Touchpoint Vol. 2 No. 3 - Connecting the Dots

volume 2 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

Connecting the Dots • Service Design as Business

Change Agent Mark Hartevelt and Hugo Raaijmakers

• MyPolice Lauren Currie and Sarah Drummond

• Service Design at a Crossroads Lucy Kimbell

Touchpoint Touchpoint

Proofreading

Volume 2, No. 3

Tim Danaher

January 2011 The Journal of Service Design ISSN 1868-6052 Publisher Service Design Network Editor Birgit Mager

Printing Peipers – Druckzentrum Kölnwest Fonts Mercury G3 Whitney Pro Service Design Network Köln International

Editorial Board

School of Design

Shelley Evenson

Prof. Birgit Mager

Jesse Grimes

Ubierring 40

Elena Pacenti

D-50678 Cologne

Coordination Miriam Becker Design Continuum Miriam Becker Image Processing Katrina Rundic

Germany www. service-design-network.org Contact Miriam Becker journal@service-design-network.org Touchpoint Subscription For ordering or subscribing to Touchpoint, please visit

Cover Picture and Conference

www.service-design-network.org/

Pictures

tp-catalog

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

contents

Connecting the Dots 06 From the Editors chapter # 1

08 Methods, Structures and Processes 10 How to Write the Perfect Pop Song!

Holger Eggert

12 Using Contextmapping for Breakthrough Insights

Damian Kernahan and Erik Roscam Abbing

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14 Your Service Is Your Brand in Action Søren Bechmann

16 Designing a B2B Service Business from Scratch Cale Thompson

18 Workshop: Beyond Roleplay Markus Edgar HormeĂ&#x; and Adam StJohn Lawrence chapter #2

20 Putting the Customer First

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22 Service Design as Business Change Agent Mark Hartevelt and Hugo Raaijmakers

28 From Boardroom to Boarding Gate Alex Nisbett

30 Enthusiasm.

Birgit Mager

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contents 32 Listening and Learning:

the Art of Wowing the Customer

Stefan Schick

38 What Will You See Today,

What Will You Do Tomorrow?

Fred van den Anker and Julia Klammer

40 The Limits of Patient Centricity Gianna Marzilli Ericson and Augusta Meill

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chapter #3

42 Social Innovation 44 MyPolice Lauren Currie and Sarah Drummond

48 Getgo Glasgow Sarah Drummond

50 Creative Waves COTEN Andy Polaine

54 Digital Etiquette Roger Ibars and Julia Leihener

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56 Workshop: Service Design Tools for Social Innovation

Sara Sitton and Heather Daam chapter #4

58 Exploring Service Design 60 Service Design at a Crossroads Lucy Kimbell

68 No Interdisciplinarity Without Disciplines Marianne Guldbrandsen and Geke van Dijk

76 Digital Service Design: Lessons from the Cloud Monica Bueno and Tiffany Chu

78 Good Idea + Good Design = Good Service?

Stefano Maffei, Elena Pacenti, Beatrice Villari

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78

80 Driving Lessons in Service Design Mark Bailey and Laura Warwick

82 Workshop: Making Service Sense Lauren Currie and Kirsty Joan Sinclair

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chapter #5

84 Background Stories 86 Why Chief Customer Officers Need to Care About Service Design

Kerry Bodine

88 Connecting the Dots Astrid van der Auwera

92 Conference Impressions 94 Student Days Impressions 96 Service Design Conference in Cambridge

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Birgit Mager and Shelley Evenson

98 Service Design Snapshots 98 The Holy Grail of Service Design is a New

Kind of Combination of Hearts and Euros.

Jussi Olkkonen

98 Video Ethnography: Multiple Applications of an Adaptable Resource

Luke Kelly

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99 Design as an Approach to Education for Sustainable Development Ksenija Kuzmina

100 Using Social Nodes to Design Services Eleanor Davies

101 Service Design in Australia Angela Bode

102 Member Map 5

from the editors

Letter from the Editors

Birgit Mager is Professor for Service Design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany. She is founder and director of sedes research – the centre for Service Design Research at KISD. Besides she is co-founder of Service Design Network and editor of Touchpoint.

Shelley Evenson is a principal, User Experience Designer at Microsoft. She has been an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Design, where she was also the director of graduate studies. She teaches in the area of Interaction and Service Design.

Connecting the Dots Doing the same thing twice doesn’t make it a tradition – but we are hopeful it just might enable one. We are devoting the year’s last issue of Touchpoint to the big annual Service Design Conference: ‘Connecting the Dots’ was the theme of the 2010 conference in Berlin, and it was the biggest Service Design Conference yet.

If you were there, you can enjoy revisiting what you heard, or discover what happened at the conference while you were elsewhere. If you weren’t there, see what you missed – some amazing speakers and activities. Everyone can start thinking about your contribution or participation in next year’s events – one of which will take place in Savannah, Georgia, at the SCAD in October 2011!

Just a couple of weeks after the big Berlin event we had a small and beautiful conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts near Boston. Capture a glimpse of our impressions of that crisp winter day alongside the Charles River! It would have been nice to cover the Nordic ServDes conference as well, but it was too close to our deadline. So in the next issue we will have a look at the Nordic highlights.

Touchpoint is now two years old and has provided six issues of insights into the research and practice of Service Design. The journal has matured over these two years – and it is now going to take the next big step. Our goal is to improve both the content and the editorial approach, and at the same time establish new categories and columns. In order to take this next step we have created a Touchpoint advisory board – Jeff Howard, Kerry Bodine, Jesse Grimes and Craig La Rosa. This new team will work together with the founding team of Shelley Evenson and myself on this important task.

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In parallel, Touchpoint will step into the digital world. For the first time, this issue of Touchpoint will be available as an ebook at amazon.com! We are hoping it will provide a strong alternative to the printed copy – both ecologically and economically.

As for the first two years of Touchpoint, I have to say that there was a good reason for bringing a printed Service Design Journal into the market where we have found an audience. It has created evidence for our young community and it is visible documentation of the growing role of the Service Design domain. But it is also a large financial investment. In order to break even we need to spend less or earn more. So our challenge will be to continue to grow – and to grow is to change.

SDN and Touchpoint will be all about this in 2011: change for the better and growth within reason. So, by this time next year we will see how much change and how much growth we were able to achieve and if the ‘not-yet-tradition’ of having a conference issue will survive the changes!

Now: Enjoy reading, let us know what you think!

The Touchpoint Team wishes you all the best for 2011.

Jesse Grimes is employed by Netherlands-based agency Informaat, which he joined in 2008 to help launch their Service Design capabilities. A dual USEuropean national, he has worked since 1999 as an interaction designer and consultant in London, Copenhagen, Dusseldorf and Sydney. His expertise includes design for mobile devices, user research, concept design and prototyping, and riding a Dutch bicycle while holding an umbrella.

Elena Pacenti is Director of the Master in Service Design at Domus Academy, Milan.

Elena deals with the design of services, design of service interfaces and design of new media for everyday use. She investigated on service design theory and tools to be applied both in traditional sectors, from commercial to social services, and with respect to telecom and web–related services.

Birgit Mager

For the editorial board and the team

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8

chapter # 1

Methods, Structures and Processes

Theories, Methods and Perspectives in Service Design

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By Holger Eggert

How to Write the Perfect Pop Song!

A Brief Discussion on Creativity.

Writing pop songs and Service Design have more in common than you would think. This article is a brief summary of my talk at the recent SDN Conference in Berlin — minus the jokes and the singing.

Writing a pop song is pretty easy: You start off with a lot of research that may include things like picking a theme you want to sing about, finding nice metaphors, learning how to play an instrument, finding a melody and some chords and much more besides. Then you write the song and then you play it in front of an audience, only to find out that they didn't like it.

But don't despair! Your audience simply didn't like the song in its current form. You can always rewrite it, play it again, edit it again, test it again with yet another audience and improve it more and more until you come up with a song that really wows your listeners.

This cycle of testing and improving is what you probably already do in your daily design work and it helps tremendously, not only with 10

songwriting but with many other creative endeavours as well.

The first step – research – is pretty well understood; there are lots of methods and tools to help you out there. The same goes for the testing part; again there are many processes to follow. But what about this step in the middle?

How do you ‘just write a song’?

How do you come up with a first draft for a project that you can then test and base your iterations on?

There's a Pattern for That.

Creativity has to do with intuition, intuition has to do with experience and you only get experience by doing the work. Fortunately there is a shortcut to intuition and that's what patterns are. Patterns are distilled experience. They can help you if you are out of your creative comfort zone but have to come up with something on the spot.

With songwriting, some of the patterns are the rhythmic structure, the contrast between different parts of the song, the flow and the repetition and many more besides.

One of the most useful patterns for writing the lyrics is making sure that the lines rhyme at the end.

A very helpful pattern for the music is a hook, a small melodic element that grabs you by the ears and pulls you into the song.

So, provided you did your research you can start by pulling bits and pieces together with these patterns and you will come up with something interesting. Keep going at it, test it, iterate and you're well on your way to pop stardom!

Where Do You Begin?

But you have to start somewhere and that’s usually a blank page or a blank window on your computer screen. And I’d like to relieve you of the fear of staring at a blank page: don't freak out thinking you're in this way over your head!

methods, structures and processes

»Then you write the song and then you play it in front of an audience …«

All you have to do is put your research into form, and knowing this makes it much more manageable.

Write a quick first draft, keeping in mind the fact that it won’t be perfect just yet. Having something completely finished is worth more than having a few well-polished lines. Better yet, write ten quick first drafts and then throw the best parts together.

And don't wait for a stroke of genius to come along and magically bless you with a great idea. If you do the work, the stroke of genius will come to you even though you may not even notice it.

But others will, and once you have them wondering how you could possibly have come up with the song you just sang for them, you're well on your way to pop super-stardom!

•

Holger Eggert, is the head of Levelgreen, a studio for user experience design in Berlin, where he has been designing all things interactive since 1998, as well as teaching, writing, speaking at conferences and generally goofing around. He’s a really nice guy although writing about himself is not one of his strengths.

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By Damian Kernahan and Erik Roscam Abbing

Using Contextmapping for Breakthrough Insights

Prior to starting a Service Design business, I had two very large frustrations when it came to the ability of companies to create really groundbreaking ideas.

The first was that it had been years since I had seen a really great insight that had both transformed the way an organisation looked at a problem, and transformed their approach to developing a solution.

The second was that the majority of research we experienced lacked any form of empathy whatsoever. Research studies were getting bigger and bigger and the information they yielded was becoming worse and worse.

And we realised that these two things – the lack of insights and the lack of empathy – were connected.

The larger the surveys, the further we removed ourselves from our customers and the further we got away from truly understanding their needs and wants.

Why is Contextmapping Valuable as a Tool for Service Design?

Company leaders often ask "how do we find those transforming

Contextmapping Is a Process for Generating Information About People's Experiences in Everyday Life for Design Purposes.

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insights that our customers are not even aware of themselves?"

And the answer we kept coming back to was: empathy.

By establishing genuine empathy with customers, the ability to generate insights and then create experiences that their customers love becomes far easier.

This is important for organisations, because so few really look through the eyes of their customers to understand what the service experience is like. Most of the information they receive as managers has been so filtered and massaged that most will never truly understand what it feels like to walk in their customers' shoes.

How Does Contextmapping Help Create Deeper Customer Insights?

The fundamental perspective of Contextmapping is that every user is an expert in their own experience domain. However, simply by asking customers what they want or need will not give you the insights you are looking for. You need to help customers express their own needs.

methods, structures and processes

share with us how they live, what they need and how they want to use products and services.

Photo by Mait Juriado

The Fundamental Perspective of Contextmapping Is That Every User Is an Expert in His Experience Domain.

Contextmapping takes into account the context of use, both in time (what happens before and after usage) and place (what happens around the usage in the room-house-street-life of the user) and experience (what emotions are directly liked to usage and what emotions follow from that or are triggered by it indirectly).

7daysinmylife was developed to facilitate Contextmmapping research projects. 7days is an online diary environment where selected users can self-document their lives through the use of images, text and icons, by web, email or sms, prompted by daily questions. Similar to a design probe, in that it produces data and insights that address the functional, personal, cultural and social aspects of their experiences in everyday life, the key difference

with 7days, is that as an online environment, it uses technology in a smart way. Traditional design probes are physical and thereby limited to a certain time and place: you have to be with the probe to work with it.

7days can capture data anytime and anywhere the respondent feels like it. Plus the technology enables the research team to follow the respondents as they go, which creates a lot of dialogue and commitment in the research team. Traditional probes are with the respondent until you get them back and you don't see them develop.

The outcomes are full of anecdotes, containing the feelings, values, needs and dreams of people because they have been given the tools to

Why isn’t Contextmapping used more often?

Quite often, it’s because most organisations like to use research for validation instead of inspiration.

In our experience, clients want research to be good, whereas we believe its sole purpose is to be new. The idea that research may break new ground can make it a little uncomfortable. However, it’s up to service innovation leaders to help organisations develop greater empathy and create offers that their customers love. 7daysinmylife. com helps clients establish greater empathy with their customers and ensure they can use it for inspiration, not just validation.

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Damian Kernahan, founded Proto Partners, Australia’s first Service Design consultancy in 2008.

Erik Roscam Abbing, founder of Zilver innovation, is a consultant and teacher with a focus on bringing together the disciplines of branding, innovation and design.

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By Søren Bechmann

Your Service Is Your Brand in Action

The other day I received the monthly invoice from my telephone company. There was a couple of things I didn't understand, so I tried to call the company. A voice thanked me for calling and tried to make me visit their website (I thought a telephone company liked the fact that their customers used telephones ...?) – and then I was put on hold.

After 15-20 minutes I gave up and decided to call an old friend who works for this company. He was unable to help me: he worked in another department. But he used the opportunity to tell me that he hated his job ...

When I returned home that day, I was driving behind a service van from the telephone company with two logos on the back. One from the company ... and one from a football club – probably the driver’s favourite club.

(A club which I hate ...!)

The same evening on TV, the company had a commercial message for me: they wanted to remind me that they are a very professional and service-focused company ...!

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No matter whether a company admits it or not, all the touchpoints between the company and the rest of the world carry a message.

Everything communicates. And often it is not the commercial- and well-designed messages that carry the strongest, most credible and effective signals.

An experience like a phone call, an invoice or the way a company handles complaints might play a much bigger role for customers' perception of a company than traditional commercial communication. Because the experience is much more tangible, personal and involving.

This is why most employees should be regarded as managers of the company’s brand: it is why any expense that enhances

the customer experience should be viewed as a marketing cost because it generates more repeat customers by word of mouth.

And this is why everybody should understand that their actions can enhance and strengthen the brand: or maybe the opposite; it can create confusion and gaps between advertising and reality.

In advertising someone used to say that "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half." The real problem is that the other half also might be wasted, as ill-informed or demotivated behaviour by staff undermines the promotional promise.

If a customer hasn’t had any dealings with a company, advertising might be the only touchpoint. So if the company at least communicates in a credible and relevant way, there is a possibility, however small, that the company might leave a 1:1 impression with the customer.

But, as soon as other touchpoints are activated – service people

methods, structures and processes

Advertising PR

Etc.

Website

Complaint Handling

In-Store

Invoicing

who are not on time, typos in ads, websites that are infrequently updated, staff who have no idea about the product they sell, inflexible service recovery etc. – the picture gets a lot more complex and blurred.

Warranties

Telephone Service

EVERYTHING communicates

Cleaning

Company Cars

Correspondence Staff

CSR

For the same reason, a company could define its brand in a perhaps different-but much-more-tangible way than before: as the sum of all touchpoints.

And if the store employees do not understand the importance of their own behaviour in supporting the brand and service promise, how can we expect the customers to understand it? Or believe the rest of the company’s promises? n k=1

»… a company could define its brand in a perhaps different-but much-more-tangible way than before: as the sum of all touchpoints.«

Sponsorships

Twitter

Everything communicates: all the touchpoints between the company and the rest of the world carry a message. And often, it is not the commercial and conscious messages that carry the strongest, most credible and effective signals.

Disney Inc. say that "Every action tells a story." The obvious consequence is that Disney want to be in charge of the story that is told.

And instead of targeting more messages at the customers, the solution could be to show the brand in action: by being something to the customers, creating relations and delivering inimitable service experiences.

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Søren Bechmann, founding partner of Service Design Institute in Copenhagen, works as a consultant, speaker and writer. He is the author of three books including the first Danish book about Service Design, Servicedesign, which was published in 2010.

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By Cale Thompson

Designing a B2B Service Business from Scratch

Engine Service Design was commissioned to support the development of Philips Retail Solutions (PRS): a new venture within Philips. Philips has three divisions, with the biggest being B2B. The driving idea was to make a business that offers innovative ways to create and manage multi-sensorial, interactive in-store experiences across multiple sites, providing consultancy as well as technology.

The official venture started only a few weeks before Engine was engaged, so it moved forward with an early collaboration between the two companies.

This project is both an exploration of building a B2B business, and of the value that service design can bring through early collaboration with a new ventures team.

The early challenge was how exactly the venture would make money. Philips knew they wanted to provide something different and new within the retail experience, building on their history of translating technology into valuable new products for customers, but did not have a clear business model.

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To gain this required a sound programme of research and design with users and key internal stakeholders. The first phase involved exploring and understanding value at a practical operational level and the second focused on the validation of that value proposition with senior stakeholders from targeted client organisations. The result was a focus on integrated product and service solutions.

The approach to these challenges also supported the dialogues around the future of this innovative concept, potential new clients and drivers for business development.

In their new role of service provider, PRS had to learn about

types of customers (marketing, sales, experience, design and support), their needs and how staff, customers, products and process interact. The challenge for our client was to structure a process that integrated the development of a service business and a definition of a clear service proposition.

We aimed to build their confidence about responding to the organisational challenges, sustainability and value of providing solutions rather than products. Engine also helped them to address the challenge of understanding that value in detail by quickly bringing the proposition to life through a suite of communication materials.

These supported open conversations with professionals, allowing them to both evaluate and build on what was presented.

A second set of communications were developed that helped to clarify the proposition and brought it to life through mockups of key touchpoints and by

methods, structures and processes

illustrating the experience of using the solutions.

Adapting cases for individual sectors and tailoring for particular needs helped to put detail onto the propositions under development.

The PRS team acquired new skills to enable this, including consultancy skills and approaches to continuous learning. This also helped the validation process develop, moving from internal to external validation over time.

All the strategies that were developed were linked through a holistic view of the solutions offer and the continual internal development. The set of offers developed are all linked, both in internal production and communication and also in varying packages of platforms, tailored to customers’ requirements.

to refine a set of offers and to produce a strategic roadmap and a compelling set of presentation materials to sell the business, both internally and externally.

The benefit of the early collaboration between PRS and Engine in this venture enabled a holistic view to be applied from the beginning, aligning the different strategies and cementing the internal and external offerings.

It has also enabled the PRS team to go forward with confidence, helping to anticipate and accommodate future changes, meeting each one with innovation and a unified proposition.

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Following successful validation, Engine supported the core team and key internal stakeholders

Project outcomes from top to bottom: Demonstrating the effects of the service when made a reality; control desk for lighting solution selections; a testing space to bring to life the reality of the retail vision

Cale Thompson Until recently Cale worked as senior designer at Engine Service Design on service strategy and innovation projects. He has since relocated to the US where he is currently at work for clients enabling collaborative consumption in the developed world creating positive change in the developing world.

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workshop insights

By Markus Edgar Hormeß and Adam StJohn Lawrence

Beyond Roleplay – Theatrical Tools in Service Design Theatrical rehearsal is used as a model for the development and refinement of services.

»Multiple iterations in service rehearsal give the co-creators time to stop, look closer and experiment. Here we investigate what the details of body language can tell us about the transaction.«

»It's useless just to claim a space is ‘safe’ – you have to live it. We spent two days spreading 89 rubber chickens through the conference – with a purpose. When people stepped through this door, they knew normal rules did not apply.«

»Rehearsal may look like roleplaying, but it is emphatically not the same thing. Great effort is made to establish safe space: there are multiple iterations; and there is a huge emphasis on doing, not talking.«

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methods, structures and processes

»Doing, not talking. Instead of PowerPoint, a musical group exercise shows one possible dramatic arc for a service offering.«

»Abstraction is a useful tool in theatre. Toys and gimmicks replace real products, freeing the imagination and adding to the creative fun.«

»Subtext is what we think, but do not say. Here, multiple levels of subtext are made plastic to reveal deep motivations behind a service transaction.«

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chapter # 2

Putting the Customer First How Service Design Helps Businesses to Focus the Attention on the Customer.

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By Mark Hartevelt and Hugo Raaijmakers

Service Design as Business Change Agent

Mark Hartevelt, Senior Director New Business, Philips Design

Today, product manufacturers are providing more value to their customers by increasingly integrating services in their offerings.

While typically Service Design contributes to this with design deliverables, stronger impact opportunities come from utilizing Service Design as a strategic partner. Here Service Design brings a new way of thinking to a company’s business innovation. By articulating innovation strategy, initiating business pilots and organizing company enablers, Service Design can help product manufacturers transform into experience providers.

The Silent Revolution of Servitization Today’s physical products are increasingly complemented with services. This trend, often referred to as “servitization” (Desmet et.al., 2003), has accelerated exponentially over the last few years. This has been driven by developments in technology, in endusers expectation and in business.

Hugo Raaijmakers, Creative Director Service Design, Philips Design

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Technology An increasing number of products, from smart phones to internet fridges, have become network enabled through various technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, cable, Ethernet, GSM, UMTS. The coverage of all these

networks has grown exponentially, which has led to an extensive development of services (e.g. mobile apps, domotica services) that connect and interact with these products. As a result, product manufacturers feel even more inclined to provide network access for their new products.

End Users User expectations are increasing.

Product owners expect that their products are network connected to receive extra functionality for their product, to have access to valueadd services and even to pay for the product per use. They expect products from the same brand to

putting the customer first

seamlessly connect. Through social media services, and thus through networked products, many end-users want to be always visible, always accessible, always on.

Business Product manufacturers are beginning to see the value of adding services to their products, and are even developing integrated service-product offerings.

They do so, firstly because adding a service to a product does result in higher sales margins. Secondly because product-services allow the brand to create an ongoing dialogue with the end-user resulting in stronger brand exposure, repeated sales, valuable consumer data and efficient customer care. But most importantly, they do so because their products can become part of an “eco-system” of connected products, services, content and social media. This product-service ecosystem is hard to copy, often locks-in the consumer with extra value and consequentially provides a sustainable stronghold against competition.

Different Approaches to Servitization For a product manufacturer, the transition to developing, producing and exploiting services is comprehensive, invasive and demanding (Olivia, 2003).

Only a limited number of product manufacturers have yet successfully exploited these opportunities on a large scale. Here are some examples

of product companies that included services to their offering, each for a different reason.

TomTom started as a true product company. However, in reaction to competition in their device business, today TomTom makes 24% of its revenues from content services, TomTom aims to further increase this number (TomTom, 2010).

»… adding a service to a product does result in higher sales margins …«

The Miele Laundrette™ provides a common room where a local community like a students’ flat can wash and dry clothing at a reserved time. It provides a professional quality level of washing for an all-in pay per washing price, paid by through debit card. The complementary online service allows users to manage their balance, to make reservations and to set SMS-reminders for reservation and for end of the washing. With this, Miele, a true product company, is now able to reach a new market, with new customers generating new recurring revenues.

Apple provides one of the most famous examples for building a successful eco-system of products, services, mobile apps and content that all seamlessly connect, that all provide clear additional end-user value and that jointly lock-in the end-user. A competitor has to compete against the entire set of connected components at once, making it hard to win in this space of “enjoying music”.

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By Mark Hartevelt and Hugo Raaijmakers

»Today most of the product manufacturing companies just have started their transformation towards experience provider …«

The Product Manufacturer’s Challenge Time is Tight The competition model for product service eco-systems is different from that for traditional products. Value spaces can only be taken once. For example, Apple tries to cover the complete value space of “enjoying music” with a comprehensive productservice eco-system. Competition has to battle against this complete set of valuable components simultaneously. In addition, some services from this ecosystem, like Apple’s AppStore, can be hard to duplicate because its resources (like trained programmers) are scarce.

For this reason, product manufacturers often have only a limited time window to successfully occupy a brand new value space.

Change the DNA Most business innovators of large product manufacturing companies feel this “call for action”. However it is often difficult for them to swiftly address these new service opportunities for three main reasons.

Innovation efforts in large product manufacturing companies are mainly driven by product technology inventions, less by insights regarding a specific value space. Secondly, these companies have a detailed, extensive and deeply deployed product creation process which has been its life-line for decades but which is not suitable for service creation. Thirdly, product

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companies have one main business model: earn from selling the product.

Services business however, requires separate business modeling for each new proposition.

Today most of the product manufacturing companies just have started their transformation towards experience provider, focusing on real end-user needs through multiple touch points and offering complete productservice eco-systems. This transition requires a complete change of the company DNA – the mentality, culture and approach throughout the entire company. Many large product companies, like Philips, have started to engage Service Design to address this challenge for change. Of course here Service Design directs the concepting of the new product-service offering, based on end-user requirements. But Service Design is also well positioned to support in changing the company DNA by organizing strategy platforms, initiating pilot businesses and starting to coordinate company-wide enablers for services development.

Service Design as Co-creator of the Product-service Offering On project level, i.e. supporting the product-service creation projects, Service Design brings-in the enduser perspective in concepting and creating the product-service offering.

Here Service Design tries to uncover the customer’s deepest motivations and needs, and uses this as a starting

putting the customer first

point for disruptive innovation. The concept for product service offering is preferably realized through a highly iterative process in which rough prototypes are created and validated by users already in the very first development stages. There is a number of specific Service Design processes, methods and tools we apply in this more traditional design role.

Service Design as Business Change Agent On company level however, Service Design is well positioned as a change agent to facilitate business innovation and organizational change. A product manufacturing company can use Service Design to prepare the company as a whole for creating, developing and exploiting product services on large scale. For this, Service Design should act on three company levels simultaneously: articulating innovation strategy, initiating business pilots and organizing company enablers. The elaboration explained below on acting on these three company levels includes learnings from the authors’ Service Design deployment at Philips.

Articulating Innovation Strategy Structural product service innovations for a product manufacturer require a clear and articulated vision on all levels of the business i.e. business unit level, sector level and eventually company level. Service Design is well positioned to support here. For this, servitization research results available on trends, on

insights and on market developments need to be studied. Through this research an overview of trends, opportunities and possible business models relevant for product services offerings can be created. By inviting the relevant strategists of this business area in a “services platform”, and by facilitated work sessions, the acquired outside-in conclusions can be combined with the strategists’ individual visions on service development. As a result of these sessions, Service Design provides one consolidated articulated vision on product services for that business area. This vision sets a direction, shows opportunities and is used as main reference for selecting the right product-service pilots (see below).

Strategies Articulate service vision & strategies

Pilots Facilitate business services pilots

Enablers Partner with corporate functions

2010

2011

2012

2013

Service Design should have an impact on three levels simultaneously.

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By Mark Hartevelt and Hugo Raaijmakers

»In order for Service Designers to embrace this new role, they need to invest in new competences … «

Initiating Business Pilots The business needs best practices for showing feasibility, business value and attractiveness of product service combinations in order to gain confidence to invest. Service Design is well able to shortlist a business that is most appropriate to run a services pilot, to articulate a possible end-game for this business and to convince the right business owner to fund and start a pilot project in their domain.

For example, the authors were able to arrange a limited budget to develop on their own account a very simple but tangible and attractive mobile app demonstrator. The positive business attention around this demonstrator eventually resulted in a request to introduce Service Design as a permanent element of the business’ services innovation process.

a business co-creator; actively contributing to the company’s future product-service propositions.

For this reason, a partnership between IT and Service Design not only allows for jointly running enabling projects, but also for jointly initiating new business pilots.

Organizing Company Enablers Product service pilots help to explore the unexplored. But in order to really enable the entire company to scaleup, build-on to synergies and use the breadth of the company’s product portfolio, design should actively build partnerships with the other “company functions” like IT, Marketing, and R&D.

Partnership between Service Design and R&D is in the early stages but has potential. Today R&D departments of most product companies are well aware of the value of making connected products. With growing interest R&D wants to learn how connected products should become prepared for potential services, based on end-user requirements. Service Design’s partnership with R&D leads to joint research projects that show the business the potential of prototyped product service-propositions, and that help to indicate the required company enablers for product-service innovation.

IT has the potential to be a very valuable partner for service innovation, as many corporate IT organizations today are extending from being a business enabler to

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Also the partnership with Marketing comes naturally. Services that are part of a product-service offering also are an effective means for marketing communication. For that reason, Marketing is increasingly interested to partner with Service Design to explore market driven product-service innovations and to define a solid process that allows Marketing to propose marketing driven, relevant successful productservice eco systems.

putting the customer first

Conclusion Service Design has started to adopt its new role in the paradigm shift that product companies are facing.

In addition to the traditional design contribution Service Design brings to the creation of the actual productservice offering, it is now also starting to facilitate and contribute to the company’s service innovation by articulating the vision, initiating pilots and facilitating the building of enablers.

In order for Service Designers to embrace this new role, they need to invest in new competences like strategy consultancy, business modeling and organizational change.

They need to develop thought leadership inside and outside the companies they work with in order to be a credible partner in providing consultancy on business innovation. And they need to really be entrepreneurial in proposing and developing intra-company partnerships.

References • Desmet, S., B. van Looy en R. van Dierdonck (2003).

The Nature of Services. In: B. van Looy, P. Gemmel en R. van Dierdonck (red.). Services Management. Pearson Education Limited, Harlow.

• Olivia, R.(2003). Managing the transition from products to services. International Journal of Service Industry Management, vol. 14.

• TomTom (2010). TomTom reports third quarter 2010 results, TomTom Investor Relations. [Online] Retrieved October 26, 2010, from http://investors.tomtom.com/

Mark Hartevelt is responsible for developing and deploying new design services for Philips Design.

This includes market research, business development, process development, recruitment and line management. His current focus is building Service Design competence for Philips Design.

Hugo Raaijmakers is developing Service Design skills and methodologies to articulate the core Philips brand value of simplicity across different services, thereby helping to support the goals of their businesses and increasing brand recommendations and loyalty.

The urgency for product companies to transform into experience providers offers an excellent opportunity for Service Design to become truly instrumental in this silent revolution of servitization.

•

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By Alex Nisbett

From Boardroom to Boarding Gate Delivering a Passenger-centred Services Strategy for the Portuguese Airport Group

ANA manage and operate eight major airports across Portugal, with over 65,000 passengers travelling through them every day.

As specialists in infrastructure and operations, their primary focus was on building and maintaining business-to-business relationships. However, with stricter European service quality metrics and increasingly tough competition within the aviation industry to attract airlines and extend routes, ANA saw an opportunity to shift their emphasis with a new vision.

This new vision, called ‘ANA Way’, centres on passengers and visitors as the customer, not just the airlines. It aims to build more direct relationships with them and, in doing so, brings the ANA brand to the fore, generating new revenue as a world-class consumer brand. July 2010 saw the completion of Engine’s two-year engagement with ANA to collaboratively create a passenger services offer as well as increase ANA’s internal service capability.

Key to ANA developing a service design capability was the close collaboration between ANA and Engine through on-project learning.

Our Approach Building ‘ANA Way’ began by setting a service strategy. After 28

sign-off from the board, a service development team, made up of ANA personnel and Engine designers, worked closely to bring the strategy to reality.

As part of the initial strategy phase, three roles for the airport were identified through passenger insight: Advisor, Companion and Hero, as well as the brand vision ‘preparing you for travel’.

Working across nine distinct projects, we used a wide range of service design techniques with two main areas of focus.

Firstly, a platform of sustainable management tools to build an internal foundation for eveloping and managing passenger services,

by embedding and sustaining cultural change within ANA. Secondly, a suite of value-added services that enhance the passenger experience across a number of areas as well as generating revenue.

Service design management tools comprised of design guides, case studies and metrics initially to be used by ANA staff, and later on by external entities operating at the airport.

The services design guides covered the overall service experience provided to the passenger and became known as ‘The Basics’.

They included Customer Service, Security, Passenger Information and Environments. Each features a set of principles, a framework and a number of tools and methods to help build a sustainable response to design challenges. The suite of value-added services builds on the basics to create new passenger service offerings around the highlevel proposition of ‘preparing you for travel’. Included in the scope of these services were families, travelling groups and premium passengers. Additionally, a presence

putting the customer first

Project outcomes: The Baby Car pilot in Porto; free to use for families with small children whilst at the airport and the Baby Changing pilot in Lisbon Airport, part of ANA’s Family Friendly strategy.

for the ANA brand was created through dedicated environments called PODs that would also benefit passengers whilst in the airport and provide a touchpoint for browsing and purchasing premium services, booking onward travel services orservices to help passengers refresh and recharge. Many of these services are underpinned by technology. The MyAirport project specified the technology strategy, and a platform to support all passenger services.

Key challenges It’s All New ANA has not worked in this way before. This created a challenge to remain practical and pragmatic, striking the right balance between the development of new skills whilst at the same time still contributing

to the progress of work streams and ultimate delivery of the programme.

Not So Fast ANA, as a large government-owned organisation moves quite slowly in comparison to a small design consultancy such as Engine. This meant that we had to be very flexible in the way we planned and delivered projects.

Telling and Selling The ‘ANA Way’ vision was to create a passenger-centred strategy, implemented through services.

Achieving this goal required a considerable amount of selling and reselling of the programme’s objectives and the approach being taken to internal stakeholders.

The ANA board required regular updates on progress: the team

consulted and collaborated with internal partners such as retail and marketing and external partners like the airlines and travel agencies.

After two years, the results of this programme are beginning to be seen in the airport as services are piloted and launched and the Airport’s focus gradually shifts towards its passengers.

•

Alex Nisbett, Service Design Lead, Engine Service Design. Alex combines design thinking with a practical collaborative approach to solving problems across diverse industries.

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By Birgit Mager

Enthusiasm.

Birgit Mager, Professor for Service Design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany.

»We want to enthuse our customer« is a phrase a Service Designer hears quite often. Most companies who strive for this do not know that they are treading on hallowed ground.

The word was created by the early Christians, when they needed to describe the overwhelming emotions that were connected to the ceremony of being baptised and originally meant ›possession by a divine afflatus‹. As David Hume put it, »Hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance, are therefore, the true sources of enthusiasm.« 1 Asked by clients if I could conduct projects on enthusing customers, I carried out research to learn more about the nature and the causes of enthusiasm 2. Interestingly enough I did not find a lot of existing research on enthusiasm. Noriaki Kano3 states that enthusiasm is caused by exceeded expectations: this is certainly interesting, but is neither a sufficient exploration nor an explanation for this strong emotion.

about enthusiasm in service and conducting in-depth interviews.

Service-related enthusiasm, or ‘wow’ experiences, are often short term, extrinsic and individual. Our analysis of data led to a typology of enthusiasm.

Via content analysis we then identified nine dimensions of enthusiasm: relief, flexibility, foresight generosity, authenticity, belonging, exclusivity, success, and completion. Could these In order to understand the typologies, dimensions could be translated into causes and impact of enthusiasm in the useful tools for the service design service context, we4 started a qualitative process? research project, analysing servicerelated blogs and literature, creating We finally succeeded by identifying our own blog for discussion and stories small scenes from the movie Pretty

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putting the customer first

intrinsic

together

long term

short term

Hobbies

individual

Fans Wow Experiences

extrinsic

Woman that demonstrated these nine dimensions in action. We started using the film clips as a tool in workshops.

The very first ‘enthusiasm workshop’ was conducted with a banking institution, and it really was a great success. Systematically working through the dimensions with the support of Julia Roberts helped us collaborate with the Bank to think simultaneously ‘in depth’ and ‘out of the box’.

Over the last three years, the Research Center for Service Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne has worked on several Service Design projects for banking institutions.

Sedes Research created user insights: observational studies, design games and self-exploration tools were applied to gather deep understanding about how a bank is perceived and used by

customers and employees. ‘The Bank of Dreams’ focused on innovative banking services that would foster meaningful emotional experiences and positive relationships with customers. Sedes conducted projects on student banking and worked with banks in order to find ways to wow the customers.

These collaborations not only explored enthusiasm, but produced results that were received enthusiastically by the bank’s management, staff and customers alike.

•

Hume, David, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, Essay X 1742-1754 2 Enthusiasm is defined here as a strong positive state of mind.

3 Kano, Noriako, N. Kano: Attractive Quality and Must-be Quality; Journal of the Japanese Society for Quality Control, H. 4, S. 39-48, 1984 4 sedes-research, University of Applied Sciences Cologne, Köln International School of Design 1

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By Stefan Schick

Listening and Learning: the Art of Wowing the Customer How and Where to Start? – How do you wow the customer in today’s ever-changing world? That is the challenge that all organisations must face. In order to master it, they have to perfect the art of wowing the customer by constantly reinventing and redefining the customer experience. This can only be accomplished by developing a feeling throughout the organisation for what will really wow a customer.

Stefan Schick, Stefan Schick, Director Quality Management, Communication Center, DB Direkt

Large organisations, with a multitude of customer contacts through a variety of channels, need to constantly monitor all customer touchpoints. To successfully master the task of achieving high customer satisfaction ratings along with the task of creating momentum for the wowing experience across a variety of touchpoints, companies must be able to anticipate the needs of today’s customer.

This gets tricky when it comes to the needs that customers do not explicitly express but still expect to be met.

When we say we want to listen and to learn, this is by no means lip service, since we are actively taking steps to do so! Listening to our customers and constantly encouraging our employees to evaluate the customer calls they handle based on their own perception, has become an ingrained practice that

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enables us to continuously learn about customer needs.

Delivering a positive surprise and exceeding customers’ expectations creates a ‘wow’ experience. However, it is all about the customers’ perception. They must be impressed again and again by a unique service experience. How can this be done? There is more to it than just exceeding expectations. The ‘wow’ effect also depends to a large extent on how we communicate with our customers: empathy and anticipating needs is what counts. When it comes to being passionate about creating that special experience that will wow the customer, there are many ways to achieve this!

Customers want to feel important and valued: as outlined by Prof. Birgit Mager, service delivery must be marked by genuine empathy, care, recognition

putting the customer first

Deutsche Bank’s Communication Center: Focus on Quality Delivering customer service 24/7 and giving our customers the option to talk to a Deutsche Bank employee at any time of their choosing was one of the main reasons for our decision to establish a central customer contact department.

of the customers’ needs, etc. Selecting the right approach and taking into consideration the individual circumstances of a customer issue is the key to a successful service delivery.

While customer perceptions differ depending on their individual circumstances, organisations must find a way to reproduce the wow effect by translating and embedding the behaviours and attitudes that trigger it into concrete processes and courses of action.

Therefore, the ‘wow’ effect is not a byproduct achieved by accident: it must be carefully planned and implemented in order to reinforce customer loyalty and retention. What are the prerequisites for successfully achieving this? For a start, one must keep an eye on the signs of change and establish a flexible quality-management system that can be adapted to ever-changing customer requirements. Creating the ‘wow’ effect is a constant process of monitoring and redefining the parameters that count in the perception of the customer.

The department serves as a switchboard for calls to branches and our headquarters and is tasked with performing standard banking transactions, such as a money transfer within Europe or buying and selling equities by phone. In addition, the Communication Center manages appointments for the financial advisors in more than 700 branch offices throughout Germany.

Delivering a positive surprise and exceeding customers’ expectations creates a ‘wow’ experience

Quality assurance is absolutely necessary to successfully handle more than 16 million customer contacts a year. A variety of tools is used to monitor and measure customer satisfaction and to make sure that

Service Offering of the Communication Center Customer Service Telephone number 0 18 18 - 1000

Central telephone number for all DB branches

• Service Offering of the Communication Center Standard banking and brokering transactions, such as Account and portfolio information Payment transactions Buying and selling equities • Switchboard function of the Communication Center • Transmitting function for branches and Headquaters • Transmitting customer call-back request to personal inbox of the responsible financial advisor • Inbound sales Managing appointments for financial advisors Product sales

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listening and learning

By Stefan Schick

ow indicators lexibility

mpathy

erformance indicators Competence Best solution

mployee attitude and behaviors

Business acumen

asic service indicators Discretion

Promt call ans ering

ffectiveness of process and procedures

uality of information provided

Total Quality Management System

qualitative requirements are constantly and consistently being met and that any deviations are detected and acted on immediately. ‘CuBe’ (Customers Benefit) is the name of our Total Quality Management System. Moreover, Deutsche Bank’s service and quality standards are summarised in our Customer Charter. This document contains our promise to our customers that we pledge to keep in our day-to-day service delivery.

Identifying ‘Wow’ Factors Our cooperation with the Service Design department at the Universitiy of Applied Sciences in Cologne is living proof that corporate social responsibility leads to tangible corporate benefits for Deutsche Bank. Our goal was to provide an opportunity for students to put the knowledge that they acquired during their studies to practical use. At the same time, Deutsche Bank was able to benefit from the existing knowledge and expertise in Service Design.

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The Service Design team from the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne was given the challenge of finding the ‘wow’ indicators for Deutsche Bank’s Communication Center , and they delivered.

A nationwide survey was conducted where customers were asked to state their personal ‘wow’ indicators in banking transactions. Furthermore, an exchange of experience via an internet platform on the topic of wowing customers was initiated.

In the end, a large collection of internal service experiences showed us what had impressed customers the most in different scenarios in the past. The analysis subsequently revealed ‘flexibility’ and ‘empathy’ as the most important factors for triggering a ‘wow’ experience from the Communication Center.

The next step was to actually bring these indicators to life by designing and defining exact service scenarios in daily operations that would reflect those ‘wow’ factors. After conducting a detailed analysis, we decided to launch services that we believe best reflect our approach when it comes to flexibility and empathy.

Emergency Cash Service: in the case of loss or theft of credit cards or cash, our world-wide cash service will deliver cash in the local currency to the customer. The amount requested will be delivered to the customer on site in the local currency. This service is a great tool for the Communication

putting the customer first

The documents are secured with a personal password and can be accessed at any time, as required. Lately, we have added important information for the customer on Deutsche Bank partners in other countries where they can make cash withdrawals. We want to provide peace of mind to our customers on their trips!

Center to provide help quickly and efficiently to a customer who finds themself in a difficult situation. First and foremost, this service gives us a perfect opportunity to impress customers by unexpectedly exceeding their expectations, i.e. wowing them.

Travel Planning: we have set up an internet platform where important financial information relevant for travellers is stored. In addition, we have established a card and document service. This service offers customers the possibility of storing relevant information about their credit cards as well as copies of important documents, such as passports, driver’s license, car registration or certificate of vaccination.

Putting the Customer First Pays Off We have put measurements in place that reflect to which degree we achieve set quality goals. We constantly measure, monitor and collect data that reflect our performance evaluation in different scenarios, both from the customer’s, as well as the employee’s, perception.

Satisfaction high

mpathy

lexibility mployee attitude and behaviors

low

Business acumen

Discretion

elevance high

Competence Best solution

uality of information provided ffectiveness of processes and procedures xample of ano model

Prompt call ans ering

low ow indicators

asic service indicators

erformance indicators

Example of Kano model

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listening and learning

By Stefan Schick

»Wowing the customer is much more than a single project! It is an attitude …«

The customer’s perception: customers are being asked specific questions to evaluate their service experience in terms of friendliness, attentiveness, prompt call answering, clear statements and explanations, confidentiality, competence and commitment. The survey is conducted by phone and by e-mail.

The employee’s perception: employees are asked to evaluate customer calls as they perceive them in regard to customer orientation and service quality. By taking into consideration the two different perceptions, additional insights into customer satisfaction can be gained.

The company’s perception: service delivery and relevance of existing processes are constantly and closely monitored. This quality check comprises an analysis of customer calls to make sure that our Customer Charter, which constitutes our guidelines and service promise to our customers, is delivered by our employees in their daily work and is regularly updated.

With our Quality Management System, we make sure that we efficiently monitor the benefits we deliver to our customers and thus take an active part in controlling customer satisfaction and in producing ‘wow’ effects. The past few months have clearly shown that the indicators we established and defined in cooperation with the Service Design team are actually very useful for constant quality monitoring.

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We have thus developed a system to systematically drive customer satisfaction, create ‘wow’ moments and make Deutsche Bank even more successful in the long run. Wowing the customer is much more than a single project! It is an attitude to be embedded into the corporate culture and behaviour of all employees and demands a flexible and customercentric organisation.

•

Media and Design M.A.

DESIGN THINKING International Master’s Degree Design Management | Media Design | Service Design | Strategy Design

Design thinking is the force by which we create new media applications and media products that serve humans. The concept of design thinking can be practiced across many disciplines and professions. It is not limited to the field of design. www.mhmk.de/master MHMK Macromedia Hochschule fĂźr Medien und Kommunikation

By Fred van den Anker and Julia Klammer

What Will You See Today, What Will You Do Tomorrow?

User-Generated Content for Service Design

The web offers new opportunities to involve users in Service Design. In our work, we explore the use of social media to enable users to make design contributions anywhere at anytime.

In a two-year R&D project revolving around the implementation of remote video consultation services for paraplegics, we asked both healthcare professionals (physicians, nurses and therapists) and patients to document situations from their daily life for which they thought video consultation would be useful.

The project, financed by the Swiss Innovation Promotion Agency CTI, was carried out in close cooperation with the Swiss Paraplegic Centre, a rehabilitation clinic for paraplegics from all over Switzerland.

To create a basis for distributed collaboration both with and between users, we first carried out a contextual analysis. Together with the central stakeholders, we defined those areas of patient care and treatment that were thought to profit most from video consultation, e.g. tele-woundcare, remote support in respiratory care and remote assistance with abilities of daily living (ADL).

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Next, collaborations with potential end-users were initiated to explore the usefulness of video consultation services for real-world activities in these areas and to specify user needs and requirements.

Starting from a participatory design approach, we wanted to promote a more active user role and initiate a process of continuous user involvement by complementing traditional face-to-face methods for participation with asynchronous, distributed forms of participation.

The challenge was to come up with a tool that participants could easily use in daily life to generate content relevant for the design of video consultation services.

We gave participants a mini camcorder and instructions for self-documentation. Furthermore, the participants had access to a platform to share and discuss their recordings and ideas for change with other community members.

The user-generated content, in the form of films, photos and blogs, helped us to specify both the situations for which video consultation is expected to be useful and the user needs and requirements to be fulfilled.

At the same time, several problems and challenges were encountered.

High demands were being put on the platform moderator to ask users to specify their contribution, i.e. to give a more accurate description of the situation. We also found that the task we gave our participants – asking them to document situations and think about the future at the same time – was too demanding. In general, users needed more input and structure for effective selfdocumentation and more guidance concerning what to document. We adapted the instructions accordingly. Still, some users did not participate at all. In this respect it might be useful to put more focus on the collaborative definition of the task and the specific role to be fulfilled by the participant, e.g. whether the person would prefer to be an ’analyser’, gathering usage scenarios, or would rather be an

putting the customer first

Assessment of Home Posted by Nurse on 14. July at 11:48 am

Sunburn on foot Posted by Physician on 20. July at 9:30 am

Patient hat sich einen Sonnenbrand zugezogen und weiß nun nicht, Wir führen bei Patienten, die stationär im Haus sind, oder auch Advicewieder for assistive technology was zu tun ist. Nach längerem Telefonat kam heraus, dass es sich ambulant kommen, Wohnungsabklärungen durch. Immer Posted by Occupational Therapist on 6.

July at 17:14 pm um eine Blase handelt, die komplett offen ist und nun einen ent entkönnten wir vor allem bei ambulanten Patienten die Notwendigkeit sprechenden Verband Das bereits Telefonat war auf italienisch einer Wohnungsabklärung anhand eines Videos oder Teilweise auch von ist Fo-es schwierig, dem Patienten das braucht. gewünschte, es hat über 10 Minuten nur umDies, den Wundzustand zu ermitteln. tos der baulichen Situation vorbesprechen. Teilweisezu müssten Hause wir vorhandene und Hilfsmittel wieder zu bestellen. weil Bei Videokonsultation wäre eine schnelle, noch nicht einmal unbedingt anreisen oder wären häufig besser den genauen die Patienten Hersteller nicht mehr wissen, sich ineinfache und genauere gewesen. vorbereitet. So könnten bereits beim Treffen, anhand der vonGrösse Prospeknicht sicherEvaluation sind oder möglich das Hilfsmittel bei einer anderen ten, geeignete Hilfsmittel gezeigt werden.

Firma bestellt haben. Ein Foto oder ein Video des Hilfsmittels würde ab und zu helfen.

Examples of user-generated content on the online platform

’evaluator’, assessing the usage scenarios of others. Another problem appeared to be the lack of social interaction on the platform, i.e. commenting on the contributions of other people and generating design ideas and future scenarios together.

Therefore, we decided to use the user-generated content from the online platform to generate future scenarios in face-to-face workshops.

According to our findings, such a ‘blended’ participatory design approach, using both face-to-face and asynchronous forms of participation, is very effective for getting continuous, high-quality input from users in the process of design.

We also found that there is some interdependency between both forms of user participation: we carried out simulations of some of the scenarios with real healthcare professionals and patients, and found that this hands-on experience with the future tasks had an influence on the users’ motivation to participate.

Carrying out such participatory simulations in a face-to-face setting as early as possible in the process gives users a clear vision of the future right from the start and can be expected to raise their motivation to participate in a distributed setting.

Fred van den Anker, Professor for Applied Psychology, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland Julia Klammer, Researcher, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland

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By Gianna Marzilli Ericson and Augusta Meill

The Limits of Patient Centricity Why Patients Aren’t Consumers

The trend towards consumerisation of healthcare has focused on empowering patients through access to information. This makes intuitive sense, mirroring a general trend away from experts as arbiters of knowledge.

On Amazon and on Yelp, the consumer is king: everyone has access and the ability to voice their opinion – regardless of expertise – and this is happening in healthcare too.

But does the retail analogy so neatly apply to healthcare? We argue that there is more to healthcare Service Design than simply putting patients at the centre of the process.

When one patient we spoke to became sick, she was responsible for transferring her own information from doctor to doctor. She had to

hunt down every test result, every MRI scan and personally deliver it.

While this approach put information literally in the patient’s hands, the challenge is that a layperson can’t read a brain scan, and the effort of retrieving it is a chore. This system was patient-centric, but misguidedly so.

A recent healthcare client began to create social networks for patients, enabling them to connect with their most trusted advisors – friends and family – regarding

Patients can become overwhelmed with the burden of gathering, making sense of, and curating information.

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their choices. But we discovered that friends and family are the least reliable information source in this particular domain: most advice shared was faulty. A better solution leveraged outside experts, leaving patients with fewer questions and less of an information-coordination burden.

In New York, practitioner and facility report cards were provided directly to patients, but had little effect on a patients choice of doctor or on patient outcomes (how well they did after they received care). However, when that same information was targeted at clinicians and the facilities where they practiced, it improved patient outcomes.

These experiences make us believe that perhaps patients shouldn’t be at the centre – at least not in the way that we have become used to putting them there. If we want to improve healthcare services, we need to understand how healthcare, and therefore ‘patientcentricity’, is different from our usual people- or user-centric approach.

putting the customer first

To begin with, patients: • Don’t want to be there (they hate being sick and are reluctant heroes) • Aren’t equipped to cope with the situation (they’re asked to make difficult decisions under stress, and they lack the expertise that comes not only from access to information, but also from judgment gained through experience) • Aren’t acting alone (the system is complex, involving multiple stakeholders both on the ground and behind the scenes) Healthcare Isn’t Retail Healthcare is not like Amazon.

When we borrow methods from consumer-experience design and try to translate them into healthcare services, we run into trouble, especially in acute care. We can’t assume a proactive or engaged consumer the way we might in retail. We also can’t assume that it’s acceptable to fall short, as it could be in lower-stakes contexts. Finally, expert knowledge is still a key differentiator in healthcare, particularly when it comes to patient outcomes.

Essentially, putting patients at the centre of our design process shouldn’t be confused with putting them at the centre of every decision-making or informationgathering process. The former may be effective, but the latter takes us past the appropriate limits of patient-centricity.

Patients are faced with situations they’d rather not be in and are unfamiliar with, and must deal with a complex, overwhelming system.

New Approaches to Healthcare Service Design If the consumer analogy isn’t working, we need alternatives. Perhaps these may be: • The justice system (in the US, people have an advocate who translates and acts on their behalf ) • Schools (ideally, a training structure set up in ways that work for each student) • Real estate (a complex, high stakes, infrequent experience with longterm consequences, where people pay for advocacy) Different analogies imply that we also need to ask different questions: 1. Who do we need to spend time with to understand all stakeholders?

2. How do we measure success?

3. How can we avoid creating a disempowering experience for patients?

By considering new analogies and questions, we hope to accomplish the goals of patient-centricity – to

create healthcare experiences and services that support people and encourage positive outcomes – without overburdening patients or ignoring the system in which they exist.

•

1

Marshall, Martin N., MSc, MD, FRCGP; Shekelle, Paul G., MD, PhD; Leatherman, Sheila, MSW; & Brook, Robert H., MD, ScD. (2000). The Public Release of Performance Data; What Do We Expect to Gain? A Review of the Evidence. JAMA, 283: 1866-1874

Gianna Marzilli Ericson, Strategist, Service Design Group, Continuum Augusta Meill, VP, Program Development, Continuum * Illustrations by Rose Manning, Envisioner, Continuum

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chapter # 3

Social Innovation

Setting a Focus on Social Interests and Innovative Concepts for People.

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By Lauren Currie and Sarah Drummond

MyPolice

Service Designers as Entrepreneurs: Just Doing It

Lauren Currie, Director of Snook

»Sarah Drummond inspired a group of talented strangers to rally around her seemingly crazy idea of making a prototype and presenting it to a panel of investors a Social Innovation Camp. In 48 hours flat. Lauren Currie has repeatedly boarded the sleeper train to meet sceptical commissioners, senior public sector managers and broadcasters and has broken down any glass ceilings that might exist around a young, vibrant startup hailing from north of England. As founders of Snook they combine design nous, a mean line in persuasion and the capacity to work until their foreheads bleed, coming up with unique, challenging ideas that you didn’t even know you needed.« (E. Mackintosh, MyPolice funder) The duo’s biggest challenge to date has been the development and management of MyPolice, software that enables the opening of a dialogue between the public and the police.

Sarah Drummond, Director of Snook

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For too long, policymaking has been monopolised by civil servants, selfserving pressure groups and sensationalist journalists. As Service Designers, Snook believe public services are too important to get lost in headline issues, and too big to leave to those who have the time and energy to write letters or sit on committees.

The concept of MyPolice planted itself in Sarah’s mind when her friend was burgled. Trying to give feedback to the police simply didn’t work: she felt pressurised, felt that no one was listening to her and that the officer assigned to the case was clearly biased.

What became clear was that communication would be improved by making it more of a conversation than just a complaint. For this reason, Snook began working on MyPolice.

You Have the Right Not to Remain Silent

»My flat got burgled and I wish I could have fed back to the police about how I was treated … I want my experience to be used to improve the service.« Jo, Glasgow, 25

A marketing campaign launched

by UK shortly before we had the idea for MyPolice.

The inspiration behind the idea

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mypolice

By Lauren Currie and Sarah Drummond

Project impressions from left to right: Talking to the public about what they would like MyPolice to be; a sketch of the policing landscape; a snapshot of the software

MyPolice provides three key features:

»The system (…) informs policy decisions, ensuring that citizens have an active part in changing the police for the better.«

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• A neutral space in which people can find out more about their local police and what they do • A platform to send feedback about their experiences with the police – good or bad – which then gets delivered to the right people • A mechanism to collect and deliver data based on real customer experience, creating a deeper understanding of what the public wants and thereby bringing police and public closer together The system helps communities identify weaknesses and opportunities in police services. In providing analysis and data for the police to act on, it informs policy decisions, ensuring that citizens have an active part in changing the police for the better. People can give their opinion at a time when they feel strongly about

an encounter with the the force, or feel that the service offered by the police could be improved. It’s the place where people can see how their thoughts translate directly into action.

The venture is funded by several innovative funding bodies; 4ip, Firstport and Scottish Enterprise. The police charges a small annual fee to every force that takes part, to provide the software and the techniques to implement it. The product’s cost is far outweighed by its benefits in terms of efficiency and quality. The people for whom the police exist get a better and more inclusive service.

The idea of feedback delivered by a ‘candid friend’ – neither a hectoring journalist or pressure group, nor a misleading apologist for an unresponsive service – isn’t entirely new. In the UK, the excellent Patient Opinion project achieves the same goals

social innovation

through a process that is tailored to the country’s National Health Service.

So what does all this have to do with Service Design? In short, the answer is: everything.

Service Designers are equipped with the skills and mindset to design living systems. We tell stories about the experience of being the victim of a crime. We visualise the journey of someone writing a letter of complaint to their local police. On the service provider side, we map complex geographies assigned to each police officer.

No touchpoint was overlooked; ranging from how to shake hands with police officers, the etiquette of addressing government officials, to turning potential customers into ambassadors.

Snook often arrive at regional policing events and find themselves turning

heads; young females with a big idea and a plan of action.

As important as Service Design is, it’s only part of the story of MyPolice. There were endless funding bids to make sense of, countless business models to explore. And learning how to manage accounts kicked Snook right out of their comfort zone.

Snook are now finalising plans for the pilot launch of MyPolice with a force based on the East coast of Scotland.

The journey has been difficult, and one that a current art-school education could never have prepared them for.

Lifestyles have changed, socialising has dwindled and the realisation that social innovation is not a day job has definitely sunk in.

•

Lauren Currie With an enthusiasm for Service Design, public services and working with people, Lauren is focused on changing the lives of British people through service design and practical action. She mentors and teaches undergraduate students at Universities all over Europe, running a variety of workshops and lectures on Service Design, Prototyping and Critical Thinking.

Sarah Drummond focuses on making social change happen by rethinking public services from a human perspective. Her work challenges the role of design within the public sector, as the winner of the first Scottish Social Innovation camp Sarah ambitiously challenges the way governments operate and make policies through initiatives such as MyPolice.

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By Sarah Drummond

Getgo Glasgow

Wyndford is a community in the North West of Glasgow and is ranked the 18th most deprived area in Scotland. Until last September, they had never met designers before. That all changed when Getgo, a collection of designers from the Masters in Design Innovation course at Glasgow School of Art tackled Audi’s Sustain our Nation competition.

The result was Green Gorillaz: a service designed by the people of Wynford to act as a community activity network, and most importantly £20,000.

stakeholder staff, management and politicians were involved in the project, echoing the sentiment of Service Design with all users at the heart of the process.

The team used techniques and skills adopted from the Service Design process to create a 'social enterprise' for the community that tackled the issue of crime. The way in which the project was conducted relied heavily on visualisation skills, co-design, user-centred processes and systematic thinking.

The project highlighted exciting new ways of working with people and challenged the status quo of how designers enter and leave a project. In this instance, Green Gorillaz proposes new methods of consultation and funding models in the context of social enterprises and community-led projects, and is an exciting prospect for replication in other sectors of society.

The enterprise is an activity network produced and used by the citizens of Wynford. In other words, it is a co-produced service that creates a valuable proposition for both community members and local stakeholders. Throughout the project, community members, local 48

The project led to designers questioning their role in such a heavily co-designed proposition: if this is Service Design, then what are we actually designing? Are we just facilitators of a creative process?

This project highlighted gaps in students’ skills in terms of creative facilitation, direct user contact and business knowledge to name but a few.

Projects dealing with ‘social innovation’1 are becoming increasingly common place in the design landscape, Service Design has become the 'go to' for designers to understand how they can 'do something good' with their skills. Service design, and it's open attitude to sharing methods, techniques and 'tools' on sites such as servicedesigntools.org and leading consultancy websites have become a lifeline to students trying to grasp what this is all about. These tools are the tangible element in an otherwise intangible landscape of 'social Service Design and innovation'.

I believe, we have a responsibility as Service Designers to question the ethics of our discipline. How can we teach the creation of sustainable solutions? Should we think about how to 'design ourselves out of a job'. Should we be looking back at more

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transformative ways of working, like the 2006 release of the Design Council's Red Paper on 'Transformation Design'? Is it as simple as becoming more humble as a discipline and ensuring we pass our skills over so work continues after we have left?

With a new league of eager students wanting to ‘do something good’ with their design skills, how can we use Service Design to promote a pragmatic and skilful method of undertaking projects that promotes social innovation and creates sustainable propositions.

To see and hear the presentation, please follow this link http://getgoglasgow.co.uk

•

1

Green Gorillaz aimed to bring together groups of the community with similar interests. Its particular focus started out with improving the physical environment of the estate, but later moved on to connecting any one with any similar interest in order to re-establish a visible community spirit through both offline and online networks.

Sophia Parker (2009). Social Animals: Tomorrow’s designers in today’s world. [Online] Retrieved from: www.thersa.org/projects/design/ reports/social-animals

Sarah Drummond, Director of Snook, focuses on making social change happen by rethinking public services from a human perspective.

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»… we felt the ideal ice-breaker was a cultural probe.« Cultural probes from top to down right: Meena Kadri's photo of children in an Ahmedabad slum. An inspiration for doing something with what you have to hand, the older girl is teaching the younger children. / Trudy Cherok's ideal learning environment – a kindergarten field trip. / Cordula Brenzei's person she most likes to work with – her partner Jan Krause.

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By Andy Polaine

Creative Waves COTEN – Service Designing Higher Education The Creative Waves COTEN project was a purely online, collaborative project concerned with rethinking higher education. It set out to answer two key questions: can higher education be reimagined through the lens of Service-Design thinking and methodologies? Can Service-Design processes be carried out in an international, collaborative and purely online environment?

COTEN continued over a decade's worth of projects bringing together students, academics, experts and professionals from all over the world to collaborate online. Earlier projects focused on graphic design, images being relatively easy to swap back and forth and rework in the pre-broadband era. Later projects took on more complex social issues, such as the 2007 VIP project helping to raise awareness of critical health issues in rural Kenya (http:// creativewaves.omnium.net.au/vip), and sustainable design practices in China's rapid developing economy (see: http:// creativewaves.omnium.net.au/c8/).

While the 2007 VIP project began to incorporate elements of Service-Design thinking, the COTEN project aimed to take this a step further and use Service

Design as a way of examining the complex problems of higher education.

Higher Education desperately needs innovative thinking, being still largely trapped in an industrial mindset. New students are fed in as raw material and, through a process of moulding and pressing, ’professionals’ exit at the other end as graduates of this production line. This process only works (if at all) for a job-for-life future in which the working environment remains relatively stable. Today's graduates will have several careers in their lifetimes and the future is anything but certain.

Andy Polaine, Lecturer and Research Fellow in Service Design at Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences, Switzerland

Most thinking within Higher Education revolves around top-down restructuring of institutions and

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creative waves coten

By Andy Polaine

curricula without any real change.

Beyond student satisfaction surveys, which have very limited use, academic institutions spend very little time understanding students' lives outside of their studies. Additionally, the idea of education as a service often meets hostility, despite being entirely a service industry.

»The online cultural probes proved to be very successful.

Participants were willing to reveal a surprising amount given that the project is publicly accessible.«

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The COTEN project's structure was a series of unfolding mini-briefs over seven weeks, each brief taking a step through the Service-Design process.

After an initial welcome from Birgit Mager, each week the 80+ participants were joined by a special guest who presented a 'lecture' in either written or podcast form. The guests – Nabeel Hamdi, Arne van Oosterom, John Thackara, Ben Reason, Snook, Uscreates and Liz Danzico – then took part in a discussion thread dedicated to their theme for debate and questions.

All the Creative Waves projects have an ice-breaker brief at the beginning where we invite participants to bring something from their cultural backgrounds to the group, both as raw material for later parts of the project and to help people get to know each other. As a Service-Design project, we felt the ideal ice-breaker was a cultural probe. Instead of sending out a physical package to participants, however, they were presented with a list of people, places and things to photograph that were meaningful, inspiring or uninspiring for them, both on a

personal level and in terms of learning and teaching experiences.

Participants shared these insights with the rest of the participants via ’pin-up walls’ (essentially online galleries) and discussed the insights and common patterns within smaller teams.

The next stage of the process was to generalise these into themes and patterns and use them as a starting point for further research directions as well as designing intervention and innovation concepts for reshaping higher education journeys. In this sense, the Service-Design process was rather accelerated and skipped over several levels of iteration, mapping and associated rigour that such a large theme really requires. But the project ran for just seven weeks and was entirely voluntary, which meant that people’s time commitments varied greatly. The seven weeks were perhaps more equivalent to seven days of working full-time in a face-to-face environment.

Problems, Positives & Conclusions Initially we planned for each team to take on a theme or idea and develop it further, but an international event took an unexpected toll on the project: the 2010 football World Cup. The dropoff in participation was noticeable as free time was absorbed by the world championship. So, instead of working on ideas within teams, participants proposed their ideas on the main message board as separate threads, and

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others collaborated with them as they saw fit. It sounds banal, but the timing of international online projects with such events turns out to be crucial.

Continuing the football theme, the project’s goals were set too wide.

Higher education is complex, politically loaded and has many competing stakeholders: restricting the brief would have created more focus and helped us move from talk to action more easily. As John Thackara remarked, it is simply impossible to tackle such a large institution head on (In fact, Thackara argued in his discussion thread that the only real way to innovate in this area is to step outside the system completely).

Ironically, the difficulty in moving from talk to action mimicked the very problems higher education has. A much more-thorough process is required that maps out the complexity and stakeholder issues, although this would need a different project timescale.

Despite the issues, there were a number of positive outcomes to the project. The online cultural probes proved to be very successful. Participants were willing to reveal a surprising amount given that the project is publicly accessible. Of course, this is a self-selected group of people interested in online collaboration and Service Design, but this might be a useful method for gathering broad insights across an international project at little expense.

Two concepts reached the first stages of development. One looked at tackling the roles of staff and institutions as well as a proposal to challenge the burden of bureaucracy. The other was a pitch to create a Co-Learning Lab (CL²), enabling students enrolled at universities to self-organise and work on extracurricular projects. The online/real-life platform would be a place where students could socialise, inform and plan projects that cross borders, geographically, culturally and disciplinarily, inspiring others to join and spark a positive change for a more open, accessible and successful higher education.

Arguably the critical lesson came from special guest, Nabeel Hamdi, when talking about his Small Change ethos.

Future and satellite projects should seek to discover the small, positive activities already existing in higher education rather than trying to tackle the monolith head on. By documenting, sharing and developing these we can join the dots together so that small changes can make a big difference.

»Future and satellite projects should seek to discover the small, positive activities already existing in higher education rather than trying to tackle the monolith head on.«

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By Roger Ibars and Julia Leihener

Digital Etiquette – 101 Guidelines for the Digital World

Many years ago, life was simple. Everyone had only one name, one phone number, one address and one set of keys. Quite clearly, things have changed. How many phone numbers, email accounts, usernames, passwords and aliases do you juggle today? The advent of communication devices and services has led people to interact simultaneously on multiple digital and physical channels, each with its own ‘code of conduct’.

Identifying the ‘dos and don’ts’ of digital media is becoming more and more important.

Understanding this unarticulated ‘digital etiquette’ is essential for the development of future products and services. Identifying behavioural patterns interacting with new technology provides an important base and inspiration for the design of media experiences.

In order to learn more about these ‘codes of conduct’ while using digital media and devices, we organised three different activities in order to gain insights and collect unspoken rules related to digital etiquette:

workspace in the centre of a multicultural area initiated by Gesche Joost’s Design Research Lab at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin. We created three stations: one to collect rules, one to break them and one to make new ones.

A 10 year-old boy for example, was longing for a time machine after the following statement: “I have to wait until I’m 12 years old before I’m allowed to use the internet, since my parents worry there might be too much inappropriate content online.”

1. Rule workshop: a playful workshop with kids and teenagers in the context of the ‘Street Lab’, a temporary research

2. Lead-user workshop: a creative workshop at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories’ Creation Center held a with advanced users

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interacting with digital devices and social networks. In order to explore their digital ‘dos & don'ts’, we provided them with a set of cultural probes to collect creative and unexpected insights about their daily life. One cultural probe, following the lines of to table manners, asked the users to arrange and prioritise their digital tools. Another, in the form of a menu, asked them to declare their top 10 golden rules for using digital media. This inspiring exploration resulted in behavioural guidelines across today’s communication channels. The reflection on these guidelines generated starting points for the development of new service ideas.

3. Critical Design Exploration: a collaboration with the department of Design Interactions of the Royal College of Art in London, under the guidance of Anthony Dunne, aiming to explore ‘etiquette and manners in the context of future technologies’.

The students were invited to come to Berlin for a project kickoff to perform a creative street intervention, challenging the

social innovation

The eEtiquette poster shows a selection of the 101 guidelines.

The book was first launched at our press dinner in July 2010.

etiquette of public space. Together with experts in different fields, we discussed and reflected etiquette issues from various perspectives.

The outcome of this collaboration were 18 projects that explored, for example, the topics of politeness, misbehaviour, white lies, alibis and embarrassment. Each of them had a unique vision raising issues for potential Service Design tasks.

They gave inspiring insights and creative narratives about etiquette and manners in the future.

As a result of these three research activities – and after a thorough process of collecting, filtering and editing – we published the book eEtiquette – 101 Guidelines for the Digital World. The book is available in German and English, and it addresses both users and service providers. Internally

as well as externally, it helps to improve digital manners when interacting with others. For consumer-driven innovation labs like the Creation Center it provides a foundation to the design of ‘wellmannered’ is services.

The eEtiquette returns the research to the user – where it originally came from. To involve the digital community in the debate, we set up the web site www.eEtiquette.com to work as a platform that continuously collects insights about digital behaviour, inviting the readers to actively participate in the conversation.

On the web site, all guidelines can be rated, commented or discussed, and new ones can be submitted as well. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Youtube accounts were also set up

to gain social-network momentum.

Through a 360° communication campaign, resulting in numerous TV, radio, print and online reports, we potentionally reached up to 70 million people. With this project, we managed to raise a broad awareness internally as well as externally and spark an ongoing debate.

•

Roger Ibars, Interaction Designer, Creation Center, Telekom Laboratories Julia Leihener, Product and Process Designer, Creation Center, Telekom Laboratories

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workshop insights

By Sara Sitton and Heather Daam

Service Design Tools for Social Innovation A hands-on workshop about co-research methods and tools adapted to a young target group

We started with a presentation on the context of the co-research methods, sharing with the participants 6 main insights on applying Service Design Tools within the social field to shape Living Quality.

The T+HUIS is a Learning Community in a marginalised area in Eindhoven (NL).

Students from different backgrounds create and offer Sharing tools and insights from the workfloor.

activities to the children of the neighbourhood that empower them for their future. In turn, the children teach the students social work in practice.

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The Mayor Game, a tool developed by Heather Daam, is introduced, as part of her ‘Melting Pot’ process, consisting of different phases, each supporting an interdisciplinary collaboration between social workers, designers and children.

Some of the workshops’ participants became ‘social workers’, and they created a dialogue with the ‘children’.

The group realized how the activity is a platform for dynamic dialogue, and gives the ability to reveal more knowledge.

Proud owners of beautiful platforms that express and map out the living-quality needs based upon the participants’ own individual experience and knowledge.

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chapter # 4

Exploring Service Design A Critical Look at the Development of the Service Design Discipline and its Processes.

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By Lucy Kimbell

Service Design at a Crossroads

"I’ve had a long day helping my client be more efficient and more effective," says the management consultant. "I need a drink. And give me a receipt so I can put it on expenses."

The management consultant ends up with no bill. "Why are your drinks free?" ask the other two. "Well," she says to the designer, "I told the barkeeper how to roll out and make money out of the drink you invented. And to the anthropologist," she says, "I told him to watch you going round talking to all the customers and find out why they really come here."

The anthropologist sits down next to her. "I need a drink too," he says. "But while I’m here can I observe what you are doing and take some notes?"

"Can you teach us how to do this?" the designer and the anthropologist ask.

"Sure," says the management consultant, "but the next round is on you!"

The designer sits down next to them.

"I’ll invent my own drink," he says, and gets busy creating an amazing concoction with the bartender.

This story has the structure of a joke but behind these caricatures of three professions lies something more serious. I want to use this story as a way of reflecting on the origins of what we currently call Service Design and to raise some questions about where it might go next as a field, as a profession and as an emergent discipline.

A management consultant, a designer and a cultural anthropologist go into a bar for a drink.

Lucy Kimbell, Director, Fieldstudio, Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School.

The time comes to pay the bill.

The designer’s bill is ¤ 108. All those special ingredients and so many iterations. "But it was worth it," he says.

Drunkenly.

The anthropologist’s bill is ¤ 7 because he kept having sips of everyone else’s drinks. But he’ll have a terrible hangover from mixing his drinks.

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There are a number of competing stories about Service Design. One is that it’s a new interdiscipline a mix of concepts, methods and tools from several different fields, brought together to address the challenges that organisations face as they try to improve and innovate in services. As an interdiscipline it is

Illustration: "Service design at a crossroads" by Lisa Gornick

Lucy Kimbell

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service design at a crossroads

By Lucy Kimbell

»Who or what is Service Design serving?«

presented as a happy fusion of the best bits of management or business, design and technology, and the social sciences.

In this version of Service Design, the incompatibilities between the values and worldviews of these different disciplines are smoothed away to produce a better user experience and increased business value.

A second story about Service Design is that it is the underpinning of anything and everything. This story rests firstly on an expanded version of design usually credited to Herbert Simon (1996) who proposed that what people who want to change existing situations into preferred ones are doing actually is design, and that therefore design is the core of professions from medicine to business to engineering. Further supporting this is recent research in services marketing, for example Steve Vargo and Bob Lusch’s (2004) idea that service underpins all marketing transactions. If we combine these two ideas – everything is design and everything is service, then – wow – Service Design is key to everything, and a theory of Service Design would have the status of a Theory of Everything.

A third story about Service Design is that it is going to shift designers away from their traditional preoccupation with objects and their roles in cocreating the world of unsustainable mass consumption that we live in. In this story, Service Design redesigns design. The UK consultancy live|work’s early emphasis on using, not owning,

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and work by Ezio Manzini and others inherits a longer tradition in design of critique and questioning. This version of Service Design places an emphasis on accountability and asks, "Who or what is Service Design serving?"

These are just three stories about Service Design – the Interdisciplinary story, the Theory of Everything story, and the Redesigning Design story.

There are, of course, others. No single person involved in the communities that make up the thing we currently call Service Design can offer an authoritative account of what it is, where it has come from and where it is going, because it is messy, emergent and communal. So in this paper I will offer some reflections on what is going on around us, and pose some questions that, I hope, have something to say about where Service Design goes next.

Changing Contexts In what follows, I note several recent developments shaping the landscape in which professional Service Design will continue to develop. In each of them, something that looks rather like Service Design is going on, but is being done in a particular way, often not called Service Design, or done by people who think of themselves as designers of services. By examining these trajectories, I hope to suggest what steps professional Service Design might take next.

Carnivorous Management Consultants If you read the market research reports on utilities, telecoms, banking and

exploring service design

other service industries, there are two important trends: first, the idea that customer experience is a way for service providers to differentiate themselves in mature markets and second, that organisations will continue to outsource what they see as non-core services.

The big IT and management consultancies are ready with their offerings. CapGemini, for example, offers Customer Experience Transformation. This starts with customer insight, and then involves developing the customer journey, market positioning, identifying opportunities, and measuring results.

Sound familiar? This is the datadriven, high-level thinking that Service Design consultants want to do, but if management consultants do it, then the designers are left with crafting the touchpoints.

But what does not appear here is what a design orientation brings to Service Design: repeated quick cycles of prototyping and testing propositions, let alone the traditions from Participatory Design of engaging end users in codesign.

Clients Doing it for Themselves In a context in which human resources and accounting services can be outsourced, it is a challenge to argue that design is a core capability within an organisation. But anecdotal reports that I have been compiling and the interviews that I have been conducting suggest that organisations are

increasingly building in-house service design teams. Once shifted inside organisations, it may be that some of the characteristics we associate with design consultancy are lost. For example, design’s attentiveness to experiences and aesthetics, and its (sometimes) critical and holistic eye, may be watered down once service design becomes a strong organisational skill.

The previous UK government, for example, invested in a knowledge base for public service managers to help them create better customer experiences1. What happens when designerly concepts and methods are appropriated and propagated within organisations for use by people who don’t think of themselves as designers?

»What happens when designerly concepts and methods are appropriated and propagated within organisations for use by people who don’t think of themselves as designers?«

Branding on a Bandwagon For branding agencies, Service Design is an obvious new territory to try and dominate. As custodians of large brands, they claim to understand and shape the nature of the relationships customers have with their client organisations. Their core activities – developing customer insights, deep market research, crafting propositions – are already a kind of design, and their understanding of what connects people to brands, and their commercial relationships at high levels in organisations, mean they are well-placed to design services.

Consultancy Wolff Olins’ website, for example, states that brands are platforms, and considers whether they give power to consumers, or allow them 63

service design at a crossroads

By Lucy Kimbell

»We need new ways to understand what public services can do for us, and what roles we have in shaping and contributing to the public sphere …«

to participate in the brand value and do that with many others, using network effects. But what is not evident here is the internal focus of Service Design.

What Service Designers have learned from bitter experience, or from reading some management literature, is that the delivery of a designed customer experience often requires redesigning processes and employees’ roles and paying attention to organisational culture and design.

Public services under pressure In the new economic order, in which banks saved by public investment are able to go back to their ways of doing business without much censure, and while public budgets are cut around the world, one thing is clear: We need new ways to understand what public services can do for us, and what roles we have in shaping and contributing to the public sphere at a time when there is less money available to invest in them.

In the UK, something that looks a bit like Service Design is happening, but coming from the new coalition government, whose major activities since being voted in have been to plan severe budget cuts. This vision of a Big Society says, “We want to give citizens, communities and local government the power and information they need to come together, solve the problems they face and build the Britain they want.”2 In this vision, people come together to work together because “we are all in it together”, according to Prime Minister David Cameron3.

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It sounds like a perfect opportunity for Service Designers to step in and help these citizens and communities work together and use their professional skills to guide the public service professionals who have been squandering public money.

But it raises questions about what really underlies ideas like David Cameron’s Big Society – and larger questions about the social worlds that Service Design can help create. The increasing attention being paid to the ethics of design suggests that design is not neutral, and the unintended consequences of designs may not be known for some years, even decades.

It therefore becomes important that Service Design, with its aspirations to redesigning the social, begins to engage more deeply with social, cultural and political theories about who has power, and how, and why, and ask itself to who or what as a profession Service Designers should be accountable.

Changing Consumption Practices The final trajectory I want to point to is the challenges posed by climate change that, despite serious research, seem to be a problem for the future, rather than a problem for now. At a recent conference on enterprise and the environment4, for example, speakers repeatedly contrasted the role of governments in setting targets, creating incentives and regulating to produce new behaviours that have lower carbon impact, versus the role of businesses in modifying activities

exploring service design

to produce new behaviours among consumers. What was missing at this conference was evidence of the emergence of service ventures creating new consumption practices outside of big business, which bypass the carrot-or-stick dualism that waits for governments to act while the planet warms up. Experiments in transition towns, sharable services and other kinds of low-carbon enterprises involve a design orientation and an attentiveness to new ways of conceiving value.

1. While managerialist Service Design can generate customer insights and visualise customer journeys today, tomorrow’s Service Design can emphasise a design orientation that is centrally concerned with iterative prototyping and testing. Conducting what Michael Schrage (forthcoming) calls ‘business experiments’, this Service Design is well-suited to futures in which organisations need to develop and maintain an open stance on what is the right thing to do next, and need help in doing this.

An opportunity exists here for designers of services to bring their skills and knowledge into configurations in which there is no obvious client, and in which they have to become designer-entrepreneurs, in order to scale up their ideas.

2. While organisations are building in-house capabilities in Service Design and customer experience today, tomorrow’s Service Design can make sure that the aesthetics of service is important. Having resisted being confused with mere styling for a decade or more, designers have forgotten how to argue the case for the value of aesthetics and should revisit one of the core things that distinguishes their work from that of other professions. 5

Proposal In each of these examples I have identified a trajectory – something that looks rather like Service Design but that is not necessarily thought of that way, presenting both challenges and opportunities. For each of them I have identified a question to which I believe Service Design could find answers.

Combining them, I offer a particular way of conceiving of Service Design in the near future. It draws on the underlying professions and disciplines that we find in Service Design today, but proposes a slightly different configuration for tomorrow.

»It therefore becomes important that Service Design begins to ask itself to who or what as a profession Service Designers should be accountable.«

3. While branding and marketing agencies are moving into designing service experiences today, tomorrow’s Service Design can bring its ethnographic eye and management expertise into working inside organisations to help them redesign operations and resources in order to deliver services efficiently and effectively, but without wasting opportunities for improvement and innovation.

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service design at a crossroads

By Lucy Kimbell

»… tomorrow’s Service Design can bring its anthropological and sociological expertise into asking critical questions about what kinds of social and public worlds are being created …«

4. While governments find ways to reform or cut public services and call it "unleashing community engagement" today, tomorrow’s Service Design can bring its anthropological and sociological expertise into asking critical questions about what kinds of social and public worlds are being created, by whom, and to what end.

5. While governments and big business make lame attempts to reduce carbon emissions through changed behaviours today, tomorrow’s Service Design can combine the design orientation with a deep understanding of practices to shift from consultancy to mobilise new entrepreneurial offerings.

This is a modest proposal for a way of thinking about designing for service in the near future, which tries not to lose the particular contributions that different disciplines can make and the important differences between them.

However, instead of an interdiscipline in which these differences are smoothed away, I propose a version of Service Design in which contestation is acknowledged and valued.

To go back to the story about the management consultant, the designer and the anthropologist, this version of designing for service takes characteristics of each profession and emphasises them. The designer insists on aesthetics, novelty and repeated experimentation. The anthropologist invests in careful, close study to understand structures and practices.

And the management consultant finds ways to routinise, scale and make money. Each of these core activities has something to offer as Service Design engages with the challenges and opportunities I outlined above, but in unpredictable ways. Design’s traditional focus on aesthetics and novelty may breed disruption in ways that do not suit highly structured organisations.

Anthropology’s commitment to careful

Something like service design

Tomorrow‘s designing for service

Carnivorous management consultants

Prototyping for organizations in perpetual ß

Clients doing it for themselves

Crafting aesthetic arrangements

Branding on a bandwagon

Re-designing organizations too

Public services under pressure

Being critical and being political

Changing consumption practices

Shifting from consultancy to being entrepreneurs

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exploring service design

analysis of practices and structures may slow things down. Management’s reductionism to efficiency and effectiveness may crush creativity and ignore material detail.

Returning to the three stories about Service Design I introduced earlier, this future version of Service Design is not, then, an Interdiscipline that blurs the distinctions between professions.

Nor is it a Theory of Everything, on the basis that everything is designed or everything is service. Instead, it is closer to Redesigning Design because it rests on an understanding of professional design practice that is concerned with (re)making the world in which we live and which we continue to shape, whether we acknowledge it or not. Thought of this way, Service Design has some implications for Design itself.

Footnotes UK Cabinet Office. ttp://www.cse.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ getDynamicContentAreaSection.do?id=9, accessed 6 October 2010 2 UK Cabinet Office http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ media/407789/building-big-society.pdf, accessed 1 October 2010 3 Prime Minister’s Office http://www.number10.gov.uk/ news/speeches-and-transcripts/2010/07/big-societyspeech-53572 4 Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment World Forum, Oxford, June 2010 http://www.smithschool. ox.ac.uk/events/world-forum/, accessed 9 September 2010 5 A point also made by Cameron Tonkinwise in a paper at the Design Thinking Research Symposium 8, Sydney, October 2010.

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Thanks to Kate Blackmon, Simon Blyth, Duncan Fairfax, Engine, livework, Philip Hill, Alison Prendiville, Steve New, Daniela Sangiorgi, TaylorHaig and Cameron Tonkinwise for several conversations which shaped this piece.

Lucy Kimbell, is a researcher and educator with a background in art and design. She was principal investigator on a multidisciplinary research project on the design of services in science and technologybased enterprises involving academics from management and design; IDEO, live|work and Radarstation; and science entrepreneurs. Her main interest is establishing what is distinctive about a “designerly” approach to service design.

A management consultant, a designer and an anthropologist go into a bar for a drink.

The designer is drunk on his creativity.

The anthropologist has a hangover from mixing his drinks. The manager is making money. This is a picture of Service Design today. What we do want it to be tomorrow?

References • Schrage, M. (forthcoming). Getting Beyond Ideas: The Future of Rapid Innovation. Wiley.

• Simon, Herbert. A. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial (3rd ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Vargo, S. & Lusch, R. (2004). Evolving to a New Dominant Logic in Marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68(1): 1-17.

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By Marianne Guldbrandsen and Geke van Dijk

No Interdisciplinarity Without Disciplines Sometimes Service Designers encounter projects where the client organisation is new to Service Design, maybe even to the extent that the client does not recognise that they need Service Design. They may not know about Service Design, or may not yet see the value of incorporating a Service-Design approach to their organisation and customer relations. These clients need more than just ‘a nice Service Design showcase project’.

They need a more long-term process for change, and they have often quite a journey to make. These journeys may well involve the engagement of various agencies that each work on different aspects of this journey.

This poses an interesting and challenging opportunity for collaboration between agencies across different roles and different stages. This article describes the findings from such a multi-agent project for a client that was new to Service Design.

Figure 1 – Examples of the waterrelated touchpoints people demonstrated during the scoping study and persona research.

Clients with little experience with Service Design often ask what Service Design is. The easiest part of the answer involves explaining that it is about creating services that are valued by the people who use them, and that are at the same time effective and distinctive for the organisations that provide them.

The second part of the answer can be a bit harder to grasp, as it explains how Service Design evolves via a delicate balance between a structured process and an open-minded attitude. This means that the outcome is not always known from the start: rather Service Design follows a series of well-defined steps that may lead to unexpected results. It can be difficult persuading new clients to sign up for this.

Dr. Marianne Guldbrandsen, Head of Design Strategy, UK Design Council

Dr. Geke van Dijk, Strategy Director, STBY London / Amsterdam

During an 18-month period, the UK Design Council facilitated a multi69

no interdisciplinarity without disciplines

By Marianne Guldbrandsen and Geke van Dijk

»… the organisation has mainly focused on the technical side of delivering water rather than the service experience.«

agency Service-Design programme with Southern Water, a water utility company delivering water and sewerage to 2 million people in the South of England. The company is privately owned with a public sector history. This history has affected their understanding of their customers, as the organisation has mainly focused on the technical side of delivering water rather than the service experience.

However, this is about to change: since the UK is introducing compulsory metering, everybody will have a water meter installed. Today, most British homes pay for water based on an estimated use, but with meters they will be paying for their actual use. For Southern Water, this means that they need to install 500,000 meters over the next 5 years: close to 400 water meters a day. This installation will mean big change for people and needs careful communication, but it also offers opportunities to introduce new services that are more customer focused.

The Design Council introduced design thinking and a customer-focused approach. This was done through a scoping phase, followed by a series of projects involving several design agencies. A multi-agency approach was chosen due to the diversity of the projects identified in the scoping phase, e.g. there was a need for profound expertise in several areas. All agencies were working towards a new design for the customer experience of the new meter-installation process and the new tariff- and billing system.

This was a great opportunity for a

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joined-up approach, and this phase presented three key challenges: the need for a strategic shift in making the organisation more customer focused and open minded; design research was needed to identify customer needs and preferences; and new and re-designed services needed to be developed that would be valuable for customers and effective for Southern Water.

Although these challenges refer to Southern Water, they are by no means unique. Both in the UK and the Netherlands, organisations are known to be challenged by the shift from the public to the private sector (e.g the energy sector), while others are struggling with increasing pressure on infrastructure combined with more-demanding customers (e.g. the transport and healthcare sectors) and still others with the need for more transparent interactions with individuals in society (e.g. government and public-sector organisations).

This is why the findings from this programme with Southern Water can be used much more broadly.

During the scoping phase, STBY undertook user research to get a better understanding of customers’ perception and relationship to water. Radarstation – a design-led management company – was commissioned to understand the existing meter installation process.

This scoping phase was important as it identified opportunities for new and existing services to be developed, both from a customer perspective and an internal, organisational perspective.

exploring service design

For user research, STBY spoke to a wide range of people; different types of households and different types of houses, both with and without a water meter. These interviews were very broad, asking people how they perceived water, where and when they used it, where they thought they used the most, if they knew where the water came into the house and also how they read their bill (figure 1). Radarstation undertook the scoping research from a ‘back office’ perspective, mapping the existing process of opting for a meter to be installed. This research ranged from the initial call to Southern Water to ask for a meter, to the planning of work, grouping the installations, guiding the teams, picking up the parts, installing the meters in the pavement or front garden and informing the customer that their meter had been installed.

Persona Creation (STBY)

Scoping study

Based on the scoping study, a framework of interrelated projects was defined, including the development of personas (STBY), establishing ownership of personas by working internally with a broad range of Southern Water staff (Radarstation), designing the ‘meter-to-me’ customer experience of the meter-installation process (IDEO), and the redesigning of the water bill (Boag Associates, figure 2) . As part of the programme, the Design Council also ran a Water Design Challenge, an educational project that educated children by getting them to understand more about water, their uses and encouraging them to come up with the best water-saving idea. Collaboration and sharing of material happened whenever possible, as some projects were running in parallel, whereas some were run in series. Design agencies that

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no interdisciplinarity without disciplines

By Marianne Guldbrandsen and Geke van Dijk

ÂťThe bill has been identified as one of the key touchpoints that could be utilised more efficiently and, to this end, it now also includes watersaving tips.ÂŤ

already had an ongoing relationship with Southern Water were also included (graphic-design, copywriting and web-design agencies). Involving several agencies has made the client appreciate design approaches in several ways, and has led to a number of innovative interventions. A key change is that the organisation now understands their customers in more depth and it has been given a framework with which they can understand their different motivations: ideal means of communication and expectations of the service provided.

The user journey-mapping exercise led to the development of a mobile information unit that follows the installation teams, so people can find information during both the daytime and evenings, and can talk to staff about the meter installation process. The bill redesign resulted in more human-centric information, e.g. comparing the customer’s water consumption with a household of a similar size, and making it clear to the customer if their consumption is reducing or increasing compared to the last bill through the use of simple and clear colour coding. The bill has been identified as one of the key touchpoints that could be utilised more efficiently and, to this end, it now also includes watersaving tips.

The overall framework of interrelated projects involved various levels of complexity. For the client organisation it was clearly a period of system change.

The operational complexity of installing a large number of meters, as well as changes to tariffs and billing, combined with the need to become more transparent and customer focused in

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their communication was challenging.

The involvement of various agencies and external suppliers added another layer of complexity.

The Design Council had the role of guiding the client team from Southern Water through the different stages of the Service Design process. As an intermediary and neutral party, the Design Council helped the client team to better understand the role of design in the service innovation process, and to develop an overall vision and scope. The Design Council worked with Southern Water to write the briefs, select the agencies and discuss the outcomes. This has given Southern Water the ability to procure these types of projects by themselves in the future.

Throughout the ServiceDesign process, the Design Council acted as a design manager, bridging the work of the various agencies. As the agencies could not always work in the same time frame, the direct collaboration between them was sometimes hampered. In that case, the Design Council co-ordinated the handover of findings and materials. Figure 3 gives an impression of how the various agencies each worked on their own projects together with Southern Water and the Design Council. With hindsight, the collaboration between the agencies could have been built more firmly into the process. A more joined-up process could have created even more added value for the client and its customers.

Some of the findings pointed out here, such as a stronger synergy between the agencies and a role for an intermediary

exploring service design

party, have since been incorporated in other projects for other clients. In that sense, the circumstances of this Service-Design process are certainly not unique to Southern Water. They strongly resonate with other situations where clients need guidance on commissioning and implementing Service Design, and where a complex series of interrelated projects by various agencies takes place.

Another point to be made in reflecting on the work for Southern Water refers to the interdisciplinary collaboration between the various Service Design professionals involved. Service design is gradually maturing into a field that encapsulates a rich mix of expertise, such as several design disciplines, consumer research, business strategy, change management and branding. Most Service Design projects are too complex to be carried out using only one particular field of expertise. Many professionals and agencies in any given field are continually expanding their knowledge of adjacent fields, in response to issues that need to be addressed for clients and projects. At the same time, our clients are not looking for mere generalists: they want support based on profound expert knowledge. This creates a certain tension we need to address.

One of the current, popular notions of interdisciplinary collaboration is the concept of the T-shaped professional (Tom Kelley, The Ten Faces of Innovation, 2005). T-shaped professionals share a broad understanding of various fields of expertise (the top end of the T): this makes it possible for them to understand each other’s work and to

STBY

Southern Water Boag

IDEO Design Council

Radarstation

Figure 3 – Collaboration between the organisations involved

collaborate. In addition to this, they each bring a specific expertise to the project team (the ‘deep’ end of the T): this is how they each add their own specialised contribution. The concept of a T-shaped professional refers both to individuals and to teams or agencies. This is a fairly accepted way of conceptualising interdisciplinary collaboration. However, when we tried to connect these straightcut T shapes to the reality of the work for Southern Water, we found that the collaboration had been far more messy, and that this created barriers for both the client and ourselves.

We found that, in reality, we are not really straight-cut T’s, but rather ‘drippy’ T’s (figure 4). Most people and agencies in the Service Design field have more than one field of expertise, and they tend to pick up more knowledge and experience on every project they work on.

This is an ongoing process of discovery 73

no interdisciplinarity without disciplines

By Marianne Guldbrandsen and Geke van Dijk

Figure 4 –

in the projects at hand. The remaining ‘drips’ were tactically less pronounced.

Because of this, both the communication with the client and the collaboration between the agencies went quite smoothly. There were definitely overlaps in the expertise of STBY, Radarstation and IDEO. Some of the work on user research, strategy and design could have been done by any of the agencies. Sometimes we felt a bit uneasy about this, but, by and large, we managed to give each other space to perform our specific roles.

‘Drippy’ T

Dr. Marianne Guldbrandsen At the Design Council Marianne provides strategic design direction across a wide variety of new and existing projects and programmes, such as Design for Patient Dignity, Low Water Living, Independence Matters and Design Out Crime. Prior to working for the Design Council she worked as a user researcher and a service design consultant.

Geke van Dijk, is co-founder and Strategy Director of STBY. STBY is specialised in creative research for service design and innovation, and works for clients in industry and public sector. Geke has a background in ethnographic research, user-centered design and services marketing.

She holds a PhD in Computer Sciences from the Open University in the UK.

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and learning, which is, in a way, very good for the development of the young and emerging field of Service Design, but it also poses the risk of stretching the top ends of the T too far, adding too many ‘drips’ and losing sight of the real, profound expertise that grounds the T and makes all the difference.

As pointed out before, Southern Water had already had to make quite a journey to understand what Service Design is and how it could help them. They clearly did not need more confusion in trying to understand the difference between the various Service Design agencies involved. If we are all ‘drippy’ T’s, what is the rationale for our specific roles and contribution to a project? A client like this needs a clear and coherent story about how the various steps in the Service-Design process link up. Reflecting on the work for Southern Water, we realised that we had all mostly expressed those parts of our ‘drippy’ T’s that were related to the role we played

The main point we want to make here is that in these kinds of complex framework projects it is highly unlikely that any agency will be doing all the work by themselves. There is likely to be more than one expert, and they all need to collaborate and give each other space. It is good to be realistic and well prepared for these situations. Being a ‘drippy’ T is all very well, but it also seems crucial to tactically select and express those ‘drips’ that are relevant for the role one is playing in a specific project. We have a shared responsibility to enhance our client’s understanding and implementation of Service Design. By focusing on their needs, and matching those with our specific expertise, we can use the depth of our disciplines to engage our counterparts in the client organisation and make them into champions of the ServiceDesign approach. In this case the client continues to engage with designers, and uses design approaches to evolve their services based on customers’ expressed and latent needs.

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Touchpoint 2#1 – »Service Design and Behavioural Change« gives an insight view of theoretical models and practical projects dealing with behavioural change. 200 µ 265 mm, 104 pages, 12,80 ¤.

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Purchase Touchpoint – the Journal of Service Design – Online Touchpoint, the SDN Service Design Journal, was launched in May 2009 and is the first Journal on Service Design worldwide. Each issue focusses on one topic and features news and trends, interviews, insightful discussions and case studies. All issues of Touchpoint are available on the SDN website. To purchase single issues or an annual suscription of three issues visit www.service-design-network.org/tp-catalog

By Monica Bueno and Tiffany Chu

Digital Service Design: Lessons from the Cloud

The cloud might be a little frightening: it’s invisible, allconsuming and, scariest of all, it’s telling you that your business needs to change. There are nuances of Service Design within the digital realm that might not be discernible to the unaided eye.

Through years of experience helping clients who have a strong foothold in the physical world to enhance their offerings with digital services, Continuum has discovered several principles you may want to know before you dive into the haze.

1. Rethink the Role of Staff This first lesson may seem unintuitive for the digital service domain. Why staff? Because information is widely available, people and communities have become the main source of support and knowledge.

For instance, TD Bank in the U.S. has recently emphasised digital banking in order to free up staff to focus on customer service. As a result, the bank’s tone has shifted from one of ‘cold expert advisor’ to ‘friendly host’.

Another example is Zappos, whose humourous commercials highlight relationship-building between staff

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and consumers, demonstrating a shift in company values.

2. Use Technology in the Right Way As we immerse ourselves further into the ‘cloud’, we need to remember that technology is getting smarter, but the human connection must exist alongside it.

What does technology provide that is unique, and how does it enhance physical interactions?

In the U.S., the recent food truck revolution is an example of a traditional business that has been re-energised with mapping and location-based services, ordering apps, microblogging,

and affordable/hack-able tools such as the iPhone. With these new modes of commerce, it has revived a sense of hyper-localism in which people and communities are reconnecting.

3. Deliver a Consistent Experience Customers yearn for a consistent user experience provided by a unified company, not a collection of disparate ‘silos’. As a result, we need to design digital and physical touchpoints to feel the same, while allowing each to do what they do best. Offering a consistent experience involves a translation of your business’s core essence to each touchpoint, which is something that ’just-breakinginto-the-cloud’ companies often neglect.

Weight Watchers, for instance, exemplifies this marriage of digital and nondigital, front-end and back-end, making sure that they streamline their online weight-loss services with people's physical experience.

exploring service design

4. Keep Learning from Customers There are countless examples of brands that have managed to successfully move into the digital realm, and that’s because they continue learning from their customers by fostering dialogue.

Nike Plus and Gatorade have embraced co-creation, allowing users to create their own exerciseoriented community and dedicating a 24/7 Twitter response centre.

5. Refocus your Organisation to Deliver What’s Right Depending on how your company is structured, it may be necessary to rethink the organisation to deliver the right experience to your customer.

The connection between frontof-house (consumer-facing business) and back-of-house (employee-based systems) needs to be seamless. Furthermore, the digital experience should be an integrated, outward-facing whole, not simply a manifestation of how the businesses is organised.

So What Do These Lessons Really Tell Us? They tell us that implementing Service Design ‘in the cloud’ is not about slapping on a Facebook or Twitter icon or merely digitising information. It’s about balancing design craft, organisational innovation, systems management, and new digital technologies in the entire context of Service Design, while keeping the human connection in mind.

Above all, it is about designing the ideal experience for people and making sure the company is ready to deliver it. We need to merge the business tools of management consulting with the visual and storytelling tools of Service Design.

Overall, we need to develop our staff, leverage our technology appropriately, and prioritise our dialogues so we can all remain relevant in the digital cloud that has, slowly but surely, become our world.

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»… implementing Service Design ’in the cloud’ is not about slapping on a Facebook page or about merely digitising information.«

Monica Bueno, Principal with Continuum, excels at developing innovative and socially meaningful solutions for clients. An industrial and interaction designer by training, Monica is deeply committed to translating customer, business and technology research into innovative solutions that are desirable and relevant to clients and their stakeholders.

Tiffany Chu, Program Development Associate, Continuum, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Architecture and a Concentration in Comparative Media Studies. Besides designing, she is an avid writer and photographer for design publications.

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By Stefano Maffei, Elena Pacenti, Beatrice Villari

Good Idea + Good Design = Good Service?

Learning How to Evaluate Service Design

Earlier this year, members of the Service Design Thematic Commission began an open discussion about the evaluation of Service-Design projects in terms of innovation from a social, economic and technical perspective for an important Italian design prize: ADI’s Compasso d’Oro1. The members of the board faced the challenge of defining an effective approach for assessing the quality of Service-Design cases, as well as thinking about the value of design for services.

Setting the basic requirements for collecting examples of good Service Designs was the starting point.

added value for users that makes the difference, and Service Design can better illustrate its potential.

A definition of the borders of the category was needed to clarify that the design of services (as performances offered by organisations for the benefit of people, and/or mediated by technology) is different from the design of digital artefacts or physical touch-points or other kinds of initiatives and temporary events often associated with services, even though these boundaries are very often questionable.

But the most challenging aspect of the criteria development was to establish the evaluation approach to be used to judge what good Service Design is. The first statement is that good Service Design can only be evaluated using a dual complementary perspective: the design’s perspective and the company’s perspective. The first one seeks to facilitate positive user experience and interactions; the second seeks to achieve good market results.

Merging the two perspectives means finding a Service-Design ‘evaluation grammar’, where qualitative aspects and the aesthet-

To facilitate the scouting of good examples, we chose to focus on services for final users, considering first those services where it is the 78

ics of the service must be tangibly expressed, and measurable qualities go beyond price attributes and include a subtle definition of customer satisfaction.

A Good Service Concept • offers a meaningful new option for users with respect to the existing and opens new potential market positions (its originality is related to a determined social and economic context); • uses supply/production/delivery processes that comply with the idea of sustainability and promotes socially and environmentally conscious behaviours; • reflects the changes of technological and economical paradigms by experimenting with new service models, delivery platforms or interaction modalities.

Good Service Design: • has a clear and well designed identity that expresses and makes visible its values and potential, coherently supports users’ understanding, interaction and participation and also fosters a clear brand positioning, awareness and diffusion for the company;

exploring service design

BikeMi – a good Service?

BikeMi is not just a bike rental service, but a complete system of public transport to use for short hauls as an alternative or in addition to the traditional means of public transport.

• provides a user interaction with the service that is consistent and pleasurable: the effectiveness of the encounter and customer satisfaction are based on friendliness, transparency and the coherent design of the touchpoints; • demonstrates a certain adoption and acceptance not only expressed through the number of clients but also through evidences and feedbacks from a wider public; • is scalable and reproducible and the service model can be potentially applied to other business or welfare projects.

Due to the prize’s nature, the work on the evaluation of good Service Design has considered only the offer side of the service. But is it sufficient to measure the value of a service?

A step further towards the evaluation of the innovation of Service-

Design projects can only be done by including the demand-side evaluation and by developing knowledge in this direction2. To move from good design to good service evaluations, the new grammar has to include criteria to actually consider the impact a service has on the business or social contexts, on consumption behaviours and on social and environmental ecologies. That can only be judged with time.

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Commission members: Co-ordinator Stefano Maffei, Luca De Biase, Giordana Ferri, Ezio Manzini, Elena Pacenti, Beatrice Villari.

Compasso d’Oro is the most important and established design award for product design in Italy, promoted by ADI (Associazione per il Disegno Industriale). The ADI INDEX selection takes place annually; every three years the COMPASSO D’ORO Design Prize is awarded.

ADI included (from the end of 2008) Service Design among the categories of projects aspiring at the prize.

2 Bessant and Davies, DTI Innovation in Services, Occasional Paper, June 2007 1

Stefano Maffei, Associate Professor at the Design Faculty, Politecnico di Milano, Italy Elena Pacenti, Director, Master in Service Design, Domus Academy, Italy Beatrice Villari, Researcher at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy

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By Mark Bailey and Laura Warwick

Driving Lessons in Service Design

In financially uncertain times such as these, navigating a clear road to service delivery is increasingly challenging. This is especially the case within third-sector organisations where funding, largely derived from central and local government and voluntary donations, is under considerable threat.

However, with increasing pressure on voluntary organisations to help deliver vital services, it has become crucial that charities find sustainable solutions to deliver high quality customer service.

Age Concern Newcastle (ACN), a charity that enhances the status and wellbeing of older people in Newcastle, has recognised the key role that Service Design can play in helping them to creatively and proactively respond to this demand.

With the help of Northumbria University and UK government’s Knowledge Transfer Partnership scheme, ACN is embedding Service Design capability within the organisation, effectively giving stakeholders ‘driving lessons’ in Service Design, in order to incorporate the principles and methodology into their everyday activity.

This two-year project is presently 80

at the halfway point, but some of the key lessons for a not-for-profit organisation can already be seen.

Preparation: 1. Theory Test: Why Learn to Drive?

In order to effect cultural change within the organisation, it is essential to engage all stakeholders as quickly as possible. This can be hindered by the levels of understanding of the term ‘design’, magnified when coupled with the prefix ‘service’. By introducing examples of conceptual service developments that had been created in the context of their work, it was possible to make Service Design tangible for stakeholders. Familiar examples of Service Design from popular television documentaries also played a role in demonstrating the breadth of ‘design’ and the role that the non-designer can play.

Taking to the Road: 2. Speed Kills (Services) Many third-sector organisations are, necessarily, reactive to funding opportunities. This can lead to short-term, unsustainable services being put in place (and then removed when the funding has run out) without due consideration to the overall impact on strategic direction, brand or, most importantly, service users.

To help mitigate against the negative effects of this reactive style, a research, test, refine, implement, review approach to new services has been introduced. This supports a shift in emphasis towards being a service-focused organisation.

3. Seeing the Whole Journey Design addresses the whole person, the whole system, the whole configuration of people and tasks: it helps individuals to see services in the round. Operational staff tend to focus on what they have control over, or what they think they have control over, and don’t consider the user journey that occurs before or after users engage in the core service activity.

Using a photographic journey to

exploring service design

record observations around the welcome, engage and leave phases of service experience, staff were given the opportunity to look beyond their immediate activities and to see the service more holistically.

4. Use all Mirrors Smaller charity groups are possibly unique in that they can know their clientele too well. Knowing the specific circumstances of individual service users can colour the way in which staff engage with service development: “… we can’t do that, Ethel couldn’t come on a Tuesday”. Staff have been taught how to run workshops and develop personas based on these to help them see a bigger picture whilst not losing sight of the individual.

5. Passing the Test In instilling the importance of process into the organisation, staff at all levels are taught how to ‘prototype’ ideas and to refine where necessary before launching, in order to reduce risk. This can require managing enthusiasm and reviewing the business- and user case. It can be

The staff of ACN during the synthesis of their photo journey activity as described in lesson 3

difficult to quantify the success of a service within non-profit organisations, so it is important to establish the key performance indicators that will be used.

Conclusions Lessons for Designers When working in such a dynamic sector, it is important that designers recognise and respond to the rapidly changing circumstances of their organisation, whilst maintaining a core design vision and organisational values.

Lessons for Organisations A project such as this is intended to leave a legacy: a culture shift where high quality service experience is at the core of the

organisation’s work and all staff are empowered to explore and initiate new opportunities (in a methodical way) and also to recognise when they need to seek expert design help in order to develop and implement these.

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Mark Bailey, Northumbria University School of Design, UK Laura Warwick, Age Concern Newcastle, UK

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workshop insights

Making Service Sense The design challenge encouraged participants to reflect on their own Service Design journey.

We transformed our logo into one hundred and forty postcards that participants used as canvases to answer the following questions: What is your job?

• How did you first find out about Service Design?

• What do you wish you had known at the beginning of your journey?

• How can we make the most of the enthusiasm of our Service Design community?

• What are the main problems for Service Design students?

• What are the key things someone wanting to get into this field should know?

• What question did you ask yourself when you were ‘learning / exploring’ • What would be your one piece of advice to anyone wanting to be a Service Designer?

• If we hold an event – what should it be like? who should we invite?

• Who is the one Service Designer who you know of who you completely respect and why?

• What kind of help should we provide?

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By Lauren Currie and Kirsty Joan Sinclair

exploring service design

We scoped the existing landscape, considering what works and what doesn’t …

• The design thinking network: ‘Wenovski’ www.designthinkingnetwork.com • Service Design Tools: an open collection of tools used in the design process www.servicedesigntools.org • Service Design Network: an international network of organisations and businesses working in and developing the Service Design domain. www.service-design-network.org • Service Design thinks and drinks; A network of events for people who are Service Designing by people who are service designing www.servicedesigning.org

We finished on »Sell me Service Design in one sentence!

I am ... a janitor / president obama / my mum / a pilot / a hairdresser / a nurse / a Wall Street banker / a venture capitalist / an unemployed teenager / a pensioner …« The outcome of this design challenge was understanding what Making Service Sense is not (i.e a website, a new social network or a closed group). We are about making Service Design accessible. If you want to be part of visit www.makingservicesense.com and follow our tweets at twitter.com/servicedesignMS.

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chapter # 5

Background Stories Background Information from the World of Services.

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By Kerry Bodine

Why Chief Customer Officers Need to Care About Service Design

As an analyst on the Customer Experience team at Forrester Research, I work with executives who are responsible for transforming their companies into customer-centric organisations. One of my primary tasks is to help them understand how design tools and methodologies contribute to the delivery of engaging customer experiences across channels as diverse as websites, mobile apps, call centres, and physical stores – basically, every single customer touchpoint.

I was thrilled to attend the 2010 Service Design Network conferences in both Berlin and Cambridge, and to learn how organisations have achieved a higher level of customer experience through Service Design. But it was clear that many companies at the conference also had extremely focused business goals in mind, such as developing new lines of revenue, reducing costs, and distancing themselves from competitors.

Service Design Has Major Implications for Company Strategy and Organisational Structure Service design seeks to create or improve the complex systems – the business processes, technology, 86

organisations, and cultures – that support experience delivery across channels. This has weighty implications for companies looking to embark on Service Design projects: • Service design shakes up corporate strategy.

Several of the Service Design agencies we spoke to at the conferences reported that they started out as product design groups but were frustrated by continually being asked to design the wrong thing: a shiny new product, but not a solution to their client’s real problems. Now as Service Designers they’re able to address the totality of a company’s connected system of products and

services. They’re also in a better position to get the attention of executives, which helps secure the clout needed for widespread changes to a company’s strategy and offerings. For example, utility company Southern Water embarked on a Service Design project that shifted corporate focus from the technical aspects of delivering water to the service experience.

• When services are designed, organisations must be as well.

Because the quality of a servicebased experience is so dependent on both frontline and behind-thescenes employees, new services almost always require significant changes within the organisation.

And it is not okay to leave these organisational changes to chance – they must be designed and rolled out in conjunction with the service. Part of Portuguese airport operator ANA’s airport redesign project includes training for every single person who works in the airport: from airline and security personnel to janitors and coffee baristas. As Oliver King from Engine Service Design said

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at the Cambridge conference, “A great service comes from a great organisation.”

Forrester’s Take: Chief Customer Officers Will Soon Find Service Design Indispensable At Forrester, we're tracking the rise of a new role within big organisations: the Chief Customer Officer (CCO). These executives are ultimately responsible for creating an enterprise-wide customer experience strategy and making sure that vision is operationalised throughout the organisation. At the same time, we’re seeing Service Design steadily gaining recognition outside Europe as a gamechanging approach to business innovation. As these two trends come together, Service Design will have a major impact on businesses and the role of the CCO. • Designed experiences will increasingly become a competitive differentiator.

Innovations in digital technology and product manufacturing mean that companies competing on price or product innovation alone put themselves at a disadvantage.

As the conference keynoters from Philips Electronics acknowledged, “Time is ticking for pure product companies. They need to become experience providers.”

We already see this today in Nike’s online running communities

and Apple’s entertainment ecosystem. Companies that embrace this approach will find that the more deeply ingrained a designed experience is within an organisation, the harder it will be for any competitor to duplicate.

• Collaboration with operations and human resources will become mandatory.

IT and marketing are the most common project collaborators when it comes to digital customer experience projects. But companies looking to execute Service Design initiatives will soon realise that they can’t make much progress without inviting human resources and operations employees to the party. And since many of these folks will have never been involved in a customer experience project before, CCOs will need to serve as both gracious hosts – making introductions and connections with other team members – and educators, providing a basic understanding of the Service Design process and deliverables.

technology implementations, and continuous executive coaching.

But Service Design agencies bring to the table something that these firms just don’t have: experience design skills. CCOs should look for their transformation consultants to partner with service-focused design agencies.

And as transformation consultants and Service Design agencies vie for a piece of the enterprise-wide customer experience pie, CCOs should also plan for eventual mergers and acquisitions activity amongst these two types of partners.

•

Kerry Bodine, VP & Principal Analyst, Customer Experience at Forrester Research

• Service Design agencies will become a major part of the vendor ecosystem.

Today, CCOs depend heavily on customer experience transformation firms (i.e., management consultants) to provide transformation roadmaps, change management services, 87

By Astrid van der Auwera

Connecting the Dots

The Service Design Conference in Berlin

Astrid van der Auwera, graduated as in Service Designer at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany. She is founding member of the Service Design Network and project director at sedes research – the centre for Service Design Research at KISD. She currently investigates on how Service Design can encourage sustainable behaviour.

A few weeks before the conference, Minka, who runs the Service Design Network office, came into our workplace with a smile. ”What is it?“ we asked her. ”The conference is fully booked!“ was her joyful reply. Almost 400 Service Designers, clients and academics from all over the globe would attend the SDN Conference. This was a great success for the Service Design Network! Many dots of Service Design expertise and interest were connected by the common destination: the Service Design Network Conference in Berlin.

Not without a little pride, we look back at the beginning of the SDN in 2004 when three Service Designers agreed that Service Design was more than a volatile trend in the design and business world. The Service Design Network was thus founded, and made its first steps towards a highly active international community. Although everyone had faith in the network, nobody then would have believed that, in 2010, the SDN Conference would be a vibrant hotspot for leading Service Designers.

The Service Design Network has grown enormously and yet, the spirit inhabiting the Kalkscheune event location in the centre of Berlin on the two conference days was still marked the by initial

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openness, warmth, inspiration and the conviction of an idealistic and highly inspired community, and was also further enriched by many success stories and research results that were to be presented to an audience of academics, Service Design practitioners and clients.

In view of these numbers and the fact that this is the 6th issue of Touchpoint, the first magazine specialising in Service Design, one can definitely claim that Service Design has developed from a design niche to a considerable issue in design. It has become real!

Let’s Work it Out! It was not easy to make choices on the first conference day, and it was

Conference impressions (clockwise, starting from top left): discussion at the Student Days, lecture at the main stage, Client Talk, a workshop on theatrical tools in Service Design, the Service Design Reception at the Hoppetosse, networking during lunchtime.

connecting the dots

By Astrid van der Auwera

»Experimental interventions, students workshops, round tables and client talks successfully changed the classical conference programme habit of sitting and listening.«

no easier to make them on the second day: the diversity of lecturers, keynote speakers, client talks, interventions and workshops might have made it difficult to choose, even for the most decisive conference attendant. But once they had arrived at the chosen event, the audience was rewarded with astonishing insights form the Service Design practice, lively and also controversial discussions and handson workshops that not only presented innovative methods and approaches in Service Design, but offered an immediate experience of it.

Leafing through the conference programme, one was surprised both by the variety of Service Design subjects and by the precision of focus on the subjects. The list of the contributors, speakers and sponsors reads like a Who‘s Who of the innovative business and academic scene.

Based on the feedback of the last conference in Madeira, the planning committee put a special focus on contributions beyond the common conference agendas. Experimental interventions, students workshops, round tables and client talks successfully changed the classical conference program habit of sitting and listening.

In order to also promote Service Design expertise among students two days before the actual conference started, Service Design ideas and methods were worked out

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and analysed at special students’ workshops that welcomed students from 20 countries with different focuses and qualifications. With the support of VW and Deutsche Telekom, the students discussed and analysed subjects like urban mobility and urban communication form a Service-Design perspective and worked out first concept drafts. This cooperation was a fruitful and interesting experience for both the students and the companies.

For more hands-on Service-Design experiences and inspiration the conference participants could also take part in one of the experimental interventions and get an instant Service-Design benefit out of it.

The client talks, where Service Design agencies and their clients presented projects together, offered the unique opportunity to learn about a project not only from the perspective of Service Designers, but also from the clients’ perspectives. This form of presentation contributed greatly to revealing insights and very interesting and lively follow-up discussions. A great forum for any subject that had not been discussed or integrated in the program framework were the round table session which attracted many participants. The controversial discussions and clever arguments were all driven by a great passion for Service Design. Many business cases from different sectors, such as the public and social sector or the health sector as well as the business sector, and showed

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how the Service Design expertise has been acknowledged and approved over recent years. Those contributions at the SDN conference 2010 focusing on theoretical backgrounds, methods, tools and approaches revealed that, although a high level of specialization and scientific background has been gained, Service Design has not settled down into conformity and convention.

When Martin, the conference photographer, sneaked into the conference rooms he captured a variety of atmospheres. There was the classic setting, with people noting down key insights with intense concentration using the latest IT tools, or an inspirational, unconventional atmosphere, involving the conference attendants engaged in spontaneous and playful dialogues or actions. At the same time in another room there was an atmosphere of hard work and glowing faces. And we could never forget the moments of outrageous participation and dramatically entertaining insights that were definitely the ‘talk of the town’ at dinner. Whoever was looking for a relaxing conference experience got it wrong here! Service Design is about working things out!

that the goal of ’Connecting the dots‘ had been achieved at the conference.

Thanks to thorough and enthusiastic preparation, a highly flexible and motivated team of volunteers and, last but not least, an attentive and inspirational committee, the conference will be a memorable event marked by connecting, sharing and enabling.

Many business cards were exchanged and projects have been planned, whose results we might see at the next SDN conference, which will take place in 2011 in Savannah, Georgia, at the College of Art and Design. The SDN planning board will soon start with the preparations for Savannah and will put a lot of effort into designing an interesting and inspiring programme for the conference: we would love to see you all there!

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»Whoever was looking for a relaxing conference experience got it wrong here!

Service Design is about working things out!«

See You in Savannah!

After all the lectures and workshops, and all the meetings and greetings, the goals of the SDN were on the agenda of the Members’ Day that followed the conference. The convivial atmosphere at the Members’ Day and the great applause at the end were proof enough 91

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student days impressions

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By Birgit Mager and Shelley Evenson

Service Design Conference in Cambridge The splendid view from the Microsoft New England Research and Development Building framed the Service Design Conference opening reception on October 27th in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Birgit Mager, Professor for Service Design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany.

Shelley Evenson is a principal, User Experience Designer at Microsoft.

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Both Lorna and Chris practice Service Design as internal consultants inside large healthcare organisations. They believe one of the keys to their project success is the commitment of strong partners inside their organisations. And Oliver King was just about ready for his Lorna described a warning to others in Keynote when the fire alarm sounded … similar situations: »We promised too almost one hundred participants evacuated the building together with the much, too fast in the early days«. The talk was very intense and painfully honest. huge Microsoft crew, standing coatless and without further information in the Roberto Fabricant from frog design brisk autumn wind. It made us think that looked at the topic of ‘Service Design Service Design for emergency situations and Behavioural Change’ – a topic to might be an interesting challenge. which Touchpoint has already devoted a Fortunately it was only a test, and after full issue early this year. So it was good 30 freezing minutes the conference to hear that the frogs are embracing the started up again. topic and moving it into their client’s world!

Oliver gave a brilliant introduction to Service Design and set just the right stage Shelley Evenson from Microsoft gave for the Healthcare panel with Lorna inspiring insight into a Microsoft Ross from The Mayo Clinic and Chris student project that focused on McCarthy from Kaiser Permanente.

Service Design and produced really We were honoured to have inspiring nice results. It will be a big challenge facilitation from Lew McCreary from to bring Service Design expertise to Harvard Business Review. all those design schools that are just Drinks and snacks, music and chat – it was an easy-going way to connect and set the mood for following day’s dive into Service Design.

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now realising the importance and impact of approaching services, and it is amazing to see how they already collect knowledge from all these online resources!

Monica Bueno from Continuum provided an inspiring list of lessons from ‘the cloud’ and highlighted how companies may need to refocus their organisations to deliver what is right.

for large complex problems such as obesity, energy, healthcare or education and bringing them to market. He challenged us to think about designing for service systems and in that context, offer what we service designers do best – have empathy, visualise futures, design experiences, see the big picture and frame the problem in human ways.

Peter Corbett is not a Service Designer, but he is in his heart a collaborator. It was amazing to see how he has created platforms for thousands of application developers to create apps for democracy – and apps for the army. A process that not only enabled government to identify real word problems and develop real world solutions, but also to save a lot of money! We have to make sure that this kind of collaboration happens – and that the savings that are realised are used for the people, and fund the future collaborations.

The final discussion with the conference planning board (Mark Jones, Shelley Evenson, Jamin Hegeman and Birgit Mager) focused on the question of how to elevate discussions and activities on Service Design between now and the 2011 conference in Savannah, Georgia.

All in all, we concluded that there is potential to greatly expand Service Design in the US with such a wonderful community and such vibrant energy!

Finally, Mark Jones from IDEO talked about finding the soul of Service Design.

Mark described creating design visions

See photos, videos and slides at www.service-design-network.org/ content/welcome-0

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service design snapshots

from around the world

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the holy grail of service design is a new kind of combination of hearts and euros.

What is good customer service?

From a corporate perspective, good customer service does not cost much and makes customers more willing pay more (EURO).

From the customers’ perspective, good service fulfills all of their service needs with minimum outlay (HEART). Traditionally, Service Design is customer driven and tends to focus more on the heart part of this equation. This easily leads to over-serving customers and, thus, earning lower profits. Traditionally, management practices in corporations focus on optimising the euro part of the equation. This makes it harder to sell Service Design.

This looks like an impossible equation. Actually, it isn't. You just have to observe clients and use spreadsheet- and image-editing software simultaneously together with the client’s CEO. We at Palmu Inc. help our clients to realise this with a methodology called ’customer value thinking’. This simply means thinking everything through in terms of both hearts and euros at all levels of the organisation.

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Fonecta, which is the fastest growing media company in Finland and the market leader in directory services, has taken this thinking to their service innovation practices and created services that cost less to produce, while at the same time, customers are willing to pay more for those same services. For example, an online service for reserving event facilities for groups of under 20 people. Restaurants and hotels are able to raise the hit rate from 20% to over 80% for new customers. This service is able to reduce the time used to reserve a venue from 4–5 days to just a couple of hours. This solution means twice or three times more commission per reservation, as Fonecta is able to package food, drinks and equipment to be sold as packages instead of just renting out an empty space.

been changed to equally serve both hearts and euros. The change has been dramatic and its effects have been instantly noticeable.

After a stream of successful innovation projects, Fonecta has recently launched a new service management organisation that utilises an iterative Service Design approach and methodology to constantly improve conversion. At Fonecta, all work from strategy to daily activities has

What are the benefits of video?

The emotional engagement of video-based ethnography, together with its accessibility and potential to inspire, are gradually becoming more established. Less well known are the range of uses to which video can be employed – as illustrated in the projects that STBY recently worked on for Nokia.

To learn more about customer value thinking or this project please email: jussi@palmuinc.com or tanja.niittymaki@fonecta.com

Jussi Olkkonen, Service Designer and founder of Palmu Inc., Helsinki, Finland

#2.

video ethnography: multiple applications of an adaptable resource

The first of these involved creating a series of videos that documented the ‘solutions’ people come up with in their everyday lives. What rou-

tines do people create to make the most of their time? How do they solve everyday problems? The films we made provided an emotional link to a diverse range of people, communicating emotional insights into their lives. They were thus used as both inspiration and an evidential foundation for concept development teams within Nokia.

In a follow-up project we designed and facilitated a 3-day workshop, bringing together various internal teams to explore different applications for the videos in Nokia’s internal processes. These included their serving as a common ‘language’ that different teams could use to communicate, aligning new concepts with existing insights and ‘road-testing’ concepts already in development.

When Nokia then asked us about making video a permanent fixture in their research processes, STBY worked with them to explore how a curated library of videos could be used to inspire, align, and assess the concepts they are developing.

We helped them define an approach in which video-based concepting workshops are formalised into development cycles. The original videos are used as examples to show how market and consumer insights, emerging trends and new concepts can be aligned in a structured fashion via formalised early-concepting workshops.

Video ethnography as a tool is still growing. Working with clients to integrate video into development processes reveals new applications, just as applying the tool to new problems inspires creative solutions.

Luke Kelly, Research Assistant, STBY London, UK

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design as an approach to education for sustainable development A round-table discussion took place amongst five professional designers and design academics during Service Design Conference ’10 in Berlin, to investigate the question: ‘How can design and design

thinking help UK primary schools to address issues of Sustainable Development (SD)?’ The insights from this discussion will be used in research undertaken at Loughborough University, UK.

Participants considered the potential of design and design thinking in order to work on different levels and scales within the context of primary schools as a public service and their change towards Sustainable Development.

During the discussion, primary schools were perceived as complex systems, and Sustainable Development as a multifaceted area that addresses environmental stewardship, social equity and justice and economic issues.

For change to happen four stages were considered: 1. Creating entry for schools into understanding of the topic 2. Establishing shared vision amongst stakeholders 3. Turning vision into real-world projects 99

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4. Tracking progress The notion of design as an enabler of change rather than as a dictator was developed by taking into account its specific uses within the context of schools and SD. Design has the potential to: • Communicate and make the topic of SD more available and engaging to the teachers and other stakeholders • Enquire about the individuals, their motivations and interests; • Motivate individuals within the system to work on sustainable issues • Understand parameters of the schools and their local communities in order to design within and for the parameters while incorporating all dimensions of SD • Ask what the future looks like and develop common vision of a sustainable future with stakeholders • Create opportunities that minimise the entry level for schools into understanding of and action towards Service Design • Inspire.

Two design values were identified as relevant to the context: • Simplicity: For SD to see uptake within schools where time and money are scarce resources, 100

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simple techniques and concepts are required.

• Relevance: Design should be relevant to individuals and to school communities it seeks to change.

Bringing together two perspectives – those of academia and industry – I introduced the notion that the way in which we tend to design services contradicts the desired effect we have as service receivers.

For more information please contact at K.Kuzmina@lboro.ac.uk Moderator: Ksenija Kuzmina, Loughborough University, UK Panelists: Ré Dubhthaigh, Radarstation; Tory Dunn, ThoughtWorks; Toke Stub Barter, Icph; Lesley McKee, University of Dundee, Scotland.

When tasked to create ideas for social entrepreneurship, design students at the Royal College of Art consistently suggest models that rely on a strong community presence: tapping into existing infrastructure, including schools, cafes and even prisons.

Ksenija Kuzmina, Loughborough University, UK

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using social nodes to design services Why have people been celebrating ‘Record Store Day’ in recent years?

The views shared by those celebrating (or maybe grieving for) their local independent music stores, suggest that music-download services have not just killed our record stores, but the relationships, ideas and personalities that we used to build there. This leads me to challenge the current approach to service creation that we tend towards.

The industry perspective that I gained while researching services in emerging countries mirrors these suggestions. Whether looking at ways people acquire new music or pay their bills, current systems place a far greater importance on the role of a social hub: a ‘fixer’, a ‘market vendor’, a ‘music man’. Though seen as less efficient than our digital solutions (self-scanning, online shopping, downloaded delivery, etc.) these systems – as with the student concepts – preserve a sense of community and offer a more social service.

My workshop hypothesised that designing with the deliberate inclusion of existing social hubs can create social nodes from which many services are delivered. Connecting these together to

form infrastructures then allows us to deliver equally efficient, socially improved services, given the knowledge we have of the groups within those hubs.

4 groups ideated around maps of Berlin, identifying examples of existing social hubs that could be converted into nodes through which to deliver more social services: from child care at your local cafes and grocery delivery while you collect your children from kindergarten to clothing repair services and sewing classes while you wait in the launderette. Far from aiming to define concrete solutions, the workshop’s aim was to challenge the convention of service design and open up the topic of including and incorporating existing social hubs. This sparked an unfinished debate amongst us that, together with the ideas, represents the start of a conversation rather than its conclusion.

Eleanor Davies, Visiting Tutor, Royal College of Art and Design Researcher, Frog Design, London, UK

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service design in australia Australia’s service design industry is still in its infancy in comparison to other industries around the world. Huddle design has joined forces with partners and clients in the field to question the commonly held belief that businesses need to compete to survive and to be successful. Instead, the focus has now shifted at looking for ways to design an industry, which is not only competitive but also nurtures open cross-collaboration.

A recent presentation at ‘Sydney’s Service Design Thinks and Drinks #6’ Dr Melis Senova, director of Huddle design, set an interesting proposition: “If you can interpret every choice as a design decision, you can look at your life as a set of designed experiences.” If we can design our world, why can’t we design our own industry?

We want to design the industry, as we would like it to be.

To see Melis’ presentation and the group’s discussion, check out this link: www.huddledesign.com/ industry A summary can also be found in Nathanael Boehm’s blog: www.eriontheinterweb.com/ 2010/09/service-design-drinks-6can-we-design-our-industry Zafer Bilda, Service Experience Architect Lead at Bienalto, was also at the event and talked about ‘Designing and Testing Service Experiences’. Zafer highlighted the different techniques of understanding an experience holistically, of setting criteria and how to measure and test service experiences.

To see Zafer’s presentation and a list of attendees, check out this link: http://servicedesigning.com.au/ 2010/08/01/sydney-service-designthinks-drinks-6 Thanks to Australia’s ‘Thinks and Drinks’ organisers Suze Ingram and Damian Kernahan. Additional information on the event can be found at: www.servicedesignhub.com.au

Angela Bode, Service Designer, Huddle design, Melbourne, Australia

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member map

service design network Denmark 1508 A/S, Copenhagen Aalborg University - School of Architecture and Design, Aalborg Copenhagen Living Lab, Copenhagen Innovation Center Copenhagen, Copenhagen Norway AHO University, Oslo Designit, Oslo The Netherlands 31Volts, Utrecht Delft University of Technology , Delft DesignThinkers, Amsterdam Edenspiekermann, Amsterdam Informaat, Baarn Media Catalyst, Amsterdam Mixe - medical marketing, Zeist Philips Research, Eindhoven Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, Rotterdam T+Huis, Eindhoven TietoEnator Netherlands, Amersfoort Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht Luxembourg integratedPlace, Luxembourg Belgium Yellow Window, Antwerpen

France Attoma, Paris Orange-ftpgroup, Paris Uinfoshare, Paris USER STUDIO, Paris Canada Ascent Group, Vancouver Cooler Solutions, Toronto Normative Design, Toronto lvl studio, Montreal USA Adaptive Path, San Francisco, CA Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburg, PA Continuum, West Newton, MA Frontier Service Design, Malvern, PA Genentech, Inc, San Francisco, CA Hot Studio, San Francisco, CA Mc Donald´s Corporation, Oak Brook, IL New Era Soft, New York, NY Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY Paulvoglewede.com, San Francisco, CA SCAD University, Savannah, GA Skyworks Solutions Inc., Woburn, MA Brazil Igorsaraiva.com, Brasilia ISG Consulting, Rio de Janeiro UFRJ/COPPE- Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - DESIS group, Rio de Janeiro Colombia Los Andes University, Bogota Ireland Centre for Design Innovation - Institute of Technology Sligo, Sligo Hygge service design & innovation, Dublin Servitize, Kilkenny Portugal Novabase, Lisboa University of Madeira – Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Funchal

Spain FunkyProjects, Bilbao United Kingdom Design London | Imperial College Business School, London Design Wales, Cardiff Engine, London Eurostar Group Ltd, London Flywheel Ltd, Beaconsfield IDEO, London Imagination Lancaster, Lancaster live|work, London Naked Eye Research, London NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, Warwick Prospect , London Radarstation, London Seren Partners, London STBY, London Strategyn, Cranfield thinkpublic, London Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd, Crawley

Germany gravity GmbH, Munich Hoffmann Consulting GmbH, Hamburg KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe Köln International School of Design, Cologne Macromedia Hochschule für Medien und Design, Munich MetaDesign AG, Berlin Rudolf Haufe Verlag, Wolfsburg service works GbR, Cologne Southwalk. GmbH, Rheine StrategicPlay, Hamburg Sturm & Drang, Hamburg tackle | Service Design - Jan Krause & Cordula Brenzei GbR, Ravensburg Tieto Deutschland GmbH, Eschborn T-Labs, Berlin Volkswagen AG, Wolfsburg or Play xperience, Schwaig ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Kiel Sweden Business & Design Lab University of Gothenburg, Göteborg Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg Ergonomidesign, Bromma Design Västerbotten, Umeå Doberman, Stockholm Linköping University, Linköping Tieto Corporation, Älvsjö Transformator, Stockholm Slovenia Gorenje design studio d.o.o., Velenje Poland Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny w Poznaniu, Poznan Finland Culminatum Ltd Oy , Espoo e21 Solutions Oy, Helsinki Grey Direct & Digital, Helsinki Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences, Jyväskylä KONE, Espoo Kuopio University of Design, Kuopio Lahti University of Applied Sciences, Lahti Laurea University of Applied Sciences , Espoo Palmu Inc., Helsinki Taivas, Helsinki University of Art and Design Helsinki, TaiK, Helsinki Yatta Corporation Ltd., Helsinki Estonia University of Tartu, Pärnu College, Pärnu Turkey KIRMIZI KALEM, Istanbul Korea Creative Design Institute, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon Hyun Kim, Seoul Kaywon School of Art and Design, Gyeonggi-do Kyung-jin Hwang, Seoul teaminterface, Seoul Xener Systems, Seoul Taiwan Chili Consulting Corp., Taipei Institute for Information Industry, Taipei Taiwan Design Center, Taipei New Zealand Ministry of Justice New Zealand, Wellington Australia BT Financial Group, Sydney Huddle Design, VIC Melbourne Meld Studios, Stanmore Proto Partners, Sydney Russel Baker, Canberra Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne Italy Experientia, Torino Domus Academy, Milano Politecnico di Milano - Facoltá del Design, Milano Austria DTF Business Development GmbH, Vienna IITF - Institut für Innovations- und Trendforschung, Graz ISN - Innovation Service Network GmbH, Graz MCI Management Center Innsbruck, Innsbruck Mobilkom Austria, Vienna tourismusdesign, Tulln an der Donau Switzerland customfuture SA, Baar Dimando AG, Zurich Luzern Universtiy of Applied Sciences and Arts, Luzern

connect.

enable.

Service Design Conference October 2011, SCAD, Savannah, Georgia, USA This year’s Service Design Conference takes place at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), Savannah, Georgia, USA. Watch the SDN website www.servicedesign-network.org to stay updated!

About Service Design Network The Service Design Network is a forum for practitioners to advance the nascent field of Service Design.

Our purpose is to develop and strengthen the knowledge and expertise in the science and practise of innovation.

Service Design Network . Ubierring 40 . 50678 Cologne . Germany . www.service-design-network.org

Photo: Daniel Mayer, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Savannah,_Georgia

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