DISQUS

eilidhdickson · 3 months ago

Hi Nick, thank you for this great post!..Its very refreshing seeing someone actually talk about the difference between service design and design strategy!

choosenick · 3 months ago

Thanks Eilidh. I wouldn't describe it as 'design strategy' exactly - its 'design-led strategy for service'. Bit more of a mouthful but an important distinction - its not about the design strategy of a service company, but its about how the company uses design and design thinking to inform its overall strategies, plans and processes. Maybe that's a semantic difference, but its non-trivial.

simonbostock · 3 months ago

Just started reading and thinking about Service Design and enjoyed this post.

You're right. Bits of this do sound as much like management consultancy as anything else.

3 points/questions:

1. Why art-school trained designers? I mean, what is it that only a designer can bring to the process you describe above?
2. Why is it necessarily a bad thing to attempt a total service transformation? You identify problems with the piecemeal approach but seem to simply assume chaos with making the big changes. I would have said that scale is one of the critical success factors of good service design rather than something to be achieved over time (more here based on SocialText's Michael Idinopulos' ideas http://siibo.blogspot.com/2009/09/kill-pilots-s...)
3. One of the main lessons of designing services that work is to make them half-baked ( http://siibo.posterous.com/inspirational-half-b... ) re: "9 - In other words, the challenge is to help everyone appreciate that their service can be designed, and then to equip them with the ability to design it! "

choosenick · 3 months ago

Hi Simon. Good questions, some of which I can begin to answer...

1 - Good point, of course all types of professionals can (and do) contribute to service design and innovation projects, but my main interest is in how the 'design' community can. This is where the word 'design' starts to trip people up a bit. I don't want to get embroiled in that debate! haven't asnwered that question really, but I would rephrase it a bit to be - "What's the role for designers in service design?" Hmm.

2 - It's not a bad thing, but it is very hard to do and can only happen with the full commitment of the whole organisation (=hard). Its also important not to confuse change/design that scales (=good) with change everywhere, at the same time (=recipe for disaster!) I'm planning to make 'service design at scale' the subject of our next Service Design Thinks event http://www.servicedesigning.com . Hopefully we can discuss this more there!

3 - I love the half baked idea, it reminds me of Matthew Taylors 'Clumsy Solutions'. Some people also refer to the idea of a 'perpetual beta' - something which generally doesn't appeal to designers (of the art school variety) who generally love to craft something until its perfect.

I think this goes back to the question of 'what's the role of designers in service design'. Another blog post I think! So - some answers, none of them complete. Sounds like a half baked clumsy perpetual beta kind of solution if you ask me!

Ferg · 3 months ago

Think this is a great post Nick; have found it really helpful in ironing out some of the uncertainty in my own mind. Although (helpfully) it asks as many questions as it answers :-)

I don't think it's just art-schoolers who strive for completeness or perfection, I think most humans are culpable to a certain extent, I also think that when people pay for or attend a workshop for example they are expecting to walk away with more than a half baked understanding. "You said you were going to teach me how to be a Service Designer" or "This workshop was supposed to develop a complete concept". What is it they say, “the more you experience, the less you realise you truly understand”.

As you allude, the focus has perhaps to be on getting people comfortable with half-baked and the fact that they too can be designers and participate in the process, rather than expect a polished deliverable handed to them on a plate.

This is perhaps a dangerous simplification but it may be built on something psychologically and educationally deep rooted (such as the entity / incremental distinction in human perception I have chatted about here: http://www.fergusbisset.com/blog/2009/08/07/com...) i.e. some people are more predisposed to it than others.

What strikes me most clearly in what you mention is the need for SDers to help people Visualise and Prototyping ideas quickly. I can't help but wonder though in order to resolve the aforementioned problem, do SDers and the users they are working with need to get better at visualising their own performance and progress within the process of SD?

I’m not saying this doesn’t already happen, I just wonder if people might be better at accepting half baked and their role in baking the rest, if SD was better at providing them with some recipe ideas and assessment of their current cookery skills.

My own feeling is that design to date as too often been presented as witchcraft or the product of inner genius. SD and it's associated UCD methods have gone some way to overcoming this, but do we as a discipline need to do more?

My question really is how presently does SD encourage self reflection and assessment of progress in its participants and is it this aspect that SD education should focus on encouraging?

Thanks again for the post, I’m looking forward to seeing how these ideas and the discussions around them develop.

RalfLippold · 3 months ago

Awesome - grass-roots level change is what is normal:-)

Horizontally across the organization and beyond the boundaries to their customers and back - not very difficult. It needs skillful facilitators and systems thinkers;-)

Qin · 2 months ago

Seriously! you should write me thesis for me... also, your case study is completed - just wait for supervisor comments then I will send it for you to have a look :)