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.

Radiomamma, improving life quality and creating social innovation

Whoever can read Italian and has an interest in social innovation should have a look at Radiomamma: a network of people living in Milan, who are sick and tired of a tremendous situation in which they have no assistance from public services and decided to help each other in finding solutions to very simple problems for everyday.

Radiomamma is a website for parents and grandparents who exchange information about new places and infrastructures for their kids and about places where it is possible to walk with a pram with no architectural barriers (and this is quite rare in Milan). There is also the possibility of generating a network of trust, exchanging little favors, and suggest family-friendly guided tours to museums. Of course Radiomamma also have a youtube channel. In other words, the small networks of people meeting everyday in the park with their kids is not transferred on the web and becomes much more powerful.

In fact this shift also creates something new, and here is, in my opinion, the power of the initiative. By using a special label for trusted shops, the network is proposing a perspective shift for service providers: kids should no longer be seen as a problem but as an opportunity: those who are granted with the blue label of Radiomamma will be the preferred shops for parents and grandparents in the network. Of course the initiative is a good chance for families to improve the quality of their life, and even a stressing city like Milan may become a little bit easier to live in.

The shops and service providers who want to get the label can make a test on the radiomamma website, to assess their level of family friendliness.

All this, in my opinion makes Radiomamma as a good example of a promising bottom-up initiative.

Saying Hello – design for ageing

 

A project called “saying hello” was funded in Wigan Borough UK and developed at the university of Salford, with the aim of working in partnership with elderly people, healthcare authoroties and voluntary agencies on investigating ways in which ageing people manage potential and actual loneliness and isolation and strategies to prevent and reduce loneliness.

I found several innovative good things in this project:

1. The project used voluntary researchers for interviewing ageing people. The nice things is that voluntary researchers were themselves in the same age range of those who have been interviewed. This made the relationship between people and researchers much tighter. It was much easier for those researchers to capture tacit knowledge from the ageing people and interpret/translate this knowledge for the researchers; furthermore the familiarity between voluntary researchers and ageing people involved in the project will increase the possibility of keeping this relationship even after the end of the research project
2. The outcome of the project was not (or perhaps not only) a report or tables with data, but a radio-play, in which six actors played a script written by the ageing people themselves. The use of this medium was very interesting. As the researchers say in the video, ageing people are not used to reports or tables of data, but they are much more familiar with television programs or radio programs. It is much easier for them to relate to this medium.
3. In orther to create the script for the video, people were asked to write down sentences about their life, their routines and their feeling, thus having one more opportunity to reflect about what really matters in their life and for the problems related to their loneliness and isolation.

Info about the project, including an interesting video and the radio play developed in the project can be found At the project website

Obama’s acceptance speech is a design brief (?)

A discussion on design for democracy in a list on design and transformation forced me to think about the relevance of Obama’s victory acceptance speach as something very similar to a design Brief. Peter Jones (Humantific) asked some fundamental questions that forced me to listen to the speach again and again and think about that for the whole day,

Peter asked the following questions:

What is such a transformative design brief? Let’s say before the “Obama design brief” is written, who frames the problem with Obama and how is this done?

 

What kind of brief creates the space for something new to show up, in an inclusive, co-creative way, making way for this leadership for participation we now are seeing?

 

 

 

 

 

I’m  not sure I am able to answer, but I can try:

Any good brief should start from a Problem definition. The speech somehow frames a problem definition, proposes what in design terms I would define a methodological approach and opens the discussion for a vision

Problem Definition:

“we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers”

This statement refers to deep unbalances in the economy, which reflect in social and economic inequalities. The problem is how to reduce such inequalities. In other speeches before this he talked about a redistribution of wealth across the American society. In general the problem definition concerns the generation of a more equal society and a society based on participation

 

Methodological approach (How should we solve the problem, what are the problem solving strategies):

“we have never been just a collection of individuals, we are the United States of America”

Refers to a perspective that refuses individualism as a value. This perspective, of course, is not calling for a new form of socialism, but remarks the essence of a nation as a community of people, with their diversities, but with a common identity.

Furthermore he reminded how this electoral campaign was based on a sort of bottom-up approach, as he was not the candidate of the highest levels of the hierarchies, but the result of a common effort of citizens to support him. Other references in the speech are to the sense of participation and responsibility of people. Besides the obvious rhetoric of this part of his speech, the speech refers to a space for co-creation, participation, based on the activation of the whole society, starting from the lowest levels.

 

Vision 

In the last part of his speach he opens a window on the future (especially that of our kids):

“if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?”

 

This is not yet a vision, but a call for a shared vision of the future (he puts it as a question and use WE, not You or I as a subject).

 

I think this gives a good frame to us, as designers, to imagine design for democracy as a future perspective for our activities.

Design can work for democracy by transforming public institutions and administrations in order to support a process of active involvement of people in finding their own solutions, expressingtheir own opinions and participating in the construction of a community or the identity of a city or the destiny of a country.

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 and why are designers important in developing innovation in those sectors.

I also found interesting the description of the stage of the process, because I suppose it could be a step towards a sort of a “blueprint of the blueprint” of a service: she mentiones the following stages [the text in square brakets is my interpretation or the way I would qualify each stage]:

• Observing to understand [I would describe this as the analytical phase]
• Capturing patient and staff experience [interpretation of the analysis]
• Mapping the service process and experience [towards a design concept]
• Bringing people together to share experience and identify challenges [ concept solution co-creation]
• Generating ideas and opportunity mapping [similar to concept selection?]
• Prototyping [Prototyping, just that]
• Testing and gaining feedback on prototypes [still on user’s co-creation]
• Designing final output [Detailing]
• Implementation and social marketing
• Evaluation

I wouldn’t say this is the perfect process, but I would be curious to see whether this process could be compared with other service design interventions in the public sector.

Acting use cases

In the last few days my students have been developing use-cases for their service design semester. We are trying something new: acting the use cases. Use cases are supposed to support the dialogue between people with different backgrounds, working on a common project. We are using use-cases in our service design semester, but the students do not have too many chances to get more participation of other actors, such as service providers or final users. Therefore they are trying to act the use case: each student from a group is “wearing a hat” of one of the actors involved in the use case. This implies that the student, who has previously made an analysis of the various actors, should try to bring the actor’s interest into the use case and make the same actions and take the same decision the real actor would take. (Of course this is very close to De Bono’s work, even if I’m not a big fan of it).

The result is that the use case becomes much clearer to the group, although I would not use this technique to present the use case to people who are not familiar with the project, as the analysis of what happens in the use case goes too much into the details, they would not be able to understand it.

The story of Stuff

The question of sustainability is quite complex, it is a HUGE problem, can you explain it in 20 minutes? Have a look at The Story of Stuff

The co-creation spectrum

The co-creation spectrum is an interesting reflection on different form of user involvement in value-coproduction processes, from mass customisation to community product design

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The lunch currier: the video

I found a draft of the video presentation for the lunch currier project (see previous post). We created this presentation for the “changing the change” conference in Torino, Italy, in July 2008. The draft is in fact better than the final version, because the request from the organisers was to compress the video to 35 seconds and I haven’t learnt to be so concise, yet.