Touchpoint Vol. 4 No. 3 - Cultural Change by Service Design

Page 1

volume 4 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

January 2013

Cultural Change by Service Design Living Service Worlds ÂŹ How Will Services Know What You Intend? Shelley Evenson

Complete Small, Affordable and Successful Service Design Projects By Chris Brooker

A Time Machine for Service Designers By Julia Leihener and Dr. Henning Breuer


Touchpoint Touchpoint Volume 4 No. 3 January 2013 The Journal of Service Design ISSN 1868-6052 Publisher Service Design Network Chief Editor Birgit Mager Editorial Board Robert Bau Nancy Birkhölzer Jesse Grimes Media Board Robert Bau Jesse Grimes Craig La Rosa Roberto Saco Project Management & Art Direction Claire Allard Design Concept Continuum Cover Picture Claire Allard Pictures Unless otherwise stated, the copyrights of all images used for illustration lie with the author(s) of the respective article

Proofreading Tim Danaher Printing

peipers – DruckZentrum Kölnwest Fonts Mercury G3 Whitney Pro Service Design Network gGmbH Mülheimer Freiheit 56 D-51063 Köln Germany www.service-design-network.org Contact & Advertising Sales Claire Allard journal@service-design-network.org Touchpoint Subscription For ordering or subscribing to Touchpoint, please visit www.service-design-network.org/ tp-catalog Touchpoint is also available as ebook via amazon.


from the editors

Cultural Change by Service Design

Each year, we always know when autumn is drawing near: days grow shorter, the warmth of summer becomes a fading memory and the service design community congregates for the global SDN conference. The conference traces its roots back to 2008, when the SDN itself was just one year old. That year’s event took place in Amsterdam, my hometown. Just over 280 of us filled a canal-side venue, and the talks and discussions were fuelled by the energy of a young organisation and by the knowledge that we were forerunners in a design discipline that was just starting to gain widespread attention. Successive autumns saw our meeting place change. The financial crisis conspired with a remote location to make 2009’s Madeira conference a more intimate affair, before returning to mainland Europe for 2010’s gathering in Berlin. The year 2011 saw us aiming to make a mark in the nascent US service design industry, with San Francisco as the venue. And, in late 2012, we returned to the other side of the Atlantic, where the City of Light – Paris – hosted our most recent gathering. Over the years, the theme of each conference has reflected topical issues within the service design community as a whole. Early conferences had their fair share of soul-searching and efforts to delineate just what is service design. Thankfully, the discipline is established enough to focus less on our own identity, and we’ve turned our gaze outwards: How do we (as practitioners, academics, and those in research) interact with the outside world? One issue in particular formed an underlying theme to the Paris conference, which was titled 'Cultural Change by Design'. That is, how does service design engage with the world of business? And this will continue to be an important topic throughout 2013, because the SDN has taken the strategic decision to focus more on the interaction between service design and business, targeting the creation of value for both. This focus on how service design can best engage with business came about because, more and more, service designers are being confronted with the commercial and organisational implications of their endeavours. One issue is that widespread changes to a service often entail equally broad changes within the organisation that provides it. Therefore, for better or worse, designers find themselves influencing or initiating change management activities in an organisation. Several talks in Paris focused precisely on this topic, including those by Stefan Moritz and Christian Lafrance, and Laura Keller and Lisa Woodley. Following the Paris conference, I interviewed the latter three speakers to learn more about their thoughts on this challenging intersection. You can find that discussion on page 38 of this issue of Touchpoint. Secondly, the success that service design has had in establishing itself in the business world has brought with it its own new set of challenges. When projects are relatively small, expenditure might be limited and less scrutiny is applied to the approach. However, large scale projects inevitably attract the attention of board-level executives, and this means that service designers are faced with a new challenge: being able to speak the language of business. We’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who took part in making the Paris conference a success, and we’re looking forward to continuing the tradition next autumn, in a new location. We’ve dedicated this issue to covering the conference (as well as the counterpart German national conference, held earlier in 2012), to continue the discussion, and share our thoughts with those who did not attend. We hope to see you all again in late 2013!

Jesse Grimes for the editorial board

Birgit Mager is professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), 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. 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 Informaat. Jesse is the principal of the SDN Media Board. Prof. Robert Bau is a creative strategist and designer thinker who divides his time between lecturing, consulting, mentoring and writing. Based in Savannah and London, he works across the world on a consultancy basis for a wide range of blue-chip clients, start-up ventures, and creative consultancies. He is also managing the B.F.A. and M.F.A. programs in service design at SCAD. Nancy Birkhölzer is a Managing Partner at IxDS. There, she connects academic research, industrial product development and her service design expertise to design transformative products and services. She co-hosted this years National Service Design Network Conference, frequently teaches and lectures on service design.

touchpoint

3


54 feature: cultural change by design 14 Design, Designers and

38 Perspectives on Service Design

and Change Management

Laura Keller and Lisa Woodley,

Christian Lafrance, Jesse Grimes International Development: Making Practical Interventions 42 Department of Human Services more Strategic Service Design Journey Based on Nabeel Hamdi's speech

6

20 Sandwiches, Champions and

Sliced Elephants Stefan Moritz

24 Service Disciplines: Who does 2

imprint

3

from the editors

6

news

forrester’s take 10 Three Ways to Create

4

46 From Field Stories to Strategic

Design

Dr. Bas Raijmakers, Dr. Geke van Dijk, Katherine Gough

What, When, Where and How? 50 Living Service Worlds ¬ How Mauricio Manhães Will Services Know What You Intend? 28 Complete Small, Affordable Shelley Evenson and Successful Service Design Projects 54 Facilitator-aided Innovation Chris Brooker

32 Small Change: Nurturing

a Customer-Centric Culture

a Shift in the Culture of Care

Kerry Bodine

Julia Schaeper

touchpoint

Cybelle Buursink

Thierry Curiale and Matthew Marino

58 Connections and Cloakrooms at

the SDNC 2012

Irene Chong and Timothea Horn


contents

74 creating value(s) 62 From Shareholder Value

to Shared Values Birgit Mager

66 Designing Transformative

Services

Nancy Birkhรถlzer and Melanie Wendland

86

70 Balancing Value with

Alignment Diagrams Jim Kalbach

74 A Time Machine for Service

Designers

Julia Leihener and Dr. Henning Breuer

80 Conference in Germany Nancy Birkhรถlzer and Thomas Schรถnweitz

84 Designing for Love Ji-Hye Park

inside sdn 86 Global Conference

Impressions

90

member map touchpoint

5


Insider

happy new year 2013! Touchpoint’s team wishes you all the best for the year to come! In 2013 we are entering the fifth year of Touchpoint's publication and we look forward to continuing to provide you interesting articles about service design!

watch conferences videos online In this issue, you will read articles about topics that were discussed during the national conferences in Germany and Korea, in addition to the global conference, which took place in France. If you didn’t have the chance to attend the conferences, or if you would like to go over it again, check out sdn website! You will find the videos of the keynotes speeches along with some presentations from the German and global conferences on www.sdnc12.de and www.sdnc12.com

the first service design seminar of sdn beijing chapter On November 22nd 2012, SDN Beijing held a service design seminar at Beijing Institute of Technology in Beijing, China. The seminar lasted for a whole day and more than 150 people attended it. The seminar introduced some hot topics on service design, explored the orientation of service design education and industry practice and promoted the exchange and progress in China’s service design circle. For those who want to know more or review the presentations, please visit the website: http://www.servicedesign.cn Luoqi 6

touchpoint


service design drinks in lisbon and são paulo On October 11th 2012, two cities united by language and history, but separated by an ocean, began to unite for a new purpose: to promote service design in their local communities. What an ocean separates, information technology connects. This was the first comingtogether of two recent chapters of SDN (Brazil and Portugal) to conduct the event called Service Design Drinks, which linked Lisbon and Sao Paulo. The event hosted by the two chapters was attended by approximately 30 people in each city. There was a transmission of lectures to each city on the subject of service design and technology. Lisbon watched a lecture by designer Erico Fileno, who spoke about the concept of wayfinding applied to location services in urban spaces and São Paulo attended lectures by designers Maria Coutinho and Mafalda Moreiro about ‘smart’ cities. Besides the lectures, each city promoted an

activity with the aim of exchanging information. Represented by Mafalda Moreiro, Maria Coutinho and Susana Branco, SDN Portugal worked together with SDN Brazil, represented by Denise Eler, Erico Fileno, Fabio Amado, Gustavo Bittencourt and Igor Saraiva. This event was the first partnership between the two chapters. We hope that other events and experiences can be exchanged in the future. Furthermore, we want our experience to be disseminated by other SDN chapters! Erico Fileno

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

members’ benefits Touchpoint Vol. 4 No. 3 – as well as all previous issues – is available through our website in PDF and ebook version for SDN members! Each member receives a login and a password when they become part of the network, while corporate membership includes five accounts. With this SDN account, the members can log in to the website. Once in the members’ area, a 'download' tab appear in the 'journal' section. SDN members can then access all Touchpoint journals, from the first publication in May 2009 till now!

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

@southwalk

www.southwalk.de


designing business and services conference

#

DBS

DESIGNING BUSINESS AND SERVICE

The aim of this year’s conference is to develop the necessary discourse around designing in the contexts of

5th international service innovation & design seminar On March 14th, Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Espoo (Finland) will, for the fifth, time host the International SID Seminar. This year‘s topic is ‘Design (f)or Value in Service Business?’ This seminar tackles questions such as: • What is the role of design in value creation? • How do you ensure sustained value creation for all stakeholders? • How do you improve your competitive advantage? These questions, and others beside, are all at the centre of current service-oriented research and practice. The seminar targets business people, service designers, public servants, students and researchers. Join in and learn from cutting-edge keynotes, engaging workshops and vibrant discussions. One of the main seminar organisers is the newly established SDN Finland. www.laurea.fi /en/ leppavaara/servicedesign/events

business, services and management, and to deepen the understanding around the following topics: • Designing business as a service • Design thinking in business and service design • Designing policies and frameworks for services • Design management in contrast to business design

global service jam 2013

On the first weekend of March 2013, designers, students, academics, business people and customers interested in service and customer experience will meet at locations all over the globe. In a spirit of experimentation, innovation, cooperation and friendly competition, teams will have less than 48 hours to develop and prototype completely new services inspired by a shared theme. At the end of the weekend, their collection of brand new services will be published to the world. Find out in which cities the Global Service Jam will take place! http://www.globalservicejam.org/ locations

• Designing business systems and service systems • Limits of designing business, Limits of designing services The conference will take be held at the IED headquarters in Rome on the 18th and 19th April 2013. To read more information, visit the DBS website: http://dbs-2013.com/

discussions on change, value and methods Satu Miettinen and Anu Valkonen present in their book Service Design with Theory, which contains discussions and debates from three distinct areas of service design research: societal change, value co-creation and development of service design. This debate includes a strong multi-disciplinary approach and the research and development of service design methods. For more information about the book, check the blog: http://www.sdwiththeory.com


touchpoint ebooks back to the roots

speech of Watch the lhoff on Michael Er

www.sdnc

12.de

More than twenty years ago, the founding dean of the Köln International School of Design at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Prof. Dr. Michael Erlhoff, took the opportunity to create a completely new concept for design education. He had a very strong conviction that design is not about beautification of things but about solving relevant problems of our society and our economy. In consequence, areas of teaching like ecology & design, gender & design, design for manufacturing and others were defined. Michael Erlhoff was also convinced that specialisation of limited design knowledge does not enable designers to relate to the complex problems of our world. A learning environment of holistic and interdisciplinary learning, mutual inspirations and broad opportunities for discovery and experiment was created that would help students to develop a very broad understanding of design as a means of creating value. Still today, the educational approach of KISD has not lost its power – and it has often been copied. Service design, which was unique at the time Michael Erlhoff created the program, is today integrated into the design education of more then fifty design programs worldwide. Masters programs are being offered and PhD studies have been successfully implemented. Business schools start to offer service design in their curricula. Today the Service Design Network is rooted at Köln International School of Design and strengthens the development of this still young design field in theory and practice. Birgit Mager

touchpoint vol. 4 no. 2 "service design on stage" is now available as ebook! In addition to the printed version, you can read all issues of Touchpoint on your e-reader and on your computer. Enjoy the easy and fast access to leading-edge knowledge on service design and download the e-books on amazon!

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 international service design magazine! We have set up interesting advertising packages including free copies of the journal. Members of SDN will enjoy special discounts! Download the Mediasheets here: http://bit.ly/tpmedia

touchpoint

9


Three Ways to Create a Customer-Centric Culture

How important is corporate culture in delivering a great service? Over Forrester’s past fourteen years of research on customer experience, my colleagues and I have asked hundreds of executives at some of the world’s top companies about their organisational barriers and how best to overcome them. Year after year, they’ve dismissed the idea that organisational structure or reporting relationships can solve service-related issues. Instead, they assert that culture has the single biggest potential to drive real organisational transformations. Culture is one of those ‘squishy’ topics that people often have a hard time getting their heads around in a business context. To make this discipline more concrete, think of it as creating a system of shared values and behaviours. Customer-centric values are the building blocks for reprogramming your corporate DNA. And behaviours are how you turn customer-centric practices into habits that your company just can’t kick. So how exactly do you instil new corporate values and change employee behaviour? The answer lies in three primary tactics: hiring, socialisation and rewards. HIRE CANDIDATES WITH CUSTOMERCENTRIC VALUES

Screening candidates for customer10

touchpoint

centric values as part of the hiring and selection process is one of the most effective ways to shift the overall makeup of your workforce. Why? Because finding people whose values and personalities match your target culture is often easier than changing the underlying beliefs of current employees. In addition to probing for customer-centricity, you also need to screen potential candidates for the specific skills they’ll need to deliver on your organisation’s customer experience strategy. For example, some Best Buy electronics stores give applicants a New York Times crossword puzzle, an Internet connection and an hour to see how far they can get. The goal is to test applicants’ curiosity and facility

to learn, key traits in helping customers who have a broad range of ever-changing questions. And the trendy W Hotels Worldwide chain encourages employees to recruit staff from hip local bars and restaurants and to look for people who naturally exhibit actions in line with the hotel’s ‘Whatever/Whenever’ service obsession, which promises to provide guests with “Whatever you want, whenever you want it.” SOCIALISE THE IMPORTANCE OF CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY

While the hiring process focuses on finding people with the right personality traits and values, socialisation helps you establish new habits. And, while you can’t just wave a magic wand and change behaviours, you can embed new standards for employee behaviour through a combination of storytelling, rituals, and training. Storytelling highlights real instances of customer-centric behaviour and gives employees tangible examples of thinking from the customer’s perspective. Zappos, the online retailer that has become famous for its customer-centric culture and service, has a 'Wow Library' of praiseworthy recorded calls that its customer service representatives can tap into at any time for inspiration on how to better open a conversation or explain a company policy.


forrester’s take

Rituals are activities that you integrate into employees’ regular routines to reinforce what it takes to deliver a great experience. For example, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company has a daily fifteen-minute line-up used globally across all of its properties. This ritual includes a storytelling session during which its employees, who are referred to as 'Ladies and Gentlemen', share the great things they did for guests the day before. Training programs are an effective way to communicate your customer experience strategy and share customer insights. Training also helps employees develop the specific skills they need to participate in human-centred design projects, interpret customer experience metrics, or simply do their regular jobs in a more customercentric way. Many companies think about training primarily as an activity for new employees — and certainly, onboarding is a fantastic time to indoctrinate employees into your customer-centric ways. But it’s never too late to teach current employees new tricks. REINFORCE NEW VALUES AND BEHAVIOURS THROUGH INFORMAL AND FORMAL REWARDS.

To keep employees focused on what’s important, you need to back up your hiring and socialisation practices with the right types of incentives. These include informal rewards that recognise personal achievement and formal rewards that compensate

employees based on customer-centric metrics. Informal rewards programs– like certificates, prizes, and perks– celebrate customer-centric behaviour and do not typically take a lot of time or money to plan or execute. For example, the Starbucks Green Apron awards program encourages employees “...to create a positive environment by aspiring to be welcoming, genuine, knowledgeable, considerate and involved.” There’s no nomination process for these awards: employees simply present them to each other at formal and informal plant, department, store, district and regional meetings. Formal rewards programs are used to structure raises, bonuses and promotions around customerfocused metrics. Because they put hard cash in employees’ pockets and can significantly boost their career paths, these initiatives take more rigour to implement. Companies ranging from Philips Electronics to Maersk Line, one of the world’s largest container shipping companies, tie employee bonuses to Net Promoter Score targets. And insurance company Allstate ties its retirement savings match to a customer loyalty index for eighty percent of company staff, including all of its customer-facing employees.

a customer-centric and servicefocused culture. Rather than forcing any particular culture-shifting tactic on their organisation, executives should involve employees in building programs that will be broadly embraced by the workforce.

This article is based on the ideas in Forrester’s new book, “Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business”.

FORRESTER’S RECOMMENDATIONS

To ensure the long-term success of their service design initiatives, corporate leaders need to concurrently work on building

Kerry Bodine is vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research and the coauthor of Outside In. Her research, analysis, and opinions appear frequently on sites such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company.

touchpoint

11



Feature

Service Design Se rvice De Global on StagConference 2012 Exploring the Relationship Cultural Change by Design


Design, Designers and International Development: Making Practical Interventions more Strategic After Nabeel Hamdi's very inspiring speech, our chief editor asked him right away if we could publish his talk in Touchpoint, so the readers can enjoy the spontaneity of his speech... Nabeel Hamdi is Professor Emeritus of Housing and Urban Development at Oxford Brookes University.

14

touchpoint

This, I have to admit, is a very unfamiliar setting for me, in the sense that most of the time I am talking to architects, planners, engineers, sometimes artists, all of whom are involved in what we call ‘International Development’. My own focus, generally, has been to try and find ways in which designers, architects and engineers – all professions (in fact, I no longer care what the disciplinary core is) – can be made relevant to some of the big issues we face out there, which used to be somebody else’s problem. There’s a wonderful quote: “What a house does… is improve health, generate income, it gives you dignity, it creates employment…” Immediately my architect friend will say, “that’s none of my business…”. So my concern has been forever to try to engage many of the professions that I have been working with and teaching with in some of those strategic issues out there. And I’ll just remind you that cities, at least in the developing countries where I work, account for around four billion people. 1.4 billion of these people will be living in slums and they will be either insecure, vulnerable or otherwise poor.

And my question is: how do we engage with this ‘client group’? How do we actually bring our services to bear in a way that is meaningful? Let me tell you a little story that some of you may have heard, but bear with me, because I want to then unravel it. It’s the story of a bus stop. I was working in a neighbourhood – in fact, it was in Sri Lanka – a little while ago, and like we always do when we are starting off in our work we try and search for community – local organisations to engage with and work with. We architects usually make a couple of mistakes; the first mistake is to engage with those who have the loudest voice, and they may not be the most representative. The second mistake is to turn fairly complex processes into things, because then we can design it. For example, if you say ‘education’, I say ‘schools’; ‘play’, ‘playgrounds’; ‘housing’, ‘houses’. We made the same mistake in this case: we were talking about community, and I said, “What we really need is a community centre”. My colleague replied,


global conference - cultural change by design

“Well actually, there’s one not far from here that they’ve built and it looks – some people think – very good. But it hasn’t worked”. So I said “OK, let’s go and have a look at it – let’s see what’s going on”. And we went down there, and it looked pretty good to me: a nice building, new, something you could photograph, which we architects always like. We went into the first room, it was pretty nice, it had an old Singer sewing machine lined up; women were sewing clothes and doing all kinds of things. I said, “well, that’s pretty good – we call this ‘microenterprise’ ”. This guy said to me: “I don’t care what you call it; actually it has created an incredible division in the community between those who have access to this service at this centre, and those who normally create employment through their own home bases. Not only that, the business of making clothes has been appropriated by men, who now manage the programme and market the clothes and so on. So there is a gender distortion going on.” So I replied: “OK, I get your point.” We went into the next room and it was a child care centre and it looked nice, there were children playing; there were blackboards and games etc. I said, “this looks fantastic; how can you say ‘no’ to this?”. The guy said to me: “well actually, in our community, child care has been a networked and not a centre-based activity. It has been operated out of the front rooms of some of the older people, other friends, who not only look after the children but also take care of their integration into the community. So actually, this has distorted things again. Also, it has disadvantaged some of those who can make some money out of it, through child care etc., and actually taken it into the centre.” So I went into the clinic and the same sort of thing happened. As I walked away, I made one of those crazy comments that architects tend to make: “I see your point. But actually it looks nice; it’s a nice colour, it’s painted blue”. The guy replied, “No actually, it’s a very ugly colour: light blue represents the ethnic minority that controls us and it has created incredible divisions in the community”. How many mistakes can one make in a situation like this?!

I had noticed in many other areas what happens where the buses stop in some of the communities: the incredible activities that occur; the life that occurs around them, the cafés, the trading, the shops and so on. We thought to ourselves: why not negotiate with the bus company? It was a private bus company; the site was like this [draws curve in the air]: there was a road that went around the site, there was a little road [that goes] into the middle and goes out again. So we thought: “why don’t we bring the road and the bus into the site, put a bus stop in the middle, and we’ll just see what happens”. It sounds very simple, but it was actually quite complex, as this was a World Bank project, and World Bank doesn’t usually like bus stops (they usually like to invest in slightly bigger programmes). Anyway, we did that. The fish were taken to market by women. Inevitably, the bus arrived every two hours (it was not a ten-minute service), and if you are entrepreneurial, like most of the people that I work with, you lay out a sheet on the ground and while you are waiting for the bus, you sell fish. So [before long] a small market occurred. The town became known as a place that sold fresh fish, so people were coming in and going out, beginning to make connections. We also broke the rule – this was an upgrading project – of putting street lights every 100 metres and clustered these around where the buses were, because in most of these areas there is very little electricity in the houses. So children tend to do their homework outside under the street lights. So we thought that if we clustered them around touchpoint 15


where the buses are, it would provide a service in that way, with a few chairs being placed. And sure enough, kids would come out and do their homework, where the buses stop. And of course, as you all know, where children are, the person with the ice-cream van turns up, the guys with the toys, and paper and pencils – a whole community emerged. Then the guys around the bus stop thought, “this is crazy: why don’t we open up our front room as a café or as a shop?”. And so shops and cafés emerged, and the rest. Over a period of time, it became a thriving community centre. It did get its building in the end, but this was a recycling centre, to turn old materials into products that could be sold, so it was a useful centre – but it also became a place for meeting. So what does the bus stop story tell us insofar as our activities are concerned? I just want to unravel one or two key principles that have guided our work over this period of time. The first is very simple, straightforward and common sense: if you want to do something big, you start with something small, and you start where it counts. In other words, you start with something that has an immediate impact, but with a long-term strategic effect. The bus stop had a very practical agenda: getting the fish to market more easily for the women. It also had that longer-term strategic agenda, which was to do with building community and creating some sense of community in this particular neighbourhood and connecting it to the remainder of the city. Many of you I’m sure will have wonderful examples. For example, the 16

touchpoint

federation of water tap attendants: In most places I work, women and children look after the water tap, literally a standpipe. To reinforce that, you create a small enterprise around it, and various other enterprises in other parts of town. Then you federate these small water tap attendants into a community that elects representatives and which then becomes a part of the water authority. The water authority is delighted because it can’t possibly service all the slums and shanty towns and, of course, this is income for the communities themselves. We had a programme in Nepal, trying to raise awareness of what happens after the floods: the snakes come out and all the bites and so on. Of course, the programme was directed at children – forget the adults, they’re a complete waste of time – you work through the kids. It was a professional theatre group doing street theatre. Of course, behind all the kids were all the adults listening. The practical agenda was how to protect yourself from snake bites after the floods. The strategic agenda was much more on how you integrate environmental awareness back into the schools, and get the kids to teach the parents about environmental issues that are to do with water, sanitation, etc. Another wonderful example is firefighting in Delhi: It was a partnership between a local community and the firefighters because the firefighters couldn’t get their fire engines into the community - the streets were too


global conference - cultural change by design

narrow. It was a partnership between some of the men and women, who would act to protect the community from fire, should it occur. And then they became trainers to train people about how to reduce the risk of fire, because a lot of cooking was done on open stoves in the houses. The second lesson from the bus stop story: we adopted an ‘action science’ or ‘action planning’ approach, where learning and doing go in parallel, not in sequence. I was taught that first I should finish my thinking; when my thinking is finished, I can start doing. And we all know that is absolute rubbish, because by the time you’ve finished your thinking, usually you’ve run out of money to do anything. In Bangladesh when I was working with UNDP, it was wonderful; that process of trying to sort out our thinking over four years with data collection, etc. By the time you’d got to that point, the data was out of date. Things had changed, so we went back and did a bit more thinking; it was great; we didn’t have to do anything! We’re taught first to know and then to act; by the principles that I’ve been trying to talk about, i.e. the ‘small change’ principles: You act and then by reflection you know – what my colleague refers to as ‘reflective practice’. ‘Knowing in action’, as it were. I like to capture that in a comment that goes “don’t think too much before you start doing – and don’t do too much before you stop and think about it.”

Third, in the bus stop example, we reversed the usual planned sequence, which follows the routine of survey (you gather data; you analyse the data, and it tells you something about the costs, the institutional capacity etc.), you make a plan, and then you implement the plan. That sequence can take a substantial amount of time. My view is that if you are interested in unlocking the resources of a place, you must change that linear process of planning. In other words, you do something first; that doing tells you something about the larger plan that emerges, which of course has to be analysed in terms of its implications. And yes, you do have to go back and do a survey to look at some of the primary causes of the problems, which then links you back to more actions. But the process is reversed: you start by doing something. I suppose, in that respect, the coherence of the plan is improvised: It emerges incrementally and responds to problems and opportunities. And they arise mostly, certainly in the places that I work, in a fairly spontaneous and ad hoc touchpoint 17


fashion. My colleague once called that process of improvisation ‘design hacking’; he has a nice interpretation of it. He says, “Hacking represents reciprocity between the user and the designer. While it complicates authorship and challenges the designer’s instinct for control, hacking also breaks down barriers between design and people, and yields significant benefits in the process, creates new engagements between products and consumers; it mediates the relevance of necessity and design; it creates abundance from very limited resources.” Of course, most managers hate improvisation, because with improvisation you don’t quite know what’s going to happen next, which we didn’t at the bus stop. We wanted to be in control, which is the way we’re taught to be. The fourth key lesson from the bus stop story is that we learn to ask questions differently. We architects tend to be not so good at that. You reason backwards, from what you do, to what you are thinking about. Instead of asking “how can I build a community centre?”, you ask “how can we cultivate community?” in that particular case. Not, as is usual, with good intent: “what is the most I can do to help and how quickly can I do it?”. My question is always: “what is the least I need to do to get things going – and what help can we provide on the way?”. Another really interesting example: I was working in Chittagong in the southern part of Bangladesh, and there was a real problem of getting the school bus in to take the kids to school. And so we were trying to figure out how to get the school bus in. Of course it meant widening the roads, which meant displacing people, which meant 18

touchpoint

paving the roads – all the expense that went with that. Somebody at the back of the room put up their hand and asked “why do we keep talking about getting the school bus in? Why can’t we talk about getting the kids out?”. That unlocked a completely different set of alternatives. We had bicycle rickshaw drivers that were only halfemployed; we had welders on-site that made rickshaw cabinets; we partnered up the rickshaw drivers with the education authority as school bus drivers. Carriages contained about six kids that could effectively be taken to the school. The kids painted the school bus. They put their names on it, they painted different colours; it was very personalised and they couldn’t wait to get to school in the morning. On Saturdays there used to be these school bus races on public open space to see which school bus wins. Asking the question differently. [...] The fifth important lesson is that we added a strategic agenda to our first practical intervention. Making practice strategic demands at least the following considerations: first, inducing change. Change in our own professional conduct. We are always talking about change outside. Our own professional conduct as designers, architects and artists, where it’s not just the expert that is seen as a special kind of person, but every person out there is seen as a special kind of expert. And unless we believe that, participation is only consultation. It’s not real engagement. There is change in practice procedure and all the participatory processes, the engagement, the conflict resolution. There is the change that we induce when we intervene, and I’m talking about my own work: when we arrive wherever we arrive, inevitably, change is in the air – if only because I may represent an international authority, or whatever. Sometimes I like to think about practice as ‘disturbing’ the place where we intervene. Sometimes we’re invited to disturb; sometimes we disturb inadvertently, because we blunder in, and sometimes we disturb because of global requirements – there are changes required due to climate change, for example. We have to be aware of what it is that we are intervening to change. Then there is change that is integral to practice. The change is part of my process –


global conference - cultural change by design

and that’s not the way I was taught; I was taught as an architect that once I produced the product, once it was done, it was finished. There is no such thing as finished! There is a wonderful Egyptian adage when translated it goes ‘when a house is finished, the family dies’; in other words, there is no such thing as finished. We know that; it is constantly evolving. Why do we always think that a built environment is finished? I always find it very interesting that when change is threatening, we adopt all kinds of defence mechanisms. One of these, for example, is jargon, which we overly integrate into specialisation. I saw on an architect’s drawing once: ‘a node of interactive action’. Does anybody know what that is? [laughs] The bus stop! But turning it into a node of interactive action made is a highly specialised piece of activity. Simplification is another defence mechanism; we reduce everything to its common denominator. Particularly in the housing world, we say ‘the average family wants this’ – well what the heck is the average family? So we deny the unique, we deny the differences, because differences and uniqueness are complicated. We also exclude anything we don’t understand: certainly in many of the non-literate communities I work in, where many of the needs are sung to you or expressed in theatre, we tend to say well if it can’t be written down, it can’t be of value, it can’t be counted; we put it aside. Certainly, I would find it very difficult to take a small group to the World Bank and they would sit there and sing their needs to the World Bank. Adding strategic value means inducing change; it means crossing boundaries, boundaries between levels of organisations, boundaries between disciplines, boundaries between knowledge and know-how, i.e. thinking and doing. Becoming more strategic also means dealing with the primary cause of problems and not just the symptoms. We’re very used to the symptoms of problems: “the house is bad”; “fine, I’ll fix it, I’m an architect, it won’t take me any time at all”. But the question is why is it bad in the first place? Again, you very quickly get into ‘it’s bad because people are excluded, there’s poverty, there’s no employment, there are ethnic

differences, discrimination’. ‘But that’s none of my speech of business!’: I’m immediately Watch the mdi o n out of that again. nabeel ha So, again, what are the primary causes – and I like to in my own discussions and surveys to challenge everyone, I walk around and follow the question, I see what I see very clearly – what am I looking at? Becoming strategic means managing constraints. I like to think of constraints as a context to our work, that may have to be worked towards over a long period of time to disentangle, and constraints that are an actual barrier. Somebody comes to me and says “I’ve got a great proposal, it’s fantastic, but I can’t do it until the government changes” and I reply, “Well, that’s not a good proposal”. Constraints analysis – the way in which we partner up people that can open doors – becomes a really interactive, participatory process. And then of course, there is strategic action of scaling up: lots of great, small projects is fine, but how do we scale them up? And we’re talking not just about scaling up numbers – I did a wonderful house, and now I can do 20,000 – but scaling up ideas, scaling up methods and scaling up impact. A small idea built into a small project can have a fantastic impact if we can begin to negotiate its place and its space, politically and otherwise. [...] Thank you very much.

www.sdnc

12.com

This text is a transcription from Nabeel Hamdi's speech at the Service Design Global Conference 2012. The transcription has been made by Steve Deegan.

touchpoint 19


Sandwiches, Champions and Sliced Elephants Corporate Cultural Change by Design

Stefan Moritz is Global Director of Service Solutions at Aegis Media. Featured as a notable alumnus in Business Week, Stefan has worked with numerous bluechip brands including Adidas, Disney, Nokia and Philips. He has accumulated experience from the fields of marketing, design and technology. His unique understanding of service innovation, customer experience and change management also affords him regular appointments as a keynote speaker, workshop facilitator and executive coach. He lectures at various universities across Europe.

20

touchpoint

In most global companies there are competing interests that can be reduced to tensions between centralised strategy and local implementation. Finding a balance between a unified global presence and regional and local adaptation is one such challenge. Far too often, centralised direction strangles local innovation or proves culturally irrelevant or, alternatively, local independence leads to a lack of cohesion and consistency. Aegis Media created a team to respond to these challenges. It involved key stakeholders responsible for HR, IT, strategy, process and tools in an attempt to re-evaluate the way they worked both internally and with their clients. Service design was used internally as a way of thinking, and also as a practical methodology. It was adopted to suit the internal culture and became a driver for the redesign of processes, roles and tools. After three years, the approach has not been problem-free but, looking at a before and after picture, it shows just how far this way of thinking has benefited and changed the corporate culture. Many global companies are led from the centre, often by people with very similar backgrounds and professional experience. Until recently, Aegis Media’s central London office dictated strategy and instructed markets on how to operate,

measuring all success in economic terms. The local markets in turn were left in peace, as long as they delivered on the bottom line. This resulted in some markets believing they knew best, ignoring any and all strategic direction coming from the centre. When something went wrong, the solution was to parachute someone in to fix the problem and then leave. So when the idea of the Service Solutions Board was introduced, the aim was to create a multidimensional, interdisciplinary team that could foster sustainable cultural change. From the outset, it was essential, from a design perspective, to begin with five clear principles that would stand behind this change: first, it was a reversed approach, from push to pull, and a decision was taken not to force ideas on people but rather to make them attractive and desired; second was introducing


global conference - cultural change by design

comms strategy research & tools

business innovation

technology/it

the concept of continuous improvement and involvement, encouraging participation and allowing prototyping to become a method by which new ideas could be tested, improved or rejected; third was what came to be known as the ‘sandwich’ approach: the recognition that culture change in any company needs both a top-down and bottom-up approach simultaneously. It is essential that senior management be visibly involved and engage the views and opinions of those who actually do the work; fourth was the importance of monitoring progress: “What is measured gets done”; and last was the concept of not taking on the whole problem at once, but rather in parts, something we called “slicing the elephant”.

service solutions board

sharing

digital innovation

people

In order to make sure that new ideas took root and became implemented, it was important to ensure that there were two things in place: a global budget requirement and local advocacy. By making it a requirement that a specific percentage of any market’s budget be directed to the changes underway, we ensured that there was no excuse for not making such changes. Creating a network of local champions who had the task of leading the implementation had the dual effect of making the changes locally touchpoint 21


THINK FOR ME

DO FOR ME

Local Regional Global

Added value to client

HELP ME THINK

Added value for provider

“When the idea of the Service Solutions Board was introduced, the aim was to create a multidimensional, interdisciplinary team that could foster sustainable cultural change.” 22

touchpoint

Stepping up in value relevant and building a global community for support, information exchange and feedback. When this was coupled with continuous measurement, the areas that needed the most attention became clear. The system was extremely simple: each market was rated according to specific criteria and colour-coded green for ‘good progress’, yellow for ‘middling’ and red as warning of no progress. Regardless of whether this was assessing the adoption of a new universal communications planning methodology, use of particular tools or the capacity to deliver specific services, it gave the markets and the central team a continuously-updated and unambiguous picture of the situation. This was then linked directly to the support infrastructure, so that solutions could be managed collaboratively. We learned many things while working through this process, but the following summary includes those that stood out:


global conference - cultural change by design

1) Companies are made of people, and building communities, supporting ideas and publicly giving recognition to people is essential to develop a sense of involvement and encourage accountability. 2) Embrace diversity – differences in terms of background, ethnicity, professional ability and culture must be celebrated in order for a global company to undergo global change. On every occasion that we compiled advisory groups, put together community forums or presented examples, we tried to ensure that we were inclusive and reflected the diversity of the whole company. 3) There are no quick changes when one is dealing with culture. The older methods of dictating change apparently gave immediate results but, when analysed, it was clear that the changes made by a market in such cases were often superficial or misleading. 4) Real cultural change revealed gaps, not always something people wanted to show or admit, necessitating that a large part of designing change must be focused on expectation management. At the same time, seeing gaps is the basis for planning solutions, and when this is linked to ideas of prototyping, the direction for such solutions is much clearer.

The key to applying service design principles for changing company culture turns on understanding the extant culture before trying to change it, recognising that people in all their diversity are at the centre of everything and that it is at the nitty-gritty level of real, tangible experience that the prospect of accepted and long term change lies. Whilst some of these things may seem self evident, the top-down, bottom-up, ‘sandwich’ approach, the development of genuine communities of advocates and champions and ‘slicing the elephant’ to take on one part at a time, all proved to be critical in starting the process of remodelling. One can dictate change, of course. But as we have seen in examples from world politics, international corporations and local governments, the processes towards real change must be based on listening rather than simply instructing.

5) Making things as tangible as possible is key to success. For example, when we made a magazine that presented how a new senior management role bridging the Aegis Media brands would look, it immediately made it clear to the Aegis executive board whether this was a direction they were prepared to go in. In fact, in this case it was not, but the prototype visualisation was clearly the instrument that brought this to light. In a similar way, the traffic-light scorecard gave a palpable sense of where people stood. The net result was that some of the markets made radical changes, altered their business models or looked to extend their service offerings in order to align themselves better with company aims.

touchpoint 23


Service Disciplines: Who does What, When, Where and How?

Mauricio Manhães has over 15 years of experience as an ITC project manager and works as a design researcher at live|work Brazil. As a PhD candidate at EGC/UFSC, with the support of CAPES foundation (an agency under the Ministry of Education of Brazil) and Köln International School of Design (Germany), he is researching the impacts of prejudice on the innovation practices of organisations.

24

touchpoint

Practitioners and researchers are very much aware of the fact that we all live in a service economy. And, in particular, a service economy that must be endlessly innovative. As a response to that broad demand for service innovation, several initiatives have been launched over the last decades, such as service design, service management, service engineering and service science. What all of them have in common is their focus: service. And, as everyone agrees, it's a very fuzzy focus. Nevertheless, each one of these disciplines has a different perspective on what service is, when it happens, where it belongs, why it is different, who does it, how it should be done, etc. To make sense of all these different voices, it would be interesting to have some sort of common language or a prototaxonomy to organise the service research efforts. A basic set of concepts within which each discipline could recognise and differentiate themselves would most probably foster collaboration among these disciplines. But, the problem would be to get the communities that evolve around each one of these disciplines to develop, accept and then adopt that unique framework. One alternative to address this issue of alignment would be to understand all these disciplines as a response to a

socio-cultural context that demands more and better knowledge about service and service innovation. Framing them from this particular perspective can unleash a whole different set of possibilities to act upon. These possibilities make them gravitate towards a common framework. One of these alternatives would be a change in perspective, returning to the context that demanded the framework in the first place. To be able to carry out that change in perspective, we would need first to agree upon which landscape we will contemplate. The proposed landscape or context is what is now known as ‘cognitive capitalism’. Secondly, we would frame it through ‘service-dominant logic’. And then, thirdly, to recognise in it a kind of human collective, interested in the survival of a particular system known as the ‘organisation’.


global conference - cultural change by design

This brief explanation serves to better circumscribe the framed perspective adopted by this article. So, it goes without the saying, that organisations demanding more and better knowledge about service and service innovation would appreciate having a clearer understanding of to whom they should turn to address specific service-related questions.

5 W 1 H METAPHOR Recognising that organisations could play an important role in the alignment of service disciplines is rather simple. But how can this perception be transformed into something practical that can foster that alignment? This question can be answered by investigating, from the organisational perspective, which discourses organisations adopt when they have to organise such an effort, one which involves several players, deliverables, diverse time frames and different locations. Usually, organisations rely on project management practices with myriad tools like project plans, PDCA (acronym for Plan, Do, Check and Act), PERT (Program or Project Evaluation and Review Technique), ‘Agile’, ‘Scrum’ and simpler tools, such as 5W1H.

The 5W1H is an action plan tool named after the acronym for What, Why, Where, When, Who and How. Although simple, this tool cannot be considered simplistic. As a matter of fact, its origins date back to the 1st century BC, being refined and reworked since then. In 1902, Rudyard Kipling framed it in his Just So Stories for Little Children like this:

“I keep six honest serving-men, (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When, And How and Where and Who.” Most organisations use the 5W1H approach because it is one of the easiest tools to implement and generates immediate benefits for managers. So, to enable these same managers to look at that intertwined set of service disciplines in a coherent and simple way, the best alternative would be to create a parallel with discourses and concepts that they already know and can relate to. This is where the 5W1H comes into the scenario of service disciplines. touchpoint 25


Tacit Knowledge

Explicit Knowledge

SERVICE

New

Old Innovation

Design

Management

Engineering

Science

Disequilibrium

Equilibrium

WHAT

Efficacy

Maintenance

WHEN

HOW

WHY

Originality

Efficiency

Repeatability

where: organisation who: organsational members

Service Disciplines continuum

26

touchpoint

THE CONTINUUM FIGURE

WHAT – SERVICE DESIGN

As can be seen in Figure 1, it is possible to create a continuum between the concepts of ‘innovation’ and ‘maintenance’. At each end are displayed some related concepts that helps contextualise the extremes. So, on the innovation side, cluster the related concepts of ‘tacit knowledge’, ‘new’, ‘efficacy’ and ‘originality’. On the maintenance side are the concepts of ‘explicit Knowledge’, ‘old’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘repeatability’. Along the continuum are positioned the words ‘design’, ‘management’, ‘engineering’ and ‘science’ roughly based on their ontological and epistemological proximity to either innovation or maintenance. Astute readers would say that engineering and science also innovate. This is true, if we opt not to pay attention to the fact that, when these disciplines innovate, they do so through processes of design and management. Going back to the 5W1H, its connection with the service disciplines, on the continuum, are the following:

Being in the realm of praxis and close to Innovation and to the concept of disequilibrium, service design should be able to answer questions that start with ‘what’ and point to originality and newness. Organisations with questions such as ‘What else can we do?’, should address them to service design discipline experts. These last ones would have to focus their research on new ways of exploring possibilities, of expanding the limits of what is possible. This is, indeed, a very rich and complex research endeavour that should aim to enable people to co-create preferred futures. WHEN – SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Although the ‘art’ of management is heavily based on tacit knowledge, its focus starts to move towards efficiency and equilibrium. Organisations that need to answer questions related to ‘when’ and timing would ask: ‘When should we start improving our service?’, ‘Is this the right moment to do it?’ or ‘What should we do NOW?’. The discipline of service management should supply answers based on ‘the lived moment’ of the organisation, even indicating whether managers should pursue solutions created by other disciplines. Knowing ‘what to do and when’ would be the major responsibility of the service management discipline and the focus of its research efforts.


global conference - cultural change by design

HOW – SERVICE ENGINEERING

CONSIDERATIONS

Entering the other half of the continuum, the first discipline is service engineering, with its proximity to the concepts of ‘maintenance’ and ‘equilibrium’. With a stronger focus on efficiency, this discipline should be expected to answer questions like ‘How can it be done better?’ and ‘How can we improve the efficiency of this service?’ Its research focus would be on organising best practices and procedures, building models and frameworks that can be repeated by organisations with the best results possible. Service engineering does not need to understand why something works, as long as it works repeatedly.

Of course, this is an oversimplification of an intertwined service disciplines scenario. Nevertheless, it cannot be considered a simplistic view of it. The concepts that support the proposed continuum are academically coherent enough to permit seeing this as a valid attempt to bring some clarity to the subject. This proposition is as coherent as possible, given the restrictions that an accessible text might impose, i.e, avoiding academic jargon as much as possible. Therefore, the main purpose of this proposal is to present, in a common and accessible language, an in-depth discussion that is being held inside the academic ranks. A last remark concerns the roles of service consultancies. This proposed continuum concerns itself with the roles of the service disciplines, not those of the consultancies. It is perfectly logical to expect that a consultancy that identifies itself as a ‘service design’ consultancy will also have knowledge of and know how to apply the other service disciplines. Its focus may rest mainly on the design end, but it should be able to work with the different ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies that each one of these disciplines ought to adopt. At the very least, it should be able to advise organisations, depending on the type of questions it is faced with, which discipline should address them.

WHY – SERVICE SCIENCE

Service science, predictably, should answer the question of ‘why’. To be able to improve the other disciplines, and to push the envelope of their research, at some point it will be necessary to know ‘Why did that workshop work?’, ‘Why did that model create that result?’, ‘Why was that the best time for doing that?’, etc. Research in this discipline should be focused on understanding the relation between elements, structures and mechanisms, and why particular combinations create specific results. This is fundamental information to report back to the other disciplines. THE CONTINUUM OF DISCIPLINES

As shown on the image above, the continuum of disciplines between innovation and maintenance contains arrows pointing to the right. This shows that each discipline has to supply some deliverables for the next one, with which it will be able to work. This is an ongoing movement that starts from creating ‘new’ things, understanding when they should be used, how they should be best applied, why they produce specific results and evolving them until they become ‘old’ and have to be recycled. The words ‘where’ and ‘who’ were not placed on the continuum because both relate directly to the specific human collectives that are doing the questioning: organisational contexts (the ‘where’) and an organisation’s members (the ‘who’). These two words represent the framed perspective that is adopted by this article.

References This text is mainly based on works by B. Mager, S. Vargo & R. Lusch, Karl E. Weick, B. Kristensson Uggla, U. Johansson, I. Nonaka & R. Toyama, H. Rittel, H Simon, S. D. Sarasvathy, M. Jahnke, H.-G. Gadamer, G. Morgan & G Burrell, T. Kuhn, S. Tangen.

touchpoint 27


Complete Small, Affordable and Successful Service Design Projects Rapid service innovation for small to medium-sized manufacturing companies

Chris Brooker delivers the Service Design Programme, which supports designers, manufacturing companies and The Welsh Assembly Government to create a hub of service design expertise in Wales. This recently won the Core77 Design Award 2012 in the service design category. Prior to joining Design Wales Chris ran a service design consultancy in Bristol, UK and has worked on projects in the public and private sector for Oxfam and Bristol City Council as well as numerous SMEs in the financial services sector.

28

touchpoint

Small to medium-sized (SMEs) manufacturing companies with limited budgets need service design. Service designers can offer them valuable and cost-effective projects that still turn a profit. We propose entering a company’s current figures into a service testing tool to help quickly breakdown and understand the problems they face and to quickly establish exactly where to focus a project. This is a new tool and process that you can use with SME businesses as they look to grow and/or develop new services. As part of Design Wales, we run The Service Design Programme and support manufacturing companies across Wales in using service design tools. The manufacturing sector in Wales employs approximately 130,000 people and contributes 13.4% of the GDP1. Three quarters of the UK economy is due to services, and most of what is left is manufacturing. But the service and manufacturing sectors are not mutually exclusive: manufacturing companies can also offer services and may want to more and more as they look for ways to compete. This opens up a range of new customers to service design agencies. Before joining Design Wales, I ran a small service design agency in Bristol. We worked with financial service businesses, public services (libraries, community spaces, etc.) and with universities to de-

velop social learning spaces. What these three have in common is easily identifiable and approachable: service users who all have an opinion about the services. These organisations are also already offering services directly to customers, and we were going in and improving them. However, with many small-to-medium manufacturing companies you are creating their services from scratch. A manufacturing company's connection to the customer can be much more complicated, and those customers are often difficult to approach for insight. These customers are often a large distributor network and the end users of the products they make. You also have to consider the supplier chain and internal departments: management, sales team, technical support, product engineers and factory floor staff, who don't always communicate with each other, let


global conference - cultural change by design

alone with people outside of the organisation. One company we worked with only spoke to the customer once at the beginning of a three-year job, and that was via a letter stapled to a delivery. There is always plenty of opportunity to conduct more primary research into the people who use their products and the suppliers and distributors who interact with their business. We would help them to find the best and most appropriate ways to do this, for example with video diaries, phone interviews and contextual observations being some of the most recent. Manufacturing companies have traditionally measured the quality, cost, supplier and delivery processes of the products they make, but are increasingly aware that what is important now is customer value and experience. With that in mind, there are lots of services these manufacturing companies can offer around the products that they make, like training, maintenance, leasing agreements, product customisation, highly technical tailored solutions and cooperative arrangements with neighbouring companies. As a service designer, it is usually very important to take a holistic look at how manufacturing companies conduct research, generate sales, take orders, develop products, deliver and install products and at the product in use. Some, often larger, manufacturers have been very good at considering this whole process, but very often, small to medium sized manufacturing companies are very good at the product development stage in isolation because, as highly skilled engineers or technicians, that is what they are best at. A small to medium-sized manufacturing company will have, as you would expect, a culture of being product focused first, and will often only offer services as an afterthought or on a needs-must basis. So, when most of these companies use the word innovation, they are talking

about faster, lighter and stronger products and not about services. Combine this with the fact that some smaller manufacturing companies don't have a website yet and these are difficult conditions for a service designer. The case study for our workshop in Paris was Fruit & Seven Games Co., a small, honest and hardworking family businesses and SME Manufacturer of handmade, coin-operated games machines. They employ 5 people and, although they go the extra mile and a half for all their customers, turnover was down from ÂŁ900k to ÂŁ500k in just two years. They had a budget of ÂŁ5,000 available for a service design project. This is the type of situation we are seeing a lot at the moment. Occasionally, a company is growing and is looking to keep moving but, as is more likely, they are not growing and need to innovate to attract new customers and to compete. The groups were also presented with other key points about the Fruit & Seven business: for instance that their machines are not the cheapest on the market. The company owner knows and sells to all of his customers personally, which makes generating sales and scaling up difficult. There has been a shift in the industry, away from casino and arcade usage and towards bingo halls and pubs, bringing a range of new players to touchpoint 29


SME manufacturing companies need affordable and intelligent service design projects

their games. In this industry, the game operator (typical customer) has all the power: games machines are handed over to them for ‘trial’ periods that can last 3 months and can then be returned without good explanation. Their online presence is very poor and they don’t use social media. However, they have just developed software that allows them to quickly develop new games and receive data from the machine in use (like who is playing and for how long, how much they spend and when). Each team was given a selection of service design tools to use as a starting point and asked to plan a £5,000, three-day project and map out the proposed actions of the design team, Fruit & Seven staff and their customers. By entering crude data about the company – turnover, salary spend, new sales and costs involved, staff sick days and retention rates, customer satisfaction and retention rates and costs of repairing faults – into the Test Your Service software (available at www. theservicedesignprogramme.com), they could really target a service design project to the area in which the company needs the most help. The majority of the groups focused their project’s attention on the internal staff actions of Fruit & Seven and wanted to really understand what value there was for the customer in each of their internal processes and actions. Important questions were raised by the attendees, like how many members of the design team 30

touchpoint

should there be working on the project? How much time and resources can we ask the company to allocate to the project and how much of the work can we ask the company to do themselves? The company does have a limited budget, but their time is a resource they do have more access to and it is the Fruit & Seven staff who will have to deliver the services. The project planning exercise we did in the workshop was aimed primarily at commercial design consultancies and how they could work on projects with smaller companies, which I personally think will involve a combination of training and the delivery of new services (and tangible touchpoints if they are needed). I have seen the benefit in training alone and I think there is a real opportunity for design agencies to run smaller, affordable but supportive projects for these companies. All signs also point to more governments funding service innovation support for SME businesses and, depending on how these projects are run in your region, there could be opportunities here for design agencies to offer their expertise.


global conference - cultural change by design

As an organisation offering support to businesses and the design community in Wales, our process with a company normally starts with training workshops where we apply service design tools to a live project with the company's employees. The next step is usually to help the company to conduct more useful research into their customers. We would help them to find the best way to do this, but we wouldn't do the research for them. We might recommend they find a design or research agency to do this for them if it is likely to be very complex. During a follow up session we then collate and review the research that they have done and they start coming up with new ideas. That is where we teach them how to use the various design tools that are available for planning and prototyping a new service. Using this process, we have helped one manufacturer of fans and ventilation systems realise that the installation service they were providing was making their customers very unhappy. They decided to stop installing the fans and developed a training course that offers an industry-recognised qualification. This training course has proved extremely popular, especially as they offer it for free and all of their competitors charge for it. Anybody who goes on the course is much more likely to buy their products. In fact, after 1 year of running the training course, sales of one type of ventilation system went from £70,000 to £1.2 million.

The delegates who made it to the workshop coined the term 'lean service design', which I really like and hadn't thought of previously. I’m sure it came up because we were planning a project for a small manufacturing company, but it is also relevant because these SME companies can't waste time or money on activities that don't have an impact on their bottom line. They have smaller budgets to spend on design and innovation, but if a company is turning over £500,000 and is paying you £5,000 to £10,000, you have to promise to add value. So the smaller design projects will have to have an instant impact or form part of a longer term, well thought-out strategy.

References 1 Brown, T. (2012, Winter). The Manufacturer: Regional Focus Wales – Business and government dance to the same tune (1). [Online] Retrieved November 1, 2012, from http://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/regionalfocus-wales-business-and-government-dance-to-thesame-tune/

touchpoint 31



global conference - cultural change by design

Small Change: Nurturing a Shift in the Culture of Care The belief ‘My home is my castle’ runs through our culture: it is about status, ownership, privacy and, ultimately, about who we are. And yet it seems that as we grow old and develop a need of care, we can no longer sustain the way we choose to live. We often move into a care home and have to leave much of what we love behind: our families, our belongings and the things that create our innate sense of ‘home’. Why is it that opportunities to learn, connect with others and to direct our own lives are so often, perhaps inadvertently, denied to residents living in care homes? As a society, it seems we have become ambivalent about old age at a time when people are living longer, the number of older people is increasing and society has the means to prolong life. As servic’e design lead at the NHS Institute, I have, for the last six months, slightly redirected my focus away from health and towards social care, in order to understand the opportunities for innovation and improvement that lie in care for the elderly. It is a subject that is dear to me at personal level, as one of my grandmothers was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago and the other one, following my grandfather’s death, moved into a sheltered housing accommodation as she could no longer sustain life on her own. I have been

Julia Schaeper is Service Design Lead at the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement

faced with the widely shared experience of coping with a dear family member entering old age. Most people who hear the word care home think of scandals, poor quality and money-grabbing, raising the question whether there is a viable future for care homes. Someone recently said to me when considering living in a care home: “I have a fear of living like this when I am old and frail.” This is not surprising considering the recent media coverage combined with future projections of our ageing population that foresee older touchpoint 33


age groups growing much faster than the rest of the population. By 2050, there will be twice as many people aged over 85, the demand for long-term care services will escalate and the overall costs of care will increase fourfold. Of course, we should not forget that we can no longer speak of one homogeneous group of older adults, but that there is great diversity in the interests and needs in our ageing population, with people who require varying levels of care. How will the country care for the growing number of older people? Who will provide it? And who will pay for it? Currently, 8% of the overall costs are funded by the NHS, 51% by local authorities and 41% privately (Laing & Buisson, 2011). UK Councils across the country have already started to tighten their eligibility criteria for social care in an attempt to save money. A great majority of people with low or moderate needs – for instance people who need help with household chores or cooking – receive no support from councils. As old age becomes the new global challenge, I believe that the care home of the future will need to become a central part of any care solution. However, it must be different from the current proposition: it needs to evolve and provide care packages that respond to personal and individual needs. It needs to be affordable to individuals and to the state, and must identify different funding models. It needs to offer flexible use, as people might need varying levels of support at different points in their condition. Already, we can find new concepts of care home provisions and more fit-forpurpose solutions: Hogewey in Holland, 34

touchpoint

for instance, is an inspiring example of a village designed for people who have dementia. It even has a supermarket where residents can pick up ingredients for cooking at home. They are allowed to shop on their own, regardless of whether they forget their money or buy impractical items. Increasingly, there are innovative services being developed outside the traditional model of care, for instance harnessing the increased willingness of families and friends to provide informal support. This is especially relevant as, due to medical advances, many people can stay at home for longer. Care4Care is such new service. Members earn care credits by caring for an older person in their local community. The hours of support are then recorded in their individual care account for the member’s own future use (http://care4care.org/). Besides some of these undeniably great initiatives that are starting to develop, there is, however, another huge opportunity to activate our valuable existing resources and equip care homes with the capabilities to tackle future challenges from within their organisations. In my work, and contrary to the picture that the media portrays, I have encountered many wonderful care home staff with a deep-rooted concern for their residents’ wellbeing and who were keen to improve their services. It is not the desire for change that is lacking, but the tools and processes to create lasting change. “We have recognised the need to make improvements in our care home for a very long time, but we have never been sure where to start and how to do it.” Care Home Manager


global conference - cultural change by design

ACTIVATING EXISTING RESOURCES TO CREATE LASTING CHANGE

In our subsequent work we concentrated on collaborating with existing care homes. With evidence suggesting that the culture of a care home directly affects the quality of life of those who live and work there (Reed at al, 1997), we aimed to create simple but significant design interventions that would harness a more positive culture based on relationships. Ultimately, our objective was to help care homes build their own improvement capability and to get people to value different perspectives and to foster creativity, learning and innovation from within their organisation. By working closely with a variety of care home communities, we learned important lessons about how to create cultural change: 1. Don’t try and force a cultural shift: start small In the beginning, some people were skeptical about the project: “Yet another exhausting effort to change” and “What’s in it for me?” It was important to understand the perspectives from staff, residents and relatives in order to work out what pushes people into action. Rather than forcing a seismic cultural shift, we introduced tangible ideas that resulted in small but notable changes that encouraged people to think and act differently. For instance, Three Things About Me was a simple activity that captured three interesting things about a person to stimulate conversations. Implemented and led by staff, it started to trigger dialogues across the home. People commented how they got to know each other better; one member of staff had written that she liked line dancing, and one of the relatives came and asked her if she wanted to go with them. Importantly, this small intervention started to build the confidence in people that making changes is not that difficult, and that it can be fun too!

2. Draw on the positive aspects of culture It is possible to draw on the positive aspects of culture, turning them into your advantage, and offsetting the negatives aspects along the way. This approach makes change a lot easier to accomplish. Hence, throughout our research we focused not only on uncovering cultural weaknesses but strengths, too. We surfaced a number of challenges including 'siloed' working and lack of communication. But, equally, we found that staff and relatives were unusually willing to commit their personal time towards making positive changes for residents. We revealed a profound concern about residents and their wellbeing, a cultural strength that remained largely untapped. Focusing on a care home’s cultural strength allowed us rethink how people could come together to share their thoughts and develop ideas for improvement. As a result, we designed a format for a relative-and-staff get-together, to provide a place where people can work together and improve their working relationships.

touchpoint 35


3. Involve people at all levels: work with and within their culture Cultures evolve over time – sometimes moving backward, sometimes progressing – and the best you can do is to work with and within them. We took considerable time immersing ourselves into the daily life in care homes. By listening to staff, residents and relatives we learned how we needed to design our interventions so that care home staff would adopt them on a daily basis. We learned that being able to describe your story, opinions and experiences makes people feel valued and important. So we created the My Story tool, which gives care home staff the time, encouragement and help they need to listen to someone’s stories and draw insights for making improvements. Through this listening exercise, one of our care homes identified various ideas of how the journey into care could be improved for relatives and residents. It was also through the simple activity of listening 36

touchpoint

that staff were able to find out important information about a resident’s past: one of the residents with dementia – let’s call him Bob – had recurring sleepless nights. Staff were struggling to manage Bob’s behaviour. As a solution, they considered giving him sedatives. By taking time to find the relatives and learning about his past, staff found out that Bob had been a night watchman and was used to being awake at night! No sedatives were needed. Instead, a member of staff came up with a different idea: they would give him a torch and get him to come along on night time rounds to check the security of windows and so on.


global conference - cultural change by design

The project resulted in a simple design framework that care homes could follow in their own time in order to make the changes they want to see. Primarily designed to help improve the experiences of people who live and work in care homes, it also aims to improve safety and reduce unnecessary back-of-house activities. Each phase of the framework is supported by a set of 24 tools to: 1. Empirically measure how care homes are currently doing, beyond hearsay and opinion 2. Capture insights about how things are working and how people are feeling 3. Understand the information, reflect and learn from it 4. Improve and collaboratively develop new ideas for change.

So far, we have tested and designed the toolkit with six care homes in England. Staff, residents and relatives report that the design interventions have improved communications across the home, reduced complaints, increased morale, empowered people to make the changes they want to see and increased the time available to care for residents. From flexible care in your home to the flexible use of a care home, it is evident that we will need to create a variety of future scenarios in order to care for our older generations. We must also change our attitude towards ageing by improving our understanding of older adults and their needs. While working on exciting alternative models of care, we should not forget the value that lies in our existing resources of care homes, staff and carers. Cultural change is complex but, by taking small steps and working with our care home communities, we have a chance to shift the cultural model from one based on patronage to one based on relationships and engagement. We have only just started this journey in the NHS, but I hope that more organisations will focus on the subject of ageing and future care. It is an area that ultimately will affect us all – and I am sure we all want to see a future in which we can look forward to being old.

•

measure

capture

understand

improve

touchpoint 37


Perspectives on Service Design and Change Management The SDN’s Paris conference offered participants the opportunity to hear several different viewpoints on the intersection between services design and change management. Here, Touchpoint editor Jesse Grimes discusses the topic with Laura Keller and Lisa Woodley (from NTT Data), and Christian LaFrance (from Different). Laura Keller is Director of Experience Design Strategy & Service Design Practice Lead at NTT Data, Inc. Lisa Woodley is Senior Director, Experience Design Practice Lead at NTT DATA, Inc. Christian Lafrance is Innovation Director at Different Jesse Grimes is interaction designer and consultant, at Informaat, Amsterdam

38

touchpoint

The theme of the conference in Paris was ‘Cultural Change by Design’, and each of your presentations covered interesting aspects of this topic. Why do you think service design is increasingly being confronted with issues of change management? Do you think this is a positive development, or a risk to the discipline? Laura and Lisa: “Service design intersects with change management for the same reasons sister design fields intersect with it: when you attempt to roll out a design, whether it is product design, service design, digital design, etc., it involves a shift from what people experience now to what they will experience post-design. For example, even in the most tactical of digital design initiatives – the web site redesign – you need to think about how it will be maintained (internal constituents) and how you'll communicate to existing users that the site will be changing

(external ones). It's a rudimentary example, but change management should always have been a problem designers tackle as part of their design. I think change management as we discussed at the conference, though, feels like a new issue because it's broader: changes that need to happen to roll out a service are much more complex than a web site. It is this complexity that is new to us, but the core of the problem is the same: managing change for people. Similar to how we say, "we aren't providing people a bike rental service, rather we are offering a sustainable, cost-effective solution for urban transport," we aren't doing change management, we are managing change for people. “The only reason tackling the issue of change management is a risk vs. an opportunity is if we don't manage OUR own change effectively within the service design field. What needs to change about how we sell projects?


global conference - cultural change by design

What should the approach now include? How will our experience of service design be different if we do change management right? What do we need design schools to begin emphasising to prepare students? When should we bring in others' non-design expertise?” Christian: “Laura has articulated three important aspects about how to think about change management when rolling out new or improved service designs: “The first is on the customer side of the service. Their service experience is well thought of by designers and usually is an improvement (if they do a good job!), so change management on their side is not a big issue beyond the usual reaction after a new design roll-out (remember the short-lived outcries when Google and Facebook released their new designs). “On the staff side, changes in the design of the service have much broader implications. An improvement in customer experience often means more work (or hopefully smarter work) on the service provider side. In my experience, technology often doesn't deliver on that in the short term, and service providers often resort to staff to deliver any improvements. Service designers need to be aware of the implications of their designs on staff and play an active role in helping staff to deliver that experience to customers. Otherwise, designers’ great service solutions may never be actually implemented and offered to customers, because staff don’t buy into the new design or are not able to deliver it (this is very similar to product design where the proposed design must be manufacturable). This changes our relationship to [the] design delivery team from the one of a prescriber to the one of a coach. It may necessitate designers to partner with change managers, or learn about change management to refine designs for implementation (in the same way that some product designers partnered with manufacturing). I believe this offers new opportunities for service designers to extend their services offering and goad internal/client teams towards great service experience delivery. “The last consideration is how we manage the change for our clients from their “business as usual”

practices to “service design thinking”. This is the big challenge faced by design and customer experience teams, particularly internal ones. It forces us to think more reflectively about the experience of service design for nondesigners. I am always surprised how easily we can gain empathy for our clients’ customers and how difficult it is for us to bridge the designer-business communication gap. Who can consult to us on our services' experience?” Jesse: Everyone just touched on a key issue brought up when service design calls for change within an organisation: it's easy to visualise the future service in deliverables such as storyboards and prototypes, but it's much harder to help a client see what they need to do in order to get there. Are there any techniques or approaches you've found useful for getting change truly implemented? Laura and Lisa: “From the communications perspective, you gain momentum toward the change via messaging that speaks to the value of the change to the individual rather than to the organisation. People want to understand what's in it for them. To believe it, they need to hear it consistently reinforced both from leadership and their peers. Piloting new initiatives can be an effective way to do this as well. Showing how a group has benefited from a similar change adds credibility to the messaging that this change is a good thing. “From the behaviour perspective, you need to work with the constituents to co-create roadmaps. Not the kind touchpoint 39


of high-level, deliverable-based roadmaps that often accompany future-state vision documents, but roadmaps comprised of tangible behaviours that lead step-by-step toward the final desired outcome. Everyone who will be a part of the change needs to understand, ‘What do I do differently tomorrow than what I'm doing today.’ Once they have adopted the behaviour in the first step, then they can move on to the next. These steps can become units of measurement as well, to track whether or not the organisation is on course toward the desired outcome. “How quickly or slowly this process happens depends on the type and complexity of change you are implementing. A technology-focused service change could be as simple as a few steps explaining how to incorporate this technology into how they work (‘When you come in tomorrow, log into the system...’). A broader culture change – redefining roles, changing how individuals communicate, or shifting how people are evaluated – will take longer. The individuals who make up that culture need to become accustomed to not just new behaviours but new ways of thinking about how they do their work, how they interact with others and how they value the organisation and their place in it. “Regardless of whether the change is focused or broad, illustrating value to the employee, co-creating the short- and long-term vision and piloting small but tangible changes is critical to progress.” Christian: “At Different, we found that having a usercentric = customer-centric + staff-centric approach is an effective way of getting change truly implemented. Staff centricity maximises effective change implementation by enabling staff members to actually provide input in the change management programme earlier than with traditional expert-driven approaches. Staff input can be articulated in two ways throughout the various phases of the change management process: “Co-creating the change state to elicit new behavioural solutions and amend the future state to maximise adoption. In several projects, we invited staff and customers to enact the future state. It highlighted what future state behaviours proved more difficult for 40

touchpoint

staff ( asking a customer open questions, coaching a customer to self-serve). Enactment also pushes staff to explore and create the best practices on how things will actually be done in the future. These best practices are at a level of detail that other staff can actually model their behaviour on. We also often re-mapped some processes with staff to make them more practical and minimise the need for change when it did not substantially impact the customer experience. “This change state co-creation step accelerates change implementation by establishing the behavioural solutions and models, by renegotiating the future state to prevent solutions that are not viable and by highlighting where to focus the change management activities on what matters for staff. “Co-creating change methods to go beyond change management communication towards experiential learning. If communications play an important role, they are not enough to enable staff to actually fully comprehend what they need to do differently from now on, as Laura explained. One project we worked on faced that kind of challenge. Our client had recently reviewed their strategy for their HR department and shifted the service model. Once the various change management artefacts were created, we organised workshops where staff put the service principles and customer personas to work on real customer scenarios. This enabled HR staff to actually understand these change management artefacts by using them. They could then apply the artefacts to the broader set of situations they have to deal with and effect the change. “This exemplifies the need for service designers to go beyond the design of staff-centric change management communications and tools. The learning and implementation of these artefacts also need to be designed so that they can actually foster the new behaviours and truly implement change.” Jesse: Another theme that came up throughout the Paris conference was that cultural change quickly becomes confronted by the realities of financial facts and figures. Although Laura and Lisa touched upon


Watch h of the speec ler Laura Kel o n oodley and Lisa W

12 www.sdnc

global conference - cultural change by design

.com

the fact that service designers can become unwitting therapists, it was Ben Reason who recounted hiring an economist on a project to demonstrate a compelling ROI. How do you each of you address the challenge of business value and financial implications, when most service designers have little training or expertise in these areas? Laura and Lisa: “Very few of us have the luxury of clients who are willing pay to bring in an economist to show ROI on a given project. The good news is that, for most of us, it isn't really necessary. We've found that many clients understand that true, detailed balancing-the-budget ROI, which considers all factors of investment, financial value and outcomes, is something that a service designer is not – and should not be – responsible for. Too many facets of ROI are not even within a typical service designer's purview. Many clients, if they require this level of ROI, have internal economists who designers can partner with and provide input into the ROI work they are doing for that organisation. However, service designers should have a sufficient understanding of the financial implications and outcomes of the work they do to be able to provide this information to the economists. For many projects, demonstrating compelling business value is not as complicated as it may seem. It's a combination of asking smart questions of the client during discovery, as well as basic math. In order to quantify value you need to know three things. The current value or cost of X, the cost to change X, and the value and/or cost of X after the change. Assuming you did something right, the value of X after the change will be greater (or the cost will be less). By subtracting the cost of making that change from the new savings/value, you arrive at the value to the organisation. You can do that metrics exercise during the discovery work, in collaboration with the right stakeholders at the client. As with all things related to service design, co-creating the metrics and business value with the client should be part of the overall project. Erik Roscam Abbing from Zilver Innovation did a fantastic job of explaining this concept in his SDNC12 presentation 'Meaning Plus Metrics = Magic', and it's worth researching further.”

Christian: “Understanding and demonstrating design’s ROI is essential to further grow service design as a mainstream tool within businesses. Communicating the value of design in terms of ROI helps assert design’s credibility and bridges the design-business communication gap I outlined earlier. One common strategy for growing internal design departments is to first build a portfolio of tactical case studies that demonstrate design’s ROI before being entrusted with wider scope projects. “As Laura and Lisa mentioned, it is not necessarily a designer’s responsibility to actually do the ROI maths. It is, nevertheless, theirs to make sure it actually gets done (which may involve doing it themselves). Just assuming someone else will do it can lead to the ROI not being calculated at all, or being done at a level where the designer’s contribution is not articulated enough. Hiring your own economist is just one way of controlling the pen and ensuring design ROI is demonstrable (and entrusted). “It is, indeed, critical to clarify at the start of the project what metrics will demonstrate its success. Furthermore, I found that modelling a project-specific ROI from these metrics enables designers to understand where to potentially best focus their effort or to have objective ways of prioritising or trading-off design solutions. Setting up the measures and benchmarks for these metrics is also important. It may be hard to demonstrate any results otherwise. It also needs to be done in collaboration with the stakeholders, because some measures may not already exist specifically for the project. Eric Ries in the Lea Start-up provides further starting points on that. “Some benefits of the design methodology are harder to measure or evidence, like doing early research or testing before implementation. It is difficult to put definite numbers on costs averted by doing things right the first time and killing early solutions that don’t generate value for the customer. That’s an area where the design discipline can leverage tools and approaches used by other discipline with similar challenges: marketing and risk/project management, for example.”

touchpoint 41


Department of Human Services Service Design Journey Moving from rhetoric to reality

Cybelle Buursink is a Director of Future Service Design within the Australian Government Department of Human Services.Currently, Cybelle and her team are developing a Design Capability Framework that continues to embed and support dynamic design thinking, enabling proactive exploration and employment of new service concepts that are better tailored to customers, regardless of their location or circumstances. She has diverse experience in roles cutting across education, private business, non-government and government organisations.

42

touchpoint

Internationally, there is a drive for governments to design policies and services that are more efficient and effective and that better meet the needs of citizens. Service design is increasingly becoming a proven avenue to go beyond traditional service delivery and design new ways of working together with people, both inside and outside the organisation, to create better experiences. Empowering people to do this is central to achieving better outcomes. This is an insight into the service design journey of the Australian government’s Department of Human Services (DHS). In 2011, the Australian government made a significant step towards move from rhetoric to reality by bringing together the primary agencies that deliver social and health-related services to create one department – the Department of Human Services – embarking on a major service delivery-reform agenda. The department’s vision is to achieve excellence in the provision of government services to every Australian, and our mission statement is simply, ‘the services you need, when you need them’. Service design has been pivotal in transforming the way DHS does business. DHS delivers services that touch the lives of each Australian in some way. The department has over 36,000 staff,

delivering services across Australia with 674 service centres, 1,500 access points and more than 100 Smart Centres that combine call and processing services and a 24/7 emergency response capability. Bringing together five different government organisations with various different approaches to service delivery into one central department poses significant issues of cultural change. A key component in enabling the department to fulfil its promise of high quality, citizen-centred services is to invest in a new way of exploring better solutions through service design. The journey so far has seen the development of a design methodology and principles, something which advocates


global conference - cultural change by design

a collaborative approach: exploring, innovating and evaluating various opportunities for improvement. This has meant pushing the boundaries of how government organisations have traditionally operated in a slowmoving and risk-averse environment. Fostering a design approach and asking people to think outside the box, engaging in rapid prototyping by getting physical, fast and using an iterative approach to identifying the best options to solve complex problems can be uncomfortable, particularly when you are challenging the status quo. Stepping into the shoes of users to better understand their experience and translating these learnings into service-delivery changes that deliver

better outcomes for the customer and government has been an essential starting point. Partnering with various government and non-government organisations, DHS has worked to deepen its insights into its customers’ experience by developing a range of customer journey maps, exploring different community engagement techniques and prototyping new methods of working together with customers and stakeholders to achieve better outcomes. Work is also underway to develop new service offers for the future, moving from the previous program-led model, towards redesigning service delivery to achieve a balance between what is desirable for people, viable for business and possible for technology.

I am confident and competent

I need help!

?

coaching development

real time support

online resources

practical package of design

I can help others

touchpoint 43


leadership and governance organisation and relationships process and practice

future service design capability

departement of human sciences

new service offerings and changes

people and skills values and culture

Design capability builds the capacity for future innovation

To maintain the momentum of these innovative approaches in harnessing customer insight and designing new services that better meet customer needs, people-capability development within the department is key. Unlocking people’s skills and knowledge about design is only one part of the puzzle. Achieving a shift to a design-thinking model and embedding an innovative and collaborative way of working is more challenging. To move further along this path, a DHS design-capability framework has been established and will be implemented over the upcoming year. The framework proposes an approach to create a sustainable ‘wheel of capability’, to help individuals and the organisation travel a developmental journey (insert diagram). There are five elements that will be focused on in order to build the capability for future innovation in service design and delivery: leadership and governance; 44

touchpoint

organisation and relationships; process and practice and people and skills. These provide the foundation for us to be able to embed a new way of thinking into values and culture. In taking a principled, centred approach with such a complex, large organisation, there also needs to be careful alignment with other activities that are forging forward. The attention and balance of all of these elements are crucial if the vision of becoming a service design centre of excellence is to become a reality. Understanding that wholescale change does not transform overnight, a maturity model has been adopted to assess both where the organisation is currently and the vision for the future of fully embedding design as the way we do our work holistically across the organisation. A number of success measures have been put in place to map our progress on the path to a more integrated, innovative approach to service


global conference - cultural change by design

design. The assurance measures used are known as the three A’s – Accountability and process, Ability and awareness and Adoption, all of which help to evaluate our delivery of our maturity goals along the journey. One of the challenges that needs to be met is to bridge the gap between theory and practice in an environment hungry to see service design changes that make it real for our staff and customers. To achieve this, there are a number of measures in place through the implementation of the ‘wheel of capability’, with the aim of organically allowing people to grow and learn whilst delivering key outcomes in a timely fashion. Balancing these competing commitments is never easy, but providing the structure and support to allow the discipline of design to mature is crucial. The Future Service Design Division has been established to lead transformational design in the organisation, which is supported by developing a range of initiatives depending on the level of skills, knowledge and confidence. Understanding that design is a dynamic practice, an action-learning environment is encouraged by delivering real-time support through coaching, live-learning experiences and a practical package of design. This strengths-based model is focused on self-sustainability, where people who initially need help and benefit from coaching support become more experienced and will transition into the coaching role to help others. Skilful planning and engagement with other areas of the organisation is vital for success. Considering the multiple stakeholders from both inside and outside

speech of Watch the n uursink o Cybelle B

www.sdnc

12.com

“Unlocking people’s skills and knowledge about design is only one part of the puzzle”

of government, this means getting the right people in the room at the right time with a willingness to actively participate in a new way of solving complex problems to enable progress toward better outcomes. Hence, part of the puzzle is providing the tools and techniques to empower people, challenge existing paradigms and work with people outside the organisation to achieve results. There is a long path to walk to ensure service design moves fully from rhetoric to reality, delivering on the promise of ‘the services you need, when you need them’. Empowering people through creating a supportive environment and developing a rich spectrum of capability will help users progress along the service design journey and ultimately make a difference to the lives of all Australians.

touchpoint 45


From Field Stories to Strategic Design Practicing interpretation skills at SDNC 2012

Dr. Bas Raijmakers is co-founder and Creative Director of STBY in London and Amsterdam.

Dr. Geke van Dijk is co-founder and strategy director of STBY in London and Amsterdam.

As designers and innovators of services, we try to step into the shoes of those who will be using and delivering the services we create. We need to empathise with them to understand what value we can create, what problems we might solve or what interactions between people we should facilitate. Observing and listening are important skills to get into these shoes, but they are not enough. We also need to be storytellers, because we must bring the everyday experiences of people into the design and strategy teams that imagine and then help create services. How can we bring the stories to these teams and how can we help them work with those stories? How can we make the stories stick to the design process from start to finish and keep them useful all along? How do we support design and business decisions with clear evidence from everyday life? COLLECTING, STRUCTURING AND ANALYSING STORIES

Design research typically goes through a number of stages, from preparation to analysis and interpretation.

Katherine Gough is Senior Manager, Ethnographic research at Nokia Design.

46

touchpoint

1. Right at the start, business constraints need to be recognised and prioritised, because they likely influence the way that the fieldwork capture methods and the unit of analysis (the basic data elements that you aim to collect, e.g. a customer journey) are initially

designed. The way you plan to communicate the research should also influence your choice of capture method and unit of analysis. Film provides a different type of evidence than do photos when it comes to communicating your results. 2. Once in the field, you need to collect data in the format and using the methods that you have designed. This can be a challenge because the environment in which you


global conference - cultural change by design

find yourself isn't always what you anticipated. That is part of the joy of the work: everyday life is not predictable. It is a combination of routines and surprises. The skill to develop here is to embrace the surprises encountered in the field without breaking the designed research structure, although you may need to bend or stretch it. You should come away from the field with data that will put you in a good position to create the unit of analysis that was specified earlier. 3. Fieldwork data needs to be structured to make it accessible to others and analysed to a certain extent to result in a collection of units of analysis. These units can be used to communicate stories from the field. If the data is captured on film, as STBY often does, the unit of analysis can be a short and concise edited film. Each film could tell a single story in two or three minutes, including the participant behaviour (practices) and motives as expressed by themselves. The editing of the film can be done in such a way as to add the findings of the design researchers in the field, which may add more participant motives. Nevertheless, the stories should remain open to further interpretation, as more analysis is to follow.Â

4. Analysing and interpreting the fieldwork results is the next step, in which the teams are seeking a deeper understanding of the practices and motives of the fieldwork participants, often focused on a particular topic such as: 'How do people keep themselves entertained while on the move?' Here the data is presented in the format of the unit of analysis specified earlier, to provide a clear starting point. Collaborative sense-making with service design and strategic teams gives the best results, because the insights created are owned by the teams that helped create them. This stage will be elaborated upon in the remainder of this article. 5. Even after its first use, the data that is clearly formatted in the unit of analysis still remains valuable. It could answer other questions in the future. When the data is re-ordered, new collections of films can be curated that, using different lenses of analysis, help to develop quick perspectives on design, strategy or business questions. It is then no longer necessary to carry out additional fieldwork to answer these questions, a huge advantage in terms of money and time. touchpoint 47


Thomas Schรถnweitz

MAKING SENSE OF PEOPLE'S EVERYDAY

Fernando Galdino

PRACTICES

Workshop at the Service Design Global Conference 2012

Analysing the data is a skill in itself. This skill was introduced and practised in a workshop during the 2012 Global Service Design Network Conference in Paris by STBY and Nokia, who have gone through the process outlined above many times over recent years. The process proposed in the workshop followed three steps. The material used for analysis was a single three-minute film of a Londoner visiting a record shop on Portobello Road while talking about his love of music and the joy and trouble that this love had brought him. The richness of the material was illustrated by the time spent on analysing it: over 1.5 hours of analysis of that short film. 1. The first round of analysis focuses on on practices: What does the participant do? In this film, for instance, he browses the record sleeves in the vinyl section, checks out the posters of blaxploitation films on the walls and hesitates before leaving because he hears an interesting song.

48

touchpoint


global conference - cultural change by design

2. During the second viewing, the focus shifts to personal motives: what motives does the participant mention for their behaviour? In this case, the participant mentions his interest in the circumstances in which the artists made their music, because it helps him to understand how a particular record was created and how creativity works in general. 3. A third viewing allows focus on further, perhaps deeper, motives that are not expressed literally by the participant but are interpretations of the viewer: what motives do we understand as design researchers (or anyone in the service design and strategy teams who has taken on that role temporarily)? Here, it was possible to interpret that the participant feels at home in the shop and puts effort into being part of a certain black music culture. These different levels of understanding also give rise to different types of opportunities, once teams start to speculate and create 'What if?' scenarios for each of the three levels of

understanding. Bringing all these levels together gives the deepest understanding and the richest opportunities. In a two hour workshop, these levels of understanding and the different types of creative speculation were all practiced and explored. CONCLUSION

Such deep understanding created by a team, rather than just a few design researchers who were in the field themselves, does not emerge magically all by itself. It requires a solid research methodology, executed with an open mind in the field, that delivers a clear unit of analysis as the basis of joint interpretation by the service design or strategy team. Such a unit of analysis allows for a structured analysis on several levels, from practices to motivations. This can happen more than once, because well-structured research data can be re-used later to answer other research questions. Every time, the results of the analysis support business decisions with structured and rigorous information that informs the design and development process.

•

touchpoint 49


Living Service Worlds How will services know what you intend?

In this article I described how two important trends (living services and the intention economy) will impact service designers and described a scenario where mobile and sensor data combined with intention could completely transform our day-to-day experiences. Shelley Evenson is an experience researcher at Facebook. Prior to that she was principal in user experience at Microsoft and associate professor for interaction design at Carnegie Mellon University.

50

touchpoint

Over the years we have grown as a community, through exploring a variety of definitions of design and service. In 2002, Gadrey1 explained that a service should first be considered a process and illustrated service as a triangle that included three primary elements: service provider, customer/client/user and transformation of a reality. Years later, Hugh Dubberly and I wrote a paper on designing for services2. In that paper, we suggested that the concepts Gadrey presented with respect to service relations, interactions, operation and activity are well suited for defining service as design. More simply, we think that the people engaged in the service are designing. We proposed that designing for service—what we do as designers—is a meta-activity. We are conceiving and iteratively planning and constructing a service system or architecture that can deliver resources to choreograph an experience that others design. As designers designing for service, we bring together skills, methods, and tools for intentionally creating and

integrating (not accidentally discovering and falling into) systems for interaction with customers to create value for the customer and, by differentiating providers, to create long-term relationships between providers and customers. Service designing addresses the functionality and form of the service medium. The aim is to ensure that the service interfaces at the touchpoints are useful, usable, effective, efficient, desirable and differentiated from both the person and the provider’s point of view3— u2e2d2(p2). In designing for digital services, this is true as well. The living nature of digital services means that designers can’t design a service experience. We are designing for experience, not designing the experience. We can only design the resources for people to bring the experience to life for themselves. As designers we create affordances that help people know where to start, what to do, and when (both physically and digitally). The services come to life through people:


global conference - cultural change by design

speech of Watch the n venson o E y e l l e h S how they ‘read’ the resources, their personal history and their context. There are many service industries experiencing the physical-to-digital self-service transition. Banking is a great example. We used to go to a place and interact with people to conduct our transactions. The people in the bank knew us. We had a relationship. Today, most mundane banking transaction services can be accomplished with the small computer known as a smart phone. If you asked someone two years ago if making a deposit would always include visiting a person or a box at the facility, they would have said yes but, today, banks trust consumers with the transaction. In a few short years, banking has transitioned from one setting to any setting and from known ‘languages’ (or scripts) for banking to new self-service languages banking. Banks have re-imagined their services and taught consumers a new language for interaction. This meta-design and re-imagining activity is hard enough in itself, but we see two trends placing more demands on service designers than ever before. The first is the meteoric rise of mobile, embedded sensors and more natural interfaces. The second is just starting to appear as a broader global trend and is reflected in the book The Intention Economy4—what Doc Searls describes as

12 www.sdnc

.com

“The living nature of digital services means that designers can’t design a service experience. We are designing for experience, not designing the experience.” a shift from “...sellers finding buyers to buyers finding sellers.” In this new world, all people will have to do is express their intentions (intentcast) and services will come to them. Magical. What Searls illustrates is that everywhere we go on the web, we are different people with different profiles. We are one person to Amazon, another to the Wall Street Journal and yet another one to Facebook (though through Facebook Connect, Facebook would like this not to be so). The ‘places’ we visit do not know us: we have different (and shallow) relationships everywhere we go. In Searls’ future, we will own our own profiles and our sensor interaction databases. touchpoint 51


intentcast

inferencing

My trip to London... Living ¬ voice, touch, but imagine sensors in the space Intentional ¬ I cast a 'wish' to a trusted service mediary Re-imagined ¬ I select which slices of my personal data are accessed in realtime with control

This re-imagined living-service world poses new questions for service providers and service designers. For example, if we believe services will be brokered and you will ‘intentcast’ for every need, who will be the broker and what do they have to do? We see hints of many companies that would like to become that broker. Amazon’s Subscribe and Save service is an example of their move in that direction. But, since these are digital services, you can compete for the broker role among device makers, banks, cards, Amazon and, of course, Facebook. In addition to the broker question, another question that arises is which service brands (and service models) do you need to cooperate/integrate with to provide the resources for comprehensive service experiences? In a recent paper Glushko and Nomorosa describe a personalised trip-planning service that utilises the principle of “substituting information for interaction”5 in order 52

touchpoint

to align service models and to provide more seamless and complete and valued service experiences. Finally, for a full re-imagining, we need to ask what an appropriate human-centred service programming language that would render all this transparent might be like. To address this question, we look at services such as Siri from Apple or ifttt.com to help us envision what integrated service worlds might be like. Rescheduling a recurring trip to London becomes magically simple when people have explicit control of their data sets, service models from a variety of providers are aligned ‘backstage’ and people can directly interact with components of the service, either through voice or touch to verify and personalise their experiences. The resulting services will feel alive and responsive and providers will flourish based on the quality of the resources they offer to shape these more exceptional relationships.


global conference - cultural change by design

data gathering

negotiation

delivery

recipe visualised

References 1 Gadrey, J. (2002) 'The misuse of productivity concepts in services: Lessons from a comparison between France and the United States.' In: J. Gadrey, and F. Gallouj, eds. Productivity, Innovation, and Knowledge in Services: New Economic and Socio-economic Approaches. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, 2002, pp. 26–53. 2 Evenson, S., & Dubberly, H. (2010) 'Designing for Service: Creating an Experience Advantage.' in Introduction to Service Engineering, 403-413. 3 Mager, B. (2008) Presentation at Carnegie Mellon University 4 Searls, D. (2012). The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. Harvard Business Press 5 Glushko, R. J., & Nomorosa, K. J. (2012). 'Substituting Information for Interaction: A Framework for Personalization in Service Encounters and Service Systems.' in Journal of Service Research.

recipe visualised

touchpoint 53


Facilitator-aided Innovation "Helping multidisciplinary teams work more efficiently to achieve superior results"

Thierry Curiale is an innovation marketing director at Orange with a background in strategy, management and communications consulting. Combining his marketing and psycho-sociological skills, Thierry has become an expert in the process of co-designing digital services for which he is developing a specific approach to collective intelligence, based on group dynamics and transactional analysis.

Matthew Marino is a FrancoAmerican designer and founding partner of User Studio, France’s pioneer service design agency. Matthew brings his strategic vision to User Studio while helping corporations and public sector organisations adopt a design-led approach to innovation. Furthermore, Matthew is an active service design advocate, promoting the discipline through conferences, articles and training sessions.

54

touchpoint

Today’s ever-changing social, cultural and technological environments have led a growing number of companies to promote flat-organisations to facilitate their multidisciplinary innovation initiatives. Designers, marketers and engineers, with their different visions and methods, must learn how to work together in the early stages of the process. The challenge lies in laying the groundwork to make this magic happen. A good example is a digital service project for Orange, conducted by Thierry Curiale, an innovation marketing director for this French multinational telecommunications company, in collaboration with User Studio, a Parisbased service design agency. This article will illustrate how a facilitator helped a multidisciplinary team reach successful results efficiently and enjoyably. In 2011, Orange launched an exploratory project to devise a new service that would allow customers to make virtual visits to France's top museums and their rich collections. Although the service itself still needed to be defined, it was clear that its development would require the expertise of a wide range of professionals, from curators to marketers, designers, programmers and publishers.

THE CHALLENGE OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY TEAMWORK

Bringing such diverse players to the same table can complicate a project. But it can also create a favourable environment for its smooth implementation by pooling resources straight from the start, making business, technical and human considerations all part of the equation. This was not done in a collaborative project at another French technology company involving a designer and programmer prototyping a novel digital device. Though it was seen as promising, the product never gained broad internal support. Had a marketer been brought in to provide insight on how this device could figure on the telco's strategic roadmap, the project's outcome might have been significantly different.


global conference - cultural change by design

The team members collaborating on various stages of the museum project. Traditionally, professionals have been more accustomed to a sequential project culture than an integrated, agile one. In the virtual museum project, the participants recognised the advantages of working as a multidisciplinary team but knew this would be no easy feat. This is where Thierry Curiale, a marketing director with experience in conducting highly collaborative initiatives, took on the role as the project's facilitator. FACILITATOR-AIDED INNOVATION

Using facilitation to help teams co-create products or services is not new. Service designers, like User Studio, have increasingly expanded their role, acting as 'double agents' working not only as designers but also as project team facilitators. Though this has proved beneficial in winning over innovation team members to a design-led project culture, where visualisation and prototyping are valued tools, it requires a delicate balance for which few designers have been trained or posses the right skills. The Orange museum project offered a testing ground for an alternative innovation model, one in which the facilitator plays a role independent from that of the

designer. We call this model ‘facilitator-aided innovation’ and have identified a set of guidelines to help facilitators incorporate the format into their own organisations. ACTING AS A CATALYST

During the different stages of a project, and notably the field research phase, participants observe the same reality but from distinct personal and professional perspectives. The facilitator acts as a catalyst to help the team achieve results larger than the sum of the parts. The Orange team members were all intent on translating a real-life museum visit into a digital one, but their own experience as museum visitors often reflected their professional orientation. The marketer appreciated an information desk's friendly welcome, a designer was captivated by the immersive experience of a silent exhibition room while a programmer focused on the detailed approach of a science tour guide. Thierry, as facilitator, made sure the group reacted to each other's impressions to construct a collective vision for the project by reformulating and propagating the ideas amongst the participants. touchpoint 55


Various project phases aimed at designing the service’s multichannel user interface

THE RULES AND TOOLS OF THE GAME

To enhance such synergy, the following principles can help a facilitator customise the rules, tools and methods for a given project: Put the right team together Though favouring heterogeneous skills and disciplines, Thierry assembled a team of no more than 12 members with homogeneous values and cultural references. This was essential to build team cohesion and avoid confl icts. Emphasize doing rather than bla bla… Thierry made sure the entire museum team referred to the project as a ‘Do-Tank’ – rather than a ‘ThinkTank’ – and banned the traditional sort of meeting where ideas are mainly discussed, favouring instead action to put those ideas to work. Over a four-month period, weekly workshops alternated with production days dedicated to crafting the project's user experience, business model and functional mock-ups. This helped team members recognise each other's legitimacy based on their production rather than their position, and helped highlight the interplay of their varied professional expertise.

56

touchpoint

Create a formal framework dedicated to exploring new ideas The facilitator of the Orange museum project involved everyone in writing a team contract. This offered a practical tool that not only established the rules of collaboration but also sent out a symbolic message: a cross-silo, heterarchical space dedicated to envisioning and testing new ideas. The contract included statements such as: ‘Freedom of expression’ or ‘Co-responsibility’. Team members, for example, felt sufficiently confident to oust from a workshop a guest speaker whose comments they felt were irrelevant, despite his invitation by the facilitator. Delegate roles so that production flows smoothly The facilitator is not the ultimate authority: they may delegate functions to other team members, focusing their responsibility on the overall flow of the innovation process. For example, Thierry delegated the workshop logistics to a ‘host’, the time management to a ‘rhythm master’, the production of time-bound results to a ‘decision mobilizer’ and the day's feedback to a ‘friendly observer’, who would suggest how to improve the next session's interactions. The division of responsibility among team members spurred responsibility and collective accountability. Attribute leadership to each discipline when relevant Although collaboration nourishes the collective thinking, the facilitator should specify when each discipline steers the project's multifaceted execution, so the marketers at Orange influenced the strategic and business stages, the designers were entrusted with defining the user experience and the developers led the prototyping phases.


global conference - cultural change by design

Remember to remain a project manager Although communication, transparency and collaboration are promoted values, the facilitator should not forget the realities of traditional project management, such as focusing on meeting deadlines and staying within budgets. RECRUITING YOUR OWN FACILITATOR

Innovation directors seeking to recruit a facilitator might look for the following skills and dispositions: • With a background in social sciences and broad understanding of multiple disciplines, they know how to deal with complex situations by embracing multiple points of view. • Experienced in group dynamics (and knowledgeable about its theory), their leadership, project management and interpersonal communications skills create team cohesion. • Promoting neutrality and generosity, they put the project's interest before all other considerations, act in non-defensive ways, and avoid judging their team's contributions.

EXPANDING THE INNOVATION MANAGER'S TOOLBOX

Innovation practitioners recognise a number of ingredients for success, such as support from senior leadership and cross-silo collaboration. Leaders who wish to promote flat-organisations must learn to embrace a new layer of facilitation skills. As Thierry Curiale put it: “As we move away from hierarchical structures and open up the system, someone needs to act as the catalyst so things don’t overheat.”

The collectively authored team contract touchpoint 57


Connections and Cloakrooms at the SDNC 2012

Irene Chong is a graduate of the IIT Institute of Design and Stuart School of Business dual MDes/MBA programme in Chicago, IL. Originally from Toronto, she is a freelance design strategist who has lived and worked in Canada, the United States, New Zealand and Mexico with a range of public, private and NPO. These days, the topic of financial literacy amongst youth occupies her head space.

Timothea Horn is a Parisbased freelance design strategist and copywriter from Sydney, Australia. Thea spent three years designing and participating in human-centred design projects in-house with an Australian financial services company. Keeping her energised is her latest project, 80museums.wordpress. com, exploring the unexpected joys of visiting museums.

58

touchpoint

The 2012 Service Design Network Global Conference in Paris brought together over two hundred people who all wake up in the morning with the same itch: how can we improve the world around us, interaction by interaction? Fuelled by a common language, that of service design, this year’s field of reflection was Cultural Change by Design. Beyond this fertile ground for thought, the conference experience itself was also under the microscope (designers being designers, it’s instinctive). Two participants reflected on the different pathways they chose for their Paris experience: Irene Chong, Toronto-based SDN member, and Timothea Horn, Parisbased conference volunteer. They explored in conversation what they experienced during SDNC12. A common question emerged as they considered the broader question of setting the stage for a good conference: how can we create a safe space for improvisation so that we can open ourselves up to new opportunities? For both Irene and Thea, creating a safe space for open conversations to trigger new opportunities is a key outcome in attending a conference. It takes more than digital space to cultivate fertile grounds for thought: a conference opens up physical space for community to build and share. It’s just as important to provide

space and time for unstructured chats to occur as well, which enables the big ideas presented to settle in participants’ minds. Irene: “Stimulating conversations with bright sparks was top of my agenda. To get the ball rolling and open up a conversation, it takes a bit of courage to stick out your hand and reach out to a stranger. “A chance encounter at the Member’s Day reception with a Swedish delegate from Prototyp could have easily turned into one of those awkward shoulder-bumping moments. But recognising we were in a purposely curated safe space, it quickly turned into a meaningful conversation and connection with David and, later, other members of his company. It can be challenging to think big while juggling a plate full of food in one hand, a beverage in the other and trying to find a third one to shake hands. As much as


global conference - cultural change by design

I enjoy the conference content, I enjoy the breaks – the moments of transition – even more. Those interstitial moments provide the space for valuable conversations to occur.” In addition to creating a physical space, a set of tools backstage to create the right conditions for improvisation to happen is important, too. In the case of participants, those 'tools' might be comfortable seating, easy-to-access refreshments or WiFi. For volunteers, forget detailed project plans. Empower them with flexible tools and not only will they come up with creative responses to unexpected situations, they will also be able to improvise conversations across the table while executing a trifecta of handing out badges, directing traffic and creating emergency signage without breaking a sweat. Thea: “There’s an unwritten law that says that the more constraints you impose on volunteers, the better the outcome when the curtains open. I observed this happening behind the scenes, as constraints created an instant bond between our group. Obviously designers are the best type of volunteer: give them a Stanley knife, a stack of Post-its and 20 euros and, before you know it, you have amended conference brochures, an improvised cloak-room with a post-it ticketing system and lunch for a bunch of volunteers.” As practitioners, we spend considerable time deep in our clients’ trenches and can lose sight of the lofty goals that fire us up. From time to time we come up for air to step back and reflect on what we do and how we do it. Face-to-face and online gatherings can provide the breathing space to sow the seeds for collaboration. Irene: “Crossing the ocean to come to Paris was driven by the desire to meet new people in the global service design community, and to re-energise through shared stories of successes and challenges. I’m always seeking interesting projects and I wanted to see where the energy is flowing today. Social and organisational change was on the agenda. I’m pleased to see the conversation moving beyond the customer-facing level and digging deeper into the organisational level. We’ve spent a great deal of energy thinking about the experience

for customers. The next question to ask ourselves: what is the service experience for the experience makers?” Thea: “In France today, service design is slowly emerging. So it’s a struggle to crack through as a freelancer. Designers don’t thrive in isolation, it’s the social connections that provide our field of study but also structure how we operate. You can nominally keep in touch with your community via online breadcrumbs but you can't replace the sense of belonging that comes from being part of a project. As a conference volunteer, you are drawn into a vibrant group for a few days, which conjures up great memories. Hearing from the great mix of speakers was a real buzz and I did throw a few messages in a bottle out to the attendees who I chatted with. We’ll see what happens next…” So would French playwright Molière’s old adage of “One place, one time, one intrigue” have provided participants with a better stage in which to exchange, connect and learn? Not necessarily, said the designers. Multiple locations for each day of the conference provided an unusual insight into the working environments of clients, students and academics. Conference delegates travelled to various arrondissments across Paris, from Montparnasse to the Quartier Latin to Châtelet, an unconventional approach to exploring a city while soaking up rich conversation. As Irene flew across the ocean back home to Toronto and Thea settled into her cosy Parisian apartment, they're left hungry for more and wondering where SDN will send them next to cultivate that safe space for improvisation and new opportunities.

touchpoint 59


KISD Photo Studio


Se German rvice Service De si Design gn Conference 2012 on Stag e

CReaTING Value(S): Transforming individual behaviour, exploring the Relationship Be tween businesses andand society through Service Service Design the performing a Design rts


From Shareholder Value to Shared Values The value of service design

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

62

touchpoint

Growth is no value. When I started teaching in 1995 as the firstever professor of service design, there was neither concept, framework nor curriculum for teaching and no market for service design. If Google had already existed, the search would have yielded 0 results. Today, we get 1.440.000.000 results when we search for service design in Google. Since the middle of the 1990s, service design has experienced a rapidly increasing growth. But growth is of no value. Growth is neither an aim nor a value in itself. In the best case, it is a consequence of influential thoughts and impactful deeds. Taking a closer look, you will find among the 1,440,000,000 results on Google almost everything imaginable that sails under the flag of service design: from advertising agencies were quick off the draw, registering service design domains to escort agencies who found the name sexy. The term ‘service design’ can denote packaging and labeling – a surface that is not connected to any relevant content. We also find IT companies and Web agencies that try to move from pure data and technology towards user orientation. They find the term ‘service design’ charming. But often they are still at the beginning of a process and have not yet really bothered to grow their service

design-related competencies. We could call this ‘service design as wishful thinking’ – a surface that is at least connected to intent. And we also find the strong core community of service design that has taken pains to develop a framework, processes, methods and tools, terminology, values and deliverables. It has grown knowledge and practice within the field of service design for all different branches. A strong community that creates solutions that are useful, usable, desirable, efficient, effective and different. There are universities that teach service design classes or offer full master programs, companies that have created teams or positions for service design or agencies that have created a strong focus on service. It is not always easy for potential clients to find out what service design is and where to find valuable partners. It is certainly a challenge for the future


german conference - creating value(s)

speech of Watch the er o n birgit mag to make it easy for potential clients to fi nd their way around this buzzing new field. Within the professional service design practice, three types of service design projects can be identified: projects that do all create value and do respond to different needs. The interface level: at this level, we fi nd a focus on improvements and innovations connected to customer experience: the journey, the touchpoints and evidences, we fi nd personas, storyboarding, mock-ups and prototyping. This interface-oriented service design focuses on the front-stage experience. The system level: at this level, we fi nd a focus on structures, processes, performances and props. Stakeholder maps, system maps, blueprints, flowcharts and organisational aspects will be in the centre of the service design project. The back stage is integrated as a crucial part of service improvement and innovation. The strategy level: at this level, we fi nd a focus on strategic innovation, improvement and innovation on strategic positioning and USPs or new business development. All three of these service design levels create value for improvement and innovation, but does it really take service design to create value? SERVICE DESIGN IS SUPERFLUOUS

A customer oriented strategy, deep understanding of the customer’s life and needs, a strong enthusiasm for constant improvement and innovation, the use of technologies as a means to create value for people, to care for happy employees who develop strong relationships to customers – these should be matters-of-course for managers of service companies, qualities expressed in their

12 www.sdnc

genes. And, without doubt, the world has seen many innovative and successful services without any trace of service design being involved! Good services do not necessarily need a service designer. Theoretically, service design would be – maybe even should be – superfluous, because it is the core business of management. But why do we encounter so many unsatisfying services, unanswered needs and problem areas? Why is there such a lack of useroriented design and innovation? Why do some of the most relevant issues of our times, like health, mobility, education or finance, still lack the innovative services to respond to them? Efficient management in our industrialised and emerging economies means delegation. Often, management is not connected to customers at all. Within the specialised silos of organisations, these customers get lost. Efficient management means quantification and measurement. Numbers, graphs, diagrams and flow charts build the foundation of information systems and decision-making. So often, human needs only appear as quantified and frozen data that are rooted in the past and do not enable understanding of people and innovative thinking at all. Managers usually have a background in economics or technology and today, the education

.de

touchpoint 63


in these fields is still very specialised, lacking an interdisciplinary and holistic approach. The product- and technology paradigm still drives business and the integration of holistic customer experience and constant interdisciplinary innovation of service offerings is still the exception rather than the rule in our economy. Management also lacks the competencies for design, even though the buzz word of ‘design thinking’ is penetrating management boards and is often misused as ‘design lite’. So the value of service design is related to a systematic change in perspective: from data rooted in the past to opportunities in understanding peoples needs, reading between the lines and focusing on the future. It is an enrichment of competencies: the ability to delve deeply and to think broadly, the ability to understand and visualise systems and create innovation that is based on interdisciplinarity and co-creation. The ability to create prototypes of not yetexisting realities and to enable their early evaluation and testing. These are values of service: but does it create value in the eyes of potential clients? FROM STAKEHOLDER MAPS TO STAKEHOLDER VALUE

‘Shareholder value’ has been the mantra of stockmarket-oriented businesses for several decades. It has a very clear mission: the dividend and the share value are the focus of all activities. This does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. Because, in the best case, a company is successful from a shareholder perspective because it offers great products or services at a price customers happily 64

touchpoint

pay, generating revenues that makes it profitable. Happy employees bring great performance, resources are treated with respect and social responsibility is taken seriously. But, many times, shareholder value is connected to a strong focus on cost reduction, job cutting, outsourcing of production to low-wage countries, exploitation of human and non-human resources, taylorisation of structures and processes and implementation of cost-saving technologies that reduce the contact with customers and the pleasure of use. So the concept of shareholder value is being discussed very controversially. But there is not much controversial discussion about the need for companies to be profitable, in order to provide jobs, pay taxes and invest in improvements and innovation. So, if profitability is the foundation of doing business, what value does service design provide for the economic wellbeing of its clients? A mini-poll that I have conducted in the service design community1 shows that more than 90% of the participants do not place their priority on the issues that drive the business of their clients. They place the priority on customers. Of course, a focus on customers can lead to profit, but it does not necessarily have to. Service Designers need to create more awareness, more competencies and more measures for value if they want to move from the experience level to the business level and if they want to move from the creative playroom to the influential boardroom. Service design has to develop concepts, arguments and measurements that transform shareholder value into shared values, that push stakeholder


german conference - creating value(s)

What is most important in service design project? customer value 64% employee value

6%

shareholder value

8%

social responsibility

9%

other 13% 10

20

30

40

50

60

total participants: 102

maps toward stakeholder value. And that enables service designers to speak the language of their clients. THE CUSTOMER IS TO BLAME

What about the non-economic values? Social justice. Inclusion. Equal opportunities. Ecological and social responsibility. Respectful relationships. How relevant are these values for service providers? As long as customers tolerate bad service and as long as they do not care under which circumstances the value has been created and produced, we will continue to move into a mainly price-focused economy. The customer is to blame. The market will provide offerings as long as there are enough customers who accept them. We do see two major changes that will have an impact on the design of service offerings: Values become more important. If consumers have choices between different offerings and the price is comparable it will be sustainability and value issues that influence the final decision2. Transparency is increasing and not much longer will the backstage be a mystery. Value driven design of services will be more and more important. Bad service experiences no longer have an effect on only one customer but potentially on millions of others that share experiences via social media. Customers are enabled to raise their voices and they will do so. Value

driven design of services, that is focusing on the respect for user needs, will become more relevant. Most service designers are strongly rooted in a human-centred approach. They relate to social and ecological aspects of value creation and regard them as just as important as pure economic value. They have a focus on respectful treatment of human- and non-human resources. And they trust that, in the long run, a respectful and value-oriented provision of services will also be economically successful. These values will become of relevance to business, not simply an idealised playground. And service design will provide value by helping to create value-oriented solutions to needs.

•

References 1 I did the same poll in the online community of business and marketing and the results were not all that different. So it can just be seen as a starting point to a more in depth research on the values that drive designers as opposed to other disciplines. 2 Otto Group Trendstudie 2011

touchpoint 65


Designing Transformative Services

Nancy Birkhölzer is a Managing Partner at IxDS. There, she connects academic research, industrial product development and her service design expertise to design transformative products and services. She co-hosted this years National Service Design Network Conference, frequently teaches and lectures on service design and was recently recognised as one of the “100 Women of the Future” by Deutschland – Land der Ideen.

Melanie Wendland is Group Design Lead at Fjord Service Design Academy. She is responsible for planning and executing strategies for knowledge sharing and creative collaboration as well as delivering employee and client trainings. As a service design practitioner she is passionately involved in identifying, developing and sharing best practices and leveraging service design thinking.

66

touchpoint

Nancy Birkhölzer and Melanie Wendland delivered a keynote at the National Service Design Conference organized by the German chapter of the International Service Design Network. Theme of the conference was “Creating value(s): Transforming business, society and individual behaviour through Service Design”. WHERE IS THE VALUE? WHY EVERY BUSINESS

NEED FOR CHANGE

To better understand the context for transformative services, let’s look at the changing circumstances under which In our fast changing society, we need to re-evaluate the meaning of value creation service businesses need to run today. First and foremost, our basic needs for customers and think of how businesses in life are very different to what they can deliver and gain value by providing once were. People are becoming more services to them. What kinds of services are required creative and taking greater control over their own lives in the so-called ‘Creative to address the needs of future customers Society’. With this trend comes a rise in while providing a sustainable and solid the need for empowerment from the very business model? services we consume. Although Maslow We see an increased discussion – saw the need for self-actualisation at the both in the consumer as well as the business context – about the need to “transform top of his pyramid of basic needs, the organisations” and deliver “transformative pyramid is now being turned around and services”, by which we mean those services self-actualisation can be recognised as a basic need that services must address. that change the way individuals or groups Alongside that, people are becoming behave in order to foster wellbeing and satisfaction. We think it will be transform- more aware of the products they buy, ative services that drive value creation and seeking transparency about the origin, delivery in the future while delivering busi- production and environmental impact of a product/service. Companies have ness value at the same time. We therefore to cater to this change in consumer want to take a closer look at how services need to be designed to achieve these goals. behaviour. SHOULD FOCUS ON TRANSFORMATIVE SERVICES


german conference - creating value(s)

Organisations and the market they operate in are evolving, and many companies face the ‘product-toservice’ transition, requiring them to focus on finding new ways of doing business in order to compete in today’s economy. But the market is already oversaturated with products and services. Never has an economy seen a market with such a variety of specialisation and choice. At the same time there is little or no growth in a maturing market and competition becomes intense. Because consumers are knowledgeable and often see products as commodities, the need for differentiation becomes a key driver for success. To further complicate the landscape, many of us feel overwhelmed by the variety and complexity of offerings at hand. Rising product and service fatigue – an increasing resistance from consumers to constantly consider, buy and use more and more new products and services – is the result. These developments make the market even more unpredictable. Finally, society is growing more complex. We have witnessed significant shifts in the way the world operates, from the financial crisis, to an ageing population, the growing gap between the rich and the poor and climate change. Each presents unique challenges to different types of business. In order prepare for these dramatic changes, businesses need to better understand how they can be addressed through their own offerings.

see many signals that the economy of transformations – and with it the need for transformative services – is finally becoming reality. SIGNALS OF TRANSFORMATION

REPUTATION CAPITAL

Reputation becomes a major factor in how individuals can influence groups and societies. Individuals are motivated by non-monetary rewards and go the extra mile to contribute time, skills and intellect for personal satisfaction and social goodwill. CROWDSOURCING

Groups become increasingly open to gather physically or virtually to generate and implement ideas in a bottomup, ad hoc and hierarchy-free manner to solve complex, multi-dimensional problems.

FROM THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY TO THE ECONOMY OF TRANSFORMATIONS

NEW FORMS OF OWNERSHIP

These challenges on the individual, organisational, market or societal level make it evident that services businesses need to react. Yet this observation isn’t new and has been hotly debated for a number as years, most notably in the book, The Experience Economy by Pine and Gilmore, written in the early 1990s. The book describes how we move through phases of the economy and explains that the end of the 90s marked an era of differentiation using services staged as experiences to their customers. The authors were clear to point out that in the future, experiences alone won’t be enough to make businesses succeed and fulfil people’s needs, but instead that transformations are the next phase our economy needs to move into. We

The idea of ‘ownership’ is changing, driven by new motivations like environmentalism, optimum use of resources and conscious consumption, along with increasing costs and new methods of collaboration. As a result, the duration and nature of the way in which people want to own things is shifting to become more flexible. SLOW LIVING

People are becoming more conscious of the role that time plays in shaping their quality of life. They are prioritising experiences, connections with others, health, holistic wellbeing and creativity over the speed and pace of life. touchpoint 67


PROSUMERISM

The line between producers and consumers blurs as people harness new ways to influence, design and produce the products and services that they consume over the product’s life cycle. ACCELERATORS OF TRANSFORMATION

Furthermore, today’s technological developments and advances help accelerate this change. From social media to the Internet of Things, mobility, context-aware devices and constant connectivity: each innovation is transforming businesses of every shape and size.

individuals within a specific community (e.g. The middle class, women, children, etc.) for long-term business success. Wheelmap.org is a great example of catering to the need of a specific community. 2. Encourage individuals to wear many hats In a time of prosumerism and the shift from owing to using, it is increasingly important that individuals be allowed to play the role that fits their current situation. Someone offering goods today can be the buyer or supporter tomorrow. Identifying people’s needs and wants and matching the right individuals together in a specific situation will be a successful means to create services with transformational character. Kickstarter.com is already doing this very well. 3. Form new habits Transformative services should help people establish and maintain new behaviours. If new habits are formed, then transformation happens. When designing transformative services we need to identify what kind of habits exist or need to be created in order to improve the person’s wellbeing. Kochhaus.de is doing this in the field of cooking and nutrition.

THE 8 INGREDIENTS OF TRANSFORMATIVE SERVICES

Against this backdrop, we have identified a set of ingredients that have a strong influence on making a service transformative in character. These ingredients should guide both designers and businesses to create services that respond to the changes and challenges mentioned above. 1. Connect to a community Transformative services should have social relevance, be deeply integrated into a social community and empower that community to achieve its own goals. Services should also be designed in a way that positively impacts the lives of 68

touchpoint

4. Establish platforms Rather than offering the solution from start to finish, it is more valuable to establish a platform where individuals and businesses can collaborate. No one expects a single company to solve a social challenge on its own. Think about partnerships for added value and to enable long lasting change. Gidsy.com is already doing this by bringing like-minded people together from all over the world. 5. Empower the individual People want to feel empowered to take their lives into their own hands. The more transparent and semantic information is delivered through a service, the more the customer will feel empowered to take critical decisions that have a significant positive impact on their personal life, society or environment. Citibank’s iPad app is a powerful example of this that is already in the market.


german conference - creating value(s)

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

6. Embed services seamlessly Through the synergy of digital and physical services, new interaction paradigms emerge. Interactions with digital systems become more embedded into our real world, and physical and more natural interactions start to become more relevant and empowering to people in digital contexts as well. The less visible the interaction, the more powerful it is for the user. Just look at the very successful car-sharing service from DriveNow. 7. Enable responsible actions Sustainability has been recognised by many thought leaders as the most important aspect to focus on. But sustainable services not only mean dealing with environmental issues but also taking into account economic and social wellbeing. The more a service can enable a customer to take responsible actions, the bigger the impact on society, the economy or the environment will be. AlertMe.com is an excellent start in the right direction. 8. Foster co-creation Last, but not least, fostering co-creation in services will empower individuals to fulfil their need for selfactualisation. Empowering individuals to co-create experiences and to be part of shaping the service offering that they will enjoy will make the service more relevant and targeted to its audience. Spotify.com shows how well this can work in practice.

Whilst delivering experiences often means short-term engagements with customers, businesses are increasingly asking themselves how they can deliver services that establish lasting customer relationships. The eight ingredients we have identified are a step in the right direction but they also require a complete shift in thinking. How do we get customers to go beyond ‘I love my iPhone’, to ‘I love my health insurance’, acknowledging the positive impact of that service on their lives? Business success in the future should be measured not only in attention, interest or desire for a service in the market, but through the impact it has on society. In this sense, our ambition is to dream: Future business success will be counted in impactful transformations rather than financial transactions.

touchpoint 69


Balancing Value with Alignment Diagrams “A company’s primary responsibility is to serve its customers. Profit is not the primary goal, but rather an essential condition for the company’s continued existence. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.”1 Jim Kalbach, Principal UX Designer, Citrix Online Jim is an active speaker and instructor on design and innovation. He is the author of the book Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly, August 2007) and blogs at www. experiencinginformation. com

70

touchpoint

So wrote Peter Drucker, one of the most influential management theorists in the middle of the twentieth century. Somewhere along the way, however, businesses seem to have forgotten these words. The opposite seems more prevalent: leaders steeped in the traditional management canon have a one-track mind: maximise short-term profits. And for these businesses, serving customers is often a necessityat best or a nuisance at worse. The result: trust in corporations is at an all-time low. Consumers have grown cynical and distrustful of big business. But there is good news: this balance is shifting. Business leaders and managers are reconsidering how they can create as much value as they can derive from a market. More and more companies are embracing the notion of ‘co-creation’, first defined by business scholars Prahalad and Ramaswamy in their 000 Harvard Business Review article “CoOpting Customer Competence.” With co-creation, customers are not seen as

gregarious herds of consumers: instead, they are considered a source a value creation and competitive advantage – as collaborators in the value creation process. Co-creation is an explicit recognition that value creation is an act of exchange between customers and a business, rather than an act of extraction from the former by the latter. What’s more, it represents a significant shift in business thinking that presents a real opportunity for design and for designers. Namely, we have something business managers don’t possess: the ability to locate and reveal value from a customer perspective. MAPPING VALUE

Diagrams are a key tool we use to model Diagrams are a key tool that we employ to model the value creation ecosystem. They are already part of the current design practice. You’ve probably used them: service blueprints, experience maps and mental model diagrams are a few examples.


german conference - creating value(s)

At a high level, I believe these diagrams fundamentally do the same thing: they seek to expose the way value is created, delivered and captured. Thus, I propose the term ‘alignment diagram’ to refer to any map, diagram or similar visualisation that reveals value creation both from the customer and business perspectives. Alignment diagrams are clearly not new. Instead, the phrase ‘alignment diagrams’ is a recognition that this type of work is as pertinent to business as it is to design activities. By reframing our work in this way, I hope to help designers and business stakeholders alike think about a balanced view of value creation. ALIGNMENT DIAGRAMMING

We can view value creation as an equation with two halves: on the one side, there’s the business perspective, including service provision mechanisms and the benefits the organisation obtains; on the other, we find the customer perspective, including the customer’s experience and the added value a service brings to a market. Accordingly, alignment diagrams also have two parts that mirror these perspectives. Where the activities of the two halves meet gives rise to touchpoints – where value lies, as illustrated in the diagram below.

Value lies at the intersection of customers and a business. Alignment diagrams seek to reveal that value from both sides of the equation (diagram adapted from Jess McMullin2).

Note that the term ‘alignment diagrams’ does not refer to a given method of visualisation. Instead, it’s a class of documents that encompasses methods already in practice. For instance, service blueprints and journey maps are examples of diagrams within this class because they seek to align customer behaviour with business activity. Figure 2 shows a service blueprint modelled after the format developed by Mary Jo Bitner. This specific example was by Brandon Schauer, a business analyst with Adaptive Path. The customer actions are indicated in the top half, business processes in the lower half. In the middle, Schauer draws a so-called ‘line of interaction’. This shows the touchpoints where value for both customers and business can be found. Another example of an alignment diagram is Indi Young’s ‘Mental Model’ approach, as detailed in her book of the same title3. Figure 3 shows a small portion of a mental model diagram for movie going and enjoying movies in general. A horizontal line divides the diagram into two parts. The top shows individual customer tasks (the small boxes), which are grouped by topic into ‘towers’. The towers are, in turn, clustered and then sectioned off into ‘goal spaces’. The boxes below the centre line show support offered by products or services for those tasks and goals. Unlike service blueprints or journey maps, the structure of mental model diagrams is hierarchical. They are not necessarily chronological, although often there is an implied chronological with some activity at times. This hierarchical organisation is particularly important for structuring products that do not have a linear, realtime interaction, such as the navigation of a website. As Young outlines in her book, designers can group the ‘goal spaces’ hierarchically to derive a high-level information architecture. Regardless of the form – a service blueprint, a customer journey map, a mental model diagram, workflow diagram or something else – we can align and represent value using different mapping techniques. This gives designers the flexibility to address client needs and project goals in different ways. touchpoint 71


blog posts facebook upcoming.com

ATTENDEE ACTIONS

register for event

welcome email

welcome signage

go to the event

welcome pack

arrive at the event

sign-in

displays

participate with displays, discussions, and drinks

twitter monitor

takeaway

listen and interact with panels

depart

line of interaction FRONT-OF-STAGE INTERACTIONS

blog, tweet, and announce event

greet attendees

sign-in attendees

seat attendees

conduct panel

facilitage q&a with panel

conduct panel

C U S T O M E R

event registration confirmation

PHYSICAL EVIDENCE

T O U C H P O I N T S

BACK-OF-STAGE INTERACTIONS

blogging and twittering event

post signage and position greeter

setup sign-in desk with volunteers, welcome packs, and attendee list

setup room: chairs, displays, drinks and a/v

mic panelist

line of internal interaction SUPPORT PROCESSES

create a marketing plan

manage cmu event registration system

recruit and coordinate volunteers

order chairs and drinks

coordinate panelists

B U S I N E S S

based on the diagram of brandon schauer, adaptive path

line of visibility

Figure 2: An example of a service blueprint for conference going. This shows alignment of multiple facets of information describing customer and business activity. PRINCIPLES OF ALIGNMENT DIAGRAMS

What holds alignment diagrams together as a class are their common principles, which are: Principle of Holism Alignment diagrams focus on human behaviour as part of a larger ecosystem. They are not about product research. As much as possible, they look at what people do in their normal lives or work environments. Principle of Multiplicity Alignment diagrams describe multiple facets of information. This is what the ‘alignment’ part of the technique is really all about. These are often represented in rows of information, such as those in a customer journey map. Principle of Interaction Alignment diagrams expose touchpoints between the customer and business and thus locate value for both sides. 72

touchpoint

Principle of Visualisation Alignment diagrams show a composite view of behaviour and processes in a graphical overview. It is the act of visualising the alignment of various types of information and the touchpoints that reveal shared value. Principle of Self Evidence Alignment diagrams should need little or no explanation. Anyone should be able to walk up to an alignment diagram and orient themselves quickly. Principle of Relevance Alignment diagrams seek to address real-world problems and therefore must be relevant to a given business or organisation, in addition to the user perspective


german conference - creating value(s)

BUY SOUNDTRACK

LISTEN TO SOUNDTRACK

DISCUSS THE FILM AFTERWARD

READ THE BOOK AFTERWARDS

AVOID DISCUSSIONS

INVESTIGATE STORY OF FILM AFTERWARDS

ASK STRANGERS THEIR OPINION AFTER A FILM

WISH THAT A FILM CAN CHANGE HOW I ACT

follow the industry

interact with people about the film

DISCUSS INTERPRETATION OF BOOK

COLLECT FILM-RELATED STUFF

LET THE MOVIE LINGER

SAVE TICKETS IN SCRAPBOOK

GET THE DVD

USE QUOTE FROM FILM IN CONVERSATION

COLLECT FILM ARTWORK

BUY SPECIAL DVDS

ALTER MY BEHAVIOR/ OPINION

COLLECT TOYS

GET DVDS AS GIFTS

LEARN CRAFT FROM DISCUSSION OF UNUSUAL POINTS

WATCH A FILM MULTIPLE TIMES WATCH DVDS I OWN MORE THAN ONCE WATCH FILM MULTIPLE TIMES

DISCUSS FILM AFTERWARDS WRITE FAN MAIL

RECOMMEND A FILM RECOMMEND A FILM WHEN ASKED

BECOME SERIOUS ABOUT THE CRAFT

TRACK BOX OFFICE COMPETITION

TRACK PRODUCTION STUDIO NEWS

WRITE ENTERTAINMENT

TRACK BOX OFFICE COMPETITION

TRACK DVD SALES

RATE A FILM

TOP BOX OFFICE PERFORMERS

TOP DVD SALES PERFORMERS

MY FAVORITE FILMS, AND WHY

MY FAVORITE FILMS, AND WHY

LINKS TO GROSS INCOME TRACKING ON FILMS

LINKS TO FILM INSTITUTE SCHEDULES

RATE THE MOOD OF A FILM

RATE THE MOOD OF A FILM

LINKS TO BOX OFFICE WEBSITES

LINKS TO FILM INSTITUTE WEBSITES

GO SOMEWHERE TO SIT AND DISCUSS FILM

WRITE A REVIEW

RATE A FILM

GET JOB AT THEATER/ VIDEO STORE

TRACK PRODUCTION STUDIO NEWS

STUDY FILM CRAFT

GET JOB AT THEATER/VIDEO STORE

LINKS TO ENTERTAINMENT WEBSITES

SEND STORY IDEA TO STUDIO

LOCAL THEATER JOB LISTINGS

C U S T O M E R

identify with a film ALLOW A FILM TO PERMEATE MY LIFE

DVD RELEASE DATES

WRITE FAN MAIL TO A DIRECTOR

WRITE FAN MAIL TO AN ACTOR

THIS FILM IS LIKE ANOTHER...

THIS FILM IS LIKE ANOTHER...

IF YOU LIKE THIS DIRECTOR, YOU WILL LIKE...

IF YOU LIKE THIS DIRECTOR, YOU WILL LIKE...

IF YOU LIKE THIS ACTOR, YOU WILL LIKE...

IF YOU LIKE THIS ACTOR, YOU WILL LIKE...

B U S I N E S S

T O U C H P O I N T S

Figure 3: Mental model diagrams seek to hierarchically align customer behaviour with business support in two halves. Principle of Validity Alignment diagrams are firmly grounded in primary research, such as observations, interviews or surveys. They should not be made up in isolation. At a minimum, brainstormed diagrams should be validated through research. I believe it is understanding these principles, not the mechanics of a single given technique, that opens up possibilities for designers. When consulting clients, designers can better tailor services to specific situations and tell a narrative of value creation in different ways as needed. VALUE-CENTERED DESIGN

While no silver bullet, alignment diagrams instil a sense of balance back into corporate thinking. At a minimum, they start a conversation towards coherence, bringing actions, thoughts and people together while fostering consensus. More importantly, they focus on creating value – for both the customer and the business. Moving forward, businesses will need to look at value as a balanced the equation. Alignment diagrams are diagnostic tools already in the design repertoire that let us do just that, bringing new relevance design work. By understanding the underlying principles of alignment, designers can leverage their skills in ways that better serve businesses and ultimately help redefine value creation.

Strategic and tactical projects within any organisation often witness conflicting perspectives. By focusing on value creation – the overlap between customer activity and business offerings – we potentially harmonise this conflict. This is first step in achieving co-creation and positioning an organisation to collaborate with customers.

References 1 Drucker, P. (1946). Concepts of the Corporation. (New York: Harper & Brothers). 2 Porter, M.E. & Kramer, M.R. (2011). Creating shared value. Harvard Business Review, 89 (1/2), 62-77. 3 Young, I. (2008) Mental Model Diagrams. (Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media).

touchpoint 73


A Time Machine for Service Designers Visit the user world of the future to understand their needs and desires Service design claims to build a better future through exceptional services that improve people’s lives. Ironically though, most of the currently employed user research methods deliver only insights valid for the past – or the present, at best. Julia Leihener is a service designer and founding member of Telekom Innovation Laboratories’ Creation Center in Berlin.

Dr. Henning Breuer is founder of the consulting company UXBerlin - Research and Innovation. CoAuthors Steven Schepurek & Jörn Schulz As part of the Telekom Innovation Laboratories research and development division of Deutsche Telekom, the Creation Center & User Driven Innovation functions as an interdisciplinary platform for customer integration and the creation of service concepts based on human needs. We build the bridge between research and business. We are a place for cultural change.

74

touchpoint

‘Creating Value(s)’ was the topic of this year’s service design conference in Cologne. ‘How can service design create sustainable value for society?’ was one of the questions we asked ourselves. Ideally, service design aims to build a better future through exceptional services that improve people’s lives. Ironically though, most of the currently employed user research methods relying on empirical data deliver insights that are, at best, valid only for the past or the present. However, if service design intends to create lasting value for social and economic change, it should also address and incorporate a leap into the future. Such a ‘long-term view’ is essential for everyone who intends to design for environments yet to come, e.g. for an emerging target group or for a new infrastructure that still needs to unfold. We need to explore future contexts in a specific domain, anticipate emerging user needs and envision future services without getting stuck in clichés from science fiction.

In this article, we present a methodology that combines service design with futures research and scenario analysis. In order to inform strategic decisions and to create concepts that are not only valid for the next 2-3 but 8-10 years, we enriched scenario approaches with methods typical of service design practices: ‘day-in-a-life’ narratives, persona creation and ideating within opportunity fields. We worked with this approach in a project for the telecommunications industry and generated possible and desirable futures for a convergent internet access in 2020. Numerous strategic options and service ideas were conceived and the client team was able to fully grasp what the future of their business might hold for them. We would like to share our experience and invite you to step on board our time machine – aiming for future values through service design. The Creation Center & User Driven Innovation division, a part of the Telekom Innovation Laboratories, was approached


german conference - creating value(s)

Trends + insights from desk research, previous projects, expert keynotes, and workshop ideation 7 key factors with 2 extreme poles from clustering of trends + insights and various sub factors 3 descriptive scenarios, 1 normative scenario as basis for backcasting 4 opportunity fields, 25 ideas, future + alternative activities, strategy criteria and a vision-roadmap

Methodological funnel showing the service design process from insights via scenarios to future opportunity fields. by the team from the company Product & Innovation All IP Access products (‘Voice & Fast Internet’) with the following questions: • How will communication and network accessibility develop in the year 2020? • Which future scenarios are imaginable and support the All-IP convergence strategy of Deutsche Telekom? • Which service concepts will be relevant in 2020 and what can we learn from them for today? In order to answer these questions, a series of workshops was set up and conducted over a period of six months. The goals were to develop a positive vision for convergent access in 2020 and a shared understanding of critical issues and service opportunities in future network access business. We explored future customer needs and behaviour in a converging technological environment. The project resulted in a roadmap of strategic measures and activities, service ideas for new business, as well as strategic milestones for the next ten years. GET STARTED: SETTING A COMMON GROUND

The first step was to gather together an interdisciplinary team covering fields of product management, service design, futures research, social science, technology and market research. After a joint commitment to the project goals and methodological approach, expectations and

relevant topics were discussed in order to define the project scope. Related products and applications from international competitors were then analysed. This helped us to agree on a definition of the term ‘convergence’ and create a common ground among the interdisciplinary participants: “Convergence stands for a seamless and coherent user experience enabled by smart, invisible technology. This technology should be securely accessible everywhere and easy to use.” IDENTIFY KEY FACTORS: WHAT WOULD REALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

A starting point for the discussion of the main factors that would impact on future network access business was provided through user contributions in the form of videographic footage and cultural probes on topics such as voice-based telecommunication. These user-generated artefacts and illustrations inspired discussions about factors that would also influence future business. For example, one user’s report about his collection touchpoint 75


Keyfactor dashboard to generate different parameter combinations of relevant keyfactors as a base grid for future scenario generation.

of phones from various providers was interpreted as indicator that developments regarding cross-industry convergence (as one influencing factor) will impact future business. Diverse sources of knowledge contributed to the discursive collection and aggregation of the most relevant factors. Trend specialists and future researchers proposed hidden and emerging user needs and cultural trends that they considered relevant in the future. Together with experts in technology foresight they participated in the controversial prioritisation of key influencing factors. Here we distinguished between rather determined elements that are largely foreseeable and critical uncertainties that can develop in different directions. For example, the development of demographic change is rather certain, whereas the process of standardisation (e.g. achieving interoperability between networks, platforms and operating systems) may or may not occur. A set of relevant key factors with two alternative parameter values each were finally identified. Beside the issue of cross-industry convergence and standardisation, the key factor collection included issues of identity management, usage versus ownership and the level of digital immersion. 76

touchpoint

TAKE THE TIME MACHINE: CRAFTING YOUR SCENARIOS

The next step yielded three explorative future scenarios for convergent access. Possible and plausible combinations of key factors were evaluated in a stepby-step approach. The key factors first were prioritised through a homework exercise by all participants. Starting with the highest ranked factors, three groups discussed in parallel different combinations of parameter values in order to generate an outline for the scenario creation. For instance, the key factor ‘usage versus ownership’ could develop in two directions: future society might develop in the direction of using goods instead of owning them, like current car sharing concepts, as well as holding on to models of owning personal possessions, just to be on the safe side. Building on our user insights, we took ‘usage on demand’ as the first promising parameter value, tending towards the usage option with almost all contents and services available in the cloud and open to subscription by users. Secondly, we anticipated that cross-industry convergence, e.g. telecommunication and automotive industry partnering, would increase until 2020, with diversification of the business beyond the traditional industry boundaries, instead of continuing to work in their traditional fields. The combination of parameters in this case would now produce a society using products and services on demand in a world where industries closely collaborate. How would another key factor like standardisation link in? What if standardisation was assumed to fail within this scenario, so that compatibility and interoperability would remain challenging for users?


german conference - creating value(s)

In continuous evaluation of very likely, as well as unconventional combinations of those potential parameters, further key factors were mapped accordingly (see image). The resulting key factor grid then served as a base for a brainstorming using the following questions: • What would a world with those keyfactor parameter combinations look like? • What kind of people would live there? What would be their desires and needs? How would they live and communicate? • What could be promising fields of opportunity in this world of 2020? ANTICIPATE FUTURE USER NEEDS: SCENARIO INSIGHTS ANALYSIS

As a result, three tangible day-in-thelife stories were generated: ‘Brave New Digi World’, ‘Carpe Net’ and ‘I Need Help’. These were illustrated

using graphic recording, as well as narrative scenario methods, in order to identify problems, challenges and business opportunities that could result from future developments. The workshop participants were asked to dive deep into the scenario worlds by reading the stories aloud and by watching out for interesting aspects that resulted from the imagined scenarios. For instance, one of the day-in-the-life stories was called ‘Brave New Digi World’ and consisted of a future vision in which people were always online, although the younger generations had been empowered in media literacy. In this scenario, older generations were more in danger of being absorbed by the information overload, since they were lacking in media competences. In the ‘Brave New Digi World’ most devices, be they digital gadgets, vehicles or sports equipment, like skateboards, would not be individually owned anymore, but would, rather, be used on demand. Through identification chips they could be checked out and used at any time. One of the fields of opportunity deriving from this scenario would be the option a telecommunication provider engaging in logistics in order to enable a seamless user experience, e.g. tracking and communicating which skateboard is available when, where and for whom.

Cross-over evaluation of parameter values for potential combinations of key factors as a method for designing a grid for a future scenario.

touchpoint 77


PROJECTED PROTOTYPING: FILTER THROUGH THE EYES OF THE FUTURE USER

One of the central aspects was the ‘future reality check’, in the form of an immersive excursion to the corporate gallery space displaying future communication technologies in a close-to-natural setting. Divided into three ‘visitors-from-2020’ groups, the workshop participants discovered future communication technologies in different life settings, such as listening to music and communicating in the living room, driving a car through unknown territory or working in a paperless office. Looking through the eyes of their future user, for example, one from ‘Brave New Digi World’, the workshop participants were asked to test what they had learned in this environment. The creation of headlines and article outlines for a future newspaper proved to be a valid methodology at this point. With this feedback material and the selected key factors and opportunity fields, we were able to filter the best of the three explorative scenarios in order to build a normative desirable scenario in the following the workshop. BACK TO REALITY: DERIVE A STRATEGIC ACTION PLAN

Stepping out of the time machine and back into the present, we applied so-called ‘back-casting’ on the normative scenario. The workshop participants started from the desirable future and worked their way backwards to the present by identifying measures and activities that need to be undertaken in order to reach the normative scenario and, thus, connect the future with the present. In the end, and with this 78

touchpoint

input, an instruction for actions was outlined, ranked and mapped on a time scale. To enable the workshop participants to adjust their roadmap to upcoming influences and impulses, the analogue version of the final documentation of the workshop series contained a ‘do-it-yourself’ roadmap set. Thus, every participant will be able to depict the roadmap on an office wall and to alternate activities and measures according to the current situation. The process of back-casting was one of the crucial and critical steps in the entire process: it was the ‘moment of truth’, when we projected all the visions that had been created back into the present, into the everyday lives of the product managers. Mapping their current business activities with the core factors along a time line, gaps became visible and clearly showed where activities are missing to drive the overall vision. Also, the understanding that current activities do not fully cater for alternative developments was an important lesson learned, and one requiring further action, e.g. a deep-dive ideation on selected topics. TALK ABOUT IT: APPLY YOUR VISION

A major challenge of these kind of projects is the communication and implementation of the results. Therefore we initiated an interactive hand-over workshop with all participants and presented a flexible documentation format in order to bridge the gap between stepping into the time machine and the everyday work of the client: a box containing a card system that shows the results and the process, as well as the tools to continue and to apply the methods in innovation development. Several exercises encouraged the managers to work with the documentation cards towards new ends. In addition, a stop-motion movie was produced, explaining the approach and the key results in an abstract but tangible and easily distributable way. An exhibition was even set up in the headquarters to share the results with more than 150 managers and decision makers. Next to the rich material generated, one of the most important achievements for the managers was the learn-


german conference - creating value(s)

Graphic recorded illustrations of extreme scenarios showing three possible converged worlds in 2020: ‘Brave New Digi World’, ‘Carpe Diem Carpe Net’, ‘I Need Help’.

ing process during the scenario generation. Participants stated that they “grew tremendously during the last half year and now feel a lot more secure in their daily decisions.” All participants from different divisions were able to create their shared vision to pursue for the next years: “Now, we have a compass for our entire service-innovation department.” This experience created the basis for an iterative refinement and reflection of strategic options with the team. TRAVEL TO THE FUTURE AND BACK: SYNTHESIS & LESSONS LEARNED

The enrichment of future-scenario modelling with service design methodology proved to be a valid approach. On the one hand, user research and creative innovation tools enriched, as well as freed up, scientific and strongly structured scenario methods. On the other hand, these elevated the capabilities, range and focus of the service design methodologies: starting with the exploration of the user needs and expert perspectives of today, we projected these along relevant key factors, created a framework to travel the future and came up, not only with new service ideas, but with a roadmap of strategic options. Just like we visit users in their everyday lives today to learn about their needs, we were able to visit the users in their various scenario environments of tomorrow. By understanding their potential desires in 2020, we can provoke the right activities and take valid action for today.

We were able to create a future vision for a specified field grounded in empathy. By anticipating upcoming needs and service ideas we are now able to prepare ourselves for the future. Back-casting user scenarios of 2020 into the present allowed us to generate a long-term strategy and even shape the future. This way, we can create relevant services with a lasting perspective, thus creating sustainable value through creating services for tomorrow –just by making use of a methodological time machine.

References Breuer, H., Schulz, J. & Leihener, J. (2012). ‘Learning from the Future – Scenarios based on Normativity, Performativity and Transparency to foster Organizational Learning’. Proceedings of XXIII ISPIM Conference 2012. International Society of Professional Innovation Management, Barcelona. Online (20.8.2012): http://ssrn.com/abstract=2125750 Schmolze, R., (2011). Unternehmen Idee: Wie kundenorientierte Produktentwicklung zum Erfolg führt. Campus Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt/New York. http://www.unternehmen-idee.de/

touchpoint 79


Conference in Germany Bringing the German and European service design scene together

The Service Design Network Germany conference (SDNC12.de) is the premier service design event in Germany and one of the largest in Europe, where the service design community comes together for face-to-face interaction and the sharing of ideas. Thomas Schönweitz is founder and managing Partner of Whitespring Service Design. He is a lecturer in service design at the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd and Hochschule Hof and is the German representative for the Service Design Network International. He is chair of the Service Design Network Germany Conference and was a host to the Munich Global Service Jam. Startup Accelerator.

Nancy Birkhölzer is a Managing Partner at IxDS. There, she connects academic research, industrial product development and her service design expertise to design transformative products and services. She co-hosted this years National Service Design Network Conference, frequently teaches and lectures on service design.

80

touchpoint

From the 21st to the 23rd of June, more than 130 business professionals, designers and academics came together from all over the world for two days of expert talks and community building. The theme for this year’s event was Creating Value(s): Transforming Business, Society and Individual Behavior through Service Design. The conference focused on the entire process of value creation, from the financial perspective of the business to the perspective of customer value and society at large. Throughout the presentations, participants were confronted with changing ideas about the definition of value creation for society, users and employees in the service industry. With the help of case studies and tools, this topic was vividly discussed. The conference team made an extra effort to invite more participants from the industry to create a closer dialog between service design practitioners and academics and those who really have applied service design to their products, services and organisations.

The SDNC12.de reception was hosted by MHMK University of Applied Sciences, Cologne campus. After a welcome address on Thursday afternoon, given by Nancy Birkhölzer (Fjord) and Thomas Schönweitz (Whitespring), participants listened to Prof. Jürgen Faust and Prof. Wolfgang Hürth from MHMK. In their keynote, Nancy Birkhölzer and Melanie Wendland from Fjord’s Service Design Academy presented the benefits and key ingredients for successfully designing transformative services. Success refers to having longterm impact on individuals and on society by helping to foster behavioural change, both among customers and among service businesses. On Friday, Birgit Mager, co-founder and president of the Service Design Network and Professor of Service Design at KISD, opened the conference day with her keynote speech on shareholder value and shared values. In what was a very engaging argument, she introduced and then rejected three provocative statements: “Service Design is superfluous”, “Growth has no value” and


german conference - creating value(s)

“The customer is to blame.” Professor Mager discussed and gave examples that showed that growth does have value when channelled and used in the right way, that service design is not superfluous as it has been shown to be beneficial for so many organisations and services and that, finally, the customer cannot be blamed, because organisations should have the responsibility for leading and guiding their customers in the direction of the correct behaviour. This talk set a great framework for the upcoming presentations, which showcased how service design has transformed businesses that were originally productfocused. It was great to see case studies from small- and medium-sized enterprises at the event, highlighting how service design has made an impact on their business and offerings. Michael Rabenstein from Emporia talked about designing for cross-generation communication and how inclusive design plays an important role in creating customer value while, at the same time, positioning the company as a pioneer in designing communication devices for the elderly. This project clearly highlighted how stakeholder value, as claimed by Birgit Mager, is an important aspect of making service design successful within an organisation, especially in small- and medium-sized enterprises with long traditions. Alexander Gerstner from Baur shared the exciting journey of the company from analogue products to digital services. Baur, one of the major players in the niche market of testing and measurement technology, has worked closely with Fjord on a service design project to develop a new digital service that aims to revolutionise the measurement business. This

talk also highlighted that behavioural change happens at several levels within an organisation. By applying a service design approach and designing a new service with a focus on both the customer and on innovation, organisational structures need to change, value chains have to be re-planned and stakeholder interests taken into account. On the other side, for the users of Baur’s services, using the measurement devices in a new way has radically changed the way the profession and skill set of measurement technicians is perceived and executed. Behavioural change is happening both front stage and back stage. Prototyping was another big topic at the conference: Fjord designer Manuel Grossmann – together with his colleagues from Service Design Berlin – spoke about the value and practices of prototyping, which stirred up some interesting discussions. Verena Augustin from IxDS also looked specifically at the role of technology and physical prototyping during the cocreative design process. Fabio Di Liberto, Principal of Innovation Practice at Continuum, gave an engaging speech and helped us to open our eyes towards fine arts and performance. “What can business learn from theatre?”, he asked. Design should surprise, design can be off-grid and against-grid and it can change behaviour (Volkswagen Theory). The day ended with an evening barbecue where we all rallied behind Germany in their Euro 2012 football match against Greece. The SDN member’s day was introduced with a speech from Julia Schaeper from the UK National Health Institute on how service design can improve the healthcare experience. Julia gave a thorough introduction to what challenges the UK National Health Service faces touchpoint 81


KISD Photo Studio

and how the Department of Innovation, in which she works as a service designer, is trying to spot opportunities and to help the NHS to transform public and private health care. Julia outlined how their design thinking approach means they are open both to the solution and to applying different creative methodologies, but also how they include non-service design methodologies such as lean thinking and Six Sigma. At the closing of the member’s day, Thomas Schönweitz from Whitespring took to the stage and came up with a fresh approach to recruiting and team building. With his presentation “How do you build your Team? Employee Retention through Service Design”, he analysed expectations, experience and satisfaction and dissatisfaction among employees. The students of Integrated Design at KISD, who formed a big part of the conference organisational team, showcased their service design skills in the way that the conference experience was created. People were received, guided and entertained with great attention to detail using spatial and information design. It was an excellent few days and we all walked away with new inspiration and fresh ideas. 82

touchpoint

As the conference topic had already highlighted, many of the cases presented analysed how value is created within an organisation by applying a service design approach. But service design not only means designing and launching new services, but also radically changing the way an organisation works. When new processes, approaches and services are integrated into an organisation, employees face big changes. Structures, procedures, lines of communication and hierarchies are but a few of the things affected. Professor Mager outlined her three levels of service design: Interface Level, System Level and Strategic Level. Service design ultimately needs to look at all the three levels at the same time. Adopting a service design approach within an organisation requires both a change of leadership and a change of culture in many dimensions. In this sense, the transformations that service design can bring about are manifold. Conferences like this are an important part of service design because they not only inspire and support continuous learning, but they also promote the value of service design beyond the narrow community of practitioners.


german conference - creating value(s)

touchpoint 83


Designing for Love

Digital services, such as Google Maps and Foursquare, are a fast-growing part of our daily lives. These services can be beneficial and much loved, like Amazon Prime, but poorly designed services can create bad feeling, causing customers to terminate brand relationships. DESIGNING LIVING ENTITIES

So what is service design all about? At Fjord, we practice service design to shape delightful experiences wherever people meet the products they use. Service design is about creating living entities that evolve and change over time. This is fundamentally different from other forms of design that generally aim for permanency. Successful service design changes in three ways: • In response to people’s evolving needs and expectations • According to feedback loops from users and related service systems • Adapting to natural growth and added functionality over time It’s not that the design of services is inherently better or more important than other forms of design, but it is different. It’s more multidimensional, and it requires different skills and a different approach, because digital services are living entities, not static or one-off things. 84

touchpoint

Instead of getting stuck in industry jargon, we like to compare services to human relationships. After all, people’s relationships with services mirror their relationships with people. Users go through different stages of service engagement and, when service design is great, they have a longlasting relationship of trust – they might even fall in love. It’s been proven through many studies that users’ relationships to their mobile phones (and the digital services that they use) can be as powerful as their relationships with people. They feel incomplete or cut off without their gadgets and services. At Fjord, we aim to design services that people fall in love with. When you design for love, you have to design for the heart, for an emotional connection, rather than merely for the mind. When you appeal to the heart, you can usually create more value.

Just like love in real life, falling in love with a service is something that happens gradually. Yes, love at first sight does exist, but it’s an exception, not the norm. Usually there are three stages of engagement with the service:

1. MATCHMAKING The matchmaking stage is about people discovering and understanding the service in the first place. Services must be designed so that they are easily discovered and understood. They have to feel real and relevant, by way of meeting real human needs. Importantly, there should be a strong ‘hook’ or strong point of differentiation – the thing that people will mention to their friends. If you’ve done a good job designing for this first stage of engagement, you can hope for a user reaction like ‘Aha!’ This type of reaction indicates that they understand it and could see how the service could be useful for them.

2. DATING The dating stage is the first trial of the service, and it’s really important to reduce all barriers to


korean conference

Three universal stages to attain true love

Digital service equivalent

Desired user reaction

Matchmacking

discovery

AHA!

trial

WOW!

Dating Truelove

usage in order to make it as easy as possible to get going. It’s also very important to appeal to the heart and make people really engage with the service. Gaming dynamics, social service components, and beauty can be very powerful at this stage. Great content, humor, and a winning personality are key. A successful design for the dating stage often results in the famous ‘wow!’ reaction from the user.

3. TRUE LOVE The third and most powerful stage is true love. If you’ve designed a service that adds value and is meaningful over a long period, users will stay loyal and let the service become a life companion. Consistency and trust will be essential during this stage. Just like with a human companion, you want to be able to always rely on the service. As you trust the service with more of your content and more of your secrets over time, you should

loyalty

OF COURSE!

Three universal stages to attain true love

never have doubts about privacy or the true intentions of the service provider. An ability to fluidly use the service across platforms and locations will be important. But with multiple touchpoints and interactions, complexity is a real issue, both for the people using the services, as well as for the companies that provide them. In digital design, there’s a tendency for complexity to take root and grow like weeds in a garden. For service designers, the trick is to make complex systems simple and elegant. When users fall in love with a service, a typical reaction is ‘Of course!’: an indication that the interaction feels intuitive and natural. Just like any great romance, getting to that ‘Of course!’ reaction is never easy. But as anyone who has ever fallen in love can attest, when it happens, it’s magic. The companies that design seductive digital services will ultimately be the ones that create the most successful and long-lasting bonds with their customers.

Ji-Hye Park is a service design lead at Fjord, an international service design consultancy that creates useful, effective, and desirable digital services that people love. She manages a multi-disciplinary team to deliver service across different industries. She is an expert in designing for multiple platforms, with a wide range of experience from ethnographic research and concepting to delivering design solutions.

touchpoint 85


conference impressions

Fernando Galdino

service design global conference 2012 in paris

86

touchpoint


inside sdn

touchpoint 87


Fernando Galdino | Thomas Schรถnweitz

members day impressions

88

touchpoint


buy touchpoint online! volu

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 Touchpoint issues visit http://bit.ly/shop-touchpoint

uro ,80 e 2 | 12 | no. 12 me 4 mber 20

Septe

Design Service ge on Sta

rspective Arts Pe rming n A Perfo ve en J. Gro ice Desig on Serv d P. Fisk and Steph

volume 4 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro

May 2012

on

By Raym

OW! ow! W Wow. W Boom! rence OM!!! am Law BOOO Hormeß and Ad rkus

By Ma

sure of st Plea The Lo rise rp and Su Liberto

ness

Random

io Di

By Fab

Eat, Sleep, Play Design Principles for Eating Sustainably By Michelle McCune

Hospitality Service as Science and Art By Kipum Lee

Reinventing Flight. Porter Airlines: a Case Study By Christopher Wright and Jennifer Young

volume 3 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro

volume 3 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro

volume 3 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

May 2011

September 2011

January 2012

Organisational Change

Learning, Changing, Growing •

Being Led or Finding the Way?

Mary Cook and Joseph Harrington

From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet

Overcoming the ‘Monkeysphere’ Challenge

Service Design Creates Breakthrough Cultural Change in the Brazilian Financial Industry

Jesse Grimes and Mark Alexander Fonds

Better Services for the People Sylvia Harris and Chelsea Mauldin

Innovating in Health Care – an Environment Adverse to Change

By Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt and Jose Mello

Francesca Dickson, Emily Friedman, Lorna Ross

Service Transformation: Service Design on Steroids

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

Using Service Design Education to Design University Services Jürgen Faust

By Jürgen Tanghe

Melvin Brand Flu

Designing Human Rights By Zack Brisson and Panthea Lee

01 01

volume 2 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro

volume 2 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro

ay 2010

September 2010

Touchpoint the journal of

ervice

volume 2 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

esign

Business Impact of Service Design

e ice esi n and Be a io a an e • Designing

otivation or otivating design? ploring Service Design otivation and ehavioural change

Service Design – The Bottom Line

How Human Is Your Business?

Connecting the Dots •

Service Design as Business Change Agent

MyPolice

Service Design at a Crossroads

Mark Hartevelt and Hugo Raaijmakers

Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason

ergus Bisset and Dan ockton

Lauren Currie and Sarah Drummond

Steve Lee

• Design and

ehaviour in co ple B2B service engage ents

Ben Shaw and Melissa efkin

harging p: energy usage in households around the world

Stuck in a Price War? Use Service Design to Change the Game in B2B Relations.

Lucy Kimbell

Lotte Christiansen, Rikke B E Knutzen, Søren Bolvig Poulsen

eke van Di k

to uc hpo int | t h e jo urna l o f s ervi ce d es i gn

service design network

1

volume 1 | no. 1

April 2009

Touchpoint

First Issue

the journal of service design

volume 1 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro

October 2009

Touchpoint the journal of service design

Health and Service Design •

Dutch Design: Time for a New Definition

Beyond Basics • Make yourself useful Joe Heapy

A healthy relationship Lavrans Løvlie, Ben Reason, Mark Mugglestone and John-Arne Røttingen

• Do you really need that iPhone

App?

Marcel Zwiers

Mark Jones

Designing from within

Revealing experiences

Great expectations: The healthcare journey

Julia Schaeper, Lynne Maher and Helen Baxter

Design’s Odd Couple

• Service Design 2020: What does

Fran Samalionis and James Moed

January 2010

the journal of service design

What is Service Design? •

volume 1 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

Touchpoint

the future hold and (how) can we shape it?

Christine Janae-Leoniak

Service Design: From Products to People Lavrans Løvlie

Bruce S. Tether and Ileana Stigliani

Gianna Marzilli Ericson

service design network

to uc hpo int | t he jo urn a l o f s ervi ce d es i gn

1

service design network

to u c hp o i n t | the jo u r na l o f s erv i c e des i g n

1

service design network

to u c hp o i n t | the jo u r na l o f s erv i c e des i g n

1

Order online at http://bit.ly/shop-touchpoint

*


member map

service design network Australia Georges Klopotowski, Sydney Huddle Design, VIC Melbourne Meld Studios, Stanmore Proto Partners, Sydney The Hiser Group, Melbourne Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne Symplicit, Melbourne Austria C Plus, Vienna DTF Business Development, Vienna designpartners, Vienna Institut für Innovations- und Trendforschung, Graz Isabelle Goller, Wien ISN - Innovation Service Network, Graz Katharina Ehrenmüller, Wien MCI Management Center Innsbruck, Innsbruck Mobilkom Austria, Vienna tourismusdesign, Tulln an der Donau Vesecon GmbH, Linz Belgium Annita Beysen, Heverlee CIC, Yvoir Namahn, Brussels Yellow Window, Antwerpen Laura Tolleneer, Antwerpen Brazil Driven Design Intelligence, Belo Horizonte Erico Fernandes Fileno, Curitiba Igorsaraiva.com, Brasilia UFRJ/COPPE - Federal University of Rio de Janeiro DESIS group, Rio de Janeiro Canada Ascent Group, Vancouver Cooler Solutions, Toronto lvl studio, Montreal Domenico Micheletti, Montreal Irene Chong, Toronto Chile Felipe Montegu, Santiago, Las Condes Felipe Gonzalez, Santiago China Beijing Institute of Technology, Peking School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking Beijing FromD Design Consultancy Ltd., Peking Shine Design Consultation Center, Peking University of Science and Technology, Peking Denmark Design, Aalborg Anette Hiltunen, Sonderborg Bharath Bhushan Chivukula, Copenhagen Implement Consulting Group, Hørsholm Katrine Ofenstein, Aalborg Hafdis Sunna Hermannsdottir, Aalborg MAN Diesel & Turbo, Frederikshavn Morten Skovvang, Copenhagen Nicholas Jary, Copenhagen Estonia Brand Manual, Tallinn University of Tartu, Pärnu College, Pärnu Finland Culminatum Ltd, Espoo Diagonal Mental Structure, Helsinki e21 Solutions Oy, Helsinki Invest in Finland, Helsinki Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences, Jyväskylä Lahti University of Applied Sciences, Lahti Laurea University of Applied Sciences , Espoo Palmu Inc., Helsinki Jaana Sari Komulainen, Helsinki

90

touchpoint

Maija Pursiainen, Hyvinkää Katriina Lahtinen, Jyväskylä Kuudes Kerros, Helsinki N2 Nolla, Helsinki Marika Mantere, Helsinki France Attoma, Paris Design For You, Bordeaux NDS Technologies France, Issy-Les-Moulineaux Pedro Hernandez,Malakoff Uinfoshare, Paris User Studio, Paris INA, Bry-sur-Marne Laurence Body, Tours Sandra Lizbeth Toledo, Montpellier Hye young Kim, Paris Germany Audrey Liehn, Berlin Caspar Siebel, Munich Christian Vatter, Berlin Christoph Thomas Merdes, Munich Fjord, Berlin gravity, Munich Ines Karger, Seeon IxDS - Interaction Design Studios, Berlin Jan Schmiedgen, Berlin Jenny Bauschmid, Munich Katrin Schöps, Kölleda Kelly Vormelker, Cologne Kiae Seong, Ulm KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe Köln International School of Design, Cologne Macromedia Hochschule für Medien und Design, Munich Marius Möhler, Heidelberg MetaDesign, Berlin Michael Wend, Munich Milena Romero, Fellbach Mitra Khazaei, Wuppertal NavigationLab Innovationsberatung, Nümbrecht Norbert Riedelsheimer, Berlin Petra Neumann, Cologne Sinnerschrader, Hamburg service works, Cologne Southwalk., Rheine Sturm & Drang, Hamburg Volkswagen, Wolfsburg Whitespring, Munich Work•Play•Experience, Schwaig Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Kiel Ideenhaus, Nürnberg Daniel Hinderink, Munich Stephanie Kieffer, Munich minds & makers, Cologne Vicky Tiegelkamp, Berlin Tina Weisser, Munich Melanie Wendland, Berlin Ireland Centre for Design Innovation, Sligo Israel Whiteboard, Bnei Brak Italy Experientia, Torino Domus Academy, Milano Politecnico di Milano - Facoltá del Design, Milano Victoria Aboud, Milan Sungho Lee, Milan Japan Takuya Akashi, Tokyo Concent, Inc., Tokyo Kahoru Tsukui, Tokyo Rrecuit Technologies, Tokyo

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 Sampartners, Seoul SK Telecom, Seoul teaminterface, Seoul THE DNA, Seoul Vinyl C, Seoul Hansung University, Seoul Haemin Lee, Seoul Mexico Federico Hernandez-Ruiz, Queretaro Julieta Bueno Valerio, Mexico City New Zealand DNA, Wellington Ministry of Justice New Zealand, Wellington Richard John Bland, Wellington Norway AHO University, Oslo Dennis Heltne Hou, Bergen Designit, Oslo


T+Huis, Eindhoven The Other Side Of The Moon, Amsterdam Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht Zilver innovation bv, Rotterdam Marlies Bielderman, Rotterdam Tim Overkamp, Delft Turkey Altis SMMM ve Danismanlik, Kavacik Beykoz / Istanbul United Kingdom Anna Rzepczynski, Dundee Christina Kinnear, Glasgow Cranfield University, Centre for Creative Competitive Design (C4D), Bedfordshire Design Wales, Cardiff Elaine Finn, St Albans Engine, London Hyojin Kim, London IDEO, London Jamie Power, Waterford Kate Dowling, Edinburgh live|work, London Markus Hohl, Twickenham Marshall Sitten, Livingston Naked Eye Research, London NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, Warwick Nile, Edinburgh Prospect, London Rocca Creative Thinking Limited, Sheffield Seren Partners, London Simon Field, Cardiff STBY, London University of Dundee, Dundee Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd, Crawley ee.co.uk James Steiner, London Annelise Lepage, Bromley Adam Walker, Newcastle Alex Wilson, London Itera ASA, Oslo Making Waves, Oslo Bekk Consulting AS, Oslo Eggs Design, Oslo SINTEF ICT, Oslo Peru Jose-Carlos Mariategui, Magdalena del Mar Poland Monika Tomczyk, Szczecin Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny w Poznaniu, Poznan Marcin Chlodnick, Poznan Portugal André Tiago Gouveia, Seixal Liliana Dias, Oeiras Mafalda Moreiro, Lisboa Maria Fontes Azevedo Coutinho, Lisbon University of Madeira – Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Funchal Martta Oliveira, Sintra Slovenia Gorenje design studio d.o.o., Velenje Spain Alvaro Aigneren Frodden, Valencia FunkyProjects, Bilbao Mormedi, Madrid Ancor Retail, Sant Cugat del Vallès íncipy, Barcelona Cristina Guembe Martínez, Barcelona Sweden Bisnode AB, Stockholm

Daytona, Stockholm Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg Ergonomidesign, Bromma Design Västerbotten, Umeå Linköping University, Linköping Semcon Caran AB, Gothenburg Transformator, Stockholm Adeprimo, Östersund Prototyp Business Design, Göteborg Switzerland Customfuture SA, Baar Dimando AG, Zurich Luzern Universtiy of Applied Sciences and Arts, Luzern Patricia Hegglin, Wohlen Sketchin Sagl, Manno Stefano Michele Vannotti, Zurich Stimmt, Zurich Taiwan Institute for Information Industry, Taipei Service Science Society of Taiwan, Hsinchu City Taiwan Design Center, Taipei MingShan Wu, Taipei HuiShan Kuo, Yangmei City The Netherlands Delft University of Technology, Delft Edenspiekermann, Amsterdam Informaat, Baarn Miriam Reitenbach, Amsterdam Océ-Technologies B.V., Venlo Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, Rotterdam Service Science Factory, Maastricht

USA Adaptive Path, San Francisco Alexander Baumgardt, San Francisco Alice Cha, Menlo Park Awasu Design, San Francisco Bernadette Anne Geuy, Emeryville Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg Continuum, West Newton Essential, Boston facebook, Palo Alto Info Retail, Atlanta John Huston Rahmes, Brooklyn Kristina Tool, Surf City Kristine Angel, Chicago Lindsay Vetell, Savannah LUMA Institute, Pittsburgh Mc Donald´s Corporation, Oak Broo Michael Sedelmeyer, Cambridge Parsons The New School for Design, New York Rick Otero, New York SCAD University, Savannah Skyworks Solutions Inc., Woburn Steelcase Inc., Grand Rapids THE MEME, Cambridge THRIVE, Atlanta Alena Benson, Washington Christine Rehm-Zola, Minneapolis Laura Andersen, Minneapolis Kendra Shillington, Huntersville Shervin Hawley, Boston Olivier Zephir, Kerry Bodine, San Francisco Smart Design, New York Natsuki Hayashi, New York Richard Clinton Ekelman, Savannah John Welch, Walnut Deborah Koo, New York

touchpoint 91


join us on linkedin, twitter, facebook and insider, the sdn newsletter to get the latest news about service design About Service Design Network The Service Design Network is the global centre for recognising and promoting excellence in the field of service design. Through national and international events, online and print publications, and coordination with academic institutions, the network connects multiple disciplines within agencies, business, and government to strengthen the impact of service design both in the public and private sector. Service Design Network Office | Ubierring 40 | 50678 Cologne | Germany | www.service-design-network.org

Photo: Martin Koziel

Get connected!


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.