Four Year of Service Design Toronto!

2013 - 201 7

Four Years of SDTO

F R O M T H E O RG A N I Z E R S

It’s hard to believe it’s been four years since the fateful thanksgiving dinner where a good friend said ‘Linn, you should meet my friend Michael - he’s really into service design too!’ That was the genesis, over beers, as most good things come into being, of what has been four years of events, dialogue, community building, and discussion on service design in Toronto.

Exploring service design through the lens of airports, relationships, end of life experiences and many more subjects has been an exciting, mind expanding journey.

In this time, we’ve seen the community grow from just a few people gathering at Bento Miso or Usability Matters, to enough to sell out Canada’s first Service Design Conference, InFlux, produced by our friends at the SDN Canada chapter.

It feels like service design has gone from a niche, unknown discipline in Canada, to an exciting space with an increasing amount of talent spreading across the country. We have seen companies like TELUS building in-house service design teams, growing interest in the civic tech and government space, as well as a number of agencies developing and expanding their service design capability.

The reward for us in organizing and working with this community has been the strength of the relationships and dialogue. We are all familiar with the term, ‘It takes a village’, and let us tell you it really does - so we would like to give a heartfelt thank you and shout out to all of our speakers, attendees, volunteers, organizations that have hosted and provided event space, and last but not least our incredible sponsor, Usability Matters, for their generous support over the years.

We hope that you will continue to celebrate the service design community and discipline with us well into 2017 and beyond.

Linnea Vizard Co-Organizer

Elina Lawrie Co-Organizer

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SDTO Events Over the Years This retrospective recounts all of the SDTO events from its inception in 2013, and showcases the development of the service design dialogue in Toronto over the years. *Note: The following articles were written immediately after the events and reflect our thoughts on the topics at those times.

2017 Mar 2017: BLND

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2016 Dec 2016: SDN Canada Conference, InFlux

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Oct 2016: SDN Global Conference

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Jul 2016: Buying Service, Selling Design

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Apr 2016: Community Show & Tell

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2015 Oct 2015: Designing for End of Life Experiences

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Sep 2015: Redesigning Democracy

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Jun 2015: Designing Relationships

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May 2015: The Airport Service Experience

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2014 Dec 2014: The Value of Service Design 20

Something else has undergone a ‘transformation’ during this time.

Can you guess how many different hairstyles Linn has had over these past four years?

The first 5 people to send us the correct answer to servicedesign to@gmail.com will get their ticket fee waved at our June 2017 event!

Oct 2014: SDN Global Conference

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Aug 2014: Postal Service Edition

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Mar 2014: Global Service Jam

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2013 Nov 2013: Service Design Drinks

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September March 2017 2015

BLND Design and Business Party In March 2017, we were super excited to share our relationship canvas workshop at BLND - a one day business and design conference on U Waterloo’s Stratford Campus.

The event hosted design leaders and speakers from a range of industries and contexts including lots of familiar faces from the service design community.

F EEDB ACK F RO M T HE T WI T T ERSP HERE Amazing workshop by @elinalawrie @wittster on explicit and implicit value in relationships #servicedesign #blnd2017 This was an excellent workshop. We laughed, we cried, we did cost benefit analyses on our closest friends and family. /ht @servicedesignTO Applied a business model canvas to my relationship with my grandma. Great session with @wittster @ elinalawrie #BLND2017

Inspiring stories on how design is reshaping women’s health (Jessica Ching, Eve Medical), and building value by piggybacking on other platforms (Rob Hayes), were presented alongside workshops on the art of ‘stakeholdering’ (Markus Grupp, Patrick Bach and Chelsea Omel) and designing thinking (Andreas Ospina).

@servicedesignTO really enjoyed your workshop at #BLND2017. Thanks so much for being part of our line up!

We had so much fun sharing our work on the overlap of relationships and design with an engaged group of students, practitioners and fellow speakers.

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Oct 2016 & Dec 2016

SDN Global Conference & InFlux Canada In 2016 SDTO focused on growing the work from our Designing Relationships event in 2015 that we then took to two main stages, the SDN Global Conference in Amsterdam, and InFlux SDN Canada Conference held here in Toronto.

The evolution of the Designing Relationships work focused on three key areas: •

Explore how the design of services impacts relationships, and examine the role of the service designer in creating these relationships

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Use Service Design framing to think about relationships in a new way.

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Equip participants with a new tool for analyzing and discussing relationships - both service and personal

SDN Global Conference It was great to see so many Canadian faces both on stage and attending at the 2016 SDNGC in October. At this years’ event, we saw an increasing amount of attention paid to applying service design approaches to improve operational experiences for employees of an organization.

In addition, we also saw an many client-vendor duos take the stage together, emphasizing the importance of an engaged collaborative partnership between these two parties.

InFlux Canada Conference The InFlux Conference held at Rotman in December was proof of the rapid growth of the service design community here in Toronto, both in its size and depth of conversation. The oneday action packed event had a diverse range of speakers, with representation from government, healthcare, telecommunications, and many service design companies willing to share their new techniques and tools.

Sydney Johnson wrote a great blog post recapping some of her highlights about InFlux and her thoughts on our workshop. Thanks for coming Sydney!

“The activity of the workshop was very closely tied to the reigning question of People in Flux as it directly dealt with expectations in relationships and how that can differ between the parties involved... Overall, it was great to end the day with an activity. It felt a little strange to be examining a relationship in this way, but strange is often good in this context.”

- Sydney Johnson

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July 2016

Buying Service, Selling Design ‘How should we sell service design?’ This is a question we have heard many times throughout the course of our Service Design Toronto (SDTO) events. While there is excitement and appetite for service design from the practitioner side, it can feel challenging to get buy-in and support from clients to execute on service design projects.

However, we think that the question of ‘how should we sell service design’ might be the wrong one to explore. In our July 26th, 2016 SDTO event, we explored the question: ‘How might we be more buyer centered in our offering?’

For many clients engaging in the design process, regardless of the design discipline, can be a very daunting process. This anxiety can be multiplied when we are talking about the intangible value that some design or management practices claim to offer. On top of that, the sea of consulting and design services has become increasingly complex and nuanced for clients. Trying to navigate this complexity while trying to identify which differences of each approach will help you better reach your end goal can be like taking a giant leap of faith when choosing a vendor.

It can be very difficult to build a common language that clients can understand and parse in terms of what services and capabilities are offered. What’s the difference between a UX vendor and a service design vendor or perhaps a business consulting firm? This mixed bag of services and capabilities from different vendors makes it hard to know when to look at them as discrete versus integrated.

We can also think about the question: ‘what do clients want to buy?’ One of the challenges we have seen is that there is sometimes a disconnect in what designers and clients put emphasis on.

Designers love process - clients care strongly about outcomes. Clients need to know what they are buying - designers often want the flexibility of open-ness in outcomes based on process.

How might we better articulate the overlap in values or shift to the shared space in the middle?

We reached out to two clients with experience procuring service design work. Dara Renton

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works at the Toronto Public Library and has been involved with projects such as the service strategy for online card renewal and registration. Jackie Bender is a researcher and social and behavioural health scientist at the University Health Network, where she develops support services for cancer patients.

• Understanding boundaries, limitations and strengths • Articulating service offerings and a range of services • Buyer sophistication and the buyer as knowledge broker

When we explored this shared value space in our research with Dara and Jackie, these were the three themes that emerged:

Articulating/Understanding the service offering/range of services What we’ve observed is that designers often struggle to articulate value clearly. This is where we get into the challenge of having a shared language that works for both parties. Dara talked about not calling it service design, which echoed something Jackie said around “The process needs to be broken down into plain language.”

Both experienced the need to act as a type of translator in their organizations when articulating the value service design would bring.

Jackie mentioned the suite of services of design is a lot larger than she thought it was. “The organization often assumes it’s their responsibility

to design the program structure, requirements finding out that there is space for collaboration is awesome. I had no idea - we’re not talking about the website, but the whole program design.” This means it can be challenging for clients to identify where service design fits in a development cycle with designers often really wanting upfront and end to end involvement.

Understanding Boundaries, Strengths and Limitations Designers claim to be able to do a lot, and the client feels it is their due diligence to figure out limitations. Dara mentioned that “Vendors aren’t often that great at knowing where their strengths lie at a more granular capabilities level.”

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For Jackie, it manifests as, “Knowing what your discipline is and then figuring out where your boundaries are - they are porous.”

For Dara, the only way to get to know vendors is to try out small projects with them. That’s that ‘leap of faith’ - learning by working together.

There is also a challenge of working with a vendor to fit the process to the scale needed - micro versus macro service design. Jackie mentioned that she had learned to think about “User centred design at an individual level (micro perspective), also macro perspective of larger service interaction.”

Both Dara and Jackie have to act as knowledge brokers in their organizations. During a procurement process, they help the clients understand what the vendor is talking about and vice versa. This often looks like breaking the process down in plain language, and helping the design vendor to craft a value proposition that will resonate.

The nut of how to ‘sell’ service design is certainly far from being cracked, but as with many things, it might all be in the framing of the problem.

Jackie also spoke about the challenge in chunking out the work - getting proposals that were far bigger in scope than what was required. The challenge for her becomes the negotiation of saying ‘no I need just this piece.’ This is interesting to hear from a designer’s perspective, because we often want to be involved end to end, and feel our best work takes place when we can be present in a full cycle of design process.

Sophistication of Buyer, and the Buyer as a Knowledge Broker Design in all of its flavours and nuances can be challenging enough to understand for a specialist.

(That manifests in all of our ‘what is service design’, ‘what’s the difference between UX and UI design’ type of conversations!)

For people who are buying design services, this is a barrier to overcome. From Dara’s perspective, “You can’t buy stuff unless you’re sophisticated enough to understand it”. This means that people procuring design have extra work to do to understand design, and the potential value proposition for their organisation.

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April 2016

Community Show & Tell With the introduction of an SDN Canada chapter, an upcoming IxDA workshop on service design, and several service design presentations at Embrace UX, the discipline is really taking off in Toronto. At our first event of 2016 we wanted to highlight some of the work that is evolving the service design practice here in our own city. Over the beautiful views from the LinkedIn offices, Margaret Fraser and Daniela Kraemer of InWithForward, and Tim Dolan of Kickframe, along with Alex Grunwald and Rob Tilley, shared the work that they have been doing.

Tim Dolan of Kickframe presented with Alex Grunwald and Rob Tilley, on work they had collaborated on for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Tim’s blog post first drew our attention to the journey map that they had created, and we thought this would be a wonderful project to share with the SDTO community.

The challenge was to support the TSO in creating a digital strategy to support them in transforming a 93-year old start-up. One of the challenges that service designers often encounter is that of clients thinking about themselves from within the confines of their organization – rather than being able to see things from a user’s point of view.

The outbound marketing push for events doesn’t always match how people find events – and in this case, customer experience mapping supported the discovery of these opportunities.

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Tim, Alex and Rob talked about the opportunity to use customer journey mapping as a strategy tool rather than a design tool. This speaks to the flexibility in intention of service design tools – they often provide a framework for the work, which can be adapted to suit a range of needs.

One of the exciting key opportunities for service design is that the non-linearity of experiences means that friction points often sit between touchpoints – and tools like journey mapping can assist us in identifying this.

Margaret Fraser and Daniela Kraemer shared the work they have been doing with InWithForward, with people at the Meeting Place in Toronto.

InWithForward is a social enterprise, which works with the idea that social welfare systems could move “from safety nets to trampolines”. That is to say that rather than being a minimum level support for when things go wrong, there might be ways for these services to encourage flourishing – the building of relationships, self-esteem and new possibilities.

Daniela and Margaret shared moving stories of the people that they have met through their deep ethnographic approach. This design approach works to start with people and influence practice and policy from there. People’s stories can give us great insight. Lots of people are struggling with lots of different things but trying really hard, and one of the insights from the work is that you can’t just have one intervention; you need a whole suite of interventions A practical takeaway from the presentation was the reminder not to overwhelm your codesign participants! Bringing a whole series of ideas to people in these sessions can be too much. Striking a good balance of giving people something to respond to (a prototype, a codesign activity) and making the session feel manageable is key.

The Q&A discussion after the presentations brought up lots of thoughtful questions. How does service design reveal the gaps and opportunities?

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What does it mean to do self-care in the context of this type of work? How do these projects get funded and measured? How do you make both the backstage and front stage processes and interventions line up?

For us, some of the key overlaps and themes that emerged were the importance of listening – for the people involved to tell their stories – be it members at the Meeting Place or staff at the TSO. This might be why designers talk a lot about ‘empathy’. Whatever we call it, it was clear from these two case studies that people feeling heard is powerful, and a great first step in any project. A further theme was that of the gaps and frictions – where are things falling between touchpoints or interventions? What does qualitative data tell us that other formal measures don’t? The need for ways to collect, understand and value qualitative data continues to be a challenge in the service design space.

We are very grateful to Tim, Alex, Rob, Margaret and Daniela for sharing their work with us. Big thank you to our volunteers, our sponsor Usability Matters, and to LinkedIn and Lynda.com for the event space.

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September October 2015 2015

Designing for End of Life Experiences Death and dying are universal human experiences - pretty much the only thing we know for certain about our lives. In a Western context, death has become taboo and institutionalized. Palliative care is a sensitive space. With an aging demographic, our healthcare systems are struggling to keep up with demand and provide people and their loved ones with good services as they reach end of life.

This month’s Service Design Toronto event explored the advantages and challenges of bringing a service design approach to end of life.

How do we design for incredibly messy, multilayered systems and experiences? What types of skills and capacity building might designers need to work in these emotionally charged areas?

Karen Oikonen presented her research work as part of the OCAD Strategic Foresight and Innovation Masters Program. Driven by a personal experience of losing her father to cancer, Karen embarked on a deep dive into the ‘needs of family members who are at a distance from a loved one during palliative care.’

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Communication: Direct to Digital - face to face communication is moving towards digital modes, however the healthcare system is not set up to accommodate this.

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Death: Denying to Discussing - conversations about death are being facilitated by movements such as Death Cafes and Death Over Dinner.

Based on experience and research, Karen elucidated the value of a service design approach in this space as follows: •

An opportunity to broaden the currently healthcare-practitioner driven conversations.

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Connecting to models of patient and family centered care through a human centered design approach.

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Service design as user centered and co-creative, considering the whole picture including time and sequencing of events.

Horizon scanning revealed some shifts that are taking place in terms of palliative care: •

Family: Traditional to Diverse - our family configurations are evolving.

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With many overlapping themes and considerations, Nisha Haji shared her work with the MaRS MyHealth research on ‘dying well’. This project aimed to: •

Better understand the patient experience.

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Identify insights related to the experience.

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Establish design principles to guide interventions and co-creation.

Both presentations provided much food for thought and discussion, and the attendees shared challenges working in this space and their experiences with death and dying. Karen has created a website where you can learn more about the project, and Nisha has written about her work on the MaRS blog.

Service design tools and methodologies included interviewing primary caregivers, palliative care physicians and nurses, informing the developments of personas and experience maps.

Many insights emerged from the research around the themes of relationships, time and story. Some samples of these insights below: •

Relationships: Doctors are trained to be doctors: much of the physician’s’ role at the end of life stage is based on their personal philosophy on the role of healthcare, which is influenced by the training they receive.

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Time: Data is dragged through the system: Physician notes of the patient visit and test results move through the healthcare system with significant lags (up to 10 day delays).

Release of information usually requires patient consent and data is only accessible in hard copy often via fax.

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Story: Dying is institutional: Most patients believe that end of life care and inevitably death can only occur in a hospital, hospice or nursing home. They don’t share their desires for alternative end of life care.

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September 2015

Redesigning Democracy It was nice to see so many faces, some familiar, some new, who came to explore the intersection of Policy and Service Design at our September SDTO event.

A timely topic given the groundswell of criticism on some recent government led design initiatives at the local and international scale. Perhaps most notably the launch of healthcare.gov and the community outreach initiated by Toronto City Hall with the intent to help inform the creation of new and the revision of existing policies regarding the shared economy; potential determinants for the success of services such as Uber and Airbnb.

In contrast to these contentious topics, we have also seen a rise of local design jams and grassroots initiatives such as Civic Tech Toronto and Challenge.gov which pool together many different perspectives and is a sure sign of increased citizen interest in policy intervention. At home and abroad we are also seeing the emergence of design driven labs – Policy Lab UK, MindLab, TACSI. Alexander Dirksen, User Experience Manager for Prollster and Operations Assistant for the Banff Forum, joined the conversation via Skype to share his knowledge and perspective on why we are seeing a shift of the inclusion of design approaches to tackle policy related challenges.

If there is such a strong desire for involvement by citizens, designers and policy makers, than why does it feel that it has yet to yield successful results? Alex brought light to some of the overlooked benefits, risks and complexities of these colliding worlds. For the purposes of the event, Alex crafted a video on his thoughts, which you can watch here.

The audience shared some challenges they faced during their experiences, a common one being the all too familiar dilemma of what to tackle first.

The non-linear structures of these public policy challenges are the reason why these types of issues have become widely known and referred to as ‘wicked problems’. Many arguments have been made in favor of co-design as an effective approach to policy making. The key point being that the human-centered design process can help to give policymakers a new perspective and approach to re-frame their decision making process on policy challenges by seeing a person at the center and the residing impact of the policies put in place at a ground level.

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The co-design method is one that is highly explored in the area of democracy and when government organizations engage in the service design process. During the Q&A, Alexander highlighted the value and importance that codesign can bring in these settings when facilitated thoughtfully. He pointed out the fact that the chances of failure are high when the right people aren’t engaged and prepared to drive the process forward over an extended period of time.

We wrapped up the latter half of the night with an activity, the ATLAS Game, led by Peter Last which explored how we can better plan and facilitate co-design activities to ensure that the takeaways are valuable.

Another key discussion topic that arose was, as governments feel the pressure to adapt to including technological solutions, how can we ensure that technology is not seen as the solution to all problems? Alexander made the great point that as designers and citizens it’s easy for us to sit back and criticize projects such as healthcare. gov and point out all of its flaws. However it was also the launch of this site that sparked a lot of interesting discussions, motivation, and initiatives from designers and public sectors workers to not want to repeat the same mistakes and instead ideate on ways to improve this process.

This proves that although there may not be a clear path to embedding a human-centered design approach within the government, so far service design and the design process has proven to be an appropriate bridge to larger scale change and impact between citizens and the government.

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September June 2015 2015

Designing Relationships In June 2015 we explored the intersection of design and relationships, including how we might apply more intentionality to our relationships. The exploration took place through three key provocations.

Can We Look at Relationships as a Service?

What do services and relationships have in common? If we define services as: “An exchange of (intangible) value where people do not take ownership of physical elements involved that are co-created, where your outcomes and experiences are likely to be different to mine,” (Cooper Service Blueprinting workshop) we can see that there are many common elements to relationships and services.

Services more often than not include human interactions – relationships are a core aspect of a service. A great interaction or relationship can save a terrible service; conversely, a terrible interaction can ruin a great service.

We have all had experiences where excellent customer service has rescued a frustrating and unsatisfactory experience. Designing services is

often about designing relationships – between people and things, and people and people. Many service design tools are about understanding and framing these relationships.

For example, stakeholder mapping offers a way to visualize the various relationships that impact a service, and find opportunities to augment and improve them.

Relationships are core to the human experience.

In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we see love and belonging as a key aspect of the needs people have. Services have always existed to fulfil this need, and they continue to evolve. In Lisdoonvarna in Ireland, there is a matchmaking festival which has been running for over 150 years.

In more modern terms, we see technological platforms like Facebook and Tinder focusing on maintaining and creating relationships. When we look at dating services, we can see the ways in which the design of services impacts the types and tones of relationships formed.

Image Source: Ayla Newhouse, Dating By Design Double Diamond

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“Nothing encodes relationships quite as clearly as the tools designed to create them.”

– Jean Hardy and Mark Handel Online dating services provide frameworks. These services say something about how we see the world, and how we conceptualize relationships.

You can see this in the contrast between Match. com and OkCupid. Match.com is much more straightforward in what it offers – you can be either a “man” or a “woman” looking for either a “man” or a “woman”. OkCupid on the other hand, offers a much broader range of options for sexual orientation and gender options.

Being explicit and intentional about our expectations and boundaries, in essence designing our relationships, open us up to new ways of thinking about them and relating to one another.

“Design is devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”

– Herbert Simon Ayla Newhouse has done work on applying design thinking to dating, and the evening concluded with a modified version of her dating by design canvas, which in turn is inspired by the business model canvas.

How Might We Design Our Relationships?

There is great opportunity to learn from applying design tools and approaches to relationships.

Sometimes existing frameworks (marriage, the nuclear family) may not be serving the purpose they were set out to serve.

Marrying for love is quite a modern construct, and we see ways in which it is being updated and redefined in our times. Emergence of statuses like common law are policy design responses to changing modes of having relationships.

The business model canvas is a service design or business design tool that creates a holistic framework for examining business models.

Our adapted relationship model canvas provoked some great discussion on the merits and challenges of applying this approach to something as messy and intangible as human relationships.

What does it mean to think about the cost structure of a relationship? Is it uncomfortable to apply business terminology and approaches to intimate relationships?

RELATIONSHIP MODEL CANVAS | RELATIONSHIP: KEY ACTIVITIES & ATTRIBUTES

VALUE PROPOSITIONS

What activities or commonalities did this relationship form because of?

What value do you offer to this relationship?

What value does this relationship offer to you?

RELATIONSHIP EXPECTATIONS

CHANNELS

METRICS

What type of relationship does this person expect you to establish and maintain with them?

Where and how does the relationship take place?

Which are the most frequent? Most enjoyed?

How will you measure the success/health of the relationship? Qualitative & quantitative?

Interesting in giving the Relationship Model Canvas a try?

What are your expectations from them?

Are they being met? Who else could you look to, to fufill those needs?

CUSTOMER SEGMENTS How does your relationship impact other aspects of your life. How does it affect other relationships?

COST STRUCTURE

What are you willing to give to the relationship? What are you willing to give up for the relationship that you wouldn’t give up for another? What’s the cost benefit of these investments?

REVENUE STREAMS

What does this person contribute to this relationship? Would you rather they give something else, and how much?

Email us at servicedesignto@gmail.com and we will send you a digital copy of the canvas.

Special thanks to Ayla Newhouse for letting us use her Dating by Design Canvas as a foundation. You can find Ayla’s version here: datingbydesign.ca/free-dating-by-design-canvas/

Image Source: Ayla Newhouse, Dating By Design Double Diamond

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May 2015

The Airport Service Experience We kicked off the evening with a short introduction to touch on some areas we found interesting, including: the cultural significance and public ownership of airport space; how airports are made up of an entangled web of services; evolving airport design trends and patterns; and the wave of the emotional journey of airport travel.

In order to help us better understand this space, we invited Shawn Lawrie to participate in a Q&A to share with us his first-hand experience in Airport design. Shawn is an Architect and Senior Associate at Stantec where he has worked on the design of many Domestic and International Airports over the last 11 years.

Although Shawn was not experienced specifically in service design, a few key themes presented themselves throughout the discussion: 1. Opportunities for Service Design Tools and Methods Not unlike other complex systems, within airport design there are numerous stakeholders at play and constrained project budgets, leaving little to no time for customer research and interviews.

Shawn further elaborated on the lack of customer interviews in their design process:

“Part of this is that we are all frequent travelers so when we design these environments we think about what we would want.”

Airport architects also have to design for the often forgotten customer group, the experience of the 3,000 or so airport employees that keep these customer facing services moving on a daily basis.

“It is as if you were to cross the Berlin Wall every single day on your commute to work.

All goods and services and airport employees have to go through security in order to get to where they are stationed, a major detail that we as passengers often overlook.”

- Shawn Lawrie People-centered service design tools and methods such as journey mapping can help to uncover hidden opportunities by fostering quality discussions and an empathetic view point among a project team and stakeholders.

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2. The Value of Co-production for a Successful Airport Design Project

The Q&A was a nice primer to the closing activity designed and led by Spencer Beacock and Marie Serrano from Bridgeable.

Shawn explained how the most successful airport designs typically have very strong, well-organized airport authorities such as the case for Vancouver International Airport (YVR): “Good airport authorities have many ways to collect feedback from their travelers on an ongoing basis, we often rely on this information to help us understand areas that need to be worked on.�

3. The Opportunity and Value to be Delivered from Uniting Multidisciplinary Teams around Service Design As airports continue to integrate new tech and IT solutions, there is an even greater need for more care taken in cross-channel transitions.

Shawn spoke about how airport design has become more modular to account for the flexibility that vendors need. As an airport evolves over time very little collaboration happens with, for example, tech companies to explore what the future of these services hold.

In groups of two, attendees mapped their own experiences as airline passengers, divided by four key stages: waiting, security, check-in, and boarding.

This collaborative exercise and tool allowed us to visualize the range of experiences and interactions travelers have across these microjourneys in pursuit of boarding their flight and/or landing in their destination.

Bridgeable elaborated on how building a visual narrative not only develops strategic insights but can pay dividends when stakeholders participate as a way to help generate consensus among the group.

Lots of things to consider when applying service design techniques to a multi-layered service as complex as airports!

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December 2014

The Value of Service Design Our December SDTO event at CSI Annex saw a huge turnout for the last event of 2014. The panel on “Understanding the Value of Service Design” spoke to a sold out room. Comprising of people from both the client and practitioner side, the panelists included Jennifer Rosart of Sick Kids, Patrick Glinski of Idea Couture, Sean Molloy formerly of Cancer Care Ontario, Judy Mellett of Telus, and Josina Vink formerly of CAMH. Our skillful moderator for the evening was Chris Ferguson of Bridgeable.

The conversation that emerged was rich and multi-layered, capturing many interesting firsthand experiences. A few key themes emerged throughout the night that were captured on a lively Twitter conversation.

People First Whether at a telecom company or in healthcare, service design takes a people first view. This not only includes the end user, but the employee experience as well.

Sean Molloy of CCO talked about the insight that they learned from patients when they repeatedly said, “As a system you treat tumours very well but you don’t treat the person”. Service design tools and methods such as deep first hand research with patients helped to address this challenge.

Finding The Problem Instead of coming in and looking at a problem specifically as, say, an user-interface issue, service design considers the holistic system. This allows the definition of a much broader system that is not channel constrained.

In this way, we are not running up channel walls, and we are not constrained by only using a website to solve problems. Patrick Glinski recalled redesigning a call centre experience while looking at the whole system, with the ability to work in different mediums to implement change. Service design also creates opportunities to include a cross-section of stakeholders and communities in the design process. Josina Vink talked about the process of breaking down normal power structures and roles through co-design techniques.

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The User and The Business Needs

Reframing The Problem

We need to continuously consider the needs of the user and their experience in tandem with the realities of the organization behind the scene.

In several cases, the panelists mentioned calling service design something different but applying the tools and methods that service design has to offer. Judy Mellet shared the challenges of selling service design approaches internally and the need to communicate effectively about what service design is and isn’t.

Jennifer Rosart articulated this beautifully.

For SickKids, service design has meant moving away from a patient-centric model with the patient in the middle, to looking at all pieces and players that come together to deliver and receive a service.

To gain buy-in, stay away from the jargon and show the impact. Co-design can act as a trojan horse that can gain traction, increase engagement and start to show impact. The time to talk about design approaches is when people in the organization are saying, “This is great! What’d you guys do?!”

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October 2014

SDN Global Conference 2014 The 7th annual Service Design Network Global Conference took place in the beautiful city of Stockholm, Sweden. We had the pleasure of being among the 600 plus attendees of the two-day event, as well as participating in Members’ Day prior to the conference. Under the theme of ‘Creating Value for Quality of Life’, diverse topics included employee engagement, customer experience, business performance, and societal impact.

Service design as a discipline is evolving, as demonstrated by the wide range of conference attendees and speakers from design, business and government.

Big Fish, Little Fish

Access to The C-suite

The recent acquisition of Adaptive Path by Capital One had the community buzzing. Many see this as an emerging trend, following Accenture’s acquisition of Fjord in May 2013. Joydeep Bhattacharya, Managing Director of Accenture, gave the Members’ Day keynote, providing some insight into the coming together of these firms.

He mentioned the demand from clients for design thinking and service design approaches as a driver, as well as a customer focused transformation of the services Accenture offers. The customer life cycle is getting ever more complex, and service design approaches can help in mapping, managing and designing in this challenging environment.

The question on everyone’s lips was – ‘What’s in it for service designers?’ There are many challenges, especially culturally, when small, design driven studios merge with big, corporate entities. One of the advantages is the ability to work at a scale often only dreamed of by designers, reaching many hundreds of thousands of people or more. A further advantage is the access to people who can make changes – bringing designers beyond the middle management layer. Access to the C-suite was something repeatedly mentioned during the conference. In his keynote, Lavrans Løvlie of live|work talked about the importance of service design being in a symbiotic relationship with business and organizations in order to create impact.

Image Source: Service Design Network Global Conference 2014

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Engaging Staff Across an Organization

Beyond Services Towards Systems

Of course, it takes more than just C-suite decision makers to create change. Often, this is a lengthy process that requires engagement and trust at all levels of an organization. Mark Levy of AirBnB wowed attendees with the company’s commitment to a robust and exciting employee experience. Highlights include office spaces designed to look like AirBnB listings from around the world, three healthy meals a day and the opportunity to give back through community work. Engaged employees were also key to Systembolaget (the Swedish state owned alcohol sales monopoly) being able to become recognized as ‘Best in Service’ in Sweden. Mia Kleregård talked about the three year journey to engage staff to deliver outstanding customer service.

Trust, involving employees and a clear company mission were key.

The themes of organizational change, and the complex interplay of business, design and people point to the evolution of service design towards a meta-discipline. Perhaps we are at a stage where we are ‘beyond service’? Andrea Siodmok talked about her work with Policy Lab in the UK – an experimental space bringing design thinking approaches to government policy-making. One of the points she raised is that often for design to be effective, we need to be involved at the pre-procurement stage. Interestingly, digital has played a role here, with gov.uk being instrumental in introducing new ideas and approaches to the UK government. Designers are looking at the very structures that influence how we live our lives. In Kigge Hvid’s talk, she made a call for designers to move beyond services towards systems. She pointed out that we have many services making improvements in the world, but we now need to focus on interconnecting these in a larger system.

These are exciting times for service design as we see the potential for future impact, and a seat at the table in how we do business, work, live and play.

Image Source: Service Design Network Global Conference 2014

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August 2014

Postal Service Edition We like to think of the postal service as the original network – it serves the need of wanting to send information and physical things to other people. The service has, over time, become fundamental to the fabric of society – as our speaker Deepika mentioned, “you can’t not have a relationship with the post office.”

Since its early days, the service has been subject to disruption and evolution. The introduction of pre-paid postage in the 1800s was a huge innovation. In our current digital climate we are seeing the decline of letter mail but the increase in package volume, due to the proliferation of ecommerce. Some interesting service startups have come (and gone) in this environment.

Outbox was a San Francisco based service that would pick up your physical mail, digitize it and email it to you for a monthly fee. Bufferbox was a Waterloo based startup that provided lockers for package collection. The service need that people have is evolving, as missed delivery package notices become a pain point for consumers.

In this fast paced and evolving environment, how can designers deliver value? Our speaker Deepika Malik, Director of UX at Canada Post, had some insights on using the right tools at the right time.

Canada Post is an institution, founded in 1753, with 68,000 employees. It has a long legacy as a service, and a very specific environment as a Crown Corporation. What role can designers and service design play? How can we introduce the right tools at the right time, for the right people, in an environment that is not always ready to embrace change?

A key theme of the evening and the discussions was the notion that as designers, we need to think carefully about the language we use. As Deepika says, whether you are a dogmatist or a pragmatist, the tools are the same. The key is picking the cherry that works, and being tactical about the language you use to describe the tool.

Many clients and stakeholders are overloaded with things to learn (lean, agile, UX, service design…) and the buzzwords can get in the way. As Scott MacGregor mentioned during the discussion, he has found most success when focusing on the

Outbox, a service that wants to digitize mail.

Banner Image: Canada Post

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principles and use of the tool first and foremost, without getting hung up on what it is called.

Another theme of the discussion was that of flexibility and design elasticity. A challenge that many large organizations face, and one that designers often see with clients, is how to design with legacy systems in mind. Complex, layered systems with intertwined front and back end systems can make many public and private sector organizations limited in their capacity to be nimble and respond to the pace of current day technology. In today’s environment the trade off between big and strong versus nimble and flexible creates huge demand for creative thinking.

Time scales are also a crucial consideration for service designers. The dream of designing a complete system end to end is one that we rarely get to live out. In reality, designers often find themselves at a certain point of a long service lifecycle, and attempting to impact the next couple of years. Balancing the need for future compatibility and working with current state is a core competency for designers. Much of this work revolves around building relationships, getting buy in and collaborating with the deeply knowledgeable stakeholders around us.

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March 2014

Global Service Jam Global Service Jam (GSJ) is a weekend long event where people come together to use design and problem solving approaches to create a service. This year Usability Matters sponsored the event and provided Shannah Segal as a judge.

Similar to a hackathon, the focus is on doing not talking, which manifests in research with real people, prototyping, and lots of fun.

To put it another way, from the GSJ website: “The Global Service Jam is a non-profit volunteer activity organized by an informal network of service design aficionados, who all share a common passion for growing the field of service design and customer experience. The Jam has a staff of none and a budget of nearly nothing.”

This year, participants in over 100 cities got together to Jam, under the intriguing global theme of an image of a die-line of a box… hmmm.

The Toronto GSJ participants, hosted at Totem and meticulously organized by Angela Barber and Marie-Eve Belanger were certainly intrigued by this theme. Friday evening kicked off with a presentation by Linn Vizard on Service Design 101, followed by a massive group brainstorm on the theme. Emerging patterns identified many possible project areas, including housing and shelter, packing and delivery, gift giving, art,

urbanism, and even existentialism!

Yes, this is the magic of group synthesis.

Saturday saw our return in a mentorship capacity, and we were thrilled to see how gung-ho the teams were about getting out into the real world to explore their assumptions and dig deep with real people. The next hurdle was begin the prototyping process – the doing not talking! So what is a prototype in the context of a service?

From the GSJ theme video, one consideration is that:

“…a prototype doesn’t describe the thing, a prototype is an early version of the thing. If it describes the thing, you might have a presentation on your hands…”

Image: Global Service Jam 2014, jeanettestock.com

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The GSJ teams got to work creating desktop walkthroughs, role-playing, prototyping touchpoints and service artifacts, and iterated on and evolved these throughout the weekend, testing as they went along. The final presentations on Sunday are available to view online, including that of the winning team, Stork Delivery, who worked on a crowd-sourced mail delivery service.

As I saw it, these were some of the challenges and learnings from the weekend: •

Get making early! This can feel scary but is invaluable.

•

Not getting too focused on one single touchpoint – a service design project needs to look at the whole system holistically.

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Agility – being comfortable having your assumptions challenged and being able to change direction based on your research with real people.

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Using the tools of Service Design such as service blueprints, customer journeys, and stakeholder mapping to really zoom out and look at the macro level.

Overall the event was a great success, and very well organized. Several participants mentioned how useful and enjoyable they found the weekend.

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November 2013

SDTO Drinks November Edition Service Design Toronto alternates between a “Drinks” and “Thinks” format, with “Thinks” being an evening with a theme and speakers, and “Drinks” being a more casual event. November was drinks time as we came together to celebrate a year of Service Design Toronto community building. Time flies when you are service designing!

An interesting evening of conversation and activity ensued, fueled by refreshments and nibbles.

Topics of conversation included big box retail experiences (the former grocery pickup conveyor belt at suburban grocery stores being a hot topic), food (including a delivery service for spices) and the ever-wonderful Toronto Public Library.

The service design activity for the evening was Service Love/Breakup Letters. Adapted from Frog’s Participatory Design Workshop, these letters are a generative research activity, which can help you to figure out where to focus design efforts. People write a personal letter to a service, talking about the health of the relationship, things they adore/can’t stand, and their hopes for the future of their partnership.

This is a great activity to get people to open up and relate their emotions and needs. The results are often very funny! It can be a good icebreaker to get people thinking on their own and then sharing with the group.

The results of this exercise yielded: •

Only 1 love letter (lots of service designing to do!)

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8 breakup letters

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3 letters to the TTC

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3 letters to telcos – Bell, Wind Mobile and Rogers Internet

The letters contained many quotable gems, including: “I swear I’m going to get a restraining order if you don’t stop sending me letters and calling me.”

(Bell) “I love how I can call on you at any time of day or night and you will see me home.” (TTC) “And the rejection: when I do get through, your programs are already full: after 10 minutes!”

(Toronto Fun Guide)

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Service Design Toronto would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors and our volunteers.

P R I M A RY S P O N S O R

VENUE SPONS ORS

Architech / LinkedIn/ Shopify / Bridgeable / BentoMiso

VOLUN T EERS

Peter Last / Arthur Mui / Andrew Rajaram / Louise McCulloch

S P E A K E R S & FA C I L I T AT O R S

Alexander Dirksen / Marie Serrano / Spencer Beacock / Karen Oikonen/ Nisha Haji/ Shawn Lawrie / Chris Ferguson / Josina Vink / Markus Grupp / Shannah Segal / Deepika Malik / Dr. Jackie Bender / Dara Renton / Judy Mellet / Patrick Glinski / Sean Malloy / Daniela Kraemer / Margaret Fraser / Tim Dolan / Rob Tilley / Alex Grunwald / Peter Last / Marie-Eve Belanger / Angela Barber / Jennifer Rosart / Sandra Gornall / Ryan Dyment / Iain Lowe / Manu Kabahizi/ Carol Kleinfeldt / Roman Mychajlowycz / Sandra Gornall / Ryan Dyment And everyone else we have likely missed - you are in our hearts <3 Thank you for your feedback, input, food for thought, questions and challenges.

Rock on!

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Founders Organizers Linn Vizard & Michael Owen-Liston

SERVICE DESIGN TORONTO

@SERVICEDESIGNTO #SDTO

Elina Lawrie & Linn Vizard

SERVICEDESIGNTO @GMAIL.COM

IMAGE SOURCE: Our dear friend, Satsuko VanAntwerp