After a whole year's hiatus from my blog, I find myself in a new home, new studio, new city and new country. It's a lot to sort out, so forgive the gap in entries.
I have taken to my post as Senior Service Designer at Ziba
with great enthusiasm. Every research assignment has had the extra edge
of working with new cultures, new places, new opinions and lifestyles.
It's reinforcing my belief that the worst thing a designer can do is not spend even a little bit of time away from the wall of hypothetical Post-It Notes.
I've been keen to help refine the service design proposition at Ziba, and while many of the projects we have worked on will remain private for the time being, there is one in particular that I would like to share. My work leading a project for GOOD Ideas for Cities has helped me pursue public sector and policy work, and understand where the boundaries between public and private sector service provision lie.
That said, I'm not here to reinforce the status quo, but explore new relationships between public, private and third sector organizations and how they can better co-create services with the communities they serve.
The Challenge
GOOD Ideas for Cities is now in its second year of exploring the potential in relationships between designers and policy makers. I am hugely grateful to the team of fellow Zibites who volunteered their talent, their early mornings, late nights and weekends to shine a light on how this combination of design and policy can make lives better for the people of Portland.
The video presentation itself set the daunting task of a 6 minute summary for a 6 week-long project, but to further condense and summarize:
Our challenge was 'How do we get the people of Portland to consume less meat?' Given that most people are unaware that this seemingly simple action is in fact the most significant action any of us in the developed world can take to reduce our environmental impact, the project needed to both raise awareness and facilitate change. At the heart of the three services suggested lies a need for real understanding of the people of Portland.
Each service is backed up by a research participant and insight that was representative of many of the things we saw in our quick and dirty dive into people's homes, habits and fridges. The key to explaining this emotional, motivational and behavioural approach as opposed to demographically-led initiatives traditionally favoured by policy makers, was our behavioural persona matrix, further explained in the video.
It provided us with tangible, human personas to design for and was a breath of fresh air to our partners at the City of Portland. However, the challenge in future is shifting the emphasis from merely GOOD Ideas for Cities and towards GOOD Change for Cities.
We have a real convert and advocate in the City of Portland for the ability of service design and design principles and approaches to create new, innovative ways to improve the lives of Portlanders. But on presenting the findings in a lecture to the Rebooting Democracy conference, I was mindful that the practices and processes within those who might affect policy change may have to be transformed to capitalize on such efforts. For now, stage one is successful. Watch this space.
This article was published in the international Service Design Network's Touchpoint magazine in October 2010.
From handier tin openers to more intuitive interfaces, the ability of design to humanise ‘things’ is well known and understood. Services, however, in spite of being provided by people in direct contact with users, are often de-humanised by measurements and policies set at an organisational level.
Top-down directives intended to increase revenue, efficiency or measurability can actually undermine experiences for staff and users, and de-couple what organisations aim to achieve from what their users want.
Following are three examples for bridging this gap illustrating how service design can meet such organisational challenges. It affirms that by transforming the front line you can liberate staff, unlock innovation and provide users with the experiences they demand to help ensure that the bottom line looks after itself.
Customer and Organisational Needs
Service users have fundamentally different needs from consumers of products. They seek individual experiences that bring touchpoints and channels together. They require direct interaction (and often human interaction) with the providing organisation.
Organisations inevitably need to divide tasks between departments and as such, develop roles and incentives to keep each of its components moving, employing automation and standardisation to boost efficiency.
These differences in needs and behaviours can cause a gap to appear, diminishing the user’s experience and in turn an organisation’s fortunes.
De-Humanised Services and Market Stalinism
A fixation on operations and efficiencies can mechanise and de-humanise services. Siloed departments can quickly create bureaucratic hoops for customers to jump through. While customers seek customization, longer-term relationships, and largely measure experiences on qualitative grounds, organisations often consider success in quantitative efficiencies and short-term ROI.
Key Performance Indicators would seem to be a happy medium, but can become subverted by target setting and the shortcuts necessary to achieve them. The minutiae of how to achieve something becomes an end in itself, obscuring and even detracting from why you’re trying to achieve it in the first place. Mark Fisher calls this effect Market Stalinism’ [1], after the USSR’s White Sea Canal project. The primary goal of allowing access for large cargo ships and tankers was hijacked by target squeezing, box-ticking and PR concerns. The result was a glorious media review of an efficiently completed canal, but in truth it was only deep enough to accommodate the small tourist steamers on which the journalists sat.
Market Stalinism at work - Wherever you hear these signs.
The above example may be humorous, but this phenomenon is visible from small-scale interactions to life-or-death scenarios.
Gill Hicks, who was injured in the London Tube bombings of 2005, spoke at the NHS Innovation Live conference last year. She explained how it was those who broke the rules, and the moments when rules were broken, which meant the most to her recovery. From rescue paramedics bending resuscitation protocols, to hospital staff later sneaking her out of the ward to improve her psychological well-being, small moments of individual initiative that did not adhere to organisational rules helped her recovery immeasurably. Although organisations need to have safety procedure and focus on the bottom line to maintain profits and value, being rule-bound can often have the opposite result.
The cost of dissatisfied users is a damaged reputation and a long time spent trying to win their confidence and custom back. By tying the hands of staff with policy, pragmatism, common sense and innovation are stifled and even discouraged.
Re-Humanising Services
Service Design is the vehicle for uniting desirable user experiences and outcomes (bottom-up needs) with operational necessities and efficiencies (top-down needs). Below are three examples illustrating how organisations can be transformed from frustrating empathy-void automatons to empowered, adaptive, innovative helpers.
1. See the design process as an end in itself: Lewisham Housing Options
Co-creative activities during the process can be as effective as the final deliverables themselves, in establishing the right culture to sustain a service.
Lewisham Housing Options - Transforming services by engaging staff in the design process
ThinkPublic and the Design Council worked with Lewisham Council to understand how they could better serve constituents who required housing, some of whom were in distressed situations and housing emergencies.
Staff members were all given a camera, some training and then went about interviewing people who were waiting for or had just had their appointment.
Through the direct experience of gathering data, footage and insights, the staff were taken away from their desks, databases and forms. Being re-connected with the situations, fears and hopes of those they serve every day, they began literally to see things through a different lens, asking different questions and getting to the heart of customers’ problems in a personal, human way.
2. See services as constantly in “beta”: Passenger Personas
Transferring tools and knowledge through workshops, training and method sharing is an often-overlooked activity. It greatly improves the sustainability of a service by equipping front-line staff and management with the tools and processes to improve and evolve the service.
One European airport group has an established protocol for understanding and improving their passenger experience.
‘Greeter’ staff are on hand to help and direct passengers as they arrive in the terminal. At quiet times, this staff put themselves in the shoes of a passenger persona, select a destination, and set off through the airport identifying gaps in wayfinding, accessibility or even maintenance and upkeep. Issues are dealt with swiftly, making the job more satisfying for staff and the experience more pleasant for passengers.
Embedding design and empathy tools creates a strong link between an organisation and its users, ensuring needs are understood. Empowering those who have the grass-roots knowledge of a situation to take action to fix problems means solutions are more informed and services are built coherently, not on an ad-hoc basis.
3. Refrain from imposing common sense guidelines: Just A Routine Operation
Generic guidelines inhibit staff from trying anything new or different. They cannot best serve individual customers, nor fulfil their role as ‘silent designers’ – observing and changing the system incrementally.
This documentary, created for the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, follows a man's experiences during the sudden death of his wife, who suffered complications after a minor operation. Rather than encapsulate what was observed through the film into another ‘framework for communications protocol' or a 'critical situation checklist', the film has simply been screened to 2,000 NHS staff. By more directly experiencing the situation the staff can draw their own conclusions, which mitigates the need for 'guidance' because skills and empathy are developed more directly. To those who may balk at a lack of control, consider Nordstrom, a US department store renowned for its customer service. Until recently, its staff guidelines consisted of just 75 words, including:
“Rule 1: Use best judgement in all situations. There will be no additional rules.” [3]
This laissez-faire approach has empowered Nordstrom sales associates to go to the extremes of customer service. By increasing autonomy and lightening the touch of administration, barriers to common sense, ideas and action are removed, enabling a culture of innovation.
Conclusion
By using Service Design to address organisational challenges, you can create direct and dynamic links between operational necessities and what users want are created, reducing waste and increasing demand.
How well this is done is most apparent at the ‘front line’ where staff and users interact. Organisations need to trust and support the people they hire, so that they can efficiently provide effective services that are meaningful and desirable to people. That is true return on investment.
References
[1] Fisher, M (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (esp. p39, 43) [2] Just A Routine Operation (2008, Thinkpublic) [3] Spector, R. (2000) Lessons of the Nordstrom Way With thanks to Thinkpublic and Sean Miller for case studies and images.
I'm proud to report that a project I have been leading at Prospect to deliver a vision for Unlocking Knowledge Transfer (KT) in the UK on behalf of the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network (CI KTN) is now complete, and the Unlocking Knowledge Transfer Executive Summary can be downloaded. It summarises three robust reports illustrating a number of new services, spaces and tools that will help bring academia and the creative industries closer together.
CIKTN needed a robust vision of the future of knowledge transfer between the creative industries and academia in the UK. We engaged a wide audience through workshops, online surveys and an online platform to develop future scenarios which inspired a number of new opportunities for KT. Over the course of five months, hundreds of people contributed to inform the three reports which map out the future of KT in the UK, with 16 opportunities (actionable initiatives, services, spaces and roles) for improving KT in the creative industries.
Problem
Now, more than ever, businesses are investing in the knowledge economy to catalyse innovation. The UK's academic institutions are world leaders in creating knowledge and ideas. The Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network (CIKTN) invited Prospect to lead a strategic project exploring the future of creating, sharing and applying this wealth and better connecting academia and business. Historically, the Creative Industries have not engaged with 'knowledge transfer' (KT) on the same scale as industries such as sciences and engineering, for example. Add to this a harsh economic climate and the increasing overlapping and competition between business and academia and you have a knotty problem; one that design is ideally suited to solve.
Solution
We used a holistic design approach and methodologies in a way that would engage a broad spectrum of people, and make sense of a diverse range of reactions, comments and ideas. This collaborative, co-creative process not only helped us gather information and insights from these stakeholders, but also encourage them to generate new solutions to possible developments in the future.
The project pivoted around the creation of four future scenarios, based on economic, social, cultural and environmental trends amongst other factors. These were designed to challenge and provoke participants and ask; 'How would you thrive in this new world?'; 'What do you fear?'; and 'What needs to be done?'.
Impact
Online surveys, expert interviews, future scenarios and five workshops conducted around the UK informed the three reports delivered through the project. The first, Baselines, documents today's landscape of knowledge sharing between the UK's creative industries and academia. The second, Scenarios, illustrates possible futures and documents how our participants reacted to them. The third, Opportunities, presents a series of robust reccomendations for future services, spaces and initiatives, balancing a wealth of views with feasibility and sustainability, realised through a powerful strategic design process.
I wanted to do this firstly because over the past few years I have helped produce films as part of service design projects and have always been an advocate of the power of showing people what their customers are experiencing and saying about them. This is too often done through cleverly-written and clever sounding documents. What's less clever is that 60 pages of statistics, insights and pull-out quotes are far less effective at achieving this than actually showing people their own customers saying what they feel into a camera.
And secondly, because the talks that followed the two shorts uncovered the power of film as not just the means to an end, where a film is presented as part of evidence at the end of a research phase to validate and unlock the next phase, but an end in itself. The two films each unlocked good points about this. Just A minor Operation: Karen's Story
The documentary was created by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. It followed a woman's experience during the sudden death of her husband, who suffered complications after a minor operation.
What struck the audience was how it refrained to encapsulate lessons learned into a 'seven point plan' or 'framework for patient dignity protocol' or a 'sensitive situation checklist'. Julia Schaeper from the NHS Institute for Innovation explained how the experiences and events were laid bare for the audience (so far at 2000 NHS staff and growing) to draw their own observations and conclusions.
Rather than giving staff guidelines as a result of the film, which seek to standardise and synthesise common sense, good judgement and empathy, the film was shown directly to staff, so that they experienced it. And from gaining experience we mitigate the need to provide often obvious 'guidance' because we develop those skills and emotions more directly.
The NHS is notorious for guidelines, targets and frameworks. But it's also rife across state institutions. Mark Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realism calls this situation in the UK 'Market Stalinism' - where the obsession with targets and how to achieve them obscures and even detracts from why you are trying to achieve them in the first place. We have already arrived in a place where the micro-motivations of efficiency overtakes the macro-motivation of care.
Lewisham Customer Experiences
Lewisham Council worked with the Design Council and thinkpublic to improve the experiences of those using their Housing Options services. many of these people are in crisis, including people who are homeless, running away from domestic violence or in one case, a woman who couldn't begin the application process until the day her house was reposessed.
Again, watching the film transferred more insight than what would have found its way into a research report. Furthermore, the interesting twist was that those filming the consultations and interviews were the council employees themselves.
Peter Gaddson, Head of Strategy and Performance with the Customer Services Directorate at Lewisham Council explained that the employees were 'looking through a different lens' and were suddenly asking different questions to those they would have asked were they working behind their desks, with databases and application forms. The film showed flaws in the system, sometimes satisfactory, sometimes distressing outcomes and a noisy, even chaotic scene in the background. Peter boldly (and bravely) affirmed that "In order to improve, you need to admit that you get things wrong."
A fantastic sentiment at a time when people are more protective of their performance and defensive of criticism, but in doing so, block the potential for real change.
I had a discussion recently about small-scale, grass roots community building and how to motivate collaborative, social and even selfless behaviour. It began with noting how a 1970’s large-scale urban block of flats may differ in terms of community and knowing your neighbours from say, houses around a village green. It reminded me of a book I bought a few years ago, full of tips and actions to make your local and wider world a better place.
"It is an ingeniously executed book aimed at galvanising alienated Britons to do something for a society devoid of fellow feeling and good neighbourliness." - The Guardian
All well and lovely, but beyond smiling and nodding in agreement, it's hard to find the time to actually do it. Whilst I could have been enriching my life, the lives of others and the general universe, I've been doing other things like watching rubbish films or mucking about on my iPhone. In fact, a Solitaire application has an horrific function on it which tells you how many games you have won (very depressing once you hit 100) and more alarmingly, how much time you have spent in a social coma, transfixed on a 4x3" screen.
shameful...and I can't believe I lost that many times!
Motivation and incentivising is the key to service design, as services simply don't exist without users and providers being engaged. It's crucial to create value and benefits for everyone involved, as well as ensuring the service as a whole is sustainable. Now If I had a widget that could use the power of such a metric positively to help make me more productive...
In fact, many services are now harnessing this power, from Nike+ visualising your athletic progress to learningtoloveyoumore and wearewhatwedo's websites featuring to-do lists that you can create and join to collaborate on your do-gooding.
They also go a long way to allowing the user to personalise and evolve their own experience of a service, with their actions and input affecting a larger system or network of people or generating visual feedback.
The balance is difficult, but I think the title of this article can be used as a guide (and is by no means a definitive list) of how to encourage user participation.
tasks - find a way of visualising or organising things to be done teams - allow people to network, share their successes and even compete transparency - put the users in control by giving them all the information mapping - use location, time, speed, efficiency, happiness...anything! micro-metrics - visualise progress and present data in compelling ways motivation - should come naturally in a user-centred or co-designed system!
And while I await the iPhone SortYourLifeOut App, I'll begin with Google Calendar and some more detailed and frequent blogs.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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