Whilst working in Portugal the other week, our team was presented with what is possibly the most broadly used service refinement tool I've ever come across.
The complaints book is required in all Portuguese businesses which deal directly with the public, from banks to cafes, shops to train stations. It is required by the Portuguese government, who also stipulate that all complaints are replied to within 5-8 days and that completed books be returned to the relevant government department. Suddenly I could see it everywhere; at cash desks, in shop windows and information points.
I am yet to understand further the provider's inevitable loopholes, the government's powers to remedy bad practice and the complainant's experience and ideally, results. However, given that the UK service sector contributes more to the its GDP (73%) than most countries, that we don't have an independent or state run system like this is lamentable. 'Watchdog', a 30-minute BBC TV show which publicises poor practice and campaigns for resolution just doesn't cut it.
Benefits of a unified, independent body to oversee complaints and responses are obvious, although the methods are complex; they maintain a baseline of performance and should ideally accompany the power to fine or shut down repeat offenders. Services that don't deliver are essentially cons. The baseline could work to guarantee a minimum standard of service, as the kitemark is the official UK mark for safety in products.
A rhetorical poster: Performance on the provider's quantitative terms
Standing in London Bridge Rail Station on my way home from portugal, I don't know where to begin. I look around for a generic complaints form. Nothing. This highlights two key cultural problems.
The first problem is the domain of the service provider. Some forward-thinking organisations use complaints forms (often spun as 'your suggestions') as the opportunity to gain free customer feedback, troubleshooting and the figures to justify an improvement. These organisations are less likely to have regular entries to a red book. Many others put up barriers to discourage complaints, skew figures and in some cases, ignore them. A favourite example is retailers Next, who dealt with a 3 month backlog of complaints swiftly and efficiently by deleting all complaints on the computer system (source: a fantastic article by Anna Tims).
The second problem is ours, the customer. A look at the surreal and shocking behaviour of organisations in Timms' article linked above will show how easy it is for customers to be worn down, to see complaining as futile and to not bother. Indeed, it's not beyond reason to suggest that some of the larger, sector dominating organisations prefer to silently encourage this culture. If we were to introduce such a system, have we become too cynical to embrace it?
Engine have produced a great video around their project with Kent County Council explaining the establishment of SILK (Social Innovation Lab Kent) - a partnership between Engine and KCC to provide service design knowledge, tools and expertise for all areas of the council. It shows Engine in the studio demonstrating some of the processes and ways of working deployed through the project. On my day out of the studio too!
The video was also posted on the Local Government Channel. Let's hope we can widen the great work we do in the public sector by getting the attention of some new councils and government bodies...
The project was also nominated for the London Design Museum's Design of the Year! Though sadly, as with the excellent service design projects that were up for nomination last year (including Velibre, the fantastic pay-as-you-go urban cycling scheme), there isn't a suitable category for service design, which is inter-disciplinary by its nature, and we have consequently been entered under 'Communications'.
This all comes at a very important time for service design in the public sector. The growing awareness of the power of user-centred design in improving and developing new services, coupled with the sad reality that as the recession deepens, more and more people will rely on some aspects of the services their councils and the state provide, mean that innovation is fundamental to meeting the demand and the challenges faced.
Recently, the Design Council launched a new capaign; Public Services By Design, underlining the huge task and huge opportunity before us. The linked article covers a great deal of the issues - personalisation of services, inclusive design processes, and in particular the the call for action below stands out:
"We need to be conscious that today’s problems are just not going to be addressed by yesterday’s ideas and yesterday’s solutions...we need a whole new approach to policy over the 10 years.”
By a 'new approach to policy', I hope that the intention is to develop a culture of innovation, amongst other things such as sharing best practice. Service design's real power is not it's ability to pull from all disciplines of design to create the more tangible elements of a service, but the ability to transform an organisation from the inside out. In order to develop successful, relevant, sustainable services, it's vital to instill a culture of innovation and encourage the open-ness and willingness to change and test new ideas so that a service is never a finished product, but an evolving, constantly refined solution.
Over the past two years that Engine has been located just by Tower Bridge, we've enjoyed the small park outside the Mayor's building, which has a great riverfront view of Tower Bridge and the Tower of London. It's a perfect place to have lunch in the summer and a pleasant walk to and from the studio.
Being designers, we're always analytical about what could be improved (i.e. whingeing)- from the strip lighting that is exactly at eye level so that you can't see into the park in the evening because of the glare, to the increasing yuppification and commercialisation of the site with tourist-priced cafes.
In particular, it seems the architects have had a dramatic lack of vision when it comes to sustainability - from the slate paving which requires the employment of two people and bristle-cleaning machines to be run across it every day to clean out the lichens which would make the surface slippery, to the fact that the mayor's building needs a bespoke crane (with its own housing) to clean it's uniquely awkward windows.
so many ruined photos...
However, a much more disconcerting and entirely avoidable trend of selling the park as advertising space has been on the rise recently. We've seen cars emerging from synthetic meteorite craters complete with lighting rigs and auditoriums, guest only Budweiser 100m races, sculptures such as a giant swimmer gliding through the ground as if it were water, and the space was enjoyably overrun by multicoloured Sony bunnies.
Perhaps it's the council trying to milk the space's prime location for some cash as we enter a recession, but the moments when the line is overstepped are sometimes painfully obvious. I doubt that any of the architectural renders, with semi-transparent families playing and relaxing in the park featured mega-scale PR stunts or the space completely fenced off. The closing off of the park is a textbook example of how getting the use-value, exchange-value balance wrong can have keenly felt effects for all users.
The space generates money which goes back into the government pot, which is a good thing. A constantly changing space can be entertaining. But this is a publicly-funded park, fulfilling a need for relaxing breathing space in the city and something which no doubt secured the planning permission to counterbalance the massive financial buildings built around it at the same time. The public aren't consulted on these changes, probably due to the sheer number and ephemerality of them.
Poor, poor nature.
The sponsorship of the space is its effective temporary privatisation, meaning that the public lose the benefits, and sometimes, entry to the park altogether. This is most acutely felt by those who live or work locally, and generates bad feeling towards the council, and particularly towards the sheepish-looking Mayor's building directly overlooking the park. In fact, the park is owned by the Potter's Field Management Trust , with a mix of public and private sector directors. It's mission statement to maintain the park in the interests of public welfare, with specific mentions of appropriateness of events may have been subject to some bending because of this mix of interests on its board.
Looking at the recent backlash to a saturation of billboards and advertisements in Sao Paulo, how do we gage the revenue generated against less tangible factors, such as the experiences and annoyance of the public, the loss of trust towards the authorities and the perception of the thousands of tourists who pass the site everyday to see we're selling out (and in the case of the giant New Zealand rugby ball, obscuring) our landmarks?
Last week Engine took part at Innovation Live!, a collaboration between NESTA and the NHS, which focused on how to develop a culture of innovation within all areas of healthcare.
It was an opportunity for NHS management to exchange best practice between themselves and health related charities, but also to meet creative organisations , invited by NESTA, who could hopefully shed some light on how to innovate within the health industry.
The NHS is a fantastic institution in concept, but the reality falls woefully short of the potential and performance possible. Gill Hicks delivered an uplifting speech on her experience of the NHS after she was critically injured in the June 7th Tube bombings. Her story of how she was supported in learning to walk again, and to gain the courage and confidence to keep going was very inspiring but touched a raw nerve in the room, which was the subject of the conference.
Many examples she gave of the things that best helped her recover both mentally and physically were moments where staff went not just above and beyond to help Gill's recovery, but they went against protocol and even directly broke the rules to help.
The image I had of the NHS as a bureaucratic monster, reinforced by stories I had heard from people who worked within it, and fuelled by the British media, seemed disappointingly accurate. The NHS is falling behind as the health issues and challenges change towards longer term, chronic illnesses. The NHS is an organisation full of ideas and running on philanthropy, but held back by the archaic nature of the institution and crippling bureaucracy.
As a service designer, it seems almost too complex and enormous a problem to take in; where do you start in the fifth-largest organisation in the world, which belongs to the public sector and deals with the most critical moments and experiences of all our lives?
mmm...engaging biscuits.
Since a brief experience with RED's Activmobs service and preliminary roll-out which stalled soon after I've been aching to get stuck in. I don't need to blow the user-centred innovation trumpet again on this blog, but if you want to find out more, England's Chief Medical Officer Professor Sir Liam Donaldson explains why he believes the NHS could learn some lessons in customer care here.
mysociety created fixmystreet, a link between people and their councils which did actually fix my street (well, Deptford High Street which was a near impasse on my morning bike ride to work), and also theyworkforyou , which is a channel for the public to identify and contact their MPs and officials. And their code is open source. Nice chaps.
They’ve made dozens of simple tools in collaboration with councils and charities that work primarily through their transparency – they could publish which MPs reply to or ignore emails, who are the best and worst performing councils from the public’s perspective, which forces councils to act from a user-centred perspective.
With people taking such direct action to change their local environment, is this eroding democratic processes or empowering members of the public to overcome the UK's world-renowned bureaucracy? Is it right that the active minority should be the ones to shape their streets, parks and local amenities?
I believe that these tools are not undermining or bypassing democracy, but making the interface between politics and the public more dynamic and personal.
Electing a government and MP is a small part of a citizen's potential. Culturally, we are focused on the few big, general decisions and how they will affect everyone and not the small, myriad personal ones. A top-down operation can lack understanding of it's end users' needs - our everyday experiences can be much better affected with a ground-up approach. The majority of eligible people in the UK vote, but many people never contact their councils to say a streetlight's broken or to inquire what happened to the plans to clean up our local park or even to propose improvements.
Cultural issues aside, one thing keeping us from contacting our councils was the feeling of the hopelessness of bureaucracy. Now that the barriers are being removed to allow for a more fluid, user-friendly and frequent dialogue, we shall see with time whether the majority becomes more active, and how governments can utilise this vital feedback to inform more responsive, robust and relevant policies.
This week I participated in a talk at the Science Museum entitled 'Future Flight'. Held at the Dana Centre, with three other speakers who were engineering luminaries from Manchester Met, Cambridge and Bauhaus Luftfahrt.
My talk covered the evolution of the design of airports and aeroplanes from a product-based and engineering-driven model, to an experience and service-based and user-driven model.
It described how with most airlines using similar technology (planes), the thing that differentiates them is the services they offer. This was then followed by a description of the complexities of designing experiences, particularly for such massive spaces such as airports and airplanes, which is seen when you take the needs, desires, abilities and mindsets of all the different passengers that will use them at the same time.
The brief introduction to the subject was rounded up with some details of the different methodologies that could be employed to research, inform and design such complex experiences such as working from the bottom up rather than the top down, placing the user at the heart of the design process.
Emotional journey mapping and the principles of co-designing with end users were used as examples of such methodologies, with quick case studies such as Engine's Connections Experience or T5 info zone included to illustrate.
The presentation stuck out from the other three who gave interesting insights into the future of aerodynamics, sustainability issues and how technology is falling behind in comparison to user demand and sheer numbers of people in the air and the environmental effects as a result. However, the marathon one-hour per speaker q & a session that followed was reassuringly passionate, as everyone there has had some good, bad, weird and wonderful experiences of flying, and it is precisely those human experiences that I am interested in.
This weekend I took part in the London Design Festival's Goldsmiths-spawned 24 hour Design Challenge, based in Deptford on the site of a new development beside the high street. Teams were originally allocated by discipline, but the thirty or so designers organically re-shuffled as new projects emerged. Interdisciplinarianism, eh?
It was an experiment to see what such an intensive experience could produce, with the aim of the exhibition being to showcase the pieces that emerge from it and also the process of designing itself. The site was open to visitors throughout, but a low level of awareness with the non-design industry public outside caused a number of us to seek out ways in which we could engage with the local community.
We were keen to avoid a behind-the-scenes 'designers doing some wacky shit then having an exclusive party that is an essentially intimidating environment for locals' and leaving having kept the neighbours up and a mess behind.
Our first task was to use £10 in the local (excellent, amazing and project-saving on several occasions) flea market to bring back objects that interested us and then create devices that helped tell their story. Ours was a beautiful, hand-written title deed to a field in Kent form 1853. Over a couple of thousand words were used to explicitly explain the extent of the estate, without any diagrams, maps, co-ordinates or tables of measurements. It was almost indecipherable.
We did however try to re-interpret it and visualise it in our own ways, which led us to our first design - a table which people from the local community and visitors to the exhibition could use to map the are in their own way. The docking station consisted of a compass made from a clock with the minute hand saying 'north'. This constantly changing north would give us a random sample and spread of the area, with participants heading in 100m (as they estimated) before recording what they could see, who they have spoken to there or are with, what they think of that place, what colours, textures they could see. These 'x' shaped pieces of paper would then be collated, computed and exhibited as a very human, abstract map of the area.
This initial design was a step in the right direction, but our group (installation) merged with product to see how we could develop something that asked less of the participants and offered more interaction and reward. What we came up with was two projects commencing around 10pm - 'Polenta Politics' - a sophisticated voting system involving a catapult, some issues on a board and some messy painted polenta balls and 'Deptford Cares' - some items made to help the community care for its public spaces and express what they like and dislike about them.
At the heart of these projects was the potential for a much larger project, should we choose to undertake it - how to engage a local community to communicate its feelings about where they live in innovative new ways and to provide the tools to co-design, improve and sustain public spaces. Hmmm.
Target practice gathers an audience in the wee hours...
Computer Arts magazine invited me to a 'round table to discuss the future of UK design education', which can be found published in this month's edition. It drew an interesting and prominent crowd who were passionate about the state of education in the UK and offered some great insights into their experiences of design students, internships and also some shared their knowledge of being tutors at various universities.
The debate was interesting, but was not the heavier discussion into the future of design education I had expected, and the resultant article was so truncated, misquoted and condensed so as to offer little in the way of advice for the industry. It did however reveal some valuable lessons and things to bear in mind for students and recent graduates trying to establish their work, skills and thinking in the design industry.
Elspeth Belden wrote a similar article for Neoco, the studio she works at, commenting on the mis-quoting and even derogatory way she was represented. Myself, I just thought I was made to sound like a bit of a prat trying to sell out the UK's world-leading creative educational system to corporations. Eesh.
This is a long term gripe of mine, finally given some air at a new project space in collaboration with Jo Harrington, Silke Eiselt and Roma Levin - we're designing a design manifeso to provoke future major design festivals. see ld-if.org for more... Design is a process not a product. It unnerves me to see the Heat magazine style hype of the modern superstar designer. Not that I'm jealous. Or snobbish for that matter. I feel like the commercialisation of design and the mystification of the designer into a unfathomable abstract genius who performs such magic to be entirely detremental to what design and designers are capable of. It alienates it from people (all people) who have so much insight to offer about how their world can be improved. Frankly it fuels my fire.
A designer said; "It may be the designer's duty to suppress any desire for self-expression" and so I ask you; is it the duty of a designer to be a conduit for people's needs and to take responsibility to ensure you are not corrupted into compromising people's needs into desires imposed and persuaded to by your ego or other, larger influences?
Beneath the newly vacated Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo Station, a huge creative space has been made of a tunnel handed over by the owners, who invited Banksy to create an installation. He responded by inviting a small army of graffiti artists to take part.
From Stencilling to freehand to tagging to just making your mark, every surface is covered with messages. Within this seeming chaos there are mutual respect for fellow artists, unspoken etiquettes and expectations, or rather limitations on content.
There are common themes such as corporations, the war on terror, and particularly the spectacle of power mediated through consumerism, tv, cctv and visible authorities such as the police. The space has a haunting feeling of presences and activity that was evidently once there. This keeps the dialogue live and sustains it both by perpetually encouraging participation and, ironically for this subbversive context, enforces the rules. Indeed banksy is seen as the head of this community, and without directly defacing his defacements, others question, comment on, praise and criticize his work and ethics.
What banksy has created is a community with ideas sharing, communication, rules and most importantly, the sustaining and keeping alive of this society by constantly creating new stuff.
This arrived through my letterbox today, though it may as well have arrived through my window tied to a brick.
Not content with staggering price rises and outrageous profits for its shareholders, it seems British Gas has diversified into running a protection racket. The delivery of the proposition is an insult to even the most ethically-loose advertising designer.
Whilst tugging at the heart strings with its use of stories of families being saved in a hand-made cut-and-paste genuine newspaper article aesthetic which is as semantically subtle as a sledgehammer in the face, it warns us that the solution to this invisible, un-smellable, un-tasteable killer is forking out for 'Homecare(TM) 100 for just £15 a month' which is just a subscription to boiler maintenance.
It finishes with 'Don't wait, sign up today and ensure you are protected.' In context it psychologically translates as 'your family might die in a nasty accident tonight. Give us money and we'll make sure that doesn't happen.'
Rather than pay them da money, I'd plump for a carbon monoxide detector for about £3 a year and check it.
I wrote this on my holiday in Morocco (so long away now), and it also features on Engine's website.
There's a large open space in the centre of Marrakesh. There are no buildings or beautiful architecture, no fountains, no wildlife or breathtaking scenery. Without people, the Djemaa el-Fna is just an empty, dusty city square. Recently this space was declared a World Heritage Site.
During the day, entertainers, storytellers, dancers, musicians and artists arrive and set up their pitches as far as the eye can see, as audiences begin to gather round. Every evening, temporary structures are erected and suddenly a vast open air kitchen and restaurant is in place, at least for the next few hours.
Unesco described it as a 'masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity'.
It is usually not the physical, tangible elements of a service that are responsible for generating the bulk of an experience. Buildings, interior spaces, products and uniforms are props for people - the users and providers - to interact with and within. However, these elements are all often in place before roles and responsibilities of people are defined, staff are consulted, re-trained or even hired.
People can make an experience in any context, and completely transform it. Communities of residents can make a vast difference to quality of life in an area. Flash mobs go head-to-head with the dialogue of physical spaces, often subverting it using surrealism.
Understanding and investing in people can create a world-class service even without a venue (mobile phones, Facebook). The key to producing effective services is co-creation: the immersion of all kinds of users through the design process. Beyond consultation, co-creation seeks to design with users to develop ideas and prototypes for testing and roleplay on the journey to delivering a service.
It's an interesting exercise to imagine a service as the Djemaa el-Fna, stripping away everything apart from the people and what roles, prompts and relationships they have with users and to ask yourself whether you are making the most of the power of people.
I recently found myself stuck on an overground train to central London (for those of you who live in London I realise that this is not a unique experience, but bear with me).
The train had been stationary for a while and was overcrowded, and the automated message repeating an apology every few minutes was only adding to the annoyance of the passengers.
After a while the driver interrupted:
"Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your driver speaking. I'm very sorry for the delay to your journey this morning. Rather than make you listen to another recorded message, I should tell you the real reason why we're stopped. There's a signalling problem further up the line at Canon Street, and because this is the busiest time of the day, there's a backlog, but as soon as I find anything else out I'll let you know but we should be moving in the next 5 minutes.
"Again, my apologies - I know it's monday morning and I know you'd all prefer not to start your week this way, but we're doing everything we can if you will bear with me."
By taking the initiative he eased people's concerns and created empathy by explaining a wider systemic problem whilst identifying himself as a human, empathic part of the service. He even relieved the tension later by joking with passengers.
In this situation, which is not uncommon, this member of front line staff appeared to understand how his customers felt far better than the company, and was ideally positioned to deliver a solution. He knew that it's frustrating to not know what's going on and that the company's provision to limit the damage to the experience in this situation was inadequate and impersonal.
So often the ease of working from the top-down means that organisations deprive themselves of true insights into their user's experiences and the invaluable day-to-day qualitative observations of their staff.
Co-creation harnesses the power of these front-line insights and experiences, and designs with users and people throughout an organisation to develop solutions that are effective, desirable and sustainable. It may even help get trains running on time in London...
A rhetorical poster: Performance on the provider's quantitative terms
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