Looks like another service design publication is in the works, this time with a healthy dose of co-creation. Marc Stickdorn, Jakob Schneider and Fergus Bisset have set up a website called This is Service Design Thinking for members of the community to suggest tools and techniques for the core of the book.
If you are into service design or design thinking or however you call our field of work, you are most probably dealing with a set of methods and tools every day — share these with us! Make your ideas of service design thinking valuable for a larger audience. Establish your approach by putting it down to printed paper and help us building a conceptual base for our discipline.
Like the recent Designing Services with Innovative Methods the initial section of this book will introduce the discipline with contributions from various authors while the end will focus on a handful of service design case studies.
I keep hoping that someone will write a book with about ten pages of 18-point type introducing the idea of service design with the rest of the book devoted entirely to presenting highly visual service design vignettes. A picture-book written for non-designers to grasp the discipline and its potential.
That’s not what this is, but there’s still plenty of evangelization yet to do inside our ranks. Hence the focus on tools and techniques. The project is still in the early stages but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on as it develops.
Now that folks have recovered from jet lag following last week’s service design network conference in Madeira there’s a fair bit of conversation brewing about how future service design conferences might shape up differently. Joel Bailey has put together a quick forum to discuss and vote on ideas.
The Service Design Network has never really struck me as a democracy per se but even though they don’t seem to be active in any of the threads it’s good to see the community thinking ahead to 2010 while the events are still fresh.
AIGA Voice features an interview with my friend Phi-Hong Ha entitled Answering the Call to Service Design. She talks with Steven Heller about the “what” and the “why” of service design and delves a bit further into the “how.”
Phi-Hong is teaching a class on the subject next fall at SVA in New York and in this interview she considers three principles for learning and practicing service design:
- Embrace people, emphasizing the user-centered nature of the discipline across a wide range of stakeholders — not just customers but employees as well.
- Learn from others, emphasizing the cross-disciplinary nature of service design and the extensive cross-pollination required for most projects.
- Make it visual, emphasizing our strength in form-giving and holistic visualization when dealing with the intangible nature of experience.
Service design is still making in-roads into the design community here in the US and these kinds of interviews are a great way to get the word out. Way to go Phi!
Here’s a new service design resource that just came across my radar. Suze Ingram from Sydney, Australia has begun compiling a promising blog called Service Design Hub. In her words it’s a place to find blogs, articles, papers, books, links and videos about service design. Lots of good stuff to sift through.
In my earlier post about participatory design I mentioned a brief note about the politics of participation. That clear support from management is a must but actually having the boss in the room during a design session can also restrict the conversation. Particularly during critique.
To follow up on the political angle, users also need a guarantee that their design efforts will be taken seriously. Bodker, Gronbaek, and Kyng discuss this requirement in their essay on Cooperative Design in Participatory Design Principles and lay out three guidelines for such exercises:
- They make a difference for the participants
- Implementation of the results is likely
- They are fun to participate in
The first two points concern the political nature of participation in design but the last speaks to the nature of the design process itself. As the authors put it: “no matter how much influence participation may give, it should transcend the boredom of traditional design meetings to really support design as meaningful and involved action.”
What other rules of thumb have you found to be useful for framing participatory design exercises?
I noticed this poster for Starbucks in the subway a few weeks ago. It’s an overt reference to Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the “third place” from his 1989 classic The Great Good Place. Oldenburg was writing about those places between home and work that serve as anchors for the community. Cafes, pubs, bookstores, salons and other venues where people socialize.
Starbucks has always positioned themselves as a modern-day third place, but I’ve never seen it put so directly.
For me maintaining a weblog is like the canary in the coalmine. Every now and then I realize that things have spiraled out of control and I haven’t posted for a week or three. If I haven’t had time to blog it’s usually because I haven’t had time to think. And that’s not good. It means something is out of balance somewhere and I need to re-focus. Now where were we?
When I began exploring the concept of co-design earlier this year the methods surrounding Participatory Design seemed like a natural place to start.
The book Participatory Design: Principles and Practice edited by Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka in 1993 provides an excellent overview of the history and values surrounding this approach, specifically questions of democracy, power and control at the workplace. The articles that stand out for me include:
- Joan Greenbaum: Participatory Design in the US
- Pelle Ehn: Scandinavian Design: Participation and Skill
- Jeanette Blomberg: Ethnographic Field Methods
- Bodker, Gronbaek and Kyng: Cooperative Design
Later that same year, ACM published a special issue on Participatory Design (Volume 36, Number 4, 1993). It’s a gold mine of specific techniques related to participatory practice. The University of Queensland has posted an entire archive of that issue online in PDF format.
Michael Muller, Daniel Wildman and Ellen White’s introduction: Taxonomy of PD Practices [PDF 3.4MB] serves as a fantastic index of the techniques described in the ACM issue and referenced in the Participatory Design book.
As I’ve read more about the history of PD it seems to be focused almost exclusively on the development of digital computing systems. I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising given the time period; in some ways it seems more akin to HCI than service design. But while the techniques don’t always seem to be a match for the problems service designers encounter many of the principles still seem to resonate.
For example: the proximity to the site where work is performed helps influence whether design ideas are general or specific. When you’re onsite it’s easier to focus on particular problems in the immediate environment. On the other hand if you’re gathered in a conference room miles away it promotes a higher-level analysis. Sometimes it’s helpful to zoom in and out in this way.
Another purely political observation is that while it’s important for a participatory process to have the full support of management, and for that support to be understood (and believed) by employees, the presence of those with the power to hire or fire can have a chilling effect on the frank assessment of shortcomings in a particular system. This is a theme echoed in many of the other approaches I’ve studied as well.
It’s been 16 years since these resources were published and I’m sure the practice has continued to evolve. Last year Indiana University hosted a conference on participatory design and it would be interesting to learn more about the state of the art. Unfortunately I haven’t had much success in digging up papers from the proceedings. Any leads?
If service designers look beyond the customer experience to also focus on the back-stage system, does that mean that service design is boring? Nico Morelli encountered this odd objection on his recent trip to Finland. To rephrase, the business professor who offered this criticism regarded a massive and challenging expansion of the scope of inquiry as potentially boring for service designers. That doesn’t make much sense to me.
The underlying point is that service designers need to be cautious about becoming overly focused on the customer experience, to the exclusion of system details. Morelli sees this as the 21st century equivalent of the designer as “decorator.” Instead, service design should be concerned with balancing the needs of both the customer and the business. Finding a symbiotic relationship between front-stage and back-stage.
This points to another aspect of service design education that needs attention. Many projects focus a great deal on the customer experience side of the equation but are a little hand-wavy about system design. Or you find programs that focus on the system but ignore the experience. We need to find a balance.
Congrats to Nick, Jaimes, Lauren, and everyone who participated in the first Service Design Thinks last week in London. It looks like nearly 50 people attended the presentations by Alice Casey, Jo Harrington, Joel Bailey, and Karl Humphreys.
Here’s an overview of the event:
Video from the presentations is also forthcoming. I’ll post an update when new content is available.
