Meet the service designer(s): Erik Spiekermann & Pia Betton

This interview poses questions drawn from this issue's theme to Erik Spiekermann and Pia Betton, who are colleagues at the Berlin office of Edenspiekermann. Interview by Jesse Grimes.

The theme of this Touchpoint is on the overlap and interplay between service design and aesthetics. As the discipline matures, some people say there’s a risk that it becomes too business-focused. Do you think service design should concern itself with “beauty”, and is that something that you think can be ascribed to a service?

Erik Spiekermann: Ugliness doesn’t sell, as Raymond Loewy said. People would prefer to use something that looks pleasant to something that doesn’t. Function is the most important aspect for a service, but beauty is a function of function. In other words: if something is ugly, it won’t work as well as if it was beautiful. It lowers the threshold to acceptance.

Pia Betton: Consumer loyalty is quickly diminishing. We randomly put together different aspects of services we like. If given the choice, people will always go for the visually attractive options. In a shopping mall I am more likely to get drawn into a shop with a beautiful atmosphere than into a less attractive outlet. When monitoring human behavior it has even been proven that attractive service employees are more sought after than their less attractive colleagues. Aesthetics always play a role. And it actually rarely clashes with more business related interests. Beauty isn’t necessarily more expensive than not so beautiful applications, often the only difference is the quality of the design work.

Service design is just one of Edenspiekermann’s current offerings, and Erik’s background especially is in typography and graphic design. What triggered your agency’s interest in the discipline, and how have you established the practice internally?

Erik: I don’t see a contradiction here at all. Whenever we designed information systems, especially forms or wayfinding, we were really designing the complete service. We just didn’t call it that. One word we always used for wayfinding was the “Nutzerkette”, i.e. all the points where a user would interact with the system and thus the service. Surely we were designing the service and not just maps and signs.

Pia: Indeed service design is a logic extension of more traditional design disciplines. As a designer at Edenspiekermann it has always been out role to look at the customer experience in total. Especially when working in the field of corporate design. Corporate design focuses on developing ONE design language and brand experience across all channels and platforms. Today designers extend their own design value chain in several different directions: 1) We don’t just design the platform or “wrapping” for the interaction between the customer and the service — we design the interaction itself. Also, today we start our work even earlier in the process. Throughout the discovery phase we document the desired service experience from a customer point of view, today you may say we design our own briefing. At the tail end of the process we also see it as a part of our responsibility to support the necessary changes in the organisation in order to deliver the experience.

We hear of agency Livework employing economists, and of others playing the role of ‘change agent’ within large organisations. But many service designers have design backgrounds, not MBAs. What does this mean for the creative aspects of the practice? Will the service designers of tomorrow be talented visualisers and co-creators, or number-crunching Excel wizards? Or both?

Erik: Being able to visualise a service is way more powerful than presenting it in spreadsheets. That goes for the process as well as the result. As I said above: who wants to use something that hasn’t been made to look approachable and possibly even beautiful? It is high time that all the engineers and spreadsheet addicts learned to communicate. Showing numbers and flowcharts will never motivate anybody except other enginners and MBAs.

Pia: I think there will be a need for both in the future. I am convinced that design skills and method can positively influence change processes. We already see a lot of design institutes introducing new seminars to teach these skills. However from our point of view there will always be a need for service designers who focus on the actual design process. In our organisations we support both. On the one hand we need people with expert knowledge within certain design disciplines and on the other hand we need them to be able to overview — and incorporate — people with totally divers skills in the design process: the famous t-shaped designers. When we hire young people today we often experience that they already bring these divers skills to the table. In the daily project work it can be very hard to distinguish a designer from a coder or an account manager from a change agent.

Erik Spiekermann is information architect, type designer and author. He founded MetaDesign in 1979 and FontShop in 1989. He started United Designers in 2001, which eventually became Edenspiekermann. Erik is No. 10 on Germany’s most popular Twitter list with 280k followers.

Pia Betton links design thinking to business. She started her professional life in Danish design agencies and continued at Berlinbased MetaDesign, where she was a member of the management board. Pia joined Edenspiekermann in 2011. In her role as a senior consultant, she coaches management groups in strategy development and change processes.