it took so long.

Then, after a few months, I had problems with the battery. I took it to the AT&T store and had to go through several steps to file a claim to replace the phone. They explained that I had to file separately with the insurance carrier before they could replace the phone. Again, more time and more headaches.

computers at home. Since I’m constantly moving between my phone contact list and different computers, I could see how this would be a huge help, but since I’ve started using it myself, I’ve discovered all kinds of small, timesaving conveniences. The Communications Hub merges all electronic communications, such as e-mail, text messages, call history, photos, chat, voice-mail, and calendar items into a single inbox or timeline. This allows me to keep track of my customers and conversations, no matter what medium is used.

Today was a good example. It was a work day. I got up and went to the kitchen to get some breakfast. While starting my day, I picked up my new Home Tablet and enjoyed my digital subscription to the Meanwhile, the strangest part is that I’ve New York Times. I use the Home Tablet been receiving separate bills for my wireless account, cable, and DSL. Aren’t they all to control my home server, integrating all the AT&T services within my home, which coming from the same company?

I have a busy schedule and want my mobile include my home phone, digital communication, and entertainment services. The phone to make my life easier, but having tablet acts as an extension or controller to keep track of paying separate bills and to the server and through it, I can access spending hours each time I contact the TV, video conferencing, the web, and all company with a problem just adds layers my phone lines. I realized I didn’t of stress to an already busy day. have time to finish the article so I marked my place and forwarded our vision for a new service it to my phone. While in transit, experience I opened the article on my phone About six months ago, I started hearing and it automatically took me to the that AT&T was making changes to the services I currently have. I didn’t pay much marker in the article. While in the car, points I got a text gifting me 75 reward points attention at first, but then Terry showed for being a customer. I’ve used the new new me how she was accessing her account customer rewards points in the past to buy through a new web service called the music and even to ‘pay’ for a late charge on AT&T Communications Hub to organise my bill. her contacts across her phone and two

»I do love my iPhone but I’ve ha, problems d with the service.«

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customer profile | keith

By Darby Thomas, Nicholas Remis, Izac Ross, Jerome Tavé and Chris Wronski

Once Once I got to the office, I logged into the AT&T Communications Hub. After catching up on the replies, I planned my day and scheduled events by dragging tasks tasks from my inbox into my calendar.

With With the Hub, calls ring through to my mobile mobile phone and computer, or any other phone phone I want to specify. Today, my dentist's office office called to remind me about an appointment. I was on another call at the time, so I declined the call on my desktop, but picked up the voice message later on my phone. I flagged the message as an appointment and added it to my calendar.

»The new system saves me time and hassle when there's something wrong with my phone.«

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for booking online. The appointment was added to my calendar for the next morning.

The next morning, I was watching a tennis match when I got a pop-up reminder on my TV screen about the appointment. It also gave me the option to record the match while I was gone.

I wasn’t thrilled about going into the store, considering how long I had to wait the last time, but when I arrived they had a new system for helping customers. There was a kiosk and when I checked in on-time, the system credited me with more reward points. I’m starting to really enjoy getting The Hub also gives me access to one bill for these points because I’ve discovered I can purchase pay-per-view movies with them. my internet, mobile phone, and DirectTV subscription. Finally, I have fewer bills to The customer rep was busy when I came in, worry about. but this time it didn’t matter because I was The new system saves me time and hassle able to browse the mobile phones on the kiosk and get information on my options. when there's something wrong with my phone. No more need to take two hours out Once I selected the phone I wanted at the kiosk, the customer rep was notified and of my day to take care of the problem! On brought the phone out to me. He then the way to a meeting last week, I dropped my phone in a puddle, but didn’t have time walked me through the checkout process on the kiosk and activated the phone. All to check about the damage right away. I wasn’t worried because I knew calls would my apps, contacts, and other information were automatically downloaded to be routed to my other communication the phone from the Communications Hub. devices automatically. When I got home that night, I got an alert on the Hub asking Overall I was impressed – and relieved. The new process at the store saved me time, if there was a problem with my phone with none of the previous headaches. since it cut out suddenly. Once I told the Hub that my phone had been broken, I was taken to a support ticket creation screen.

The system asked me how I broke my phone and where I was currently located.

I selected a store that would give me the Service concept and touchpoints designed by fastest service and made an appointment. I noticed I was rewarded with points SCAD Service Blueprinting class, Fall 2009.

touc hp o in t | the jo u rn al of s ervice d es ign

While on his way home from work Keithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s phone dies without warning.

Keith uses the AT&T Communication Hub to contact customer service and report his problem.

AT

Customer service is unable to resolve the problem and sets up an appointment at a local AT&T store.

T

ireles

While enjoying a tennis match on TV Keith gets a pop-up reminder of his appointment.

s

tore

AT e rs

eith logs into the AT T in-store kiosk. This alerts the employees to his arrival and brings up his support ticket.

As soon as the AT T employee activates eithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new phone it auto sync his contacts and content from the AT T cloud.

e

T

TS

TU -

A nowing that eith has an appointment the D R asks if he would like to start recording his show.

New AT T Cloud

After arriving back home eith starts the recording of the rest of the tennis match and life returns to normal.

Illustraton by Nicholas Remis

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dos & don’ts Service Design

Recipe consultant In this supermarket in Berlin you can browse through recipes via a touchscreen and print them out, to shop what you need for preparing the recipe. No more worrying about what to cook and what to buy. Let yourself get inspired through the in-store ‘recipe consultant’.

Hurrying up in supermarkets In the supermarket next to my flat they changed the checkout counters from those versions with two trays to those with one tray for the scanned goods. So now you really have to hurry up packing your goods, because the goods from the next client are

Stolpersteine In Cologne and several cities in Germany and Europe tribute is given

already rolling down the tray and mixing up with your grocery. So you need to hurry up, the cashier needs to slow down, and the next client needs to wait for you. All in all, the situation at the checkout just got worse.

Thomas Viehweger, Berlin, Germany

Thomas Viehweger, Berlin, Germany

to the victims of the Nazi period.

In front of their last self chosen place of residence brass plaques are embedded in the sidewalk.

Meanwhile Stolperstones are placed in over 500 sites. “A person is only forgotten when his name is forgotten". With the stones of the houses the memory of the person who once lived here is still alive. On the stone it is written: Here lived… A stone. A name. A human.

Entering Social Security through the ‘No Door ’ This portal, to a New York City office of the Social Security Administration, is the front end for a variety of government services for the elderly and disabled. This first encounter makes it clear that all who enter should leave any expectation of civility at the door.

Chelsea Mauldin and Sylvia Harris, New York,

Minka Rössner, Cologne, Germany

100 the jo jouurn rnal al of of Service s ervice Des d es ign 100 touc to u chp hpooin intt | the

USA

Become part of an inspiring Network!

Neighbours' initiative Most people love dogs. Even in cities many people have their ‘best friend’ always with them. Unfortunately there are hardly any dog stations with plastic bags provided. In Maastricht people solve this problem for themselves and hang up signs and bags in order to keep their neighbourhood clean.

The Service Design Network is an internationally aligned forum for practitioners and academics to advance the growing field of the young discipline Service Design. Our purpose is to develop and strengthen the knowledge and expertise in the science and practise of service innovation and to improve services generally.

The Service Design Network is rapidly growing – More than 90 full members from all over the world have joined, representing academics, agencies and industries. More than 800 subscribers have already signed in for Insider, the Service Design Newsletter. Apart from that, the sdn community website provides a platform for collaboration and communication among network members.

Join the community - and become an sdn member today!

More infos on page 93 or online at www.service-design-network.org

Thorsten Frackenpohl , Maastricht, Holland

share your service experiences The Do's and Don’ts-page in Touchpoint is a special feature, which provides space for our readers to publish their pictures and experiences from the world of services. Make use of this opportunity and share service flaws or outstanding service successes with an international audience!

the assignment If you would like to see your story published here, please send in a photo, together with a text describing the situation depicted, which illustrates your personal (positive or negative) Service Design highlights, to: journal@servicedesign-network.org The Service Design Network Office collects all stories and chooses three to four examples to be published in each issue.

About Service Design Network The Service Design Network is a forum for practitioners to advance the nascent field of Service Design. Our purpose is to develop and strengthen the knowledge and expertise in the science and practise of innovation and improve services generally.

Service Design Network . Ubierring 40 . 50678 Cologne . Germany www.service-design-network.org touc hpoint | | the thejour jour nal nalofofSeservi rviceceDdesi esi gn gn

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member map

Service Design network Finland Culminatum Ltd Oy , Espoo Laurea University of Applied Sciences , Espoo KONE, Espoo Taivas, Helsinki Grey Direct & Digital, Helsinki University of Art and Design Helsinki, TaiK, Helsinki Palmu Inc., Helsinki Jyv skyl University of Applied Sciences, Jyv skyl Kuopio University of Design, Kuopio Lahti University of Applied Sciences, Lahti e21 Solutions Oy, Helsinki Sweden Tieto Corporation, lvsjö Business & Design Lab University of Gothenburg, Göteborg Linköping University, Linköping Doberman, Stockholm Design V sterbotten, Ume Transformator, Stockholm Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg Norway Designit, Oslo AHO University, Oslo nited Kingdom Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd, Crawley Imagination Lancaster, Lancaster Engine, London IDEO, London live work, London Prospect , London Seren Partners, London STBY, London thinkpublic, London Design London Imperial College Business School, London NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, Warwick Naked Eye Research, London Radarstation, London Strategyn, Cranfield Eurostar Group Ltd, London Ireland Centre for Design Innovation - Institute of Technology Sligo, Sligo Hygge service design & innovation, Dublin Portugal University of Madeira–Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Funchal Novabase, Lisboa SA SCAD University, Savannah, GA Mc Donald´s Corporation, Oak Brook, IL Continuum, West Newton, MA Frontier Service Design, Malvern, PA Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburg, PA Paulvoglewede.com, San Francisco, CA New Era Soft, New York, NY Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY Skyworks Solutions Inc., Woburn Canada lvl studio, Montreal Ascent Group, Vancouver Normative Design, Toronto Brazil UFRJ/COPPE- Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - DESIS group, Rio de Janeiro Igorsaraiva.com, Brasilia ISG Consulting, Rio de Janeiro

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Turkiye KIRMI I KALEM, Istanbul Korea Creative Design Institute, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon ener Systems, Seoul

Taiwan Chili Consulting Corp., Taipei Institute for Information Industry, Taipei Taiwan Design Center, Taipei Australia Proto Partners, Sydney BT Financial Group, Sydney Huddle Design, VIC Melbourne Russel Baker, Canberra Meld Studios, Stanmore Austria ISN - Innovation Service Network GmbH, Graz MCI Management Center Innsbruck, Innsbruck Mobilkom Austria, Vienna Italy Domus Academy, Milano Politecnico di Milano - Facolt del Design, Milano Experientia, Torino Germany Sturm & Drang, Hamburg Kรถln International School of Design, Cologne Macromedia Hochschule f r Medien und Design, M nchen Rudolf Haufe Verlag, Wolfsburg Volkswagen AG, Wolfsburg Southwalk. GmbH, Rheine service works GbR, Cologne KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe Denmark Aalborg University - School of Architecture and Design, Aalborg 1508 A/S, Copenhagen Copenhagen Living Lab, Copenhagen Switzerland Luzern Universtiy of Applied Sciences and Arts, Luzern Dimando AG, urich Belgium Yellow Window, Antwerpen The Netherlands Delft University of Technology , Delft 31Volts, Utrecht Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht T Huis, Eindhoven TietoEnator Netherlands, Amersfoort DesignThinkers, Amsterdam Edenspiekermann, Amsterdam Informaat, Baarn Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, Rotterdam Mixe - medical marketing, eist Media Catalyst, Amsterdam Spain FunkyProjects, Bilbao New Zealand Ministry of Justice New ealand, Wellington

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Service Design

Conference 2010

Berlin 13th - 14th October Members Day 15th October

This year´s Service Design Network Conference takes place in Berlin, Germany on the 13th and 14th October 2010.

For more information and to register visit: www.service-design-network.org The annual sdn Members Day is scheduled for 15th October. Save the date!