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Snook present at Service Design Network to introduce Embedding Design
So, I’ve been on a little holiday of the states. Well a “work holiday” where I’m not in the office soaking up influences from further afield and then on an actual “real holiday” – where I opened my emails only 4 times.
One part of my trip was presenting at the annual Service Design Network Conference in San Francisco.
Apart from the small earthquake that shook the Palace conference suite, (and literally shook me – my first earthquake experience) thank you to the Service Design Network for choosing such a great city to host the annual conference, it was a pleasure to visit such a beautiful city.
At this years conference, I had time to reflect on the work being presented and how it aligns with what Snook are doing. I wish we had entered more extracts on some of the projects we’ve been doing such as Start Up Street Stirling and our new Design for Government work. Snook believe these are good examples of the exciting directions Service Design could be going.
I go to the Service Design Network conference for three reasons;
(1) Extend our practice
I want to know and discuss service design from the frontline of doing it, in an honest, frank, open way so Snook can develop our practice, learn and share our mistakes/failures and build on ideas amongst our peer group. This conference is full of amazing minds and talent – sharing this knowledge is what makes it for me.
(2) Meet new people
I want to meet new people coming into service design from other disciplines and importantly, representatives from organisations who are doing what we call ’Service Creation’ – people who want to know more about designing services.
(3) To catch up
I want to catch up with some of the people we’ve been in correspondence with around service design for the last 3-4 years. We have made some dear friends through the #servicedesign hashtag on twitter. I love catching up with them and having a beer in a foreign pub.
On reflection, I enjoyed this conference for the second and third reason, not the first.
I would have loved more opportunities to extend my practice and share back with others. Last year in Berlin I was desperate for the presenters to talk about designing with organisations. I am far more interested in designers who work inside organisations rather than the actual process of designing.
And so here in lies the difficulty that the Service Design Network are challenged with balancing. There are three types of users at the conference, a complete mix of people with different needs.
These are:
(1) Experienced service designers - who want to develop their craft by listening to others and getting feedback on their work, this also includes academics.
(2) New service designers - they want to find out more, know the basics and find out how they can cross discipline boundaries.
(3) Curious organisations - technically the client and the departments/people ranging from the marketing to finance guys. They make services, they want to know more, and we should learn from them about how our work can be useful and valuable to them.
In Berlin the conference was really missing the third user group and as a result the audience spent too much time and energy looking in on themselves as a discipline. The focus was on the process, the tools, the how to – in a very removed sense from what is actually happening in the real world.
Services do not exist in a vacuum, nor does Service Design. The only time I think service design can exist in part on it’s own without an organisation is when a new business/concept is starting out, similar to how we wrote about MyPolice in the book, This is Service Design Thinking, which @pubstrat highlighted. But even still, when we had a strong concept, we still needed to work closely with the police to understand our design and truly consider implementation.
And so my first hat tip goes to Brandon Scheur who delivered the closing keynote on day one. As a designer with an MBA from Adaptive Path ( exercising both left and right brain thinking ) Brandon gave a great keynote focusing on the reality that there is an entire field in the U.S dedicated to service creation (this should be obvious but I do feel service design discipline is too introspective within it’s own communications, this is not applicable to all however). I guess this is not news but Brandon’s delivery of the point and his beautiful presentation spelled it out, loud and clear.
Brandon visualised the break between the spend on service creation and the actual spend on what we know as service design. $2 billion versus $70 million as seen below. Furthermore, the people doing ‘service creation’ are system engineers, operations management, branding and marketing, customer service etc. These are the people service designers should be working with, as always I find myself going back to the importance of designing inside organisations as opposed to from the outside.
I also found his point on how much we spend on advertising interesting. We spend huge amounts of money selling a service, but what happens when we get the SAG? (Service anticipation gap as Brandon describes) when it doesn’t live up to the expectation? If we spent a fraction of that on service design, we may end up improving customer satisfaction, having more people talk about how great the service is and essentially bring in more business.
A couple of other lessons included moving more into market development and service development as opposed to being stuck in an optimisation quadrant and really focusing on lean service design. One of the biggest thing design has going for itself is it’s ability to prototype services before we implement them. What if we took this one step further and looked at agile ways of delivering services in a lean capacity? Brandon used the example of a new park set up in the city which many opposed at first complaining about increased parking / congestion / people. The approach taken was to set up some basic plants to create a basic prototype of a new space in the city, which people began to use. Over time, and by reflecting on people’s behaviour the park has slowly grown in stages. Smart development, smart investment. We should be doing this agile/lean stuff in the Scottish public sector and now!
I’m not going to go into all the talks I saw, some were interesting, some should have been interesting, you could see the content was but if you’re going to have people present on the main stage, please ensure they have a good level of presentation skills, I want to walk away feeling inspired. (Adam Lawrence from Work Play Experience certainly knew how to get a message across, especially when using a flying shark as a prop) Others I missed but heard were good and have been catching up with over twitter are: (Sorry if I missed any out here)
Erick Moehr, Crossing the chasm: Bringing Service Design to the mainstream market
Chelsea Maudlin: Making the business care for Service Design in the public sector
Richard Buchanan from Weatherhead School of Management finished the conference, and as a true showman does, didn’t have any slides. What Richard does is interesting. He teaches design thinking to MBA students. He left a fantastic position as head of design at Carnegie Melon to do so in the belief that we should be moving towards the 4th order of design. Throughout the conference I heard Richard asking a couple of presenters, ‘What is the sustainability of your efforts?’ and here in lies what Richard is getting at. We need to be going beyond service design to have impact. His first and second order, as Richard describes is the posters, toasters. Then comes service, the 4th order is about organisations and people, about relationships, about content. Richard talks about empowering people, about handing skills over to people and I must say I was disappointed he had not made it to my presentation which is what myself and Stuart Bailey were talking about.
It’s simply not enough to design services in a vacuum and even now, I think consultancy is on it’s way out as a fundamental model to developing the services we deliver.
I co-presented with Stuart from the Glasgow School of Art ‘Embedding design: Changing our thinking’ which was developed during my time with Skills Development Scotland, a public body in Scotland over a year ago. It’s taken me time however to reflect on my lessons there and also be part of Snook, working with different public institutions/organisations and private companies to decide where I feel our efforts best lay in transforming the way services are delivered in Scotland.
It comes from the fact that when you map the journey of policy into public bodies and out to the public, there really is very little, if no design involved until a brief has already been written up to go to tender. We simply cannot go on like this. Design must be embedded inside the public sector to really push to the forefront great ideas, and ultimately save money before costly solutions are developed from boardrooms that ultimately fail/or have lacklustre appeal to potential users.
You can download the Embedding Design presentation here
That’s why I’m talking about embedding. This isn’t about throwing designers in an organisation. It is both bringing in design capacity and expertise inside the organisation and educating/building understanding and capabilities of it’s potential so this design team/designers/central role can flourish.
Having been asked to design a toolkit originally, what I walked away with was an embedding plan which true to Buchanan’s sentiments on the ’4th order’ of design. It is simply not enough to deliver toolkits to organisations on how to design, we have to consider it becoming the DNA of the organisation.
We spoke about the difficulties of embedding design, answering questions from experience at SDS and other organisations on where design fits in the organisation, what is it’s purpose, and how when a team is purposed with the task of ‘doing service design’ that their job has to balance both delivery and embedding to be ‘allowed’ to do design.
The presentation has all the content, but importantly we are talking here about the DNA of design. One of the things I developed for the company was a re-visualisation of the standard double diamond approach championed by the UK Design council. It stemmed from something Peter Gorb said which was, ‘Firstly, design cannot be seen’. This is one of the biggest issues we had in the company. So I created a circle that took the company process and the 4Ds of discover, define, develop and deliver and merged these together (later linking in tools that are relevant to each stage). What I liked about this visualisation was that it really echoed Lucy Kimbell’s notion of ‘Perpetual beta’ which she talked about at last year’s SDN conference in her keynote, Service Design at the crossroads. The idea is that even if you complete the delivery stage, within the company the design process is not over, it’s about being more lean and agile and similar to Ohno’s Toyota process, continuously developing solutions/ideas/projects/platforms.
It was a pleasure to present this with Stuart and to house the work, and develop ideas around embedding. We will be launching a new venture at embeddingdesign.com (coming soon!) where we are looking for more organisations to pilot the scheme with.
Unlike Fabian who wrote a critical review up of the conference, I did not attend the members network meeting. I haven’t signed up ( yet! ) at the moment I cannot see the value in it presently, but I am not completely dismissing the idea of joining.
I have some ideas for the SDN network and it’s role if I consider myself as a user.
(1) Charge a minimal fee, much less than 500e so that everyone can join. Use this to grow a network and some base funding for supporting the ideas the network wants to push.
(2) More transparency on who is part of the network and what the goal is. Could there be some kind of annual report with goals pulled together co-creatively for everyone to see. This might help people understand what mission they are giving money to. Think kick-starter and how it shows you where your money is going.
(3) Offer members the opportunity to pay for being part of collaborative bids, on a singular basis. If the SDN network could bring together multi disciplinary teams across the globe to work together to make awesome teams who had a chance of going for substantial bids (that often smaller firms cannot bid for) then I would honestly pay on a bid by bid basis if they facilitated the conversation and collaborative bid writing. For me, this is valuable on many levels, and a service I would pay for.
It’s easy to be critical however and I still found the conference enjoyable and worthwhile on different levels. As always old and new friends made it for me (you know who you are and hello Kansas!) but I really want to push this discipline forward and currently, I’m happy to be doing this in Scotland. SDN Network really needs to be pushing the boundaries where Brendon and Richard talked about but make sure it is still inviting for new comers.
Thank you once again to SDN and the network, and especially the volunteers who I imagine work tirelessly before, during and after the event to make it what it is.
Talk to Sarah about this work
Sarah Drummond
Director
