Professor Bob Young International Service Design - Northumbria University

November 29th 2006

Developments in Service Design Thinking and Practice

INTRODUCTION AND CONTENTS

• Purpose of this presentation

• What we did in ISDn1

• What’s been happening in the world of Service Design since ISDn1

• Moving forward

• Role of this workshop

PURPOSE OF THIS PRESENTATION • Bridge between ISDn1 & ISDn2 • Setting the scene• The broader purpose of NU concerns the

nature of design practice to support the role of design in society

• Links with other research concerned with the evolving role of design (including Designing for the 21st Century)

• A focal interest is the development of appropriate descriptions of service design content and process to improve the designer’s ability to navigate and contend with complex projects

• Approach - is the perspective of the design practitioner and their sense making requirement for theory and knowledge to support design practice

WHAT WE DID IN ISDn1 - KEYNOTE CONTENT • Service Innovation through Design

Thinking - Prof Tim Brown, IDEO US Inaugural Lecture as visiting professor to Northumbria University, discussing the work of IDEO internationally in creating innovation in businesses and services

• Signposts for the Next Decade - Dr. Andrea Cooper, Design Council Design's role in addressing global issues in the next ten years

• Pioneering Service Design - Chris Downs, Live|Work We are what we use - not what we own

• Objects of Service - From Subjects to Objects and Back Again - Prof. Steven Kyffin, Philips Design How can design help to creatively understand people, create value across the full business development process and create poignancy to our technological trajectories

WHAT WE DID IN ISDn1 - KEYNOTE & CASE STUDIES • Designing Design in a Complex World

Dr. Bob Young, School of Design, Northumbria University The evolution of service and systems design thinking in academia

• Better Services Happier Customers, Oliver King Case Studies from the work of The Engine Group

• Redesigning Public Services, Jennie Winhall Case Studies from the work of RED at the Design Council

• Designers! Who Do You Think You Are? Kamil Michlewski of Northumbria University Inside the design cultures of Ideo, Wolff Olins, Philips & Nissan Key issues addressed

WHAT WE DID IN ISDn1 - QUESTIONS

• What is service design• What is its derivation in relation to the

changing context of design and the role of the designer in society

• Why and how is it different and similar to conventional types of design and the roles of designers

• Who does it• Who needs it and why• What types of methods and approaches to

service design are used• Examples drawn from the work of the

most notable companies currently engaged in service design: IDEO, Live|work, Engine, Red Group

• Examples of student projects in association with major public and private sector organisations

WHAT WE DID IN ISDn1 - ISSUES

• Designing with people not for people• Designing with multi-disciplined teams• Learning to listen before acting• The importance of pathways and touch-

points• Service Design needs a more

sophisticated model to understand its process - a multi-dimensional model of content and context issues not just design process elements

• Design students are becoming concerned more about issues to be addressed by design rather than learning the specifics of a traditional design discipline

• If product design requires a developed sense of seeing manifested through the act of sketching, then service design requires a developed sense of listening manifested through the act of storytelling.

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING SINCE ISDn1

• Dott 07 Public Commission service design projects

• Carnegie Mellon conference on Design Emergence

• Next Design interview by GK Van Patter with Live|work and Planet

• ONE North East Transformation Service Design Panel

• New doctoral projects established by Northumbria, the Design Council and Dott 07

• DesForM2 Conference, Eindhoven and the importance of narrative in complex design

• Related projects supported by 2nd round funding of Designing in the 21st Century

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING SINCE ISDn1 - DOTT 07

• Dott 07 Public Commission service design projects– Lo carb lane– Ournewschool– Urban farming– Design and sexual health (Dash)– Move me

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING - DESIGN EMERGENCE

• Carnegie Mellon conference on Design Emergence

• Emergence September 2006 focused on service design.

“This emerging area spans many disciplines, from design and business to technology and the social sciences, and is relevant both in academia and the

professional world”.

KeynotesMary Jo BitnerProfessor of Marketing & Services LeadershipArizona State UniversityOliver KingCo-founder and DirectorEngineBirgit MagerProfessor of Service DesignKln International School of Design

PresentersNeale BarretService Strategy & Research LiaisonIBM Systems & Technology GroupChris DownsManaging Partnerlive|workJennie WinhallSenior Design StrategistRED: UK Design Council

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING SINCE ISDn1 - NEXT DESIGN

“GK VanPatter, Gill Wildman and Chris Downs share news from the front lines of innovation consulting practice, thoughts on the changing expectations of clients, the challenges of reinventing design, the impact of globalization, the slugging it out nature of the UK marketplace, rising above politics, the demise of the waiting for the brief model of design and service innovation facts & fiction”.

Gill Wildman: “John Thackara is right on the ball when he says service design is not new, it’s just not very developed or sophisticated. If you have a look for Lynn G. Shostack in Harvard Business Review and the books by Bill Hollins, you’ll find there are people who have been grappling with it for some time, for a long while.”

Gill Wildman: “What I’d like to see more of is design education that focuses more on interdisciplinary working, collaboration, context driven design, and more socially oriented forms of designing. These are the lasting skills for designers. Learning Flash and Photoshop can take a back seat, as they are rapidly replaced with other software.” Gill Wildman: “Service innovation design encourages you to take a genuinely people-centered, empathetic approach, beyond even the user-centered design methods popularized by best-practice product designers.”

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING SINCE ISDn1 - DIEC PANEL

• ONE North East DIEC Transformation Service Design Panel– - setting up a ‘Transformation Service

Design Panel’ to include a selection of the major expertise in Service Design in the UK to deliver service commissions Third phase of development of service design by ONE

– 1st phase - development of the Design Innovation Education Centre service design blueprint and business plan

– 2nd phase - pilot projects– 3rd phase - design panel

• First commission: ‘Supply South Tyneside - Public Sector Contract’ to support SMEs within South Tyneside to identify and bid for more public sector services

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING - DESIGN FOR 21st Cent

• Related projects supported by 2nd round funding of Designing for the 21st Century

• Embracing Complexity In Design (ECiD) led by Prof Jeffery Johnson, Open University - key focus - complexity science

• Designing for Services in Science and Technology-based Enterprises based in the Said Business School, Oxford University - key issue - service design

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING - ECiD

• Can the methods of complex systems science:– inform designers, and vice versa? – create complex adaptive artificial systems? – understand the enabling conditions of

creativity in human organisations? – produce or implement designed systems? – support the socio-economic and legislative

context of design? – investigate the design process as a complex

socio-technical system? • Can the methods of design researchers:

– inform complex systems? – enable designers to deal with uncertainty

and complexity? • What is the theoretical relationship between

complexity and design? • What is the role of design in complex socio-

technical systems?

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING - DESIGNING FOR SERVICES

• Concerns the shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based one.

• Ongoing investigations within a wide range of disciplines from management, engineering and economics to sociology, geography and history

• Yet design aspects of services are rarely considered – how they are designed (design as process)– the ways organizations go about designing

services (design as function) and – the nature of the processes, physical and

digital artefacts, and experiences which together enact and constitute services (design as outcome).

• Also, little research into the emerging discipline from art and design, described as “service designer”

• Service design rarely exists as specialist programme, in the UK or indeed internationally

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING - PHD STUDIES

• New doctoral projects established by Northumbria, the Design Council and Dott 07 are being set up

• Northumbria Studentship - looking to investigate the relationship between service touch-points and the way they are experienced and portrayed

• Northumbria / Design Council co-sponsored Studentship - looking to investigate the methods and process of service design practice, including a review of the Dott Public Commission projects.

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING - DeSForM NARRATIVITY

• DeSForM2 Conference, Eindhoven and the importance of narrative in complex design

• Seminal keynote presentation by Jurienne Ossewold, The Creative Media Consultancy and the Design Academy Eindhoven; What can design learn from storytelling?

• Stories can provide us with emotionally, sensually and intellectually rich experiences

• Service design focuses on the role of the user and the design of experience

• How the principles of storytelling can be a source of inspiration to service design audiences

MOVING FORWARD – THE POWER OF STORYTELLING: THE UNILEVER CASE STUDY

• The case study was a collaborative learning and design research project with a blue-chip industry - Unilever

• The process of creating such collaborations is about seeking permission to be creative at a fundamental level of human-centred thinking in what are traditionally market and financially driven fast moving consumer goods industries.

• This project reveals the power that storytelling has in enabling design to communicate the human dimension of a business’s activities

• The outcome of the case study shows that there are mutually beneficial values for industry and academia, including; a vital new role for design

//. RELEVANCE OF SERVICE DESIGN TO INDUSTRY

Service Design and the related Experience Design are becoming more and more important, major brands have recently become aware of the importance that customers give to the experience of using a product more than to the possibility of owning it. This shifts the traditional role of the designer from that of configuring products to designing systems and the memorable experiences they need to provide.

But how do we prototype experience?

//.4D DESIGN BRIEFING

Creating a narrative as a source of inspiration and new thinking

Generating a design brief using 4D design techniques

Using time and motion provides a design team with a richer content which potentially opens new spaces for the product / service development team members to explore

//. WHAT WE LEARNED - THE IMPORTANCE OF NARRATIVE!

All work on the development of methods and processes of designing beyond the level of conventional product development point to the importance of designers mastering the capacity to design in the 4th dimension.

It’s how Designers make meaning and communicate systems/service thinking to others - colleagues from other disciplines, clients or service providers and service users

It’s how Designers receive permission to work at a policy level within organisations on and behalf of all stakeholders.

We learned about the capacity of designers to make meaning and create purpose through narratives to assist the formation of new policy.

“While everything, technically is an experience of some sort, there is something important and special to many experiences that make them worth discussing. In particular, the elements that contribute to superior experiences are knowable and reproducible, which make them designable.” Nathen Sherdorf; http://www.nathen.com/ed/index.html

MOVING FORWARD – PROCESS AND METHOD DEFINITIONS

• live|work definitions: • Service Design - design of experiences that relate to people through touch-points

over time. • Service Ecology - is a system of actors and the relationships between them that

form a service. • Touch-points - service touch-points are the tangibles that make up the total

experience of using a service. The tangible touch-points of the service is one of the key factors that determine people's experience of service quality.

• Evidencing - service evidence are touch-points designed to represent parts of a service experience.

• Experience Prototyping - service experiences are intangible, taking place over time with multiple touch-points, media and modes. Services are prototyped in different ways to products. – Experience prototypes are used to do rapid service prototyping, involving

customers, experts and clients to develop and refine services. • Service Blueprint - is an operational tool that describes a service in enough detail to

implement and maintain it. • Service envy - if we want to make people desire services more than products, then

services will have to confirm and communicate the owner’s sets of values. http://www.livework.co.uk/home/research0/glossary.html

MOVING FORWARD - USEFUL MODELS TO SUPPORT SERVICE DESIGN PRACTICE

• Substantiation of early doctoral research (1980s) based on a complex system design project for the emergency services

• Yielded a set of key factors deemed to be highly influential in the development of successful complex system (service design) projects:– Communications,– Knowledge and information,– Personality, attitude and values,– Design strategy and policy ; and – The level of design decision making.

• Thinking about the levels of decision making also led to the derivation of a content-based model of design

MOVING FORWARD - CONTENT-BASED MODEL- A NEW MODEL OF

LEVELS OF DESIGN COMPLEXITY

D3 - PolicyThe creation of meaning and purpose

Design of context

D2 - SystemThe design of systems and services

Designing context

D1 – ProductsThe conventional world of design ofartefacts, components and products

Design in context

Intangible

Tangible

Macro

Micro

MOVING FORWARD - DIEC’S INTEGRATED MODEL OF CONTENT WITH THE MARKET DESIGN FUSION PROCESS

• Proposal is to orientate the content and process elements of the design dynamic in a cross relational (x-y axes) format rather than linearly

MOVING FORWARD - REFINEMENT OF THE INTEGRATED MODEL OF DESIGN CONTENT AND PROCESS

MOVING FORWARD - REFINEMENT OF THE INTEGRATED MODEL - CONSIDERATION OF DESIGN CONTEXT

MOVING FORWARD - A REFINED INTEGRATED MODEL OF DESIGN CONTENT PROCESS AND CONTEXT

• How can services be prototyped from both demand- and supply-side perspectives?.

• What kind of data is useful to the designers and other stakeholders of a service,, during the design process?

• What criteria are used to define a service as successfully designed i.e. profit-turning, easy to use & quality of user experiences, ecologically sustainable etc.? 

• What methods and media are available to help articulate complex systems e.g: visual, verbal or conceptual?

ROLE OF THE WORKSHOP - QUESTIONS FOR THE TABLES

• The purpose of the plenary is to report back the findings of the workshop table discussions and identify new insights

• Also to consider viewpoints about the following questions:– In what ways do the design of public

and private sector services differ?– What influences the perception of

risk amongst public and private

sector service design sponsors?

Thank you

ROLE OF THE WORKSHOP - ISSUES FOR THE PLENARY