Is service design boring?

My thoughts and my doubts on service design, or at least on my approach to this, after the service and experience design workshop in Kuopio

Help finding scenarios

I’m organising a project on tracking systems for elderly people. The scenario is as follow:

Elderly people, their relatives, friends and assistance personnel living in a specific area can carry a GPS device (it maybe their own mobile phone) which make it possible to visualise their position on a map (maybe google maps). They can also send short messages as in Twitter or Google Latitude. The visualisation may be possible both on a mobile phone screen or on a computer at home, possibly using applications like facebook (or any other application that support any kind of social interaction).

I’m trying to figure out how this scenario could define new services for 

• functional use (i.e. telemedicine, assistance services, ask for help)
• Persona use (i.e. reassurance when living alone)
• Social networking (i.e. inviting people for lunch, going out for a walk)

 

So, this is a call for contribution: any idea about how to use this opportunity?

I promise that I will publish a list of all the possible scenarios on this blog. We may also think of an award for the best idea, but if I promise for instance a trip to Aalborg I’m not sure I will have too many contributions.

Three good reports on service design

Three very interesting reports are on my desk in this moment. I’m very slow at reading them, but I think they are a must for whoever wants to work on service design, especially in the public sector.

The only one I managed to read so far is “the Journey to the Interface”, by Sophia Parker and John Heapy (Engine) (Parker and Heapy 2006). The other two are…

Service design: what’s next and what’s going on now?

We had a very interesting conference on service design a couple of weeks ago, in Amsterdam. It was not the first, but it was clear that we are still at the very early stage of the definition of service design as a discipline (from the academic perspective) and as a fully defined professional competence, from the perspective of professional design studios. I started writing this post with the intention of reflecting on what’s next, but I should probably reflect on what’s going on right now.

The evidence that we are still at the earliest phase is that everyone is trying to find a definition of service design. The research of a definition is, in my opinion, disorienting and sometimes misleading. Of course it is perfectly legitimate, and in fact I keep reading messages in mailing lists about much more “mature” disciplines (e.g. industrial design) asking questions about definition of the discipline (in some industrial design lists this question comes out every second month and triggers never-ending discussions). However the definition of the competence and area of influence of industrial design is quite well defined and solid and such questions are not changing it too much, whereas the lack of a background in service design makes the discussion about the definition a time-demanding (and consuming) activity that many practitioners and academic, me included, would like to avoid, so that more time is available to work on cases, methods and tools.

I don’t want to dismiss the discussions whether service design relates to interaction design, or experience design or industrial design, this is a very interesting discussion and in fact I think that it would be stupid to ignore the inputs and the methods those disciplines can provide to service design. However I believe the most important think to do in this moment is to “learning by doing”, thus collecting methods, tools, experiences from whatever discipline, including social studies, anthropology, economics, engineering, etc, and generate a toolbox for service design to operate on concrete cases. In other words I feel the need for an “operative paradigm” on service design. The term operative paradigm is taken from Arbnor and Bjerke (Arbnor and Bjerke 1997); I explain this term with the metaphor of the plumber’s toolbox: the plumber uses the various tools in his toolbox according to his own needs: sometimes he needs a spanner and sometimes a screwdriver. Both spanner and screwdriver are also used by electrician and other professions, but the plumber doesn’t care about who else uses those tools, he just uses them, adapting the tools to the problem he has to solve. An operative paradigm is a toolbox including methods and tools that others may have developed in other disciplines. As far as such tools can be adapted to solve a problem in service design, they are meaningful and should be used. Sometimes the way we use those tools is not exactly the same way other disciplines would use them. Ethnographers, for instance, use video observation for analyzing people, whereas service designers use it as a starting point to change the way people behave. As any other designer, service designers work with such tools as “bricoleurs”. Ethnographer would be horrified by the way we use video observations for instance. But we use them anyway, as far as they are effective and produce some result. I personally experienced several negative reviews to my funding applications to social studies research councils, when I presented my research proposals. The common answer was that what I was proposed was a project, not a scientific research! But I found that this “non-scientific” work, has given me some results and I’m trying to find a way to put them in my personal toolbox.

What’s next part 1

So, to answer the question “what’s next?” I would say that a very first task is to create this toolbox, possibly using cases (I expect professionals to contribute in this sense) and methods, provided by researchers and academic studies. We have seen some good tools for our toolbox in the conference in Amsterdam, but I think that much more tools should be added, to deal with other tasks in service design.

What’s next part 2

Another consideration about “what’s next” concerns the question of industrialization of services. What we have seen at the conference was a sort of “craftsmanship state” of service design: each case was a single one, very localized, very much related to the context and the actors participating to it. Localisation and personalization of services are in fact what makes service relevant in the age of mass customization. In fact I would argue that service would possibly bring us beyond mass customization, towards highly personalized solutions. However I also think there is a need to investigate some of the aspects coming from the tradition of industrial design. Industrial design started when someone translated the knowledge in the craftsman’s brain into drawings and codified signs (blueprints) that could transfer this knowledge to others, therefore making this knowledge reproducible. Talking about the industrialisation of service means considering how local and highly customised solutions could be translated from one context to another, from one individual to another. This is not an academic speculation, this is a practical question. Working on individual solutions would be very expensive for any business, if they could not find a way to re-use the same knowledge from something else. With industrial production companies where reusing this knowledge as embedded in products, with the result that the same product could be sold to many different people. In service design the knowledge should be embedded into service activities, procedures, journeys (the most used term in the conference). The result of the industrialisation of services is that the same knowledge, capabilities, skills, interactions, could be proposed in different contexts, although the final product would not be standardised.

The service blueprint is of course the main tool we can use for industrialising services, however the blueprint we have seen so far are just focusing on the individual experience. The mechanism that would make the underlying knowledge reproducible in other contexts or to other individual is still unclear. So this is what I hope to see more insights in the next future.

 

References

Arbnor, I. and B. Bjerke (1997). Methodology for creating businesss knowledge. Thousand Oaks, Calif. ; London, Sage.

 

Open innovation in bank service (and some thoughts on design)

While designers are discussing about how they would design services, services are changing by themselves. This is the case of bank and financial services, which of course are not living a happy period. In 2005 a new system of social lending was funded in UK and is now developing in other countries (USA; Italy). The initiative is called Zopa. Social lending is basically a system in which some people lend money directly to other people without the mediation of a bank. The role of the service provider (Zopa) is to create mechanisms of trust and warranties

Service design conference in Amsterdam: spolights and shadows

The first conference of the Service Design Network in Amsterdam is just ended. I found it very interesting, not just for the presentations, which, after all, were not memorable. But rather for the quantity and quality of contacts I had in this conference.

My general impression is that there is only one place where someone is really doing something on service design, UK. However there are many places where people THINK about service design, therefore experiment methodologies, add knowledge. It sounds like there is a huge potential to start a new kind of innovative activity, this potential is restricted by the lack of knowledge on service design on the companies and public administrations’ side, but the pressure for using this knowledge is becoming very high and sooner or later there will be an explosion of cases. The fact that there were so many companies, business associations (e.g. Confcommercio, the association of retailers in Italy) and government institutions (e.g. Erhverv og Byggestyrelse in Danmark) demonstrates that public perception of service design is increasing.

The panel on Scandinavian design, which was quite boring, anyway (I think it should have been organized differently, because the speakers had much more to say), suggested me another consideration: while in UK the professional profile of service designers is very well defined, in the other countries such profile is totally unknown. This is probably preventing business and government to think of service design as a resource, or to frame service design correctly. I’m aware, for instance, that the Danish government considers service design as a branch of the traditional Danish design, therefore assuming that traditional product designers will be able to solve the systemic complexity and the organizational issues related to the design of services.

A methodological consideration: I’ve seen many projects in this conference: all of them used the same methods and the same terminology. The metaphor of the “journey” was new to me – I always preferred to use “scenarios” instead- however I discovered that almost everyone is using it. The homogeneity of the methodology could be a good sign, it may mean that we are somehow consolidating a tradition of working in this area. However I have my own doubts about what I’ve seen. I had the impression that service designers are learning very well how to involve users and stimulate participation and coproduction. I think the exercise proposed by ThinkPublic was very significant in this sense. However I’m wondering whether the metaphor of the “journey” is good enough to describe the systemic perspective of service design. When we have a journey we usually use some tools (unless we walk to Santiago de Compostela). We may use a train or a car or we may fly. My impression is that the focus on the journey casts the spotlight on the experience (and in fact a lot of works were coming from the experience and interaction design area), but leave the backoffice in the dark. Furthermore when we travel we intersect our journey with the journey of many other people: other customers, but also people who are supporting our journey. What about the journey of the flight assistant? And what about the journey of the air traffic controller, which we never meet during the journey?

I would like to see some works that mixes the two perspectives of front and back office. It is also a matter of changing the scale of observation: a journey corresponds to the 1:200 scale in Architecture, whereas we need a 1:1 scale for certain types of interaction. I tried to work on this scale with Use Cases, but I had no chance to discuss this scale, because there were no cases in the conference discussing this.

In other words this conference was the reverse opposite  of what you read on service design on management and engineering books: whose books (see Ramaswamy, Hollins, Pugh and others) emphasise the organizational and functional aspects of product service systems; they do not organize services from the users’ point of view, but rather from the perspective of an organization. What I’ve seen in this conference is a focus on users, whereas the organization, or the mechanism that support users’ experience in a service, was possibly forgotten.  I should say, though, that this is what the conference showed and what it did not show, as in the normal activity of service designers I the functional and organisational issues of a service system are not ignored. Engine, for instance, presented an interesting case in the Kent city council, but only if you visit their website you discover that, beyond what they presented they also worked on a “service specification document“.  Perhaps showing and discussing this to the conference would have improved my (and not only mine) overall impression about the presentations in this conference.

Finally I had a fantastic idea from this workshop: I’m working on services and infrastructures for elderly people and I thought that there could be a lot of projects in this area. The one I’m most interested in is an exploration of Web 2.0 tools for ageing people. Is there anyone interested in working on this?

Wiki page on public services

I’ve just finished updating the page on Public Services of the service design wiki. I’ve included some cases of public service design (those in which service design was a planned or explicit activity, at least) and all the main bibliographic resources I know of.

Service design podcasts

By chance, exploring an archive of open source audio files I found a  list of speaches from the Emergence (06 and 07) conferences on service design. Including the speach of Cris Downs, Richard Buchanan and many others. A good source of information…

On service design in the public sector

 A podcast of a presentation of Sophia Parker, from Demos, illustrates the challenges of service design in the public sector. The presentation introduces a publication “the Journey to the Interface”. In this publication a new perspective on is proposed, which tries to understand services as people do. The publication consider strategies for collaboration between professionals involved in public services, sets criteria to measure success and argues for service design as a new way of planning and organising public services.

Sophia Parker is the deputy director of Demos, and has been involved in several interesting projects on public services, working with Hilary Cottam and other members of Participle  in several project, including Southwark circle project, on ageing people.

Design of the healthcare system

In an article on the Health Service Journal Deborah Szebeko talks about her experience of service designer in the public sector, an issue I’ve been working in the past (also in this blog). Deborah describes how she worked on service design in the healthcare sector…