Touchpoint Vol. 10 No. 2 - Designing the Future

vol 10 no 2 | october 2018 | 18 €

Designing the Future

44 THE FUTURE OF SERVICE DESIGN IN A POST-HUMAN WORLD Sandjar Kozubaev 60 FUTURES THINKING: A MIND-SET, NOT A METHOD Zoë Prosser, Santini Basra 70 HOW

FORESIGHT PRACTICES SUPPORT SERVICE INNOVATION Thalis Laspias

Touchpoint Volume 10 No. 2 October 2018 The Journal of Service Design ISSN 1868-6052

Pictures Unless otherwise stated, the copyrights of all images used for illustration lie with the author(s) of the respective article

Published by Service Design Network

Printing Hundt Druck

Publisher Birgit Mager

Fonts Mercury G2 Apercu

Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes Guest Editors Andrea Fineman Brian Gillespie Alisan Atvur

Service Design Network gGmbH MĂźlheimer Freiheit 56 D-51063 KĂśln Germany www.service-design-network.org

Project Management Cristine Lanzoni

Contact & Advertising Sales Cristine Lanzoni journal@service-design-network.org

Art Direction Jeannette Weber Julia Vukovic

For ordering Touchpoint, please visit www.service-design-network.org

Cover Illustration Sayali Bharambe

f ro m t h e e d i t o r s

Designing the Future

As the pace of technological innovation continues unbroken, the services we use in our day-to-day lives more and more resembles the stuff of science fiction films. Voice-driven assistants who can schedule appointments on our behalf and medical diagnoses carried out with the support of AI are already today’s reality. But each of these developments carry complex design challenges within them. How do we ensure that services based on cuttingedge technology meet not only our traditional requirements for successful services (e.g. that they’re usable and intuitive) but also new ones, such as trustworthiness and transparency?

In this issue of Touchpoint, we focus on what our practice will look like - or should look like - as it moves into the world of tomorrow. From discussions on how artificial intelligence can best be harnessed to improve service experiences (see page 26) to projects aimed at harnessing the power of augmented reality to improve in-store experiences (see page 94), the complex interplay of technological considerations and service experiences are explored in fascinating detail by this issue’s authors. In addition, service designers themselves have turned their foresight techniques on their own profession, postulating what our discipline might look like in the short to medium term (see page 20).

All in all, this issue applies a unique and future-focussed perspective on our discipline that I find very intriguing, and I hope you do too!

Join the ​Touchpoint discussion on Slack!

Jesse Grimes for the editorial board

​Have a q​uestion for ​an author? ​ Want to shar​e your​own perspective with the community? Head over to the #touchpoint channel within the SDN's Community Slack, and take part!

Jesse Grimes, Editor-in-Chief of Touchpoint, has ten years experience as a service designer and consultant. He has worked in London, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf and Sydney and is now based in Amsterdam with Dutch agency Informaat. Jesse is also Vice President of the Service Design Network.

Andrea Fineman is a service designer at Getaround, a San Francisco-based startup that enables people to share their cars with people in their community.

Brian Gillespie is a Boston-based independent strategic design consultant helping his clients and partners design and manage the diverse activities associated with driving business success by design. Brian is a member of the SDN Management Board.

Alisan Atvur is a senior user research lead at Novo Nordisk A/S. He specialises in mixedmethods user research, creative workshop facilitation and new product development.

Birgit Mager, publisher of Touchpoint, is professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD) in Cologne, Germany.

She is founder and director of sedes research at KISD and is co-founder and President of the Service Design Network.

sdn-community.slack.com Not yet a member? Join at bit.ly/SDNSlackNEW

Touchpoint 10-2

3

48 14

Customer experience

Front stage Back stage

Service design

18

2

IMPRINT

3

FROM THE EDITORS

6

NEWS

8

KERRY’S TAKE

8

Designing Future Culture Kerry Bodine

10 CROSS-DISCIPLINE 10 Prototyping for Impact

in Healthcare Boris Divjak

14

4

Human Machine Collaboration: Designing for a New Kind of Relationship Satsuko VanAntwerp, Simon Mhanna

Touchpoint 10-2

20 The Future Faces

of Service Design Tomasz Bienkowski, Beata Bienkowska

26 The Difficult Task

of Orchestrating AI-powered Services Laís de Almeida

31

60

FEATURE: DESIGNING THE FUTURE

Radical Futures: Designing for Fundamental Change Alix Gerber

34 Artificial Intelligence:

A Threat or an Opportunity?

Titta Jylkäs

36 Designing Relationships

with Technologies Which Pass as Humans Gustav Borgefalk

40 Aesthetics of Interaction

between Human and AI Cecilia Lee, Nick de Leon

44 The Future of Service

Design in a Post-Human World Sandjar Kozubaev

48 Speculative Design

and Service Design: A False Dichotomy Antonio Iadarola, Antonio Starnino

54 Introducing DIVE for SMEs

Ricardo Mejia, Alejandro Chitiva, Ties van Bruinessen, Wim Verhoeff 60 Futures Thinking:

A Mind-set, not a Method Zoë Prosser, Santini Basra

c ontents

66 88

94

64 TOOLS AND METHODS 66 Prototyping Spatial

User Experiences Gregor Finger, Isabell Fringer

70 How Foresight Practices

Support Service Innovation Thalis Laspias

74 Aligning Future Vision

in Large and Diverse Organisations Marcela Machuca, Aleksandra Kozawska

78 A Customer Experience-

centric Approach to Service Quality Mauricy Motta-Filho, Doug Cavendish, Luis Alt

84 Designing Better

Services by Designing Access to Information Waris Misbah, Ghadah Gabel

88 Using a Service Ecosystem

to Quickly Grasp Complexity Jesse Grimes

94 Smart Service Design for

a Shanghai Garment Store Dr. Bo Gao, Yingyue Deng, Dr. Kang Zhang

100 Culture-driven Service

Transformation: A Framework Shreya Dhawan

105 PROFILES 105 Lara Penin 108 INSIDE SDN 108 Congratulations to the

Service Design Award 2018 Finalists

Touchpoint 10-2

5

ne ws

LOOKING FORWARD TO A MILESTONE SDGC18

The Service Design Global Conference 2018 has generated huge interest from people worldwide, with both the main programme and Members Event tickets almost sold out. We have been overwhelmed with the response and for this reason we’re determined to deliver

UPCOMING EVENTS BY SDN ACCREDITED TRAINERS

Our network of SDN Accredited Service Design Trainers is constantly growing! Trainings are taking place all around the world. Some of them will also be joining us at SDGC18 in Dublin. Topics range from successful implementation of service design concepts to artificial intelligence, as well as combining service-dominant logic, lean thinking and service 6

Touchpoint 10-2

a great experience through a highly-curated programme, which includes 70 speakers from around the globe and many side events for attendees and the general public.

With the Convention Centre Dublin (CCD) and the Round Room at The Mansion House as our main venues, SDGC18 promises to deliver a great atmosphere to accompany Dublin’s local flavours. We would like to thank

our many sponsors for joining us in bringing this 11th edition of the Service Design Global Conference to life, as well as the local team and volunteers for making it possible. We invite everyone to stay tuned and to follow all our channels to catch up with the latest #SDGC18 news, and after-conference coverage.

design to deliver better services and iterate over time.

If you are looking for training to endow you with expert knowledge and skills within the area of service design, using a professional and state-of-the-art approach, we invite you to check out the upcoming talks and workshops by our SDN Accredited Service Design Trainers at www.service-design-network.org/ headlines/upcoming-events-by-ouraccredited-sd-trainers

If you are interested in advancing your career and strengthening your professional reputation, why not become an SDN Accredited Trainer yourself? The necessary requirements and additional details, as well as a range of unique benefits, can be found at www.service-designnetwork.org/accreditation

SERVICE DESIGN PODCAST: IMPLEMENTING SERVICE DESIGN IN LARGE ORGANISATIONS BY MARC STICKDORN

Our partners at the Service Design Podcast have recently released their 27th podcast episode, and welcomed Marc Stickdorn as their guest. The well-known co-author of This Is Service Design Thinking and This Is Service Design Doing talks about how to implement service design in large organisations. He also shares tips on what you as a service designer can do to have a bigger impact in an organisation, how to learn the language the business speaks, and how to help organisations in achieving their goals while implementing customer centred thinking.

Have a listen at http://bit.ly/2Nv6W5W

ADVERTISE IN TOUCHPOINT

Reach out to an international audience of decision makers and highly qualified professionals, rising interest of future employees. clients and customers! We set up interesting advertising options for you, and SDN members enjoy special discounts. To sponsor the theme of an issue or see your ad and sponsored content published in the next Touchpoint, contact us at journal@service-design-network.org

Join the SDN Community on Slack!

2,950+

particip ants already joined!

The official SDN Community workspace on Slack offers a new community platform for service designers around the globe, with direct community interaction, discussion and knowledge sharing.

Our Slack workspace is open and free to both members of the SDN and the wider service design community. Upon joining, you’ll be able to choose to participate in a range of channels which match your interests: •

Service design in specific sectors, e.g. the public sector and healthcare

•

Case studies, content from Touchpoint, tools and methods and information for those new to service design

•

Events, such as the annual Service Design Global Conferences

•

Chapter-specific discussions – to become more involved in an SDN Chapter near you

•

Studying and teaching service design

•

… and much more!

Join us today at bit.ly/SDNSlackNEW Already signed up?

Visit sdn-community.slack.com and get involved!

Touchpoint 10-2

7

Designing Future Culture While walking across the Millennium Bridge in London earlier this year, I noticed a group of people standing around and looking down curiously at a man who was laying at their feet. My first thought was concern: Is this man alright? Does he need help? But as I got closer, I realised that he was not only fine — he was painting!

I would find out later that the man was Ben Wilson, a.k.a. The Chewing Gum Man. And he’s created hundreds of paintings on this bridge, each on a canvas of spat out and squashed chewing gum.

While the adults in the crowd hovered about him in silence, an audacious five-year-old girl approached and asked the question that was likely on all of our minds: “Why are you doing this?” To which The Chewing Gum Man gently replied, “There are lots of ugly things in this world, like these spots of old, dirty gum. I’m trying to make them a little more beautiful.”

No doubt, he succeeds in this mission. His miniature paintings add bursts of color to the metal bridge and surrounding grey of London.

Some depict tiny action scenes. Some look like crazy multi-colored aliens.

And others have become tributes bearing the names, languages and country flags of onlookers. All along the bridge, as locals hurry from one side to the other, amateur art 8

Touchpoint 10-2

appreciators stop and stoop to admire his many works.

No one asked Ben to do this. In fact, the London police have twice asked him not to do this, by way of arrests in 2005 and 2009 on suspicions of criminal damage.

Changing cultural norms is hard, even when you’re creating something beautiful.

As service designers, we also aim to create beautiful things that add value to people’s lives. And, as the theme for this issue of Touchpoint suggests, we’re increasingly leveraging technology to do so. Not surprisingly, cultural change is hard for us, too. We’ve already begun to feel the strain of social media’s role in shaping elections, the life or death algorithms of self-driving vehicles, and the ethics of technology’s increasing ability to impersonate humans. We feel this strain as our broad societal norms shift — and as people in the organisations developing these services grapple with their daily decisions.

One thing is certain: Cultural considerations will — must — gain importance as we create more services based on social platforms, artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain and whatever other technologies come next.

Service design and culture I’ve often described service design as the envisioning of people’s ideal journeys and the underlying ecosystems that are required to support them. These ecosystems — the people, processes and technology that lay hidden behind the scenes — are the primary feature of service blueprints. And defining the mechanics of service delivery is, in my opinion, one of the key benefits of taking a service design approach.

If the underlying ecosystem is not defined, the quality of the resulting experience will be left to chance.

But now we must go further than simply defining the mechanics.

Sure, we’ve laid out all the new ways that employees and partners need to work, collaborate and communicate. And we’ve determined where technology will intervene to streamline, personalise or influence.

But we must also think about the effect that our services will have on the greater culture in which we live. We must consider whether our services will propel society forward on a positive arc — as many have argued the work of The Chewing Gum Man has — and seek to understand their potential unintended consequences.

k e rr y ’ s ta k e

Can we design our greater societal culture? Hmmm. That’s a good question and fantastic topic for another issue of Touchpoint — or perhaps a PhD dissertation! But what I’m confident we can design are corporate cultures.

What exactly is corporate culture?

In his upcoming book, Great Mondays: How to Design A Company Culture Employees Love, my good friend Josh Levine outlines the six key components of workplace culture: — Purpose: Why an organisation exists beyond making money — Values: Shared beliefs about what’s most important — Behaviours: Choices made by employees, guided by purpose and values — Recognition: Programmes that encourage culture-aligned behaviours — R ituals: Group activities that build and strengthen relationships — Cues: Reminders that help employees stay connected to the future Josh is a proponent of the idea that culture is a system and, as such, is

something that can — and should — be designed. (In fact, he teaches culture design at the California College of the Arts.) But in his book, he also cautions that “culture design isn’t easy because it requires working with others to not only answer the questions, but to put them into action.”

Indeed, in today’s work environment, you can’t dictate how your employees and partners should think and act — and then expect everyone to fall in line. As we’ve seen in recent news, edicts like “Don’t be evil” don’t prevent people from making decisions that feel, well, evil.

Designing corporate culture Fortunately, service designers come equipped with one particular tool (or maybe you’ll call it a mindset) that I believe is central to designing corporate culture: co-creation.

Service designers know that people support what they help to create — and we apply this axiom consistently and effectively when defining the roles, processes and technology systems that are required to support our visions of people’s ideal journeys.

But to ensure that we’re designing services that support the type

of future we want to live in, we also need to apply co-creation to the environment and context in which those roles, processes and technologies are designed and implemented.

First, we need to co-create our organisational purpose and values.

What future do your employees and partners want to create? And why is that important to them? Next, we need to co-create the desired behaviours, recognition, rituals and cues that shape our organisations’ patterns of thinking and working, ensuring that employees and partners willingly support the purpose and values long into the future.

Culture co-creation is the key to ensuring your employees and partners will take it upon themselves to make the world a little more beautiful.

Kerry Bodine is a customer experience expert and the co-author of Outside In. Her research, analysis and opinions appear frequently on sites such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company.

Follow Kerry on Twitter at @kerrybodine.

Touchpoint 10-2

9

Prototyping for Impact in Healthcare Using theories of change to prototype better pathways Pressures for efficiency and savings that drive digital innovation projects in the UK healthcare sector have created an increased focus on short-term goals and a fragmentation of services. Transformation that tackles complex social problems, however, requires a shared, long-term vision. How can healthcare organisations design solutions Boris Divjak is a Senior Strategic Designer at Unboxed where he works with local government, hospitals and other organisations to shape their digital services. He guides teams in using agile and Design Thinking practices to co-create value for organisations and their customers through a handson, collaborative approach.

He was joined by Unboxed colleagues Martyn Evans and Leon Odey-Knight on the project described here. boris.divjak@unboxed.co

10 Touchpoint 10-2

focused on long-term impact when resources are limited?

Measuring the impact of service design has become a hot topic within the service design community in the last year, with an entire issue of Touchpoint dedicated to this discussion in November 2017.

Nonetheless, theoretical frameworks for service evaluation are scarce and are primarily used to evaluate the impact of services that have already been established. This is often of little help to designers during the early stages of innovation, when the aim is to assess proposed service improvements while they are still being developed. Iteratively prototyping and testing new concepts with service users has long been an essential part of the service design process, but these practices are rarely explicitly linked to (or guided by) desired long-term outcomes.

Clearly framing which aspect of a service design concept needs to be evaluated is a challenge, since a service concept involves many different elements

(objects, touchpoints, interactions, etc.) that are interconnected and influence each other. It is simply not possible to prototype an entire service.1 At Unboxed we have adopted an approach that involves developing a theory of change – an explicit model of how a new service concept contributes to intended outcomes – in order to guide prototyping and evaluation in our digital innovation projects.

Theories of change have been used since the 1990s to evaluate development programmes in many different contexts, such as philanthropy and international development.2 Theories of change can be

1 Foglieni, F. et al. (2018) About evaluation in service design: As it is and how it could evolve. In ServDes2018 - Service Design Proof of Concept, 489–498.

2 Weiss, C. H. (1995). Nothing as practical as good theory: Exploring theory-based evaluation for comprehensive community initiatives for children and families. New approaches to evaluating community initiatives: Concepts, methods, and contexts, 1, 65-92.

c ro s s - d i s c i p l i n e

Service improvements

Intermediate outcomes

Long-term outcomes

Increased capacity within existing services Online profile and medical history

Allocated to correct clinic

Faster confirmed diagnosis and treatment

More data provided before first appointment Online questionnaire (for patients)

Fewer unnecessary follow-up appointments

Reduced cost per patient

Tests before appointment

Happier, healthier patients

Theory of change for the rheumatology referrals project, linking proposed service improvements to desired outcomes.

used to guide the design process as well as to evaluate implemented service concepts. One of the main benefits of this approach is that it compels the design team to explicitly articulate assumptions about how a proposed concept might achieve an intended outcome. These assumptions need to be validated through research. This article explains how prototyping can be efficiently used to provide evidence for an emerging theory of change.

In our experience, an outcomes-focused perspective on design and prototyping of new service concepts is particularly relevant for healthcare organisations, which are traditionally cautious towards innovation and often require rigorous evidence of impact before introducing anything new. Unboxed employed a theory of change to design service concepts and develop prototypes in our work with a London hospital. Rheumatology patients referred to the hospital by the primary care services were often not directed to the most appropriate clinic for their first appointment, resulting in a high number of unnecessary follow-up visits. By using the approach

described in this article, we were able to demonstrate that the proposed service improvements could lead to a more efficient referral process.

Identifying key outcomes and mapping the outcomes chain We started developing the theory of change by identifying the desired long-term outcomes. The discussion included key stakeholders from the rheumatology clinic and others involved in delivering the service. There are often tensions between different actors and what they consider to be a good outcome. In the case of our healthcare project, for example, we needed to consider trade-offs between what is desirable by the general public (e.g., better healthcare services) and what is viable for the National Health Service (e.g., within budget restrictions).

After having agreed on key goals for the project, we shifted the discussion towards intermediate outcomes – factors that act as barriers or enablers to the final outcome.

We gained a deep understanding of factors affecting the Touchpoint 10-2

11

referral process through interviews with patients and staff at the clinic. When we felt that both long-term and intermediate outcomes were clearly defined, we used them as inspiration for co-design activities, generating ideas for improvements to the referral pathway.

Throughout this process, we were gradually refining a visual representation of our emerging theory of change. This took the form of an ‘outcomes chain’ that explicitly linked elements through an ‘if … then’ logic, demonstrating how our intended service improvements would lead to intermediate and long-term outcomes.

Assumption: Service improvement

Intermediate outcome

enable patients to patients will be

provide more detailed If we...

information before the first appointment

… then ...

allocated to the correct clinic.

(online questionnaire)

Test: Create questionnaire with a focus on being able to identify patients

Identifying and prioritising assumptions Many of the links in our theory of change were initially based on assumptions and required further validation.

We needed to make these assumptions explicit and identify the ones that represented the biggest risk to the project outcomes.

We talked through the links in our outcomes chain as a team. While examining the emerging theory of change, we asked questions to refine it. Does it make sense? Are there any gaps or missing links in the outcomes chain? Are the proposed service improvements realistic? Giving rationales for causal connections within the outcomes chain helped the team to articulate more specific assumptions.3 We wrote all assumptions down and prioritised them.

First, we looked for assumptions that would have had the biggest negative impact on project outcomes, should they have proven to be invalid. And second, we identified statements that had the least sufficient supporting evidence. This provided a clear focus to plan our prototyping and testing activities.

Prototyping and testing When guided by the theory of change, prototyping is primarily aimed at providing evidence for its underlying assumptions as quickly as possible. In our healthcare example, for instance, we devised simple paper questionnaires and tested them with patients in the waiting room of the rheumatology clinic to see if a questionnaire could provide data of sufficient quality to clinicians. We used the simplest possible design required to conduct a quick test. Only after initial

3 D. H. Taplin et al. (2013). Theory of Change Technical Papers. [Online] Retrieved 6 August 2018 from http://www.actknowledge.org/ resources/documents/ToC-Tech-Papers.pdf

12 Touchpoint 10-2

with specific symptoms. Send link to patients via a text message to see if they would fill it out successfully.

Give responses to clinician for analysis to see if patients can be allocated to the correct clinic.

Example assumption and associated test from the rheumatology referrals project.

positive feedback did we invest more time in developing prototypes that more closely resembled the envisioned digital experience.

When can we say an assumption is validated?

Rigorous quantitative testing is often not viable during the prototyping stage. We did not have access to a large number of patients to test with, and repeating the tests in a variety of contexts would have required more time and resources than we had at our disposal. We should stress that the aim of prototyping at this stage was to provide quick learning to inform the next iteration of the theory of change and further refinement of our proposed service improvements. For this purpose, rich qualitative insights supported by quantitative results with a wide confidence interval (due to a small number of participants) provided satisfactory evidence. Though the evidence may not be sufficient for conclusive validation, it served as an indication that we were on the right track.

Establishing iterative, collaborative working practices In early stages of innovation, learning quickly and iterating often is essential in order to use resources efficiently and mitigate potential risks early. In our example, we used a theory of change to guide this iterative learning process. It worked well with our

c ro s s - d i s c i p l i n e

A patient-centred referral for rheumatology

A patient-centred referral for rheumatology Improved pathway

Diagnostics + Appointment

Appointment only

Patient visits GP

Patient receives info and link to questionnaire

Referral sent to hospital via eRs

Intermediate outcomes

Online questionnaire

Vetting of info from patient and GP on eRs

Patient invited into appropriate pathway (via online booking through eRs)

Questionnaire sent to hospital

More data provided by patients before first appointment

Patients allocated to correct pathway

Alternative pathway (e.g. physiotherapy)

Investigations before first appointment (when needed)

Ensuring availability of equipment

Long-term outcomes Faster confirmed diagnosis and treatment and Fewer unnecessary follow-up appointments

Why does this matter?

Average cost to the healthcare provider:

Number of appointments in rheumatology (per year):

Insights from testing the new pathway with patients (randomised sample):

ÂŁ170.63 per rheumatology appointment

4,058 new patients

In a pilot study 65 percent of patients who received the questionnaire completed it successfully .

14,870 follow-up appointments

“I liked it, it made me feel prepared.

It made me feel like you guys were organised.�

Improved patient experience

Reduced cost per patient

Increased revenue through increased capacity for new patient appointments

Proposed new pathway for the patient referral process

collaborative, agile workflow, as it reinforced a shared understanding of long-term outcomes while providing a point of reference for discussions about where to focus the immediate efforts of the project team. It helped us articulate how the project fits with other initiatives in the hospital that share similar goals and brought key stakeholders together around a shared vision.

Innovation brings about change, and the theory of change should keep evolving as the hospital introduces new improvements to the pathway. In the ever-shifting context of a public service, short learning cycles can be more useful than elaborate long-term impact evaluation programmes. Theories of change provide a bridge between these two worlds, allowing service designers to iteratively evolve their understanding of how a new service concept will lead to intended outcomes and gradually build stronger evidence for impact through prototyping.

In our patient referral project, the theory of change enabled us to collaboratively develop a new pathway with a focus on long-term outcomes that benefit patients, primary care providers, and the hospital we worked with.

It guided our prototyping to provide supporting evidence for key assumptions and build a stronger business case for continued investment in the project.

Touchpoint 10-2 13

Human Machine Collaboration: Designing for a New Kind of Relationship As we shift towards an AI world, service designers have an important role to play in designing a new relationship between humans and computers in the workplace. Service designers will need to conceptualise and design interfaces that are well-suited to translating meaning and enable a true collaboration between Satsuko VanAntwerp is a Solutions Designer at Element AI. She previously co-founded a service design firm, led design research at a software innovation firm, and hosted a monthly meetup on how the practice of design is changing in an AI world. satsuko@element.ai

Simon Mhanna is an Innovation Designer at The Moment. In addition, Simon has been leading conversations on the Future of Work in Canada with the belief that the future is more human. Currently he teaches at The Institute Without Boundaries and is Programs Lead for the Toronto Offsite Design Festival. simon@themoment.is

14 Touchpoint 10-2

humans and AI, in order for this human-machine relationship to thrive into the future.

Growing up, one of our favourite cartoons was The Jetsons. The moving sidewalks and humanoid robot assistants seemed like the ideal future that we wanted to live in. Society has long celebrated machines doing things for us – washing our clothes, cars, dishes and teeth. The machines of the past were not sophisticated. We had to program their every move. With the (re)emergence of machine learning and advances in deep learning, we are seeing AI that can ‘perceive’ and ‘think’ in ways that are not pre-programmed in an “if this then that” format. These advances have opened up a world of possibility.

Suddenly a Jetsons-like world seems not so far off. As we transition towards AI ubiquity, practical questions and concerns are arising. How will AI change our lives and the way we do things? Will it replace humans in the workplace? Or will AI integrate, adapt and participate seamlessly in our complex human systems?

To many, AI seems mysterious, unknown and – unfortunately – threatening. The media perpetuates this reputation by constantly using Terminator imagery to describe AI. Without understanding how AI works or its current limits, it’s easy to get caught up in fearmongering headlines and predictions about a ‘robopocalypse’. It can also feel like a threat to our job security, our livelihood, our sense of work community, and even our sense of importance and identity – spanning multiple levels across Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’. This concern is amplified by the stories we see in TV and movies – Ex-Machina, Westworld, Blade Runner 2049 – that paint pictures of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)1 , or AI that can successfully complete intellectual

1 What is AGI by The Machine Intelligence Research Institute https://intelligence.org/2013/08/11/ what-is-agi/

c ro s s - d i s c i p l i n e

tasks at a human’s level of intelligence. Even though AI is nowhere near the kind of general intelligence that is portrayed in the movies, this framing combined with media coverage reinforces a perceived power imbalance; the sense that AI is all-knowing and coming to replace us.

All of this can leave us feeling defensive, creating little room to think about collaboration or possibility.

The duality between AI replacing workers versus AI augmenting workers has been damaging the relationship between humans

guide and train the tool to handle new situations that the examiner identifies. At the same time, the tool enables the examiner to do a better job than they can do alone. As it improves, the tool frees up time for the examiner to focus on more strategic and rewarding parts of their role, such as prevention and customer interactions.

There is an opportunity for a meaningful humancomputer relationship that is win-win. As we shift towards an AI world, service designers have a role to play, alongside engineers and technologists, to ensure that the interactions and experiences between humans and machines are desirable, human-centred and create positive social outcomes.

and machines for too long. Besides, this debate misses the mark.

Secondary stakeholders Primary stakeholders

The reality is, AI’s abilities are specialised and narrow.

AI is very good at tasks such as performing the complex calculations required to recommend the best courier delivery route to get from a fulfillment centre to various addresses receiving packages, or at performing repetitive tasks such as reviewing medical files to find patterns leading up to a particular diagnosis or condition.

Meanwhile, there are things that humans remain much better at, that we may take for granted, such as drawing information from multiple sources, extrapolating nuance from context, and using emotional intelligence and ‘common sense’. This makes us especially good at things like improvising, negotiating, explaining, teaching, collaborating, making jokes, caring for others and leading others. Combining human and machine capabilities has the potential to amplify our respective strengths. That’s why leveraging AI’s narrow capabilities in the workplace is so attractive.

The human-machine relationship is reciprocal. For example, imagine an AI tool that helps a claims examiner at an insurance companies identify fraudulent claims by flagging potential fraud files early and identifying new fraud patterns. This tool requires a human to monitor,

Partners

The Workplace Stakeholders Map

What does the proliferation of AI tools in the workplace mean for service designers?

AI – the new stakeholder on the map

Service designers often support and facilitate the relationship between users and the service provider through the deployment of technology. A good service Touchpoint 10-2 15

Customer experience

design follows principles around technology such as: “technology should not be the driver but the enabler of a service”, or “technology follows”. It is never forced into the design.

The rise of intelligent technologies is changing the equation. Service designers addressing workplace challenges will need to consider AI as not only a tool, but also as a new stakeholder with its own set of conditions to succeed. AI has the potential to learn and evolve in order to transform our workplace through the automation of tedious tasks, improved engagement with important stakeholders, and providing timely insights and enhanced decision-making.

Therefore, to maximise the benefits of AI, service designers need to start thinking not only about how to use technology to complete tasks, but also how to mentor this intelligent technology to enable workers to focus on the most rewarding aspects of their jobs.

Human-machine collaboration requires two-way communication.

Considering AI as one of the key players in delivering a service is a new paradigm for the service exchange.

Designers will need to build tools that enable all users – AI systems included – to overcome barriers in the system. In addition to data availability, system integration and the ‘socialisation’ of solutions, a major barrier to an AI-enabled service exchange is communication between human and machine.

The need for two-way communication arises when a human is interested in understanding why a machine made a certain prediction or recommendation. The fact that humans and machines process the world differently complicates communication and collaboration.

Two-way communication between workers and machines is a key interaction to enable human-machine collaboration and to ensure that AI tools are user-friendly.

16 Touchpoint 10-2

Front stage Back stage

Service design

Human-AI collaboration based on the service design ‘stage theory’2

Machine-to-Human

When you or I look at an image of a cat, we may see furry ears, a tail and whiskers, whereas a machine sees clusters of pixels. In order for an AI to explain in terms that we understand why it classified an image as a cat, the machine must first know our mental model of a cat (having furry ears, tail and whiskers), and apply these labels against its own perception of what makes up a cat (a certain arrangement of clusters of pixels).

If the machine were to simply provide us with the causal chain of calculations (i.e. the machine’s language) that led to the output “cat”, it would not be a useful explanation. There are millions of variables, each with their own weight, that go into any given AI output.

An additional layer of analysis – a translation – is required to put the explanation into terms that are understandable to humans.

Instead of binary yes-or-no outputs, or complex chains of calculations, service design can enable a more nuanced exchange between the machine and the worker, thereby enabling the worker and the AI to work together more harmoniously. Highlighting the most important variables considered by the algorithm, visualising the key

2 The Theory by Practical Service Design https://blog. practicalservicedesign.com/demystifying-service-design-part-156be3322d070

c ro s s - d i s c i p l i n e

decision-making points and patterns, displaying the level of confidence (i.e. accuracy, precision and recall scores3) in the proposed output, or even ‘chunking’ the output into more manageable deliverables, may be features that future interfaces consider for a smoother handover between human workers and AI tools.

Human-to-Machine

Likewise, humans will require ways to feed information into AI models to teach those models to become better over time (such as training an insurance fraud detector to improve its alerts and predictions over time) and in order to co-produce outputs. For example, Waze, the route-mapping app, finds the fastest route using both its algorithms as well as other users’ real-time inputs about accidents and other traffic disruptions.

Explanations are hard enough between humans, let alone in human-to-machine cases. Our language is often context-specific, fuzzy and imprecise. For example, the concept of a “small town” would vary widely between someone who grew up in a sparsely populated country such as Canada, compared to someone who grew up in a country like China, where a town can have a population of three million. When speaking with other humans, we ask for clarification and we make inferences based on what we already know about the conversation and context, as well as about the person we’re speaking with.

Despite the fuzziness of the language, humans manage to have meaningful conversations with one another.

Service designers will need to think-through and design interfaces that are suited to translating meaning between humans and AI. These interfaces will need to create the conditions for humans to provide consistent, clear and accurate inputs that set the machine up for success. This will mean taking into consideration things such as the current cognitive load of the human worker while providing inputs, and the different ways humans express meaning (do workers have varying language

or mental models to describe the same phenomena?).

Getting these elements right will require early and frequent usability testing throughout the development process of the AI tools.

A new kind of relationship

There is a current opportunity to develop a new collective intelligence and build human-machine systems that can sense, analyse and act collaboratively. This new collaboration creates greater efficiency and effectiveness than would be possible without the other, by pairing the complementary aspects of human cognition and empathy with AI abilities.

As AI makes its way from research labs to workplaces, the teams building AI tools will require support from service designers to facilitate the interactions, experience, and relationships between humans and machines.

For this human-machine relationship to expand and thrive in the future, it will be essential for service designers to immerse themselves in the possibilities of the technology, and apply human-centred methodologies towards facilitating a symbiotic relationship in which machine and human systems can build upon one another, elevating the potential of both parties to new heights.

3 Accuracy, Precision, Recall or F1? by Towards Data Science https:// towardsdatascience.com/accuracy-precision-recall-or-f1331fb37c5cb9

Touchpoint 10-2 17

f e at u re

Designing the Future

The Future Faces of Service Design The future of service design has become a trendy topic in the service design community worldwide. Recognising the scarcity of evidence-based analysis of this topic, we applied foresight tools to explore four alternative scenarios for the development of service design in the coming years.

Tomasz Bienkowski is founder and Lead Service Designer at Innovation Titans, a service design consultancy operating in Belgium and Poland. He is also co-founder and representative of the SDN Poland Chapter, and a member of the SDN Belgium Chapter. He is finalising his MBA studies in Service Innovation and Design at Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Finland.

Beata Bienkowska is cofounder of the SDN Poland Chapter and a member of the SDN Belgium Chapter, and is also finalising her MBA studies in Service Innovation and Design at Laurea University of Applied Sciences in Finland.

She has more than ten years of professional experience in the public sector and advises at Innovation Titans.

20 Touchpoint 10-2

Will service design evolve to a new phase in the coming years? What will be the new face of service design? Which drivers of change will be crucial in determining its ‘new reality’: advancing digitalisation, the development of AI or organisational changes? Are there any weak signals1 providing insights into the direction of service design development? With all these (and many other) relevant questions stimulated by a broad discussion in different circles of service designers (i.e. evolution of service design was the main theme of the 2018 SDN conference in Finland), we decided to embark on a futures thinking2 study.

During the research process, we scanned the horizon3 to identify the latest weak signals, trends and megatrends related to service design. Specifically, we analysed a wide range of event recordings, reports, magazines, summaries and other forms of web content. Based on the analysis of the collected inputs, we developed a set of four alternative scenarios for service design development.

While these alternative futures were developed while looking at the short- to medium-term maturity horizon, several manifestations4 of these developments are already present, though not yet evenly distributed. We differentiated the four futures using the ‘Impact/Probability’ matrix: trends were scored based on their potential impact, and on their likelihood of occurring. We focused on the key trends within a set of few selected megatrends, including development of service design

1 Weak signals are first and seemingly negligible when occurring events that hint to the emergence of potentially important future change. Can be understood as exhibits of future trends.

2 Futures thinking is a systematic approach to exploration of alternative, possible future changes. Synonym to foresight, futures studies and futurology.

3 Horizon scanning is a systematic research of information to identify key areas of change that should have significant impact on development of the future.

4 Manifestations are exhibits, patterns representing existing trends; not to be misunderstood with trend drivers.

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

as a discipline, organisational changes, development of AI and high tech, data protection, and the changing nature of work. This context served as a basis to derive the main characteristics of each scenario, identifying different possible pathways of the development of service design in the short- to medium-term.

organisations need service design more than ever, and at the same time they are more open to service design in general. Service designers push the organisations towards even greater innovation and creativity. In-house service design becomes more prevalent globally and across sectors.

Nature of work

The four scenarios 1. Human vs. Hybrid Face (High Probability, High Impact) Main characteristics: service designers equipped with hybrid skills in high demand, more human-centred services, organisations embracing the mind-set of start-ups.

Market outlook

Awareness of service design – and the disruption it brings about – increases in organisations, including in the public sector and in where service design was unknown just a few years ago. This situation creates a dream opportunity for service design agencies; they do not have to rely heavily on the largest sectors, such as finance, to remain afloat. Projects, teams and budgets are scaled upwards. More challenging and wicked problems are tackled. Benchmarks and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are established to track results against standards and competition. New organisations and forms of collaboration between service designers are developed to enhance professionalism.

Entrepreneurial and skilled service designers increasingly choose self-employment not only to adapt to market changes but also to have an open window to engage in challenging projects in different parts of the world, in both physical and online settings. The latter situation – in which work is only carried out remotely – gains in popularity and becomes prevalent. With an everincreasing demand for service design as a discipline, it becomes diffused at a larger scale and reaches new parts of the world. As a result, many in-house teams and design agencies find it increasingly difficult to employ skilled service designers.

Knowledge and skills

“Hybrid designers” combining tech and user research skills are in ever-increasing demand. The rapid development of user research skills has eclipsed the pens and Post-its phase; mobile ethnography, visual research and online recruitment are becoming a standard. Also, technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality are enhancing service design in everyday work.

Artificial Intelligence

Service design as a discipline

Alternative service design tools and methods are developed and used to support design implementation.

Experiments with alternative approaches to managing design projects are conducted. More specifically, agile methods are implemented for ongoing in-house service design.

Organisational changes

Future organisations embrace the mindset of start-ups, having fewer formal structures, are becoming more agile, inclusive and reliant on project-based contracts. Such

Concerns related to the malevolent development of artificial intelligence5 and ‘unfair’ algorithms eventually lead to investigations and strict government regulations.

Not all service designers stay ethically grounded when they design algorithm-based platforms or cocreate experiences which use bots. The service design community revisits discussions about the ethics of service design and the role of service designer, focussing on the design of “even more human-centred services”.

5 It is debated that if AI develops exponentially and uncontrollably, then it may cause or want to cause harm to humans.

Touchpoint 10-2 21

The use of gamification and behavioural design is reconsidered; manipulation and limitations of freedom of choice are cited as concerns.

High-tech

The further potential of advanced technologies, such as voice assistance, biometrics, image recognition and volumetric video are developed by engineers. Service designers assist in making these technologies useful and ‘human’, and support the development of new business models. To enhance the work of service designers with advanced technologies, specialised design tools and methods are developed.

Data protection

The pervasiveness of IoT technologies, as well as new data breaches and the manipulative design of privacy dashboards by major online platforms lead to a revision of data protection regulations (such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe), and an enforcement of new data protection policies. Service designers who rely on user data are faced with limited access to information, what significantly challenges their ability to deliver targeted, personalised design solutions.

2. Digital Face (High Probability, Low Impact) Main characteristics: Digital transformation as the core of service designer's tasks, designing the offline world of experiences in fashion, AI taking over from service designers the most tiresome tasks.

Market outlook

With an increasing demand for service design projects across the sectors, there are simply not enough professionals to satisfy demand. Although organisations become more conscious of the need to address societal challenges and include them in strategic planning, their main focus remains on commercial projects and thus the share of projects conducted in the social sphere is a far cry from what’s needed.

Nature of work

Exclusive and flexible access to service designer’s skills and knowledge is more important than his or her physical presence over the duration of a project. Lead service designers facilitate dispersed teams in different parts of the world, with increasingly better service design, research and communication tools.

Digital

Selected research information is being clustered to recognise patterns behind current and potential future trends.

22 Touchpoint 10-2

Service designers equipped with business acumen and knowledge of social sciences help digital-focused organisations remain customer-centred and stay ahead of competition. Moreover, they help policy-makers design overarching policies that guide digitalisation of societies

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

and economies. This involves both the identification of forward-looking challenges and opportunities related to digital transformation, as well as prototyping and testing solutions. Importantly, through collaborative and multidisciplinary approaches, service designers help stakeholders to understand the scope of the digital revolution and make pro-active decisions to take full advantage of the change.

Offline

Service designers focused on creating offline experiences are not in the same demand as digital experts, but owing to their genuine focus on human needs and originality they find their own niche. Even if customers tend to turn to the digital world to shop, they still seek the offline world of experiences. The increasing focus on the value of these experiences – coming from trends such as “switching off” and “coming back to nature” – helps to maintain the traditional segment of services. It creates a demand for service designers who assist bookstores to flourish once again, creating multi-sensory store experiences and authentic, offline premium services.

Artificial Intelligence

Thanks to the developments of AI, some tiresome tasks of service designers are automated and significantly reduced. As a result, service designers can focus on their core responsibilities and perform facilitation, critical thinking and problem-solving. Because these unique skills are highly sought-after, the value of service designers’ time increases.

Education

Increased demand for design, including service design and Design Thinking – which become even more incorporated in academia – is grasped by educators and transformed into new educational offerings. With a multitude of courses on the market, the need for professional and highly-regarded certification remains high. Various communities of ‘service design thinkers’ on the national and global level anticipate this process and create or further expand the certification offering.

3. Blended Face (Low Probability, High Impact) Main characteristics: AI forcefully stepping into the shoes of a service designer, service design embraced by digital, expansion of systems thinking-based service design.

Artificial Intelligence

AI takes over design functions and responsibilities in a rapid manner, including in the area of service design.

Today, for example, multiple advanced research and web design bots already are in operation. The role of service designer is reduced but still irreplaceable when it comes to a wide range of human-specific capabilities, including facilitation, critical thinking and emotional intelligence.

Deceptive competition

Service design agencies become nearly indistinguishable from digital and software ones. This is a result of the digital and software agencies widening their services to include research and development to support clients in the front-end of innovation. Some agencies even provide end-to-end service design. Corporations, which acquired service design agencies in recent years, further integrate service design capabilities, processes and resources into their practices and stop referring to these as ‘service design’. At the same time, service design becomes dominated by the customer experience and Design Thinking professions, which attract greater attention.

Consequently, after being diluted in the march towards digitalisation, service design disappears as a distinct discipline.

Service design as a discipline

Service design becomes heavily influenced by systems thinking and a ‘systems thinking-based’ approach becomes standard. Service designers’ attention shifts away from commercial to social projects, in which they solve wicked societal challenges at scale. Social Progress Index and Social Return on Investment indicators are used while planning and evaluating service design interventions.

Touchpoint 10-2 23

substantially different from ‘creative agencies’. They must succumb to the norms and work face-to-face all (work-) week long.

Artificial Intelligence

AI doesn’t develop at the expected pace. It remains highly specialised and reliant on pre-programmed solutions which are incapable of adapting to novel situations.

Technological challenges related to the development of human aspects of AI, such as experiencing and understanding human emotions and the development of creative (novel and useful) ideas, are not yet met. As result, service design work remains relatively unaffected.

High-tech

While some of the current emerging technologies, including virtual and augmented reality come to fruition, service designers find it challenging to reap the benefits from these advances in their day-to-day work. Their use is limited to major agencies, which invest in the development of technology-specific skills.

‘Impact / Probability’ matrix helps to develop four alternative future scenarios fast and without prejudice toward any of them.

4. Corporate Animal Face (Low Probability, Low Impact) Main characteristics: service designer embedded in physical environment, service designers not realising the potential of high-tech, AI having very limited impact on service design.

Nature of work

Although, the research shows that working from home increases happiness and productivity, not all companies are willing to invest in the transition needed to reap the benefits of such flexible working. Service design becomes more embedded in organisations, and more service designers find themselves working in environments 24 Touchpoint 10-2

Concluding remarks We acknowledge that while some aspects of scenarios described above are already present in certain countries/ sectors/organisations, some are just over the horizon, and others might not materialise at all. Regardless, we hope that the possible pathways we’ve identified for the next years will serve as a starting point for further analysis, contributing to the development of service design as a discipline and practice. With this in mind, we intend to further explore them in the coming months.

We plan to add new, fresh signals, including ones coming from interviews with thought leaders. We also intend to explore the implications of observed changes in greater detail, create narrative scenarios and ideate on possible solutions to address the issues that are uncovered.

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

the service design award annual

Softback 168 pages 190 x 255 mm 4-colour litho Designed by the SDN with love

About the Service Design Award

J. Margus Klaar

8

When we started the award, there was a fair amount of scepticism that it would take off. There have been other service design awards around the world over the years, and many of them have floundered. Sometimes, the idea can be right but the timing wrong. Or the organisation wrong.

But for the Service Design Award, both the timing and organisation were finally right.

be presented. This is where the judging gets tricky: How do you balance the fact that quantitative data is unavailable with the need for proof of impact? The experience of the jury obviously plays a role here, as well as the jury meetings where these projects are discussed back and forth in sometimes too much detail. This is also where the client endorsements are important, because we can contact the organisation directly, to verify the claims. Sometimes, even the time between the entry date and the jury meetings provides enough time to give more ‘meat on the bone’ than could initially be submitted.

The founding thought behind the Award was to create a template for defining what is good service design. After three years, it is still a being refined, but most of the principles that we put in place for the first year’s jury work, are actually still current and relevant. And by providing the framework for submitting entries, the poster for the exhibition, and the visualisation requirement, we are slowly building up a case file of excellence in service design, that can serve as reference and proof of concept, for organisations still sceptical about putting design at the core of business strategy.

The award evolves.

In New York 2015, there were awards for four winners across commercial and nonprofit / public sector categories. In 2016 in Amsterdam we again awarded four winners and introduced the student category.

In 2017 in Madrid, we saw one winner in commercial and two each in the non-profit / public sector and student categories.

The criteria for entries are lengthy, but the most important one is easily summed up: Provide proof of how service design impacted the results. This is what is always in the back of the judges’ minds when they are reviewing entries.

Can you draw a line between the service design work done, the insights gathered and the results delivered, that isn’t just a list of activities, but a clear and demonstrable cause-and-effect?

Jury work overall, is time consuming. Reading through 5—10 pages of text with full concentration is taxing. Doing it for dozens of entries means that different jury members will quite naturally focus on different aspects of the project.

Lots of jury meetings are needed to discuss the projects one-by-one, so that the decisions made about the shortlist

When the criteria for the entries were drawn up for the first time, there was obviously an enthusiasm for both qualitative and quantitative data. But quantitative data takes time to accumulate, and in many projects that were submitted, only qualitative and anecdotal evidence can

9

66

winner

Design In Schools Australia – A Design and Education Collaboration In 2015, Design Managers Australia (DMA) was approached by Macquarie Primary School in Canberra, Australia, to tackle a ‘dangerous’ school car park. An immediate partnership was formed between two disciplines (education and service design), and between two Company organisations (the school and DMA). The resulting Design Managers Australia (DMA) programme, ‘Design In Schools’, established 18 elevenClient Macquarie Primary year olds as a formal service design team. The process School Country was built around the creation of six structured design Australia modules with a launch of the rebuilt car park in October 2016. The project had real design outcomes (an improved car park experience), methodology outcomes (the development of a reusable methodology) and a lasting impact on both teachers in the school and designers from DMA, who have evolved their own practice.

non-profit / public sector 67

Order your copy at www.service-design-network.org/books-and-reports/

UK

60

Introduction and Objectives The objective was to develop the company’s emerging user-centred design process, integrate a future forecasting methodology, and provide strategic design directions with future service proposals for 2025. The success of the project resulted in a new industryacademic, collaborative educational model, which GSA has implemented into other Undergraduate Product Design degree courses.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is a UK centred bank with an international customer base of over 30 million people. Following the 2008 bailout, RBS recognised the challenge of rebuilding public trust, and subsequently established a stronger focus on customer centred design to improve customer satisfaction. RBS briefed the Master of European (MEDes) student and new graduate team at GSA to explore the behaviour and attitudes of future customers aged 16-25 towards banking over the next 10 years and beyond. The collaboration enhanced the RBS team’s understanding of millenials’ attitudes to finance, as well as enriched their understanding of user-centred design and brand strategy.

Process The GSA team researched current and emerging disruptions in the field of banking and Generation Y. These were documented as visual communication and working tools called STEP cards (Social, Technological, Economic and Political trends). These STEP cards created an evidence-based approach to future forecasting by introducing a red thread for each step of the project from research to final outputs. This will enable RBS to pivot and work pre-emptively, as the trends are adopted and evolve over the next decade.

Tools and methods designed for millennial customers in 2025 were co-created with the RBS design team through a series of collaborative workshops at GSA studios and RBS Headquarters in Edinburgh. To build on the desk research, the students undertook 43 interviews with members of Generation Y. A persona creation method called ‘tribes and chiefs’ was developed, enabling the clustering of similar behaviours into ‘tribes’, for each of which there was a ‘chief’ persona - the archetypal and lead user for that group.

These 12 chiefs represented the wide range of RBS’s future customers and represented their outlook

towards four domain areas: New values, safety & security, data and saving & spending.

A conceptual world context for 2025 was visualised based on the trend research. Future users’ journey narratives were developed by combining the tribes and the future world. Narratives were visualised then used to communicate and test strategic directions for RBS. Output The future world context of 2025 is used regularly in RBS projects, allowing the design team to take a broader view of external factors when considering design directions and solutions. Based on these outputs, the students developed service concepts and proposed new values for RBS in 2025, which were tested with 40 Generation Y users through simulations, co-creation workshops, provotypes (provocative prototype) and provocative scenarios. A portfolio of qualitative research and design recommendations was developed based on this user testing.

The tested outcomes have since been used to provide in-depth user research at RBS – encouraging the RBS teams to stretch their thinking, explore beyond the usual bank project timelines and open up new perspectives on customer needs.

Impact Benefits for RBS and their customers The GSA team developed a bespoke terminology to support communication of future-focused outputs, which in turn helped shape the emerging RBS design approach. The project has given the RBS design team success stories to advocate design across the organisation. It was used as an example of good design practice in the Service Design Foundation course that the RBS design team developed and delivered to over 250 colleagues. This introduced the project to employees on all levels; designers, product managers, operational teams, project management teams and technology partners.

“The project is contributing to a cumulative positive effect on customers through the development of solutions that are much more in tune with their needs and concerns than has been the case in the past.” — Brian Cooper, RBS UX Design Manager, May 2017

commercial-student collaboration

Price: 39€ plus shipping SDN Members receive a special 10% discount.

A team consisting of Master of European Design students and new graduate designers from The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) partnered with the new Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) design team for four months. The student team developed the company’s emerging user-centred Student Team design process and integrated a future forecasting Eloise Smith-Foster, Aleksandra Kozawska, methodology. They also conducted in-depth user research Rosie Trudgen, Lizzie Abernethy, Will Brown, into Generation Y, designed service concepts, futureJosefine Leonhardt, Robyn Johnston, Amber oriented ‘tribes’ and a ‘future world context’ — outcomes Jones, Ottavia Pasta, Ole Thomas Tørresen, that continue to impact the design approach of RBS. Josh Woolliscroft and Struan Wood The success of the project resulted in an innovative, University The Glasgow industry-academic educational model, which the GSA School of Art Client included as part of the syllabus for a number of courses The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) within the Design Department.

Country

finalist

Future Bank 2025 – According to Generation Y

61

#servicedesignawardannual #servicedesignaward

It's here – the very first edition of the Service Design Award Annual. This beautifully designed book is a celebration of the very best in service design and delivery, with stories from finalists and winners from the first three years of the award as full, illustrated case studies, demonstrating ‘what good looks like’.

See how the best in our field are pushing the boundaries of service design.

Hear from the judges on how they approached the challenge of decision-making.

Be inspired by outstanding projects from both the commercial and public sectors, delivering impact in a wide range of categories and across the world.

Touchpoint 10-2 25

The Difficult Task of Orchestrating AI-powered Services Without good user-centred design approaches, AI technologies will most likely struggle to be integrated into complex service industries such as healthcare and travel. The challenge of the future will become how to design authentic experiences within these service contexts.

Laís de Almeida is currently Service Designer at DeepMind Health. Laís specialises in designing for healthcare services. With a Service Design MA from the Royal College of Art, her previous experience includes service design projects for the NHS and for Borough Councils, and co-founding a ‘tech for good’ start-up using machine learning for the private rental sector.

26 Touchpoint 10-2

Applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) — computer systems able to make sense of complex data and perform tasks that require a level of cognition comparable to human intelligence — are becoming more common in everyday consumer products. They are also slowly starting to hit the service delivery landscape, in areas as diverse as hospitality, healthcare and tourism, where the stakes and complexity are higher. This is especially the case in the healthcare industry, where, in January 2017, the United States’ Food & Drug Administration for the first time approved an AI-powered model.

Developed by Arterys to be used in clinical settings, it is a cloud-based imaging software that detects heart problems. But how will AI technologies be successfully deployed if they are not coupled with a deep understanding of the user and the context the user operates in?

Success of AI applications will hinge on user understanding A study carried out by researchers at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University attributed the failure to successfully deploy clinical decision support tools that use machine learning technology into the clinical context to a lack of understanding and appreciation for clinicians’ workflows.

The researchers encountered resistance from clinicians due to a lack of trust or a lack of perceived need for the technology.1 These sentiments are not surprising for two reasons. Firstly, doctors and nurses value evidence and are legally liable for patient care, meaning ‘black box’ models — systems that do not explain their internal

1 Yang, Qian & Zimmerman, John & Steinfeld, Aaron & Carey, Lisa & Antaki, James. (2016). “Investigating the Heart Pump Implant Decision Process: Opportunities for Decision Support Tools to Help”.

ACM transactions on computer-human interaction: a publication of the Association for Computing Machinery. 10.1145/2858036.2858373.

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

workings — are difficult for clinicians to interpret, scrutinise, and, ultimately, trust. Secondly, when new machine learning technology is deployed to accomplish tasks that people feel they can and should do themselves, users can quickly discredit the power of the model.

These two reasons are further explained below.

Credit: Fábio Salvador

Black box models don’t inspire trust The CMU research demonstrated how clinicians feel uncomfortable about predictions suggested by models until they understand what contributes to that model’s output. Doctors are trained in evidence-based practice, an approach to clinical practice whereby decisions around the management of specific patient groups and conditions are based on validated research. Doctors also have a medico-legal responsibility for patient care decisions and can be held liable for adverse events. These reasons may explain why clinicians find it difficult to trust algorithms that either don't explain their logic, or that haven't been peer-reviewed in established journals.

There are different ways in which machine learning models can be trained, and often the different architectures of the neural networks used in constructing these models can result in outputs that are difficult to explain because users cannot clearly identify what components the model is paying attention to in order to derive its conclusions. For example, if one were to train a machine learning model to identify airplanes in a picture, it is possible that it wouldn’t identify an airplane on the tarmac at the airport if trained only with pictures of airplanes in the air. The model may be associating the label ‘airplane’ with the blue sky background instead of the airplane’s shape, which is an example of a case where training data is not representative of, or considerate of, nuances in meaning.

The context in which an item appears can determine whether AI successfully recognises it.

User experience disciplines often discuss how to be transparent with the user in order to drive better experiences. The complexity of how some machine learning models are trained, the data used, and the weight given to the model’s various components may pose challenges to designers in how to present the user Touchpoint 10-2 27

with the right balance between concise, accessible explanations and more in-depth information. Kizilcec explored the question around how much transparency is needed to build trust among users in his study How Much Information?. He demonstrated how too little or too much transparency can have negative effects on user trust in an education case study. When students received their final mark on an essay, he tested their trust in the score by providing either no explanation for the grade, some explanation, or an in-depth explanation. He found that when the essay’s assessment model contradicted the student’s expectation of their essays’ final grading, or they were not given enough justification, they mistrusted the system. Similarly, when they received an extensive breakdown of metrics, they also lost trust.2 The ‘explainability’ of machine learning systems and algorithms is important not only for the end user’s experience, but also for helping developers and designers to spot problems with the inputs and/or outputs of the model. It is considered best practice to scrutinise the output of models to interpret whether it is both appropriate and expected. Often, the data used to train the model has intrinsic bias from the imperfect real world that could lead to unfair outcomes. ProPublica carried out a study on the reoffending risk assessment scores calculated by the COMPAS algorithm, a software tool used by some U.S. states’ judicial systems to inform sentencing. An explanation of the algorithm is not available, and COMPAS proved to be unreliable, with only 20 percent accuracy in predicting reoffending rates in violent crimes, and 61 percent accuracy across all crime types, for the period of two years analysed.

On top of its inaccurate predictions, the algorithm was also found to be unfairly biased, because it scored black

2 Kizilcec, René F. (2016). “How Much Information? Effects of Transparency on Trust in an Algorithmic Interface”. ACM. 10.1145/2858036.2858402 3 Angwin, Julia & Larson, Jeff & Mattu, Surya & Kirchner, Lauren. (2016).

“Machine Bias: There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks”. ProPublica. Retrieved July 26, 2018, from https://www.propublica.org/article/machinebias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing

28 Touchpoint 10-2

defendants as having a risk rated as double that of white defendants.3 Aggregated datasets do not often allow the nuance of individual experience to influence decisionmaking, lumping individuals into wider categories with potentially unfair consequences.

As noted, the output of a machine learning model can be the result of associations that aren’t expected.

Lipton, in his paper The Mythos of Model Interpretability, describes a research example of a model, trained to identify patients with pneumonia at higher risk of mortality in hospital, that wrongly identified patients with history of asthma as a lower risk group. However, the model did not consider that clinicians actually follow additional treatment protocols for pneumonia patients with a history of other respiratory problems, who are at a higher risk of dying from pneumonia. Had this model been deployed to clinical settings without oversight, it could have resulted in preventable deaths.4 This demonstrates the importance of understanding the context in which the users operate.

Augment user abilities — don’t replace Returning to the CMU study findings, quick user scepticism of the usefulness of machine learning models is common when users feel they could, and/or should, do the task themselves. This exemplifies a common behaviour called the ‘AI effect’, in which people discredit the ‘intelligence’ of machine learning results. Would users be more receptive to the technology if this provided an insight that the user couldn’t otherwise have considered but can now do something about? One may expect that those moments where the technology could highlight results that aren’t obvious would be the ones that would drive real user value.

Above all, technology needs to fit in to ensure that it will be adopted. Patient care in hospitals often follows processes that respect a specific structure based on role, seniority and responsibilities. Introducing technology into this system needs to respect those same structures.

4 Lipton, Zachary C. (2016). “The Mythos of Model Interpretability”. eprint arXiv:1606.03490

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

Where does service design come in?

Service design choreographs processes, props and people, and how these interact sequentially over time, to co-design the experience with the user as a focal point. However, if we speculate ways in which AI technology could flood the service landscape, in realms from health to hospitality, it is possible that the user would be able to trigger an infinite number of interactions when different components of a

5 Holbrook, Jess & Lovejoy, Josh. (2017). “Human-Centered Machine Learning: 7 steps to stay focused on the user when designing with ML”.

Google Design Medium Blog. Retrieved July 23, 2018, from https://medium.com/google-design/human-centered-machinelearning-a770d10562cd

service are powered by this technology. For example, when a user interacts with an AI-powered assistant, a designer may not be able to predict all of the questions a user may ask, but they will have to develop a product that responds nonetheless. How will a service designer blueprint the details of so many possible variants of an interaction?

Credit: Fábio Salvador

User-centred design is essential to accomplishing this in hospital settings. This is being demonstrated by projects such as the development of a computerised decisionsupport system to administer complex medications to children in paediatric intensive care units, developed by the Helix Centre, and the implementation of non-faceto-face consultations used when patient examination is considered unnecessary, developed by the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation. In the future, the most successful applications of machine learning models will probably showcase a deep, evidence-based understanding of the user needs and context, and augment users’ abilities rather than attempting to replace them. This is an idea broadly accepted as an ‘Augmented Human Intelligence’ (AHI) approach to AI, and it might help allay scepticism and resistance toward the technology.

Holbrook et al suggest that designers should use the machine learning ‘confusion matrix’ to weight the costs to the user between ‘precision and recall’. 5 The authors demonstrate how designers already have a great role to play in the development of consumer products by using user insights to weight the benefit or risk of showing more false positives or omitting some false negatives when fine tuning the application of the machine learning model (based on ‘precision and recall’). Taking isolated user insights into the full context of the user’s workflow will be the next step to design AI into complex systems.

Orchestrating AI-powered services

If we use the metaphor of an orchestra, service designers are the people who have to think about how the piano will work with the flute or the violin, and what the audience’s overall experience through the whole piece will be. AI poses a challenge to designers by introducing an almost infinite number of possible variations in interactions, making it difficult for the designer to forecast and plan for the end user’s experience. Imagine not knowing when the piano will play a crescendo and not knowing if it could clash with the flute’s diminuendo.

In order to evolve, the service design industry may have to create new tools that enable us to think of services in a more modular way, which may break the concept of sequential experiences that are currently core to the field.

‘Design systems’ are already a rising trend in UI design to keep up with the rapid development cycles of Touchpoint 10-2 29

What will happen to service authenticity?

At Google’s PAIR UX Symposium in March 2018, Azeem Azhar during his talk The Future of Work and Artisanal Cheese introduced the idea that AI will reduce human error in the long run, but that human error is often what endows an experience with authenticity. He speculated that, with the rise of AI, such ‘authentic’ experiences will become scarce, rare and expensive. The ideas introduced in this essay demonstrate that the modularity of AIpowered services has the potential of ‘designing out’ human error, but can also lead to ‘mass customisation’ of services.

For some services such as those in healthcare, the reduction of human error will have a very positive impact. A 2016 Johns Hopkins University study found that 250,000 people die each year in the U.S. due to avoidable medical errors, which is higher than chronic 30 Touchpoint 10-2

Credit: Fábio Salvador

agile digital product delivery. These are also incredibly powerful to enable personalised content for the user in real-time whilst guaranteeing an experience that respects what the designer initially intended.

Will we see a similar trend in UX and service design?

This may be uncharted territory but will we be able to design isolated principles that can materialise in realtime when interacting with users? We may need to create tools that enable us to design principles into service components. For example, we may design principles for tone of voice and blueprint the building blocks to services in a modular way, enabling them to come to life at typical service moments, such as providing assistance, welcoming the user, or apologising for a failure. Designers will need tools to stress test whether the modules can be agnostic of sequence in which the user encounters those interactions. UX and service designers may also have to work closely with research scientists and engineers to bake into production models those components that make up a good user experience through products and services, ensuring that the user will never find a dead end and, more importantly, that the service will be consistent throughout.

AI has the potential to lead to ‘design out’ human error, and lead to the mass customisation of services.

respiratory disease. This makes it the third leading cause of death in the country, according to the annual list published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Implementing technology that aims to reduce human errors could ultimately reduce in-hospital mortality. However, in other service industries, such as hospitality or tourism, the truly memorable experiences are often the ones that feel authentically unique – even when they have flaws or errors attributable to humans.

The most unique experiences – those that would be more difficult to replicate – are likely to be the stories that, for example, a tourist will choose to tell co-workers about once back from holidays.

‘Mass customisation’ may lead to an elimination of serendipity within experiences and could present a challenge in creating authentic, genuine and unique experiences that truly delight the end user. Designers still have a way to go when designing AI technologies, and it will be interesting to see what the best service design examples powered by AI will be in the years to come.

How will designers create truly empathic AI-powered experiences? How will designers identify the type of service moments that users want to perceive as unique?

And could designing service authenticity be the ultimate challenge that AI-powered technologies poses to the service design industry?

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

Radical Futures: Designing for Fundamental Change Designing for the future provides a chance to question the status quo and build a path towards equity. However, when we focus on solving problems within existing systems, it is difficult to challenge the system itself. Instead, what if we designed services for a future in which we believe differently?

Ferguson, Missouri, is the site of internationally recognised protests that erupted after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in 2014. Since then, Ferguson has committed to changing its policing and court practices. In January 2017, I joined a group of Ferguson residents who are involved in this participatory policy reform in order to learn about their process. This open, public group is called the Neighbourhood Policing Steering Committee (NPSC). The NPSC works with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Ferguson Police Department to develop revised plans and policies – for example, on officer recruiting and community policing. This is a service design project, reconsidering what the service of policing should look like and how it should work.

Throughout this process, when we talk about how policing could be different, people often bring up policy changes that respond to the problems they see and

experience today: Maybe police could ask nicely before they stop and frisk someone on the street. Or maybe the police could stop killing people of colour.

Beyond minimising harm, it is hard to imagine holistically different ways of keeping people safe that challenge the foundational beliefs of policing. As Alain Badiou says, “The power in place doesn’t ask us to be convinced that it does everything very well [...] but to be convinced that it’s the only thing possible.”1 In response to the difficulty of imagining alternatives, I worked with NPSC members to challenge Ferguson residents to imagine new institutions that could keep people safe without policing.

Through this ‘Futures of Public Safety’ project, as well as through developing a ‘Radical Design’ class at Washington University in St. Louis and leading

Alix Gerber is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, teaching courses such as “Radical Design” and “Design & Research”.

She uses participatory and speculative design practices to visualise alternative futures that challenge the status quo. Alix has an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design in New York. designradicalfutures@gmail.com

1 Badiou, A. (2009). Philosophy and the Event.

Cambridge: Polity Press.

Touchpoint 10-2 31

experimental workshops, I’ve learned some lessons about how to support the imagination of alternatives.

Uncovering ideology and exploring alternative beliefs Comparison is a powerful tool for opening our minds to alternatives. When we look at a practice that we are accustomed to, it is easy to take it for granted. But when we place it in contrast to something else, we can start to uncover our own beliefs. For example, most police departments today use a punitive justice mind-set. This has become second nature to us. It is obvious that laws must be enforced in order to be effective. If someone breaks the law, there should be consequences. It is difficult to imagine another way until we look at our own model as compared to another mind-set, such as restorative justice. Defined by Howard Zehr, restorative justice suggests that people should be held accountable to each other instead of to written laws.2 Instead of using punishment to deter wrongdoing, restorative justice holds people responsible for healing the harm they’ve caused.

Neither of these mind-sets is universally right or wrong, but by placing them in contrast to each other, we can begin to understand some of our subconscious beliefs.

We could also contrast ‘guardian’ versus ‘warrior’ mindsets in policing, a government-led versus communityled approach, or reacting to harmful behaviour versus

Justice is served

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth

Polarity map defining four visions of public safety.

32 Touchpoint 10-2

Prevent crime through public service

I’ll pray for you

preventing it. These are all spectrums from one prioritisation of values to another.

In Ferguson, members of the NPSC and I started by asking residents to describe how an ideal society would respond to a range of scenarios, from witnessing domestic violence to the theft of a car. Rather than focusing on peoples’ concrete suggestions, we paid attention to the values and desires behind them. By sorting these responses along various spectra, a framework emerged, outlining different visions about how to keep people safe without policing. Later, three possible futures were selected. The first, ‘The Future of Social Service’, is led by an involved government that provides public services to prevent harmful behaviour before it happens. In the ‘Future of Grassroots Cooperation’, neighbours keep each other safe without government intervention. And ‘The Future of Hearts and Minds’ is based on developing morality through local religious leadership.

Striving for provocation rather than problem solving Once we have defined an alternative belief that challenges our current system, we can begin to explore how it might play out in terms of public services. Often, it is at this point that we confront the ‘impossibility’ of alternatives.

For example, someone might say it is impossible, dangerous or utopian to imagine neighbours keeping each other safe without professional intervention.

This initial reaction often blocks the development of alternative visions, stopping them before they can even take form. By instead naming and including the flaws that are pointed out, we can respond to critique in a more productive way. No future will be without flaws, but by visualising multiple alternatives, we can work together to prioritise which challenges we want to confront. This builds on Dunne and Raby’s definition of a speculative design practice that produces critical provocations rather than earnest proposals.3 After defining multiple visions in the Futures of Public Safety project, I created three tangible scenes within these futures that were displayed at exhibits and

2 Zehr, H. (2002). The Little Book of Restorative Justice. Brattleboro, VT: Good Books.

3 Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

Scene and artefacts from the Future of Social Service, including the check-in glove and citizen risk profile.

workshops across the cities of St. Louis and Ferguson.

In the Future of Social Service, viewers encounter a case manager’s desk in a bureaucratic cubicle. Participants are invited to occupy the scene, either as the case manager or the client. They may try on the check-in glove and look at the citizen Risk Profile on the computer screen.

At first glance, the Risk Profile seems to achieve the utopian dream of ensuring that everyone has the care and resources they need. We see a treatment plan and service history, all headed by the ‘Metropolitan Department of Social Services’. But then, a viewer might think twice about the bars showing the client’s risk for anti-social behaviour, drug abuse and violence. Underneath, there is a list of factors used to calculate the risk, including ‘few living relatives’ and ‘adverse childhood experiences’.

We might begin to wonder whether the goal is really to serve and heal the person, or to tame their potentially threatening characteristics. Who determines what services people need? If we rely on services to prevent harmful behaviour, are people required to comply with the services they are offered? And how would a governing body obtain this personal information? These questions begin to build a more complex vision that incorporates both positive and negative results of an alternative system. By comparing the scenes from the three future

visions, community members were able to have a conversation about which aspects they want, and which ones they want to avoid.

Incorporating radical change into everyday progress This kind of speculative practice can be used in parallel with more everyday problem solving, as a way to expand imagination and approach incremental change with more developed, long-term visions that lead towards fundamental shifts in values and beliefs. It can be controversial because it requires us to look honestly at the beliefs underlying current services, which can be painful and frustrating to confront. This practice can also be confused for a desire to completely tear down current structures, even when it is used only as a thought exercise in the midst of more gradual work. However, for a few participants in Ferguson, the Futures of Public Safety project has been an important complement to our policy revision and community engagement work. As one participant said, participating in a workshop involving these scenes helped him to open his mind to alternatives and look more critically at the policies we are reviewing, here and now.

Touchpoint 10-2 33

Artificial Intelligence: A Threat or an Opportunity?

Insights from service design experts Artificial intelligence (AI) has triggered many debates since its birth in the 1950s. From dystopian views to high praise, opinions about the effects and role of AI vary from one person to the next.

In the field of service design, however, the topic of applying AI is still in its infancy.

Titta Jylkäs is a service designer and doctoral candidate working at Volkswagen Financial Services in Germany, and enrolled at the University of Lapland, Finland. In her current research, she focuses on strategic service design in the digital transformation of customer services utilising AI.

34 Touchpoint 10-2

Over the past years, AI has made its way into our everyday lives through various products and services, such as voice assistants and chatbots. Beyond the visible elements of these services, AI also operates in back-end systems, automating mundane service tasks and processes, orchestrating and personalising content and forming a loop of continuous learning and improvement.

Through its continuous advancement, AI will provide new ways of learning, understanding and working, becoming a more and more prominent part of our lives. But what does that mean for service design?

As a part of my current research, I had the privilege of interviewing seven service design experts to learn about their perspectives on the relationship of AI to service design. In the interviews, we discussed the potential role AI has in our field, the possibilities for its application, and how human values should be considered when working with AI. The insights from these discussions represent

the current thinking, and reinforce the notion that we are still at a very early stage of understanding what AI means, and how to work with it. Further trials and explorations will be valuable in showing both the full potential and the limitations of AI in service design.

“Currently, the use of AI is often in the background work of design, providing new ways of using data. For example, instead of looking at larger customer profiles, AI can help direct solutions to individual needs and avoid stereotypes.

But the outcomes of AI are only as good as the data we put in, so it is important that the input has good quality and that it serves the purpose of the analysis.�

Juhani Lith, Service Architect, Palmu (Finland)

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

“There are no established models or processes for how to use AI in service design. We utilise the whole field of data science to innovate AI methodologies,

possibility, and it needs to be evaluated

AI has many benefits. For example, AI can process

before it is established in a service. We

data without business-related scaling issues and can prevent the occurrence of unfounded personal biases. AI is also very successful for us in identifying the bigger topics to focus on in design work. We believe that AI will not replace human designers in the future.

However, a service designer may become a “For a designer, working with a piece

curator who puts

of AI that is already abstract, to

AI into a human context

make it easier for me to understand in

and extracts meaning

terms of the way that I use those

from analysis results.”

things that are going to go in front of a consumer, is certainly a design challenge in its own right. Working with AI is another way of working, and we should understand what we are working with.”

Senior service designer, design agency (USA)

and the reasons that are driving me to use AI. Not every possibility is a good

which solve design challenges. Combining design and

abstract pieces and patterns to design

“I would begin with the customer needs

shouldn’t implement AI in a service simply because we can. I believe that voice interfaces will have a bigger impact in people’s lives, but the fit should be tested with people and adjusted to the purpose before implementation in a service.”

Senior consultant, strategic design agency (Germany)

Niko Reunanen, Data Science Lead, Hellon (Finland)

“We think so much about how to make AI seem human. But maybe AI and smart services will have their own identity, which is something that we can’t “Even though services themselves will evolve through machine learning and artificial intelligence, the basic psychology of human behaviour changes at a much slower pace. We should aim to understand humans

“AI can be really valuable when dealing with services that take into account the emotions of users in one way or another. AI can provide much more precise models of how to react in those situations.

Nevertheless, a strategy for utilising AI is often missing, and it is challenging to see what the role of AI may be in digital services.”

Milla Sumelius, Chief Digital Officer, Roger Studio (Finland)

better and better. Advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning can already help us gain that understanding and form patterns that might otherwise be hard to see. Through AI, designers will get new tools that can automate manual work, which will give us the freedom to focus on the reasons and true meaning of our work. Nevertheless, I think that a common language and thus a mutual understanding of what we mean by AI is still

foresee now and which has to develop first.

You have to explore the technology and see what its appearance will be and how people will perceive it.”

Sebastian F. Müller, independent service designer (Germany)

missing when designers talk about these technologies.”

Sami Niemelä, Creative Director, Nordkapp (Finland)

Touchpoint 10-2 35

Designing Relationships with Technologies which Pass as Humans More realistic and human-like technology presents unique challenges for service designers. In this brief essay, I will introduce some of these tough ethical challenges and explain why it is imperative that we design relationships with digital services that are constructive, non-deceptive and non-abusive.

Gustav Borgefalk is a Swedish tech-entrepreneur and service designer. He is a co-founder of Sqore, a global education marketing service provider. Gustav is currently an MPhil candidate at the Royal College of Art in London and his research focuses on the future of persuasive technologies. gustav.borgefalk@network. rca.ac.uk

36 Touchpoint 10-2

Virtual assistants, digital fashion models, and other human-like services are becoming more realistic. It is safe to assume that many more realistic, humanlike technologies will soon be readily available in the service designer’s toolbox.

This also means that people will face nonhuman agents which mimic humans in everyday situations at home and at work.

Though humanoid robots still have some way to go before they can effectively pass as human, digital human representations simulated in voice and video technology are approaching highfidelity realism. How should designers handle these realistic, human-like services that are now entering society?

like ‘umm’ and ‘mhm’ in the right places in the conversation. According to MIT Technology Review, Duplex will soon be integrated with Google Assistant, however it will initially be used for only a limited set of tasks, such as scheduling haircuts or reserving tables at restaurants. If one tries to discuss other topics with the assistant, it will try to steer the conversation back to the task at hand.1 According to market intelligence firm Ovum, an estimated 7.5 billion installations of virtual digital assistants will be established by 2021, more than the world’s population.2 What would the implications be if they were all indistinguishable from humans?

Humanising technologies At Google IO 2018, the company demonstrated Duplex, an eerily realistic voice assistant that was demonstrated calling a salon and scheduling a haircut.

The virtual assistant not only managed to successfully answer the questions from the salon clerk, but it also inserted sounds

1 Metz, R (2018) Google demos Duplex, its AI that sounds exactly like a very weird, nice human. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview. com/s/611539/google-demos-duplex-its-ai-thatsounds-exactly-like-a-very-weird-nice-human/ 2 De Renesse, R. (2017). Virtual digital assistants to overtake world population by 2021. https://ovum. informa.com/resources/product-content/virtualdigital-assistants-to-overtake-world-populationby-2021

Credit: VectorStock

d e s i G n i n G t h e f u t u re

Photo-realistic imagery is also moving into the mainstream and finding new commercial applications.

Digital fashion models now pose as social media influencers, enabling large-scale, manufactured social influence through persuasive, cross-platform storytelling.

The virtual teenage Instagram model Lil Miquela is a hyper-realistic social media influencer that has more than a million Instagram followers. She is allegedly the creation of a Los Angeles-based company offering digital character-driven story worlds, meaning that they use so called ‘transmedia narratives’ to manufacture influence across different digital platforms. This phenomenon raises many new questions concerning trust and responsibility, and service designers working in this space will clearly need to consider the ethics of using deceptively human-like creations to persuade and influence people.

Video is another domain in which high-fidelity realism is offering possibilities for new forms of digital services. At the 2018 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Epic Games and 3Lateral demonstrated photo-realistic, real-time video renderings of the actor Andy Serkis reciting Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The video

was developed using the Unreal engine and created using the motion capture of movements by an actor.3 Such advances open the door for services in which realistic human characters in video content can be manufactured instantly.

Humanoid robot technology has made great advances, but it is still a long way off from the realistic androids in films such as Blade Runner or Ex Machina. However, even once physical artefacts offer high-definition, multi-sensory experiences, it will likely take even longer for humanoid robots to reach cognitively and sociallyacceptable levels of realism. Several technologies must converge to create a realistic level of movement, speech and physical appearance in such robots.

Dehumanisation of technology Although these ‘digital humans’ are largely created in our image, worrying signals are emerging from the humancomputer interaction research community that people

3 Unrealengine.com. 2018. Epic Games and 3Lateral introduce digital Andy Serkis. Unreal blog. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/ epic-games-and-3lateral-introduce-digital-andy-serkis

Touchpoint 10-2 37

are not always treating these creations well. According to Dr Sheryl Brahnam, somewhere between 10 to 50 percent of people’s interactions with virtual assistants are considered abusive.4 The case of sex robots is perhaps the most illustrative example of how humanoid robots may be abused by their owners. Such robots are designed to be sex slaves and can offer no defences to abuse. At the Ars Electronica Festival in Austria 2017, the sex robot Samantha was brutally violated by visitors, leaving the New York Post to sardonically report, “Even though the hardware was broken, the software still worked”.5 While this may strike a nerve with most people, few would likely care if someone kicked or even took apart a dishwasher. What is it that is different about the abuse of human-like technologies?

One of the reasons that service designers should pay particular attention to the abuse of human-like technology is the need to understand whether unchecked abuse normalises or even reinforces bad behaviours towards other human beings. My impression is that this has not been discussed enough in the human-computer interaction community. Perhaps there is a risk of people becoming conditioned to treat people badly in the real world, if they are allowed to abuse human-like technologies without consequences. This debate certainly exists in the case of violent video games, where a recent meta-study conducted by the American Psychological Association suggested that, “... research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behaviour, aggressive cognitions, and aggressive affect and decreases in prosocial behavior,

4 Siegler, J. (n.d.). The ethical implications of chatbot experience.

Bentley University. https://www.bentley.edu/centers/userexperience-center/ethical-implications-chatbot-user-experience 5 Steinbusch, Y. 2017. Sex robot heavily soiled by ‘barbarians’ at tech fair. NY Post. https://nypost.com/2017/09/27/sex-robot-heavilysoiled-by-barbarians-at-tech-fair/ 6 Calvert, S. et al. 2017. The American Psychological Association task force assessment of violent video games: Science in the service of public interest. The American Psychologist, 72(2), 126–143.

7 Kühn, S. et al. 2018. Does playing violent video games cause aggression? A longitudinal intervention study. Molecular Psychiatry.

38 Touchpoint 10-2

empathy, and sensitivity to aggression.”6 Despite that finding, another study by Simone Kühn claims that playing violent video games has no long-term effects on aggressive behaviour in adults.7 The general public should not disregard the possibility that it may become more aggressive and less empathetic if it abuses virtual beings.

The issue of abuse may become even more important in the case of realistic, human-like services, because of the deeper social dimension. Before the full extent of this challenge has been clarified, service designers should pay close attention to research in the intersection between design, ethics, psychology and humancomputer interaction when designing synthetic beings.

Should virtual assistants be programmed to talk back disrespectfully when insulted? Should robots fend off their abusers, or play a passive role in the abusive act?

Solving for dignity How should service designers approach challenges such as the abuse of realistic, human-like technologies? To better understand what the consequences of normalising abuse may be, I suggest that service designers should look at the institutions of slavery, to better understand how not to design these emerging relationships.

As we all know, slavery is a dark and horrific side of human society. For good reasons, slavery is outlawed in all countries, but despite the progress made on human rights issues, human trafficking, prostitution, forced labour and child labour unfortunately still exist in many forms around the world. The word ‘service’ stems from the Latin word ‘servitium’, meaning ‘slavery’. By design, these abhorrent ‘service systems’ have normalised and institutionalised the abuse of human beings.

How may this insight guide the thinking in the case of realistic, human-like technologies? Before the scientific debate has settled, I would argue that service designers should avoid normalising the abuse of human-like technologies. These tendencies should be curbed already at the design stage, to avoid inhuman service systems to emerge. In addition, I argue that if the moral agenda is not user-driven, it must be designer-driven. As Peter-Paul Verbeek argues in Moralizing Technology, technology

d e s i G n i n G t h e f u t u re

Read Touchpoint Archive Online is not neutral, but actively shapes human morals and values through mediating the human experience.8 For better or worse, service designers are now in the business of designing relationships with artificial humans, and the designed qualities of these relationships matter.

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” wrote John Culkin in A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan.9 Depending on our design choices today, these human-like technologies could eventually become our productive companions, but they also risk becoming a new class of slaves.

In a Wired article, Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, presented an appealing Shintoist view that all things, human and non-human, natural and unnatural, should be treated with equal respect: “Just as the Golden Rule teaches us to treat others the way we would like to be treated, abusing and ‘dehumanising’ robots prepares children and structures society to continue reinforcing the hierarchical class system that has been in place since the beginning of civilisation.”10 In my opinion, designing non-abusive and nondeceptive relationships with the growing number of realistic, human-like technologies are important responsibilities for service designers.

450 + articles free access

Touchpoint, the Journal of Service Design, was launched in May 2009 and is the first and only journal dedicated to the theory and practice of service design. Published by SDN three times per year, it provides a written record of the ongoing discussions within the service design community.

To improve the reach of this unique resource, Touchpoint has opened its Archive (all issues except the three most recent). That means more than 450 articles related to service design are freely available on our website.

Enjoy the opportunity to search articles by volume and issue, by authors or keywords.

8 Verbeek, P. P. 2011. Moralizing technology: Understanding and designing the morality of things. University of Chicago Press.

9 Culkin, J. M. 1967. A schoolman's guide to Marshall McLuhan. The Saturday Review, March 18, 51–53.

10 Ito, J. 2018. Why Westerners fear robots and the Japanese do not.

Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/ideas-joi-ito-robot-overlords/

Visit the SDN website and sign in for a free Community Membership to dive into the Touchpoint Archive! Full issues of Touchpoint may be also read on-screen and on mobile devices via the Issuu website and app.

www.service-design-network.org Touchpoint 10-2 39

Aesthetics of Interaction between Human and AI A Multisensory Approach Some of the Smart Service Artefacts (SSAs)1 that have not been able to establish emotional connections with users will continue to face an ongoing challenge of user drop-off.

Service designers can address this drop-off by adopting a multisensory approach that triggers the most contextually Cecilia Lee is a PhD candidate in service design at the Royal College of Art in the UK. Previously she worked in the luxury fashion and jewellery sectors as well as at the United Nations. She currently works as a consultant for a leading law firm in the UK and helps them innovate legal services through service design thinking. cecilia.lee@network.rca.ac.uk

Nick de Leon is head of service design at the Royal College of Art in the UK. The department is a leading post-graduate programme in service design, and has more than 90 Masters and PhD students. It undertakes live projects with government and industry. He has a PhD from Imperial College Business School on Smart Cities, a Masters from the RCA and a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College.

40 Touchpoint 10-2

appropriate emotional response in a user.

The absence of human touch in user-SSA interactions A Smart Service Artefact is a consumer product enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) that can sense and respond to its environment and autonomously interact with a user. Typical examples of such artefacts are consumer wearables, digital assistants and chatbots. But these products, despite their purposes of making the users’ lives more convenient, tend to suffer from low user retention rates.2 Researchers such as Clawson and others3 interpret the root cause of this problem as a lack of user’s perceived value. They

further demonstrate that the perceived value cannot be defined in utilitarian terms alone, and that it involves the psychological benefit that fulfils the user’s emotional needs.

Chaturvedi4 also points out that SSAs that connect with users on an emotional level can co-create value with users by enhancing their well-being and happiness.

Nevertheless, many existing SSAs have not yet accomplished this goal.

A great example which illustrates an SSA’s failure to co-create value is a user’s typical interaction with a chatbot.

Although advances in machine learning

1 This article introduces the term ‘Smart Service Artefact’ (SSA), which refers to a consumer product enabled by artificial intelligence that can autonomously respond to and sense the environment, and interact with users.

2 Gartner (2016). Gartner survey shows wearable devices need to be more useful. Retrieved from http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3537117 on 10.06.2018.

3 Clawson, J., Pater, J.A. Miller, A.D., Maynatt, E.D. and Mamykina, L. (2015). No longer wearing: investigating the abandonment of personal healthtracking technologies on Craigslist. UBICOM, Osaka, Japan.

4 Chaturvedi, R. (2016). Will the next Siri be empathetic? Retrieved from https://techcrunch. com/2016/06/18/will-the-next-siri-beempathetic/ on 11.11.2017

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

algorithms and natural language processing have made chatbots smarter than before, they still lack the human capability for empathy. This is because human emotions are inherently complex, and available chatbot technology lacks the ability to accurately detect complicated emotions through the text analysis alone. In addition, in order for a chatbot to generate the most contextually appropriate answer for a user, it needs to be trained by the massive datasets accumulated from a vast array of interactions with diverse groups of users. Given these current limitations, the dynamics of conversation remain mechanical, without human-like empathic attributes.

In response to the lack of empathy in human computer interactions (HCI), the design and HCI communities often entertain the prospects of building more emotionally intelligent SSAs to humanise interactions.

Users expect SSAs to be more empathic to their constantly evolving needs. However, a more empathic gadget alone is not enough to sustain user engagement and to enable both user and SSA to co-create value.

Instead, service designers, along with the developers5 of SSAs, should use emotion as a strategic tool to design for an experience that provides opportunities for relationship-building to both the user and the SSA, throughout the user journey.

The recent study by Spadafora and his colleagues6 demonstrates how emotions can positively influence a user’s interactive experience with the Sofa-Bot. The SofaBot can autonomously interact with a user by responding to the user’s gestures. The study illustrates that, as users develop an emotional connection with the Sofa-Bot, they feel more confident about using it, and they find their experiences to be more enjoyable.

5 In this article, ‘developers’ refers the firms that make SSAs, such as Fitbit and Amazon. The word ‘manufacturer’ has been avoided because many of these companies outsource manufacturing to third parties.

6 Spadafora, M., Chahuneau, V., Martelaro, N., Sirkin, D., and Ju, W. (2016). Designing the behaviour of interactive objects. Proceeding TEI’16: Tenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction, 70-77.

This example shows how service designers can use emotion as a strategic tool to design for the aesthetics of interactions between users and SSAs. The key part of this design process includes facilitating the user’s meaningand sense-making activities. During their interactions with an SSA, users try to make sense of their experiences, and this process allows them to attach personal meanings to each experience. For example, smartphones are SSAs that have excelled at building emotional connections with users. These connections exist not only because the smartphones serve utilitarian needs, but more importantly, they offer personally meaningful experiences by allowing users to stay in touch with loved ones. Although the design and marketing communities may have acknowledged the importance of their roles as facilitators of meaning- and sense-making activities, they have yet to introduce a framework which is widely and consistently adopted. Such a framework could be the foundation of their design processes, enabling a focus on the aesthetics of interactions between users and SSAs. However, despite the absence of such a framework, the design and marketing communities have implicitly supported user’s meaning- and sense-making activities with a specific tool: a multisensory approach. A multisensory approach refers to the use of human senses as design principles to design for emotionally rich experiences. Because human senses underpin human emotions, a multisensory approach has often been used by marketers as a customer retention strategy.

To date, however, such multisensory approaches have over-relied on visual and auditory senses.7 In comparison to studies on visual, auditory, and haptic senses, there are still relatively few studies on the senses of taste and smell, due to the current technological constraints faced by developers in exploiting these senses using digital artefacts.

7 Bodnar, A., Corbett, R. and Nekrasovski, D. (2004). AROMA: ambient awareness through olfaction in a messaging application. ICMI04, Pennsylvania, USA.

Touchpoint 10-2 41

However, this knowledge gap offers immense opportunities for service designers, especially because the sense of smell is directly linked to areas of the brain – the amygdala and hippocampus – that control emotions.8 This means that service designers can potentially manipulate scent to facilitate users’ meaning- and sense-making activities, thereby triggering the most contextually appropriate emotional responses.

This process is not without any significant challenges, however. Because a person’s experience of smell is highly individual and culturally-specific, it is not easy for designers to design for an olfactory-based experiences that appeals to the broad mass of people. In addition, because there is no standardised smell scheme, designers find it more challenging to design for an olfactory-based interactive experience in HCI applications.9 Nonetheless, Obrist and her colleagues10 have developed the “Ten categories of experience with smell” (see Fig. 1) based on 439 smell stories they have gathered through an online questionnaire.

Category 1

Associating the past with a smell

Category 2

Remembering through a smell

Category 3

Smell perceived as stimulating

Category 4

Smell creating desire for more

Category 5

Smell allowing identification and detection

Category 6

Overwhelming power of smell

Category 7

Smell invading private and public spaces

Category 8

Social interaction is affected by smell

Category 9

Smell changes mood, attitude and behaviour

Category 10

Smell builds up and changes expectations

Fig. 1: The “Ten categories of experience with smell”.

8 Amores, J. and Maes, P. (2017). Essence: olfactory interfaces for unconscious influence of mood and cogtniive performance. CHI 2017, Denver, CO, USA. 9 Brewster, S.A., McGookin, D.K. and Miller, C.A. (2006). Olfoto: Designing a smell-based interaction. CHI2006, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

10 Obrist, M., Tuch, A.N. and Hornbaek, K. (2014). Opportunities for Odor: Experiences with smell and implications for technology. CHI14, Toronto, Canada.

42 Touchpoint 10-2

The aim of the study was to explore experiences and emotions related to smell and link them to potential technologies.

Although the categories of smell do not represent an exhaustive list, service designers can still use them as an initial design toolkit when they consider designing for olfactory-based interactive experiences.

There are a number of brands that have already adopted smell experiences. One such brand is Apple, which utilises scent to build emotional connections between their products and users. When a user opens a MacBook package, they can smell a scent associated with a MacBook that takes them back to their experience at an Apple store. This example also shows Apple’s detailedoriented approach to building user’s expectations from

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

the very first point of contact with a product, using the power of the olfactory sense. In addition, it illustrates well categories 2 and 10 from the list cited earlier.

Credit: Andy Kelly on Unsplash

Designing for the future aesthetics of service interactions Designing for olfactory-based aesthetics of services interactions is still in its early stages, but what makes this space exciting is that the possibilities can be limitless.

As stated earlier, a multisensory design framework that guides a systematic approach can offer a promising resource for the service design community. As the first step, service designers can focus on developing a framework that explores one specific category in depth.

Miyasato’s design framework – Smellization 11 – is an example which has expanded Category 9 (‘Smell changes mood, attitude and behaviour’). Based on this framework,

Miyasato uses smell as a trigger to stimulate energysaving behaviour.

In addition, a framework that expands on past studies on visual, auditory and haptic senses with new insights from the studies on olfactory and taste senses can provide service designers with a holistic overview of a multisensory experience in HCI. By creating such a framework, service designers will be able to better facilitate users’ meaning- and sense-making activities, and trigger the most contextually appropriate emotional responses at each stage of users’ journeys.

11 The author introduces the framework, ‘Smellization’, and defines it as “the process of representing abstract data as smells that can aid in understanding and recalling their meanings” (Miyasato, 2017, p.173) Miyasato, T. (2017). “Smellization” of warnings against overuse power used to promote energy saving behaviour. UIST17, Quebec City, Canada.

A multisensory approach as the design principle for the future of aesthetics of interaction in HCI.

Touchpoint 10-2 43

The Future of Service Design in a Post-Human World Challenging the human-centred approach can help us become better service designers One of the fundamental aspirations of service design is to attend to human needs and relations that are unique to service interactions. However, in our technology-laden world, the boundaries between a service and a product are blurring. Moreimportantly, the boundaries between humans and non-humans Sandjar Kozubaev is a service designer and futurist at Sparks Grove, a design agency based in Atlanta, and a PhD student in Digital Media at Georgia Institute of Technology. He studies futures and speculative design. sandjar.kozubaev@gatech.edu

44 Touchpoint 10-2

are also becoming harder to distinguish. In this essay, I will explore the implications of technology-mediated human relationships on the future of service design.

What’s in a service?

“In the last X years, the share of services in economic output has grown from Y percent to Z percent.” It is very likely that any service designer has heard or used some version of this statement to re-iterate or elevate the importance of service design. The exact numbers represented

by X, Y and Z in this statement are not relevant. What is relevant is that this argument is always employed to show how drastically the service economy has grown, especially in developed economies.

This is reflective of a wider tendency among service design practitioners to differentiate peoples’ interactions with services from those with products.

Furthermore, physical artefacts (products, applications, technologies, etc.) are seen as subservient to the service interactions.

In other words, they are mere instruments

in creating more effective, seamless and profitable or cost-effective services.

This ethos of human-centricity manifests itself in the tools service designers use in their practice. An example is a service blueprint, one of the most widely-used service design tools. Its schematic representation helps ensure that a service is designed holistically. The interactions of a service recipient with various touchpoints of that service are depicted at the very top of the diagram, while the systems and infrastructure that enable those interactions are at the bottom. This hierarchy reinforces the commitment to a viewpoint that backend infrastructure needs to support the service over time and is required to enable such desirable qualities as seamlessness, convenience, customer satisfaction and so on.

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach of thinking about services. However, it obscures some important aspects of how humans relate to technology, and how technology influences the human experience beyond being an instrument. In other words, as I will demonstrate below, technology is how we perceive and experience the world and our place in it, rather than simply being a tool. The reason this way of thinking is important is because the boundaries between what is or isn’t a service – as well as the boundaries between what is or isn’t human – are becoming more difficult to parse.

One example of this blurring of boundaries is the smartphone. It is common to think of the smartphone as a product that is involved in the delivery of a service. One way this distinction is made is because a smartphone is tangible and therefore it is a product, whereas a service is intangible. But another way to think about it is that the object itself has characteristics of both a product and a service. The smartphone on its own is completely useless unless it is connected to infrastructure such as communication towers, payment systems, data servers, etc. But the infrastructure is there to provide a service. So does the smartphone itself have any meaning outside of a service? Perhaps the smartphone is a part of infrastructure itself.

You can see that once we challenge conventional boundaries, we can understand relationships in new ways. It is not sufficient to think of the distinction between a service and a product in terms of tangibility.

Furthermore, a smartphone can be thought of both as distinct and separate object, but also as an extension of oneself. People can become so attached to their smartphones that they take them to bed or to the toilet.

But this relationship is deeper and more entangled than mere attachment. Media theorists and cognitive scientists have argued that smartphones can serve as means by which we present ourselves to the outside world (e.g. through social media). They can also serve as an external

cognitive apparatus, extending and transforming ways in which we perceive and understand the world.1 Some have taken this idea to an extreme, arguing that the use of technology in such a way creates a new kind of human being, a cyborg. As early as the 1990s, Thad Starner, a pioneer in wearable technology, demonstrated this through his own experience. He wore a custom personal computer nearly constantly for many years.

The device not only augmented the world around him, allowing him to bring up relevant information on a miniature display, but also helped with his speech impediment.2 What this tells us is that technology doesn’t just exist in the world, it shapes the very relationships in the world; between human and non-human, between services and products, and so on. In the process, it creates new categories and concepts (e.g., a cyborg, a wearable, etc.), challenging our conventions and practices.

Over the next few decades, as technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), synthetic biology, nanotechnology and others become more prevalent in everyday life, the issues of how these technologies frame our experiences, define or blur boundaries, and what agency we have over them will become more contentious.

It will become critical for service design to consider new ways to understand these relationships, beyond taking a traditional human-centred view in which technologies are mere instruments.

1 Miller, J. (2014). The fourth screen: Mediatization and the smartphone. Mobile Media & Communication, 2(2), 209-226.

2 Bass, T. (1998) Dress Code. Wired [Online] Retrieved August 7, 2018, from https://www.wired.com/1998/04/wearables/?pg=6

Postphenomenology as an alternative If seeing technology as instruments for a service is not sufficient, what other options do service designers have? One of them is to turn to a postphenomenological approach. Peter-Paul Verbeek, who developed some of the foundational concepts of this theory, has become quite influential in design theory and practice in recent years.

Postphenomenology argues that when we use technology in particular situations, it shapes, and is shaped, through

Touchpoint 10-2 45

© Monkey Business/stock.adobe.com

These are some of many complex considerations Verbeek highlights to show that technology is not a neutral and passive entity, but has a certain agency; that it has its own capacity to exert power and influence.

Moreover, Verbeek argues that technological artefacts have morals embedded in them and that they (and their designers) should be held accountable for those morals.

For service designers, this implies considering technology not as an instrument of a service, but as a symmetrical participant in the service.

Fig. 1: A couple undergoing an ultrasound exam.

human experiences and existence, and consequently, human-world relations.3 Verbeek illustrates this by using the obstetric ultrasound procedure as an example. Pregnant women and their partners and doctors use ultrasounds to examine an unborn child. Ultrasound imagery has become routine worldwide. Verbeek argues that the sonograms produced by ultrasound imagery do not just produce a neutral view into the womb of the expectant mother. Rather, they ‘mediate’ the relationship between the unborn and the external world in specific ways.4 For example, the way in which an image is displayed (e.g. its size, resolution, position etc.) creates a certain separation between the mother and the unborn child. Furthermore, the mother is positioned more as the environment for the foetus to grow within as an individual, rather than someone joined in unison with it. Ultrasound can also increase the involvement of the father in the process of foetal development, thereby narrowing the distance between the father and the foetus. The father can participate in the discussions of the sonogram. And because the procedure itself has a certain medical status, it allows the father to take time off work to participate in it.

3 Pandey, S (2018). Framing smart consumer technology: Mediation, materiality, and material for design. International Journal of Design, 12(1), 37-51.

4 Verbeek, P. P. (2011). Moralizing technology: Understanding and designing the morality of things. University of Chicago Press.

46 Touchpoint 10-2

How objects mediate relations: The case of Bird Verbeek’s use of obstetric ultrasound as an example was strategic. It involves sensitive issues of medical ethics, family, parenthood and even what it means to have an impact on a human life. But the theory of technological mediation can be applied to everyday services and products too. One of the recent issues I have encountered in my design research and futures practice, is the domain of personal mobility and the changing landscape of personal vehicles. Energy companies are interested in how autonomous vehicles will shape energy demand. Airports are interested in the role of cities and transportation hubs. Cities are interested in how to manage their car traffic, bike lanes and parking lots.

Unfortunately, technology is often seen as an objective instrument to solve a problem, which tends to obscure the complex relationships it creates, as I described above. Let us explore an alternative perspective with an example.

One technological solution that has become both popular and controversial in the United States is rentable electric scooters provided by companies such as Bird and LimeBike. Unlike traditional urban bike-sharing solutions, which require a docking station, these scooters are dockless. Because every scooter is equipped with a GPS tracker, riders can locate them using a smartphone app. After completing the journey, the rider can park the scooter in any location and leave it there, after ‘locking’ it, again with the smartphone app. The system automatically calculates a fee based on the customer’s duration of use. Micromobility, as this segment of the industry is called, is a competitive and lucrative business.

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

Bird Rides, Inc. has recently been valued at US$2 billion.

Dockless bikes and scooters are also creating problems for American city officials, because abandoned scooters are beginning to disrupt sidewalks, parks and other public spaces. Some cities are banning the service altogether, while others are trying to adjust their local ordinances to find a compromise.

From a postphenomenological perspective, dockless scooters are interesting because of how they mediate the relationship between a rider and the city. One aspect of this mediation is how a rider perceives a public sidewalk.

An average, well-mannered scooter- or bike-rider would probably not abandon her personal transportation vehicle in the middle of a sidewalk. First, she would at least think to lock it to a lamppost or a docking station to avoid theft.

Second, she would try to avoid creating a trip hazard for the public (out of fear of a lawsuit or just out of decency).

But technology such as Bird changes this relationship.

Suddenly, a sidewalk can be treated as a personal space without any regard for how one’s actions might affect others. Riders commonly leave Bird scooters wherever they like, often creating inconvenience for others (see Fig. 2). The important question is this: Where does this behaviour come from? A human-centred view would tell us that it comes from the customers; they are the ones who make choices. However, postphenomenology suggests that a Bird scooter has its own set of morals and values built into it, not just in how the object is designed, but how you find it, use it, pay for it, etc. These values are brought into the relationship between people and the

Fig. 2: Haphazardly-parked rental scooters pose hazards for the public.

environment, just like we have seen with the ultrasound example. How much of the behaviour is due to human choice or due to the influence of the object is a difficult question to answer. One thing is certain: Assuming that an object is a passive, neutral entity waiting to serve human needs is too simplistic and short-sighted.

The object brings its own set of values embedded in its design, and mediates how people relate to the world around them.

Looking into the future of service design The implications of the post-phenomenological approach for service designers are two-fold: 1. Service designers are in a unique position to consider design problems as systems of relationships rather than individual solutions. However, the quality of these relations are often overlooked. Therefore, service designers should focus their attention on these relationships between and among humans and non-humans in a more symmetrical way rather than assuming that humans are always in the centre (or at the top) of a service.

2. Service designers should improve their understating of technologies and support systems in order to enrich their dialogue about, and understanding of, the role of technologies in services. This means not only knowing what a technology does, but what values it represents at a fundamental level – at the level of the computer code, the material, the manufacturing processes, etc. As we have seen with the cases of Bird and the sonogram, the decisions designers and engineers make embed certain values and morals into the technologies, and service designers need to play a more active role in questioning and illuminating them.

Regardless of the tools or philosophies we may prefer, one thing is certain: As technology enters deeper into all aspects of our lives, be it medicine, law, entertainment, government or any other, this kind of multi-layered knowledge of technology will be imperative in designing the services of the future in more inclusive, equitable and sustainable ways.

Touchpoint 10-2 47

Speculative Design and Service Design: A False Dichotomy Two examples of workshops applying speculative service methods This article focuses on two practice-based experiments that tested the integration of speculative design and service design around the subject of the future of work. The experimental Antonio Iadarola, PhD. Industrial and service designer and researcher. Born in Naples, Italy, he founded Studio Wé in New York, an experimental practice designing future work environments and processes in the public and private sector.

He is Associate Professor in Design at Beijing Institute of Technology and lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London. anto@studio-we.com

Antonio Starnino, MFA. Service designer and lecturer. Born in Montreal, Canada. He has a passion and curiosity for affecting positive change.

Co-founder of Studio Wé and graduate of the Master in Service Design at Politecnico di Milano. He has worked for a number of design agencies on projects across a number of industries. astar@studio-we.com

48 Touchpoint 10-2

workshops started drafting common methods for a more ethical and ecological approach that considers both stakeholders’ needs and long-term systemic impact in the services we design.

The extended field of speculative design today We are in a moment in time when both the design and non-design communities fully understand the necessity of collaborative practices to generate innovation and ‘design for good’. In this climate, speculative design is also venturing forth from the art galleries and becoming increasingly co-creative. Provocative exhibits and short videos are giving way to workshops and public interventions. We are witnessing more and more examples of speculative co-design practices and projects. An example of this is the work of Extrapolation Factory, a design-based research studio that uses participatory design to build shared future visions of society and services.

In the last decade, while Design Thinking demonstrated how the

strategic aspects of design could generate new organisations and be used as a management mind-set, critical and speculative design came to the forefront to reaffirm the maturity of design as a cultural agent, expanding design’s role beyond interpreting industry and technological needs.

Their two vibrant academic and professional communities appear to be already blended, but there is a methodological discrepancy. On one hand, service design is highly structured to wrap around the complexity of organisations and their multichannel interaction with users. Not only are service design’s methods strictly defined and organised in iterative stages to satisfy the pressure of project planning and management of most organisations, there is also an extra layer of meta-methods – the facilitation

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

techniques that designers transfer to non-designers or client teams to maintain service design processes.

Speculative design, on the other hand, has historically been designer-led, offering visions of possible artefacts and interactions (photos, videos, performances) built by creative teams and contextualised in narratives depicting possible futures, for the purpose of debating and interrogating those possible futures. The conversations generated are collaborative in nature, but the creation of the future vision is predominantly a designer’s personal interpretation of current signals and trends. The role of designers as authors (rather than facilitators) in speculative projects enabled this practice to develop without heavily formalised methods.

Perhaps, taking this viewpoint, service and speculative design might be seen as ‘opposite’ methodologies; one equipped with structured, user-centred processes and methods to understand the needs of users of a specific service ecosystem, the other based on general principles that each designer adapts to his or her way of working in order to create future prototypes aimed at interrogating the future of technology and society.

Service design is based on qualitative research into the quality of services and how users interact with them in present contexts, while speculative design is a projection into the future of new ways of living and working, as well as technological developments. Logically, the two approaches complement one another beautifully to deliver organisations with solutions that will be viable in the short or medium term, as well as long-term ethical and systemic policies and programmes.

Speculative design interventions are increasingly being included in projects that are predominantly strategic, where the goal is not public debate per se, but generating radical ideas around a defined challenge, or redesigning services and strategies.

However, what’s still unclear is how the two methodologies integrate at an operational level.

Speculative design in the context of service design Our proposition for understanding how to integrate the two design disciplines is to look at the first principles of

service design, instead of looking at service design as a set of methods. Furthermore, we propose extending, through speculative design interventions, our stakeholders’ awareness of future systems and phenomena that are wider than the service provider/user horizon.

This proposition considers stakeholders’ focus to be only the starting point for the inclusion of ecological and ethical insights into elements such as infrastructure, social and political shifts, geopolitics, knowledge advancements and all other aspects that are beyond the control of the stakeholders we are designing for.

Our experimental proposition to the service design practitioner offers a holistic framework for designing services in dynamic and uncertain industries.

Understanding how an organisation’s services (will) operate beyond its existing ecosystem, even in ways that are different from the original intentions, is important for avoiding unwanted consequences that can jeopardise the business. When one thinks about the recent scandal involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, or the use of apps that allowed protesters to co-ordinate their locations during the London riots, or even the unruliness that Uber causes in some cities, one sees that service providers need to directly and indirectly respond to the effects their services have on communities, systems and organisational structures that likely weren’t even considered as stakeholders at the beginning.

The first principles of service design The first ‘first principle’ we considered is that a service is a co-created generator of value. The idea of a service as an interaction that involves users and service providers, and which provides value to both, is highly contextual.

As service designers, we observe and explore context and user needs through user research. However, most of the context you are researching now will change, and users might not be able to fully consider future possibilities and desires unless a scenario is presented for them to explore.

Even expert designers might need to use new discovery activities to study the trajectories of behavioural change driven by new technologies, in addition to researching

Touchpoint 10-2 49

‘current state’ discovery goals that are commonly part of user research plans.

Speculative design processes, on the other hand, start with gathering hints of future social and technological changes from different sources that are often used in card sorting exercises to frame different future scenarios and understand what patterns are emerging and what essential research questions stem from those scenarios.

The second ‘first principle’ of service design that we considered is that touchpoints are the atomic elements that allow service encounters. Services exist through touchpoints that allow a service provider to deliver value to users. So, in the development phase of the service, we need to understand how the same value can be delivered despite the evolution of technology in the long term.

In contrast, speculative design’s most prominent aspect is the creation of ‘diegetic’ prototypes. These are prototypes that can be used to enact and represent multiple futures and visualise how technology shapes the way we live and work. This type of visualisation is similar to future-based user stories, and can be used to understand the design requirements of touchpoints and from them create briefs for their implementation.

The integration of methods and tools In particular, wearing a speculative design hat becomes useful in certain phases of a service design framework.

In the context of the double diamond visualisation describing the typical service design process, speculative design activities are particularly beneficial: 1. Before starting discovery and during scoping to understand what to research and to define ‘what we don’t know’ 2. Between the first and second diamond, before starting the development phase, to consider longer-term systemic visions in tandem with the resolution of immediate user needs.

Speculative design can be integrated as part of research planning and used as a method for understanding and evaluating touchpoints against long-term delivery criteria, creating an evolutionary timeline of the service 50 Touchpoint 10-2

that considers its relevance over time despite possible shifts in technology and socio-cultural conditions. Of course, in this frame, we have no certainty that the future scenarios we are using to measure value will actually happen, but the point is not to try to predict the future – it is instead to anticipate a number of possibilities and, such as in the lean startup approach, evaluate how the service would perform and iterate in possible future scenarios.

The first applications of our proposed integrated approach came in the form of research workshops in two very different environments.

The first case consists of the academic courses we developed and currently run at Beijing Institute of Technology, where we teach students a mix of humancentred and speculative design methods to prototype examples of new work environments. The hybrid speculative/human-centred approach is not deliberately differentiated. Within the course, we start by observing an existing co-working environment through visits and user interviews. We then develop insights and combine them with ‘future of work’ trends and speculation on the effects of automation, digital manufacturing and VR on the future workforce. This initial research work is used in the creation of short films depicting fictional future user stories. Finally, the students extract key touchpoints from their narrative and prototype them. The results are the design of new spaces and furniture for co-working environments that integrate technology and consider current work processes.

The creation of short films that incorporate user research outcomes and personas contextualised in future scenarios helps the students to develop a number of touchpoints that would not have been possible to conceptualise solely on the basis of user insights. The addition of speculative design to user research, in this case, helps to build momentum and push radical thinking towards solutions.

Creating stories depicting future technology and behavioural patterns helps designers understand the social consequences of new product-service systems.

The investment of time and resources that is necessary to create a fictional narrative is justified by the support

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

Fig. 1: Future Instances cards in use at the Gov(dot)Futures workshop.

CONTEXTS What are the signals that alert us of imminent changes in society?

CONFLICTS What future trends currently coexist and contradict each other?

FORCES What are the forces and entities which are able to change current conditions?

RESOLUTIONS In what possible ways will current issues be solved in the future?

Fig. 2: Categories assigned to Future Instances cards.

Fig. 3: An example of a Future Instance Scenario Canvas, in which Future Instances cards were elaborated upon.

that this activity provides in demonstrating the relationship between products, services and spaces. A key benefit we saw in the workshop was the use of short movies (storyboards would serve the same function) as syntheses of research findings. The movies’ narratives force the participants to think about how best to explain the research content and to include tangible products and spaces around the characters that become the touchpoints to prototype.

The second case is an experimental workshop in Ottawa (collaboration between Studio We and Benoit Meunier, designer at IBM Design Studio) on the theme of policy design for the future of work with a group of public sector practitioners. In this case, there was the need to find a correlation between what is happening now (current services) and, as an overarching question, how policies would respond to changing factors over time (specifically, automation in the workplace).

To start, we curated future instances cards, which served as initial prompts for teams to become familiar with research on the future of work. The teams combined the cards to form possible maps of the future. Our cards were designed following five sub-themes underneath the workshop theme: automation, skill development, redistribution of jobs, income inequality and universal income.

The Future Instances cards were also divided into four categories (‘contexts’, ‘conflicts’, ‘forces’ and ‘resolutions’) to ensure a good mix of narrative elements that could lead to a comprehensive scenario.

The cards activity helped participants understand the interdependencies of these important phenomena and facts; during the workshop, each of the three groups created a map that intertwined these signals. Through a future instance scenario canvas, each group then created a visual picture of their future scenario created by the combinations of the cards and the discussions that the exercise generated.

Each scenario ended with the creation of a radical question to underlie the key aspect that the team was going to analyse through the development of future narratives. The teams later would study this radical Touchpoint 10-2 51

Fig. 4: Four different story arcs as developed by Situation Lab.

question through the exploration of their futures via new prototypes, prompted by this ’speculative brief’: “Develop a year 2048 design fiction intertwining your future instances and radical question into a story arc with a protagonist.”

The creation of a future narrative is also supported by the consideration of a story arc, a method created

by Situation Lab, a speculative design agency based in California. This method consists of further developing an existing scenario following three different possible trajectories: escalating some current trends; describing how the observed phenomena would stabilise and become the status quo; and building a future in which different

Fig. 5: Scenario mapping in action.

52 Touchpoint 10-2

forces destroy each other or one where new ones will emerge.

The groups used these activities and a scenariostoryboard canvas we created for the workshop to create their future stories. The groups based their future stories on a suggested narrative structure that describes the context of the story, introduces an aspect of conflict between phenomena, and includes an external force or agent for the resolution of social or technological tensions.

The last part of the workshop was dedicated to developing speculative prototypes. The rationale behind prototyping physical artefacts to represent intangible aspects of future policies, in our case, is to play on the correlation between policies and services. By using prototypes to roleplay how users would interact with touchpoints in the future stories, we were able to describe and discuss the influences that policies have on how services work, and the impact they have on our protagonist-user’s life. Participants explored these aspects and tested different possible future experiences through iterations of their prototypes and material tinkering.

These aspects of ‘expanded’ and ‘embodied’ narratives provided a rich mix of content and material to start backcasting how the future narratives would develop

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

Fig. 6: Diegetic prototypes created during the workshop.

within a timespan from 30 years in the future to now (the current state). By tracing back the changes that led to the future stories, participants were able to come up with today’s design principles and policy recommendations to suggest possible immediate actions to undertake to tackle the projects uncovered in their scenarios.

The idea of backcasting was very successful for participants because it links the future-oriented thinking with indications of what policies to design now in order to be prepared for plausible futures. Its utility in the service design process is to ground a stronger future perspective. This complements the evidence-based and user-oriented approach of service design that is typically found in present-based scenarios aimed at tackling current challenges.

Service design uses contextual and situational knowledge, but services and context are in constant evolution in terms of the way that they affect one another. Speculative design provides methods that bring dynamism to the context so that service strategy can be considered in a non-static state.

creation of future instances is a very powerful tool for introducing new discussions to the organisation.

The new content can come from expert contributions, existing knowledge and designers’ visions.

2. ‘Pre-Develop’ – to expand idea generation and development processes using ’what if’ questions and backcasting. The latter is a tangible takeaway, in the form of a canvas of principles and a timeline of possible service iterations that stakeholders can use to build future projects and service redesigns with ethical considerations in mind, informed by the understanding of the service impact over time.

What remains for a full speculative-service design integration In conclusion, we found that the integration of the two methodologies is quite natural. We believe that the next steps for a full integration are to design specific methods for two main phases: 1. ‘Pre-Discover’ – to expand the field of research and help with framing ideation. In this phase, the Touchpoint 10-2 53

Introducing DIVE for SMEs A design-led technique to explore product and service futures

Futures thinking is an important capability to support the sustainability of any kind of organisation. Examples of these techniques are technology roadmapping, a managerial practice used extensively in tech industries, and concept cars, a practice that has long been used by automakers as a design-led way to envisioning future products. Whereas automotive corporations use this futures technique as a driver for innovation, small and Ricardo Mejia is a partner and strategic designer at rrebrand Latam, a strategic design consultancy that helps organisations innovate in a meaningful way. He is also a PhD fellow at IDStudioLab at the Delft University of Technology.

Alejandro Chitiva is Marketing Director at Realists, a SME in Germany leading surgical trainings through technological innovations. He has an MBA in promotion and training for SMEs. Ties van Bruinessen is a naval architect at Oceanco, working on the development of new projects and designs.

Has a PhD in ship design, focussing on applying innovation in newlydeveloped ships.

Wim Verhoeff is an industrial designer at Oceanco, working on the design and development of luxury yachts. He holds a MsC in Integrated Product Design.

54 Touchpoint 10-2

medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are not familiar with these kinds of explorations because they can be very resource-intensive.

Because few SMEs use futures thinking, many lack an appropriate game plan that enables them to anticipate and respond to a turbulent market.1 That lack of a clear vision of the future is one of the main reasons for the eventual failure of some SMEs.2 This is a problem because SMEs are considered the backbone of social and economic prosperity due to their roles as generators of new ideas and technologies, job creators, and as sources of knowledge and specialised goods and services for larger business.3 To help these enterprises, as part of a large investigation that involved Ph.D. and Master students’ graduation projects, we developed ‘Design, Innovation, Vision and Exploration’ (DIVE). DIVE is a design-led futures technique that supports SMEs in making and sharing a strategic vision of

the future translated into specific services or products.

This article illustrates the use of DIVE with Oceanco, a Dutch company that designs and produces yachts over 80 meters in length. During this exercise, DIVE demonstrated its efficacy in supporting participants in creating future visions, prototyping product-service systems and stories, and making recommendations for different timeframes.

DIVE DIVE (see Fig. 1) “consists of a quick dive into the depths of speculative futures and a swim back to the world as it is”4 .

The exercise started with a kick-off meeting with the company representatives

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

Fig. 1: DIVE´s blueprint includes the five activities.

from Oceanco, who act as problem owners, and external professional designers from the Service Design Studio in Oslo, Norway, as process owners. During the exercise, problem owners provided information about the company, acting as “experts of their own experience”5, while process owners collected, organised and analysed that information, and lead the series of activities. Facilitators from the Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands), and Leipzig University (Germany), gave the problem and process owners (the participants) an abbreviated theoretical background on DIVE and provided instructions for the activities described in Figure 1.

In ‘Activity 1: Understanding the present’, the participants used the ‘Strategic PES – Product-ExperienceService’, a visual tool that applies the metaphor of a fish to analyse SMEs, applied in this case to get an overview of Oceanco. Viewing the company as a living being “facilitates a strategic conversation between designers and entrepreneurs and allows the measurement of areas of reflection in a visual way”6 . It also helps participants

distance themselves from the company and remove pre-conceptions. The fish is divided into four parts: the company’s know-how (the head), the market that steers the company (the tail), the company’s infrastructure (the back), and the portfolio of products and services (the belly). This is used to set a domain, an area of exploration, and a time frame for how far this exploration goes.

As part of the ‘Activity 2: Approaching the future’, the process owners, together with the problem owners, conducted a brief investigation to gather trends and drivers within the selected domain to make a shared vision of the future.

Using this vision as an inspiration, in ‘Activity 3: Exploring the future’, the process owners made different mock-ups and created stories to develop and select diverse ideas.

In ‘Activity 4: Communicating the future’, the process owners polished the final mock-up and story to share the vision concepts (concept products, services or product service systems) in the form of a short video.

Touchpoint 10-2 55

Finally, in ‘Activity 5: Looking back into the future’, the process owners used the short video to spark a conversation among problem owners and external experts in design-driven innovation about the future of the company, supporting the decision-making process in the present. During this conversation, the process owners plotted a roadmap in which different ideas and concepts were organised along the time frame selected in Activity 2.

After all the activities, which took three consecutive days to complete, facilitators led a ‘closing meeting’ to collect final thoughts and feedback about the technique.

In addition, the process owners delivered the videos of the vision concepts and the roadmap to the problem owners. As part of their role as process owners, the external designers used a toolkit (see Fig. 2) throughout the process.

Results Using the canvas provided in the toolkit for Activity 1, and applying the proposed fish metaphor, participants defined Oceanco as ‘Luxus Streamliner’ (see Fig. 3).

As expected, the metaphor here serves to facilitate and speed-up the interaction and understanding between process and problem owners. As part of this understanding, process owners observed that due to the firm's exclusive market niche – where the processes of sales and production are particularly complex – Oceanco only rarely produces yachts, but those it does produce are

carefully-crafted, unique pieces that are accomplished with the assistance of highly-specialised subcontractors.

Although this very competitive company is part of an exclusive industry, its behaviour and personality are humble and reserved.

According to this analysis, participants described the topic for this exploration as “luxury on the water” and set three time frames for the vision concepts: 2023 (‘the world as it is’), 2028 (‘the near future’), and 2033 (‘the speculative future’). To analyse context factors, the process owners researched social, cultural, political, economic and environmental trends. The cultural and social trends in particular led them to the following findings: — An expected increase in the number of billionaires — Increased shifts in world wealth distribution — Philanthropy as a fashion — The desire of wealthy people to reach new destinations such the arctic or the moon — Technology’s move towards the human-machine integration.

Given these insights, the designers defined the future vision as: “Oceanco wants to redefine the notion of Luxury on the water”.

In view of this vision statement, the external designers created the vision concept “Heaven of the seas”. It depicts the year 2033 in which billionaires are worried

Fig. 2: DIVE’s toolkit includes a poster with an overview of the activities, a short description of the process, and three canvases, used to report Activity 1 (Strategic PES), Activity 2 (the changing trends and developments and the stable states and principles), and Activity 5 (the roadmap). Because Activities 3 and 4 use only three-dimensional models, they do not require canvases.

56 Touchpoint 10-2

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

Fig. 3: The illustration of ‘Luxus Streamliner’. It is a medium-sized fish that dwells in exotic waters. According to the participants, to survive in this glamorous habitat, Luxus attracts prey using its tiny but flamboyant tail to move its muscular and compact body, and is surrounded by a large group of crabs representing its subcontractors.

about civilisation. In this context, the yacht is conceived more as a water-based alternative, with special features that make it self-sustainable, such as a greenhouse to grow food, covers that collect and store solar and wind energy, and medical facilities with virtual connections to specialists all over the world. In this vision concept, external designers consolidated ideas about the trend of environmental awareness, one that is more appealing to wealthy people. Accordingly, this proposal also considers the yacht as a means to preserve ecosystems, allowing partnerships with scientific institutions and researchers that may conduct projects on board. The external designers made a video (see Fig. 4) to communicate this vision concept to the company representatives. In the video, they role-played an informal conversation between two owners, in which one of them is showing off her yacht and the particular features that makes it unique. As part of the conversation, they used a voice-driven device to show images of the vessel and its features.

Considering this vision concept, and in order to make the recommendations more actionable, the external designers drew a roadmap (see Fig. 5) that compressed several ideas for the medium- and short-term.

As part of these ideas, they made two vision concepts: “Oceanco future lab” for the year 2028 (see Fig. 6), and “Green luxury” for the year 2023 (see Fig. 7).

“Oceanco future lab” suggests transforming a yacht into a mobile research facility to conduct research on maritime technology and shows users how to establish partnerships with scientists. “Green luxury” was created to target the new kind of billionaires, those who came from tech companies and have a different mindset regarding environmental and social responsibility. The product-service system proposes the development of new

Fig. 4: Frames of the video “Heaven of the seas.”

Touchpoint 10-2 57

Fig. 5: The roadmap that includes the world as it is, the near future and the speculative future.

eco-oriented features for yachts, for instance, sea plastic cleaners, sea planters and air purifiers. It also alludes to the integration of new technologies and the co-creation process of the product with the customer.

Learnings from this exercise Participants were able to successfully finish the futures exploration despite facing some difficulties during the first two activities. They did not have sufficient time to familiarise themselves with the toolkit, having only two hours for Activities 1 and 2. The complications experienced in carrying out these activities could also be related to the differences in working style between process owners and facilitators, which is a common situation during DIVE’s activities. Moreover, the process owners were used to following prescriptive techniques which allow precise control over activities and outcomes from the beginning, whereas the facilitators proposed a more exploratory exercise. Activity 1 involves a high level of uncertainty, because the participants do not know each other beforehand, do not know the company and are unfamiliar with the technique. The achievements in the final three activities could be due to the external designers’ experience in dealing with these types of activities –designing products and services, making prototypes of services, and facilitating conversation.

58 Touchpoint 10-2

Another challenge faced by the process owners was prototyping a product-service system. When displaying a product-service system, and making a physical prototype, the mock-up of a static object is not enough. Videos are well-suited as ways to ‘materialise’ the outcomes of this exercise, because they show the service interactions between the artefacts and their users.

Participants appreciated the toolkit because it provided an accurate guide to the activities to be performed, while also generating a visual record of the analysis and results of each activity. In addition, the web page served as DIVE´s information support, easily accessible for all participants throughout the activities.

According to the problem owners, “DIVE can guide Oceanco in defining a future based on a changing environment. Due to the compact and efficient approach, it can be easily implemented within the current company structure, producing valuable outcomes.” Interestingly, although the company is currently a product-based sales business, all the vision concepts, created as outcomes of the exercise, point towards a service-based one in which Oceanco will sell its know-how as the main product.

It seems that in the future scenario envisioned by the participants, product-service systems have more meaning for customers and therefore will add more value to the business.

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

Fig. 6: Frames of the video “Oceanco future lab”.

Fig. 7: Frames of the video “Green luxury”.

Conclusions Exploring the future is not an easy task. It implies a high degree of complexity, mainly because of its uncertain nature. In order to cope with this challenge, DIVE aims to obtain a concrete image of the future, one that can be easily shared with other people. This tangible image of the future enables participants to generate innovative concepts, a set of organised ideas, and the ability to share them with others. Therefore, it invites diverse stakeholders to address the challenges inherent in the future. In general, design-led futures techniques, such as DIVE, stimulate the company to explore possible futures and choose a preferable vision that provides a destination for strategic planning. By making this destination concrete, designers make it easier for companies to understand the world as it is, a desirable future they might envision, and to form a shared sense of direction on how to get there.

1 Majama, N. S., & Magang, T. I. (2017). Strategic Planning in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Journal of Management and Strategy, 8(1), 74.

2 Ejdys, J. (2014). Future Oriented Strategy for SMEs. Procedia, Social and Behavioral Sciences, 156(April), 8-12.

Rohrbeck, R., & Gemünden, H. G. (2011). Corporate foresight: Its three roles in enhancing the innovation capacity of a firm. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 78(2), 231-243.

Armitage, S. (2017, February 16). Fatal Flaws: 10 Reasons Why SMEs Fail.

Retrieved from Entrepreneur: https://www.entrepreneur.com/ article/289265 Kannan, G. (2016, December 9). 11 Reasons Why SMEs Fail. Retrieved from Leaderonomics.com: https://leaderonomics.com/business/ why-smes-fail 3 Lukács, E. (2005). The Economic Role of SMEs in World Economy, Especially In Europe. European Integration Studies, 1(4), 3-12.

Muller, P., Devnani, S., Julius, J., Marzocchi, C., & Gagliardi, D. (2016).

Annual report on European SMEs 2015/2016. European Commission.

European Commission.

4 Mejia Sarmiento, R., Pasman, G., Hultink, E-J., & Stappers, P. J. (2017).

Developing DIVE, a design-led futures technique for SMEs. In C. Vogel, & G. Muratovski (Eds.), Proceedings of the IASDR Conference RE: Research. (pp. 770-787). Cincinnati: IASDR. 5 Sanders, E., & Stappers, P. J. (2012). Convivial toolbox: Generative research for the front end of design. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.

6 Mejia Sarmiento, R., & Parra, J. (2014). Strategic PES: Product Experience-Service, a visual tool to support SMEs through servicedominant logic. Touchpoint, The Journal of Service Design, 6(3), 80–85.

More details of DIVE can be found at http://dive.pktweb.com

Touchpoint 10-2 59

Futures Thinking: A Mind-set, not a Method Embedding futures thinking within design practices Design practices are becoming increasingly future-focussed, reflecting the complexities of the design challenges that we face.

Futures thinking can offer us tools and methods to help with this, but more than that, it might offer us a new way of seeing the world that we design for.

Zoë Prosser is a Futures Researcher at Andthen.

She researches design and designs research that considers the subtle behaviours beneath our engagements with new ways of thinking and doing. Her work within rural contexts focuses on democratising and sustaining community autonomy. zoe@studioandthen.com

Santini Basra is the Director of Andthen. He is a designer and researcher exploring the crossover between design and futures thinking. He founded Andthen in 2016 and has since led projects across the finance, education, retail, manufacturing and mindfulness sectors. santini@studioandthen.com

60 Touchpoint 10-2

Service designers operate within a user-centred world, where design challenges are driven by human behaviours, attitudes, needs and wants.

However, people are always changing; they are shaped by the socio-cultural, technological, political and economic influences of the surroundings they live in. Some of these influences might be predictable or obvious, such as the reduced possibilities to live and work abroad for UK citizens, following their country’s departure from the European Union. They might also be unexpected or subtle, such as changes in online social behaviours following a privacy scandal involving a tech giant.

User-centred designers are masters of researching and understanding the ways in which people behave right now, but design challenges are often complex, everchanging, and rarely do they only exist in the ‘now’. We argue that designers tackle challenges best by considering not only how people behave now, but how external

influences change these behaviours and needs over time. In contexts where the pace of change is increasing, service designers must respond by thinking in even longer terms. By exploring futures thinking, designers can create services that are more resilient to potential change, and may even take an active role in shaping the change that affects them.

As Douglas Rushkoff stated during a recent talk at FutureFest 2018, “The word ‘future’ should be interpreted as a verb, not a noun.” It can be used to describe not only a place in time at which we arrive, but the process of proactively shaping change.1 What is futures thinking?

Increasingly, future-oriented practices are influencing the design disciplines of today. ‘Foresight’, ‘futurism’, ‘futurology’, ‘anticipation studies’ and ‘futures

1 Rushkoff, D. 2018. Why Futurists Suck. Futurefest, 7 July, London.

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

Preferable

Probable Plausible Possible

Fig. 1: Based on a well-known taxonomy of futures, first visualised

by Joseph Voros, the ‘Futures Cone’ is a visual tool that helps to categorise different future scenarios according to likelihood and preferability.

thinking’ (sometimes ‘futures’ for short) are terms that are often used interchangeably to describe the practice of thinking about the future in a structured way, and the methods and approaches that are used to do so. For clarity, we like to use ‘futures thinking’ when discussing this.

However, futures thinking is by no means a young practice. Throughout the 20th century, it was concerned with anticipating the future, for use within post-war political planning or as inspiration to the science fiction writers of the era, such as H.G. Wells. In recent years, the practice has shifted its focus away from predictions of the future, known as forecasting, toward the critical exploration of future possibilities, known as foresight.

While it is still not formally defined or well established as an academic discipline, there are maxims that are commonly agreed upon. “You can’t know the future” is one of them. In other words, futures thinking looks beyond the scope of ‘probable futures’ to examine the full realm of ‘possible futures’ (see Fig. 1), with the goal of identifying unforeseen opportunities or de-risking propositions. It seeks to unpack the question of “what could happen?”, rather than attempting to answer “what will happen?”.

Futures thinking is primarily concerned with systemic factors, and is less concerned with immediate problems.

It recognises that everything is interconnected, and that in order to make meaningful and long-lasting impact, one must understand and intervene in the overall system rather than addressing only individual elements. If we applied this approach to a project about meditation, for

example, we would also consider adjacent subjects such as mental health, self-help, work performance and online self-image.

Where futures thinking and Design Thinking meet Many designers who already practice futures thinking do so by applying it as a tool or method to be deployed at certain stages of their design process. In some cases, foresight has been used before the design process even begins, as a provocation to rouse the team and encourage new, creative thought.2 In these instances, futures thinking is viewed as supplementary to the design process, but not baked into its methodology or mind-set.

We challenge this notion of futures thinking as a method or tool to be deployed by designers and argue that it delivers more meaningful impact when built into design as a mind-set. We believe that futures thinking is an approach with a set of principles that can be integrated into design methodologies from start to finish.

Futures thinking as a mind-set for design The methodology that we have crafted introduces the divergent, exploratory mind-set of futures thinking to the outcome-oriented mind-set of design. This helps us answer both the long-term question of “where do we want to be?” as well as the short-term response to “so what do we do next?”.

2 Collman, N. 2018. Beyond the Next Big Thing: Designing for the future human. Nile Webinar: https://nilehq.com/video/Beyond-The-NextBig-Thing-webinar-Neil-Collman.mp4

Touchpoint 10-2 61

Credit: Illustration by Lizzie Abernethy

Fig. 2: An illustration of a possible future of digital education, made as part of the University of Edinburgh’s Near Future Teaching project.

62 Touchpoint 10-2

Meanwhile, design expertise helps us communicate the abstract future concepts that we envision. Illustrating a possible future scenario through a visual or physical artefact is significantly more powerful than describing it through language alone (See Fig. 2 and Fig. 3). This helps our clients, users and project stakeholders better empathise with the human experiences that might exist within the described future scenario.

In blending design and futures approaches, we embed principles from futures thinking into our design practice, two of which we will discuss here in further detail. From start to finish, throughout project scoping, research phases, fieldwork, synthesis, testing and refining, we:

d e s i g n i n g t h e f u t u re

1. Take an interest in the possible, and not only the actual

This principle manifests itself at several points throughout any given project. In early research phases it may involve looking to fringe users to define weak signals of change, while in user engagements we might use conversations of possible or preferred futures to help uncover and unpack people’s deep beliefs and aspirations. In client strategy sessions we might challenge stakeholders with visions of futures that are outside of what they consider ‘probable’ in order to inspire them to pursue new opportunities.

2. Understand the changing system

We view people, services, products and organisations as part of a constantly changing system. They are not isolated elements, but are interconnected, and are part of a system in which elements are always changing and influencing each other. This understanding of the changing system is not, and cannot be, built solely through a series of methods and project activities. It is conceived as a mind-set that is deeply ingrained, affecting the very way we interpret our observations

Fig. 3: A physical artefact created to communicate a possible multicurrency future to Hitachi EU. (Credit: Lewis Just and Santini Basra in collaboration with the Glasgow School of Art.)

of the world. Again, this principle has different roles to play in different stages of a project, from identifying the unexpected consequences of developments in fields adjacent to a particular project’s subject matter, to building an understanding of the many socio-cultural, technological, political and economic factors that might have an impact on a designed project outcome over a period of time.

The value of futures as a mind-set By adopting these futures thinking principles within our design methodology, we have derived values that we believe are also applicable to the work of service designers. These include: 1. Building an understanding of the changes that are shaping the behaviours and needs of the people that we design for and with.

2. Building resilience into our designs by considering the unexpected consequences that might affect us in the future.

3. Using possible future scenarios to communicate and share our own, and our collaborators’, visions. This forms and strengthens our culture with clients, audiences, and each other by helping us share complex or abstract ideas.

For service designers who are new to futures thinking, and for those who might have already experimented with its methods or principles, it is our hope that futures thinking will become more regularly embedded, as a mind-set, within design practices. While the discrete use of futures thinking methods or tools is valuable, we believe that embedding the mind-set of futures thinking within a design or innovation team provides more impact.

Just as human-centred and service design mindsets have become the norm within our current design practices, the principles of futures thinking can help shape and refine our ways of seeing the world. Of course achieving this takes experience, but we believe that by taking time to explore and experiment with its principles, futures thinking can transform our design processes and working cultures.

Touchpoint 10-2 63

Tools and Methods

Prototyping Spatial User Experiences Harnessing virtual reality as a high-fidelity prototyping method Using immersive technologies gives service designers and clients the opportunity to research complex service ecosystems. Such technologies offer the tester the chance to move away from abstract assumptions of how a user could think, feel or act in a Gregor Finger is a creative technologist at IXDS in Germany. An expert in immersive technologies, Gregor is dedicated to working with virtual and augmented reality. With a background in interaction design, he engages in developing interdisciplinary application areas for these technologies. gregor.finger@ixds.com

Isabell Fringer is a design lead in the IXDS Seamless Mobility venture. She develops future mobility solutions through technology enabled services, for the public transport and mobility service providers along with her team. To do so, she relies on agile product development. isabell.fringer@ixds.com

66 Touchpoint 10-2

certain context, and can instead work with actual user interactions and movements. It also provides a foundation from which products and services can be designed to be truly aligned with user needs.

Creating the virtual environment of sufficient fidelity is the most demanding aspect of this prototyping method. Once set up, however, it is a flexible tool which is relatively inexpensive considering the saved costs and the technology’s utilisation throughout the length of the project. It can be adapted for different scenarios of user tests as needed, thereby addressing a variety of demands.

elements to achieve a seamless passenger information system in the subway carriages and stations.

Following the service design-based ideation phase – which generated insights about which information was necessary before, during, and after traveling – the team was confronted with the challenge of testing the complex and intrinsicallylinked guidance system.

A holistic approach to testing complex systems The methodology described in this article was successfully implemented on a recent project with Hamburger Hochbahn AG during the design of a service infrastructure for a new subway line in Hamburg, which is currently still in its conceptual phase. There was a key focus on harmonising static (printed, non-interactive) and dynamic (digital)

Preparing to explore future scenarios Before starting a user test within a VR environment, the subjects were prepared in two ways. First, to reduce a possible technology bias, they were introduced to the VR equipment and to a section of the virtual world which would not be part of the actual test.

Second, to get the subjects into the right mindset, they were introduced to

tools and me thods

Fig. 1: From left to right: Prototypes of the future guidance system (developed with an ideation workshop); Preparation of specific ideas for the user test; The final simulation in VR.

a realistic scenario which they would encounter in the real world. This immersion was accomplished using traditional methods such as theatre play, visualised design scenarios, or service prototypes.

During the VR phase of the user test, the service designer and other observers were able to witness the subject’s experience of the virtual space. The service designer also could facilitate conversations to encourage the user to expressing what he or she was experiencing, thereby allowing a detailed understanding of the user’s choices. However, a valuable aspect of the VR set-up is that users who are deeply immersed in a virtual setting often begin to describe their experiences without being prompted.

Tricking the brain into accepting an artificial environment To attain the most realistic data on the user’s behaviour, it is essential to minimise the facilitator’s influence on the subject, as well as the subject’s social desirability bias to conform to group norms. One clear advantage of VR technology over traditional methods is that the subject

has no visual connection to the observer, leaving the subject fully immersed within the spatial prototype.

In such a setting, it is essential to create a stable immersion – a state in which the user is not distracted by wearing equipment. Because the environment, headset, controllers and the imposed position of being studied could be unfamiliar for the subject, it could lead to the unintended motivation by the subject to “perform”. This could result in a potentially false testing data, as the Hawthorne effect1 suggests. However, in this case, efforts to were made to reduce the potential for false data by providing the subject with enough time and space to try out the virtual environment. In fact, the whole session was designed so that the subject could feel comfortable and present in the virtual reality.

To achieve a stable immersion, it is essential for the researcher to understand how the brain can be tricked into accepting an artificial surrounding. As neurologist

1 Cambridge, J., Witton, J., Elbourne, D.R. (2014). Systematic review of the Hawthorne effect: New concepts are needed to study research participation effects. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.

Touchpoint 10-2 67

1. Introduction: The subject runs through a tutorial-like process to become familiar with the technology and the scene. This happens prior to actual testing.

2. Orientation: The user is introduced to the testing scenario, story and context. This can occur inside or outside of the virtual environment.

3. Experience: The immersed user takes part in the VR experience (user test) while being guided by a service designer through a structured conversation.

© Guterstam et al (2011)3

and best-selling author David Eagleman states, “Your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull […] Your brain doesn’t know, and it doesn't care, where it gets the data from. Whatever information comes in, it just figures out what to do with it.”2 On this basis, the well-known “rubber hand illusion”3 experiment reveals how quickly a subject adapts to a new sensory environment. The effect of this ‘body transfer’ illusion encouraged the researchers to introduce three phases of guiding a user into a state of stable immersion:

A perceptual illusion, the “rubber hand illusion” is essential to acclimatise the subject by tricking their brain into accepting an artificial environment.

Crucial tools for the user testing analysis Tools operating in the background monitored the user’s behaviour within the virtual world and provided additional qualitative insights.

IXDS team member Felix Lange developed a Unity3D plugin to track different user movements, enabling researchers to retrieve quantitative data about where the subject is walking, standing, looking and hesitating.

This open-source software, RecordAndRepeat4 , is readily available on GitHub and will be developed further.

2 Eagleman, David. (March 2015) Can we create new senses for humans?

[Video File] Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/david_ eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans 3 Guterstam et al (2011). The Illusion of Owning a Third Arm. Retrieved 24 July, 2018, from https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/ journal.pone.0017208 4 https://github.com/fx-lange/unity-record-and-repeat

68 Touchpoint 10-2

RecordAndRepeat enables practitioners to track and visually layer the different user movements for analysis.

tools and me thods

Taking the prototype for a virtual spin.

Spatial prototyping as a tool to solve tomorrow’s problems, today The simulation for testing the future public transport stations and carriages described in this article shows only a fraction of the potential of what could be tested with a VR prototype.

The vision for this particular set-up is to further develop the complexity of the user tasks, and scale the set-up as needed according to project requirements. This could initially involve extending the field of user research to conduct, among other things, experience stress tests. For example, users may encounter a simulation of a fire or another emergency circumstance so that service designers may evaluate if subjects can easily find their way to exits. Furthermore, this set-up could support the evaluation of whether the guidance system works universally. This could be done by simulating the vibrations of probing canes used by blind people or people with low vision. As the project develops, so will the VR prototype.

Spatial prototyping also carries benefits for internal and external stakeholder management. Because not all stakeholders can interpret design documents such as wireframes, a VR prototype offers a more tangible way of communicating the current project status while allowing the stakeholder to experience the future setting themselves.

The potential this technology offers is best summarised

by Sasha Samochina, an immersive visualisation producer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, who says we must “… bring 3D designs into the world and solve problems before they’re real”.

Creating long-lasting and adaptive spatial prototypes with immersive technologies reveals the potential to test future scenarios in great detail, and build valid products for the real world.

Touchpoint 10-2 69

How Foresight Practices Support Service Innovation Using foresight techniques to explore the future of personal care Imagine if you could have all your soaps, moisturisers and other daily skin care products produced instantly by a 3D printer in your bathroom, or if you could have a skin analysis carried out by a digital tool that uses artificial intelligence to assess your skin and Thalis Laspias is an assistant strategic foresight consultant in Arup’s Foresight, Research and Innovation team. He brings together experience from the engineering, design and research disciplines to deliver projects that bring positive change to people’s lives and enables organisations to thrive. He has a Master’s degree in design from Goldsmiths University of London and has worked as a service designer in London-based studios. thales.laspias@gmail.com

recommend personal hygiene products and skincare routines based on your skin type, lifestyle and needs.

These may sound like distant future scenarios, but they will soon be a reality as new technologies and changing consumer preferences are rapidly redefining how and where we care for our skin. These include an increase in digital experiences and tools that support personal care routines, as well as a shift to more sustainable and ‘natural’ offerings.

Therefore, it is important for businesses in the personal care market to continuously innovate, to manage emerging risks and opportunities and ensure they are prepared for the needs of their future clients.

A fast-changing corporate context Like many other sectors, the market for personal care products has entered a period of rapid change. Personal care products include an array of moisturisers, shampoos and shower gels, facial cleansers and toners, sun creams and

70 Touchpoint 10-2

lotions, as well as medical advice on skin care. An ageing population, climate change, global middle-class expansion, and the advance of new technologies are among the drivers that are fundamentally changing how we use personal care products and the experiences we expect from them. In light of these changes, established companies and new players are creating new standards in personal care and wellbeing. Driven by new forms of marketing and endorsement through channels such as Instagram, the market is now much faster and less predictable in terms of consumer desire from one minute to the next.

So, how can established personal care companies deal with such change? What does it mean to innovate and develop new products in this fast-moving and uncertain market environment? How can value be created in new ways?

tools and me thods

Futures thinking and foresight can offer a powerful framework for answering these questions. Foresight practices enable organisations to explore plausible futures, understand implications of the new normal, manage uncertainty, and define the vision of what they strive to create. This exploration includes understanding key drivers of change, detecting signals, mapping risks, and recognising the implications of change for a specific business or context. This insight into the future is becoming an integral part of the innovation process and provides a cornerstone for the development of new services.1 Exploring the future of personal care The Foresight team at Arup worked with Beiersdorf AG, a global personal care company, to explore what personal care will mean in the year 2030. The aim of the project was to examine fundamental questions about space, services, products, experiences and cultures that will define the future of ‘care’, and the implications for their business. Arup Foresight delivered a series of future user journeys and service experiences that aimed to identify opportunities for innovation across a range of global markets and product categories.

Our approach to envisioning and exploring the future Mapping and analysis of relevant global, regional and sector-specific trends The research began with a horizon scan, which is the identification, collection, and analysis of information about future market trends in the personal care sector. The research sought to identify short- to longterm tendencies in society, technology, economics, the environment and politics (known as the STEEP framework). These tendencies included regional cultural and demographic changes such as age, income and generational mix, technological shifts and disruptors such as digital manufacturing, the ‘Internet of Things’ and artificial intelligence, as well as economic factors such as the collaborative economy and open innovation.

The trends captured were the result of a rigorous process based on feedback aggregated from expert interviews,

1 Arup (2017) An Introduction to Corporate Foresight 2 ibid.

knowledge gained from desktop research and literature review, and the utilisation of Arup’s Drivers of Change tool. The Drivers of Change programme examines key drivers impacting the future of the urban environment, ranging from climate change to urbanisation to resource consumption. The team looked to these drivers to identify the major trends impacting the future of the personal care sector.2 Mapping and analysis of relevant case studies and exemplars As part of the research phase, the Foresight team captured and reviewed global best practice case studies, current developments and emerging concepts — known as weak signals — that may have a significant impact on the operational environment of Beiersdorf. The aim was to identify existing innovations to act as inspiration for future value propositions for products and service offerings. These case studies were gathered from across markets and geographies, allowing the team to quickly compile a global snapshot of innovations in the personal care and healthcare sector.

Synthesis and consolidation Identification of trends was followed by an analysis of how the trends would impact the specific organisational context in terms of service offering and customer experience. Working in collaboration with senior internal stakeholders, the key projections for each trend were captured and classified according to relevance and impact. The trends research was ultimately synthesised into six key themes, outlined below: — Diversification and personalisation — Do-It-Yourself movement — Data collection and analytics — Digital and physical experiences — Changing environments — New business ecosystems Each theme was mapped against a set of five personal care trends. These trends were captured in a set of cards, providing both visual and textual descriptions using the quantitative data captured during the research phase.

Furthermore, each card provided the key questions for practitioners to consider, as well as a list of relevant case studies.

Touchpoint 10-2 71

ideas about the characteristics of future customers and demand for personal care services, products and experiences. These ideas were captured across a time horizon encompassing the potential short, medium and long-term changes. Based on these trends and future profiles, the participants then developed a concept for the key characteristics of the product or service, the target audience, the selling proposition, the revenue streams and the key stakeholders.

Fig. 1: Trend card.

Research

Trends

Trend Research Exemplar Research

Stakeholder workshop

Synthesis

Student workshop

Explore Understand Prioritize

Ideation Concepts

Future personas Future experiences

Storytelling

Future stories

Fig. 2: Design process.

Workshops The initial research activities were followed by two workshops: one with internal stakeholders from Beiersdorf, and another with students from the MA Narrative Environments course at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London.

Stakeholder workshop The stakeholder workshop explored the future of care across the six core themes. The participants — a broad group of 30 internal stakeholders from Beiersdorf’s product planning and marketing teams — were invited to collectively review the trends and examine their implications across personal care products, services and experiences. Teams of participants were given a printed set of the trend cards developed in the synthesis phase to support ideation around the key topics. Each group selected the three trends considered to have the greatest impact on the personal care sector and captured the key implications and opportunities for the company.

On the basis of these trends, the participants generated 72 Touchpoint 10-2

Synthesis The concepts were prioritised based on the potential desirability of the customer and the business capability to develop the proposed product or service. The Foresight team then synthesised the workshop material into three conceptual areas: — New business ecosystems: Care that comes to you Local consulting and mobile distribution.

— Digital and physical experiences: Personalised luxurious personal care experiences available anywhere customers need them.

— Support do-it-yourself communities: Sharing skin-care expertise and experience via online platforms.

Student workshop In the second workshop, the students imagined future customer personas and potential service experiences.

The engagement of world-class art and design students provided a unique view on the future of care, which enriched the project and provided a diverse set of insights. Four different user groups were defined based on demographic characteristics and care needs, and the four personas that emerged consisted of an elderly couple, a working professional, an athletic father and a family with two children.

The students then developed four customer experiences that explored the future through the eyes of customers.

This human-centred approach ensured that any new products, services or experiences are designed around people, their expectations and their desires. The future user experiences developed were: — Story 1: Young family with baby and small child during their bathing routine. A 3D printer produces customised products to treat each family member’s respective skin conditions.

— Story 2: Elderly couple receiving professional

tools and me thods

Fig. 3: Future customer experience.

healthcare service. Mobile care-hub caravans offer diagnostics and professional care services while supporting local communities.

— Story 3: Working professional woman with heavy travel schedule. Wearable device feeds live data back to a cloud system, which provides appropriate personal care products and services at every stage of the trip.

Story 4: Father caring for his teenage son’s sports — injury. An automated personal care machine in a sports store provides customised product kits based on the customer’s needs.

Future storytelling At the end of the project, the students were tasked with visualising the future personas and customer experiences together to develop future personal care narratives. The stories were presented and captured in a 10-minute video intended to inspire new service offerings.

Delivering value to the organisation The trends identified in this project provided an indication of the types of change that should be expected, and the impacts these changes could have on the future product and service portfolio of Beiersdorf. The aim of this project was not to predict, but to inspire. It acted as a basis for conversations among staff from across the company and created an overall shift in awareness related to emerging risks and opportunities in the market of personal care.

It helped to develop a shared understanding of the type of company that Beiersdorf can and should be, both today and in the future. Internal product development

teams utilised the outcomes of the project to understand opportunities for future growth fields, new product categories and overall innovation strategy.

Foresight and service design for services innovation Foresight practices are an integral part of service innovation and can bring essential value to service design projects, influencing the quality of the outcomes.

Foresight analysis enables a company to examine potential drivers of change and identify the key challenges and opportunities for growth. This foresight knowledge grounds the ideation phase of the service design process on possible, probable and plausible futures, enabling the generation of future-proof concepts.

Service design brings customer centricity into these future contexts and creates new solutions for desired futures.3 The methods of foresight and service design complement each other in the innovation process and provide a muchneeded combined approach to service innovation. Both foresight and service design are future-oriented, creative and participatory approaches, tackling issues in a holistic, systemic and iterative way with an ultimate aim to foster innovation and create value.4

3 Kuosa, T. (2014) Participatory Foresight and Service Design, Touchpoint, Volume 5 Number 3.

4 Ojasalo, K. et al. (2015) Foresight and Service Design Boosting Dynamic Capabilities in Service Innovation

Touchpoint 10-2 73

s p o n s o re d c o n t e n t

Aligning Future Vision in Large and Diverse Organisations A mapping tool for vision alignment Co-creating future visions in large organisations can be a daunting task, involving multiple stakeholders with diverse viewpoints, cultural backgrounds, levels of influence and commitment. At BBVA, we have found that achieving tangible outcomes means not just listening to and incorporating leadership feedback, Marcela Machuca is lead service designer of the global service design team at BBVA. Prior to BBVA she worked for Designit and Last.fm.

She is the founder of Madrid’s Service Design Drinks, which began in 2010. marcela.machuca@ doingdone.org

Aleksandra Kozawska is a senior service designer at BBVA with extensive experience working in consultancies such as Sopra Steria and Fjord.

Her design education includes University College London (UK), Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and Glasgow School of Arts (UK). She was a Finalist for the SDN’s Service Design Award 2017. kozawska@gmail.com

74 Touchpoint 10-2

but working alongside and involving leadership teams at every stage in the design process. To meet this challenge, the BBVA service design team has developed an internal tool known as the “stakeholder vision map”.

As William Gibson wisely noted, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”1 Like many large organisations today, BBVA can resemble a collection of silos. In our case, these silos stretch across a range of countries as diverse as Spain, Turkey, the United States, Mexico and Peru. With each country having its own interests, technological capacities and adoption timelines, the stakeholder vision map enables us to understand different positions and align the entire organisation around a common vision of the future.

This early alignment provides us with the support necessary to tackle global projects that will more ‘evenly distribute’ that future across BBVA.

In this article, we will explain the stakeholder vision map and illustrate how we use it to co-create and align ‘preferable futures’ – understood as those that represent what we want to happen, as referred to by Dunne and Raby (see Fig. 1).2

1 William Gibson, 1999 November 30, National Public Radio: NPR: Talk of the Nation, The Science in Science Fiction, Interview with William Gibson, [Quotation is spoken around 11:50] (Accessed npr. org on 2018 August 27th) 2 A. Dunne & F. Raby, “Speculative Everything”, MIT Press 2014.

s p o n s o re d c o n t e n t

The stakeholder vision mapping process Step 1: Carry out provocative interviews through speculative scenarios and ‘Strategic GPS’

Typically, the work of designing futures is based on trends research, user co-creation or speculative scenarios. However, Brian David Johnson, a futurist at Intel, talks about futurecasting not only as a multidisciplinary endeavour involving all the above techniques, but primarily as a way of discovering value through conversation3.

As a part of the typical service design process, teams conduct internal interviews to understand the context of a problem and uncover organisational insights. Similarly, our first step is to trigger meaningful conversations using disruptive insights drawn from initial trend analysis and user research.

In order to nudge stakeholders into taking a firm position, we prepare a set of provocative and speculative scenarios to stimulate and establish disruptive positions (see Fig. 2). Incorporating this information into the stakeholder vision map helps us measure not only how ‘preferable’ a given future might be, but also allows us to push the boundaries of ‘probable’ futures which may apply to the organisation .

Strategic GPS, inspired by the Global Positioning System, is another powerful exercise we learned from our partners at Designit. In the context of the project at hand, we create a list of opposing strategic statements, all of them equally desirable, defining possible directions that the organisation might take which could impact the end user.

In order for us to gather information about mid- to short-term plans, which might influence future scenarios, each stakeholder is asked to mark and then explain the reasoning behind their selected positions (see Fig. 3).

With these responses we can gather information about the specific technologies, partnerships or capacities each department or country is developing which can help us identify project enablers.

3 Brian David Johnson from Intel, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pPpYpyphxJ0

Fig. 1: ‘Preferable futures’ represent what we want to happen. This ‘Futures cone’ representation is based on A. Dunne and F. Raby, “Speculative Everything”, MIT Press 2014.

Fig. 2: Speculative scenarios are high-level concepts described with provocative phrases and images that represent ‘probable futures’ based on trend research.

Fig. 3: A hypothetical example of Strategic GPS. The marks represent the position a stakeholder took in relation to each of the opposite statements presented. Exercise learned from our partners at Designit Madrid.

Touchpoint 10-2 75

s p o n s o re d c o n t e n t

Step 2: Analysis through mapping

Tim O’Reilly, pioneer publisher and new technologies visionary, argues that maps are the most important tool to understand and anticipate the future. According to him, “Maps are a system to understand where we are and where do we want to go.”4 To achieve maximum value from your stakeholder vision map, we recommend systematically going from general to specific as you create it. This means beginning with mapping the organisational objectives stated by the stakeholders along with their assumptions about customer needs in Level 1.

To best represent stakeholder discourse, it is important to select the most relevant variables and visualise diverse positions with the respective data behind each diversion point. For this reason, we represent insights together with accompanying data and anonymised quotes. Keep in mind that while anonymous data is important, the map should list all stakeholders interviewed and the date of the project as a footnote, because this information may have an impact on the final conclusions as well as decisions taken outside of the project context.

Level 2 explores a set of speculative scenarios that represent possible futures, as a way to understand the level of disruption the organisation is willing to embrace and how daring or conservative leadership views are.

Level 3 comes from Strategic GPS insights. Here we visualise anonymised votes with dots indicating stakeholder positions with respect to the opposing concepts that were presented to them. The more dots that cluster around a particular concept, the more supporters it has within the organisation. In case stakeholders hesitate to take a position, their position can be placed in the middle, but always backed-up with a rationale.

Optionally, there could be tactical decisions to be made in certain aspects of a project due to existing differences in capacities, for example: technological legacy, local acquisitions or cultural aspects.

4 Tim O’Reilly, WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us, Harper Business, October 2017.

76 Touchpoint 10-2

Fig. 4: Sample stakeholder vision map – a tool which visualises a range of organisational viewpoints. Each dot represents the weight of opinion, which then links to corresponding quotes or insights.

s p o n s o re d c o n t e n t

When approaching analysis, it is also important to understand the degree of alignment across stakeholders. At times, leadership will be focused on short-term goals and problems, or simply not have had an opportunity to shape a united vision toward a particular future. In other cases, there will be diverse viewpoints on a matter. The reasons behind this disagreement should be explored in detail.

Remember that when presenting insights, they must be rooted in quotes and data. Be sure not to lose divergent opinions in the analysis process. As a best practice, we also recommend involving at least one person with insight into the company’s high-level strategy in order to understand and put stakeholder responses into context.

Finally, note that for the most impactful result, information design and visualisation skills are important, because a well-articulated set of insights reflect and project a clear and actionable position.

Step 3: Aligning future visions through sharing

At BBVA, we have found it essential to not only nurture and sustain futures conversations, but also to share them back to stakeholders. We see this process as the equivalent of holding up a mirror to show how the organisation is looking into the future. It is useful to establish alignment, and either support or challenge the current direction and vision of the organisation.

In fact, we consider leadership vision as a hypothesis of the future, which must be continuously challenged and validated through a design process involving end customers and other stakeholders such as technology, legal, security, etc.

The stakeholder vision map has the most value when it is shared with all relevant stakeholders across the organisation, but most of all with all those who took part in the interviews, because they might lack visibility into their peers’ visions of the project. The map will encourage stakeholders place the project within the overall organisational strategy, as well as challenge teams or reduce uncertainty around expectations, scope or desired impact. The map also helps teams see firsthand how vital it is to align on a common vision – not only across teams and countries, but also vertically

within different levels of leadership, from top to middle management or execution teams, anticipating tensions and misalignments.

Conclusion Design projects that look into the future are commonly used as exploratory or experimentation exercises that rarely achieve implementation. However, we have found the mapping process to be helpful to accomplish tangible outcomes. By identifying strategic directions, platforms, capacities and supporters, the team will feel empowered to generate more disruptive yet still feasible ideas.

Mapping future visions of an organisation brings with it a host of difficult questions: — What hypothesis are we testing?

— How far into the future are we projecting?

— How disruptive should our future vision be?

— How much money/time/resources do we want to invest to implement this vision?

— Who is going to push the implementation of this future vision?

Stakeholder alignment around these questions is crucial.

Ultimately, it will be the organisational leadership who will leverage platforms and teams to build futures.

Ultimately, it will be the organisational leadership who will leverage platforms and teams to build futures and drive implementation towards the agreed direction.

For this reason, it is crucial to provide leadership with a clear visualisation of their options and choices. The stakeholder vision map does just that, showing points of strategic convergence as well as highlighting associated challenges.

At BBVA, we have found the stakeholder vision map to be an indispensable tool for visualising the full range of organisational viewpoints and finding common ground among stakeholders. On the other hand, as service designers we should never forget to always contrast the organisational vision with the needs of the end users.

Touchpoint 10-2 77

A Customer Experiencecentric Approach to Service Quality Traditionally, the concept of ‘Service Quality’ (SQ) is defined as the gap between expectation and perception1. In this article, we present a customer experience-centric approach to service quality that focuses on the impact that service design processes have in delivering a strategically-defined experience proposition.

Mauricy Motta-Filho is Assistant Professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He holds a Ph.D. in service design, and has extensively collaborated with industry, bridging academic knowledge and market application. m.a.mottafilho@gmail.com Doug Cavendish is service designer working at the intersection of design and technology, helping organisations improve customer experience by focusing on the systems that deliver service. doocavendish@gmail.com Luis Alt is a founding partner of Livework in Brazil, author of the book Design Thinking Brasil. He has lectured in institutions like ESPM São Paulo, UFSC, Parsons New School and Universidade Positivo. luis.alt@liveworkstudio.com.br

78 Touchpoint 10-2

Services only exist at the moment of the service provision – that is, during the value co-creating interactions with customers2,3. Before that, services are only a cluster of resources that have the potential to support the co-creation of value3,4 . Therefore, delivering a high quality service requires a focus on the artefacts (service processes, physical and digital interfaces, information systems and organisational structures) that support the service interaction5. It is the role of service designers to combine the appropriate resources, enabling the right customer experience for both clients and service providers. In that sense, service quality is defined in relation to the experience the organisation aims at delivering to its customers – their customer experience proposition. If the service delivers on the desired experience, the design process can be considered a success. If it does not, it has failed.

The customer experience-centric approach to service quality proposed in

this article focuses on evaluating how successful service design practices are in enabling this strategically-defined customer experience proposition to emerge. It acknowledges that the customer experience is the outcome of customers' interactions with different touchpoints, and that these experiences are not only good or bad, but are also rich in meaning. It is through the interactions with the service that customers experience the organisation, associating meanings to its brand.

A customer experience proposition can therefore serve as a parameter for assessing service quality, informing designers what experience they should aim to deliver, while also defining criteria for evaluating the service design process.

The use of brand-specific parameters also enables the evaluation of individual parts of the customer journey (i.e., multiple touchpoints across different channels), whereas traditional service quality methods focus on the overall perception

tools and me thods

of one type of channel (i.e., quality in digital6 or retail1 environments). This is particularly relevant for assessing the service design process.

Building a customer experience-centric quality assessment method In an effort to improve its customers’ experience, Itaú, a leading financial institution in Latin America, asked Livework Studio Brazil to help them rethink their Service Quality Assurance practices. The briefing prompted two distinct yet complementary initiatives. First, to develop a new approach to assess service quality, building on their initial concept based on a SERVQUAL1 model. Second, to support the bank's service design department in evaluating the performance of their projects. Together with Itaú's service design team, we divided the process of developing a customer experience-centric method to service quality for the financial institution into four phases: A. Understand In the first phase, we focused on gathering knowledge on the theoretical-methodological state of the art about ‘Quality Assurance’ and also on evaluating the existing SERVQUAL model empirically within the bank.

Validating the existing model: — Traditional SERVQUAL models measure the gap between expectation (pre-interaction) and perception (post-interaction). However, because the model used by the institution also evaluated the maximum and minimum expectation, it essentially asked the same question three times. During our initial field research, respondents found the survey too lengthy, and the questions rather complex, resulting in a low level of response. Moreover, the existing model was considered inadequate for evaluating individual touchpoints across different channels, because it was designed as a generic questionnaire.

T heoretical-methodological learning: — Issues regarding the use of repeated questions in SERVQUAL-based models were also found in the literature7. Nonetheless, because expectations – whether from past experiences, from word-of-mouth, or perceived image – always influence the current experience, there was no need to assess it separately.

Also, exploration of the nature of customer experiences resulted in the understanding that experiences cannot be reduced to a continuum between good and bad8, and that the meanings that emerge from the service interactions play a key role in brand

UNDERSTAND

IMAGINE

DESIGN

BUILD

Validating Servqual

Parameter-based approach

Service Quality dimensions

Service Quality Assurance Framework

Theoreticalmetohdological learning

Brand and design principles

Refining method and tool

Implementations and next steps

Fig. 1: The different phases of the developing the customer experience-centric method for service quality.

Touchpoint 10-2 79

differentiation9,10. Finally, the importance of focusing on the enablers of the customer experience – that is, the processes, interfaces, and systems that support the service interaction – became clear2 . Because the customer’s experience emerges over their interactions with service touchpoints, the design process must aim at supporting the desired customer experience (proposition)11 .

B. Imagine The limitations of the existing SERVQUAL-based model, coupled with the needs to address the meaning associations emerging from the customers’ experience and to consider the customers’ interactions with touchpoints across different channels, took us to an exploration of alternative quality assessment methods.

A second literature review on service quality didn’t provide an answer to the challenges uncovered in the previous phase, resulting in an extended review of the service literature.

This extended review reinforced the role of the enablers of the service interaction (service prerequisites2) in supporting service quality. This led to the development of a parameter-based method, in which quality dimensions were defined by brand-specific design principles. The main idea was to assess how well the organisation delivers on the ideal (brand-based) customer experience proposition. In turn, this created two new challenges: define the service quality dimensions that Itaú wants to convey, and create the assessment tool.

C. Design The next phase was about defining the quality dimension and developing the assessment tool. Three rounds of field application helped to refine the tool, making it easier for the respondent, and therefore more efficient.

— Defining the quality dimensions: The service quality dimensions should refer to characteristics of the customer experience the organisation wants to deliver through its service. Because Itaú already has an established tradition in retail spaces and digital design, the principles used in the design department 80 Touchpoint 10-2

informed the dimensions of ‘Itaúness’ – the essence of Itaú's customer experience proposition. Following that, the task was to translate traditional design values into experiential parameters that could be used by the service design department. The development of the service quality dimensions emerged in collaboration with Itaú's service design department, in the context of full integration between our teams.

— Developing the assessment tool: Once the dimensions were defined, a rough prototype was devised in order to quickly survey the tool. This first sketch was tested with over 100 respondents (twice as many as in the first phase), and the learnings from the test informed new iteration cycles.

Refining the assessment tool: Through three iteration — cycles, we improved the survey questions and the format of the tool, making the questionnaire more specific. For example, in the first rounds the quality dimensions were assessed in a rather indirect way. Later, the questions were adjusted to be more grounded in the descriptions of the brand-specific service quality dimensions. In the end, we concluded that the more specific questions provided the most relevant insights, supporting the use of brand-specific parameters to inform the service quality dimensions.

D. Build Up to this point, the method being developed focused on a questionnaire that uses brand-specific parameters.

However, during the last design iterations, we noticed that it was necessary to have a trigger that could inform when and where the questionnaire was needed – a first-level type of research that could point toward the touchpoints that needed evaluation. This led to the integration with the existing Net Promoter Score (NPS), resulting in an approach that was both efficient and effective. The use of NPS was also meant to facilitate the implementation of the new model, making it easier to develop isolated tests.

Currently, the main challenge for the implementation of the new customer experience-based method at Itaú is to adapt the model to different channels and products, as

tools and me thods

well as to structure an operation capable of automating data collection, embedding the new method in the research and operations pipelines.

based method to assess the redesigned service, the service design teams at Itaú can then determine how successful their intervention was.

A glimpse of the framework The resulting Service Quality Assurance framework, as recommended to Itaú, builds in a three-level research system (see Fig. 2). It is first triggered by a low NPS on an existing touchpoint (first level). The customer experience-based method is then used as a research tool at the second level, providing design teams with insights about deviations from the desired customer experience, informing the brief for a service design process meant to further explore and improve the current service experience. Then the improvement cycle takes place, at the third level. As suggested in this project, the improvement cycle follows four phases: ‘Immersion’, ‘Ideation’, ‘Prototyping’ and ‘Testing’.

Replicating the model The framework created with Itaú to assess the quality of its service delivery is specific to the organisation and its brand promise. Nevertheless, building on our learnings, we suggest that organisations interested in applying a similar method should approach this challenge by taking the following steps: 1. Understand your customer experience proposition In order to understand the status of the customer experience, it is important to know what the desired customer experience is. Because the customers’ experience (and thus their perception of service quality) is based on the expectations created by the brand, it is essential to have a clear understanding of what the brand stands for. The brand strategy is thus the ideal starting point for the development of the customer experience proposition, because it provides a link between service design practices and business strategy. Alternatively, as in the case presented in this article, existing design guidelines and principles can provide ready-to-use directions that are aligned with the brand promise.

2. Develop the tools to assess the customer experience The brand experience proposition provides the parameters for assessing the service quality.

However, tools are necessary to operationalise the evaluation. Surveys can be distributed through different channels, and the questionnaire can have a number of variations in format and wording.

Customers should be surveyed in the correct contextual environment, and the data collection must be convenient for them. Most important, the key is not so much in identifying where the service is not aligned with the promise, but in understanding in what ways it isn’t.

3. Combine with other metrics In the case we presented, the customer experience based method was combined with Net Promoter Score

In order to create a new approach to service quality assurance that informed Itaú about the quality of its customer's experience, prompting new research and/ or projects, we had to build an all new method, reducing the complexity and completion time of existing questionnaires, while still providing knowledge about the customers' perception of the brand based on their interactions with the bank.

From this point, the implementation cycle takes place. The service design team generates a guideline, briefing the technical teams, following the development, validation, implementation and maturation of the project.

The implementation process follows until the designed improvement gains traction and can be measured by a new evaluation cycle. By using the customer experience-

Touchpoint 10-2 81

1st Level NPS Identifies Issues in: > Service touchpoints > Broad and under-defined

User journey

LOW NPS

2nd Level CX-based method Identifies issues in: > Service quality dimensions > More specific and detailed

BAD XP

Service quality dimensions

3rd Level Improvement cycle

Co-create Solutions by: > Immersion >Ideation > Prototyping > Testing

Traction

Implementation

Fig. 2: The Service Quality Assurance framework developed for ItaĂş.

In the first level, the NPS identifies problematic interactions. This triggers research at the second level, which is supported by the newly-developed, customer experience-based method (and the tools that operationalise it). Finally, at the third level, the improvement cycle begins, co-creating solutions, which can be re-assessed after being implemented and gaining traction, evaluating the success of the design intervention.

82 Touchpoint 10-2

tools and me thods

(NPS), an assessment tool more broadly accepted by the organisation. This can help not only make the method mode efficient, but also help to cope with organisational scepticism.

4. Iterate to make it more accurate In order to ensure the validity and accuracy of the information provided by the new tool, constant loops of assessment and update are necessary. A side effect of updating the tool is that the historical benchmarks it provides might be lost; nonetheless, the trade-off is preferable.

Conclusion The service quality dimensions and the assessment method built in this project made it easier for Itaú to know where to focus their design efforts. Moreover, by providing a framework for comparing the evolution of the customer experience, the new method also supports the evaluation of the service design response to an unsatisfactory situation.

In order to create a new approach to service quality assurance that informed Itaú about the quality of its customer's experience, prompting new research and/or projects, we had to build an all new method, reducing the complexity and completion time of existing questionnaires, while still providing knowledge about the customers' perception of the brand based on their interactions with the bank. In the short time since its creation, the new method has become multi-channel and it is starting to be used to diagnose service problems, giving the service design team deeper information on what is wrong with the given touchpoint, instead of only where the problem is, which NPS already provides.

This means that the service design team can be more assertive in choosing which problems to tackle, and have more insight into the issues and challenges they are facing. According to Luiz Rangel, Service Design Manager at Itaú, "the method has allowed Itaú to qualify in a more granular manner the ratings from the NPS, pointing the experience dimensions that are more impactful and must be prioritised by our team. We see it as a blood exam whereas NPS tell us only if there is a fever".

1 Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Berry, L. L. (1988). Servqual: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perception. Journal of retailing, 64(1), 12–40.

2 Edvardsson, B., & Olsson, J. (1996). Key concepts for new service development. Service Industries Journal, 16(2), 140–164.

3 Vargo, S. L., Maglio, P. P., & Akaka, M. A. (2008). On value and value cocreation: A service systems and service logic perspective. European Management Journal, 26(3), 145–152.

4 Maglio, P. P., Vargo, S. L., Caswell, N., & Spohrer, J. (2009). The service system is the basic abstraction of service science. Information Systems and E-Business Management, 7(4), 395–406.

5 Patrício, L., Fisk, R. P., & Constantine, L. (2011). Multilevel service design: from customer value constellation to service experience blueprinting. Journal of Service Research, 14(2), 180–200.

6 Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V. A., & Malhotra, A. (2005). ES-QUAL: A multiple-item scale for assessing electronic service quality. Journal of service research, 7(3), 213-233.

7 Cronin Jr, J. J., & Taylor, S. A. (1994). SERVPERF versus SERVQUAL: reconciling performance-based and perceptions-minusexpectations measurement of service quality. The Journal of marketing, 125-131.

8 Kahneman, D., & Riis, J. (2005). Living, and thinking about it: Two perspectives on life. In F. A. Huppert, N. Baylis, & B. Keverne (Eds.), The science of well-being (pp. 285–304). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

9 Batey, M. (2008). Brand Meaning. New York: Routledge.

10 Sherry, J. F. (2005). Brand Meaning. In A. M. Tybout & T. Calkins (Eds.), Kellogg on Branding (pp. 40–69). Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.

11 Zomerdijk, L. G., & Voss, C. A. (2011). NSD processes and practices in experiential services. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 28(1), 63–80.

Touchpoint 10-2 83

Designing Better Services

by Designing Access to Information Information plays an integral role when it comes to both providing and consuming a service. Each interaction that takes place throughout the entire service journey requires certain information to be presented in an accessible format for the interaction to be successful. This article describes how service Waris Misbah is a Service Design Manager at HUED, a service design consultancy based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Waris' background is in service design and innovation. He has been working on service design projects for the past four years. He currently leads the service design discipline at HUED. waris@livehued.com

Ghadah Gabel is a freelance service design consultant based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Her background is in design management and innovation. She has been working on service and experience design projects for the past four years in Saudi Arabia and the United States. ghadah.gabel@gmail.com

84 Touchpoint 10-2

designers can safeguard this information accessibility (and the service experience) by adding an information layer to the service blueprint.

It is 3 p.m. on a hot June afternoon in Riyadh, and I’ve received an SMS from a courier company notifying me that a parcel addressed to me is ready to be collected from its warehouse.

Excited, I take a 30-minute Uber trip, only to discover that the information is inaccurate and my parcel is still with customs. Extremely frustrated, I return home with Uber. That evening I receive another SMS which says that same parcel is ready to be collected. To ensure it’s really true, I contact customer service, which takes another 20 minutes. An hour later, and having paid for two more Uber rides, I’m home with my parcel.

What’s clear for designers when looking at this customer experience incident is that accurate information is key to delivering quality and pleasurable service experiences. Extrapolating such faults to

the innumerable services that exist in our daily lives, it is not difficult to imagine the cost and negative impact to both consumers and companies resulting from incorrect information and/or poor access to correct information.

Information and service design Providing the right information at the right time and in the right format is essential for ensuring great quality services. Because services are co-created by both service providers and service consumers, it is crucial for both parties to seamlessly provide accurate information to each other.

Take, for example, a simple service such as a haircut. I have to provide information to the barber about the style I am looking for in order for me to receive the required haircut. This example shows

tools and me thods

the importance of providing correct information for such a simple service. Imagine how much more important information would be for a more complex service.

Information underlies the interactions and value exchanges between customers and front end service staff. Customers usually have to provide information about themselves, their preferences, and the service they require. The serving staff needs to process all these types of information. Furthermore, the type of information required for both parties changes based on the stage of their service journey. For example, service staff require different information to deal with a customer request during the ‘returns’ phase of a service, compared with the ‘purchase’ phase. Therefore, successful service experiences require that the information provided be designed specifically for each stage of the service journey. If service providers fail to provide the right information at each stage, the entire service quality can be compromised. For customers, this means functional and experiential failures, and for service providers, it means operational inefficiencies.

comprehend its structure. For example, service providers should make information available in multiple languages based on customer needs, rather than creating a burden for customers who must translate text from languages they don’t speak.

Principle 3: Timing of information is crucial

Necessary information should be provided at the right time in the service journey. Providing information too early or too late can cause confusion, cognitive overload, or simply cause mistakes.

Principle 4: Meta-information can be as important as information itself

Meta-information, which is information about information, should be available to both customers and service staff. For example, knowing when the last service interaction with a customer occurred can provide insights and assist decision making by service staff.

Principle 5: Service staff should have access to holistic information about a customer prior to

Principles of information design for services Based on the nature of services and of information itself, a number of information design principles can be derived that will successfully guide the design of a service: Principle 1: Information is required for decision making

Both customers and service staff require information to make decisions. As service designers, we need to know what decisions customers and the corresponding service staff make at each stage of the service journey, and what information supports them at those moments.

Consequently, we should design information and the related interactions to help ensure that both parties have the information they need.

Principle 2: Information should be correct and properly formatted

Information should be easy to understand and should not require customers or service staff a lot of effort to

interactions

Customers should not be required to spend significant time conveying information about previous interactions during the service journey. Too often, service staff ask customers about previous service interactions, wasting valuable time and causing frustration. Furthermore, due to their natures, services result in very contextspecific information. Therefore, information resulting from every customer interaction should be captured and available for authorised service staff to refer to when serving customers. For example, a customer may have communicated a specific issue they have with a service to an agent. In future communications, agents will be better able to address the customer’s issue if they have access to previous communications with that customer.

Designing information for services using the service blueprint The service blueprint is a remarkable tool when it comes to designing the entire service journey and its Touchpoint 10-2 85

Phase CUSTOMER INTERACTION

Information Customer Should Provide

Booking Browse Options Dates

Number of people

Types of preferred rooms

INFORMATION LAYER

Availability of rooms

Information Customer Should See as a Result of the Interaction

Types of rooms available Rooms details

Special offers if any FAQs

Time spent on browsing

Meta-information

Day and time of browsing

Trending searches

Touchpoints used to browse

Book Room

Arrival Commute Arrival details

Contact details

Payment details Special needs

ID details

Arrival time updates

Special needs

Number of luggage

Deadline for booking pick up

Booking details

Selected option details

Contact information Location

Guide to additional services

Show Booking

Preferred pick up option

Time available for completing the booking Confirmation

Check-In

Available options for pick up

Directions to the hotel

Receive Keys

Go to Room

Payment card details

Breakfast location and time Available rooms and floors

Upgrade options

Status of room's readiness

Special directions to hotel's amenities Instructions for using the wifi Room service details

Room location

Time spent to finish booking Incomplete booking

Day and time of booking

Touchpoints used to book

Date and Time of requesting pick up

Time of check in

Time of arrival

Issues with booking if any

Status of room's readiness reception

Check in duration

Customer acknowledgment status

Number of keys given to customer

Details of phone and email conversations with the customer if any

‘Customer entered the room’

‘Luggage delivered to the room’ ‘Special customer needs fulfilled’

LINE OF INTERACTION FRONT END STAFF INTERACTION

Receive Booking

Arrange Pick-Up

Request ID & Payment

Provide Keys & Other Info

Guide Customer to the Room

Expected check-in time

Information customer facing service staff should have

Booking details

Customer's stay history

Pick up details requested

Availability of cars and drivers

Booking details

Special requests Readiness of rooms status

Number of keys requested Room details

Directions to customer's room Availability of porter

INFORMATION LAYER

Upgrade options available

Information customer facing service staff should see as a result of the interaction

Acknowledgment of booking ‘received’ by customer

Booking details ‘viewed’

Customer's stay history ‘viewed’

Meta-information

Time and day of booking confirmation

Details of phone and email conversations with the customer if any

Customer ‘picked up’

Booking details confirmed

Estimated time of arrival

Room's readiness confirmed

Driver and car chosen

Date and time of pick up arrangement Time taken to arrange pick up Pick up details ‘viewed’

Customer entered the room

Payment accepted

Time taken to complete check in Special needs fulfillment status

Customer received luggage

Number of keys provided

Fig. 1: Service blueprint for a hotel service with the information layers

86 Touchpoint 10-2

tools and me thods

interactions, as well as the overall service system. In addition to its traditional uses, we can also use the service blueprint to design information for each stage of that journey. This can be done by simply adding layers called ‘Information’ both above and below the ‘line of interaction’, and the line of visibility. Figure 1 shows an example of a service blueprint for a hotel service with these information layers. (Please note the blueprint is not exhaustive; it has been developed only to aid the comprehension of the information layer.)

Information layer above the ‘line of interaction’ For this layer, add three sub-fields. In the first sub-field, capture information that the customer is expected to already possess and provide for the service interaction at this step of the service. In the second sub-field, capture the information the customer will see as a result of the interaction. For example, when a passenger requests assistance during a flight, the system should inform him or her that the request has been received and a flight attendee will serve them shortly. In the third subfield, capture meta-information about the information contained in the second sub-field. For example, the system should capture the time when the passenger has requested assistance. This will help designers to think about all information that should be provided to the customers when interacting with the service system. In addition, thinking about meta-information will help designers to capture the information that the service system should display as a result of customer’s interactions, which can then be used by service staff to further facilitate certain interactions with the customer.

the customer. The same benefit will cascade to backoffice staff, who can now see the information required and produced by customers, as well as the customerfacing staff.

With these fairly simple additions to the service blueprint, service designers will be able to deeply analyse and comprehensively design the information required by the entire service system to provide a great quality service. In addition, service designers can use the principles above as a checklist for each stage of the journey, to ensure all key aspects are covered by the information layers.

Information layer below the ‘line of Interaction’ and ‘line of visibility’ For this layer, repeat the same as above, capturing the three sub-fields for relevant service interactions. In this case, however, the roles will be ‘customer-facing service staff’ and ‘back-office staff’. Customer-facing service staff will be able to see the information they require to process the customer’s request, in addition to seeing all the relevant historical and contextual information about Touchpoint 10-2 87

Using a Service Ecosystem to Quickly Grasp Complexity A unique visualisation to deliver insights right from the start of a service design project

Jesse Grimes is a Principal Service Designer at Informaat in the Netherlands, and has ten years’ experience carrying out service design projects for a wide range of national and international clients, with specific expertise in the areas of financial services and innovation projects. Prior to Informaat, he has worked in London, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf and Sydney. Jesse is also Vice President of the Service Design Network, and Editor-in-Chief of the SDN’s journal, Touchpoint. grimes@service-designnetwork.org

Thanks to its holistic nature, service design is uniquely suited to bringing a customer-centred perspective to the design of today's omnichannel services.

In the earliest phases of a service design project, the 'service ecosystem' can be identified and visualised, long before more detailed customer journey mapping and service blueprinting work takes place. By building a shared understanding of the breadth and complexity of a service earlyon, a service ecosystem is a powerful and easy-to-implement tool for the service designer's arsenal. In this article, I'll introduce the structure and format of the visualisation itself, the ways it can be created, and some different ways of applying it.

What is a service ecosystem?

A service ecosystem visualises the broad range of interactions and touchpoints that come into play across a customer lifecycle, and it does so with just a few layers of information. Yet despite its simple structure, it provides important new insights for the team that creates it.

Like customer journey maps and

88 Touchpoint 10-2

service blueprints, a service ecosystem is a chronological view of a service experience, but it only concerns itself with phases, rather than the precise order of events within them. Within the phases, the user's needs are identified, alongside the service interactions, and the touchpoints on which they take place.

What's in the name?

Before diving into the structure and application, a little context might be in order. In service design terminology, 'service ecosystem' usually refers to the actors involved in a service, and the value exchanges that occur between them.

The 'ecosystem' is sometimes visualised concretely as a 'service ecology', which pays particular attention not only to the value exchanges, but the distinctions between roles.

However, when my colleagues and I developed our own interpretation of a 'service ecosystem' ten years ago, we saw it as a concrete visualisation rather than an abstract term. This interpretation of the term – the circular visualisation – is the basis for this article.

tools and me thods

Structure of a service ecosystem Let's take a look at the elements of a service ecosystem, from the inside out.

Firstly, a service ecosystem is structured as a set of concentric rings, and reads clockwise from the ‘12 o’clock’ position, phase-by-phase. This ring-based visualisation sets it apart from typical customer journey maps and service ecosystems, and also emphasises the fact that some service experiences don’t fully end, but begin anew with the discovery and consumption of new products. It also emphasises the holistic nature of the ecosystem – encompassing all its elements within clear boundaries, as opposed to the sprawling, linear nature of blueprints and journeys.

Time Phases

Touchpoints

Interactions

Phase-specific need(s) Underlying need

Figure 1: The elements of a service ecosystem, which are read in a clockwise manner.

Here is a detailed breakdown of the individual rings: User's need(s) Representing the user-centred focus of service design, the service ecosystem places the user at the heart of the visualisation. The user's “underlying need” occupies the very centre of the circle, while needs specific to individual phases are located in the relevant segments of the next ring outwards. Taking the example of a service ecosystem for an insurance provider, the underlying need for the user might be something like “feel protected in case of the unexpected”, or more succinctly, “peace of mind”. During the “usage” phase, in which an event occurs that triggers a claim, the more specific needs might be “reassurance” and “assistance”.

Interactions The next ring outwards contains the discrete interactions the user has with the service, phrased in very simple, concrete terms (often ‘verb + noun’). Within a segment of the “Interactions” ring corresponding to a phase, no order is implied by where interactions are positioned; they are simply scattered through the segment. The interactions are also written without reference to a touchpoint, to avoid bogging down the document in unnecessary detail. Continuing the example of an insurance provider, interactions might be “initiate claim” or “change customer details” (not, “report claim via app” or “change address details in customer domain”).

An additional benefit arises from identifying interactions in an agnostic manner within this ring.

Because all of the in-use touchpoints are identified for a given phase, the service ecosystem can inform decisions on what interactions will be supported on what touchpoints. This can be done later, while scoping the functionality of the service (writing user stories or otherwise creating specifications), thanks to the generic way the interactions are written. By supporting the re-use of interactions across multiple touchpoints, the service can be built more efficiently, and also meet the needs of users who don’t want to be confined to doing things only within one channel.

Touchpoint 10-2 89

Touchpoints The places on which the interactions of a given phase occur are gathered together in the next ring outwards: “Touchpoints”. Here, touchpoints that play a role in a specific phase are named. They could be things such as “app” or “call centre”, or “email newsletter”. Similarly to interactions, no order is implied by where they are positioned in the ring, and no attempt is made to visually link interactions and touchpoints. Finding the right level of detail when describing touchpoints is also important.

“Online”, “digital” or “face-to-face” would be too vague to be of use. “Public website” is acceptable, but there may be even more value for naming specific aspects of that website as well, such as “customer support forum”.

Phases The outermost ring is self-explanatory – it contains the high-level phases of the service that the user progresses through. In practice, these phase names should correspond with phases used in later deliverables, such as customer journey maps. For many services, typical phase names will suffice (e.g. “awareness”, “orientation”, “purchase”, “use”, etc.). It often makes sense to identify the phase names in advance of the service ecosystem workshop, to kick-start its creation.

‘As-is’ and ‘To-be’ service ecosystems A service ecosystem can be created both for current services (‘as-is’), as well as for services that don’t yet exist (‘to-be’). For ‘as-is’ services, the creation of the visualisation relies on capturing details about the service experience as it is today. When creating a ‘to-be’ service ecosystem, care must be taken to ensure the identification of interactions and touchpoints match with the user needs. Specifying interactions and touchpoints without properly validating them risks an ‘inside out’ approach, and mismatched expectations. Therefore, a ‘to-be’ service ecosystem relies on clearly articulated user needs at its centre.

A word about granularity It is tempting – especially with experience creating detailed customer journeys and service blueprints – to 90 Touchpoint 10-2

go into a great level of detail when creating a service ecosystem. However, this risks creating an unwieldy and overly-complex document, which will require significant time to create and interpret. Much as in customer journey mapping, a significant proportion of the value delivered by a service ecosystem comes about in the awareness and discussions it triggers within the team during its creation, and not simply the deliverable itself.

For an interaction, “pay bill” is adequate; it's not necessary to reveal further complexity by having individual interactions for “pay bill by credit card” and “pay bill by direct debit”, for example. Similarly, avoid getting too detailed when identifying touchpoints and phases.

Lastly, I've been asked several times about the possibility to create multiple service ecosystems. For example, to cater for different personas, when their needs differ. In our view, it's best to stick with one service ecosystem, and abstract the persona needs enough so that they can be shared by all personas. However, in cases where the service is platform-based, individual service ecosystems do make sense. As an example, the service experiences for riders and for drivers with a car-sharing service is significantly different (especially the underlying needs and interactions), so it makes sense to visualise both services separately, as different ecosystems.

It’s also worthwhile saying that a service ecosystem will offer little added value for simple services that have very few interactions, or only one or two touchpoints.

And lastly, don’t attempt to build a service ecosystem for a single touchpoint, such as an app. Keep the holistic nature of the deliverable in mind.

Purpose of a service ecosystem Creating a service ecosystem early in a project offers several advantages, foremost being the insights it delivers into the (future) service's eventual complexity. By systematically working through each phase of a service and identifying the touchpoints and interactions that come into play, a team often realises that things are more complex and interconnected than they had previously

Terminate product

Email

Change customer details

Call centre

Customer domain

Social media

App

WhatsApp

Customer domain

Direct mail marketing

Receive Get quick marketing comms quote

Change payment Welldetails informed Transparency Best Change product Speed value coverages Peace of mind Clarity Resolution of claim

Policy documentation

Reassurance Assistance

Monitor claim progress

Email

Trust Ease

Select product and coverages Set up customer details

Receive proof of coverage

Initiate claim

U

App

Insurance comparison site

Investigate product options Read product reviews

App Public website

Insurance certificate

Consumer reviews site

Public website Payment services provider

Email Call centre

WhatsApp

sa ge

Call centre

Set up payment details

Describe loss

Call centre

Email

See Facebook ad

on bo ard ing

Public website

nd

Se rvi ce an d

ion at in rm

Aw are ne ss an Public d website

ion tat ien or

te

tools and me thods

ea as rch Pu

Figure 2: An example of a high-level service ecosystem for an insurance provider.

thought. And in cases where ownership and delivery of different elements of a service are spread among people or departments – such as channels or products – it can have an especially great impact. My colleagues and I have facilitated more than a few service ecosystem creation workshops in which individual product owners were for the first time confronted with the fact that their ‘product’ (an app, for example) existed alongside many other touchpoints that the end customers would also be using. Triggering this ‘service’ awareness, as the first step towards orchestrating all the touchpoints and interactions to deliver the best experience, is the true power of visualising a service ecosystem in this way.

Beyond the complexity that a service ecosystem often surfaces, it can also be used for more concrete purposes, which I'll get to a little later.

How to go about creating a service ecosystem So what does it take to draw a service ecosystem – whether ‘as-is’ or ‘to-be’? Firstly, it's a team effort, rather than something crafted by a solo service designer.

Identify a group of people who are responsible for the service, and invite them to a workshop. Strategic and ownership roles tend to bring the most value to the activity. Unlike customer journey mapping and service blueprinting, the specific insights of policy, legal, marketing or IT representatives – for example – are less relevant here.

Working on a whiteboard or wall which can be later dedicated to the service ecosystem is ideal. If that's not possible, two easel/A0-size pieces of paper taped together can be a good start. Start by drawing and labelling the relevant rings, and identify the phase names on Post-its.

Distribute them around the outside of the outermost ring, but be prepared to reposition them based on the eventual size of each phase.

If customer research has been carried out already, it should be possible to identify the needs at the centre of the visualisation. If not, you can consider making assumptions of the needs, or leaving them blank until they can be filled in based on real insights (and then used to sense-check the interactions and touchpoints).

If assumptions are made concerning needs, ensure they remain recognised as such, and are replaced with validated needs once research has taken place.

Then continue to fill in the interactions and touchpoints, on a phase-by-phase basis. Normally, the team members present, and the knowledge they bring, is enough to accurately capture the true extent of touchpoints and interactions. Although the service ecosystem is not intended to replace ideation activities later in a project, it can be employed at the earliest stages of a project and help identify expected functionality of the future service, and where opportunities might exist.

In general, a 90-minute workshop is adequate to complete a service ecosystem. For complex services, or cases where progress moves slowly due to lots of discussions, a second 90-minute workshop may be necessary.

Touchpoint 10-2 91

Change customer details

comms

quote

comparison site

Investigate product options Read product reviews

Customer domain

Change payment Consumer Welldetails reviews informed Transparency site Call center Best Change product Speed value coverages Peace of mind Select product Clarity Resolution and coverages Public Customer of claim website domain Reassurance Trust Set up customer Repairs Assistance Ease details carried out Auto repair Payment garage services Set up payment Monitor provider details claim progress Email Receive proof Public Describe loss ionEmail of coverage website at in Call center Initiate claim New insights through additional annotations rm App Call center A service ecosystem's real value comes inWhatsApp the insights Figure 3: When visualising App WhatsApp it delivers for visualising future services, but it can also a future service Paper sa App ge insurance ea Terminate Public as be employed to bring current services into focus in a website experience, interactions certificate ch product r Email Pu new way. This can be useful to see the impact of future and touchpoints that Change customer details

]

te

Resolution of claim

] [

[

Auto repair garage

]

Repairs carried out

Email

Transparency Speed

Reassurance Assistance

Monitor claim progress Describe loss

Best value

Peace of mind

Trust

Ins com

Investigate product options Read product reviews Select product and coverages

Clarity

Ease

Call center

Set up customer details

Set up payment details Receive proof of coverage

Emai

Aw Initiate claim Direct mail are ne center Call marketing Public it on ss website a an WhatsApp Figure 4: To emphasise the impact of interactions and in Public d Social media m r App website App touchpoints hostedsagby third parties, they can be included App e Insurance Email Public in the visualisation in brackets.

See certificate website rch WhatsApp Pu Facebook Call center ad Terminate Receive product Email Get quick marketing Insurance comms quote comparison Change customer site details Investigate Customer Receive product Consu Welldomain referral rebate options revie informed Transparency sit Read Call center Best Change product product Speed value coverages reviews Peace of mind Select product Clarity Resolution and coverages Pub Customer of claim webs domain Reassurance Trust Figure 5: By making a visual distinction between Set up customer Repairs Assistance Ease details carried out Auto repair Payme interactions, garageit is possible to illustrate a roadmap service Set up payment Monitor provid details or release planning (theclaim progressive progress introduction Email Receive proof of elements of the service). Describe loss Email of coverage Call center Initiate claim Call center WhatsApp App Paper sa App ge insurance ea Public as certificate h c website r Pu

Se rvi ce an d

te

Call centre

ta ien or

92 Touchpoint 10-2

Change product coverages

Wellinformed

U

As a precursor to customer journey mapping Although customer journey mapping is ideally done for an entire service lifecycle, practical considerations often mean that journeys are shortened to encompass only parts of the service experience. A service ecosystem

Change payment

crossed out. details

Call center

Customer domain

Receive Get quick marketing comms quote

become obsolete can be

Customer domain

Aw are ne ss Public website Email

See Facebook ad

] [

]

can be used to identify individual, shorter journeys, by grouping sets of interactions that span one or more phases. With the journey identified, the requisite research and mapping activities can occur later.

See Fig. 6.

nd

on b

[

U

Harnessing the power of a service ecosystem In addition to the insights that the creation of a service ecosystem delivers, it can also have more practical applications within a (service design) project. Here are several ways in which the information and insights it contains can be translated into action:

Social media

nd

Se rvi ce an d

U

changes to the service.

Two additional types of annotation can be used when creating the service ecosystem, to bring in additional layers of information: −− Obsolete touchpoints and interactions – A line can be drawn through items to show that in the future, they will no longer play a role in the service experience.

This is useful for seeing the evolving complexity of a service, transitions between channels, and highlighting those that are new. See Fig. 3. −− Third-party touchpoints and interactions – These can be indicated with brackets surrounding the item, to show that the specified touchpoint is beyond the control of the service provider. This is useful to provide context when third parties still (significantly) impact the overall service experience, such as the role of an auto repair garage in relation to car insurance. See Fig. 4. −− Releases and future functionality – When visualising a ‘to-be’ service, visual distinctions can be made between different product releases. For example, a different colour can be used to indicate interactions which won’t be available at launch, but later in time.

See Fig. 5.

Direct mail marketing

on bo ard ing

] [

[

tools and me thods

To identify areas of opportunity A completed service ecosystem makes visible the type and numbers of interactions in the experience lifecycle.

In doing so, it also lays bare the stretches of time where no interactions take place, or perhaps where touchpoints are over- or under-utilised. Insights such as these can be the trigger to determine whether new elements of the service should be introduced. See Fig. 7.

Figure 6

For competitor analysis When designing a new service, a deep understanding of what’s on offer from competitors is important. Based on simple research methods such as “mystery shopping”, it’s possible to easily gather enough input to visualise the service ecosystem of the competitor. Analysing theirs and yours side by side will make visible key points of difference, and might help trigger innovation. See Fig. 8 Figure 7

To support the orchestration of complex services Complex services – especially those delivered by large organisations – demand orchestration at a strategic level. This orchestration can be supported by the holistic perspective a service ecosystem affords. Rather than having touchpoints developed and managed individually, teams and managerial roles can refer to the service ecosystem when planning work, to ensure the “big picture” of the service experience is kept in perspective.

See Fig. 9.

Figure 8

Conclusion It’s my hope that sharing this visualisation with the wider community offers a new tool which allows service designers to quickly grasp – and communicate – the complexity of services for themselves and for stakeholders. A service ecosystem requires a relatively low investment of time and effort, yet pays quick dividends, especially for those seeking to convince stakeholders of the value that service design can bring. And it can remain a living document, updated as required, and used to communicate the totality of a service, in a way well-known deliverables like customer journey maps sometimes fail to do.

Figure 9

Touchpoint 10-2 93

Smart Service Design for a Shanghai Garment Store This paper presents the results of intelligent technology research and case studies in a modern garment store in China. It also analyses students’ projects, which were designed with SGI (Shape Grammar Interpreter) generation technology, intelligent storage systems, humanoid robots and interactive services to explore the possibility of using digital capabilities to create new service offerings.

Dr. Bo Gao is an associate professor of service design, information and media design, sustainable design in the College of Design & Innovation at Tongji University. Dr. Gao published several of academic papers and hosts research projects.

She is an active member of DMI/SDN/DESIS and LeNS in China. gaobo@tongji.edu.cn Yingyue Deng is a graduate student of the Product Service System Design programme at the College of Design & Innovation at Tongji University. vian_dengyy@outlook.com Dr. Kang Zhang is Professor of Computer Science and Director of Visual Computing Lab, Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas. kzhang@utdallas.edu

94 Touchpoint 10-2

growth rate 120 100

Total Retail Sales of Consumer Goods (%)

80

Da Shang (physical store) (%)

60

National Online Retail Sales (%)

40

Tmall (Online) (%)

20

JingDong (online) (%)

0 2014

2015

2016

The brick-and-mortar clothing store industry has been negatively affected by rise of e-commerce in China. According to the data published in April this year by the China National Business Information Centre, online retail sales in 2017 accounted for 15 percent of total retail sales of social consumer goods, an increase of 2.4 percent from 2016.1

2017

year

Fig. 1: The growth rate of the top three companies in 2014-2017 and the total retail sales of social consumer goods and the growth rate of retail sales across the network (source: https://www.sohu. com/a/237840807_778261)

e d u c at i o n a n d re s e a rc h

Compared to the increase of online stores, typical physical stores have neither a significant advantage in price, nor in their associated experiences, and business sales remain far below the online retail sales.

Physical stores remain threatened by e-commerce, but still enjoy an advantage in service, which cannot be replaced. By 2017, the service economy accounted for 70 percent of Shanghai’s total GDP2. In April 2018, the Shanghai government launched “Shanghai Service,” a three-year action plan to promote existing services in traditional industries. Because services have become a key aspect of Shanghai, the service model of traditional physical stores requires innovations to explore new opportunities. By connecting the needs of customers in the digital and physical world via a series of touchpoints, garment stores have the potential to bring innovation to existing consumption patterns, leading to commerciallysustainable development and the transformation of those garment stores.

The ‘Shanghai Garment Store in 2020’ project Tracing back to the “ (Hong bang)”3 tailoring period, most garments are typically made by hand. The garment manufacturing process has several phases: Measuring, cutting, trying-on by customers, and sewing. During the 1930s, some Shanghai garment stores had a clear division of labour in order to accomplish this customisation. It was common that garment store had a backyard factory where the garments were produced. What a customer experienced was a customised service according to his or her own body shape, as well as personal preference and experience. Customised services not only maintained the tradition of ‘Hong bang’, but became a legacy for modern physical garment stores to take with them into the future. Keeping the tradition of customisation, and offering quality service, is quite necessary – especially for young people who have grown up in the internet culture.

They require new experiences which cannot be offered by online shopping. Therefore, exploring the variety of personalised experiences available within a physical store has become an important opportunity for innovation of the physical store service model.

Digital-based service innovation presents another challenge: It usually redefines the roles of the service

1 China National Commercial Information Centre, published in April 3, 2018, from http://www.cncic.org.

2 Xu, JH., (2018). Improve City Energy Levels. Retrieved July 29, 2018, from Shanghai Wenhui Daily (008).

3 Liu, YH., (2013). Comparison Study between Suit Industry and Fashion Industry of Hong Bang Tailor. Decoration, 2013(04), 76-77.

4 Bygstad, B., & Lanestedt, G. (2009). ICT based service innovation – A challenge for project management, Journal of Project Management, 27(3), 234-242.

Fig. 2: Tmall ‘virtual fitting room’ on a mobile phone.

Touchpoint 10-2 95

provider and the users4 . Online retailers such as Alibaba and Tmall (China’s largest e-commerce platform) have given birth to new service methods, relying on interaction and big data, promoting new service methods, and persuading young customers to switch from online shopping to offline alternatives.

A successful case is “Mo Da”, which was launched by the well-known e-commerce platform Tmall. “Mo Da” is an online service which offers matching clothing for users. Based on an analysis of historical data and an automatic recognition of clothing styles, an online virtual fitting room is created in the customer’s mobile phone. After a short customisation, customers can use the “3D dressing lab” to create a 3D model representing their own body shape. When compared to a picture of a generic model wearing clothing, it is more intuitive and life-like to show the same clothing as worn by the user themselves. The trigger for developing such a service was a wish to solve the problem that online shopping could not offer the ‘trying on’ of clothes, as well as its inability to let users see different images of themselves in various combined outfits.

Another innovative case within the Chinese market is called “YCLOSET”. It is a platform for experiencing fashionable clothing by renting garments instead of

purchasing them. Customers can choose up to three pieces of clothes from different brands to wear at one time, and then delivery staff will come to their door to both pick up old ones and deliver new ones. Customers do not need to wash clothes or return the garments to the store, and they can rent for an unlimited number of times. Users need only to become a member and pay a membership fee of 499 RMB (approximately US$73).

The YCLOSET addresses customers' real underlying need for fashion, which is to wear rather than own the clothes, so, by redesigning the service, customers can now experience the quality of a product more directly and sustainably.

The project “Shanghai Garment Store 2020” was initiated by the Smart Service Design Science course at the College of Design and Innovation, at Tongji University in Shanghai. The goal of the course is to help physical clothing stores attract young, Internet-savvy consumers, and to design distinct service experiences that online clothing stores cannot offer. The students convened two user groups: A young target group (professional, aged 25), and potential target consumers (second-year university students aged 20, and second-year graduate students aged 25). The co-creation between the students and user groups inspired them to design from the users’ own

YCLOSET customers can rent three pieces

Clothing is rented via the YCLOSET app and

At the end of the rental period, clothing is

of clothing at one time, up to a maximum of

delivered without charge.

returned – and new clothing delivered –

30 items in 30 days.

Fig. 4: How the YCLOSET clothing rental service works. (source: https://www.yi23.net)

96 Touchpoint 10-2

at the customer’s door.

e d u c at i o n a n d re s e a rc h

clothing consumption habits and expected services of the garment store, a process which resulted in user personas.

Another new element introduced by the course was the integration of experts who introduced four key technologies: 1. Rule-based automatic generation, which is used to generate personalised colours and styling5, such as the SGI (Shape Grammar Interpreter) generation technology.

2. “Smaply”, a web-based software which visualises customer experience, such as personas, journey maps and stakeholder maps.

3. The in-store interactive interface, including the design of a virtual fitting room, and AI fashion identification, which is used to match clothing with the users’ needs.

4. Service robots, which help during service delivery by taking over repeatable tasks.

The course encouraged students to explore how to rationally select and integrate existing smart technologies into the retail experience in order to improve the customer’s experience or create new touchpoints.

Furthermore, the course encouraged students to consider a sustainable vision of the garment industry. The design process will be elaborated afterwards.

Fig. 5: Generate Shape

Fig. 6A: Adjust the pattern

Fig. 6B: See print effect through AR mirror

Fig. 7: Colour manipulation

Project 1: “Wear a Portrait” This project is aimed at young Chinese women who love buying clothing online and are seeking new experiences.

For them, outfits are key to their image. Without having a chance to see clothing first-hand, they choose based on patterns or styles, and according to how they would define their own identity and what they expect themselves to look like. The unique aspect of this service is the ability to introduce a customised personal image onto clothing and accessories, thereby bringing a new service into physical stores.

5 Li, YN., Zhang, K., & Li, DG. (2017). Rule-Based Automatic Generation of Logo Designs. Leonardo, 50(2). [Online] Retrieved April 6, 2017, from https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/LEON_a_00961.

Fig. 8: Print pattern on clothing

Touchpoint 10-2 97

It begins with customers selecting one piece of clothing or an accessory, and entering a fitting room which is equipped with an augmented reality (AR) mirror. By using image generation grammar principles (SGI) and AR technology, the mirror captures the customer’s facial features (see Fig. 5). It then translates these into a graphic representation (made of patterns or strokes), and combines other foundational elements to create a portrait of the customer (see Figs. 6 and 7).

Customer can then perform small adjustments in the AR mirror to create a quick but unique textile pattern, which can be printed or stitched onto the clothing (see Fig. 8).

As part of this service, customers receive suggestions for matching articles of clothing from shopping assistants. The customer is also invited to return every three months for new matching guidance for new seasons. The service therefore tries to create a new service touchpoint by providing an interactive experience based on customised clothing. Customers are involved in the whole process of making their own creation.

Fig. 9: A flow diagram for the Yishang smart fitting room.

98 Touchpoint 10-2

Project 2: “YiShang” – A smart fitting room service for professionals “Yishang” is a smart fitting room professionals in Shanghai’s central business district. It helps them to fulfill their specific clothing needs, for example, evening dresses for different occasions. By cooperating with various brands, the fitting room can provide personalised, multi-brand purchases for this group. Customer can choose several articles of clothing and reserve a time to use this fitting room via an app. The Yishang fitting room is located inside shopping malls in the city centre, and the schedule is flexible enough to fit the customer’s needs; they can try and buy clothing after lunch.

When using the fitting room, the customer sees a 360-degree immersive experience thanks to the interactive wall inside. This wall also provides some practical contexts in which to view their outfits, such as a meeting room or dinner party. Another feature of the system is the multibrand collection it offers. Different items of clothing can be collected from across the store, and delivered to the backstage of the fitting room. A humanoid robot helps to display customer’s selection on the rotating booth. When it is unused, the Yishang fitting room can serve as a branding display to attract new customers.

e d u c at i o n a n d re s e a rc h

Conclusions The course explored the possibilities of interactive services by selecting the younger generation as the service targets. However, the precise service offering requires further segmentation of the client in the huge physical clothing store market. Going forward, future courses will be focusing on middle-aged and elderly people as target consumers and core service users. The characteristics of visual perception and the behaviour of the elderly should be considered in order to effectively improve the service experience for these groups.

Fig. 10: Context of the Yishang smart fitting room.

Fig. 11: Overhead view of the Yishang smart fitting room.

Touchpoint 10-2 99

Culture-driven Service Transformation: A Framework Today, organisations are going through sporadic transformations of varying magnitudes, contexts and complexities. Service designers have entered many of the organisations as change managers, tasked with designing and managing the internal culture change throughout all phases of a goods-to-service transformation, often Shreya Dhawan is a Strategic Innovation Designer at MJV Technology and Innovation in Atlanta. She holds an MFA in Service Design from SCAD. She recently finished her master’s thesis on organisational culture change in service-transformed organisations and is looking to explore the application of service design to complex challenges. shreyadhawan92@gmail.com

100 Touchpoint 10-2

called ‘servitisation’. With the utilisation of existing knowledge and the creation of new knowledge, it is possible to address cultural transformations towards a service-transforming organisation using a service design lens.

Context of the culture change challenge Services are the future and a progressive offering through which businesses grow. Since the industrial revolution, manufacturing firms have depended on goods to yield profits and maintain competitive advantage. However, over the past few years, this perspective has moved towards services. A new perspective has emerged which focuses on the application of a new logic in the industry, called the ‘Service-Dominant Logic‘ (S-D logic). This perspective focuses largely on intangible output, the co-creation of value and relationships with customers.

The shift in perspective and towards this new mindset is a shift in focus from a producer perspective to a customer perspective; the change of mindset and

value-creation process also known as ‘servitisation’. Manufacturing firms need to adopt and disseminate this new mindset in order to be successful and competitive in their respective industries. Servitisation is a large and complex transformative process towards services, requiring large scale change in the organisation. Culture change is one of the many complexities related to this transformation.

Culture helps employees make sense of service-oriented strategies and is responsible for directing their behaviours within an organisation. This impacts the end user’s experience from the service organisation. Culture is malleable and volatile; it affects the way an organisation’s members think, feel and behave. While it’s always collective

e d u c at i o n a n d re s e a rc h

and represents a group’s identity, it takes time to get absorbed and nurtured. This poses problems of resistance when change to culture is initiated. Walker and Soule (2017) expressed culture metaphorically when they said, “Culture is like the wind. It is invisible, yet its effect can be seen and felt. When it is blowing in your direction, it makes for smooth sailing. When it is blowing against you, everything is more difficult.”

Culture change as knowledge creation The concept of knowledge creation is not new. In today’s world, an organisation can gain sustainable competitive advantage if they have the ability to create and utilise knowledge. According to Nonaka and Toyama (2003), knowledge is created in a spiral that goes through seemingly antithetical concepts such as order and chaos, micro and macro, part and whole, and tacit and explicit.

Tacit

Individual Values

Externalisation Organisational Values

Explicit

Tacit

Socialisation

Tacit

Understanding the context of the culture change in a organisation undergoing service transformation helped identify gaps and suggested a number of directions this research study could take. At this stage, a hypothesis was formed: “A successful service transformation requires culture change through exploration of tacit and explicit knowledge within the organisation.”

Methodology and analysis A multi-phase, mixed methods approach was conducted in four stages of secondary and primary data collection.

The first stage involved reviewing journal articles and archival research on the subject, while the remaining three phases comprised of semi-structured and structured interviews with nine experts from the fields of organisational culture, transformation, design, knowledge management and service design. The diversity of the sample, and their varied levels of expertise, became an advantage and a source of rich data, because each Characteristics of service-oriented organisations expert had a unique and personal perspective to share.

With this data collected, three sets of analysis were Recurring in income conducted which are discussed the(long-term following sections. customer relationship and competitive advantage)

Analysis 1: Reframe existing concepts

+ +

Tacit

Internalisation

Combination

Explicit

Explicit

Explicit

Shared Values

FP4

The secondary research conducted uncovered no fixed Non-transferable product FP1 ownership characteristics of service-oriented organisations.

However, with the help of the existing characteristics Customisation and/or FP6 of service, three characteristics of service-oriented personalisation organisations were defined: 1. The organisation’s capability to have a source of recurring income through the building of long-term Figure 2. Development customer relationships 2. Offer non-transferable product ownership (‘product’ here means both goods and services) 3. Co-create value for the customer through customisation and/or personalisation

+

New individual Values

S-D lo premi

These characteristics provide a broader lens to identify Figure 1. SECI framework by Nonaka (1994) recreated by author. a service-oriented organisation, but do not necessarily imply that all service-oriented organisations will embody them at all times. With the growing need towards a This creation of knowledge is a transcending process service mindset, the focus then shifted to redefining through which different individuals, groups and the 11 ‘Foundation Premises’ (FPs) of S-D logic. These organisations share and exchange knowledge to transform into a better and more stable state. In this way, FPs pose problems of clarity to organisations, who may an organisation can deal with and design around complex be unfamiliar with the existence of this new paradigm realities such as culture change, by synthesising tacit and and its relative importance to their organisation. In an attempt to reframe these FPs, an automated text analysis explicit knowledge in a social environment.

Figure 1: SECI framework by Nonaka (1994) (recreated by author)

Touchpoint 10-2 101

Characteristics of service-oriented organisations

S-D logic foundation premises

Service transformation goal

+

FP4

FP7

FP9

Non-transferable product ownership

+

FP1

FP2

FP3

FP5

Customisation and/or personalisation

+

FP6

FP8

FP10

FP11

Recurring income (long-term customer relationship and competitive advantage)

= = =

Goal 1 Competitive offerings through stakeholder expertise

Goal 2 Co-creation based on nontransferable ownership Goal 3 Ongoing innovative customisation

Figure 2: Development of Service Transformation Goals

Figure 2. Development of Service Transformation Goals

technique was applied to the FPs. The analysis of what was extracted helped define the operational context of the service organisation and the application in a cultural setting.

Together, the reframing of the characteristics of service-oriented organisations and FPs helped define three overarching transformation goals beneficial as a guiding reference to a service-oriented transformation (See Figure 2). The three transformation goals are: 1. Competitive offerings through stakeholder expertise 2. Co-creation based on non-transferable ownership 3. Ongoing innovative customisation Analysis 2: Extract real world experience

The data collected from primary research was analysed through the application of the software used earlier. This was done to find out if the real world view supported the findings from the literature. The software extracted five topics and keywords within those topics. The context of these keywords was found by referring back to the interview transcripts.

The table (see Figure 3) shows one extraction as an example, the topic “Basically�. From this analysis, it was evident that the interviewees spoke about building capacity, knowledge and trust in the organisation, while they emphasised the design of services, conversation and artefacts to build culture in the organisation. There were conversations about the experience of customers, employees and the workplace, highlighting a shift in focus on people and their respective environments.

102 Touchpoint 10-2

They expressed the need for innovation of the company, strategy and teams.

Analysis 3: Evaluate findings

A qualitative analysis of the transcripts was performed through affinity diagramming. Setting aside what was already known, here are some previously unknown and interesting perspectives which were discovered: 1. Organisations undergoing transformation will largely benefit from understanding and adopting a serviceoriented mindset.

2. With their systemic thinking and sense-making capabilities, service designers take up the role of enablers and facilitators of the culture-change process, often designing and facilitating conversations in an organisation.

3. Because culture is never constant, any change in the existing culture requires continuous interventions to account for its changing context. This makes it a long, time-consuming process, often measured in years.

4. Culture change efforts should be designed to target people at both individual and collective levels, because tacit knowledge may be different at each level of the organisation.

5. It is never too late to initiate a service transformation, because every organisation exists in its own unique context.

e d u c at i o n a n d re s e a rc h

Topic

Keyword Extracted Associated Context

Specific Value

HIGHEST

Basically

Kinds

People, manufacturing problems, companies, authority, interactions, training, teaching, work, customer facing services

Builds

Capacity, knowledge, trust, capability, organization, culture, momentum, advocacy, consultancy

Designing

Services, culture, conversation, experience, touchpoints, artifacts

22,55

LOWEST Experience

Customer, employee, workplace, design, deliver, teams, job, deliver transformation, build, flow

Innovation

Company, organization, strategy, team, model, humancentered, physical space, project, model

Figure 3: Topic 1 extraction of transcripts with associated context

The three sets of analysis proved the hypothesis and provided insights that helped design a solution to the culture change challenges faced by organisations through a service transformation.

Design Solution The proposed framework (See Figure 4) is based on the SECI framework by Nonaka (1994) that emphasises the need for knowledge creation within the organisation through an interplay of tacit and explicit knowledge.

The framework has four key elements that create this knowledge through a spiral of culture change efforts.

These four elements are represented through the colour gradient: ‘design for context’, ‘build practices’, ‘experience artefacts’, and ‘innovate meaning’.

These culture-driven steps are performed towards the three transformation goals defined earlier, based on the application of S-D logic. This four-step, culture-driven framework can help drive culture change and provide clarity to transformation efforts in organisations. By breaking the complexity of culture change in a servitisation context, these action-based steps can help organisations scale-up efforts and build the required buyin needed for a culture transformation as big as this. The framework can be tailored to any organisation’s needs and specific contexts within a broader spectrum of a goods-to-service transformation, and does not in any way present a linear and rigid approach for the same.

Implications and future directions Through this framework, service designers can aid organisations in the understanding and the adoption of S-D logic. This is achieved through culture-driven practices towards the three transformation goals.

Theoretically, it can help utilise existing and new capacity and knowledge within the organisation, providing an understanding of organisational complexity.

Furthermore, this study can be explored by using a case-study approach and generating organisationspecific frameworks for different use cases, for example in mergers and acquisitions, or to suit the needs and contexts of B2B and B2C businesses. There can be more emphasis in understanding the different stages and types of goods-to-service transformations and the application of the framework accordingly.

Manhaes, M. (2018). Constructing an approach to identify service design narratives: the findings of an automated text analysis. ServDes2018 Service Design Proof of Concept.

Nonaka, I. (1994) A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation.

Organization Science 5(1), 14–37 Nonaka, I., & Toyama, R. (2015). The Knowledge-creating Theory Revisited: Knowledge Creation as a Synthesizing Process. The Essentials of Knowledge Management, 95-110. doi:10.1057/9781137552105_4 Vandermerwe S , Rada J . 1988 . Servitization of business: Adding value by adding services . European Management Journal 6 ( 4 ): 314 – 324.

Vargo, S. L., & Lusch, R. F. (2015). Institutions and axioms: an extension and update of service-dominant logic. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 44(1), 5-23. doi:10.1007/s11747-015-0456-3

Touchpoint 10-2 103

INNOVATE MEANING Interactions with these artifacts contribute to new tacit knowledge, defining a new context.

Servitisation Towards a service organisation with a service-oriented mindset

ak

ld

er

s

er

tis

eo

rsh

ip

tr

a

rin

no

n-

f fe

om

tio

n

iv nn

ov

at

n ba

EXPERIENCE ARTIFACTS Culture is embedded in artifacts to make it tangible enforcing engagement and development of a new social system.

Ong

oin

gi

LE

Co c r e a t i o

st

isa

e

sed

cu

on

eo

titiv

bl

e wn

SCA E &

Co m p e

n

sf

a er

e

TIM

gs

th

ro

ug

h

st

o eh

p ex

CO L

RE

LE CT I

VE

FL

EC

TI

O

N

IT

LIC

EXP BUILD PRACTICES Definitition of context helps build practices that foster trust and resilience.

DESIGN FOR CONTEXT Context is key. It is evolving, unique, and multi-dimensional.Understanding context involves understanding people and their tacit knowledge.

IN

DI

CIT TA

Figure 4: Culture-Driven Service Tarnsformation Framework

104 Touchpoint 10-2

VI

DU AL

tools and m p ro eth f iol d es

Lara Penin Meet the service designer

For this issue of Touchpoint, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes met with service design pioneer and educator Lara Penin, who has recently made a great contribution to the service design literature, with her publication of An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible.

Jesse Grimes: You've been educated at one of the first universities world-wide offer to service design coursework Politecnico di Milano - and now you are leading the Transdisciplinary Design Graduate Program at Parsons School of Design in New York City and teaching service design. From your perspective within academia, what are some of the differences (and commonalities) between service design education in Europe and North America?

Lara Penin: My personal experience covers a few institutions in Europe, North and South America and academic relationships developed in many other countries. So my account is less of a regional comparative analysis of service design education and more of a reflection on its progress in the last 15 years.

When I was a PhD student in Politecnico di Milano back in the early 2000s, service design was emerging as new paradigm for thinking differently

about design, but it wasn’t clear what were the industries and applications that could benefit from it the most.

Literature was scarce, because pioneer practitioners were still working on the first de-facto demo projects for service design and there hadn’t been enough time to reflect on these projects, verify their impact and codify learnings into teaching resources. The first service design firms were emerging and some European funded multi-institution projects started gathering both academia and industry partners around issues such as food systems and other themes that were ripe for innovative approaches. Together, these players helped define a first wave of tools and approaches and started formulating the potential transformative capacity of service design. All very aspirational and experimental.

In the circles in which I participated there was a shared interest in services as a potential strategy to reduce the environmental impact of goods, with

Lara Penin is an Associate Professor, Director of Transdisciplinary Design Graduate Program at Parsons, co-founder of Parsons DESIS Lab and author of An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible.

PeninL@newschool.edu

Touchpoint 10-2 105

the concept of a product-service system emerging as a potential solution for businesses to change their production and consumption paradigm towards the shared use of goods. This is the context where I personally grew as a service designer.

Meanwhile in the U.S., the interaction design community was beginning to depart from a productcentric mode into a more holistic approach in terms of how people experience technology. In this scenario, the multi-stakeholder and systemic nature of service design was helpful in defining a more humanised experience for people when they interact with platforms, as well as what happens to the people behind those platforms. In this sense, the service design community in the U.S. overlaps in interesting ways with UX and HCI. And in other parts of the world, notably Brazil and India, there has been a growing interest in understanding how service design could both learn from and contribute to social entrepreneurship and income generation practices in underserved communities as well as informal sharing and logistic practices.

This was the ever-evolving landscape of service design when I moved to New York and started teaching service design at Parsons ten years ago. In an attempt to capture all these parallel ongoing developments, I would selfproduce readers for my students consisting of a mix of academic papers, toolkits from firms such as Engine and Livework, glossaries from European academic projects, and a nascent database of resources offered by the Service Design Network and the Interaction Design Association.

Together with a few colleagues, I was fortunate to have the chance to pioneer service design teaching at Parsons, which was at the time starting a shift from a vocational art and design school into a school that recognises the emerging strategic role of design. And students were ready too. The artistic and experimental DNA of a school like Parsons, together with the social justice vision our university embraces, was fertile ground for an original approach to service design. Students are very creative in terms of research and participation, exploring different media to better capture rich stories and narratives of people and are also very critical in their own social agendas.

In talking to colleagues worldwide, I realise that we are today a robust and diversified community, with practitioners and academics producing and codifying not only new ways of doing, but most of all, demonstrating the value of service design in a range of applications. In particular, healthcare and public interest services have notably explored and incorporated service design into their spheres. In terms of methods, I think the basic service design toolkit has been pretty much diffused and absorbed everywhere. Take the winning projects from the SDN Awards in the last few years and you see a range of projects with clearly demonstrable results in these industries, and using very similar tools.

There are however aspects that remain notably underdeveloped. For example, the ethics and potential power imbalance of participatory processes in service design, and how design research may do harm if it does not follow ethical principles and empathic approaches; or the reductionism of some popular service design tools such as personas, that may bring forward biases or assumptions of designers leading to the distortion of reality to some degree.

In my book, I try to surface the issue of labour and power relations in service situations, and how understanding the consequences of, for example, designing greetings protocols, or how uniforms are in fact material embodiments of organisational identities, or how emotional labour is part of the service interaction, even if it is not reflected in paychecks earned from service jobs.

Another noteworthy knowledge gap is understanding how service design can help humanise technology. In a way, I think the gaps are related to a clearer positioning of service design as an inherent political practice, to which neither practitioners, researchers nor educators should shy away from.

We're seeing more and more business school students getting exposed to Design Thinking and being educated to see the value of design and customer experience.

Similarly, many practicing service designers are taking it upon themselves to start talking the language of business, to better communicate the value of their work, and improve its chances of successfully landing in complex organisations. To what extent do your design

The context and perspective you’ve shared shows

school students understand - and even perhaps seek out

that we’ve come a long way in terms of service design

- an education in the business aspects of service design?

education. Do you see any clear gaps or areas for

And what is your programme offering to prepare them

improvement?

for this increasingly necessary capability?

106 Touchpoint 10-2

tools and m p ro eth f iol d es

While the curriculum of our programme does not cover traditional business aspects, we do emphasise design-led research, multi-disciplinary collaboration and a systems-oriented approach that turn out to be highly valuable skills in industries dealing with complex problems. Some of our foundational literacies and practices include participatory methods, critical reframing and storytelling. We teach service design applied mostly to civic and social interest issues, and also embrace futures-oriented practices such as critical and speculative design. The managerial aspect of service design might have the counterproductive effect of increasing things like solutionism and incrementalism, so there’s the need to regain the freedom to invent and experiment.

We try to think of design as a mode of thought and action that crosses and connects different disciplines to address complex/wicked problems, exploring various modes of creative practice and creative action - a form of social inquiry through design. Our curriculum embraces a constant state of emergence that is needed to respond to an ever-evolving landscape of challenges and possibilities. In navigating complexity, we expect our students to develop the important muscles which will be needed in future positions and roles. I believe that these are highly sought-after capabilities for any industry interested in positive change.

I am also a member of the research laboratory Parsons DESIS (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) Lab that works at the intersection of strategic and service design, management and social theory. The lab promotes collaborative projects, academic events and comparative research programmes that help define and sustain our teaching, often involving partners outside the university.

In my own teaching I try to create learning experiences that are essentially formatted as project-based studios interspersed with a few seminar-like moments during which students review critical theory and historical background. For example, if students are approaching services related to incarceration, they should make time to read Foucault, or if they are going to re-imagine services to improve the financial inclusion of immigrants, they should be sure to review the recent history of relevant immigration policies. Similarly, as they start to develop insights and explore new ideas, they should go and see what other practitioners have already done, so we also ask students to review case studies from practice that can inform their design repertoire. The Touchpoint journal and the SDN Awards are great resources in this context. That’s also what I tried to bring in my book, with the rich stories from practitioners I interviewed, I tried to derive generalisable learnings out of their unique experiences, so that novice practitioners can start from a higher ground. There is nothing more rewarding than seeing the growth of students into meaningful careers and lives.

ceive mb ers re SDN me ff. Login o % 0 nd 3 site to fi D N we b to the S count co de in your dis r’s Dashb oa rd. mb e your me nt is va lid until 18 Discou m b e r 20 31 D e ce erba ck a nd p a p th o on b ditions. eBook e

In your newly-published book, An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible, you include within each chapter of Part II (the ‘process’-focussed section of the book) a case study and a practitioner interview. This seems like a great approach to me, because it brings real world context to the underlying theory. Looking back on how you created the book, and also how you teach your students, I was wondering if you could briefly describe just what elements your ideal service design education would consist of, for someone entirely new to the field?

Touchpoint Touchpoint10-2 8-1 107

Congratulations to the Service Design Award 2018 Finalists Out of more than 80 agency, corporate and student submissions from all around the globe, 16 finalists were selected by an international jury of service design experts.

These projects are internationally recognised as benchmarks of worldclass service design. This shortlist consists of six ‘Professional Commercial’ projects, seven ‘Professional Non-Profit/Public Sector’ projects and three ‘Student’ projects. The SDN, as a host of the Service Design Award, is delighted to showcase, promote and support the best new talent in our rapidly growing field. The help accomplish this, the finalists’ work will be on show during the entire 2018 Service Design Global Conference in Dublin.

On October 11, the winners will be announced and they will share their work in pecha-kucha style presentations the following day. The complete list of shortlisted projects and finalist case studies is available at www.service-design-network.org/ service-design-award-2018-finalists Special thanks to the 2018 SDN Award Jury: Kerry Bodine, Muna AlDhabbah, Priscila Williams, Taina Mäkijärvi, Luis Alt, Damian Kernahan, J. Margus Klaar, Florian Vollmer and Prof. Guosheng Wang.

108 Touchpoint 10-2

PROJECT / LOCATION

PROJECT / LOCATION

Digital Wayfinding Design & Prototype / USA COMPANY

Baby- Reducing Stress and Increasing Parent Spend Through Design / United Kingdom

Continuum

COMPANY

CLIENT

Hellon

Southwest Airlines, Four Winds Interactive

CLIENT

CATEGORY

CATEGORY

Professional Commercial

Professional Commercial

PROJECT / LOCATION

PROJECT / LOCATION

Debt Collection Experience / Chile COMPANY

Project Phoenix: Service Design for Tesco Bank / United Kingdom

MagiaLiquid

COMPANY

CATEGORY

Modern Human

Professional Commercial

CLIENT

Musgrave

Tesco Bank CATEGORY

Professional Commercial

inside sdn

PROJECT / LOCATION

PROJECT / LOCATION

PROJECT / LOCATION

Da Vinci - Service Portfolio Design at Enterprise Scale / England

KRAFTENS HUS / Sweden

Boost+Inno Project / Finland

COMPANY

COMPANY

COMPANY

Kraftens hus

FromHereOn

CLIENT

Laurea University Of Applied Sciences

CLIENT

RCC, Chalmers University of Technology / CHI - Centre for Healthcare Improvement, Knowit Insight

British Telecom CATEGORY

Professional Commercial

CATEGORY

Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector

CATEGORY

Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector

PROJECT / LOCATION

PROJECT / LOCATION

PROJECT / LOCATION

Transforming the Mortgage Buying Experience / Ireland

Public Sector Development based on User Needs / Sweden

The Intelligence Augmentation Design Toolkit / Finland

COMPANY

COMPANY

COMPANY

Wipro Digital

Innovationsguiden

Futurice

CATEGORY

CLIENT

CATEGORY

Professional Commercial

The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR)/ Sveriges Kommuner och Landsting (SKL)

Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector

CATEGORY

Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector Touchpoint 10-2 109

PROJECT / LOCATION

PROJECT / LOCATION

PROJECT / LOCATION

Developing a Police Force's Digital Experience for Citizens / United Kingdom

User-centric governance: A nation-wide redesign for permit applications / Netherlands

Smart Cities Made Human / Canada

COMPANY

COMPANY

City of Calgary – Civic Innovation Lab

Fjord

Koos Service Design

CLIENT

CLIENT

CLIENT

Federal Government

West Midlands Police

Rijkswaterstaat Kwaliteits Instituut Nederlandse Gemeenten (KING), VNG Realisatie

CATEGORY

CATEGORY

Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector

COMPANY

Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector

CATEGORY

Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector

PROJECT / LOCATION

PROJECT / LOCATION

PROJECT / LOCATION

Redesigning Field Hospital Handover / United Kingdom

ALKE / United Kingdom TEAM

CON+ Optimizing pet adoption service in the shelter / Taiwan

TEAM

Vasiliki Karaoglou, Ji-Young Lee

TEAM

Charlotte Fountaine

UNIVERSITY

CLIENT

Royal College of Art, London

Design Information & Thinking Lab, Shih-Min Hong

Médecins Sans Frontières

CATEGORY

UNIVERSITY

UNIVERSITY

Student

Royal College of Art, London

National Taiwan University of Science and Technology

CATEGORY

CATEGORY

Student

Student

110 Touchpoint 10-2

r u B ri K

vol 10 no

2 | oct obe

€ r 2018 | 18

Designing the Future

ubaev Sandjar Koz WORLD a 70 HOW T-H UMA N Santini Basr IN A POS E DESIGN Zoë Prosser, OF SERVIC A MET HOD ET, NOT lis Laspias A MIND-S TION Tha OVA NG: INN NKI E S THI SERVIC 60 FUT URE SUP POR T PRACTI CES FORESIGHT

FUT URE 44 THE

Touchpoint 10-2 111

Become part of the Service Design Network Belong to a strong network and play a role in strengthening the practice of service design!

Become a Member

Touchpoint Journal

Local Chapters

Touchpoint is the first and only journal dedicated to the practice of service design.

Published by practitioners for practitioners, Touchpoint is essential reading for both newcomers and seasoned experts.

SDN Chapters are vibrant communities in which service designers can connect, create and exchange knowledge at a local level. Join one of the existing chapters or build a new one in your country or area.

Personal Profile

Community Knowledge

Create your own profile and establish yourself within the SDN community! With your personal profile on our website you will be visible to a global community of potential clients, peers and partners.

SDN encourages you to share your thoughts and insights with the service design community. Self publish articles, projects and opinion pieces via our website in the Community Knowledge section.

Event Discounts

Case Study Library

We grant our members discount on our global and national conferences, on contributions to the Servcice Design Award, on partner events and much more.

Discover our growing resource of real case studies – from different industries, the public sector as well as social innovation projects.

About the Service Design Network The Service Design Network is the global centre for recognising and promoting excellence in the field of service design. Through national and international events, online and print publications, and coordination with academic institutions, the network connects multiple disciplines within agencies, business, and government to strengthen the impact of service design both in the public and private sector.

Service Design Network Office | Ubierring 40 | 50678 Cologne | Germany | www.service-design-network.org

Photo: Fernando Galdino

KEY BENEFITS FOR MEMBERS