Strategic Creativity Series #02 the play's the thing

Strategic Creativity series

THE THE PLAY’S PLAY’S THE THE THING THING Jonathan Wray Jonathan Wray

The Readership in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven

Collaborating with: KLM, Delft University of Technology In the CRISP project CASD

Research period October 2011 - January 2013

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THE PLAY’S THE THING Jonathan Wray

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Contents Preface 5 Bas Raijmakers

The Thing is... 9 Introduction, Jonathan Wray

Strategically Ludic 12 Scene 1 Research findings 12

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Bringing the ‘Boom! Wow! Wow!!

WOW!! BOOOM!!!’ back to service design

Adam Lawrence

Scene 2

A history of long haul flights

Scene 3

Research findings: Cabin Crew and Passengers

Scene 4

The Customer Journey Map

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People

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Forget users and consumers, embrace cyborgs

Jaimes Nel

Scene 5

Research findings: forced interactions

Scene 6

Hand baggage only

Scene 7

The way they make me feel

Scene 8

Cabin Crew interactions workshop

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Props

Rosebud, the Beaver and the Doomsday Device

Plot

Jonathan Wray

Scene 9

Service Design in Tourism

Scene 10 Scene 11 Scene 12

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51 Research findings: research focus 54 The Social Compass 55 Research findings: final thoughts 59

Meaningful Interactions on Long Haul Flights

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Conventions of Social Interaction

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The contribution of The play’s the thing to CRISP

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Open Design Space Open Design Space, Piet Hein Clijsen Bas Raijmakers

Contributor Biographies 74 Glossary 76 Colophon 78 3

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Preface Bas Raijmakers

Services are about interactions. These can happen between people, ­between people and objects, environments and systems, and also between objects, environments and systems without any further human intervention. ­Moreover these interactions are not only direct, they can also be mediated, via a call centre or a webpage for instance, or via technical protocols if humans are not supposed to be involved. This may seem an ­incoherent collection of people and stuff, but the interactions are what keeps it all together, like some kind of glue, and create coherence in the experiences of the people that use and deliver a particular service. Service design aims to create that coherence through design, by directly addressing these interactions. This book reads as a concrete example of how that can be done, on a conceptual and strategic level. ­ ervices comprise more than 70% of Dutch GDP. They are not only crucial S to the Dutch economy, but also to Dutch society through all the public and semi-public services delivered, from infrastructures to care. Services, or in more academic terms, Product Service Systems (PSS) are what we investigate and design for in the Readership for ­Strategic­­Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven, within the Dutch national ­Creative Industry Scientific­Programme (CRISP). In fact we currently, and will go on to investigate a total of 10 design research projects over the course of four years, together with the three Universities of ­Technology­in the Netherlands, the two ­Universities of Amsterdam and more than 50 companies and organisations in the creative and service industries.

Design has traditionally played a large role in delivering services, but on limited often separate levels such as branding, retail environments, communication design and the objects that are used in delivering services.

Interaction design has been around for a while, and plays a decisive role in designing the interfaces of the digital media that are today part of many services – from an app on your phone to the screen of a cash machine. But designing the interactions that form the glue of Product Service Systems is quite uncommon. Since interactions in services are created by people who deliver and use the services together, at the moment of delivery, at the location where the service is delivered – one cannot design them. It is however possible to design for these interactions, by supporting and 5

e­ mpowering the people that are involved in the interactions, both customers and employees. As such, ‘designing for interactions’ is clearly different from ‘interaction design’; when compared to the latter, designing for interaction requires a not only much broader range of disciplines to create the coherence in service delivery but also new ways of thinking and making in design. This is an exciting new opportunity for design that designers and academics have started to explore and CRISP aims to investigate deeply and thoroughly.

Jonathan Wray started exploring these new ways in his work well before he joined the Readership in September 2011. Originally trained as a ­furniture designer at Buckinghamshire University, he graduated from the Design Academy Eindhoven masters course Cum Laude in 2008 with a project that looked at how design could help people with arachnophobia to deal with their condition. Despite not positioning this work as service design, the combination of tangible and intangible elements in his design does point to a clear sensitivity for not only form and function but also the meaning of an object to people. This meaning is not just ‘a meaning’ that people give to an object, but includes the narratives that people create around objects to give them a place in their experiences. His graduation project led him to design objects for people with a phobia of spiders (arachnophobia) – imagined, or real; items such as a staircase with a ­separate path for the spider. Giving the spider a contained and predictable place in the narrative of fear mitigates its scariness, as he learned through his design research with arachnophobiacs.

The various roles objects play in interactions between people is what fascinates Jonathan Wray. Product Service Systems provide a rich environment to explore such fascinations through design. And vice versa, PSS design can benefit from such new perspectives on designed objects, as tangible objects have not received much attention so far. One could argue that the object in PSS design is entitled to a bit more time in the spotlight. Not via the well-known approach of upgrading traditionally offline, single-buy products such as coffee machines to a PSS aimed at building profitable customer relations through selling coffee pads (e.g. Nespresso, Senseo), but by looking at existing services and re-imagining what role objects could play to deliver these services. Jonathan explored this alternative route for inflight services on long haul flights, with KLM, as part of the Competitive Advantage through Strategic Design (CASD) project in CRISP. Several months into the design research, after sessions with long haul passengers and cabin crew, Jonathan presented intermediate results to the managers in charge of KLM’s inflight services team who take part in the 6

CRISP. Robert Ehrencron is part of the team of KLM that is takes part in CRISP and worked with us in exploring the narratives of crew members, and the ‘customer journeys’ of passengers. This bottom-up approach struck Robert, and others at KLM, as interesting and promising. In a meeting with the entire top management team for inflight services where inter­mediate results and directions for further research were presented, the team ­observed that the design research approach we took – designing for interactions between passengers and crew – with the experiences they have as people taking part in a service delivery was considered to be interesting for further exploration. This process exposed new directions to explore, such as the discovery that trying to design cocoons around people in e­ conomy class is not the only way. This in turn gave rise to the idea to design for more ­social interactions between passengers – which consequently could be connected to the brand values of KLM. Being able to move down as well as up between brand values and people’s experiences in a plane, while d ­ esigning services, was recognised by the the KLM Service design ­managers of the CRISP KLM project team as of strategic value. ­Being able to move in two directions at any time gave them much more room to manoeuvre and a much better understanding of possible results of what they were trying to create: a much better experience in economy long h ­ aul flights.

This book tells the story of a prime example of the thinking and doing that enable such fundamental shifts. Design can make this happen, but not all by itself. Other disciplines are needed, in collaboration with design, to inspire design in its thinking and to support it in its doing. The design research led by Jonathan Wray demonstrates how this can be done, and thereby serves as a great example of what CRISP tries to achieve: to grow and understand the strategic roles that creative industries can play in our economies and societies.

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The Thing is...

Introduction Jonathan Wray

Design research is by no means a fixed thing, but all research shares a similar goal and that is of arriving at a something, a result or an answer to a question. Normally this conclusion is unknown, and in some cases the question is not even clear. This is even truer when designers position themselves at the fuzzy front end of innovation and attempt to think on a strategic level. In 2011 when I began working with KLM ‘the thing’ was an unknown, an outcome that KLM and myself would conceive, or that I would produce. The conversations became discussions around questions rather than specific products that needed creating.

Typically designers create ‘things’ be it products, interiors, graphics, ­ani­­mations, interfaces, gadgets, clothes, and other stuff that can only be­ defined as ‘a thing’. That was also the expectation of KLM in our first meeting.

Here, the online Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definition: thing [noun]

an object that one need not, cannot, or does not wish to give a

specific name to.

The ‘thing’ represents the driving force of any design research, it is maybe in its purest form an answer to a question or a design. For designers and ­researchers this is familiar territory, for whether we know it or not, our goal and expectation is to arrive at, create, make or do something. When a thing is required, research can be valuable and appropriate because research not only attempts to solve problems but also to understand or define problems.

Researchers are not always primarily object-focussed but rather are often process-orientated; they crawl around subjects attempting to design the context as well as the artefact(s) and not always in a linear direction, but back and forth holistically. This non-linear, holistic approach is useful in strategic design. Dan Hill describes this well in his essay, Dark Matter and Trojan Horses a Strategic Design Vocabulary: “This basic idea, zooming back and forth from matter to meta, and using each scale to refine the other, is core to strategic design. There are several emerging ideas that we can use to organize our approaches to this idea. They are described as ‘plays’, as in a football play book, to suggest they might be adopted and altered and deployed elsewhere.”

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The play’s the thing

The word ‘play’ also inspires other meaning about how to do design ­research for product service combinations. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet inspires as an analogy when Prince Hamlet proclaims: ‘the play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’ For a play to be successful, it is essential that actors trigger the audience through the delivering of a story. Props allow actors to connect to each other, and also to visualise and communicate the context of the story to an audience. Essentially what makes this combination suitable to explain PSS and strategic design is that all the elements are created simultaneously or back and forth from the same idea. They share coherent content, or in this analogy, they share a story.

Bringing a theatre performance from a script to a production requires the talents of many people. Even small productions have many aspects that need to be addressed. Each component for producing a play, from the plot of the story to props, scripts, requires agreement among many people.

This book is one result of 15-months of research, bringing together people, conversations ideas and thoughts about how we do design research, how it can become strategic, and what processes are beneficial.

Ultimately we are no longer product-focussed and yet can no longer only be process and business-focussed. A truly holistic approach to service design and strategy is like producing a successful theatre production. The premise being that the success of a play depends upon three key elements: that of a good plot, people, and props.

Plot

With all good plays and films it is the story or plot that ultimately makes or breaks any performance. This is the journey that takes audiences on the highs, the lows, the peaks and troughs of drama and emotion. People ­designing services should think of their service like the plot of a play to create the mood of the experience they want to create, the rhythm and pace, to be able to define the level of experience people have through ­service experiences. This element is strategic in nature and designers can have a huge role to play, as they often are excellent storytellers.

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People

The plot is set, the script is a work in progress and the next element is the cast. Who plays what role? It’s through these actors that the story is delivered, and the better the actors are at delivering the story, the greater the success. To continue with the play vs PSS analogy, you may consider PSS designers as playing a director’s role, working earlier in the innovation process strategically to work with ‘actors’ (or frontline staff) to help direct, shape or mould the nature of the actors’ performance. Plays take an immense amount of manpower, aside from actors, as there are multiple people involved, with different roles.

Props

Props are the less obvious elements that scatter the stage, neither important nor dispensable. Sometimes they are central to a story’s narrative. ­Actors commonly use props to judge space, and interaction with each other. Props give them a shared understanding or context. They also, and possibly most crucially, connect the audience to the actors. The viewer can visualise what the actors have imagined in rehearsal. Props are crucially important for coherence and can silently or deafeningly define atmosphere or expectations.

This publication looks at how these theatrical elements can be used and applied strategically through design research and service design in the PSS process. Jaimes Nel provides a new perspective to human-centered design when talking of people in design processes, WorkPlayExperience discuss dramatic arcs within service narratives, and Jonathan Wray suggests that theatre and film can offer inspiration into how objects or products are ­created strategically in the creation of services. Yet ultimately it is the combination of these three elements simultaneously, back and forth strategically so that makes creating a service a bit like a successful play.

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Strategically Ludic Robert Ehrencron (Manager New Business Development and Innovation, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines) and Jonathan Wray.

Synopsis

When Jonathan Wray – Design Academy Eindhoven Research Associate – is tasked with exploring KLM’s in-flight services, he discovers a discourse ­between people throughout the service experience. Through a series of strategically constructed workshops, Wray and his close collaborator Robert Ehrencron of KLM attempt to make sense of the relationships between people, and look forward to how KLM can ultimately begin to change a ‘cocooning culture’.

Scene 1

Research findings

Characters:

Robert Ehrencron – Business Development

Management and Innovation at KLM

Bas Raijmakers – Reader at Readership in Strategic Creativity DAE

Jonathan Wray – Research Associate DAE

Scene:

The scene opens at Design Academy Eindhoven. Robert has

been invited to see the research findings and focus of the

research after a series of Passenger and Cabin Crew workshops.

→

Robert: Jonathan:

So, I’m curious what you have found!

Yes, well as you know we have conducted many

workshops with both Passengers and Cabin Crew, and what we have discovered is that central to Passengers and Cabin Crew’s experiences in-flight are almost always to do with people, the people sat around them in the cabin, and also their interactions with Cabin Crew. These interactions can be the most draining moments of the flight both through these, interactions and in some cases as a result of a lack of interaction.

Robert:

Jonathan:

So is this something you have found in all the activities you have done?

Yes, as you know through the different workshops and focus groups we have worked with, what 12

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keeps cropping up are stories not about food or entertainment systems but stories – good and bad – about their experiences with people.

It seems that as a result of, or in preparation of, avoiding people in the plane the attitude and behaviour of Passengers is to create cocoons as much as possible, to isolate themselves for fear of people around them affecting their flight.

Bas:

We did learn that these cocoons work well in business

class, as there is much more room, but actually in economy class there is not so much space. So Passengers find themselves in forced interactions, and these interactions have not been designed for.

Jonathan:

On the flip side, many times it seems that

Passengers would welcome better interactions or relationships with Cabin Crew, again something less of a concern in business class.

Robert:

It’s interesting that you say this, as traditionally, long haul flights were very social occasions: Passengers found themselves together on an adventure…

(Scene changes to a flashback of one of the earliest long haul flights; Robert’s dialogue continues as a voice over (VO) whilst scene changes).

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Plot Bringing the ‘Boom! Wow! Wow!!

WOW!! BOOOM!!!’ back to

service design Adam Lawrence

In this essay founding partner of WorkPlayExperience, Adam Lawrence, presents their two main tools. WorkPlayExperience is an award-winning service innovation and customer experience consultancy that works ­globally with a toolset based heavily on theatrical techniques. They are also the initiators of the Global Service Jam. The first tool, Investigative ­Rehearsal, is a workshop technique, which can be used to rapidly test, break and iterate service prototypes, or to quickly develop insights and ­options for change based on existing services. Typically lasting several hours or a day, rehearsal is a full-bodied experience (we use our full bodies, not just our heads), so it stimulates our emotional connection to the service and gives us more human-centred insights. Dramatic Arcs, the second tool, are a lens through which we can understand experiences as a sequence of high and low ­engagement. Based on the lessons from film, theatre and ­music, they can help us tell in advance if a service will ‘rock’ or not, or help us edit existing services like an editor will cut a film for better timing and drive.

Part 1 Rehearsing for service [3]

“Rehearsal is not repeating something until it is perfect – that’s called practice.

Rehearsal is trying out alternatives to see what works, and experience how it feels.”

It seems a no-brainer that the key participants of a service design or ­customer experience project should include the people who deliver (or will one day deliver) the service. These ‘front-line’ folks are doubly valuable.

Firstly, they have a wealth of real-world experience, which easily trumps that of the consultants and senior managers. And, secondly, they are ­crucial stakeholders who must be brought on board for the service to be a success. If the service delivery team are not convinced, any new service design will be watered-down – or ignored – from the start.

And yet working with these service delivery professionals is difficult for many designers and managers. There is a communication barrier, which in fact is a gap between very different ways of working. The front-­ liners may be unaccustomed to thinking or working strategically, may be 15

­ ncomfortable­speaking to senior management or ‘suits’, and may not have u the skills of expression, draftsmanship or abstraction which are implicit prerequisites of many service design workshops.

Meaningful service innovation needs robust and easily understood tools to bridge this gap and allow a very mixed group to communicate, ideate and innovate quickly and cheaply. Their ideas should be co-created and co-designed, be based on real-world experience and emotion, and should be reality-checked by testing and iterating on the spot as part of the ­development process. These tools exist and we can find them in the theatre – not on the stage, but behind–the-scenes in the rehearsal room.

In our service innovation and experience work with organisations in ­telecommunications, professional services, retail and public service, we use ‘Investigative Rehearsal’ as our core tool. It can be mixed and mashed with other service design tools, or stand alone as a productive intervention in its own right. It produces a rich crop of pre-tested and pre-selected ­ideas, as well as a boost in awareness and appreciation of the issues involved.

“Theatre is the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to model human interaction.”

Just as in any creative process, the first challenge in any rehearsal is to establish ‘Safe Space’ – the physical and mental environment that allows honesty and failure. A readiness to fail is a vital prerequisite to innovation.

It’s an everyday condition in a working theatre or design studio, but to participants from other backgrounds it is both alien and uncomfortable.

Several techniques can be used to build up Safe Space, and it is a ­process, which should be taken seriously. We use extreme warm-ups to make sure we all start the day by failing and laughing about it. We don’t tell the ­participants that they will be ‘acting’ later. We make sure the door is firmly shut, that there are no visitors, no observers, and no job titles in the room.­­ We often work impossibly fast – producing, say, 20 prototypes in ten minutes, forcing us to be rough and ready to discard ideas. We laugh a lot. Most importantly, the workshop facilitators are ready to openly fail themselves.

As we develop Safe Space and move towards the rehearsal proper, we will need a story to build on – something to rehearse. This might be a ­service prototype; but if an existing service provides the foundation for the ­project, then we collect disaster stories of when it has gone wrong. (Storytelling games like a One Word Story on ‘my worst ever day at work’ can be a great way to get the ball rolling and establish common ground). ‘Destruct testing’ using extreme cases in this way reveals far more than examining 16

everyday situations. We work with participants to choose the most useful stories to take forward – but insist on real stories, not composites. We will need detail later.

What follows is a how-to of the process.

If your participants need help getting the story straight, get them to draw a storyboard first. Give them an impossibly short deadline (ten minutes?) so they are forced to draw stick-figures. If they are cautious have them present the storyboard. This will be the first time they address the whole group, but it’s a safe, familiar situation.

Once the stories are fixed, tell the group that you want to experience the story. Give them a ridiculously short time (only three minutes) to prepare the cast, setting, props and to walk through the scene a few times. Offer whatever tables, bags and bits of paper are lying around to use as props.

Never ask them to act, or mention the dreaded ‘roleplay’. Just tell them you want to experience the scene as if you were there. No-one plays him/ herself (Safe Space). When they are done, ask them for a quick run-through.

Don’t comment, just applaud and move on quickly to the rehearsal proper.

Doing, Not Talking!

The basic rehearsal process is deceptively simple, but both revealing and productive. In a process based loosely on Boal’s Forum Theater, we use two main phases[1].

In the first phase of Investigative Rehearsal, the scene is played at a realistic pace and participants are invited to stop the scene whenever they see something interesting. They briefly explain what they have seen – that look, that shrug, that choice of words, that positioning – without judgement.

Nothing is good or bad: it just ‘is’. Then, without changing a thing, the scene rewinds a few seconds and continues. This phase gives a valuable understanding of what is really happening in the story. Motivations, frustrations and conflicts become clear – crucially, they are often expressed (and ­understood!) on a non-verbal level. That’s fine, because we will be dealing with them on a non-verbal level too.

The second phase of Investigative Rehearsal can develop in many directions, so it needs a strict structure to keep the flow. This time, participants will be invited to stop the scene when they see the potential for change. (We prefer not to talk about ‘improvement’ or ‘making it better’, because these 17

words will tend to lead us down the officially approved path towards what is written in the company handbook. Instead, we just look for alternatives.)

We will be changing the way the service is delivered, and the depth of those changes will depend on our brief. Do we only change the behaviour of the service delivery staff (service script, training, KPIs), or will we go ­deeper­ and change the room (architecture), the sequence of events (process ­design, systems architecture), or even the products or offerings themselves (value proposition, business model)?

The process is simple, even rhythmic. Here’s how. Roll the scene, and when a ‘stop’ is called, invite the person who called the stop to simply switch roles with the actor and show their version. ‘Before we waste time talking, just show us what you mean…’ Let the new version run for a little while, then ask the audience (not the change initiator) what the change was, and how it felt.

Make a note of the change on a flipchart or sticky note – this list will grow and grow – and then straight back to the scene. Ask for alternatives, or let the scene continue until the next stop is called. Keep a strict rule of ‘doing, not talking’. Don’t discuss, but keep trying alternatives, keep adding to the list.

If things slow down, be a ‘Difficultator’ and add some spice. Add pressure factors, extra customers, system failures, stock problems. Once again, ‘destruct testing’ will quickly show the limits of a service design, as well as opening up interesting new service ideas.

The output of this session will be a long, valuable list of pre-tested alternatives, all co-created from the emotional and practical experience of a simulated service encounter and mixed with the experience and insight of everyone in the room. The alternatives form the ideal basis for the construction of the next iteration of prototype or prototypes, which in turn can be tested and progressed in the same way. The fidelity might increase as you move towards launch, with the range of options decreasingA. At the end, the same process of rehearsal within the new, fixed service design becomes your roll-out training, allowing staff to find themselves within the new design and give it their own authentic flavour.

Part 2 Making it rock

Why do some movies really grab us, while some drag? Why can a remix of a song be a huge hit, while the original ends up gathering dust? The answer is in another tool of show business, which can easily be applied to service experiences – the dramatic arc[4].

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We often design service experiences as a sequence of events in a customer journey or blueprint. This is reminiscent of the filmmaker drawing up a storyboard, planning the action and camera movement well in advance of filming. But these sequential representations only show half the story.

Much of the magic will happen in the editing suite, where the film is given its pacing and timing. It is the interplay of pace, timing and content which keeps us on the edge of our seat.

Services have pacing and timing too – or cadence, as Joe Dager calls it[2]. In fact, every experience we have leads us through a sequence of emotional highs and lows, of involvement and detachment. Whether it is a movie, song, party, holiday or mobile telephone contract, we cannot escape this ‘arc of tension’. Dramatic arcs, as they are more commonly (mis)named, are vital in our appreciation of a service experience because, quite simply, some of them rock and some of them flop.

In one of our regular design sessions with a central European telecommunications provider, you might see participants standing around a whiteboard, which shows a single jagged curve. It’s not a sketch of the alpine skyline looming outside the window, though it looks quite similar.

The ­discussion is energetic, and switches between German and French with fragments of Italian and English mixed in. Occasionally, they mark a peak or a valley on the line with a sticky note labelled ‘video’ or ‘handson ­session’. The notes get moved around, the line is redrawn, rediscussed.

There are comments like ‘That’s not enough of a boom for this part!’, or ‘Too much Frodo Baggins; we need some Miss Marple!’

These participants are training specialists who are creating internal ­education services for this market leader. Every one of them has designed and led dozens or hundreds of courses and workshops for their colleagues throughout the organisation, but they are excited by this new approach.

The curve they have sketched represents a dramatic arcB, which they feel will grip their learners, and they are rearranging and exchanging the ­content and method mix to fit the line.

[1] A

[2] B

By the way, Investigative Rehearsal works for digital services too. As well as looking at the system in use, try having a person play the digital system and experiment with making them more or less human by limiting or enlarging vocabulary and activity options. It’s striking what insights this can bring.

The term is strictly ‘arc of tension’, but like us they prefer the term ‘dramatic arc’ because, well, it sounds more dramatic.

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Before choosing an arc, they have discussed various classic dramatic forms, elements of which will crop up in every curve they draw: • Frodo Baggins

Frodo Baggins is the arc of the epic, like Homer, the Nibelungenlied, or Lord of the Rings (Tolkien’s book, not the film). From a relatively plodding start, the action grows and grows until kingdoms fall or the Ring goes into the Fire. It’s massively satisfying, but with a significant risk of losing people’s interest during that slow start phase.

• Miss Marple

Miss Marple – or any crime story – is a refinement of the epic ‘Frodo’ arc.

It’s still an uneventful tale, as an old lady basically wanders around the village and drinks a lot of tea – but at the beginning there was a murder.

The bloody deed grabs our attention with its implied promise of a thrilling denouement later, as well as giving us something to do while Miss Marple compliments the roses; like her, we look for clues.

• James Bond 007

Many blockbusters, variety shows and follow the classic curve ‘James Bond 007’, or ‘Boom-wow-Wow-WOW-BOOOM!!’ They start with a dramatic scene which grabs our attention just like Miss Marple’s murder did (in Bond, it’s usually a stunt), we then drop the pace (Bond’s London and Miss Moneypenny) before setting off on a sequence of sub-arcs. In Bond, each adventurous location is a little more exotic and exciting than the last, until we come to the final confrontation with the huge explosions and saving the world. The whole film: Boom! Wow! Wow!! WOW!! BOOOM!!! A romantic comedy might have just the same arc – they meet (Boom!) but circumstances force them apart; they meet again and fail to get together several times (wowWowWOW!) before they finally marry (BOOOM!).

Of course, these dramatic arcs do not only apply to training courses. Every service we develop has a cadence of more and less intensive interactions, a cascade of expectations met, not met, or exceeded, all fitting together to engage or disengage the customer. The classic Desperate Housewives ­TV-series arc of small arcs for each episode followed by a whopping season finale is the same as the Irish pub (weekend, weekend, weekend, St Paddy’s Day!), the church (Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Easter!), or the mobile phone contract (bill, bill, bill, new phone!). The season finale, the festival, the new phone are the strong experiences which create the memories and make us fans. (After all, when were those Irish Pub pictures taken?)

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Our alpine educators will build on these arcs, and others, in their service design. They will probably plan a big start like in Marple or 007 – but not so big that the finish cannot top it. And like Bond they will try to up the ­involvement over the course of the experience, using various mini-­episodes with periods of lower or higher intensity. If they have repeating formats, they will drop in a season finale now and again. Their goal is to create a better experience for the leaner by changing the way that the e­ lements fit together.

The team have already noticed that the arcs are scaleable, and that arcs nest within arcs. The five-minute video which forms one phase of the three-hour workshop has, of course, an arc of its own. Depending on what comes after it, they may choose a video, which ends with an upswing into a next energetic activity; or one which ends on a cooler note and leads well into a phase of concentrated work. Naturally the three-hour workshop is part of a larger journey, with an invitation and registration beforehand, and feedback meetings, practical experiences and conversations with ­colleagues ­afterwards. Drawing the arc for the entire sequence, the ­designers start to see relationships of expectation and energy between the various ­components. And then there is the curve of the entire learning journey over a career at the company...

As experienced trainers, the designers are aware that not every learner experiences the curves in the same way. What might be a ‘boom’ for one participant might be old news for another. So, like the directors of animated films like Ice Age, they plan for different types of customer. Not for adults and kids, like at the movies, but perhaps for different learning types or backgrounds. In practice, this means drawing the dramatic arc for each persona on the same page, and adjusting the experience appropriately.

The company have worked hard with WorkPlayExperience to strategically embed this kind of thinking in their educational organisation. An initial service design session with personas and journeys led to the development of a prototype two-day workshop for training designers. This workshop was itself constructed with a deliberate dramatic arc and featured various design tools such as investigative rehearsal – so participants could experience them before hearing about them. An initial trial took place with friendly users – many of them very senior – to win their support for the methods and the project. Their feedback prompted a change to the start of the arc, and the second iteration rolled out in a series of workshops for every training designer in the team. Soon, they were creating new educational experiences and tools based around dramatic arcs, and often featuring rehearsal. But just winning over the designers was not enough. A third major iteration was tailored to the trainers themselves, teaching them to 21

spot dramatic arcs in their training scripts, understand them, and find their own ways to authentically fulfil or adapt them when necessary.

The simple ‘Hollywood’ language of the intervention was also a strategic choice, with facilitators, designers and trainers soon talking about ‘booms’, ‘wows’, ‘Miss Marple’ etc, and repeating the mantra of ‘Doing, not talking!’ in various languages. The two-day workshops migrated successfully from a dedicated studio-location into more usual training spaces, and printed take-home tools were produced to support the techniques in use. Partner firms that also produce and deliver training to the same learners were invited to join the continuing sessions, initially as individuals and then at a national event for all education partners. Impressed, they also adopted both tools and vocabulary; so internal and external colleagues are now on the same page, and the learners get a harmonised, if diverse, learning experience.

Summary

As designers and engineers of services, we can look to the performing arts for millennia of experience in satisfying customers – and doing it using appropriate technology, on time and on budget. Investigative Rehearsal can give us a tool to work with experiences and processes quickly, directly and emotionally, not only through the blunt proxy of journeys and desktop walkthroughs. And the dramatic arc is a lens which can quickly tell us if our designs have the potential to be real rock and roll, and show us where a change of emphasis can make all the difference. Both these tools are quickly explained – there is no need to talk about journeys, avatars and ­personas when everyone understands storyboards, props and characters.

And crucially they are democratic, as they are understood equally by everyone who shares our common cultural experience. The designer in the room becomes the facilitator/difficultator, not the expert. And that is what we should be.

22

References [1] Boal, A. Theatre of the Oppressed. Pluto, London, 2000

Wikipedia. 2013. Forum Theatre. (August 2013).

Retrieved 24 August 2013 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_theatre.

[2] Business 901 – Implementing Lean Marketing Systems. 2013.

Insight into the Customer Experience through Theater (April 2013).

Retrieved 24 August 2013 from http://business901.com/blog1/ insight-into-the-customer-experience-through-theater/.

[3] Lawrence, A., Hormeß M. E. Beyond Roleplay: Better Tools to Steal From Theater, Touchpoint Vol 3 Issue 3, Retrieved 24 August 2013 from

Service Design Network: http://www.service-design-network.org/ products-page/article/tp03-3p64.

[4] Lawrence, A., Hormeß M. E. Boom-wow-Wow-WOW-BOOOM! – Dramatic Arcs

in Service Design, Touchpoint Vol 4 Issue 2, Retrieved 24 August 2013 from http://www.service-design-network.org/products-page/article/tp04-2p24.

23

Scene 2

A history of long haul flights

Characters:

Robert Ehrencron (as Voice Over).

1930s Passengers, Cabin Crew, Captain.

1940s Passengers, Cabin Crew, Captain.

1960s Passengers, Cabin Crew, Captain.

1980s Passengers, Cabin Crew, Captain.

Scene:

A flashback to 1930s scene evolves through years corresponding

to Robert’s VO

→

Robert:

…As in those days a long haul flight would consist of maybe only five Passengers because back then planes couldn’t fly for the long periods they can today. A flight could take five days, but they would stop at various destinations along the way. So Passengers and Cabin Crew would find themselves in a much more social experience. And this wasn’t just limited to on the plane, but at each stop. Passengers and Cabin Crew and the Captains would often stay in the same place, have dinner together, creating an extremely social experience. Of course this was the beginning of long haul flights, and it soon changed.

By 1945 planes could already fly for seven to eight hours straight, with about 95 Passengers. By the 1960s it was up to 180. Naturally we began to see a change in long haul travel. Passengers went from the romantic notion of the ‘travelling adventure’ to find themselves travelling together. This was really when it began to shift; long haul flights were beginning to lose the romance of adventure, which was probably natural. So with more and more Passengers on planes Cabin Crew became much busier, Passengers then would find themselves getting bored during these longer flights. As a solution airlines and Passengers began to design their way out of boredom by entertaining themselves, through such media as music or reading. This habit escalated by the 1980s with planes travelling for at least ten hours straight. Airlines introduced entertainment systems. Passengers fended for themselves with personal music devices, and both airlines and 24

Passengers realised that they had designed their way into what you call these ‘cocoons’. As you mentioned earlier these cocoons work quite well in business class, but not in economy class, because in business class there is enough space; in economy class they are much closer together.

Scene 3

Research findings: Cabin Crew and Passengers

Characters: Scene:

→

Jonathan: Robert:

Bas, Jonathan, Robert.

Discussion at Design Academy Eindhoven continues...

Jonathan:

That explains a lot.

Yeah?

Yes, what’s really interesting is that the problems we have been dealing with now we have designed our way into. It especially gives a lot more meaning to the Customer Journey Map we created at the beginning of the project with the Cabin Crew.

25

In what way?

Robert:

Jonathan:

Well, as you probably remember the very first activity we did with you at KLM was to generate a Customer Journey Map to get an overview of the current in-flight service. A lot of what you have mentioned is very apparent in that map, and especially the stories…

(Scene changes to flashback to the KLM Workshop).

Scene 4

Characters:

The Customer Journey Map

Cabin Crew 1, 2, 3, 4, Jonathan Wray, Prof. dr. ir. Pieter Desmet (TU Delft),

Steven Fokkinga (PhD Candidate and CRISP researcher at TU Delft).

Scene:

Jonathan Wray and Steven Fokkinga facilitating a workshop with

Cabin Crew, who are telling stories of good and bad experiences they

have had as both Cabin Crew and Passengers.

→

Cabin Crew 1: Well

my story is a classic, which most Passengers

can relate to. I was sat in the window seat and I had been asleep. When I woke I really needed to go to the toilet, but of course the two Passengers next to me were blocking my exit and were both also asleep.

Jonathan:

So what did you do?

Cabin Crew 1: Well

I thought about how I might be able to climb

over them, but thought it would be worse to wake them whilst climbing over them, in the end I just waited longer until the woman next to me woke maybe ten minutes later and so shuffled past her and climbed over the guy sat in the aisle seat.

Would you have woken them eventually?

Cabin Crew 1: I might have, although I have noticed that many Jonathan:

people really don’t want to. In general they would rather sit and suffer than disrupt other Passengers.

Cabin Crew 2: Yes

I think you’re right. The best example

of that is the ‘Call’ button. So many people will not press the Call button.

Jonathan:

I can certainly relate to that, I 26

Illustration of a bad Passenger experience during a long Haul Flight.

Stephan Fokkinga, Jonathan wray, and KLM Cabin Crew creating a Customer Journey Map.

27

have never pressed it ever.

Cabin Crew 3: Why? Jonathan:

I just never think my need is important

Pieter:

I have a story in which a really annoying Passenger

enough to disturb the Cabin Crew. used his call button for what he deemed to be urgent. He was sat across from me and saw me on my laptop mid-way through the flight and he told me to close it or else the plane could crash. I kindly explained to him that this wasn’t the case, it’s only at take off that you can’t use electronic devices. Adamant that he was right, he pressed the button to call the Cabin Crew. I wasn’t worried because I knew I was right. However the man made such a fuss that the Cabin Crew asked me to close it to calm the other Passenger down. I made my case, but she insisted as she wanted to relax the other Passenger, which I thought was really unfair…

(Scene fades out…).

28

People Forget users and consumers, embrace cyborgs Jaimes Nel

Contemporary design problems have increasingly come to be understood as systems problems. This is partially due to the increased complexity of digital projects but also because of the recognition that success is dependent on designing with and for the eventual users of a design. ­ User-centred design adopts this as a mantra but it’s easier said than ­ done, and unfortunately what often results is a poor second-cousin, what we might call user-‘scented’ design. User-centricity, however, brings ­tremendous value to a project by acting as a device that orients multiple disciplines around a shared ethos and perspective; but design projects are usually about realising value for multiple stakeholders, not just end-users.

Failing to explicitly acknowledge the needs of all stakeholders can allow business needs to quietly reassert themselves as a project progresses. Total commitment to user-needs can paradoxically result in an eventual failure to meet those needs. To address this, we need to be able to think beyond ­user-centricity, to design that incorporates people as a principal material alongside ­business and technology.

One useful concept for such a move beyond user-centred design is that of the cyborg. It’s an ambiguous term. We think of overtly android characters from films such as Blade Runner or Alien. Yet a more mundane concept of cyborg sees human beings as fundamentally interdependent with their technology. This mundane cyborg is a human body, capable for example, of accurately locating and meeting with other human bodies in a city. Such a cyborg may rely on any number of technologies in order to achieve such a capability, such as voice calls, maps and an address system. By thinking of design projects as attempts to create new such configurations of humans and technology, with distinct new capabilities and potentialities, we can start to find a new program for working with people that doesn’t fall victim to the potential hypocrisies of user-‘scented’ design.

This means flattening out all the actors involved in systems problems and treating all elements as equal and potentially interesting – as places of potential action. In this way we can start to open up our understanding of systems and find spaces to effect dramatic change. Just as we would seek to understand the affordances of particular physical materials in order to make best use of them in the design process, we must try to understand 29

people. People are complex and contradictory, and we must move beyond treating them as mere consumers who rationally confirm our successful understanding of them when they buy or use our designs. User-centred design may actively disguise design’s potential since, by rhetorically placing the user at the centre of our efforts; it can create hidden agendas, such as the objectives of the organisation funding the design. By contrast, a flat perspective treats all elements as equal and designs for a future state that produces value for as many of its parts as possible.

So how does such a flattening change how we work with people? Does it require different methods? Are the standard tools of design researchers still valid, methods such as interviews, workshops and focus groups or ­observation? I argue that the change in thinking I am emphasising does destabilise the object of design research but that this doesn’t rule out our use of particular methods. Instead it challenges us to think about how our choice of method influences our results. Traditional market and social research are closely linked with the concept of the sovereign individual, the unique human being, who validates the results of our design, typically through the act of buying. A cyborg-oriented research project may use similar techniques but needs more agile thinking that is able to develop alternative, potentially conflicting models of its object.

The payoff is that such a reframing frees us to incorporate other methods, so long as we are capable of understanding that each perspective offers only a piece of the entire picture. A world-view in which everything is partial is better suited to take advantage of the creative leaps offered by alternate perspectives and radical diversity. Approaching our work in this way allows us to move freely between traditional research methods and more active versions such as prototyping. It removes the tensions between qualitative and quantitative research, particularly where quantitative work is descriptive and exploratory, rather than predictive. And importantly it breaks down the wall between research and design. Research to this perspective is simply the creation of shared understandings, an early material in the design process.

When we frame design challenges in this way, as configurations of potential interactions, we must factor unpredictable and contradictory human ­beings into our designs. What does it mean to do this? Which characteristics of ­human beings must we understand in order to design such systems?

How do we understand human (or even non-human) configurations other than the individual, such as groups (and sub-groups such as teams or cliques within an organisation)?

30

At the heart of it, design challenges must address two particular attributes.

On the one hand, we must answer how the particular affordances of (different) bodies and minds will interact with the technology we are seeking to introduce. This is the space inhabited by User Experience or UX work, with their roots in Human Computer Interaction and Engineering. On the other hand, we must also address a deeper question about the potential of our new cyborg creation. Will this new configuration deliver value to all of its parts? What benefits must such a potential future state bring to its members to persuade them to buy into in its achievement? Here we are on less well-defined territory. Such research may look at one and the same time like social, cultural, policy or economic research. And yet, its explicitly creative and interactive nature marks it out as different to such disciplines.

This is research as process, as action, rather than as knowing. This research is about trying to deliver value to people where only successfully delivering that value will define whether such value exists. More simply put, our most capable means of knowing the future is to create it.

We must be pragmatic when working with people in such a way. We must find ways of defining, accessing, interacting with and describing people.

Each of these are creative acts that help to shape the outcomes of our ­design process; however, we will come under strong pressure to treat these activities as methods of knowing, rather than creating. Such pressures will frequently carry the full weight of organisational politics, making our own framings secondary to more traditional ones. In such circumstances, we must be able to translate our framing whilst understanding how such a translation affects the claims we are able to make about our work. We need to evolve a language that takes such uncertainties and translations into ­account and transcends them.

The first stage of such a process is defining our target audience, a quite challenging stage of the process. The ideal execution of this stage involves the exploration and grouping of a large dataset to derive data-driven ­clusters or segments. In most cases where such data exists, it is usually already constructed in ways that make exploration and reframing difficult.

We ­usually access this data through segmentation presentations or market share reports that are structured in a way that sometimes make it impossible to query or reconstruct our own definitions. Often, it’s important to work with existing definitions, particularly where such definitions have social lives within the organisation, and are already the source of shared understandings. Big data makes the promise of opening company datasets up to broader usage within organisations, but it is still a rare design p ­ roject that starts this process in a truly exploratory fashion. However, even 31

a­ lready defined quantification is preferable to none whatsoever. As well as delivering specific insight into the individuals and groups who will use your product or service, this stage should help you to focus on particular characteristics and behaviours that you want to understand in more depth.

Where no such data exists at all, it can be tremendously helpful to work towards even rough models from sources such as national statistics or ­reports from organisations working in the sector.

Secondly, we need access to people defined by our explorations above. This typically involves acquiring a list of potential candidates and screening them for inclusion according to a variety of criteria. Here is where the ­prior definition benefits from quantification. We can move beyond guessing the size of particular segments or specific behaviours. A variety of models exist for managing this stage of the project, from outsourcing recruitment entirely to a specialist agency, recruiting through our clients or partner organisations (this works best when they have actively engaged members) or engaging in recruitment directly via advertising or participating in relevant activities. How we choose to do this depends on our budget and the time-frames we have available, and all approaches have pros and cons that produce particular results and influence the understandings we are able to achieve. For example, recruiting through a client organisation often means speaking to people who are vocal fans or detractors, whilst outsourcing recruitment may mean encountering ‘professional’ respondents. Such considerations must be taken into account and their effects understood.

Eventually we are able to actually meet with people in some form and ­engage in interactions, which will help to inspire or steer our design efforts. Here is where it becomes most obvious that we are engaging in an active form of research. We may ask people to participate in prototypes, we may simply ask them about particularly relevant topics or we might observe them using alternative products/services that can illuminate the potential use of our as-yet un-designed version. What is important for us to understand is how these methods actively construct particular responses, and how our results are bound up with method. Whilst traditional research argues for creating distance between ourselves and our subjects, design research instead breaks down these barriers, asking subjects to participate in the imagining of different potential futures. The key to managing such a process is reflectively understanding what conclusions we are able to draw from it, and where responsibility lies for responding to it. This is possibly the area requiring the most reframing. Too often, we fall into the trap of understanding what people say and do as the gospel truth, to be followed linearly. This is one of the many factors leading to user-‘scented’ design.

32

I­nstead, we should explicitly label our approaches as future or past/ present oriented. Past or present orientation means exploring behaviours and examples, and are possible to explore empirically. When we do this we should be clear about the number of cases we have encountered and therefore what we can claim from our results. On the other hand, future or generative approaches explore potential futures and are thus by definition uncertain. We need to be clear about moving between these modes and about the claims we make based on such data. Again, being clear about our claims is a discipline, which allows us to experiment more freely and to integrate the creative design work.

Finally, we must describe our activities in ways that will enable our ­often dissimilar teams to achieve shared understandings. This is where the ­ distance between design research and other models becomes the most apparent. Though we usually embed our learnings in deliverables such as personas or user journeys, it is the soft outputs that are often the most ­valuable. These are the hypotheses and working models, and even s­ imply the ongoing discussions that the team uses to frame creative work and structure the search for direction of a project. A small number of d ­ escriptive and memorable design principles may do more to create shared ­direction than a large number of complex outputs. The most effective output of design research is often the active creation of understandings, partially grounded through interaction with people, but nevertheless a creative act undertaken by the design team. This creative aspect of design research is easily overlooked yet extremely important Ultimately, introducing people into the design process acts to destabilise it, but simultaneously creates new sources of meaning and understanding that can be sources of new, more widely shared stability. I’ve argued that we need to develop new vocabularies and approaches that allow these complexities to exist. To do this may involve drawing on intellectual resources from beyond the traditional canon of research that is well understood amongst our clients and stakeholders. Designers need to be both brave and knowledgeable about the status quo they aim to subvert. It also ­involves re-appraising the role of designers, engineers, executives and others whose roles involve creating, sharing and decision-making about potential ­futures. This means acknowledging and validating these roles as they currently stand. We need to move beyond the heroic designer versus the user-centred designer to a conception of designers as creative agents ­influenced by many sources of knowledge. An understanding of people and technology’s impact on them is as necessary for today’s complex design problems as an understanding of the character of wood is for a carpenter.

33

Scene 5

Research findings: forced interactions

Characters:

Jonathan, Robert

Scene:

Discussion at Design Academy Eindhoven continues...

→ Jonathan:

There were many more stories, which were all to do with these ‘forced interactions’. We got even more insight into the relationships between Passengers and Cabin Crew when we started constructing the Customer Journey Map. We started chronologically, working parallel between the Passenger actions and the Cabin Crew actions. We quickly realised just how much Cabin Crew have to do during a flight, the five Cabin Crew participants almost methodical in how they went through their tasks. I quickly realised though, that they were neglecting to say what the Passengers were doing parallel to their tasks. I had to keep bringing them back or slowing them down to fill in the Passenger actions.

However, even when I did the Cabin Crew couldn’t really categorically say what Passengers would be doing. Even in the final Customer Journey Map there are big white gaps in the Passenger Actions row. This was when I realised that Cabin Crew are predominantly task-focussed rather than Passengerfocussed. I can see from your story earlier how they have evolved into this. But we were still left with some blank spaces in a Customer Journey Map of the customer. We did, however, try to fill these gaps with the next workshops with Passengers.

Robert:

Ah yes, the hand baggage only workshop? I remember it, but what did that tell you? Did you find out what Passengers do, specifically?

Jonathan:

Well there was no one thing that Passengers did but we learnt a lot about the different types of Passengers that there are and the kinds of experiences they attempt to create in these white spaces of their Customer Journey…

34

Scene 6

Hand baggage only

Characters:

Jonathan (VO), Kate, Jack, Hugo, John, James

Scene:

Jonathan facilitates a workshop with Passengers at Schiphol

→

Jonathan (VO): …so

I had asked the Passengers to bring with them a

typical hand baggage they would take on a long haul flight including the contents, of course. They took it in turns to show their items and explain what it is and why they take it on long haul flights.

Kate:

Most of my luggage is taken up with an overflow of my check-in bag. I don’t need much on the flight.

I try to sleep as much as possible, because I don’t like the plane environment. I find it a bit claustrophobic. I don’t need anyone to entertain me; I can entertain myself, and as such like to keep myself to myself. I have a journal that I use to just write in - it’s a bit like talking to yourself, which is much more preferable than talking to people around me. I fly about one to two times a year back to Japan to see my family. I don’t really like the plane. I do get bored but that’s why I have my journal and try to sleep or zone out.

I’m very good at keeping myself entertained.

Jack:

Well for me I quite like flying although I agree with Kate. It can get a bit boring, but unlike you I am not very good at entertaining myself; I’d much rather talk with people if possible. That’s why I always bring dice with me. Sometimes I’m travelling with my family and we like to play Yahtzee (we can play for hours) seems silly but we can. When I’m not travelling with my family or other people I don’t worry too much, I’m quite comfortable talking with other people. But it can be difficult because most people don’t really want to talk a lot. So I can get fidgety. But I don’t really bring things to entertain myself… maybe I should.

Hugo:

Literally I just have my phone charger, a change of socks, a jumper, and a couple of books. I neither love nor hate flying; it’s just a means 35

of getting from one place to another. Ideally I would just sleep and wake up there to pass the time as quickly as possible. This is really difficult though so I do take books to try and prevent boredom, but I find it very difficult to read in the plane. Often I don’t even open them.

John:

My dad always said if you’re marching you’re not fighting. In other words I like flying because it’s free time, and when I land I have to go to work.

So I typically take books; I’m a big reader and I see it as an opportunity to read; often that book I have been meaning to read but never got round to it. Oh yes and I always take a book like this one that makes me look intelligent (laughs).

James:

Well for me this task was easy, as I always have a bag packed permanently. I travel a lot so have a system and over the years have got everything I

Passenger Hand luggage provided an insight into different profiles of passengers, and what kinds of experiences they attempt to create for them selves.

36

need. I don’t really bring much to entertain myself, I expect that of the airline. I’m quite demanding of the flight because often it’s quite expensive so I always try and get the most from the service or at least what I’m entitled to. However I always have sleeping pills, a book, and my laptop. They are the only things I would use in the flight. The rest is back up clothes in case something happens to my check-in bag. Which has been lost twice!

Scene 7

Characters:

The way they make me feel Jonathan, James, Jugo, Kate, John

Scene: Follow-up

→

Jonathan (VO): In

Passenger workshop at Design Academy Eindhoven

a follow up workshop with Passengers we

had an idea of the kinds of experience they attempt to create, so participants brainstormed how flights make them feel, collectively.

Passengers begin to share their thoughts:

James:

If I have to do a long haul flight before I enter the plane I think… (Long sigh) Getting on the airplane doesn’t give me a happy feeling, the people who work there are boring.

Hugo: Kate:

Also entering the plane you feel like cattle.

It’s irritating, because I almost never sleep.

Hugo:

That’s another thing: you lose total control.

James:

Irritating Passengers, I have seen that many times

It’s boring but it is also exciting…

Kate: Kate:

James:

It’s very uncomfortable, but also relaxing because I can give over the control.

Passengers not taking their seat or just throwing themselves in their seat. That annoys me, and the company can do something about that because that makes me angry. The in-flight entertainment is boring, alcohol irritates, no sleep frustrates.

John:

They treat you like you’re one of many. And you’re not comfortable, which doesn’t make you relaxed.

37

Kate:

It takes so long that you have so much time

to think, and to observe everything that it gets confrontational towards yourself.

Fake, annoying, self-centred. They take

John:

control so you cannot do what you want. They pretend that you are special to them but it is all so very fake. And it’s tiring.

Jonathan:

You have said a lot of things about Cabin Crew already.

Yeah they are fake and not genuine.

John: Jonathan:

You have to be genuine.

Maybe that it’s a two-way thing, how do you create that relationship? Because you could say that it

is from a good place that the Cabin Crew try to be smiley and pleasant. But it’s a bit transparent.

Yeah, but they have the ability, because

John:

they are the service people; because what you reflect on people you get back. They can create the feelings; if you scream at someone, you get screamed at. Be polite and friendly…

Jonathan:

So the goal is to create a genuine relationship between Passenger and Cabin Crew? But on that assumption the Passenger has to give back also. I’m sure the Cabin Crew have similar feelings and stories of Passengers.

Kate:

Yes, you expect the same back.

Robert:

So Cabin Crew play an important role

James:

Yeah, they should just be customer-focussed.

John:

Yeah, it’s like a mirror. in getting out of this bad mood.

Because some of the time I get the feeling that they are a little bit self-centred.

John:

Yeah so that doesn’t help you get

Jonathan:

I think your partly right, when we did the

out of this shitty mood.

Customer Journey Map, we discovered in fact that they are task-focussed rather than Passengerfocussed because they have so much to do.

John:

But when you have such long flights they

Kate:

Yes they should on a long flight have time

aren’t all always doing something. enough to be Passenger-­ focussed.

38

Passenger Hand luggage provided an insight into different profiles of ­passengers, and what kinds of experiences they attempt to create for ­ them selves.

Passengers humanised their Long Haul flight experience by thinking of the service as a person, and imagining what kind of person it would be, and how that person makes them feel.

Scene 8

Cabin Crew interactions workshop

Characters: Scene:

→ Jonathan:

Jonathan (VO), Cabin Crew, Passenger, Purser Cabin Crew workshop at Schiphol where they are recalling past experiences.

It became even more apparent now that these

interactions between Cabin Crew and Passengers were central to a lot of experiences, or that Cabin Crew could in fact help a lot in the way that they interact with Passengers. In response to the Passengers’ desire for better Cabin Crew relations we looked at how Cabin Crew interact with Passengers and how they could do it differently. We did this through looking at narratives within long haul flights from the Cabin Crew perspective, to see how they could do things differently or better.

39

(Scene changes to a KLM flight, where we see one of the Cabin Crew’s past experiences).

Excuse me sir, could you please return to your seat?

CC: Passenger:

No, I’m staying here, I have every right to sleep here, I need my sleep.

I’m sorry sir but it’s not permitted to lie

CC:

in the aisle. Please return to your seat.

Passenger:

No, I can’t sleep in that seat and I need my rest for my arrival.

If you don’t return to your seat I

CC:

will have to get the purser.

Passenger:

I’m not moving.

(Purser comes) Purser:

Hello sir, for health and safety reasons it is not permitted to sleep in the aisle I have to ask you to return to your seat.

(Man begrudgingly returns to his seat) Passenger: Purser:

I will sue you, you have ruined my rest.

Thank you sir, I hope you can get some sleep.

(Scene fades back to the meeting room where the Cabin Crew have been listening to the story).

Jonathan:

Ok, wow I haven’t heard that story before. So now have a think in your groups about how you could do things differently either to avoid the situation or solve it better. And when you’re ready tell us the new narrative.

(Groups huddle and scene fades out and back to the KLM flight).

CC:

Passenger:

Excuse me sir, could you please return to your seat?

No, I’m staying here, I have every right to sleep here, I need my sleep.

CC: Passenger:

Sorry sir I know you’re tired, but it is not allowed to sleep in the aisle.

I need to sleep, I can’t sleep in my 40

seat. It’s too uncomfortable.

CC:

Could I perhaps get you an extra blanket or a warm cup of tea to make you more comfortable in your seat to help you sleep?

(Passenger begins to return to his seat).

Passenger:

(sighs) Okay, yes, a blanket and a cup of tea would help.

(Scene fades back to KLM meeting room with Cabin Crew).

Jonathan: CC1:

So what did you do differently?

There is one word for this: empathy. I realised that his problem was he can’t sleep, so rather than enforce rules I attempted to solve the problem of helping him sleep. So it was important to act upon or communicate empathy.

CC2:

I think you can train Cabin Crew during their first training course and also train them to be a little bit more creative in solving problems: it must be a challenge for Cabin Crew to solve these problems.

CC3:

Very often I see that Cabin Crew are

CC4:

You can initiate a 9+ moment. A normal moment is

the ones that need the empathy. you get on board, you do your meals, you do your in-flight safety. You do the basic things that every airline does. But if you have a 9+ moment, if you see somebody who wants to ask something or react to it, or even in advance if you see somebody looking for something, be proactive. All the extra things, like, “Are you nervous looking around for connections”, “Can I help you with a map or show you where to go?”, all the extra is a lot of extra time but people remember it.

Jonathan:

Do Cabin Crew have enough time during flights to act upon empathy?

CC3:

Yes, especially during the boarding there

CC1:

Time is not the problem. When Cabin Crew have an

should be enough time. assessment, they act differently. Then they are the perfect steward. So they have it in them, but maybe we have to find a way to get it out 41

of them more often, like a bonus or reward.

CC 6:

Boarding is very busy but you could act on it briefly and say that you will come back to it... recognise the situation, listen and come back to it.

Jonathan:

Do you think that there is a responsibility of the

CC 5:

I think they do have a responsibility... for the

CC 2:

Maybe we need to explain that there are

CC 3:

No... but you do need them to follow the

CC 4:

What I think is that there is a problem with looking

Passengers to contribute to the ‘good feeling’? safety of themselves and of the other Passengers. moments that they need to obey us. rules and some rules are not nice. at Passengers as a group and then recognising them as an individual and then it goes the other way around they [the Passengers] say we are all just Cabin Crew handing out food and when they start talking to us they realise it’s a person. If you can make that switch or give a training we could do something more about that to change that in your mind and maybe that would work better.

Cabin Crew explore scenarios and potential narratives of their encounters with passengers. Firstly creating a story board of a bad experience they had with a passenger, then modifying the story. In reflection Cabin Crew identified how they could interact differently even with the most difficult passengers, by understanding what the underlying problem was for the passenger.

42

Props

Rosebud, the Beaver and the Doomsday Device

Jonathan Wray

Design typically concerns itself with the creation of things, and hosts of design methods and processes have been developed to look at how we can find new ways of arriving at different objects or tangible artefacts. ­Services are created in the moments of interaction, between service user and ­service provider; what this means is that the role that objects and products play changes from one of ‘Interaction design’ to ‘design for interaction’, to mediate or to provide a platform for service interactions, or, as Segelstrom puts it: “Whereas design traditionally deals with tangible artefacts, most services are a flow of events mediated through artefacts and interactions.”[7] Furthermore this Service Dominant Logic (a concept of Vargo and Lusch[9]) suggests that we can no longer separate products from services and that the nature of designed objects is transforming. Philips Kotler suggested already in 1977 that the importance of physical products lies less in owning the products themselves, but rather in obtaining the services they render.

His perspective implies that physical products are carriers – vessels – of a service offering or meaning. This chapter looks at what role objects have in the creation of services where design problems are more complex, and looks at how the strategic use of objects in films and the meaning they can generate in narratives could be beneficial to design research and Service Design Thinking.

An expanding design landscape

Some design problems can be seen as complicated challenges that can be solved through breaking them down into smaller and smaller chunks, like designing a car. However, most important modern problems are complex, rather than complicated. Complex, or wicked problems[6] as they are known in the academic world, are messier and more ambiguous in nature.

They are more connected to other problems, more likely to develop in unpredictable non-linear ways and implemented solutions are more likely to produce unintended consequences. The premise of these (wicked) problems is that they cannot be solved through a rational scientific approach as they are often ill-defined, involve various stakeholders with different ­perspectives, and have no correct or optimal solution. Thus, wicked problems cannot be solved by the application of standard (or known) methods: they demand new, creative solutions.

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Product Service Systems (PSS) are part of these new types of solutions.

The holistic approach needed to create integrated PSS supports the ­evolution from the notion that form-follows-function, to one of interaction and meaning. Form and function are still relevant of course, for at the later product development stages they are still valuable characteristics. ­However, in earlier stages of PSS creation, designers will find themselves dealing with intangible material such as emotion, behaviour, and as a ­result will design interactions between people and objects rather than just objects. Service Dominant Logic suggests that we can no longer separate products from services and that the nature of designed objects is transforming. Designing as an activity is consequently changing too, becoming more complicated and connected to more non-design expertise than ­previously.

As such, it is important to not see designed objects as the pinnacle of a ­process but look momentarily away from form and function and analyse how the intangible qualities of objects can become vessels for generating meaning and interaction in PSS. If used more diversely and with less ­emphasis on their being finished, polished things, they can act as s­ trategic elements at different moments in designing services. PSS should look to the intangible qualities of objects and how meaning can be generated through interaction: services are a combination of both tangible and ­intangible elements and are created in the moments of interaction between people and products (or touch points) in a service.

“An object by itself is not enough; the wider context is what makes it sing, what makes it a success.” [4] Dan Hill’s quote above sits well with Conceptual and Speculative design, an approach to designing objects which is successful in dealing with these ‘wider contexts’. Dunne and Raby define Critical Design as “one of many mutations design is undergoing in an effort to remain relevant to the complex technological, political, economic and social changes we are experiencing at the beginning of the 21st century.”[2] The term I have been using for this role is Vessel, to suggest that objects are carriers of meanings that are made available, created or interpreted at ­specific – sometimes strategically important – moments in the design ­process and beyond, in service delivery. Vessels are also a form of d ­ esign mutation from a conceptual design approach. Vessels are purposely termed to escape traditional ideas of designed objects, allowing a fresh approach to define the nature of these objects or artefacts and their functionality.

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For instance, they deal with meanings that people associate with ­objects or that objects can evoke, as a result of how they are designed. Objects require ­interpretation to become meaningful. We give objects meaning by ­projecting our own understanding, memories, emotions or perspectives onto them. Whilst Vessels have roots in conceptual or speculative design, the idea can be evolved and appropriated to the design and delivery of services on a strategic level. In doing so this conceptual, open-ended, ­unfinished design approach becomes relevant in a new appropriation. Vessels are more concerned with generating meaning than primarily focusing on form and function; they become a communication tool for reflection as well as a form of expression, using designed artefacts as carriers of this internal and expressive meaning. Seeing design in this way becomes really engaging, for there is something to understand about objects beyond the obvious issues of function and purpose. It suggests that there is as much to be gained from exploring what objects mean as from considering what they do and what they look like[8].

Objects and meaning

We are surrounded by objects, and through their meanings, we are ­surrounded by stories. In this sense an object is more than material and functionality. It is reason, ideology, context, emotion, and sensation; and above all it is communication. “Just as a story, an object is a text, a way of exhibiting shapes, and a vehicle of transmission of meanings.”[3] For this reason, objects require, and can provoke, interpretation by people. The meanings that result are not completely random, but neither completely fixed. For instance, as de Botton states: “Any object of design will give off an impression of the psychological and moral attitudes it supports.”[1] These are not necessarily those designed explicitly or implicitly into the object, of course, as the interpreter and his or her context influences the meaning making, too. We have a close connection with objects in daily life, perhaps only surpassed by our relationships with other people.

Also in film, objects are signs that represent ideas, ideals and express ­intended meaning. Great plays, stories and films with their well thoughtout characters, rhythmic narratives and plots often rely on tangible artefacts around which characters navigate, or that can define plot and narrative, from the never seen ‘Doomsday Device’ in Dr Strangelove, to the prominent suitcase in Pulp Fiction, or the enigmatic ‘Rosebud’ in Citizen Kane. What if objects functioned similarly in design processes; not only as results, but also moments to communicate or generate meaning?

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What is important to demonstrate with these few examples is that the ­objects themselves are either seemingly ordinary or never seen throughout the film, yet the meaning and role they play in the interaction between fellow actors (or characters) and the unfolding of events is powerful. It suggests an interesting role for integrating objects into the design process and actually, for delivering services at different moments. In this role, objects do not necessarily aim to solve problems, but intend to inform or shape events and interactions, to generate meaning or questions, in order to propel actors and narratives forward. The following examples are potential design methods for using tangible artefacts as Vessels in service design research, inspired by their strategic role in film narratives.

The Beaver (Jody Foster, 2011)

Walter Black is a depressed CEO of Jerry Co., a toy company nearing bankruptcy, who is kicked out by his wife. Walter moves into a hotel. After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, he develops an alternate personality represented by a beaver hand puppet found in the trash. He wears the puppet constantly, communicating solely by speaking as the beaver, helping him in his recovery. Colleagues and family go along with the charade as Walter explains that the beaver is a prescription puppet; it’s not until even the puppet can’t contain his depression that Walter – in an attempt to separate from the puppet – actually cuts his own arm off.

This puppet becomes a Vessel through which Walter is able to express himself better, more confidently and takes him, albeit temporarily, out of his depression. The beaver represents objects that can be used to stimulate people to talk openly about their personality, emotions or feelings about certain situations. The stuffed toy technique represents the using of objects that are personal and close to them, or are comical, which allows people to take a step back from the issue (especially if it is complex) and talk more freely and with less pressure. The premise of this concept is to create a safe space for reflection and discussion, and is extremely playful in nature.

This may be through the use of metaphors in which an object re-frames the context, or, by allowing the participant to step out of their shoes and into a form of fiction, which is closely related to the same concerns and emotions as the desired context. It allows a collection of stories, which can inform designers of concerns, emotions or psychological profiles of (future) ­service users.

An important characteristic of the beaver is that it was found in the trash.

This is pivotal, as found or existing objects can function like the beaver, 46

as people’s hand luggage proved to be a valuable set of objects to understand what kinds of experiences Passengers attempt to create on board.

In preparation for a workshop, Passenger participants were asked to bring with them typical hand luggage for a long haul flight. Through a ‘showand–tell’ type discussion Passengers were asked why they had packed ­particular items: these seemingly ordinary objects, such as socks, dice, books or ­journals opened discussion about connection, privacy, comfort, and ­expectations of long haul flight experiences. The stories were embedded in the objects – invisible – yet they became meaningful data in the design process at an early stage to understand what Passengers do, what they expect, and what kind of experiences they attempt to create on long haul flights.

The ‘Doomsday Device’ (In: Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

A United States Air Force commander, after becoming paranoid and going insane, orders his executive officer (of the Royal Air Force) to put the air force base on alert, and instructs an aircraft attack on Russia. What results in the war room is a heated discussion between the American president and Soviet ambassador. The former explains that the Soviet Union has created a ‘Doomsday Device’ consisting of 50 buried bombs set to detonate should any nuclear attack strike their country. The President’s wheelchair-bound scientific advisor is former Nazi, Dr Strangelove; he is sceptical, noting that a doomsday device would only be an effective deterrent if everyone knew about it. The Russians admit they had plans to reveal its existence the following week at a Soviet party conference, in honour of the Premier ‘who loves surprises’. Ultimately the war room officials and the Soviets are unable to deter the nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, which results in a cloud of radioactive material that will destroy all life on earth.

Here, the doomsday device represents a satirical comment on the nuclear scare in 1962, despite never being seen. For design it highlights that the very idea of an object or device and its meaning can catapult a series of other activities and dialogues between people. A doomsday device represents the art of bad ideas, as often they touch a nerve of what is actually the state-of-the-art and effectively highlight all the flaws with current affairs.

Objects in this sense can be testimony to how things shouldn’t be and can quickly point to what we should be looking to achieve in order to avoid a ‘Doomsday Device situation’. As in the film example, such an object can bring multiple people and perspectives together, to negotiate how to move forward in the process; it can also crudely highlight through discussion 47

what is wrong with the context for which we are designing, whilst taking into account the rational and irrational behaviours or perspectives of the multiple people involved in the service or design process. As with stories, dystopias are a great place to begin to make things better.

One particular concept that addresses this proposition was inspired by a fantastic research artefact that a group created in a workshop at the ­Service Design in Tourism conference (SDT). In response to an irritating and smelly Passenger, the group designed a cocoon-like mask, which ­depleted all sound, smell and vision of the environment. What they quickly realised in a reflective discussion was that what they had created was a perfect example of what they should have avoided designing. In actual fact it highlighted the instincts that passengers currently have in long haul flights: to isolate themselves rather than attempt to solve the conflicts through more social means. This artefact was hugely successful as it didn’t offer a solution but it accurately portrayed the problems with current behaviours, and the subsequent problems it causes. This suggests an interesting proposition to design a flawed object, or a dystopian design, which can more accurately, while quite crudely, indicate the current problems.

The ‘Rosebud’ (In: Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, 1941)

When wealthy media magnate Charles Foster Kane dies, he utters the word ‘Rosebud’. An obituary newsreel documents the events in his public life. The producer of the newsreel asks a reporter, Thompson, to find the meaning behind his last word. The reporter interviews the great man’s friends and associates, and Kane’s story unfolds as a series of flashbacks.

Thompson interviews all the personal contacts for Kane, but he is unable to solve the mystery; he concludes that ‘Rosebud’ will remain an enigma.

However at the end of the film, the camera pans over workers burning some of Kane’s many possessions. Onto the fire, one of the men throws an old sled with the word ‘Rosebud’ painted on it – the same sled that Kane was riding as a child the day his mother sent him away, which is a significant turning point for the character. For the viewer this solves the mystery of what ‘Rosebud’ is; the sled represented when life was once simple and truly happy for Kane.

The Rosebud is an exciting proposition for designing an artefact as a ­ conclusion to a longer research process. This concept represents how seemingly trivial objects can round up and communicate a lot of ­knowledge or data. From the design perspective it is more interesting to think of d ­ esigning a Rosebud first, in response to a deep understanding of 48

customer needs for instance, before designing an entire service. Just like the Rosebud sled signifies the understanding of the ultimate turning point in Kane’s life. The Citizen Kane scenario presents the sled in the last shot of the film only – in hindsight as the starting point – as a strategic anchor from which a life of events and interactions escalated. The suggestion here is that such events and interactions are not fixed, and although delivered ­linearly, they are certainly not created so. It follows that a holistic view of the entire story or service in this case should be created simultaneously back and forth, and that tangible objects act as good anchors or m ­ ilestones in a design ­ process because they provide meaning grounded in deep ­customer ­insights. A Rosebud, however, should not be considered as a product in a service but something that aids the design team to remain grounded in what matters to the people they design for, and something that gives direction to their design effort and helps explain that effort­ to others.

One conclusion to the KLM research, was a ‘Rosebud’ type object. A ­fictional object called the Social Compass. The compass embodied the ­layers of data and conclusions resulting from the research. It is purposely fictional and speculative to avoid becoming a solution; rather, it is similar to the Rosebud sled in that it gives meaning to a series of occurred events.

In the design context it connects multiple moments in the design process into one meaningful conclusion. The compass and the Rosebud sled strip away a lot of information and highlight the most meaningful, important aspects. Strategically speaking, it also becomes a new beginning to move forward.

Conclusion

As designers and researchers it is exciting to consider how we might strategically use the theatrical storytelling approach to attempt to in­ form strategy through objects. Objects from everyday life acquire several functions in films: they can be solely used as scene objects or to support a particular film style. Other objects are specially chosen to translate a character’s interior state of mind or the filmmaker’s aesthetical or ethical commitment to narrative concepts. The beaver, ‘Doomsday Device’ and ‘Rosebud’ illustrate the huge role that objects can play in interactions and unfolding narratives and yet are not necessarily the main focus of the film. They are catalysts; carriers of meaning that at varied moments create interaction and narrative. It is this characteristic that can contribute to the design processes from start to end. By giving presence to intangible elements or strategies, they can allow designers and organisations to help 49

people who use services to truly become actors alongside the objects, creating a holistic, and yet quite spontaneous experience. This is why ­Service Dominant Logic suggests that we can no longer talk of services and products separately, but that they, along with people, all become actors in the creation and delivery of services. This should happen back and forth simultaneously, knitted together through a narrative strategically, with similar care and consideration as is found in films or plays. Because what truly is the experience is the play, the unfolding of events and ­experiences through people and products in which all these actors influence each other and are equal in their role. It seems that strategically we (designers and ­researchers) could benefit hugely from the strategic thinking and ­processes of creating a play or film, with a harmony of people, objects, narrative and ultimately a great story.

References [1] de Botton, A. The Architecture of Happiness. Penguin Books, London, 2006.

[2] Dunne, A.J. and Raby, F. Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects.

Birkhäuser, Basel, 2001.

[3] Glassie, H. Material Culture. Indiana University Press,

Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1999.

[4] Hill, D. Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary.

Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, 2012.

[5] Hollein, H. MANtransFORMS: Konzepte einer Ausstellung.

Loecker Verlag, Vienna, 1989.

[6] Rittle, H. and Webber, M. Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning.

Polity Sciences, Vol. 4 (1973), p. 155-169.

[7] Segelström, F. New Grounds, New Challenges? Exploring

Stakeholder Research in Service Design, in Nordic Design Research Conference, NorDes,Helsinki, Finland, 2011, NorDes. Retrieved 1 August, 2013,

from Nordic Design Research: http://www.nordes.org/opj/index.php/n13/article/view/136/119.

[8] Sudjic, D. The Language of Things, Penguin, London, 2009.

[9] Vargo, S. and Lusch, R. (Service­dominant logic: Continuing the evolution.

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (36), p. 1­10.

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Scene 9

Characters: Scene:

→

Service Design in Tourism Jonathan (VO), Robert (VO), Participant 1, Participant 2, Participant 3 Workshop at Service in Tourism conference Innsbruck, Austria.

Jonathan (VO): It

was clear now that both Passengers and

Cabin Crew mutually felt that there was a need on both sides to improve these forced interactions to try and break these cocoons.

Robert (VO):

Yes that’s clear, but how?

Jonathan (VO): Well

the Cabin Crew mentioned that one way is looking

at how Cabin Crew are trained. There is a lot of opportunity for designers to work with how Cabin Crew are trained and particularly how they solve problems. But we also wanted to explore another element, which is also apparent in your story about long haul flights. What tangible things – touch points or products – could help with these interactions or even mediate or create better interactions? So we used the Service Design in Tourism conference to test this in a one-hour workshop. The participants were asked to work from personal bad experiences they have had on a long haul flight. Using only commonly found objects on the plane, they had to use these to improve, alter or solve problems they experience on the plane. When the participants finished they acted out their stories with their new props and an insightful discussion arose…

(Scene changes to the end discussion at the Service Design in Tourism conference in Innsbruck).

Participant 1:

What you guys did in your group with the notifications on the screen, I was kind of hesitant of that, because I would like to just encourage people more to just talk. If you come in and maybe we can find a solution, maybe come in and say “Hi” to your neighbour and once you have done that you don’t need notifications on your screen but maybe create a ritual or something and not have tools or technology take that human communication away 51

– but find ways to increase and encourage it. We had a situation in our group where one person is already sleeping. That might make things more complicated, but if we had a solution that would encourage communication then they might be more considerate to each other in the first place.

Participant 2: So

perhaps some things are handed out that

people have to share with their neighbours…

Participant 1:

Yeah.

Participant 3: Especially

as you don’t know the people around

you. If you would know them they would be more considerate about how they feel.

Participant 1:

What I’m taking away from this is that I am going to introduce myself to other people. Because if I do that they will… well no one’s going to say I won’t tell you my name… no, but they will automatically be more aware because we now talked, so I won’t have anyone pushing their seat on me…

Participant 4: No,

but I think it’s really interesting what he is

saying, because if we listen to all of our stories the common ground that we all share is that we don’t dare to ask – not even the Cabin Crew. So actually what he is saying really makes sense.

Why don’t we communicate more with each other?

Using crude props, of objects ­commonly found on Long haul flights (such as paper cups, blankets, inflight magazines, and blind folds) passengers attempt to ­improve interactions from their own bad experiences, and acted out these new insightful scenarios.

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An artefact created to remove unwanted sound, smell, and vision, but after a reflective discussion the creators identified this as being the opposite of what is needed. That in fact by talking and interacting more, problems could be avoided. This artefact represents perfectly the current attitude to Long Haul Flight interaction.

Participant 2: It

does, I was happily surprised once when the

Passenger in front of me introduced himself and he said “hello, I am so and so and I would really like to go to sleep now and recline my seat do you mind?� And that is a very nice way to getting the seat in your face.

Participant 4: Well

actually, what we made here is the anti-

example: you shut yourself off completely.

Whereas the better or more positive solution would be to not make this necessary.

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Scene 10

RESEARCH FINDINGS: RESEARCH FOCUS

Characters: Scene:

→ Jonathan: Robert:

Jonathan, Robert Discussion at Design Academy Eindhoven continues...

So, that’s where we are at…

Nice story, thanks. I have been involved in a lot of these workshops and I understand what you do, but not how or why you do it. Now I hear all these stories together, it’s clearer. So what’s next?

Jonathan:

Well the goal is to develop a conclusion that

attempts to represent these findings, to not design a solution per se but to design a scenario that represents strategic elements as to how KLM could improve interactions on long haul flights. My personal focus of course will be around objects and technology, and this is especially interesting in reflection of your story, and how, when airlines introduced technologies such as entertainment systems, these contributed to the cocooning that occurs today. As technology will undoubtedly have a huge impact on the future of air travel, it is important to speculate now what it should attempt to accomplish. Taking into account all the things we have discovered thus far, from the diversity of people’s behaviour and want for interaction, as some crave it and others will never want it, to finding ways to re-establish a relationship between Cabin Crew and Passengers, to allowing taskfocussed Cabin Crew an opportunity to act upon their empathy. That I guess is the goal, which KLM can begin to work towards if we first imagine an albeit fictional scenario that has meaning and can be digested into future activities to reach that goal…

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Scene 11

The Social Compass

Characters:

Man 1, Man 2, Cabin Crew, Woman 1, Woman 2,

Boy, Mother, Hugo, Man 2

Scene:

The scene opens on a fictional scenario on a KLM flight. Two

Passengers are talking through a device (devised to allow a

more transparent atmosphere through an audio network

between Passengers and Cabin Crew, allowing more sociable

and outgoing Passengers to broadcast conversations whilst

allowing others to either keep to themselves or merely listen in).

→ Man 1:

Man 2:

What? To be honest I’m not sure.

Well, I’m not having no veggie meal, I’ll

I think there are two options. be well annoyed if they have ran out.

Man 1:

I tell you what, I’m really not bothered so I’ll order the meat and if you don’t get yours we can swap how about that?

Man 2:

Well, that’s kind of you but you shouldn’t have to… let’s see what happens.

(Cabin Crew looks to her compass. The dial is spinning between two numbers, she identifies the seat numbers of the two conversing, realising that in fact they are rows apart from each other, and whilst continuing to prepare meals, changes her search for more active conversations. The second dial is flicking between a couple of other numbers acknowledging conversations. She quickly tunes in…).

Woman 1: Woman 2: Woman 1:

He’s asleep.

Do you feel different?

No, I dunno, I mean in a way yes… I’m just really looking forward to this honeymoon, ten days of sun. Ahh …

Woman 2:

Oh food’s here… well have a wonderful honeymoon.

My food is here – maybe speak in a bit.

(The Cabin Crew switches channels again. Meanwhile… Hugo is sat slumped in his chair listening to his compass… he didn’t feel comfortable talking to people, but was interested to listen to those who felt confident and social enough to broadcast their conversations).

Boy:

This is air radio… bringing you all the news from the sky…

55

Mother:

Samuel… turn that off, no one wants to listen to you banging on about nonsense… and will you sit down? They will be serving food soon.

Boy:

Mother:

Boy:

But I’m bored…

Look, dinner will be here soon so just sit tight till then…

Awwww, but it’s uncomfortable…

(Hugo takes his compass and using the mirror looks back down the cabin.

There is a boy leaning on his seat stood in the aisle holding the compass.

Hugo continues to listen).

Mother: Boy: Mother: Boy:

Here, read your comics.

Well, read them one more time.

I have… I’ve read them like a hundred times…

You don’t read your books a hundred times…

(Hugo reaches under his seat, opens his bag and lifts out his jumper. He then takes out three comics. He considers them for a moment and looks back down the aisle. He considers them for a while, puts his two favourites back and holds one on his lap. He sits a bit longer looking for Cabin Crew to pass by. A man walks towards where he is sitting and Hugo signals him).

Hugo: Man2: Hugo:

Hey, excuse me…

Me? Yeah, you couldn’t do me a favour, could you?

Just give this comic to that boy down there…

(The man looks down and sees the boy now swinging off the armrest. The man looks at the comic, smiles.)

Man2: Hugo:

I would be delighted.

Tell him to keep it, as I’ve read it a hundred times!

(The man continues up the aisle, stops at the boy’s row, talks first to the mother and then looks down at the boy. Hands him the comic.

The boy had stopped bouncing around, the boy jumped back in his seat as the man pointed in the direction of Hugo. Then the man sat down in the seat opposite the boy the other side of the aisle.

Moments later Cabin Crew begin food service. The Cabin Crew works his way up remembering the seat numbers of the couple on a honeymoon. When he 56

approaches them he asks them which meal they would like and serves them food).

Cabin Crew:

Congratulations on your wedding, compliments of Cabin Crew.

(He offers them both a glass of wine and then takes out a small battery operated candle he had in his waistcoat pocket and places it between the two. It flickers artificially…).

Cabin Crew:

Enjoy the rest of your flight…

The Social Compass, a concluding conceptual artefact that represents how technology can offer a platform for ­improved interactions, yet acknowledging that different people want varied levels of exposure to social exchange.

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The screen-less Social Compass, allows Passengers and Cabin Crew to connect through audio channels, and even locate each other in the plane is they so wish. Symbolically the compass has a mirror as a posed to a screen encouraging an acknowledgement of themselves and their environment.

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Scene 12

RESEARCH FINDINGS: Final thoughts

Characters:

Jonathan, Robert

Scene:

Discussion at Design Academy Eindhoven concludes.

→ Robert:

Jonathan:

A bit like a social network, but in-flight?

Yes, and services like Twitter and Facebook are good

examples and reminders that in fact people do like to share stories when they are given the opportunity.

The compass similarly represents the choice for people as to the extent that they want to share, and when Cabin Crew also contribute to this social network the in-flight community takes on a whole new dimension – a more transparent, social one.

Robert:

The choice is important. I feel it reminds us to cater to individuals rather than a group of Passengers. As the Cabin Crew talked about earlier in the project!

Jonathan:

Yes, after all different people want different levels of interaction and communication, and the previous scene represents a transparent scenario, and what could happen when these cocoons we currently experience were more expressive or transparent

Robert:

It also triggers a thought, what weird and wonderful ways Passengers and Cabin Crew might utilise this for… they would do things that no amount of speculation can achieve. Can you imagine?

Jonathan:

I really can’t…

THE END

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Open Design Space Meaningful Interactions on Long Haul Flights The Open Design Space (ODS) Meaningful Interactions set out to generate insights into how designed objects can be carriers of meaning created by both designers and the people who use those objects. Furthermore, it 足investigated how these meanings can stimulate interactions between people, by not just focussing on objects, but first exploring the diversity of people and narratives that are common in long haul flights.

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The ODS was held in the context of the research of Jonathan Wray, who looked at the subject during a year-long research together with KLM. Over five days the students from Design Academy Eindhoven collaborated with KLM Cabin Crew to create new interactions between Passengers and 足Cabin Crew during long haul flights, to further research the sometimes failing relations between these two stakeholder groups. The first meetings were about scoping the research matter together with Passengers and Cabin Crew from KLM, after which the students broke up into groups to come up with a project that would look at Meaningful Interactions on Long Haul Flights.

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DAE students began prototyping potential narratives and scenarios their passenger might encounter, and looked at how Cabin Crew and fellow passengers encounters might occur, and what narratives could potentially unravel. Later KLM Cabin Crew participants at Schiphol played their role as Cabin Crew in the impromptu role-plays, which highlighted that different cabin crew personnel have different approaches and techniques to dealing with passengers.

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Conventions of Social Interaction Piet Hein Clijsen

“The Open Design Space (ODS) was literally open: we didn’t only study the research matter but also the research process.” Tutor Piet Hein Clijsen explains, “We started by creating a set of five imaginary long haul flights Passengers who would serve as subjects throughout the workshop.”

Enacting long haul flights

“One couldn’t find a more ethnically mixed and international crowd than on intercontinental flights. Remarkably the personalities we developed all turned out to be western and Caucasian… We created scenarios that could unfold between our imaginary Passengers, which were tested by re-enacting them. During the workshop with Cabin Crew our presupposition that travellers wish to stay anonymous to each other was confirmed.” Piet Hein elaborates: “An unexpected occurrence could ‘shake’ people out of their anonymity and thereby lead to more good will and understanding: it could provoke interaction without ‘forcing’ people to participate.”

Channelled explorations

The ODS proved to be very effective for the students to become aware of their research approach and preconceived ideas it is based on. These premises that underpin a design process should be rigorously ­investigated. ­Piet Hein: “In order to really ‘create knowledge’ by testing a research hypothesis by empirical research, the time-frame of the course – four meetings – wasn’t big enough. We did however learn to reflect on whether a research approach is effective or not and to explore and set up a research ­hypotheses. For that reason, placing your work in a context, within history or social cultural frame works is very interesting. We realised that the history of long haul flights created an insight into how they Lisa Hu: have come to be what they are now.”

Students’ process

The students were very enthusiastic about the ad-hoc research during the ODS. By role-playing and staging scenarios they were confronted with their expecta63

“Narratives and stories are a uniquely human medium for organising understanding of the world, making sense of past experience and sharing the meaning of experience with others.”

tions and preconceptions, and therefore wanted to tweak the program as it was set up beforehand. This however was difficult since the ‘free’ framework was of course grounded in a strict curriculum. After every meeting there was a reflection on the research progress and what was ‘gained’ (if anything). Piet Hein: “Reflection is not regularly embedded in design education. Students are accustomed to ‘quickly’ work towards a (often material) result. Getting this kind of responsibility in forming your own research question and deducing results from your findShay Raviv ings shook the students out of their comfort zone.”

“The company and the Passengers are trying to build small cocoons for each Passenger. But in this small space, it is just not possible. And there the problem starts.

Maybe instead of trying to go inside, and isolate the Passengers from each other it is better to think of going outside – make the space more communal, or introduce people to each other, or create space that allows interaction and sharing.”

Passenger behaviour

Throughout the workshop we realised that perhaps there is not so much to be improved in long haul flights in terms of material changes, but there may still be non-material gain in Passenger behaviour. The expectations people have getting on a plane and the conventions of social interaction aboard planes could potentially be areas for improvement. This shows that designers in their attempt to create improvements could turn out to not just create a product that will solve a specific problem, but may design a new mindset. “Most of the student projects seem to reflect this insight: most ‘solutions’ are aimed at surprising the customer by waking them out of their routines. “The smallest changes can make a big difference.”

What can design come to be?

To reflect on the results as well as on the process was a very stimulating experience. This makes a design approach more scientific. The workshop offered a different kind of research that is not current in the curriculum of Design Academy Eindhoven. The students became Michele Degen: aware of the ‘perception of man’ they bring into a pro“That design is not ject. It was a very valuable lesson to start with the user ­object–based, I knew before the workshop. instead of the designer’s barely underpinned vision: But Meaningful for design students it is very important to realise they ­interactions was an are not a solitary designer working on a project, since eye-opener, that design is philosophy. ­Design is most graduates come to work in teams.

When studying a service context we also study ourselves. Role-playing shook us out of presumptions and 64

social behaviour. Design is service. Design is experience. Design is connecting people.”

expectations. If you would place such research in the context of philosophy, you could compare it to 19th century philosophers who would project a perspective on the essence of what it means to be a human onto society and the everyday man would just have to deal with that. Post-modern / contemporary philosophy researches society with the use of sciences and therefore has a multiform inter-subjective take on what it means to be human.

Through the experimental dynamics of the programme all participants were equal, tutors and students alike: no one has the answers beforehand.

Piet Hein: “Doing research together was very stimulating: it created an open platform where you’re not sure what the answer is. When you arrive in the morning, you don’t know where the day will take you. As with travellers in planes, surprise was a vital element in the research process.”

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student project number 1: Shared Interactions

A hundred things you can do with string: some are practical, some silly. It stimulates interaction between Passengers. For some of the games you’ll need two lengths of string, which you can either borrow or collaborate with a neighbour.

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When asked to design an object or service element in tune with their personas behaviour, this group proposed that something as simple as a piece of string combined with 100 was of using it during the flight could stimulate a more social environment.

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student project number 2: Personalised Welcome

This solution to designing interactions proposes that small changes to the environment can position people differently on entering the plane.

The students suggest that personal detailing can change the interaction between Passengers and Cabin Crew, or customer and service provider to a personal guest level. This subtly shifts the role and understanding of each other in the service and creates an opportunity for a more special and social experience.

This group highlighted the boarding of the aircraft as a crucial moment when an environment that passengers can walk into can dictate the relationship between service provider and passenger. Through a series of small artefacts they positioned passengers as guests as a posed to customers which instantly changes the perception of the relationships.

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The contribution of The play’s the thing to CRISP Bas Raijmakers

CRISP is a four-year project, which started in 2011 and will end in 2015, with many connected, small projects within it. ‘The play’s the thing’ is one such project (part of one the eight main projects called CASD – ­Competitive Advantage through Strategic Design) and its findings move the overall goals of CRISP ever forward. Through these project contributions, CRISP also becomes more concrete, as a vehicle to make design more strategic and render the economy more competitive, through design.

Designers create new perspectives on PSS and their design

With The play’s the thing, Jonathan Wray explored theatre as an inspiration, and designing for meaning creation as a vision. This led to the idea of Vessels that carry meanings created by Passengers and Cabin Crew ­together instead of mere objects that perform a task in a Product Service System (PSS). An additional focus to the common and traditional focus in product design on form and function was added, specifically on how ­objects allow for creating meaning and facilitating interaction between people. Such fundamental shifts in thinking are what we are aiming for with CRISP, because when PSS are developed from new perspectives like this, they can provide a competitive advantage to the service provider.

Projects like The play’s the thing do not yet deliver the PSS that are built on these new foundations; they create the opportunity to do so. And that is exactly where CRISP should make its contributions to industry: not by competing with exciting agencies on the market but by enlarging that market for designers through opening (or building?) new doors.

How can design education prepare designers for such roles?

On the one hand, Jonathan Wray took a very grounded approach by working with Passengers and Cabin Crew, and used his design skills of synthesis and visualisation to comprehend, analyse and communicate their stories. He did this not just by listening but also by experimenting with theatre techniques. On the other hand he took a philosophical approach with his view on products as Vessels for meaning that cannot be entirely determined by the provider of the products as part of a PSS. In his view, 71

meaning is co-produced and this fits again very well with what PSS design needs to do: design for interactions rather than designing the interactions themselves. How can this concept be taught to students?

In the Open Design Space (ODS) organised at Design Academy Eindhoven, Jonathan Wray and Piet Hein Clijsen, tutor at the academy, explored with students how it can be done, and found some valuable insights as related in the interview with Piet Hein in this book. The most striking insight was that confronting students with their expectations and preconceptions ­regarding the situations and people they design for, in this case long haul flights, was very valuable. How we may do this in a more artbased ­educational ­environment, without shifting the balance entirely to ­process-driven design education, e.g. user-centred design, is not that clear.

One potential method explored in the ODS was the use of theatre-techniques to really help confront students with their own expectations and preconceptions and provide rich material for reflection. Future design education can build on this.

Within the larger CRISP programme, The play’s the thing shows how – in the very complicated and multidisciplinary field of service provision in the airline industry – designers can make contributions beyond well-known areas such as product design, interior design, branding and interaction design by taking the more holistic perspective of service design-thinking. Jonathan Wray created a new perspective on products that serve as a part of Product Service Systems. How much more strategic can you get as a designer?

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Contributor biographies

Daniëlle Arets

Associate Reader (Associate Lector) in the Readership (Lectoraat) ­Strategic Creativity, Daniëlle Arets also possesses a key role in communicating the knowledge that results from CRISP to creative industries and ­education as a Knowledge Transfer Officer for CRISP. Danielle has a strong ­record in organising debates for a wide array of public, educational and ­commercial institutes, and through this experience she has become a strong a­ dvocate for inter-disciplinary research and design. As Associate Lector and ­Knowledge Transfer Officer, Danielle aims to bridge academic and design thinking through strategic, creative tools and techniques, and of course, many debates.

Piet Hein Clijsen

Piet Hein Clijsen has a Masters degree in Social Philosophy and Ethics from Tilburg ­University and has worked as a tutor at the Design Academy Eindhoven for five years where he tries to wake up the students’ interest in Philosophy and Science. Insight into human perception, behaviour and thought could lead to more creative and empathic solutions from ­designers. Furthermore Piet Hein has held his own production company PH3 in the field of exhibitions and events for the past ten years.

Adam Lawrence

Adam Lawrence is a customer experience expert, comedian and actor with a background in psychology and the global automotive industry. He uses expertise gained in the world of theatre, film and storytelling to help organisations influence and impress their customers and partners. Adam is co-founder of WorkPlayExperience, a service innovation and customer experience company with a unique theatrical toolset. Based in central Europe, they work worldwide with large organisations in telecommunications, financial services, fashion and government. He is also co-initiator of the Global Service Jam – the world’s biggest ever service design event (so far).

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Jaimes Nel

Jaimes started his career on the web in the 90s when that meant doing a little of everything, before combining his interest in making with studying how technologies affect people and society through a Masters in Social ­Research at Goldsmiths. He has since worked on bridging these two perspectives for a wide-range of global clients, including Ebay, Channel4, BBC, Orange, the NHS, Volkswagen and many others. He was Head of ­Research at pioneering service design agency Livework and has since worked with many of London’s leading design and innovation agencies as an independent consultant.

Bas Raijmakers

Dr Bas Raijmakers PhD (RCA) is Reader (Lector) in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven and leads the in-house CRISP research team.

Bas has a background in cultural studies, the internet industry, and interaction design. His main passion is to bring the people for whom we design into design and innovation processes, using visual storytelling. He holds a PhD in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art, in London. He is also co-founder and Creative Director of STBY in London and Amsterdam: a design research consultancy specialised in design research for service innovation. Bas works for clients in the public sector and industry, around the globe.

Jonathan Wray

Jonathan Wray graduated with a BA as a furniture designer from Buckinghamshire University, and went on to pursue a Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven with a thesis entitled An Anxious Imagination that was more concerned with the intangible characteristics of objects and human ­interaction than that of form and function. Jonathan has been exploring these intangible characteristics further in the context of Product Service Systems as a Research Associate at Design Academy Eindhoven as part of the CRISP project CASD. Within CASD he has collaborated with KLM and Technical University Delft, on his project ‘The play’s the thing’ through which he published a paper titled Vessels: Objects as carriers of intangible content in PSS, as part of the Disruptive Interactions conference in ­Lugano, Switzerland. He concluded his research with a speculative object (The Social Compass), which represented how technology can help stimulate improved interactions on long haul flights whilst catering to the diversity of personalities and behaviours of the people on board.

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Glossary Competitive Advantage through Strategic Design (CASD)

Jonathan Wray’s project, ‘The play’s the thing’, is part of CASD. CASD is about achieving effective strategic design thinking that enhances the ­competitive position of Product Service Systems (PSS), its designers and its providers. PSS can help companies achieve competitive advantage. As one of eight CRISP projects, CASD develops the knowledge that design agencies and service providers need to realise effective PSS. Design-­ thinking is central to this knowledge: a creative, user-centered and vision based approach – rather than being technology or marketing driven. ­Design-thinking becomes strategic if it is adopted in the fuzzy front end of innovation where opportunities are identified and ideas are generated, or when it informs strategic decision-making at later stages. Under the ­auspices of CASD, academic partners TU Delft, University of Amsterdam and Design Academy Eindhoven collaborate with creative industry and PSS providers to pilot PSS combinations that are recognisable, legitimate and coherent for customers.

Creative Industry Scientific Programma (CRISP)

The Readership is embedded in CRISP (see crispplatform.nl). CRISP is a Dutch national research programme of more than 60 organisations, in which Design Academy Eindhoven collaborates with the Technical Universities of Delft, Eindhoven and Twente, VU and UvA in Amsterdam and over fifty design companies and service providers in The Netherlands. CRISP is supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. For details about all CRISP projects, see www.crispplatform.nl.

Open Design Spaces

Open Design Spaces is an initiative of the Readership Strategic ­Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven. The team of Research Associates of the Readership works on collaborative projects within CRISP. The Open ­Design Spaces extends this collaboration to students and tutors at the academy to introduce what academic design research entails. These short workshops are a way for students to participate in this research programme. They are a bridge between the Readership in Strategic Creativity and the educational programme of the academy.

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The Readership in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven

The Readership explores how design and creativity can play a strategic role in society and the economy in general, and in service innovation in particular. Academic knowledge is created through designing, within the strong design culture of Design Academy Eindhoven. The results of the programme are used within the educational programme of Design 足Academy Eindhoven by way of Open Design Spaces: a four week design research module for students around a topic related to the research of a Research Associate. Further results are disseminated through public debates, conferences, workshops and publications. You can follow the work via several digital channels. See more details at: www.designacademy.nl/strategiccreativity.

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Colophon The play’s the thing The Readership in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven Editor:

Jonathan Wray

Editorial team: Daniëlle Arets, Ré Dubhthaigh, Bas Raijmakers, Ellen Zoete Writers:

Jaimes Nel, WorkPlayExperience (Adam Lawrence and

Markus Hormess), Robert Ehrencron, Piet Hein Clijsen

Proofreader:

Jane Hardjono

Graphic design: Eric de Haas Printed by:

Lecturis, Eindhoven

Edition:

500

CRISP CASD partners (project leader: Giulia Calabretta):

KLM, Delft University of Technology, Design Academy Eindhoven, Fabrique, FLEX/the INNOVATIONLAB, KVD Reframing, NPK design, Océ Industries, Philips, RMIT University, Scope, SkyTeam, STBY, Studio Dumbar, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Zeeno Guest tutor Open Design Space:

Piet Hein Clijsen Participating students Open Design Space:

Alissa van Asseldonk, Constanze Buckenlei, Michele Degen, Vincent van Dijck, Lisa Hu, Liesje Lokbi, Valerie Overhoff, Maayan Pesach, Shay Raviv, Julian Jay Roux, Brigitte Severin Special thanks to:

Damon Taylor, Economy Class Intercontinental Cabin Crew Panel Images:

p. 39, 57, 58, 66: Maartje van Gestel p. 1, 14, 25: Hudson, K. and Pettifer J., Diamonds in the Sky: A Social History of Air Travel, The Bodley Head & BBC Publications, London, 1981. and: De Vries, L., Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij vlucht KL-50, Logboek van vijftig jaar vliegen, Albert Heijn NV. Uitgave Meijer Pers NV, Amsterdam, 1969.

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Publisher:

Design Academy Eindhoven Emmasingel 14 Eindhoven, The Netherlands www.designacademyeindhoven.nl/strategiccreativity email: opendesignspaces@designacademy.nl ISBN: 9789491400070 Price: 10 euro The Readership in Strategic Creativity, 2013 Reader (Lector): Dr Bas Raijmakers PhD (RCA) Associate Reader (Associate Lector): Drs Daniëlle Arets Visiting Research Fellow: Ré Dubhthaigh MA (RCA) Research Associates: Michelle Baggerman BA, Alessia Cadamuro MDes,

Heather Daam MDes, Maartje van Gestel BA, Susana Camara Leret MDes, Karianne Rygh MDes, Mike Thompson MDes, Jonathan Wray MDes The Readership Strategic Creativity is partly funded within the Creative Industry Scientific Programme (CRISP). CRISP is supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. www.crispplatform.nl

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-­ NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. © 2013 Jonathan Wray et al.

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Designers are no longer merely the producers of goods, but are attempting to design products, services and systems, around complex or wicked problems, and contemplating a new landscape of design. They are becoming strategists working at the front end of innovation processes; and the very notion of what and how a designer operates is becoming increasingly blurred. In an original attempt to make sense of this new strategic design landscape, this project and its attendant publication talks of Strategic Service Design as a well-crafted play, which involves, people, ­ a good plot and fine props.

‘The play’s the thing’, is a project by Jonathan Wray, Research Associate at Design Academy Eindhoven, and part of the CASD project within CRISP (Creative Industry Scientific Programme).

CRISP focuses on Product Service Systems, requiring designers to think and work more broadly in response to large-scale societal challenges. We can no longer separate products, services and people, but need to thread them together strategically, like a carefully constructed piece of theatre. ‘The play’s the thing’ proposes a new perspective to the understanding of what PSS are, and how designers can operate in this strategic role.

This book is part of a series of publications of the Readership in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven. The Readership explores how designers trained at Design Academy Eindhoven can create academic knowledge through design.

Bas Raijmakers PhD (RCA) Reader in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven

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