Touchpoint Vol. 3 No. 3 - From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet

volume 3 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

January 2012

From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet

Service Design Creates Break­ through Cultural Change in the Brazilian Financial Industry

By Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt and Jose Mello

Learning the Language of Finance Gives Your Ideas the Best Chance of Success

By JĂźrgen Tanghe

Designing Human Rights

By Zack Brisson and Panthea Lee

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January 2012

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from the editors

From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet

When Jamin and Alex came up with the title ”From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet“ for the SDN conference, in a catchy phrase, they had captured the essence of the service design challenge for this decade.

Jamin Hegeman: “Service design, from the perspective of designers, is now understood.

The challenge we face is gaining credibility and being able to practice. The greatest limiting factor is a lack of understanding by business. For service design to be successful, designers and business executives need to bridge the gap between the two practices. Designers need to be able to speak more to business needs, both to sell their services and also to ensure design solutions have clear business value and will be executed. From sketchbook to spreadsheet extends the meaning of execution. It's not just about delivering a great service concept or plan. Designers also need to understand the business value of their solutions to make them actionable and sustainable.”

Designers talk business, and business people talk design. The borders get fuzzy, especially in the world of services,. This is good. This is bad. In service design we already have – and we really need – designers who have a good understanding of business. Without the integration of strategic thinking, reflection on systems, structures and processes, all the deep dives and experience scans will be of limited value. It is frontstage and backstage, it is about usefulness, usability, desirability and effectiveness, efficiency and profitability.

“We're seeing that businesses are beginning to move the other way (the presentation from McDonald's was a case in point at the conference) and there are many instances where businesses are dipping into the designer’s toolbox, so we're wondering, what we might do in the opposite direction? It was also, in a way, a provocation, is this what we need to do and if so what might we do in order to get there?”

Designers need a good understanding of business issues. But they also need to be different and to keep their unique identity and competencies. So, in the end, it is not about copying business but, as Jamin says: “Brandon Schauer, one of the keynote speakers, asked what the future service design team might look like. I think it will include people from business.

The challenge going forward will be how best to integrate with existing business practices.

There is a giant mountain of precedent and business practice to overcome to make design – and service design in particular – a trusted approach to improving and innovating services.

I don't think we can do this on our own.”

The fourth global SDN conference was a starting point for an ongoing process of reflection and learning. It was a fabulous success. Alex summarises: “The outreach that our global conference has generated is amazing. For me, one of the exciting results from SF was the global coverage we're getting: that is an awesome achievement, not just for us as a network, but also for the profession.” And Jamin ads: “There were more people from the business community onstage and in the crowd than in past conferences. That is a big achievement that the community can build upon.”

The articles of this Touchpoint issue are all related to talks given at the conference. But in the ‘Inside SDN’ section you will also find interesting insights into the development that the SDN is going through on its way to becoming more strategic, more professional and more connected. Enjoy! Stay in touch! Let us know what you think!

For the editorial board,

Birgit Mager is professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany.

She is founder and director of sedes research – the centre for service design research at KISD, co-founder and president of Service Design Network and chief editor of Touchpoint.

Kerry Bodine is vice president and principal analyst for customer experience at Forres ter Research.

Her research, analysis, and opinions appear frequently on sites such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and AdAge. Hugh Dubberly manages a consultancy focused on making services and software easier to use through interaction design and information design. Before he worked at Netscape and Apple and has taught at CMU, IIT/ID, San Jose State and Stanford.

Jesse Grimes has twelve years experience as an interaction designer and consultant, now specialising in service design. He has worked in London, Copenhagen, Dusseldorf and Sydney, and is now based in Amsterdam with Dutch agency Informaat.

Dr. Satu Miettinen is professor of Applied Art and Design at the University of Lapland. She is actively working with writing and editing service design research literature.

contents

Individual Membership

28

Student Membership

7 2

imprint

3

from the editors

6

touchpoint insider

forrester’s take 8

Why Service Design?

Why Now? Kerry Bodine

cross-diszipline 10 The Missing Link Jan Erik Dahl, Jørgen Kjaergaard and Jakob Stoevring Soerensen

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feature: from sketchbook to spreadsheet 18 Service Design Creates Break-

36 Redesigning Hospital Food

Services for Vulnerable Older Patients

Claire Bamford, Alastair Macdonald and Gemma Teal

through Cultural Change in the Brazilian Financial Industry 42 Left Brain /Right Brain

Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt and Jose Mello

24 Learning the Language of

Finance Gives Your Ideas the Best Chance of Success

Jürgen Tanghe

28 Designing Human Rights:

A Service-Driven Approach to Social Progress Zack Brisson and Panthea Lee

Susan Bartlett and Rob Grossi

46 Austin Center for Design

Looks at Homelessness Ruby Ku

48 Changing How We Care Ali Baba Attaie and Liz Burow

54 What David Taught Goliath Damian Kernahan and Erik Roscam Abbing

64 education and research

94

58 Creating Competences in

Service Innovation and Design

Jukka Ojasalo and Katri Ojasalo

tools and methods

profiles

68 Service Mapping Iain Barker and Janna DeVylder

72 Designing Mass-

customised Services

Yuen Wah Li

76 English-language Education

that Makes Everyone Happy

JongWon Seo and MinJu Yim

Network France!

80 Interview: Julia Schaeper

Christophe Tallec

Miriam Becker

64 Beyond Roleplay Markus Hormess and Adam Lawrence

91 ‘Bonjour’ Service Design

84

dos & don’ts

inside sdn 86 From Sketchbook

to Spreadsheet Birgit Mager

90 Service Design Network

Denmark Has Completed Boarding

92 The Conference in Numbers Mauro Rego

94 Conference Impressions 96 Student Day Impressions 97 Members Day Impressions 98

member map

Rikke B E Knutzen, Nicola Morelli and Katrine Rau Ofenstein

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Insider

new service design ma programme at royal college of art in london In 2012, students can apply for the new Masters programme in service design at the Royal College of Art School of Design. This new programme will offer a two-year MA, as well as opportunities for MPhil and PhD research. It will deepen students’ appreciation of how design can transform the experience and value of services, making them compelling to users, as well as profitable for the organisations that deliver them. It will educate students in the very latest tools and techniques of service design and explore, as well as stimulate, research in this field. The course combines lectures, workshops and projects, grounded in empirical evidence drawn from real-world practice as well as theory. Students will undertake group and individual projects that tackle the different domains of public service provision and consumer and business services, in partnership with leading service sector companies and public sector organisations. For more information about the programme and the application process have a look at the RCA website: www.rca.ac.uk

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domus academy: new masters course in a new building The Masters in Service and Experience Design course started up in

pioneering service design in sweden A bold decision was recently made in Sweden: a central government authority decided to make use of service design methods in order to create better services for their citizens. In Sweden, the Social Insurance Agency, or Försäkringskassan, administers and pays for parental benefits that everyone who pays taxes are entitled to. The process of applying for parental benefits, such as paid maternity leave and reimbursements for caring for your sick children, is often a complicated process that many people find confusing, unnecessarily complicated and time consuming. This results in a lot of resources spent on correcting and explaining the system and Försäkringskassan often gets phone calls from confused mums and dads regarding how to apply for these types of benefits. In order to simplify the application process and promote self-service, Försäkring-

Milan at the end of 2011! Young professionals from the USA, Italy, Japan, Taiwan, Colombia, Turkey, Canada, Indonesia and China are participating in this adventure by the post-graduate Italian design school.

After an intensive introductory session of lectures and contributions from different disciplines and experts, the designers have started their first project in collaboration with industry.

Find more information at the DA website: www.domusacademy.com.

skassan asked the service design consultancy Transformator Design to help them create a better service experience, based on customer insights from Swedish citizens. It was a groundbreaking decision, since service design is hardly used in the public sector in Sweden, and it was the first time that Försäkringskassan had used Service Design in order to understand their customers’ behaviour and needs rather than basing their services on legislation and policies. By using service design, Försäkringskassan hopes to shake up the application process and create new application channels while, at the same time, formulating the draft for a new legislation to better suit the need of the general public. A more user-friendly application process will promote self-service rather than personal assistance and will decrease costs, which means that less tax money is spent on parental benefits. It’s a win-win situation that may pave the way for improvements for the public sector in Sweden.

new individual membership and student membership at sdn

Individual Membership

Student Membership

design for services by anna meroni and daniela sangiorgi The book Design for Services, by Daniela Sangiorgi, Anna Meroni, et al., was published in 2011. In the book, the authors reflect on the recent transformation in design practice from the conceptualisation, development and production of tangible objects to design for change, better experiences and better services.

They articulate what design is doing and can do for services and

We want to open the Service Design Network for students and also for individuals who are practicing service design! Beginning in 2012, a new membership package for individuals will be introduced to complement the corporate membership targeted at businesses and institutions and the new student membership. Find more information about the three types of SDN memberships on page 88 and online at www.service-design-network.org/members_agencies

how this connects to existing fields of knowledge and practice.

The book is organised into three sections: ‘Introduction to Design for Services’, ‘Design for Services: From Theory to Practice and Vice Versa’ and ‘Future Developements’.

d in Intereste esign ed ic rv e s more e to ubscrib news? S SDN News, the ‘Insider’ ave a look at h ere: letter or issues h s u io v pre er id s in n bit.ly/sd

Design for Services can be purchased via www.gowerpublishing.com Design for Services ISBN 978-0-566-08920-6 298 pages £65.00

The The best best wayway to keep to keep your your customers customers is to is keep to keep them them wanting wanting you. you.

Muensterstr.

Muensterstr.

111 111 48155 48155 Muenster Muenster Germany Germany +49.2506.3048437 +49.2506.3048437 info@southwalk.de info@southwalk.de

@southwalk @southwalk

www.southwalk.de www.southwalk.de

By Kerry Bodine

Why Service Design? Why Now? Customer-centricity: Your Best Bet for a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

For decades, companies have been promising to delight customers, while simultaneously disappointing them in nearly every channel. That tactic won’t cut it anymore. Why not?

We’ve entered a new era that Forrester calls the age of the customer: a time when focus on the customer matters more than any other strategic imperative. In the age of the customer, companies find that: Commoditisation Has Stripped Away Existing Sources of Differentiation.

Competitive barriers of the past like manufacturing strength, distribution power and information mastery can’t save you today. One by one, each of these corporate investments has been commoditised. Now every company – and even enterprising individuals with smartphones – can tap into global factories and supply chains.

And after huge IT investments, companies are realising that the Internet ‘Cloud’ provides all of the computing resources they need.

Traditional Industry Boundaries Have Dissolved: car manufacturers now find themselves competing against not only other automakers but also services like Zipcar that obviate the need for car ownership. Likewise, Google News, Expedia and iPads undercut newspapers, travel agents and

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laptop manufacturers, respectively, and eBay swallows profits from the entire retail industry. In addition, customers stack up companies – no matter what industry they are in – against firms like Southwest Airlines, Apple and Disney that are known for customer-centricity.

Customers Have More Power Than Ever: with online reviews, social networks and mobile web access, it’s easy for your customers to know more about your products, services, competitors and pricing than you. As strategy guru Michael Porter said: “Where the buyer has full information about demand, actual market prices and even supplier costs, this usually yields the buyer greater bargaining leverage.”1 And when customers aren’t happy, they don’t think twice about crucifying brands on channels like Twitter and Facebook.

Customer Experience Translates into Real Business Value Executives don’t get to decide how customer-centric their companies are: customers are the ultimate arbiters. That’s why Forrester defines customer experience as: how customers perceive their interactions with your company. Whether business-toconsumer or business-to-business – or product- or service-focused – every company in every industry can leverage great customer experiences to: Bolster Brand Equity: referencing customer service conversations, Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com’s chief executive officer, wrote in Delivering Happiness: “Our belief is that the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there.”2 Even with conservative estimates, it’s easy to make the case that the call centre has influence on par with, if not greater than, that of mass advertising campaigns. And the call centre is just one of many customer touchpoints where the experience influences the customer’s impression of a brand.

Garner Customer Loyalty: years of Forrester data confirm the strong relationship between the quality of a firm’s customer experience and

forrester’s take

e th ers l of mer buy leve sion. e d ag sto ere ew bses e cu pow d a n er o nc n a o i em man tom n t i a m de cus o rm and o d f s n of f in d pc ea l o ? f s 0– e e o ecte ins m tro g c 01 n a nn ha co ow r 2 u co ply c ho n fl so n up se w atio tio ns ho orm ate. u b o i i r t n nf min ist nec atio ri0 d do 01 f con ort ist o rs –2 e de 90 ag obal ansp ake d 9 ten e 1 n gl d tr s m . co clud ok, uy, an stem key in cebo st b . sy tion ing fa m, be ple r u f ctu , b o s ib d ap m t, 0 a e e o u f 9 k ag anu an ma an n.c ntui 19 o – m i z g m ass rin , a 60 am ogle 19 m ctu rial ses go bna fa dust hou l. ies m in wer sfu s an o p p cce m t, su co 60 ar 19 ul almota, f 0– s w 0 s x y a, 19 to s, cs , rc , cce rd ing up su fo , boe ny ge g, so p&

Graphic source: June 6, 2011, “Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer” Forrester report, Forrester Research, Inc.

loyalty measures, like willingness to consider the company for another purchase, likelihood to switch providers and likelihood to recommend. We have also found a solid connection between customer experience ratings and Net Promoter Score (NPS) in multiple industries.

Boost Revenue: even small shifts in customer loyalty can translate into billions of dollars of incremental revenue each year for firms in some industries. Want specific examples?

Last year, financial services firm USAA created a seamless, low-stress experience for researching, financing and insuring vehicle purchases.

The result? A 77% year-over-year increase in visitors to the car-buying site, a 15% increase in completed auto loans and a 23% increase in vehicles sold. And B2B technology services company CDW drove

$230 million in incremental revenue in just one year by following up on sales leads identified through customer loyalty surveys.

Drive Down Costs: through its Voice of the Customer program, Fidelity Investments recently identified a problem with account authentication in its interactive voice response system. It recruited a few associates to discuss the issue, identified its root cause and quickly launched a solution. Its estimated annual cost savings from this one fix? $4 million. Other companies count their savings in terms of higher employee retention.

Service Design Drives Better Customer Experiences The term ‘customer experience’ has now entered the standard vernacular of the business world, and companies

We have entered the age of the customer

are increasingly making customer experience part of their corporate strategy. Because service designers consider holistic customer journeys – and the complex systems of people, processes and technologies that support them – they are perfectly poised to help firms capitalise on the power of positive customer experiences. But to succeed, service designers need to become adept at modelling the financial impact of their work and driving real change throughout large organisations.

•

References 1 Michael E. Porter, Competitive Strategy, Free Press, 1980.2 Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, Business Plus, 2010.

2 Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness, Business Plus, 2010.

Kerry Bodine is vice president and principal analyst for customer experience at Forrester Research. Her research, analysis, and opinions appear frequently on sites such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and AdAge.

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By Jan Erik Dahl, Jørgen Kjaergaard and Jakob Stoevring Soerensen

The Missing Link The Service Promise and Delivery

Jan Erik Dahl, senior management consultant and chief development officer, MSc in Engineering and eMBA.

Jørgen Kjaergaard, partner, MA.

Jakob Stoevring Soerensen, management consultant, chef and MSc in Business Administration & SCM. The authors work at Implement Consulting Group, one of the largest management consulting companies in the Nordic countries. All authors help service organisations creating change with effect.

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Every day, the media feature stories of customers experiencing how organisations – both private and public – fail to live up to their service promises. This may seem uncalled-for, since considerable resources are spent on both designing these services and operating an efficient service delivery.

In this article, we will attempt to describe what was, until now, the 'missing link' between these approaches – the missing link which, at present, seems to exist between the inside-out production approach with design of efficient processes and operational environments and the outside-in approach with design of service experiences.

As illustrated in figure 1, the two approaches tend to challenge the commonality in the organisational language. The marketer communicates output and experiences and the operator seeks to drive process efficiency across the delivery.

Thus, focus is on the effect that may result from operations specialists meeting designers and customer experience specialists, but also indicates that the access for service designers to top management may be through understanding the operations and the world of service delivery.

Some underlying challenges are, however, often present when these groups of people meet. Based on the experience from numerous change projects, these include:

• The design, implementation and operations phases are often handled as separate disciplines with little mutual involvement.

• Operations are often not taken into consideration when driving sustainable change in the organisation’s service design.

• The cost drivers and the revenue streams are often managed in separate parts of the organisation with no obvious link.

To mitigate these challenges, a different approach to designing, operating, optimising and developing service organisations is needed.

cross-discipline

customer service product

input infrastructure, raw material, equipment, employees, technologies and facilities

process experience

output perceived value measured in result and experience

outside-in

service delivery inside-out

service operations

Figure 1: Inside-out vs. Outside-in Approach

A Holistic Perspective on Service Organisations – Attractive and Efficient A service organisation is normally a complex organisation. Managing service organisations requires managers who, like great conductors, are capable of orchestrating harmony based on highly different instruments, individualities and processes. Moreover – since it is almost impossible to control it all – these conductors seek to master the art of facilitating and coaching their people to do an excellent job, driven by a holistic understanding and by passion for service excellence.

To help the operational conductors, the function of the service designers

could be an active asset, but they need a framework in which roles and responsibilities are clearly defined.

Thus, we introduce the concept of the Service Delivery System. It can be used to understand how to drive an efficient service delivery while still being attractive to customers, thus balancing the outside-in approach of the market orientation and the inside-out approach of operations. The Service Delivery System seeks to provide the user with tools to ensure the attractiveness of the service design balanced with operating efficient front and back offices.

Figure 2 illustrates (main dynamics in red and toolboxes in blue) how we need to:

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By Jan Erik Dahl, Jørgen Kjaergaard and Jakob Stoevring Soerensen

1. Meet customer demand in the variety that occurs from the customers we have chosen to target.

2. Apply different approaches to optimisation that match different operational environments and link these to achieve holistic and smooth cross-functional collaboration in order to drive the full potential of efficient service operations without compromising the attractiveness to the customers.

The funnel in the model illustrates that a larger dispersion typically exists as to the needs and expectations of the specific customers than is the case in the delivery models and management tools found in the organisation’s operations engine. This is also seen in the most standardised service

operations as customers in the most standardised fast food restaurants are able to order a standard burger without pickles.

The two lines, the line of interaction and the line of visibility, illustrate the already known organisational divides seen in service blueprinting. The line of interaction is the key focus area, as this is where the services are perceived and consumed, but also where the designer often clashes with operations. Here, the key for service designers is to ensure that the design of the overall service concept and the underlying service packages answer strategically anchored questions such as: 1. To whom shall the services be provided?

2. Where must the services be delivered?

3. When will the services be accessible?

organisation local operational improvement

local operational improvement

back office

front office

customer

standards service specification / delivery model – process optimisation

service specification / delivery model – process optimisation

service concept

service specification / delivery model – process optimisation

service packages service design

service specification / delivery model – process optimisation

demand

service specification / delivery model – process optimisation

stability

flexibility

line of visibility 12

demand demand demand demand

service outcome & service experience

line of interaction

cross-discipline

Describing how the services will be delivered is dependent on the distance between the line of interaction and the line of visibility. It is part of the service design to decide where these lines should be and how exactly we want our customers to experience the contact points that we decide should exist.

When such strategically anchored design decisions are made, the consequences are not always entirely obvious, especially when the organisations must manage many service packages through multiple sales channels. A recent Northern European business case showed clear challenges for a retail bank pushing their services through an app as well as through ordinary retail infrastructure. Internal efficiency increased while moving the line of visibility up through the funnel and very close to the line of interaction only to be separated by an IT – and, therefore, more controllable – application.

The challenge, however, is that this has expanded the scope of simple commodity services and reduced the potential for personal service as a differentiator, and retail banking is now moving towards a simple commodity. Almost all retail banks in Northern Europe offer online banking solutions. Thus, the new service design actually became a challenge, as the ability to differentiate diminished. Furthermore, and because little attention was paid to the back office functions in the design phase, complexity increased as these operational functions were not ready

Figure 2: Service Delivery System

and trained for the direct customer only separated by a simple app platform.

In the model, the vertical dimension illustrates that being in control of everyday operations is required in the different functional units, besides being in control of the processes.

Most often, it is the responsibility of a functional manager to ensure local optimisation of operations ('being in control of my unit'). The leverage point of the Service Delivery System is the service concept and packages for the functional manager to deliver up to the demand stipulated in the different service packages. This approach increases the pressure on the service designers.

Here, design does not stop with the customer interface, but must articulate the anchor point of the service delivery.

For designers, the split between process optimisation and local optimisation of operations is underrated. Process optimisation is a horizontal exercise across all internal functions. Local optimisation of operations is a vertical exercise across the many different processes.

Hence, the focus of the Service Delivery System is on HOW to deliver the most efficient service without compromising the 'what', 'when' and 'where' that have already been specified in the strategically anchored service design.

The HOW underlines the needs for involvement of the delivery organisation in the conceptualisation of the service design. Also, co-creation is not limited to only user or customer involvement, but needs to incorporate the knowledge of operation. Without early involvement of operations, service designers fail to understand the organisations where

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By Jan Erik Dahl, Jørgen Kjaergaard and Jakob Stoevring Soerensen

they apply the 'who', 'when' and 'where', increasing the risk of services never being delivered as promised in the design.

Who – Human Infrastructure and Implementation People make it happen. When you strive for customer excellence, it all comes down to the people in the organisation: to their ability to understand their customers, to translate and transform customer demands and preferences into efficient and attractive value propositions and, not least, to deliver these value propositions in a dedicated and consistent fashion.

Literally, the 'human infrastructure' of the organisation is as important as organisational charts, formal responsibilities etc., which makes recruiting the right people and keeping them dedicated, competent and responsible a strategic task.

When you want to implement changes in your service offer to the customers – which may be initiated by a new customer strategy or new insight into what the customers really favour – you need to orchestrate a change project.

Even technical solutions such as social media require a change of behaviour by the people in the organisation. When changing, you may want to identify change agents to facilitate the change.

Without discussion, operational managers in the organisation are the single most important change agents to get on board. The challenge is how to drive an efficient change process.

A common misconception of strategic change is that you start with a management decision and then

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implement it. Roger Martin illustrates this as the idea of the brain deciding what the body should do. Instead, strategy and design execution should be like a white-water river where choices cascade from the top to the bottom.

In a company, those in charge make broader and more abstract 'upstream' choices, and employees 'downstream' are empowered to make choices that best fit the situation at hand 2.

A way for service designers to manage the upstream and downstream processes should be ensured by an upgraded collaboration between designers and the operational managers.

Bonding their knowledge will ensure a full picture on the change. This would also make top management listen as the change process covers direction in the service promise and assurance in the ability to deliver the service.

In God We Trust – Everyone Else Must Bring Data To be able to provide attractive and efficient services, you need data so that you can act on facts – facts also tend to be the language of the modern service operations. This does not mean that ‘gut feeling’ is out, but data is a good supplement to decision-making. An insurance company had an apparently successful inbound customer call centre with a staff of 130 people. Data showed that service levels for response time and customer satisfaction were on target.

However, the customer churn rate was still high, despite the good figures, and the customers were very satisfied with the different touchpoints. Data collection and analysis revealed that

cross-discipline

many customers to the call centre had decided to choose another insurance company before they called, knowledge that had not been gathered earlier by the designers and operations, who both looked at positive figures. To be proactive, the company decided to transfer people from the inbound call centre to an outbound customer centre that contacted customers. The insight that provided this decision came from experiments combined with careful ’hand-held’ data collection: the company carried out small experiments, i.e. changes in the contact with customers (timing, channel etc.) and carefully registered the response from customers, thereby learning what worked well.

Why is this an important example for designers?

Well, you need to combine exploration with exploitation when designing services and to involve operations as the key stakeholder together with the customer. You cannot develop, design or deliver services successfully if you do not involve the stakeholders in the experiment.

When your experiments prove successful (and prove means that you ’must bring data’), you implement them to exploit their potential. Data will also make management listen.

Revisited – The Missing Link With this article, it has been our intention to provide an overview of the Service Delivery System that we believe is a step towards closing the missing link in the dialogue between the service design community and the service operations community. We hope

that we have succeeded in illustrating an approach that we can use to discuss the design of service delivery systems that can consistently deliver the intended attractive services to our customers in an efficient manner.

To ensure a reliable service promise where organisations efficiently meet or exceed customer expectations, we recommended that five key elements be taken into consideration: • Service design and service delivery must be seen and handled together.

• People drive change, and the earlier the involvement, the smoother the transition.

• Operations managers are the key resource to the change process: change agents may help them.

• Build organisations where the human infrastructure supports the customeroriented change process.

• Experiment when developing services and use data and real-time customer experience to support continuous learning.

Best of luck to all of us in designing the next service experience!

•

References 1 Johnston, Robert & Clark, Graham (2005).

Service Operations Management. Prentice Hall 2 Martin, Roger (2010). The Execution Trap.

Harvard Business Review, July-August

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photo: Christina Kinnear

Feature

From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet Exploring the Relationship Between Service Design and Business

By Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt and Jose Mello

Service Design Creates Breakthrough Cultural Change in the Brazilian Financial Industry Service design can be a great tool to infuse a culture of innovation in big companies, even in traditional sectors of the economy.

This article will show that by empowering business leaders and decision makers with the right and relevant knowledge and service design tools, instant transformations can occur. The Wealth

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from sketchbook to spreadsheet

Management & Services division of Brazil’s Itaú-Unibanco, the largest bank in the Southern Hemisphere, embraced the challenge of using service design as its main drive for innovation, focusing on the implementation of a long term human-centred innovation culture.

In 2008, in a gargantuan merger – the biggest, in fact, in the history of Brazil’s financial industry – two major players joined forces to become Itaú-Unibanco, the largest bank in the Southern Hemisphere and one of the 10 largest banks in the world today.

A new bank was born, and with it a new culture: dreams and goals needed to be designed. After the merger, Itaú-Unibanco became the leader in almost every segment in which it operates and, as a consequence, the bank embraced the challenge to become the number one player for the financial industry in the country.

Considering this complex and challenging scenario, bank executives began to look for innovative companies in other sectors of the economy in order to understand what makes them great trendsetters and leaders and what lessons could be learnt from them. They studied several companies with a history of innovation such as 3M, Google and Procter and Gamble. However, no model seemed to

suit the specific needs of the business, and it became clear that a new and particular form of innovation had to emerge. There were no models to copy or other players to acquire: the bank needed to build its own tailored innovation model in order to ensure survival and sustain its leadership position in the long term.

Itaú-Unibanco established a new Wealth Managements & Services (WMS) innovation team and a partnership with design consultancy IDEO for the definition of this new strategy. The primary questions waiting for answers at that time were: why innovate? And where to innovate?

Throughout 2010, more than 300 employees and partners of the WMS division got their hands dirty in the construction of this strategy. The main objective was not just to co-create a methodology, but to forge a new way of thinking, a culture that would allow the company to put people at the centre of any strategic decision and, with that, to produce the

Tennyson Pinheiro, founder-director, live|work, Brazil

Luis Alt, founder-director, live|work, Brazil

Jose Mello, Innovation.edu project leader, Itaú-Unibanco

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By Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt and Jose Mello

results that meet people’s desires and, at the same time, to align business needs for better results. As a result of this journey, Itaú-Unibanco defined five values to serve as a guide for the new culture of innovation: • A Spirit of Participation The need for the business areas to move beyond their borders and co-create results.

• A Common Language The establishment of a common language about what innovation is.

• A Style of Experimentation To foster experimentation through prototypes and give space for error and learning.

• Recognise efforts (as well as results) To acknowledge that results are consequences of constant effort and learning.

• Room for Exploration To establish a policy of constant exploration of new possibilities.

The next step was to make sure those values could be actionable by any leader in the organisation and would really impact the business on a daily basis. It was time for the WMS innovation team to answer the ‘how’ question. How could they make sure those values became an influential factor on the project management and decision making processes of the bank?

To make the jump from values to action, service design was chosen as an approach and a platform as, at its core,

Executives shadowing subway users at rush hours in São Paulo. | left: Process guides by the WMS Innovation through design team top:

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from sketchbook to spreadsheet

“Can you imagine recruiting high-level executives of one of the world’s largest banks, getting them out of their comfort zones and asking them to ride the subway during the rush hour in order to get a deep, empathetic understanding of real users’ lives and experiences?” it is the application of a human-centred perspective in order to deliver better service solutions. But for that approach to really penetrate business leaders’ minds and affect their conduct, Itaú-Unibanco needed to create and establish methods and tools that could be easily used by the bank executives on a daily basis. This next step, where the vision touched the ground, was called Innovation.Edu and, for this phase, the global service design consultancy live|work was chosen as a partner.

Innovation.EDU was not to be a series of workshop sessions. It needed to be real: real people, real challenges and real application of service design tools. The program also needed an immersive, in-the-field experience that enabled the bank innovation team and live|work consultants to guide the bank’s executives towards a clear vision of what service design could bring to the business.

The program needed to be structured upon the base platform created by IDEO and, at the same time, be actionable enough to allow executives to start changing their approach from day one.

This represented a big challenge, as most leaders were not well acquainted with design methods and practices and most of them were very sceptical about it. To tackle that complexity, we held co-creation sessions to ensure that everybody from the business could make their ideas and points of view count as to how the program should be designed. Using co-creation workshops, the design team mapped out do’s and don’ts to guide the construction of the learning-by-doing Innovation.EDU experience.

By involving those leaders in the conversation, the project team found out that the program should take the program participants completely outside their

normal comfort zone, giving them the opportunity to be completely immersed in the experience, with nothing present that would trigger their usual thought patterns.

The result was the preparation of a quick-fire project, a small-but fully wicked challenge, that would allow them to delve deep in the world of service design and see firsthand its holistic approach to problems.

We agreed upon two full days of immersion and a scenario of designing an entirely new commuting experience for people who use the underground in São Paulo.

Can you imagine recruiting highlevel executives of one of the world’s largest banks, getting them out of their comfort zones and asking them to ride the subway during the rush hour in order to get a deep, empathetic understanding of real users’ lives and experiences? Then add to that thought the fact that the São Paulo subway carries 3.4 million users everyday.

For some of the executives, it was their first time even using public transport and they got a little panicked when they realised that this was not a drill and that they would do no ‘dummy runs’ of the experience. Instead, they were about to live it and to hunt for insights while doing so. And they did it, brilliantly.

Without exception, the experience was transformative: their concerned faces often gave way to a carefree, almost child-like expression as they made their

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By Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt and Jose Mello

way back to the project room. Their level of engagement was outstanding.

Over the next day, after their deepdive ethnography, the newborn service designers moved with grace through the ideation and then solution experimentation phases, focusing their efforts on creating a better subway experience for three different target groups.

Building on the insights gathered in the field, they could understand what it’s like to create an experience from the user’s point of view, instead of just imagining what it would be like to be a user of the subway at rush hour. Every solution presented by the small groups of ‘executive service designers’ was relevant and surprisingly ‘out of the box’, considering their previous points of view (and misconceptions) about how people commute using the subway in São Paulo.

At the end of each quick-fire project, we conducted a session for the teams to share impressions and feelings about the two days of intense work. We asked participants to express their point of view regarding the work of the last two days, including the feelings that they experienced and how they could relate all of this to the work and to the challenges that they face daily inside their business units.

In the end, not a single participant doubted the relevance and suitability of the service design approach as a way to

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foster innovation and produce better business results. By the time they returned to their business units – after their baptism of fire as service designers – they were changed individuals. Their mindsets, perspectives and opinions about the design process and its holistic approach had changed dramatically, and feedback like that quoted below became routine for the Itaú WMS innovation team:

“I never imagined that the experience would be so good and would bring me so many insights. I came back suffused with enthusiasm and, the very next day, went through a brainstorming session with my team. I want to congratulate all the team behind it, who gave their all during those two days and who contributed to the feeling that we can do things differently in our daily lives.”

Claudia V.

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

Prototype for a commuting solution for the São Paulo subway.

To help these leaders keep their transformative enthusiasm for service design, live|work designed a toolkit that was built to fit their daily activities. The executives are using this toolkit as a reference and, at the same time, a base canvas for project planning. Named the Service Envy Toolkit,’ the kit included an Insights Pad, a small, portable magnetic board created to help executives turn any boring meeting into an engaging co-creation session.

This is indeed an ongoing journey for Itaú and the WMS innovation team, and much still needs to be done. But the first stage of this huge cultural change initiative has already been delivered, and with a

great impact that resonated through a wide range of business units within the WMS division at Itaú-Unibanco.

The culture of one organisation is a reflection of the way its people behave and organise themselves for the future. Service design has, once again, proved itself to be an efficient way to include a humancentred perspective into two of the most crucial manifestations of a company culture: the way it handles and prioritises projects and the decision making process.

By proposing a balanced mix of persistent focus on the end-user with a consistent search for streamline, cost-effective processes, service design is positioning itself as a powerful and time-relevant approach that better connects a company to its people’s needs and desires in a wholly different, improved and sustainable way.

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By Jürgen Tanghe

Learning the Language of Finance Gives Your Ideas the Best Chance of Success

Jürgen Tanghe Is a psychologist and founder of Kite. He runs service design and organisational transformation projects with his clients and plays some futsal on the side.

Being a service designer, you know the feeling: that rush of adrenaline when you have finalised an idea or concept that you really believe in… That is, until you present it to the decision makers.

The big shots – who you think would recognise a great concept when they see one – decide against implementation. This article will try to explain some elements of what happens in decisionmaking processes and especially what you could do to salvage your idea (besides killing the finance guy).

Let’s starts with a widespread fact: organisations, especially large ones, are not built for innovation, they are built instead for stability and predictability. That’s not bad in itself, good management practices stop organisations from losing money, from taking unnecessary risks and from adopting, well... bad ideas. Unfortunately, they can also impede innovation.

Finance: Evaluating Projects The foundation of the curriculum of any business school is something called value-based management. The premise of this thinking, reduced to its core, goes: ‘everything we do, we should do to create most value for (the shareholders of) the company’. Value in Euros, Dollars or Yuan that is…

Projects are scored based on Return on Investment (ROI) projections, often

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using a Net Present Value (NPV) calculation. This formula calculates the future cash flow of a project over a certain period, reduces them by a factor and then subtracts this from the cost of the initial investment in the project. If the result of the formula is positive, the project will create value. As a manager, when you need to choose between projects, the general rule is: ‘you may as well pick the one with the highest return’.

This line of thinking is biased in several ways against innovative projects.

One of the most obvious reasons is that, for innovations, there is simply no way to accurately estimate the three NPV factors.

Secondly, it undervalues new ideas with regards to the status quo. There is often the implicit assumption that the current way of working is successful and it will stay this way. This is obviously

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

design

–

implement

–

+

+

+

+

–

–

–

–

–

not the case. Business requires ongoing innovation because new products quickly become commodities and the competitive environment is continually changing.

Finally, this way of thinking only takes into account cash flow and financial value and does not consider the indirect effects of things such as customer loyalty, organisational learning or customer promotion.

Operations: Capacity Utilisation Every operations manager will tell you their first goal is to increase the efficiency of current operations.

By doing that, costs will go down and margins will increase. One way to reduce costs is to make optimal use of existing capacity and resources.

All sorts of quantitative methods exists for doings so, most notably Six Sigma.

Check assumptions, learn Iterate, prove concept

Future cash flows which determine go / no-go will be based on assumptions made in the design and prototype phase

Impact on the design

cost

Check assumptions in the design phase to better forecast future cash flows, hence lowering the risk. The finance guy will put numbers on these early assumptions to make his decision.

Cost of change

time

This is also represented in the decisionmaking process, usually because prior investments are not taken into account.

If you reuse existing assets, they will not be considered a cost in the formula above. Evidently, this is negatively biased against projects requiring the installation of new capacity or technologies.

In practice, you can expect different functional domains within your organisation to advise you to ‘tweak’ your idea in order to reuse existing resources (e.g. systems) and make attempts to reshape your idea until it fits the policies that they have adopted (e.g. in terms of human resources, communication, etc.).

So What Can You Do ?

As a general rule, you can say that if you want to convince somebody, you have to speak their language.

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By Jürgen Tanghe

“You need to understand and use business terminology in order to reassure them and use your strengths as a designer to win them over.”

Draw Up a Spreadsheet I know it’s probably not the favourite activity of the typical service designer, but you have to draw up a spreadsheet and showcase it together with your concept.

No need to be 100% exact or precise, but you do need to demonstrate that you have thought things through. Use it to explain your assumptions. Spreadsheets, used as a discussion document, will demonstrate how you and their customers think that the non-financial benefits will have a positive effect on the bottom line.

Prototype Strategically You don’t need to explain the power of prototyping to any service designer. It is also a formidable technique for reducing any risk inherent in the project! And risk is something finance and operations managers love to avoid. It allows experimentation and learning and avoids costly failures or corrections during larger-scale implementation.

Building (low-tech) prototypes allows testing of the service without large investments needing to be made.

Basically, you use a small amount of money to test if your ideas on cost and

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benefits are on the right track, and small amounts always have an easier decision -making process.

So, for example, build a low-tech mock-up of a website and observe customers interacting with it, or set up an experiment involving roleplay to simulate customer interactions.

Finally, use the prototype to reduce the defensive reflexes that maintain the status quo in the organisation! Make it an attractive piece of work that people can be proud of, especially if it doesn’t fit existing policies or models. Then invite the functional specialists of various domains (HR, IT, marketing, etc.) to your prototyping sessions and challenge them to find ways to reduce the investment in new capacity or resources, without adapting the experience they have had with the prototype.

Use Storytelling Sometimes managers mistake business cases for ideas. And, as discussed, the continuation of the status quo often looks like a solid business case. Storytelling then can be particularly helpful.

As rational as a financial decision may seem, nothing can beat an emotionally compelling story. Customer stories can overturn current assumptions / conventions within the organisation, especially if you make them very personal.

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

so, what to put in the spreadsheet ?

Evidently, every return on investment is calculated using income versus expenditure figures. But, as we mentioned, these numbers can’t be predicted, so the worst thing you can do is present them as absolute truth.

The starting point of every innovative project is a number of assumptions about the behaviour of the target customer. Suppose you are designing a new experience for a luxury travel agency: what assumption do you have on how the improved experience will reflect on customer behaviour throughout the service journey?

• Will it attract more customers: how many?

• Will they decide in favour of your agency?

• Will they choose more expensive holidays and spend more?

• Will they become more loyal and travel more frequently with you?

• Or maybe they will be willing to book longer in advance?

These all will affect the cash flowing in. Also, on the expenditure side, there may be benefits from the new design, such as delivery or administrative costs.

All these assumptions should be listed and discussed with the decision makers. Discussion is key: the worst thing you can have is a ‘cold’ , no-go discussion. Maybe you can find comparable examples to make your point. If you have any evidence from other situations, industries or companies that your assumptions are solid, it will certainly strengthen your case.

If possible, try to get them to reflect on what this contradiction will mean in financial terms in the (near) future. Make them reflect on the negative consequences of doing nothing. This will give your idea a far better chance against it.

Take, for example, the compilation of testimonials we gathered for a healthcare insurer. Customers told us about how they only thought about the company during emotionally difficult periods of their lives and about the insignificance that the company had while they were healthy. They told us that they didn’t attribute any role other than health insurer to the firm, and made management see that their plans for alternative revenue generation made no sense without a redesign of the basic service.

Adopting these three measures will increase the likelihood that your innovative service design is protected against the defensive forces embedded in management practices.

•

References 1 Christensen C (2008) Innovation Killers, Harvard Business Review 2 Govindarajan V, Trimble C (2005) Building Breakthrough Business within Established Organisations 3 Gunther McGrath, L (2001): Failure by Design, Harvard Business Review 4 Ries E. (2011) The Lean Startup

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Designing Human Rights: A Service-Driven Approach to Social Progress

health care education financial services

social protection

Illustration: Mollie Ruskin

By Zack Brisson and Panthea Lee

All service transactions have the potential to support or inhibit human rights. In fact, the sum total of the services a citizen receives is an accurate measure of a society’s real-world embrace of rights. This is an inherently practical approach to human rights, and an evolution in the theory of how societies can be improved.

For the past 60-odd years, the articulation of human rights has been largely led by academics and theorists. Political philosophy, however, offers little consolation to the one person in every eight who lacks access to clean water, the 1,000 women who die every day from preventable pregnancy- and childbirthrelated causes or the 67 million children without access to basic education.

The old methods have had some success: ambitious policies and international conventions have undoubtedly advanced the attainment of universal human rights. But challenges to human rights and livelihoods remain, and better services provide a complementary channel to improving human outcomes.

It is April 2011, and we are in a makeshift 3x4-metre tent in rural Pakistan. The ground is parched, broken into crumbling divots of lifeless beige.

Three children, ranging from age five to eleven, peek out from behind a halfmetre tall pile of household sundry, the remains of their family’s worldly goods.

Their mother passed away two years ago during childbirth. Their father, Hassan, is completely exhausted. Despite 11-hour days as a temporary day labourer in a brick factory, Hassan is in debt.

Hassan and his children are victims of the August 2010 Indus Valley floods. Although the formal refugee camps and aid organisations had largely shut down operations by winter, over a year later, Hassan and other displaced families are still living in makeshift housing, thrown together with supplies begged from relief workers.

Having lost their home in the devastating floods, Hassan’s family qualified for government support, but a glitch in the service system prevented him from collecting his aid funds. Hassan spent a fruitless week camped at the relief outpost, pleading with officials. But, he was told, unless he could pay an exorbitant ‘handling fee’ the system could not accommodate him.

Hassan was forced to feed and clothe his family on credit, and he now faces the unpleasant consequences of that decision.

Zack Brisson, principal, Reboot.

Zack’s experience designing political innovation spans the halls of Washington to the streets of post-revolutionary Tunisia. Prior to Reboot, Zack led a human rights advocacy campaign for the Center for American Progress and chaired the National Geographic Society’s innovation group.

Panthea Lee, principal, Reboot.

With field experience in over 20 countries, including Afghanistan, China, Egypt and Sudan, Panthea’s work focuses on the practical applications of design and technology in international development.

Prior to Reboot, she managed global programs for UNICEF Innovation, including child rights advocacy in Iraq and the launch of Palestine’s first open source software community.

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By Zack Brisson and Panthea Lee

“At first, the shopkeepers lent to us, but then everything got more desperate and they began coming by daily, shouting at me in front of my children and demanding I pay them back. When I said I couldn’t just yet, they accused me of theft,” he says. “It was horrible.”

Hassan borrowed money from an informal moneylender to repay his creditors, at 60 percent interest.

That debt is now due in three weeks, and Hassan feels overwhelmed and alone. “I don’t know what to do. I’m a bad father and I can’t provide for my children. Won’t anyone help me?”

Hassan’s story is tragic but not unique. A lack of critical services can strip people of their dignity and their ability to survive, a sad truth we see all too frequently in our work from Pakistan to the United States. Everyday services hold immense power to frustrate or improve lives.

This year marks the 63rd anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite the many triumphs of the modern human rights movement, including great advances in legal reform and the criminalisation of human rights abuses, underperforming social service systems worldwide continue to undermine the protection and realisation of recognised rights. There is a significant gap between human rights theory and practice.

Hassan did not see the impact of the millions of aid dollars pledged to flood relief. Instead, he acutely felt the lack of effective services in his time of need. And not just relief services. Poorly designed and administered services, from citizen registration to banking to health care, worked in concert to cripple Hassan and his young children’s chances to pursue a secure and dignified life.

Bringing Human Rights from Theory to Practice As students of history and practitioners of social development, we recognise and support the role of policy in achieving social progress. In fact, many at Reboot come from backgrounds in politics and advocacy. Yet policies can take a long time to trickle down and, when they do meet the real world, their effects aren’t always as intended. We believe services – a key delivery vehicle for policy – are equally important for social progress.

Services matter because it is largely through these everyday transactions that people interact with the institutions that shape their lives.

For most of us, these touchpoints are not at polling stations or in letters to politicians. They are at our local

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health clinic, at our unemployment office or at our child’s school. These are the moments when human rights are realised in practical ways. Things work, or they don’t.

People’s lives are improved or frustrated.

Faith in society is encouraged or eroded.

The good news? Services are comprised of complex interactions between people, institutions, and technologies that can be understood, mapped and optimised. In short, service systems that are falling short can be improved: enter service design.

Learning from the Private Sector Social service organisations have begun to realise how much they have to learn from the private sector. The customer experience, as perfected by Steve Jobs, and the customer relationship management practices of Amazon have proven that a user-centred approach can produce powerful outcomes.

It is unsurprising that the private sector is ahead in delivering effective services. For when private-sector services fail, punishment is swift and mean: sales drop and market share is lost. To preempt the competition, companies must anticipate customer needs and deliver solutions that delight. Thus, the private sector has well-developed methods for learning about, designing for and effectively serving human needs.

In the non-profit sector, however, the impetus to innovate is not as prevalent. The threat of public disapproval, as well as simple bureaucratic inertia, may even incentivise stasis. These constraints threaten livelihoods, especially in developing nations where basic services are critical for survival, but often hard to access, unreliable or of poor quality. In these contexts, NGOs often step in to serve those disenfranchised, but the accountability found in the private sector is lacking:

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

when a company delivers poor service, customers take their dollars elsewhere.

When an NGO delivers poor service, its beneficiaries often have no other choice but to endure.

Until policymaking mechanisms catch up with modern mechanisms for service delivery, quicker and more efficient social progress may come through a focus on improving social transactions.

Of course, peeling back the layers of public services is a process rife with politicking. But instead of grappling with theoretical notions of progress, service-focused solutions provide a tangible, outcomesbased approach to social improvement.

The Right to Aid in Times of Crisis Getting large bureaucracies to change how they deliver services can be tough.

A good starting point is strong research.

Let’s return to Pakistan: in the wake of the 2010 floods, a coalition of public- and private-sector partners formed to provide aid relief. United Bank Limited, a leading Pakistani bank, was a leader in the relief effort and helped

disburse emergency funds to nearly two million families through preloaded debit cards. It was a fast, easy and secure way to distribute aid.

The initiative – a $ 1.6 million corporate social responsibility initiative for UBL – was ambitious and life saving. In the first 70 days alone, over $ 230 million were disbursed to families in need. But the program was also complex, involving multiple actors in rural locations with poor infrastructure. Breakdowns in communication, technology and process were inevitable.

Flood victims waited entire days in ATM queues, only to learn that machines had stopped working and that their family would go hungry for another night. Opportunistic officials demanded hefty ‘handling fees’ from textually or technologically illiterate families who needed help retrieving their aid funds.

One man we met traveled 16 hours from his village, largely on foot, to plead his family’s case to officials in Islamabad: “Nothing in the village worked. Nothing.

I just wanted someone in charge to know.

Instead of grappling with theoretical notions of progress, service-focused solutions provide a tangible, outcomesbased approach to social improvement.

In a critical sector like healthcare, policies are incredibly important, as are the services people receive when they walk into the health clinic. In those services, we have the potential to pick up the slack where policies fall short.

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By Zack Brisson and Panthea Lee

A group of Pakistani women recount their frustrations about flood relief efforts: when NGOs fail to deliver, it is often the poorest who suffer.

I wanted someone to listen and to take responsibility.� He returned from the capital dejected and empty-handed: no one would listen.

These challenges are not unusual given the context: chaos and exploitation accompany all disasters. Although they were outside the control of any one body, these service breakdowns exacerbated the trauma for those already distressed and increased the costs borne by program administrators.

Within Disaster Lies Opportunity Reboot was engaged to design a better service model for ongoing and future relief disbursements. Flood victims

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needed better care and service providers wanted greater efficiency managing future rounds of aid. And although we didn’t know it at the time, these improvements would prove critical for a future disaster in the autumn of 2011.

But humanitarian aid, while important, does not address why poor families were so vulnerable and so exposed to risk in the first place. Part of the reason was that they lacked access to the basic services and protection mechanisms enjoyed by the majority of citizens in the developed world, but by only 11 percent of Pakistanis, the country’s elite. Poor Pakistanis did not have secure places to store their cash,

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

and so their life savings were washed away in the floods. They did not have access to insurance products to protect themselves in times of disaster, disaster like the one they had just experienced.

Yet because of the aid program, nearly two million Pakistani households now had access to formal banking for the very first time: this represented a remarkable opportunity for financial inclusion. And we had one critical ball in our court: UBL also had a strong mobile banking platform. This meant that anyone could access banking services through basic mobile phones and small retailers nationwide. This was revolutionary for rural populations who either did not have banks nearby or – being illiterate and often poorly clothed – were too intimidated to actually enter one, even where they existed.

Given these opportunities, Reboot decided to expand our remit beyond designing a better aid program. With UBL as

The Watan card was used to disburse emergency relief funds to nearly two million Pakistani households in the wake of the 2010 Indus Valley floods.

our primary partner, we set our sights on advancing equal access to security and opportunity for Pakistan’s poor.

Getting Down to Work Preliminary scoping revealed that the primary challenge was not with the aid or banking systems per se: rather, it was the aid administrators’ lack of knowledge about their beneficiaries. The corporate executives in Karachi and the government officials in Islamabad had no prior experience with the rural, poor Pakistanis who had been worst affected by the floods. This made it impossible for them to deploy an effective system to meet their needs. Thus, we began an intensive design research process to better understand the flood victims.

We conducted extensive interviews with those manning the relief efforts and mined their existing data.

We then embarked on a research tour through four cities and 26 towns and villages throughout Pakistan, as well as within our client bank.

To bridge the empathy gap between service providers and beneficiaries, we deployed two teams.

One focused on end-users (both flood victims and the agents that served them), and another on our client.

Team User engaged with approximately 300 individuals – from imams to street cleaners and from loan sharks to vegetable sellers – through a combination of individual and group interviews, service intercepts and contextual immersion.

Meanwhile, Team Client were embedded within the bank to understand its practices (so we could build upon them) and its aspirations (so our solutions could help to achieve them). People don’t talk enough about empathy for your client, but it’s critical. We spoke with staff across functional areas, from call centre operators to the EVP in charge. We shadowed the bank’s field agents to better understand their roles in the current system and we experienced first-hand how tough it is to run an aid program.

The two teams synced nightly, sharing findings and identifying patterns and new questions – mapped to our research framework – to be pursued the next day. The research frame was thus a dynamic, rich and constantlyupdated resource that allowed the teams to make the most of our time in the field.

By understanding both sides of the service equation, we were able to map users’ needs and realities

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against the bank’s capacities and goals. This process produced key insights on the limitations of the current aid and banking systems in meeting user needs.

Better Aid, More Financial Inclusion So what did we find? Let’s start with the aid program: confusing procedures had enabled well-positioned individuals to charge families hefty fees to to retrieve their funds. Thus, one solution we designed was a robust monitoring systems – analog, given the context, and involving ‘mystery shopper’type checks – to prevent exploitation of vulnerabilities and the siphoning off of funds.

Another important insight was the great trust flood victims now placed in the physical card they had used to collect their aid. As literal lifelines, the cards’ value had been heightened in beneficiaries’ minds.

Most kept their cards in the most secure location they could find, carefully wrapped in its original envelope, as if to preserve its powers. With this knowledge, we developed a campaign to leverage the symbolism contained within the cards (relief, comfort) and to transfer the positive associations over to the formal banking sector.

To further improve the acceptance of formal banking, and thus financial inclusion, we also designed a new marketing and education campaign.

Current efforts, our research showed, were divorced from the realities of the flood victims and of Pakistan’s poor more broadly. For a population that had been repeatedly rejected by the banking

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Physical security and freedom are just the starting points for human rights. As designers, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to advance human dignity and wellbeing through more responsive, more accountable services. sector, neither the security of a bank nor the potential of a savings account were obvious. Human beings care about what things can do for them, based on their current realities. While stockpiling cash for a rainy day was not a luxury open to these users, saving for a daughter’s wedding was a universal need among this user segment and one important enough to drive and even change behaviour.

This finding was immediately actionable. The bank reframed its offerings in terms of realistic applications

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

to the lives of the poor, applications grounded in scenarios sourced directly from our experiences with users. It could now describe the advantages of regulated banking over kistanwallahs (grey market moneylenders) in terms the poor could understand. It now explained how formal banking also respected Sharia law, a common reason users turned to kistanwallahs. And the bank could now compare formal banking to the women’s savings groups that were pervasive in the rural areas and that illustrate in concrete, accessible terms how the former meant decreased risk for their life savings.

We also discovered that UBL’s network of human agents, the primary delivery channel for its mobile banking services and, realistically, the only channel accessible by the poor, was not optimised. The third-party retail agents acting as the bank’s cash-in and cashout points were often the sole human touchpoint between customers and the bank, yet they were not seen as a marketing tool by the bank. As the first point of contact for poor and often illiterate customers, they were in a strong position to explain the security that banking services could bring to their lives.

Based on these insights, the bank hired a new team of specialists to coach and support these agents. It is also now considering the creation of an online network for agents to share tactics on customer service and to coordinate joint, hyperlocal marketing campaigns.

A tiered incentive scheme would encourage agents to participate and to bring learning from the network through to successful execution.

Robust research and design led to improvements, not just in the aid system, but in how service providers viewed and served the most marginalised members of Pakistan’s population. Beyond

humanitarian aid – critical, but ultimately a ‘Band-aid’ solution – we helped kick off a process that would decrease the vulnerability of poor, rural Pakistanis in the event of another tragedy.

By making a business case for serving low-income users, we helped turn a commendable but unsustainable corporate social responsibility initiative into a long-term business growth area.

By helping the bank see their offering as a service that needed to be tailored for different populations, not a one-sizefits-all product, we made banking more relevant and accessible to Pakistan’s poor. The result? Millions of people were no longer just helpless victims in need of aid: rather, they had become economically empowered customers with agency in their own futures.

A New Approach to Human Rights Physical security and freedom are but the starting points for human rights. Thus, as designers, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to advance human dignity and well-being through more responsive, more accountable services.

The attainment of human rights cannot be viewed in binary terms – either ‘rights achieved’ or ‘rights not achieved’ – but, rather, as a spectrum between the most positive and the most negative possible outcomes. For us, as designers, this means that in a complex, nuanced and imperfect world, every social service that we improve is a step closer to fulfilling universal human rights.

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By Claire Bamford, Alastair Macdonald and Gemma Teal

Redesigning Hospital Food Services for Vulnerable Older Patients

Claire Bamford is a senior research associate at the Institute of Health & Society, Newcastle University, UK. Claire has over twenty years experience of research in health and social care settings.

Professor Alastair Macdonald is senior researcher at The Glasgow School of Art. With a background in product design, for the past 15 years he has been leading research to tackle complex healthcare challenges.

Gemma Teal is a design researcher at The Glasgow School of Art with a background in product design engineering and commercial consultancy.

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What benefit can design research bring to help address complex and sometimes chronic healthcare challenges such as hospital-based malnutrition? Design researchers at the UK’s Glasgow School of Art are collaborating with other disciplines to redesign the food service and mealtime experiences of older people in hospital.

In the UK, six out of ten people aged 65+ are at risk of becoming malnourished or their situation becoming worse in hospital (European Nutrition for Health Alliance, 2005).

Malnutrition delays recovery, increases the risk of complications, impacts upon quality of life and is costly to healthcare systems. Some of the causes of malnutrition in older hospital patients include nausea, reduced appetite, increased nutrition requirements and problems with physically eating.

Participative Approach mappmal is a multidisciplinary research project that is radically rethinking the hospital food service for older people in hospital, with the long-term aim of reducing malnutrition. The research team includes designers, sociologists, food scientists, dieticians, ergonomists and technologists using a participative design methodology in order to harness the expert knowledge of a ‘food family’

of medical, domestic and catering staff and includes older people and key stakeholders. The output of the project is ‘hospitalfoodie’, a new service prototype that includes new foods, products and procedures and tools for managing nutritional care.

Contextual Research To understand issues with the current service, the sociologists, designer and food scientists conducted contextual research in the hospital environment. The sociologists’ and food scientists’ approach was to ‘follow the food journey’ and to document the people and procedures used to supply food and nutrition to the older patients.

In addition, the sociologists conducted in-depth interviews with the food family. The designer used observations on the ward to directly gather practical insights into the eating environment and mealtime experience for patients and staff.

PlaymobilÂŽ hospital scene created for an experience mapping activity at the first co-design workshop. Participants were asked to describe events and issues pre-, during, and postmealtime using a comprehensive set of images comprising typical situations derived from ethnographic data and observational studies.

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By Claire Bamford, Alastair Macdonald and Gemma Teal

Co-design Workshops The resulting data were analysed and translated into visual maps to reveal the food journeys and to identify issues (Macdonald et al, 2010). These ‘maps’ were validated by the food family at the first co-design workshop. Further activities were designed to develop understanding of the mealtime experience from the patient perspective.

One idea-generation activity was designed to enable staff to remove the constraints of the NHS and to imagine the ideal food service, using analogies to other types of service experiences provided by other well-known organisations.

The wealth of information and ideas generated were analysed and synthesised into service principles and opportunities for development that were developed and validated at our second workshop. key insights: 01. The need for staff to see nutrition as part of treatment, yet for patients, mealtimes need to be a nonclinical experience about enjoying food.

02. Many older patients may miss or eat insufficient food at mealtimes, and snack choice is limited. Older patients can also be overwhelmed by the large portions typically provided in the three main meals per day.

03. Current approaches to monitoring food intake are not accurate and do not provide information about the energy, protein and nutrients consumed.

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Iterative Development What followed was an intensive period of development, with early prototypes of new foods, products and interfaces created by the research team for evaluation by the food family at a third workshop. Specialist product and interaction designers were then engaged to build the next stage prototypes for testing by our food family at smaller, more focused workshops.

The connecting thread of this iterative development process was a set of ‘service narratives’ that allowed the team to connect the ideas as a unified service and to collaboratively develop the service as delivered to three exemplar patients. In essence, these narratives were the new service prototype, describing the new products, places and procedures along the timeline of the patient stay.

As the new service evolved, the narratives became a tool to communicate the new service at a series of

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

An example of a storyboard frame created by participants to describe the mealtime experience of Bhundi, a patient who had been admitted to hospital following a stroke. Speech and thought bubbles encouraged the participants to think about the interactions and feelings of patients and staff throughout the mealtime scenario.

left:

One of the key innovations is a new application which allows staff to record and monitor the nutritional intake of each patient.

The bedside touch screen presents staff with an image of the food provided and prompts them to rub away the food consumed.

above:

exhibitions as satellites to major conferences. These were an extension of the earlier workshops, inviting feedback in order to refine the service prototype in the final phase of the project.

The Evidence Base In addition to co-design workshops, the sociologists conducted ongoing interviews with the extended food family to explore the practicality of imbedding the new service in practice. The designer worked closely with the sociologists to prepare visual materials as tools to communicate the new service, and these were tailored to the profession of the interviewee. This process helped to refine the service prototype and build on the evidence base that supports the proposed new system.

The Outcome: The New Service Prototype hospitalfoodie responds to the preferences of many older people to eat ‘little and often’ by providing six smaller, energy and nutrient-dense ‘mini meals’ per day. This is achieved by supplementing existing catering systems with ward-based food provision, including a ‘mini meal’ trolley.

A series of nutrition management applications on a touch screen, both at the patients’ bedside and on staff interfaces, facilitate nutritional screening and

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By Claire Bamford, Alastair Macdonald and Gemma Teal

Acknowledgements mappmal was funded through the New Dynamics of Ageing Research Programme, a cross-UK Research Council initiative and is led by Paula Moynihan, Professor of Nutrition and Oral Health, at Newcastle University. www.hospitalfoodie.com (launch November 2011) References 1 BAPEN (2006). Malnutrition among Older People in the Community.

British Association for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition.

2 European Nutrition for Health Alliance (2005). Malnutrition within an ageing population: a call for action. Report on the Inaugural Conference of the European Nutrition for Health Alliance, London.

3 Macdonald, A.S., Teal, G., & Moynihan, P.J. (2010). A smarter food service for nutritionally vulnerable older adult hospital patients. In Clarkson, P.J., Langdon, P. & Robinson, P. (eds.). Proceedings of the 5th Cambridge Workshop on Universal Access and Technology, 169-177.

assessment, food ordering and ongoing nutritional care.

One of the key innovations is a new application which allows staff to record and monitor the nutritional intake of each patient. The bedside touch screen presents staff with an image of the food provided and prompts them to rub away the food consumed. The amount of each food eaten and the nutrients consumed are then automatically calculated.

This data ‘feeds’ the hospitalfoodie system, highlighting patients who aren’t receiving the nutrition they need and alerting relevant staff who are accountable for ensuring follow-up care. This introduces a new interaction between the staff and patient, encouraging them to eat to meet their daily nutritional targets, which are displayed on their bedside ordering interface. The information can also reassure relatives that food intake is being monitored.

Business Implications In tackling malnutrition in hospitals, the potential health and social care benefits for the UK are significant.

The financial rewards are also high, with malnutrition estimated to cost the healthcare system £ 7.3 billion per year (BAPEN, 2006). While attempting to solve this issue for the benefit of older patients, we have created a system which has the potential to save money for the NHS, something that is increasingly important as they search for ways to find £20 billion in efficiency savings by 2015. Anticipated business benefits

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include reduced length of stay and significant reductions in food wastage.

By gathering individual patient nutrition intake data using the new application, the hospitalfoodie system can measure and demonstrate any resulting improvements in nutritional care. It also follows that hospitals can obtain an accurate measure of food wastage and the resulting costs.

Concluding Thoughts The success of co-design activities in generating innovative and practical ideas can be demonstrated in the new service prototype: it is possible to trace many of the core ideas and guiding principles back to our first co-design workshop.

For the designers, working closely with sociologists has been extremely important to the success of the project.

The food family feedback gathered by the sociologists documents design decisions and provides a clear evidence trail to support the new service prototype. In turn, the sociologists have benefited from the designers’ skills in visualisation, prototyping and communication.

The use of narratives to connect the new foods, products, procedures and systems has been vital to the success of collaborative service design and has now become a tool to communicate the new service prototype as we work towards the long-term goal of implementing the hospitalfoodie system in UK hospitals.

•

What is hospitalfoodie?

food products and systems

nutrition management systems

+ six smaller and energy and nutrient dense ‘mini meals’ per day + supplementing existing catering systems with ward based food provision including a mini meal trolley + a new fully adjustable dining surface

A series of nutrition management applications on a touch screen at the patient bedside and on staff interfaces.

This includes a new food monitoring application which is linked to a nutrition composition database.

filtered through... ward culture

What can hospitalfoodie do...

...for patients?

Provide personalised food provision including: + tailored menus + ordering closer to consumption + setting the scene for meal times + nutrition intake is monitored

...for staff? + facilitate screening, communication and builds accountability + calculate requirements and monitors achievement of targets + provide short fall alerts + prompt time limited actions + provide performance data

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The Pathway to Success “I’m not interested in being famous. I’m not interested in having a lot of money money. I just want to be able to take care of myself and my family, and that’s what success would be for me.”

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The ethnographic study revealed that Rise clients defined success very differently than the Rise program administrators: The definition of success doesn’t involve growing their business in order to make a lot of money. They don’t have ambitions to get bank financing, sell it, or bring on more investors or partners.

To them, ‘success’ means being able to survive indepently while honouring their own daily rhythms and the rhythms of their illness. There is some concern among clients that the programme doesn’t fully understand this, and is trying to ‘make me into what I don’t want to be’.

By Susan Bartlett and Rob Grossi

Left Brain /Right Brain: Re-imagining a Micro-Finance Organisation’s Service Offering

A microfinance organisation supporting entrepreneurs with mental illness was struggling with a wicked problem: despite a handful of individual success stories, they hadn’t been able to create a holistic, sustainable program with national reach. Diagnosis? Too much left-brain analytical thinking, not enough rightbrain design thinking. By applying user-centred service design techniques, stakeholders began collaborating and co-creating to drive meaningful change in the program’s design.

Our story starts in 2008: philanthropist Sandra Rotman wanted to help men and women struggling with mental illness and addictions, but she didn’t want to use traditional avenues, like donations to hospitals. Instead, she wanted to create something bold and innovative that could transform how society approaches mental health. And so Rise Asset Development was born: a unique non-profit organisation providing affordable micro-financing to aspiring entrepreneurs who self-identify as suffering from a mental illness or addiction.

The rationale for Rise is compelling.

We know that meaningful work is a key determinant of a person’s self-identity and mental health. However, the episodic nature of many mental illnesses can make it difficult to work within the 9-to-5 rhythms of the regular workday.

By working for themselves, Rise clients

can reap the benefits of employment, while circumventing the difficulties of holding down a salaried job with fixed hours. While most small businesses require some degree of start-up capital, mental health consumer/survivors1 often have poor credit, which precludes them from accessing financing. Rise provides micro-financing (loans, leases, and lines of credit) that allows clients to establish or grow their small businesses. Rise also supplements its financing with support services, mentoring and friendly lending terms to help entrepreneurs overcome setbacks along the way.

In 2008, Rise launched as a partnership with the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, with the Rotman family providing financial backing. Rise found some

Susan Bartlett is a senior associate at Cooler Solutions, where she designs services and helps organisations develop internal innovation capabilities. She is currently working on a project to help cancer patients understand the risks and benefits of different treatment options.

Rob Grossi is a principal at Cooler Solutions where he oversees implementation of innovation and service design projects for clients in the healthcare, consumer and retavil sectors. With a background in strategy consulting at BCG, and in the private equity and financial services fields, Rob helps translate and align design solutions to specific client business needs.

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By Susan Bartlett and Rob Grossi

TARGET MARKET

people interested in selfemployment

people who can‘t access traditional bank financing

people who self-declare as having or having had a mental illness and/or addiction

The Rise Asset Development Program targets clients who self-identify as having or having had a mental illness or addiction, who are interested in pursuing self-employment opportunities, and who want or need financing to support their ambitions, but cannot access financing through traditional channels.

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prospective clients and began establishing micro-finance agreements. In many ways, the early work of the program was very successful. The personal success stories were uplifting, as many clients were able to overcome significant mental illnesses and establish successful microbusinesses. For example, one client re-entered the world of work after a lengthy illness-related hiatus, using a loan to replace outdated photography equipment and rapidly building a profile as a successful fashion photographer. As none of the loans were in default, the Rise founders were optimistic the program could deliver on its bold mandate.

But by early 2011, despite these successes, there were signs that the broader program was beginning to flounder. Recruiting and outreach was one problem: only $27,000 had been disbursed to 11 clients; and the mentorship element that was supposed to be central to the program just wasn’t

taking off. There were plenty of resources and smart people dedicated to making the program succeed, but they were having real difficulty achieving growth.

What was going wrong?

The design of the Rise program was very much driven by the supply side, rather than what the clients wanted. For example, Sandra Rotman was committed to having a mentorship program as part of the Rise offerings, with MBA students from the Rotman School providing the mentoring. From her perspective, this was a way to help the Rise entrepreneurs build successful businesses, while also giving MBA students a chance to broaden their worldviews and gain empathy with a marginalised community. However, our ethnographic study with existing clients found that the Rise clients defined success in a very different way to most businesspeople. To them, the mentorship program was an example of Rise trying to impose an external definition of success and not recognising the value of their ‘survivor skills’ as people with mental illness. The Rise entrepreneurs were also wary of the potential for stigma by working with MBA students.

The ethnography uncovered many other insights: clients were used to operating within an informal gratitude economy based on trust, respect and reciprocity versus the more impersonal

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

formal economy; clients also wanted to be treated as people first and entrepreneurs second, letting their illnesses remain in the background.

The insights were presented in a 6-hour design workshop with a diverse set of stakeholders: mental health providers; Rotman School representatives; Rise board members and mental health survivors. This workshop was critical to the project. We brought together a real diversity of perspectives: not only in the material presented but also in the worldviews of attendees. It was the first time many of the participants had come together to discuss the Rise program and its service offering, and they had wildly varying ideas of what the program should ultimately be.

With a typical left-brained approach, we would have walked into the workshop with a point of view we wanted to present. Given the many different perspectives represented in the session, this likely would have closed down discussion. Indeed, several stakeholders came into the session somewhat sceptical, or even confrontational. However, as we presented the ethnographic insights, supplemented with clips from client interviews, the group began to drop their defences and develop empathy with the Rise clients.

We made sure no one in the room was positioned as the definitive authority, so people felt comfortable sharing the many divergent opinions we needed to hear if we were going to help Rise. Ultimately, the right-brained approach to the workshop allowed us to build trust amongst the attendees.

As the day progressed, participants cocreated communications tools (marketing collateral, conversation scripts), developed approaches for outreach outside of the mental illness community

and redesigned the mentorship program.

The trust developed from the earlier conversations was paramount, as hands-on co-creation was uncharted territory for many participants. Most importantly, output reflected both the clients’ viewpoints and the perspectives of stakeholders voiced during the earlier group discussion.

At the time of writing, Rise is in the process of launching the program revisions.

It will be a few months before the impact of the service design work is realised. However, we can already see positive effects stemming from the workshop. During the Rise board meeting scheduled on the day of the workshop, board members made strategic decisions that were directly influenced by the ethnographic insights and conversation they had heard earlier in the day. Many individuals who were sceptics prior to the workshop left saying that Rise “gets it.”

We believe that many of those converted sceptics became advocates for the program, contributing in part to a big jump in funding applications after the workshop. Finally, we built trust and empathy amongst the broad group of stakeholders who will need to work together if Rise is going to achieve its goals and, in so doing, won a few converts to rightbrain, design-based approaches.

•

References 1 Someone undergoing treatment for a mental illness or disorder.

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By Ruby Ku

Austin Center for Design Looks at Homelessness

As part of the inaugural class at the Austin Center for Design, a new educational institution that produces design graduates focused on humanitarian and cultural problems, my class decided to look at homelessness in Austin, Texas through partnership with a local shelter. We began with the explicit understanding that we would come nowhere near ‘solving’ such a complex issue. We did believe, though, that with ethnographic design research and deep excursions into various areas – such as jobs, housing and health – we would be able to uncover new insights.

As we synthesised our findings, the theme that jumped out the most was that the public’s perception of the homeless had to change before any true progress could be made.

The people we talked to did not conform to the stereotypical image of a homeless person: we met teenage mothers, college graduates, artists and others who are hardworking individuals just like you and me.

They possess a tremendous amount of knowledge and skills, from carpentry and roofing to oil painting and computer expertise. The most surprising finding came when they were being asked about the best part of their days: over and over again they told stories about helping others and sharing their knowledge. Currently, many social services provide shelter,

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food and medical assistance that are fundamental to physical survival, but attention to other needs, such as selfesteem and sense of belonging, often separates the long-term homeless from the temporarily homeless.

Instead of constantly asking about problems and deficiencies, we need to focus on the things people can offer, in order for them to feel like they have the power to change their own situations.

At the end of the research phase, we presented our findings to the shelter staff. We recommended programs that would allow them to focus more on leveraging people’s strengths and potential contributions, such as allowing those who are computer literate to help keep the lab open, or those who made it into tran-

sitional housing to share their newly learned budgeting skills. The concept of peer learning at the shelter was very well received amongst the staff and their board of directors.

Furthermore, we were also beginning to see from our research that this form of engagement doesn’t only apply to the homeless population, but also to new college graduates, retirees, stay-at-home mothers and other professionals who don’t feel fulfilled in their day jobs.

All of them have a need to engage and to contribute. We decided to build HourSchool as a platform to facilitate peer learning by means of small informal classes, with an emphasis on encouraging more people to share their knowledge and engage with their community.

Peer Learning Platform: from Sketchbook to Spreadsheet Taking principles from the ‘lean startup’ methodology, we put our hypothesis and assumptions to the test, ensuring that we were serving a need that actually exists. Before we built anything, we leveraged existing

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

tools such as Facebook Events to test if people actually wanted to take classes from their peers and would be willing to pay for them.

Subsequently, we built a simple web interface to automate some of the logistics, one that still lacks a lot of features but is enough for us to continue to engage in conversations with people, to experiment and to perform iterations on our service.

Our core mission is to empower more people to teach, and we measure our success by the number of students we are able to turn into teachers. Over the last few months, we have deepened our understanding of the core principles that will help us achieve our mission:

‘HourSchool for Community’ has allowed us to create awareness, to learn a great deal about people’s behaviour and to generate revenue by charging a small service fee for class hosting and providing resources for teachers.

Since its launch, we have been approached by people inquiring about using HourSchool as a platform for peer-led training programs at companies, universities and non-profits. We are now developing HourSchool for Business, allowing organisations to use it as a software-as-aservice (SaaS) subscription.

Meanwhile, we’re using a percentage of our revenue to subsidise the usage of our platform by non-profit organisations. By being mission-focused and backed by a business model, we aspire to continue to bring peer learning into people’s cities, workplaces and lives.

•

• The peer-led nature makes learning more relevant and less intimidating.

• Student-driven topic suggestions and teacher nominations give people a new sense of validation, especially if they have never thought of themselves before as ‘teachers’.

• The bite-sized, one-hour class gives students a taste of a new topic and gives first-time teachers a taste of the teaching process.

Ruby Ku is the co-founder of HourSchool, a social venture that came out of Austin Center for Design. She is also an interaction designer at Thinktiv, a venture accelerator in Austin, Texas.

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By Ali Baba Attaie and Liz Burow

Changing How We Care Innovating the Dental Care experience for Underserved Communities in New York City

Tooth decay in children is a big problem. Tooth decay is largely preventable, yet it remains the most common chronic disease among children and adolescents aged 6 to 191. For children from low-income communities, tooth decay is an even bigger problem, as they carry a significantly larger disease load but have less access to care compared to more affluent communities. Pain from untreated tooth decay is so severe that it prevents millions of children from eating, sleeping and learning2. For communities with large disease loads, few solutions are being offered by the health care profession that are innovative enough to holistically address the root causes of this epidemic problem.

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from sketchbook to spreadsheet

Fixing vs. Preventing For many socio-economically disadvantaged families in the United States, access to dental care is impractical, costly, or inaccessible. In addition, many low-income communities consider a trip to the dentist as emergency treatment, rather then as a preventative measure.

So, even when patients come in for

Health buddies participate in Givesmile, our sister outreach program that travels to day-cares, churches, schools and health fairs within neighbourhoods served by the clinic, to teach kids and parents about the importance of brushing, visiting the dentist and eating healthy snacks.

treatment, it doesn’t mean they’ll come back. In the communities that hellosmile serves in New York City3, on average, only twenty percent of patients return for regular check-ups.

This creates a market for invasive ‘drill and fill’ treatment, where the dentists time is spent fixing existing problems, rather than trying to communicate how to prevent problems from occurring in the first place. A typical dental clinic in a low-income community runs on a business model that is 70% invasive treatment care and 30% preventative care.

Most Health Solutions aren’t Medical, They’re Social In order to tackle America’s most common chronic childhood disease, we need to change how we care and invert the typical 70/30-business model to provide low-cost, efficient and effective preventative health care solutions. At hellosmile, our solution is centred on a service blueprint grounded in prevention through 1) engaging children and families with patient-centred approaches, 2) empowering mid-level providers as oral health champions, and 3) connecting communities through the exchange of information and collaboration among stakeholders. With these approaches, we work to build an ongoing dialog about healthy eating habits that effect not

Ali Baba Attaie, DDS, FAAPD director, Paediatric Dental Medicine, Mount Sinai Paediatric Dental and co-founder of hellosmile.

Ali is a paediatric dental specialist with active private and hospital-based dental surgery practices in New York City.

He now works at a network of paediatric dental and medical clinics spread across Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, where innovative experiences help deliver high quality dental and medical care to all children.

Liz Burow is a design strategist who works with organisations to help them express their values through memorable experiences and spaces. She holds a Masters of Architecture from MIT, teaches visual thinking studios at Parsons School of Design in NYC and is currently a consulting creative director to hellosmile in NYC.

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By Ali Baba Attaie and Liz Burow

only oral health but also the health and wellness of the entire body. Our goal is to create stronger, more self-reliant communities by designing conversations, spaces, incentives, products and toys that are choreographed to create a ‘WOW!’ experience for our staff, our patients and their families.

Recruiting Local Talent To create this experience, we focus on two areas that help our preventative care message stick: talent recruitment and customer retention. Our preventativecare business model is dependent on our patients and their families returning for regular check-ups and modifying health behaviours like brushing twice a day and finding alternatives to sugary snacks, based on conversations with our health-care providers. To do this, our patients must have a trusting and engaging relationship with hellosmile from the very first phone call and all the way through to each fond farewell.

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In our service blueprint, the person most empowered to help communicate the importance of preventative care is the hello buddy. The hello buddy, a mid-level provider and registered dental assistant, ‘hosts’ the child and parent at the clinic to make sure they have a comfortable and engaging experience, encourages behavioural change through education and information sharing and provides a wide range of preventative oral treatments under the guidance of an attending dentist. In this new clinical business model, we find that emphasising the role of hello buddies lowers the treatment cost under the supervision of dental professionals.

Creating charismatic hello buddies puts particular emphasis on cultural sensitivity, recruitment and the professional development of our mid-level provider. Our model is based on the idea that patients are more likely to listen to a provider who seems familiar and similar to them. Our recruitment is founded on

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

Developing a sequenced narrative helps guide our ‘hosting’ staff through important touchpoints and conversations.

an entry-level work force typically hired from the neighbourhoods that the hellosmile clinic serves.

Such mid-level providers are more motivated to provide preventative dental services than the dentists, whose primary focus is to treat active acute disease. To further align the needs, perceptions and understanding between patients and providers, courses and on-the-job training are co-created and co-taught with employees, doctors, team leaders, IT professionals and designers .

Workshops help our staff understand their ‘hosting’ responsibilities and assist in active patient/family engagement. In addition, outreach and volunteer opportunities empower staff to become community change agents and health ‘champions’ beyond their time as employees of hellosmile.

Health buddies participate in Givesmile, our sister outreach program that travels to daycares, churches, schools and health fairs within neighbourhoods served by the clinic, to teach kids and parents about the importance of brushing, visiting the dentist and eating healthy snacks.

Rewarding Membership Hello buddies engage and motivate our patients to return for regular check-ups by enrolling patients as members of our Passport Incentive Program. The program is a series

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By Ali Baba Attaie and Liz Burow

The hellosmile passport documents check-up attendance, and facilitates conversations around healthy eating and brushing habits.

of conversations and incentives that are expressed through the design of our clinics that include the spaces, toys, graphics, products and interactions with patients. At the centre of the program is the hellosmile Passport, which acts like a membership rewards card and is given to children upon their first visit.

For the hello buddy, the Passport Program provides a series of conversational prompts and props to engage parents in chair-side discussions about the causes of dental disease, the importance of brushing and eating tips that promote better oral health. Most importantly, the Passport Program creates a reward for returning for the next preventative visit: small prizes for coming to scheduled

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appointments that culminate in a raffle ticket for a quarterly grand prize draw.

Prizes like Nintendo Wii gaming consoles are selected for their popularity as well as to encourage physical activities shared between parents and children.

Providing a Hub for Service Design Thinking We strongly believe that service design thinking can change the healthcare landscape within underserved and low-income communities. Until now, most design services have not penetrated this market, due, in part, to a client perception that ‘design’ is costly, unnecessary or inaccessible. In response, we have established hellolab, a non-profit

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

innovation lab that brings together business leaders, designers and health care professionals into a studio setting where people can work, meet and share data, ideas and sketches as they research and develop appropriate service models.

Hellolab’s objective is to make design accessible and affordable to communities who can greatly benefit from design strategy and service design thinking.

Service Design Thinking as ‘Social Glue’ Our vision is to help eliminate childhood tooth decay in every community served by hellosmile. While our goals are big, each project begins with a conversation where we look at ‘bits’. Service design thinking helps us understand how all the ‘bits’

come together as a whole experience and why it matters. The tools and techniques of service design, like creating personas, storyboarding, experience prototyping, role-playing and affinity mapping help facilitate more constructive, user-focused conversations between our multi-disciplinary team members and help us figure out how to make our ideas happen. Service design helps us turn our spreadsheets into sketches of efficient systems and inspiring experiences and then, eventually, back into spreadsheets as we gather more data, evidence and experience. We hope to see more service-driven innovations and effective problem solving that address the needs of under-served communities, in our community and in yours.

References 1 According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention 2 Oral Health in America: A Report of the Surgeon General, National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), 2000.

3 hellosmile PMG has clinics in Woodside, Sunnyside, Corona, Jackson Heights, North Central Bronx and Parkslope and treats an average of 2000 of children/ month.

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By Damian Kernahan and Erik Roscam Abbing

What David Taught Goliath: How a Small Service Design Firm Leveraged Outsize Business Outcomes for a Global Icon

Damian Kernahan, founder of Proto Partners, Australia’s first Service Design consultancy in 2008.

Erik Roscam Abbing, founder of Zilver innovation, is a consultant and teacher with a focus on bringing together the disciplines of branding, innovation and design.

To help companies build predictable, high quality relationships with their customers, we have developed a process we call ‘branddriven service innovation’ that we have applied to Virgin Mobile, a mobile phone operator in Australia. Like the customer-focused company it is, Virgin mobile continuously measures their customer experience satisfaction, resulting in a well-defined numerical index. Virgin had reached a position where they were looking for outside assistance in driving that index upwards.

But what makes the case interesting is that Virgin wasn’t interested in just being on par with industry standards, they were looking for a uniquely differentiated service delivery and customer experience.

In fact, they were looking to deliver the famous Virgin experience to mobile communications in Australia.

In working with Virgin Mobile to bridge the gap between their current customer experience and the desired branded customer experience, our work demonstrated that even large customer-focused companies like Virgin can use service innovation to bring value to companies and customers.

Here are the top 3 lessons: 1. Don’t hire a service design agency first and then a business consultancy.

Hire them together.

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The world in general, and our clients in particular, are not short on good ideas.

What they are short on are ideas that make commercial sense and fit their business strategy. Having business strategists involved at the outset ensures that any ideas are shaped by the commercial strategy along the way and marry customer opportunity with market opportunity. It’s the right way to balance the out-of-thebox creativity with the in-the-box business rigour, right from the outset. And

The Brand-Driven Service Innovation process involves a constant iteration between design thinking and business thinking.

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

it’s far more powerful than leaving the creative work to the designers and then throwing it over the wall to the business folks to figure out how to make it work.

Throughout the Virgin project, the business analysts were involved just as heavily as the design team.

In the research stage of the project, they were focussed on analysing a Net Promoter Score study to find out which stages of the Virgin customer journey contributed most to customer satisfaction and what aspects of service delivery (such as staff flexibility, transparent cost structure or adequate information) actually drove customer satisfaction in these stages. We also calculated the potential business value to be unlocked in each of those stages.

design research

company dna

brand promise market research

This thorough quantitative analysis gave both Virgin and us a clear focus on those parts of the customer journey that truly needed attention and where improving customer experience was a worthwhile investment.

Later on in the project, we used design research and rich emotional customer insights to get the organisation on board for the business redesign that followed. In flipping traditional thinking, we then used rigorous business metrics to build trust in and commitment to the outcome of a process that had already had emotional commitment from senior management.

The moral of this first lesson: don’t think of business and design as separate entities, or consecutive stages

opportunity mapping

customer insights

customer metrics

service design

growth roadmap

business casing

training staff

service blueprint

business design

service dna

measuring effect

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By Damian Kernahan and Erik Roscam Abbing

in a process. We taught Virgin to work in this way and, as a result, were able to unlock this synergy between business and design right from the start.

2. You can’t outsource service design. You need to be 100% involved in the research, design and implementation.

The second important lesson is that service design is not something you hire in from the outside while you go about your business, only to implement the ideas at the end of the project.

The service delivery eco-system is the lifeblood of a company like Virgin mobile. Its redesign has to be rooted in the bedrock of the organisation and has to be felt emotionally and understood rationally by all its staff and managers.

From the outset, we involved Virgin in every step we took, not as an audience to our process or as a recipient of our insights, but as active contributors and co-creators. That means more than involving your client in an occasional workshop. It actually means involving them in tasks that you would normally do such as designing the research set up, visiting customers in their homes, doing store visits and analysing research results such as customer diaries.

We believe that the ownership of the research and design process should lie

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with the client. And the only way to do this is to let the client do the work with you. Does that mean we can lean back? Not at all! It means we have a responsibility to clearly explain how we do what we do. We need to educate the client in how we use design thinking to make sense of complexity, how we use visualisation to connect concepts and insights into a holistic framework, how we use our customer empathy to find the real answers behind the obvious ones and how we iterate between analysis and synthesis and intuition and metrics.

3. Brand is not something you sprinkle over your services as decoration. Brand is fundamentally what differentiates you from your competition, so it should be the source of service innovation.

In many companies, the brand is used as means to differentiate a given proposition by communication and advertising, but if the proposition itself isn’t different, the brand is confined to making promises it can’t keep. That’s why we believe – and we tell our clients – that their brand is the promise they make to their customers, but the customer experience is the promise they keep. This sheds a different light on the concept of branding. Rather than leaving it to the marketing department to use

from sketchbook to spreadsheet

the brand mainly for communication, the brand becomes the shared focus and vision throughout the entire company, to inspire purposeful change and to drive meaningful growth.

This new view of a brand needs to be deeply rooted in what truly differentiates the company: its internal assets, culture, (human) resources and capabilities. It needs to connect precisely to customers’ genuine needs, desires and aspirations. And it needs to resonate deeply with the people in the organisation who are responsible for service innovation and delivery.

Virgin has a very strong and differentiated brand proposition throughout the world. For Virgin Mobile Australia this had led to a fresh and inspiring brand communication.

Intuitively they knew their brand was not sufficiently being used to drive service innovation, but they also knew that they needed help to do it. Thus, we set out to help Virgin with precisely that.

We first took Virgin through what their brand values really mean to them in terms of future business opportunities. And we explored how Virgin’s core philosophy of breaking conventions to delight and better serve customers could be applied in the telecommunications industry.

Then we took the Virgin team outside, to delve deep into the lives of their customers in order to better understand their values and motivations. We used our customer insight tool, the 7daysinmylife. com website, to learn to understand how the virgin brand philosophy was relevant in the lives of these people. Together with Virgin, we learned that fairness is much more about giving people attention than about an equal exchange. We learned that control is much more about creating understanding than about giving people options. And that simplicity is much more about being human and open than about simply stripping away complexity.

•

“We tell our clients that their brand is the promise they make to their customers, but the customer experience is the promise they keep.”

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By Jukka Ojasalo and Katri Ojasalo

Creating Competences in Service Innovation and Design The SID Master’s Programme for Practitioners Combines Business and Design Competences

Jukka Ojasalo, PhD, professor, has been developing several master’s degree programmes at Laurea, one of them being the SID programme.

Katri Ojasalo is PhD. and head of SID Master’s degree programme at Laurea University of Applied Sciences, Espoo, Finland.

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The demand for service innovation and design (SID) competences has rocketed among companies and other organisations across all industries. Rapid changes in the economic environment, demographics and new technologies are driving governments, businesses and individuals to seek sustainable efficiency and effectiveness through new service models. The Master’s degree programme in Service Innovation and Design aims to create the distinctive competences needed for future success. The main objective of the degree programme is to provide education which is based on the genuine competence development needs of companies and other organisations. This article outlines the basic structure and practices of the SID Master’s degree programme offered

by Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Espoo, Finland.

Laurea has been offering the cutting edge Master of Business Administration programme in Service Innovation and Design since 2009. It is a 90 ECTS creditpoint, professional program that trains students from diverse backgrounds to become practicing service developers.

The entry requirement for Master’s studies at Finnish universities of applied sciences is that an applicant hold a Bachelor’s or Master’s level degree and has acquired at least three years of relevant work experience after

graduation. The final selection for the degree programme takes place through an entrance examination. The SID Master's degree programme is provided in English and can be completed alongside a fulltime job in 18 – 30 months.

The aim of the programme is to provide students with multidisciplinary knowledge in service innovation and design. This happens through advanced studies of different service theories and their implications for SID practice. The programme brings students to the fore-

service innovation service provider(s)

- business goals: growth, profitability, internationalization - strategic innovations - internal organization - business networks - service culture - change leadership - trends and changes in the global environment - image

customers (and end users)

- revenue models - segmentation - investments - finance - quality - productivity

- value co-creation consisting of co-design and co-production - new service development processes - service system - service concept - service resources - service delivery processes - customers’ processes - touchpoints - service technology

- needs - expectations - mental pictures - values - attitudes - behaviour - prosesses - culture - networks

- customer experiences - customer value creation processes - perceptions of the service and service brand - learning together

environment

environment

competences to be created in the degree programme in sid

understanding the value for the provider following up the value for the producer increasing the value for the producer

Competences related to - futures thinking - analysis of global environment - change leadership - service culture - management of networks - service accounting and management control systems

understanding the value for the customer co-designing the value with the customer co-producing the value with the customer

Competences related to - development of revenue models - productivity - investments and financial issues - pricing of services - marketing and selling of services - intrapreneurship - empowerment of personnel

following up the customer value

service design competences

business competence in service innovation

competence

increasing the customer value Competences related to - design thinking - customer experiences and value creation - integration of customers in NSD - creativity

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By Jukka Ojasalo and Katri Ojasalo

front of recent developments in the SID field by including supervised development training. Another important objective is to improve students' competences in combining academic rigour with managerial relevance when working on independent projects. Compulsory study modules are: • Business and Management Competences in Service Innovations (15 ECTS credits) • Value Creating Competences (15 ECTS credits) • User-centric Service Design Competences (15 ECTS credits) • Thesis: a service development project (30 ECTS) A central theme of the studies is that services (both commercial B-to-C and B-to-B as well as non-profit) possess a set of unique characteristics that require a distinctive approach to strategy, innovation and design. At the beginning of the studies, students acquire the competences related to deeply understanding customers/users, their latent needs and behaviours in their natural environment. At the same time, they study strategic management and new service development. They also familiarise themselves with the basics of design thinking. In the second semester, they learn methodologies for futures studies and deepen their competences in service design processes and methods. Moreover, they learn how to build a service brand, and to commercialise and sell services.

Finally, service leadership and service culture is their last compulsory topic.

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The elective studies (15 ECTS credits) enable students to pursue their specific interests, as well as to overcome deficiencies in their service design skills. For example, service design tools, cross-cultural issues and management of business networks are topics that the student may choose. The SID studies culminate in a Master’s thesis project.

The aim of the Master’s thesis is to develop the student’s ability to carry out a demanding service development project independently.

The students of the degree programme have a varying and multidisciplinary background. This is a significant strength of the programme. Most of the students have their educational background (i.e. a Bachelor’s or a Master’s degree) either in the field of business administration, information technology, engineering or design. The group is international: almost all the continents are represented. The students work for many kinds of companies and organisations alongside their studies: multi-national corporations (both manufacturing and pure services), SMEs and public sector.

This all creates a unique and fruitful basis for innovative thinking. The heterogeneous group spends three days per month together and co-creates new competences by discussing, sharing and further developing the individual assignments they have carried out between the contact sessions. For example, a student working for Nokia comments: "The program supports my current position in our Services Unit enormously well. Our SID group is very international and we are from very different areas of business, so I'm confi-

education and research

dent my personal goals will be achieved.

I wish to find great new ideas, new ways of thinking and working and to be able to exploit them in my everyday work, even while I’m taking the course. I have always supported my work with studies and this SID Master’s programme is a very natural continuation of my previous studies."

The SID Master's programme has impressive knowledge in its Advisory Board, not only by academic standards, but also in terms of business competence and experience. The Advisory Board consists of ten highly experienced business executives, entrepreneurs and academics in the field of SID. The Advisory Board meets on a regular basis, around five times a year.

The members of the Advisory Board bring state-of-the-art knowledge of the contemporary issues and trends in SID in the business community. They also offer their personal network for the use of the programme. Members of the Advisory board have also been involved in organising the Laurea’s annual SID seminar, selecting the students and key note lecturing.

The Service Innovation and Design programme is conducted using the Learning by Developing (LbD) model developed and adopted by Laurea itself 1. Learning

by Developing is the pedagogical innovation that the Finnish National Evaluation Council based their decision on when Laurea was appointed as a Centre of Excellence in Education. The LbD model is based on the principle of involving students in diverse and demanding research and development projects, carried out in cooperation with companies and other organisations. For example, the SID Master’s students have been and will be

working for a long-term project (20102012) called CoCo that aims to enhance co-creation in the b-to-b context and to create concrete tools and methods for involving customers in the processes of both designing and delivering services. The CoCo project is carried out in conjunction with four b-to-b service companies, Laurea, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and Tekes (The Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation).

The students have analysed the current state of the co-creation approach in the companies, and now they are starting to organise workshops in the companies where they will utilise different service design methods. Under the guidance of lecturers and experts from business and other organisations, students receive genuine, research-oriented and multidisciplinary learning that is completely different from memorising facts by heart for exams. In other words, a great deal of learning is based on practical problem solving in authentic cases, either in larger projects such as CoCo or in the students’ own organisations. This greatly motivates students, since they are able to directly contribute to their own work and the development of their organisations. Consequently, the role of teacher changes from traditional lecturer into that of coach.

So far Laurea’s SID Master’s degree programme has been a great success. The feedback from both students and the business community has been excellent. It is evident that there is a rapidly increasing demand for SID competencies in the future. The next intake for the Laurea’s SID Master’s Degree Programme is in Spring 2012.

References 1 Raij, K. (2007). Learning by Developing. Laurea Publications, A58. Edita: Helsinki. Also online: http://www.laurea.fi/fi/ tutkimus_ja_kehitys/julkaisut/ tutkimukset_a_sarja/Documents/ A58.pdf

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photo: Miriam Becker

Tools and Methods Service Design Related Techniques, Activities and Deliverables

By Markus Hormess and Adam Lawrence

Beyond Roleplay Better Tools to Steal from Theatre

Markus Hormess is a service innovation consultant with a background in science, music and process design.

Adam Lawrence is an actor, comedian and customer experience director with a background in psychology, marketing and product development.

Markus and Adam are cofounders of WorkPlayExperience, a service design consultancy with a uniquely theatrical approach. They are also the co-initiators of the Global Service Jam.

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It's no surprise that service designers “In a typical seven have been drawing on the theatrical prohour, co-creative cess for decades. As a tool for modelling session, we might human interactions, theatre is cheap, fast spend two hours and flexible. Sadly, most practitioners establishing a Safe don't go beyond ‘roleplay’, a relatively Space. It generates clumsy and notoriously unpopular proa relaxed attitude cess that barely scratches the surface of to the fear of failure, this widely misunderstood toolset. In this which will otherwise article, we'll look at a far more powerful restrict creativity tool for designers: investigative rehearsal. and honesty.”

Why Theatre?

Designers can use theatrical tools at any stage of a design project. At the kickoff, it's a non-invasive way of investigating existing services. In later design stages, it generates ideas quickly and tests designs as soon as they are born. It is even powerful in the final stages of training for service delivery.

Theatre is a great co- creation tool, as it's fun, fast and everyone understands the terminology.

Why confuse folks with touchpoints, operators and tangibles, when everyone can already talk about scenes, cast and props?

Of the many ways of modelling and prototyping human behaviour, theatre is perhaps the only one that is set up to deal with emotion. In customer-centric or human-centred design, that's a crucial difference.

From Roleplay to Investigative Rehearsal The main problem with roleplay is obvious: while designers may be comfortable with it, co-creation partners from outside a design context simply hate it. The ’R word’ can cause a co-operative group to close ranks and fold their arms. It's

tools and methods

the cast • Participants: backstage crew, frontline staff, perhaps customers • Group size: 8 to 14 works best • Leadership: the director (often a design lead) is a non-judgemental guide

familiar from training courses: usually, a couple of unprepared participants are dragged up, given some kind of briefing and told to roleplay their way through a fictitious, stereotypical scene. They get one attempt, then their squirming efforts are criticised at length. It's a painful memory for all.

Apart from its unpopularity, there is another weakness of roleplay that is important, even for designers: it only gives you something to talk, talk, talk about: it is not an investigative or developmental tool in its own right.

A theatrical rehearsal is different. The players know the starting story well, either through familiarisation or because

they have developed it. They spend time on understanding the events. And, most importantly, there is no fear of failure: there is a real ’Safe Space’ and the scene runs through rapid iterations, often with a changing cast and minimal discussion.

Any individual ’mistakes’ dissolve in the flow and the new design develops through doing, not talking.

‘Safe Space’ Lack of attention to Safe Space is one reason that design roleplays usually under-perform. In a typical seven

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By Markus Hormess and Adam Lawrence

the ideal story • • • •

Is developed by the team Is based on their own experiences Has an emotional component Can be based on an existing service, or the latest idea/prototype/test

hour, co-creative session, we might spend two hours establishing a Safe Space. It generates a relaxed attitude to the fear of failure, which will otherwise restrict creativity and honesty.

Physically, the space needs to be flexible and private. Shut doors, draw curtains and remove most of the chairs: you'll be on your feet. Grab anything you can to serve as props (Rule 3: Use What You Have). Imprecise, abstract or fun props free up creativity and are more useful than costly replicas in the early stages.

The key to safe space is showing that normal rules do not apply. Use your behaviour to show that the participants, not the designers, are the experts. Bosses are not welcome to ‘sit in’, so invite them to either take part or go away. There is no hierarchy in a rehearsal, and there are no right or wrong answers. Avoid ‘good’ and ‘bad’: just describe how the play-through of a suggestion feels and decide together which ones to follow up. The director should keep it fun, but focussed and real (Rule 2: Play Seriously).

A Safe Space cannot just be declared, it must be embodied. The best way is by openly breaking rules and routines: be surprising, use high energy warmups, invite people by chicken1, let participants build the set, rearranging and thus ‘owning’ the room. Embody playfulness, finding your own way (it doesn't have to be rubber chickens) to show that you do not take yourself too seriously, while remaining earnest about the customer and their issues.

Most importantly, never confront inexperienced participants with a blank stage and say ‘Now, we act’.

Carefully choose a sequence of methods that ease into the true rehearsal phase, increasing interactivity and involvement with each step. For example, start with

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’Boom!-wow-Wow-WOW-BOOM!!’, the typical dramatic arc of a James Bond movie, and one of many that can be applied to service designs.

group storytelling, then personal stories, storyboarding, presentation, allocating roles, setting up stage and props, a quick walk-through and then slip straight into the investigative rehearsal. Preserve Safe Space by making sure that nobody plays themselves (especially when reenacting their own experiences). Don't talk about roleplay, theatre or the stage: just say ‘show me’.

The Rehearsal Once the Safe Space has been established and a story prepared, the investigative rehearsal itself has two distinct phases: Understanding and Experiment.

First, ask the team to run through the scene once, to give everyone an overview. Ask them to use the whole set, entering and leaving the room as the real person would.

Now start again and encourage people outside the scene to call ‘stop’ when they notice anything interesting or relevant. This might be a physical challenge, confusing terminology or body language revealing motivation or tension. There might be a ‘stop’ every few seconds: try stopping after just three seconds and asking ‘What do we know already?’ The goal is a deep understanding of what

tools and methods

rules of rehearsal The three rules of a successful investigative rehearsal: 1. Doing, not Talking 2. Play Seriously 3. Use What You Have

A highly insightful exercise to reveal the subtext (unspoken thoughts and motivations) within a service scene

is happening on a physical and motivational level. Ask questions like ‘How is he feeling?’, or ‘What's actually happening right now?’ Note the insights and move on: do not change any aspect of the scene.

In the experimental stage, it is time to start playing around. Run the scene again, but this time the team should call ‘stop’ when they have an idea of what could be different. This might mean changes to the set, props or behaviour (process) of the service provider. When each ‘stop’ comes, tell the idea giver not to describe the idea, but to show it by taking over a role in the scene (Rule 1: Doing, not Talking). Let the idea run for a while, record the idea on the board and decide to follow it up or return to the original. Iterate, iterate, iterate.

The director will need to keep the team focussed, moving and honest. The role is never judgmental (this can be hard for designers), but tries to accept and work with every idea. At the same time, the director needs

to keep the team realistic, encouraging them to stay in the real world and criticise their own ideas. In Forum Theatre, a very similar form, the director is also called the ‘Difficultator’ or ‘Joker’. Both terms are highly apt.

Experience shows it's better to demonstrate a problem or advantage within the scene than to talk about it.

Playing the idea through will reveal its real impact, so the director will often be heard saying, ‘Don't tell me, show me!’

The result of this process will be a list of tested ideas, refining and building on the previous design or prototype. These ideas have been generated by the participants themselves from their own real stories and are ready for the next iteration – or for implementation.

Relevance and buy-in are guaranteed.

Outlook The investigative rehearsal is just one tool of theatre that is profoundly useful to designers. It can be enriched and expanded with other theatrical tools and concepts such as Subtext, Co-operative Storytelling forms and the Dramatic Arc to develop and implement services that are truly co-creational and that weave in emotional considerations from the very start.

•

References 1 A growing plague of 89 rubber chickens distributed around the SDN conference in Berlin were not just advertising the workshop. Turning up in the weirdest places over three days, they caused curiosity, laughter and play, already building Safe Space before the workshop started. Participants entering the room already knew that ‘normal rules do not apply’.

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By Iain Barker and Janna DeVylder

Service Mapping: Seeing the Present, Projecting the Future, and Creating a Roadmap to Get There

Organisations that do not fully examine the delivery of their services get stuck in their organisational maturity, destined to repeat their successes and failures over and over again. To break this repetitive cycle, firms need to understand and address the systems and processes that are supporting – or thwarting – the delivery of their services. In short, they need to hold a mirror up to their organisations. Service mapping can help.

Iain Barker and Janna DeVylder are co-founders and principals at Meld Studios, a service and interaction design studio in Sydney, Australia.

Meld Studios works with a range of organisations both large and small, covering financial services, government, telcos, education, and non-profits.

Service mapping is: • A process that captures the touchpoints, roles, systems, contexts and intent within a service • An artefact that expresses the delivery and support of service • A tool, used by organisations to guide, build and measure service delivery Service mapping is a critical component in ensuring that an organisation’s service vision is translated and operationalised.

What goes into a service map?

There are three different service elements that should be captured in a service map: External tangible manifestations of the service are what a customer sees and interacts with, such as a boarding pass, a website or the layout of a store. These are relatively easy for an organisation to identify and tend to be the traditional

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things looked after by aspects of the organisation. These are the artefacts of the experience, the things that get built, but a service is more than just a combination of tangible artefacts.

External intangible manifestations of the service are the things that a customer, while engaged in the service, experiences that are not physical, such as temperature, wait time, ambience or emotion. These service elements often go unnoticed and undesigned by all but the most diligent organisations. As such, they are left to chance. But the reality is that they go far from unnoticed by customers.

That doesn’t mean that customers can always tell you about these things if you ask them – they are intangible for them, too, most of the time – but they have an impact on how people experience, perceive and value a service.

tools and methods

Internal manifestations of the service are things that staff use in the delivery of a service that are never seen by customers, such as systems, processes and strategies. These are typically underfunded and disjointed from the external experience, often because the connection between the internal action and the resulting external effect are not explicitly understood or well communicated within an organisation.

Internal manifestations of the service often fall outside the scope of what can be designed or considered by a ‘customer experience’ project. These things end up getting considered in isolation, without any insight into how

they could better support the organisation in the delivery of the service.

All of these things are important to capture in a service map. After all, if you can’t capture them, you are likely to forget to design them.

Three Kinds of Service Mapping While the elements captured for a service map would be the same, regardless of kind, the level of detail which is captured depends on the intent of the mapping.

There are three types of service mapping, and while each has a distinct purpose based on organisational need, they are entirely connected: A current state service map is a reflection and understanding of the service you provide today, enabling you to assess and monitor how your organisation is delivering with its current people, systems and processes.

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By Iain Barker and Janna DeVylder

A future state service map is a vision of the service your organisation wants to be providing, reflecting business strategy, customer needs and innovation of service delivery.

A service roadmap is an artefact that helps companies design for the transition. It shows how service delivery and customer experience can shift and be supported over a series of delivery phases and puts your organisation on a pathway from current state to future state.

So where to begin? Do you start by understanding where you are, identifying opportunities for change from that current-state base? Or do you start by looking strictly forward, creating a future state that is based on business drivers, strategy and innovation, serving as an aspirational piece for your organisation to make change that has a real impact? The answer lies in the trigger for taking on the exercise and in what your organisation is intending to do moving forward.

“There are three types of service mapping, and while each has a distinct purpose based on organisational need, they are entirely connected”

Current-State Service Map Few organisations look to map and understand their current service experience. This is partly because services can be very messy and very complicated and, thus, can appear very difficult and time consuming to map in a meaningful way: it is definitely easier to map an ideal future state than deal with messy realities.

If a service appears to be broken, it can lead people to a state of futility about fixing it. The likely reality is that the service isn’t completely broken, and failure to take the time to map it means failing to comprehend the fullness of the facets involved in delivering the service. If

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you dismiss it as all bad, rather than looking to understand it, you run the risk of failing to comprehend all the knowledge that has built up over years that supports the delivery of the service. As a result, you can end up designing an ideal service that is totally disconnected from the realities of service delivery.

Start with the current state if: • Your organisation only has an appetite for incremental change and wants to build off your current service base.

This approach doesn’t prohibit innovation, it simply starts by utilising your existing strengths and identifying gaps, weaknesses and opportunities for change. We have used this with organisations that know there is no room for large-scale infrastructure changes but that still require service innovation.

• You don’t understand what services you provide. There are many companies that simply do not have a holistic view of their service offering, with departmental and organisational silos preventing cohesion and understanding. Seeing how these services do – or don’t, reflect the overarching vision of the organisation is a powerful tool for instigating future change.

Future-State Service Map Creating a future state service map takes time and effort but those creating it need not get bogged down in the details of how the service will be realised. The most important aspect of the future state is

tools and methods

expressing the intent of the service. At this point, very little may be known about the underlying infrastructure and organisational change needed to bring those service moments to life, but what is articulated is the vision of where the organisation wants to be with regard to providing service.

Some clients are concerned that starting at the current state will perpetuate the status quo and tie them to incremental change, with the future-state vision enabling clients to communicate within the organisation around the impact a new service vision could have. Clients that are about to undergo large-scale infrastructure work are at a critical moment where a future-state service map can provide critical input into what the systems and processes need to be able to support, rather than the system dictating the service that can be delivered.

Start with the future state if: • Your organisation needs an aspirational vision of service delivery. If your organisation is open to exploring what could be with little to no initial constraint, starting with your future state is the way to go. This is beyond a strategy piece: it is an experiential vision of what your organisation has to look like in order to provide the ideal service experience that you want to put forth.

• Your organisation is in need of innovation and change.

With the ever-expanding commoditisation of products, service delivery is often the key differentiator between competitors. Envisioning your organisation as a service organisation – beyond the product – can often be the change you need and may be more achievable than you think.

Service Roadmap It is a rare situation when a future service state can come to life within one project lifecycle. As designers, we must not leave this transition state to chance for it, too, can be – and should be – designed. One client we worked with

had a known, multi-year, multi-scale organisational transition project going on. It was clear from the outset they would need to focus and build year-toyear. We created a roadmap that not only outlined what the ideal end state would look like, we also designed what each point of the service looked like for each phase of the project. This enabled us to prioritise project efforts on foundational elements of service that could easily be built upon and expanded with time, all the while shifting the customer experience towards the ideal state.

It’s time to make a roadmap if: • Your organisation has established a service vision and knows where it currently sits. If your organisation knows where it wants to go with its service delivery, you can create a transition plan that highlights what needs to be put in place over time to get there. Each transition can reflect the service values you aspire to, working your way towards the fully-realised vision. Organisations must be cautious in taking this step, only creating plans when the hard work of looking ahead and realistically looking at today has taken place.

There are naturally nuances and degrees to which all of this can be done. You need not do this across your entire organisation: it can be undertaken at a specific service delivery point or it can encompass an entire customer journey. Regardless of your scope, there is always a place to begin.

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By Yuen Wah Li

Designing Masscustomised Services Insights from Managing Customer Experience in Public Transportation

Dr Yuen Wah Li is a service strategist and consumer insights specialist who has worked in a variety of service settings for improved customer experience design and management. He is currently working for a Hong Kong-based, international leading public transport service provider. He is a scholarpractitioner in business management with special interests in consumer, employee and organisational behaviours.

Like any aspect of business, service design is meant to facilitate the value creation of users (or customers) and for users as individuals and a community. Contemporary marketing thinking refers to value creation as a customer’s evaluation of the experience that emerges from usage or possession of resources, even from one’s own mental state (Gronroos, 2011). In other words, designers – and business enterprises alike – enable customers to create value through the consumption experience of a given product, process or proposition as described in the pyramid in Figure 1.

This notion does not preclude the value-creating processes associated with everyday and mundane behaviours such as commuting using public transportation. Rather, everyday behaviours have immense influences on the well-being of individuals and even society as a whole (Norman, 2004). The contribution of design and delivery of public transport services that lead to good customer customer experiences is remarkvalue able and highly sought after. consumption This paper attempts to experience advance a practicing model for managing customer designs / deliverables

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experience in public transportation and it lends particular insights on the user-centredness of service design and delivery. Additionally, it shows how well-crafted and well-managed customer experiences can facilitate the creation of customer value in various aspects. Extended applications of the model framework to other service categories are also explored in this paper.

Customer Experience Model In considering the customer journey through public transportation, we can, by charting a journey map, identify all the touchpoints involved between

Figure 1: Customer value pyramid

tools and methods

environmental: ambient environment, station / train components & mmi utilitarian

environmenta lt

t oin hp c u

utilitarian

hu m

point uch to an

social

o

emotional

human: people and underlying processes

emotional social

voice of the customers and a given service provider customer (voc) over a journey. We identify and articulate three kinds of touchpoints, namely voice of the frontline environmental, human and institutional, (vofl) that a typical public transport user will come across, by advancing the Customer in customer institutional: st t in Experience Model (the Model) for the it u corporate insights o tio n al t ouchp and social public transport industry (see Figure 2).

The Model underscores the notion of the utilitarian Voice of the Customer, both external and emotional internal, as being at the heart of crafting social and managing the customer experience at individual touchpoints and throughout Figure 2: Customer experience model for public transportation the entire journey. For these benefits, the Model is adopted in industry and used in practice to govern the service design equipment and machinery (e.g. passenger information and delivery carried out in a customer-oriented mandisplay units, entry/exit gates and self-service ticket ner, with due emphasis on customer experience and, vending machines). Customers in general have ample hence, customer value as the outcome. It is also theoretiopportunities to experience such physical components, cally underpinned by the extant literature on customer both individually and in combination. In view of the fact experience management, particularly Berry, Wall and that those experiences are essentially sensory in nature, Carbone’s (2006) work on three categories of experienvironmental touchpoints have a pervasive influence ence clues for services (namely functional, mechanic on customer experience. Customer perception about and humanic), as well as Verhoef, Lemon, Parasuraman, a given service provider may be largely determined Roggeveen, Tsiros and Schlesinger’s (2009) proposed by their experience with touchpoints of this category determinants of customer experience for retailers. and even imprinted for frequent travellers due to their repeated experiences over time (e.g. the odour of a Touchpoints In public transportation, environmental touchpoint refers particular metro station).

By human touchpoint, we refer to personal interacto those customer contacts with the physical aspects of tions between customers and the personnel of a given a given service system, including the ambient environpublic transport service provider, e.g. customer service ment of trains and stations (e.g. ambience, air quality and ambassadors (in a station or at a call centre), platform noise level), facilities (e.g. signage, lifts and seats) and 73

By Yuen Wah Li

assistants and train/bus drivers. Given the fact that most components of public transportation usage are self-service based, staff-customer contacts may be relatively sporadic for individual customers compared to other service industries. Despite this, these interactive experiences are essential in providing a human face to customers, and also functionally important in resolving individual customer problems, e.g. lost property enquiries, wayfinding and fare-related disputes. Service providers seek to turn such opportunities into ‘moments of truth’ in view of the fact that customers appealing for problem resolution are likely to be personally and emotionally charged. Service providers will be advantaged by a frontline team that is well-equipped and duly empowered, in terms of processes and resources, for instance, in solving customer problems and addressing their emotional needs.

Institutional touchpoints in public transportation refers to the interfaces where customers interact with two (or kinds of) ‘institutions’, namely the service provider as a corporate entity or service brand and the transient community of other travelling customers. On one hand, customer perceptions and expectations will be shaped by marketing campaigns and public relations initiatives launched by particular public transport service providers. On the other hand, customer interactions ranging from casual chats about the service in use to deliberately courteous or offensive behaviours while traveling will impact customer experience both favourably or unfavourably in almost all stages of a journey.

While inevitable, interactions with other customers affect customer experience in a rather idiosyncratic manner, since the contexts are much more varied. Public transport service providers therefore seek to propagate and reinforce certain desirable customer behaviours (e.g. giving seats to those in need, no eating or drinking inside compartments, etc.), through, for instance, passenger education campaigns, with a view to creating a customer culture that is aligned with their corporate image or brand. Effective customer experience management at institutional touchpoints implies a strategy with direct (service provider-customer) as well as indirect (customer-customer) measures.

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Voice of the Customer The touchpoint categories highlighted in the Model allow us to identify the key drivers of the customer experience in public transportation. Crafting pleasing customer experiences over these touchpoints, however, calls for a deep understanding of customers. For example, who the customers are, how they value the service, what they are really looking for from the service, how they respond and react in certain circumstances and what they like and dislike most about the current service and why. Service providers should tap into the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and translate that feedback into actionable customer insights for crafting and creating valuable customer experiences. By VoC, we refer to the details about customers themselves and their service experiences, including personal characteristics such as demographics, lifestyles and habits, attitudes such as expectations, preferences and evaluations, as well as manifestations such as behaviours, choices and communications. Such information can be acquired and collected by a number of methods including observation, focus groups, interviews, online surveys and even casual chats.

Equally important, service providers should listen to the Voice of the Frontline (VoFL), as a counterpart of VoC, for the unique advantage of the frontline team in participating in the same context where customers are using and experiencing the services, as well as their participation in service operation and dealing with customers. Their first-hand knowledge about customers, along with their feelings and opinions about particular work processes and the workplace, offers indispensable insights for the design and delivery of valuable service experiences for customers.

Customer Value With in-depth understanding about customers as revealed

by VoC and VoFL and the actionable customer insights generated, public transport service providers can be inspired to craft customer experiences at environmental, human and institutional touchpoints, as well as the totaljourney experience, in a concerted manner. The consumption experience is conducive to value creation for and with customers in various aspects, namely utilitarian, emotion-

tools and methods

product & portfolio: device, system, billing, etc.

channel: stores, call centres, sales agents, etc.

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ch an

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ct produ / portfo li o

al and social values (c.f. Boztepe’s (2007) utility, emotional, social significance, and spiritual values for kitchens). The resulting customer values are expected to vary across the customer experience created at different touchpoints as proposed in Table 1 (also see Figure 2).

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Wider Application voice of the The Customer Experience Model introcustomer (voc) duced above was developed and advanced for the public transport industry as a voice of the frontline guiding principle and communication (vofl) tool for service providers and service designers in particular. There appears po customer p ra ch to be promise in applying the Model’s te / insights u c o m m u nit y t o framework to other service industries, especially those involving mass number corporate & of customers (or mass customisation), e.g. community: brand, fan club, telecommunications, shopping malls and social media etc. consumer banking. A proposed model customised for the telecommunication industry is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Customer experience model for It is conceivable with given this the telecommunications industry example that the Model’s framework may be adapted to other service industries and, likewise, provide insights into the kinds of value utilitarian emotional social touchpoints shaping customer experience, the notion touchpoint of the Voice of the Customer as central to design and environmental high medium low delivery of touchpoint and overall-journey experiences, and the consequential values created for customers.

References 1 Berry, L.L., Wall, E.A., & Carbone, L.P. (2006). Service clues and customer assessment of the service experience: Lessons from Marketing. Academy of Management Perspectives, 20(2), 43-57.

2 Boztepe, S. (2007). User value: Competing theories and models. International Journal of Design, 1(2), 55-63.

3 Gronroos, C. (2011). Value co-creation in service logic: A critical analysis.

Marketing Theory, 11(forthcoming).

4 Norman, D.A. (2004). Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. NY: Basic Books.

5 Verhoef, P.C., Lemon, K.N., Parasuraman, A., Roggeveen, A., Tsiros, M., & Schlesinger, L.A. (2009). Customer experience creation: Determinants, dynamics, and management strategies. Journal of Retailing, 85(1), 31-41.

oi

r

•

human

high

high

medium

institutional

low

medium

high

Table 1: Customer values by touchpoint experience Utilitarian value relates to the accomplishment of a physical or cognitive task. Emotional value relates to the affective benefits, e.g. the degree of pain and pleasure associated with using a given service. Social value relates to the attainment of social prestige and the construction and maintenance of one’s identity through possession or usage.

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By JongWon Seo and MinJu Yim

English-language Education that Makes Everyone Happy Collaborative Service Inspired by Participatory Design

JongWon Seo, service designer, SK Telecom.

JongWon Seo is a project manager working in the humancentred innovation team at SK Telecom. He holds a master’s degree in Design Methods from The Institute of Design at IIT in Chicago (2008).

MinJu Yim, service designer, Hyundai Motor Company. MinJu Yim is a service designer in the marketing department at Hyundai Motors. Previously, she worked at Samsung as a user interface designer and at SK Telecom for new business planning and customer service.

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Late last year, South Korea-based SK Telecom jointly developed a computer-based Smart Learning System with Chung-Dam language school in Seoul. This was SK Telecom's first effort to develop a Smart Learning English service, and to branch out into educational work. At the start of the project, a significant question arose: why have there been no success stories concerning ICT-based education in such a highly developed ICT nation as South Korea? The answer: there have been two major challenges in education.

Firstly, there are many stakeholders in education including students, parents and instructors, and their respective needs are very different. Within English education specifically, students feel overwhelmed and suffer from a lack of motivation, parents feel under pressure to supervise and guide their children’s study and instructors are expected to deliver high quality classes.

Students usually come home from a ‘crammer’ school after 10 p.m. and have little time to fully understand and internalize what they have learned at both their regular schools and their crammers. Therefore, instead of improving their fundamental English skills, many students simply rely on rote memorisation to do well on their

tests. Their parents also face their own dilemma: they have to take care of the education of their over-stressed children, which has changed significantly since their own time in school.

Secondly, educational services should be realistic and quickly prove their effectiveness. When the content of service does not take into account the reality of the education, this can often be neglected.

To improve performance, many ICTbased education services are designed to optimise users' study time and to reinforce structure. However, they often overlook spontaneous participation and immersive learning, and do not solve the more fundamental educational problems.

To resolve these two problems in English education, a participatory design

tools and methods

methodology was employed where students, school administrators, parents and instructors were all involved in improving the educational program.

A participatory design workshop was held in which all key stakeholders were invited, in order to understand their needs and the dynamics of their teaching and learning environments.

Some difficulties were encountered when we tried to reconcile the needs of students, parents, and instructors. First of all, the needs of these three stakeholder groups were often in conflict. For example, we shall consider the situation where a teacher uses the limited class time to check homework during the class.

Students might prefer that the time was used instead for English conversation, while the teacher might think that the class time should be allocated to all students rather than focusing on one.

To resolve these problems, the conflicts in educational circumstances were categorised, and the needs of each of the stakeholders were noted and prioritised by a service planner and school representative.

In addition, it was difficult to formulate ideas by sharing the needs with stakeholders, because each considered only their own circumstances and the needs of others

were not easily understood. For that reason, it was necessary to evaluate the position and situation of each stakeholder in detail.

To solve the problem, we expressed the educational context as an illustration. The illustration explained the circumstances, as well as the conflicting needs of each stakeholder.

It helped the three concentrate on their needs and understand the needs of others. The illustration also contributed to resolving different perspectives and arriving at one central idea. This process was performed repeatedly until an idea was verified for each need, and it was elaborated into a solid concept.

Through the participatory design workshop, we set up the following three strategies to design an educational service that would meet the needs of each key stakeholder: Facilitation of Mutual Interactions Between Teacher and Student Since English is a foreign-language subject, a smooth interaction between learners and the teacher is the key factor that motivates students and gives them the actual experience of using the language. Accordingly, educational activities between students should have an organic connection to promote positive mutual interaction in the learning process.

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tools and methods

Support Systems to Integrate snd Understand Subject Material The effective use of students’ limited time is a precondition of education and its supporting services. Currently, there are various teaching methodologies that help a student to memorise study materials easily and effectively. Various services for English education, including recent and past learning subject material, should be appropriately accessible.

Managing and Integrating Each Student's Entire Academic History Since academic levels vary among students of the same age, standardised curriculum systems based on the school year is far from effective. Instead, an individual’s academic history should be systematically managed, checked

Smart learning system helps peer-group interactions to be active by recording them. Students can ask their questions to peers during study in the Smart learning system, then peers can share their thought and discuss the issued questions by themselves. After sharing and discussing, teachers can join to the system and check the students’ interactions and help them.

and analysed. Also, subject material and teaching techniques based on the student's level should be segmented and refined further. Furthermore, planning services should be provided to a student to help manage and motivate them, alongside parental support.

Through the participatory design workshop, we uncovered ways to provide the value that each stakeholder is seeking. Students value the support they receive during the educational process in order to easily practice self-directed English lessons.

Parents wish to lessen the burden associated with managing their children’s English education and to reduce conflict. Teachers value stronger interaction with their students.

Also, through this methodology, we were able to ideate with stakeholders by providing visual materials in order to develop a more detailed educational service. In addition, we brought together diverse stakeholders with conflicting needs to collaboratively solve problems through discussion and mutual understanding.

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By Miriam Becker

“My Goal Is a Move Away from Seeing Health Services As Commodities – Which Is What They Have Become – to Seeing Them As Relationships, Which Is What They Used to Be.” Touchpoint spoke to Julia Schaeper about the challenges she faces as an inhouse Service Designer at Britain's The National Health Service Institute of Innovation and Improvement.

You Are a Service Designer for the National Health Service in Britain. Where Is Your Desk Located? Is It in a Hospital Close to the Customers?

Or in an Administration Office Close to Your Employer?

Julia: My desk tends to be wherever my projects are based.

Sometimes that means working from within a hospital trust or GP surgery amongst front line teams, and other times it means working from patients' homes or shadowing them, or basing myself in design studios or locations where the team meets. I work flexibly – and from home, too – which is really useful when you have to get your head down to a particular task and write up your research insights, for instance. Because my team tends to be spread out across the country, we use remote communications, which enables us to connect our screens and share what we are working on in real time.

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Describe a Typical Working Day. It's hard to describe a typical working day in my world because no one day is like another. I work across the design process: one day I might be giving a talk advocating design thinking; another day I might be setting up a project, writing a project plan or recruiting patients; or I might be found inside a ward, observing and working directly with patients and staff.

For my projects, I tend to travel a lot in the UK, so I would say that a typical working day usually starts early and finishes late.

What Are The Main Goals of Your Work at NHS? With large organisations like the NHS and old models of care, I sometimes think that as the system swings into action it leads you (as a patient) into greater dependency and need, of course at much greater cost to our public spending. Instead of advocating the old

‘assess-treat-refer’ model, I am interested in nurturing the prevention agenda, the first step being to promote a better understanding of the service – its problems and needs – before designing a solution.

I think that, in the NHS, we are great at assessing, but not so good at understanding or connecting the dots. With the drive to create more efficient and productive systems, we have come to standardise many aspects of the service delivery. I believe that the more we standardise, the less we create room to understand what really matters to individuals – patients and staff – and the more we risk duplicating work and wasting resources by making patients fit pathways of care that perhaps don't respond best to their actual needs. I would say that one of my goals is a move away from seeing health services as commodities – which is what they have become – to seeing them as relationships, which is what they used to be.

profiles

Julia Schaeper, service design lead, The NHS Institute of Innovation and Improvement

How Much Freedom Do You Have in Your Work? Is the NHS a Good Environment for Creative Problem Solving?

Supporting the NHS and those working for it in order to improve and innovate their services is crucial, especially in the straitened economic times we find ourselves in. Strategically, my work needs to align with wider policy agendas set out by the Department of Health and the NHS. We might be asked to look into particular areas or tackle subjects that relate to important policy developments. This typically gives me the framework to work within, and determines the level of creative problem solving that's required: i.e. knowing when to push for creativity and when to let go. In my day-today work, I feel empowered to apply

creative problem solving and take patients and staff with me on that journey. Prototyping is key, accepting that there is a risk of failure and a need to get up and try again, and the environment at the Institute is one where this type of trial-and-error is encouraged. So, yes, while there is a good sensibility for creative problem solving, it will always have to be grounded in political realities.

How Do Service Design Tools Fit into This Environment?

They fit well, especially given relevant policy documents including Lord Darzi's 'High Quality Care for All', which is a couple of years old now. It states that quality of care can only be improved by analysing and understanding patient experiences.

That sort of policy development creates an appetite for tools and techniques that help to better engage with patients and understand their needs. Besides, most healthcare staff are keen to do this anyway, referring to many

service design methods as a 'nobrainer'. Service design tools can also complement existing and more widely spread ‘Lean Methodologies’ that, when combined, deliver great results.

What Are the Main Challenges You Face in Your Job? • Understanding takes time upfront: it can be challenging to get NHS teams to find the resources and motivation to understand complex problems and needs at the front end of the innovation process. Instead, people often revert to what they know best and start optimising components of the system, which leaves it more fragmented, more impersonal and disconnected.

• “But designers design chairs”: most people don't know the value service design can have in the context of problem solving and innovation.

I often have to explain myself and make sure I have my 'basic introduction to design thinking and service design' ready to go.

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By Miriam Becker

• Lost in translation: healthcare has its own jargon, and I need to be able to understand acronyms and management talk. If I want to be listened to, I need to speak in a language that others can comprehend. This can mean dropping design terminologies altogether.

• The bottom line: quantifying the impact of good design interventions and proving actual cost savings still remain a key challenge.

What Project Are You Working on At the Moment?

My main project is looking at type 2 Diabetes and exploring new ways of how the NHS can assist patients better in managing their condition and adapting healthier lifestyles that could reduce associated health issues, such as visual impairment, amputations and kidney and heart disease. I am also working with accident & emergency teams across the country to look at redesigning ambulatory emergency care services

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and, very soon, I will be working with my local hospital to improve community and hospital services for patients with sickle-cell disease.

innovation and to build in a pool of capabilities that will sustain your design interventions.

How Is Service Design Perceived In the British Health Sector?

I think people see it as being slightly challenging due to time and resource constraints, as mentioned earlier. However, most people I talk to are very excited about service design methods: they see the approach as an opportunity to establish a climate in which people feel it is OK to try out new ideas and to learn from failure, rather than punishing people for it.

Is There a Difference Between Designing Services for a Single Company and Designing for A Complex System? How Do You Apply Your Findings to Such a Big Institution?

The difference might be that when you design for a complex system, you are likely to have to rely on other people fulfilling their role well, by either driving the innovation process in the long run From Your Point of View, What or maintaining its outcomes as Competences Can Service your project finishes. In order to Designers Bring into the really inspire and enable Health Sector? service design at large In the The ability to scale, I believe you ection Profile s oducing tr in e • Move people from have to spend at b l il m we w es fro rsonaliti sign, e p t n re e 'organising' to least some time d diffe f service titionworld o c e ra th p designing' service figuring out how dents to u like to from stu ould yo w o h : • Visualise complex to create a culture w W ers. t us kno here? Le -designe e s e issues and break them of continuous l@servic journa

.org network

into smaller more tangible projects that can be actioned • Ask naive questions and challenge staff in a way that makes them have to step out of their day-to-day comfort zone and consider other viewpoints • Experiment and prototype in order to test ideas early, and at low cost • Develop tools that help build relationships between NHS organisations and patients: digging deep into people's needs, creating shared ownership and maintaining ongoing allegiances • Support the shift from 'doing things better' to 'doing better things'...

Please Share a Tip for Service Designers Who Are Confronted with Developing Services for Complex Systems.

Break that complexity down and find a focus. Keep planting lots of seeds. Appreciate the small steps as they translate into real outcomes, but don't loose sight of the bigger idea.

•

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dos & don’ts service design

We Love You to Stay Longer!?

On the first day, everything’s fine: in the hotel room there’s a bottle of water as a welcome, on a tray there’s a kettle, tea, coffee and even two packets of biscuits. On the second day, the tea that I’ve drunk is replaced, but not the water or biscuits. On the third day, there isn’t even any more tea. After a phone call, the teabags are replaced, but the water and biscuits are only complimentary on the first day. That’s a mistake in the system: guests who stay longer are more profitable for the hotel, so longer stays should be rewarded!

Their motto should be "We love you to stay longer – and we show it!"

Birgit Mager, Cologne, Germany

Good Morning One foggy, freezing morning, still tired, I went to get my morning coffee from ‘Cafébar’, like I do every morning.

And, like every morning, I was late and stressed. After waiting in the queue, I finally got my coffee. I didn't even look at the girl behind the counter.

But then, while I was turning to leave, she said: “Hey, wait! Christmas time is starting. Look! We have a little advent calendar for our customers. So every morning you’ll have a piece of chocolate with your coffee.” She smiled at me and I realised that the day was going to turn out to be a good one.

Lena Hammes, Trier, Germany

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Take Care of the Details In October we booked our flight tickets to travel to the SDN Global Conference in San Francisco. On this trip we did not have a lot of luck... First governmental mechanics discovered defects on the plane so that our trip started with a two hour delay. We landed in Philadelphia aware that we had lost our connection

Make Up For It! The membership fee for a children’s sports club was debited twice from our bank account. We discovered this when we checked our bank statements and reported the mistake.

The accountant apologised, send us back the money and that was that!

We would have been happy with a small token of compensation – a sticker or a balloon or something...

Astrid van der Auwera, Cologne, Germany

photos: thermos jug – Tamorlan, airplane – Ante Perkovic, brussels sprouts – Rüdiger Wölk (from wikimedia), advent calendar – Lenna Hammes

flight to San Francisco. When we approached the airline desk to replace our tickets we realized that the new tickets were for the day after! After one more unsuccessful try to catch another flight, we made our way to the hotel near the airport just to discover that the airline reserved only one room for my boss and me! Neither the receptionist nor the non-ending answering machine of the airline hotline could help us.

So we had to pay ourselves for the other room. Approaching the airline information desk at the airport the next morning we had to find out that the two women sitting there were not helpful either as they just told us: “We can’t do anything, you should send an email to the following email

address…”. After a last six hour flight, with no free food on-board, we arrived in San Francisco with no intention of traveling with this airline again...

The only good thing was that our arline tried to compensate the failures, but as they did not take attention to the details the overall experience stays bad.

Ione Ardaiz, Madrid, Spain

share your service experiences The ‘Dos and Don’ts’ page in Touchpoint is a special feature that 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 few lines describing the situation depicted illustrating your personal service design highlights (or lowlights) to: journal@service-designnetwork.org. The Service Design Network office sifts through the all

How to Prepare Brussels Sprouts Visiting an organic farmers market in my town, I was pleased that the man at the stall not only provided me with fresh vegetables from my region, but also gave me some tips for preparing them. That’s a service you won’t get in a supermarket! (For those of you who don’t know yet: if you want to make sure that your Brussels sprouts don’t taste bitter, you better freeze them one time before you cook them...)

stories that you send us and chooses three to four examples for publication in each issue.

Miriam Becker, Cologne, Germany

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By Birgit Mager

From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet Shaping the Future of Service Design Network This year, the SDN Members Day was hosted by Adaptive Path, in a fabulous location at San Francisco harbour that provided both great views and space for open and intense discussion about the activities and goals of the Network. The last four years of the SDN have been amazing. We have seen a growing community all over the world, great national and global conferences, growing national activities, great publications and intense discussions in many channels.

Birgit Mager, Co-founder of SDN, professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany

Beyond all this success, there are issues to focus on: the need for a more precise definition of the overall mission and strategy of the SDN; and the necessity of building structures that can really shape this growth are the current important topics.

4

Individuals

6

Students

44

reg egis eg gistered as Corpo r rate Members rpo

Companies

including two public institutions

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Universities and other Academia

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189 Members

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Today the SDN aims to • Reach out to institutions and companies all over the world, creating awareness of service design and getting them to apply service design, using external consultancy or in-house service designers.

• Nourish and connect the knowledge within the community, broadening the scope of shared theoretical and methodological expertise.

• Strengthen the quantity and quality of educational offerings, ensuring that a sufficient number of qualified young service designers are available to fulfil the growing demand.

Agencies counting Service Desig esign esig gn Agencies, s Consulting s, onsulting, onsulting g, Business Innovation etc.

SDN member structure 2011 – find more information in the complete annual report at the SDN wesbite

inside sdn

• Supporting networks between students, PhDs, agencies, academics and companies.

• Building platforms for global and for national interests and needs.

involve yourself locally

the netherlands france

germany austria south korea

What has been done so far?

The SDN’s annual report gives an overview of the activities that have taken place in 2011. You can download the report on the SDN website.

What Will Happen Next?

• We will create more opportunities for members to take ownership of the SDN and to actively get involved in making the network impactful and successful.

• We will continue the process of stabilising the financial situation and of professionalising the management of the SDN • The SDN’s discussion about business strategy and value creation will be moved forward.

• Please connect and be part of these developments, contribute your thoughts and your active involvement and – if you have not already done so – become a member, in order to support the strengthening of this emerging field!

At present, there are five SDN national chapters

Since January 2011, members of the Service Design Network have started founding the first national SDN chapters. This way, we will develop active local communities that are closely connected to the global development of service design knowledge and practice. The chapters respond to national needs and interests and provide space to personally interact with peers. The more people join, the more lively a community can be! So we invite you to actively get involved in your local chapter. At present, there are chapters in Austria, Denmark, Germany, France and Korea. Use this opportunity to co-create the network, get to know and exchange ideas with the local service design community and to organise and take part in service design events in your country! All representatives will be happy to hear from you! Look up the national representatives and their contacts here:

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http://bit.ly/sdnnationalchapter If there is no national chapter in your country yet and you are a service design professional who is rooted in the SDN community and enthusiastic about building one, we’d love to hear from you! Check out the little application form (link) and a short how-to-guide (link) online and contact us with information about you and your motivation!

We’d love to get you involved, so please don’t hesitate to contact us!

welcome students, young professionals and individuals SDN is encouraging everybody working in service design and learning about it to join the network!

We recently set the stage for individuals, young professionals and students, making it affordable for them to be part of this fast-growing community. From now on, SDN will offer three types of membership: corporate membership, individual membership and student membership. Students and PhD

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members will not only receive a free subscription of Touchpoint, they will also benefit from publishing their profile and articles on the SDN website and will have priority booking for student tickets for Service Design Conferences and for the student and PhD Days during the annual Service Design Conference. Join now and get socialising with the service design community! You can find all the information on our website: http://bit.ly/sdnstudentmembership An interesting note for all of you who are planning to study for a PhD: a first meeting of PhD candidates in service design from

all over the world took place in San Francisco this year. Together, they plan to build a networking system that will provide a unique chance to meet and connect – as well as receive feedback on – working processes from colleagues or possible mentors. The PhD network is in the pipeline: stay tuned!

Besides the corporate memberships Service Design Network now offers two new memberships types

Corporate Membership

Individual Membership

Student Membership

for businesses, agencies and academics

for young professionals, self employed and individually interested

for bachelor, master and PhD students showing their study certificate

includes 1 user

includes 1 user

includes 10 users

bu to u c y hpo onlin int e

share your work

You might have already noticed that we have reworked the SDN website. It’s now more visually appealing and it offers brand-new features! One feature is a section called ‘Share’ that you can find inside the ‘Learn’ section. We created it to offer you an open space to publish your work and your findings and to discuss them with the community. As a member of the SDN, you are warmly invited to publish papers, articles, theses, methods and case studies connected with service design. Have a look and read the first online articles!

Moreover, Touchpoint now has its own space at the SDN website and can be accessed more easily. Visit www.servicedesign-network.org to view all the new features and contents!

If you would like to share your ideas and to help put more of them into practice, then you can either get in touch with the founders of the national chapters in your country or contact the SDN office at info@service-design-network.org!

Touchpoint, the SDN Service Design Journal, was launched in May 2009 and is the first journal on service design worldwide. Each issue focusses on one topic and features news and trends, interviews, insightful discussions and case studies. All issues of Touchpoint are available on the SDN website both as printed version and ebook. To purchase single issues or an annual suscription of three issues per year visit http://bit.ly/sdntouchpoint

d A r u o Place Y t n i o p ch in Tou Do you want to make your institution or company known throughout the world of services? Do you want to grab the interest of future students, employees or customers? Then seize the chance and advertise in Touchpoint – the first and only international service design magazine! We have set up interesting new advertising packages including free copies of the journal. Members of SDN will enjoy special discounts! Download the Mediasheets here: http://bit.ly/tpmedia

By Rikke B E Knutzen, Nicola Morelli and Katrine Rau Ofenstein

Service Design Network Denmark Has Completed Boarding

Service Design has been gaining a foothold in Denmark in both the private and public sectors, and the attention to the field is growing more with each day that passes. In recent years, professionals have taken charge and have spread the word of service design to help it fully take root in Denmark.

The National Chapter’s mission is to bond various sectors and professions by establishing a versatile networking scene. This mission is also reflected in the diversity of the founding members. MAN PrimeServ is a strong global supplier of after-sales services for diesel engines in ships and power stations. With a high service-orientation and technical competence, they provide a comprehensive spare part program and global support 24/7, 365. Aalborg University Department of Architecture, the sdn denmark board members Design and Media Technology (AD:MT) educates students in problem-based design solutions and has a research unit on Rikke B E Knutzen, Nicola Morelli, Katrine Rau Ofenstein, service design. business development associate professor, service designer, M.Sc. Aalborg Universimanager, PrimeServ, PhD, Aalborg Eng. Industrial Design ty was one of the M.Sc. Eng. Industrial University, AD:MT first educational Design. representative

Service Design Network Denmark was founded as a National Chapter on the 5th of August 2011, when the founding meeting of SDN Denmark took place in a small apartment in Aalborg. Katrine Rau Ofenstein had just returned from international work experience and felt a need for the service design scene to grow in Denmark. With this in mind, SDN Denmark was established, together with MAN PrimeServ and Aalborg University.

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establishments in Denmark to focus on teaching industrial designers about service design.

SDN Denmark will function as a virtual and physical platform, where business professionals, designers, employees within the public sector and students and researchers can come together and share knowledge and experience.

Designing services in Denmark has roots going back to the 1970s, when a major part of the Danish National Hospital System was established. During recent years, the term ’service design’ has been acknowledged as a professional field of practice in Denmark. This is evident through the increase in the number of service design publications, growing focus on service design in education systems and the diversity in fields of service design implementation across the country.

SDN Denmark has already hosted the first three Service Design Drinks events in Aalborg, Århus and Copenhagen and is ready for the next step of the journey. Denmark has completed boarding and is ready to exchange knowledge across borders.

For more information about SDN Denmark, see the LinkedIn Group (http://linkd.in/pzquVM).

•

By Christophe Tallec

‘Bonjour’ Service Design Network France!

photo: Didier B /wikimedia commons

On June 24 and 25, the first National Service Design Network Conference France took place, bringing together more than a hundred participants. A panorama of case studies provided by international keynote speakers, as well as by French key players, agencies and companies, introduced the practice and theory of service design in a range of industries. It revealed and highlighted the existing practice and set of methodologies used in France.

Check out the program and presentations for day one (keynote speakers) and day two (workshops) on the Service Design Network website: http://bit.ly/sdncfrance2011. This first National Service Design Network Conference was staged thanks to our main sponsor, Nekoé and its co-organisers, SDN, Apci and Utilisacteur,

with sponsorship in kind from Ensad, Ensci/les Ateliers and IFM. The excitement and the enthusiasm generated by the conference led us today to announce the Service Design Network France, a French chapter aiming to promote service design practice nationally, to introduce the French approach to service design within the international network and to act

as a platform to generate and share resources with its members, service design practitioners and enthusiasts, as well as other service innovation stakeholders.

SDN France’s next move is to exhibit in the French pavilion, organised by APCI and UBIFRANCE, during the IDA Congress Taipei. Visit the chapter website: http://bit.ly/sdnfrance.

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the sdn france board members

Anne Marie Boutin, president of the French design promotion agency, APCI, which she founded in 1983.

Yo Kaminagai, APCI board member and RATP design manager for the director of the Department of Environment, Property and Heritage.

Giuseppe Attoma, founder and director of the Attoma agency.

Paul Pietyra, founder of Nekoé

Christophe Tallec, co-founder Utilisacteur / Uinfoshare

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the conference in numbers service design conference 2011 san francisco

conference contributions by country submmited approved

norway sweden

finland

denmark uk

the netherlands

canada belgium usa

spain portugal

germany turkey

france switzerland

austria

korea

italy mexico

india

singapore

brazil australia

australia

09 | 02

austria

04 | 01

belgium

02 | 01

brazil

04 | 01

canada

04 | 02

denmark

01

finland

04

france

04 | 02

germany

12 | 02

india

01

italy

01

korea

01 | 01

mexico

02

norway

04

portugal

01

singapore

01

spain

03

sweden

05 | 02

switzerland

01

34

114

turkey

01

uk

16 | 06

usa

28 | 12

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Graphics: Mauro Rego

the netherlands 05 | 02

registrations

330

attendants

non-members sdn members students new members speakers

129

66

290

41 34 20

registrations

sdn team volunteers guest / sponsors

attendants non-members sdn members students new members speakers others australia austria belgium brazil canada chile china denmark finland france germany india italy jamaica japan korea mexico new zealand norway poland portugal spain sweden switzerland the netherlands taiwan uk usa

12 03 02 06 16 03 01 13 12 08 27 01 02 01 11 16 02 01 06 01 01 02 09 01 08 01 16 149

finland

norway

canada usa uk

the netherlands

denmark

germany poland france

austria japan

belgium spain portugal

mexico jamaica

brazil chile

switzerland italy korea india

china new zealand australia

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conference impressions

photos: Miriam Becker / Christina Kinnear / Jeannette Weber

service design conference 2011 san francisco

94

95

student day impressions

96

members day impressions

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member map

service design network Denmark Aalborg University - School of Architecture and Design, Aalborg Implement Consulting Group, Hørsholm Innovation Center Copenhagen, Copenhagen MAN Diesel & Turbo, Frederikshavn Norway AHO University, Oslo Designit, Oslo Making Waves, Oslo The Netherlands Delft University of Technology , Delft Dr. Kominski's Social Service Design, Amsterdam Edenspiekermann, Amsterdam Informaat, Baarn Media Catalyst, Amsterdam MOC consultants, Breda Océ-Technologies B.V., Venlo Philips Research, Eindhoven Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, Rotterdam Service Science Factory, Maastricht T+Huis, Eindhoven The Other Side Of The Moon, Amsterdam Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht zilver innovation bv, Rotterdam Luxembourg integratedPlace, Luxembourg Belgium CIC, Yvoir Kite Consultants, Waarschoot Originn, Brussels Namahn, Brussels Yellow Window, Antwerpen

France Attoma, Paris Axance, Paris Ingersoll Rand, Angers NEKOE, Orleans Orange-ftpgroup, Paris Uinfoshare, Paris USER STUDIO, Paris Voyages-sncf.com, Paris VEEB DESIGN, Rhone Canada Ascent Group, Vancouver Cooler Solutions, Toronto lvl studio, Montreal YuCentrik Inc., Montréal USA Adaptive Path, San Francisco Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburg Continuum, West Newton facebook, Palo Alto Genentech, Inc, San Francisco Info Retail, Atlanta Lopez Negrete Communications Inc., Houston Mc Donald´s Corporation, Oak Broo Moment, New York Parsons The New School for Design, New York RKS Design, Thousand Oaks SCAD University, Savannah Skyworks Solutions Inc., Woburn The Service Design Group, Chapel Hill THE MEME, Cambridge Mexico Afirme Financial Group, San Pedro Garza Garcia insitum, Mexico City Colombia Los Andes University, Bogota Brazil Driven Design Intelligence, Belo Horizonte Igorsaraiva.com, Brasilia UFRJ/COPPE- Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - DESIS group, Rio de Janeiro UFSC, Santa Catarina Chile Procorp, Metropolitana Ireland Centre for Design Innovation - Institute of Technology Sligo, Sligo Portugal University of Madeira – Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Funchal

Spain FunkyProjects, Bilbao

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United Kingdom Capita, London Design London | Imperial College Business School, London Design Wales, Cardiff Engine, London Eurostar Group Ltd, London Flywheel Ltd, Beaconsfield IDEO, London live|work, London Naked Eye Research, London NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, Warwick Prospect , London Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield Seren Partners, London STBY, London University of Dundee, Dundee Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd, Crawley Vodafone, Coventry

Germany Fjord, Berlin gravity, Munich Hoffmann Consulting, Hamburg KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe Köln International School of Design, Cologne Macromedia Hochschule für Medien und Design, Munich MetaDesign, Berlin service works, Cologne Southwalk., Rheine StrategicPlay, Hamburg Sturm & Drang, Hamburg Tieto Deutschland, Eschborn T-Labs, Berlin Volkswagen, Wolfsburg Whitespring, Munich Work•Play•Experience, Schwaig ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Kiel Sweden Bisnode AB, Stockholm Business & Design Lab University of Gothenburg, Göteborg Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg Ergonomidesign, Bromma Design Västerbotten, Umeå Doberman, Stockholm Linköping University, Linköping Transformator, Stockholm Slovenia Gorenje design studio d.o.o., Velenje Finland Culminatum Ltd Oy , Espoo e21 Solutions Oy, Helsinki Grey Direct & Digital, Helsinki Invest in Finland, Helsinki Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences, Jyväskylä Kuopio University of Design, Kuopio Lahti University of Applied Sciences, Lahti Laurea University of Applied Sciences , Espoo Palmu Inc., Helsinki Yatta Corporation Ltd., Helsinki Estonia Brand Manual, Tallinn University of Tartu, Pärnu College, Pärnu Poland Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny w Poznaniu, Poznan Austria DTF Business Development GmbH, Vienna IITF - Institut für Innovations- und Trendforschung, Graz ISN - Innovation Service Network GmbH, Graz MCI Management Center Innsbruck, Innsbruck Mobilkom Austria, Vienna tourismusdesign, Tulln an der Donau Japan Keio University, Tokyo China Guangzhou Acadamie of Fine Art, Guangzhou Jiangnan University, Wuxi TUSD Tsinghua University, Beijing Korea Creative Design Institute, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon CYPHICS, Seoul design BNR Co. Ltd., Seoul Handong Global University, Pohang Hansung University, Seoul Hyun Kim, Seoul i-CLUE DESIGN, Seoul KAIST Information-based Design Research Group, Daejeon Kaywon School of Art and Design, Gyeonggi-do Korean German Institute of Technology, Seoul Kyung-jin Hwang, Seoul NCsoft Corporation, Seoul Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd, Suwon-si SK Telecom, Seoul teaminterface, Seoul Yonsei University, Seoul Xener Systems, Seoul

Italy Experientia, Torino Domus Academy, Milano Politecnico di Milano - Facoltá del Design, Milano Switzerland customfuture SA, Baar Dimando AG, Zurich Luzern Universtiy of Applied Sciences and Arts, Luzern Sketchin Sagl, Manno Stimmt, Zurich Nigeria House of Logic, Lagos Intels Nigeria Ltd., Port Harcourt

Australia BT Financial Group, Sydney Huddle Design, VIC Melbourne Meld Studios, Stanmore Proto Partners, Sydney Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne Symplicit, Melbourne University of Canberra, Bruce

New Zealand DNA, Wellington Ministry of Justice New Zealand, Wellington Taiwan Chili Consulting Corp., Taipei Institute for Information Industry, Taipei Taiwan Design Center, Taipei

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About Service Design Network The Service Design Network is a forum for practitioners and academics to advance the field of service design. Our purpose is to develop and strengthen the knowledge and expertise in the science and practise of innovation.

Service Design Network Office | Ubierring 40 | 50678 Cologne | Germany | www.service-design-network.org

Photo: Martin Koziel

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