Touchpoint Vol. 5 No. 2 - Designing Citizen-Centred Public Services

volume 5 | no. 2 | 15,80 euro

September 2013

Designing Citizen-Centred Public Services Social Innovation in Local Government: Sustaining Success

By Julie McManus and Emma Barrett

Public & Collaborative: Designing Services for Housing

By Chelsea Mauldina and Eduardo Staszowski

Are Free Public Libraries Still Needed?

By Mikko Mäkinen and Richard Stanley

Touchpoint

Proofreading

Volume 5 No. 2

Tim Danaher

September 2013 The Journal of Service Design ISSN 1868-6052 Publisher Service Design Network Chief Editor Birgit Mager

Printing PEIPERS – DruckZentrum Kölnwest Fonts Mercury G3 Whitney Pro Service Design Network gGmbH Mülheimer Freiheit 56

Editorial Board

D-51063 Köln

Alisan Atvur

Germany

Jesse Grimes

www.service-design-network.org

Varun Malhotra Jess McMullin Project Management & Art Direction Claire Allard

Contact & Advertising Sales Claire Allard journal@service-design-network.org Touchpoint Subscription For ordering or subscribing to

Cover Picture

Touchpoint, please visit

Claire Allard

www.service-design-network.org/read/

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

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from the editors

Designing Citizen-Centred Public Services

With the on-going effects of the global financial crisis still being felt, governments around the world have been struggling with a quandary: How to deal with the increasing demands on their services, while budget cuts and austerity measures force departments to make do with less.

Alongside more efficient working practices and technology-led evolutions such as a push towards digital self-service, service design is increasingly playing a role in delivering better, smarter, and human-centred public services. And why not? It’s a perfect match. Leaving despots and dictatorships aside, governments exist to serve their citizens, or “users” (to look at them in a different light). At the same time, service design puts users at the heart of a designed service. So when these “users” of public services can be considered to be nearly the entire population of a country, the potential impact for service design becomes enormous.

Historically, the UK have been pioneers in the field of service design within government.

With a track record of supporting design in its many incarnations, the relatively-nimble national government has followed the lead of smaller councils and initiated service design projects in many areas. Projects which were initially run by external consultancies such as Livework and Engine (both of whom have shared project stories within these pages) are now increasingly being done by in-house service designers. This represents an affirmation that the discipline itself is shaking up bureaucratic workstyles and delivering excellent results, efficiently.

We’ve heard success stories from far and wide, not just the UK. Writing from Japan, Yukinobu Maruyama tells us of how following the 2011 earthquake, the city of Sendai used service design techniques to improve future government responses to major disasters (see page 46). And an editor of this issue, Jess McMullin joins his Canadian co-contributors in showing how service design has been put front-and-centre within the British Columbia government (see page 22).

But as usual, we’re not focused exclusively on the issue’s topic of service design and the public sector. Simon Field brings his expertise and experience in the field of software architecture to service design in our Tools and Methods section, where he proposes how trade-off analysis can be used to select from different service design solutions. And we also hear the outcome of the first global GovJam, which has followed in the footsteps of the successful Global Service Jam, as well as catch up with news from the first ever SDN Japan Conference.

It’s less than three month’s time until the Service Design Global Conference reconvenes, this time in Cardiff, Wales. We expect this conference to be a sell-out, so if you haven’t done so already, we encourage you to register and join us for two full days of inspiration, education and networking. We look forward to seeing you there. Goodbye for now, or as the Welsh would say: Hwyl fawr am nawr!

Jesse Grimes for the editorial Board

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, cofounder and president of Service Design Network and chief editor of Touchpoint.

Jesse Grimes has thirteen years experience as an interaction designer and consultant, now specialising in service design.

He has worked in London, Copenhagen, Düsseldorf and Sydney, and is now based in Amsterdam with Dutch agency Informaat.

Alisan Atvur is a Principal Design Strategist at GE Healthcare.

Most recently, his work includes experience strategy, facilitation, and creative direction. Formerly, he was a Senior Design consultant at frog and the Director of Strategy at InReality.

Jess McMullin is the founder of the Centre for Citizen Experience, a strategic design consultancy that works to transform public sector service delivery and policymaking by growing government design capability.

Varun Malhotra is a founder and principal at Changeis Inc, where he oversees all aspects of strategy and service delivery operations for the company, and consults with senior management across Changeis’ government clients.

test

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65 12 2 imprint 3 from the editors 6 news

forrester's take 10 How Business Model

and Brand Influence the Service Experience Kerry Bodine

feature: designing citizen-centred public services 22 Connecting Practice and

Policymaking

Jess McMullin, Alex MacLennan, Dominique Bohn, Blair Neufeld

28 Making Service Design a

Solution for Government Program Managers Michael Sedelmeyer

31 This Time, it’s Different Lea Ward

cross-discipline 12 A Prescription for Making

Innovative Medicine Relate Allison Matthews, Diane Klein

16 Government ICT: From

Infrastructure to Service Enabler Mel Edwards, Justin Barrie

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36 Viable: Balancing

Community Experience and Government Strategy Darren Menachemson

41 From Public Service Design

to Public Policy Design Stéphane Vincent, Romain Thévenet

46 What Service Design Can

Do for Evacuation Facilities Yukinobu Maruyama

48 Public & Collaborative:

Designing Services for Housing Chelsea Mauldin, Eduardo Staszowski

55 Are Free Public Libraries

Still Needed?

Mikko Mäkinen, Richard Stanley

58 Restructuring Britain Louise Downe

60 Becoming a Citizen Anders Kjeseth Valdersnes, Ben Reason

65 Social Innovation in Local

Government: Sustaining Success

Julie McManus , Emma Barrett

contents

86 90

tools and methods 72 Introducing the Service

Architecture Review Method Simon Field

76 Social Work: From Services

to Screen

Andrew Cramer

80 Introducing Dialogues Mark Fonds, Peter Bogaards

education and research 86 The Experience of Creative

Citizens

Daniela Selloni

profiles 90 Interview: Varun Malhotra

inside sdn 93 Service Design Network

Japan Conference 2013 Atsushi Hasegawa

94 Dragon Hunters:

Jamming and Public Service Adam Lawrence, Markus Hormess, Mikaela Griffiths, Ruth Mirams, Christophe Tallec

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Insider

discover the programme of sdnc13! of sdnc13 on the conference website.

sdn brazil talks 2013

Date: September 28th, 2013 Opening: 8am Closing: 8pm Venue: Escola São Paulo at Augusta Street, 2074 - São Paulo, SP, Brazil After party: We’ll have Service Design Drinks at O'Malleys Bar brazil.service-design-network.org (in Portuguese)

Photo: Fernando Stankuns

SDN Brazil Talks 2013 is the first conference to feature service design in Brazil, and welcomes the participation of people interested in the field, such as business developers, designers, education researchers and practitioners, fostering both practice and study.

The ‘Talks’ will be on September 28th at Escola São Paulo, a creativity centre in the city of São Paulo that has significant cultural, economic and political influence both nationally and internationally.

It will be a busy day with talks, academic presentations and business cases. SDN Brazil Talks is a free event!

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinrp/

Kerry Bodine, Ben Terrett, Joel Bailey and Marc Catchlove are part of the amazing line-up that the conference team has put together for the Service Design Global Conference 2013 in Cardiff! The conference will bring together leading thinkers from the worlds of academia, business and design to debate, discuss and share their experience of using service design methods to build value for customers. Presentations, Petcha Kucha's and workshops will be related to this years theme of ‘Transformation through Service Design’.

You will find the whole programme

Join us on the 19th and 20th of November in the Welsh capital to debate, share and learn about the latest developments in the field of service design! SDN members, as well as student and Ph.D. candidates will have the opportunity to enjoy one extra day of insightful presentations and workshops on the 18th of November. Last years conference was sold out, so secure your place and get your ticket!

To receive the last news about the conference and service design, subscribe to the SDN Insider newsletter! www.sdnc13.com

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case study library The first service design professional case study library has been launched! An invaluable resource for SDN members, whether they are practitioners, academics or researchers, ‘from the community to the community’!

After two decades of service design as an independent discipline, gaining ever-increasing recognition all the while in both design and business, there has never been a professional collection of case studies as a source of reference – until now.

All SDN members have, from now

on, access to the case study library on the SDN website.

Would you like to submit your service design case study? You are welcome to participate at anytime with your work, which can be related to any industry, public sector or social innovation topic. The service design community will be happy to see the library growing with more and more insights from the field, so don’t hesitate to share your knowledge with SDN Members!

Have a look at the case study library or submit your case study at: www.service-design-network.org/ case-study

follow the global conference on twitter!

Stay tuned about Service Design Global Conference 2013 latest news!

Follow the conference on Twitter @sdnconference

@sdnconference SDN Members can enjoy a 15% discount on the Service Experience Conference 2013 ticket! Send a mail to media@service-design-network.org to get your promotional code!

The Service Experience Conference 2013

October 3-4 | San Francisco an Adaptive Path Event

The Service Experience Conference brings together designers and business leaders to address the practice and execution of service design. Register at sx-conference.com

Insider

sdn poland is born!

The Service Design Network is happy to welcome its new chapter from Poland! This enthusiastic chapter has already concocted a string of service design events for the Polish SD community!

You will have the opportunity to meet the chapter on the 20th to 22th September 2013 at the Łodz

Design Festival, where it will be organising a workshop city jam.

SDN Polska is also coordinating hosts for the Global Sustainability Jam on the 22th-23th of November 2013 in Poznan, Szczecin, Warsaw, Cracow and Lublin! And, last but not least, a National Conference will be organised in February 2014 in Poznan! poland.service-design-network.org

healthcare and design

The fifth conference on User Experience design, taking place in Lugano next October 26th, focuses on healthcare and design.

Discover how digital technology can improve people’s health! All the talks will focus on the new frontiers of healthcare: futuristic experiences that are already real.

introduction to service design in munich Service Design in Munich, Germany, is vibrant and flourishing.

On July 23rd, the Service Design Network Germany issued an invitation to an introduction to Service Design at the first SDN Talks Munich. More than 120 people signed up to the event, hosted by HUB Munich. Speakers from both theory and practice presented the tools and processes of service design and showed results of their workflow with a real-life case study.

Anette Rinner, service design analyst at Whitespring Service Design 8

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Thinking kicked off the evening with her presentation ‘Why Service Design?’, in which she introduced the tools and process of service design an drew parallels to systems thinking and systemic consulting.

Thomas Gläser of envis then walked the audience through a typical service design and UX project with his talk ‘Service Design for Non-Designers’.

The case study was provided by Verena Augustin of IXDS Berlin and Stephan Augustin of BMWi in Munich, outlining the processes and findings from their ‘BMW Wallbox Making Of’ project. The evening was concluded with a heated discussion during the closing panel talk.

Photo: Thomas Schönweitz

SDN Members can enjoy a 20% discount on the conference ticket!

Send a mail to media@servicedesign-network.org to get your promotional code!

The event was supported by our SDN members dpool, Designit and TNG Technology Consulting.

Learn more about SDN Germany and watch the videos of the talks here: www.sdnde.org (in German)

Service Design books

Book Recommendations from the Network design for care innovating healthcare experience

by Peter Jones

Design for Care is the new bible for designers and design researchers in the field of healthcare. With this book, Peter H. Jones offers a current and comprehensive source that addresses designing for the complexity of healthcare experiences.

He points out the evolving role of the designer in the process and across sectors and design disciplines.

The book is composed of three main chapters that invite the reader to rethink care and its consumers, patients and care systems. Design as Caregiving, Co-creating care, Patient-Centered Service Design,

Designing Healthy Information Technology, Systemic Design for Healthcare Innovation or Designing Healthcare Futures are only a few of the very insightful topics this book addresses. Along the journey of the main character, Elena, the reader is given the chance to follow the treatment-seeking experience of a primary caregiver negotiating the healthcare process and so the opportunity to understand the different touchpoints, challenges and opportunities.

Whether a health seeker, a care giver, a healthcare professional,

a UX or service designer, or a service, product or innovation manager in healthcare, everyone will find their role in the 'health journey' of this book. Over 356 pages, the reader will be fully inaugurated into the many aspects and emerging opportunities of the healthcare experience and steered towards an innovative future for designers in this field.

Jennifer Bagehorn SDN members also get a 20% discount! Contact SDN Team at media@service-design-network.org to receive your promotional code!

service design by industrial designers

by Froukje Visser

Froukje Visser is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) at Delft University of Technology and works as an independent design consultant. In her recently published book, Service Design by Industrial Designers, she elaborates the role of service design in design education and its consequences for a new generation of designers. The changing role of design and its growing complexity demands a rethink of the way that design is understood and taught.

Visser invited students, design practitioners and design educators to a think tank where they critically

discussed and reflected upon the new challenges for designers.

The education program at the TU Delft serves as an example.

Different topics cover the main implications when designing for products and services today: Involving Users, Prototyping, Social media, Stakeholder Commitment, Back-end Design and Business Models. Furthermore case studies illustrate the practical application of those areas. The newspaper-like layout makes it an easy read and allows the reader to get a quick overview of the main thoughts and thrust of the chapter, but it also allows the reader to delve deeper

into the topic if needed. The book serves as a great source for design students and design educators and provides valuable insights for design practitioners.

Jennifer Bagehorn You can purchase the book at bit.ly/book_SD_industrial_designers touchpoint 5-2

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How Business Model and Brand Influence the Service Experience

Service-based interactions occur at all stages of the customer journey: discover, evaluate, buy, access, use, get support, leave and re-engage. To better understand these interactions, many companies have developed customer journey maps: visual documents that illustrate the steps that customer take. But it’s not enough to know that these interactions exist and the order in which they occur. If you want to shift your customers’ perceptions of your service, you have to examine those interactions on a deeper level. Specifically, you need to look at the types of interactions customers have and the qualities that those interactions embody. And that’s where your business model and your brand come into play.

YOUR BUSINESS MODEL DETERMINES THE TYPES OF INTERACTIONS CUSTOMERS WILL HAVE

How can your customers interact with you? Can they buy your services directly from your mobile app? Or do they need to go to a bricks-andmortar third-party retailer? Do you have self-service customer support on your website? Or do your customers call an outsourced call centre when they need help? The answers to these questions are deeply rooted in your company’s business model.

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Kerry Bodine test

For example, Zipcar’s car sharing business model necessitated decentralised, non-staffed access to vehicles that, in turn, drove a need for keycard (and then mobile phone) vehicle entry, a type of interaction never conceived of with business models based on vehicle ownership or centralised, staffed rental locations. And mobile phone operator giffgaff built its business model around social platforms and a tiny number of core employees.

The result? When customers have

questions, they speak to each other, not to giffgaff.

While the connection between business model and customer experience might be obvious, I don’t find that many companies actively consider the two in tandem.

Consider Citibank: the financial services giant hired the same architects responsible for the Apple store to design its bank of the future.

Not surprisingly, it wound up with a bank that looks, well, exactly like an Apple store. And while the Apple store aesthetic is admittedly lustworthy, Citibank neglected the fact that Apple’s hiring, training and in-store technology – core aspects of the Apple retail business model – are the lifeblood of its unique in-store experience and what makes the Apple experience so damn hard to replicate.

Service designers need to determine if new types of interaction have the potential to create lasting value for their organisation. This means analysing service innovation ideas within the context of the core business mechanics. To add structure to this process, they should explicitly map out the mechanics of possible new business models – like resources, activities, and revenue

forrester´s take

structure – using a tool like the freely available business model canvas.1 This visualisation can help teams see how core business activities can fuel new interactions — and support them in the long run.

BRAND VALUES DRIVE THE QUALITIES OF THOSE INTERACTIONS.

What does your customer experience really feel like? Do your sales reps maintain an air of professional distance? Or do they chit chat with your customers about their plans for the upcoming weekend? Do you have generic stock photography on your Facebook page? Or custom imagery that evokes a particular emotion? The answers to these questions represent the more intangible attributes of your service and they are deeply rooted in your brand. They are what makes any given interaction feel like it really belongs to your company, and to only your company.

Your brand is your company’s genetic material: a powerful code that enables your organisation to express itself appropriately in an infinite number of customer interactions. For example, if you walk up to a check-in kiosk at an airport and the word ‘Howdy!’ scrolls across the screen in gigantic

letters, you’re likely flying on JetBlue Airways. Or walk into any Westin hotel lobby, and you’ll surely be greeted with its signature white-tea scent and tasteful floral displays, both of which reinforce the hotel’s calming, sophisticated brand. The qualities of these customer experiences create strong associations with their brands. And the more a new interaction looks, feels, smells, sounds, and tastes like a specific brand, the harder it will be for competitors to copy.

While this may sound like common sense, many of the business people I speak to on a regular basis – people who are ultimately responsible for designing or delivering their company’s services – have little to no idea of what their brand stands for. And without a clear and accurate understanding of the brand, they are rudderless.

Which is unfortunate, because communicating key brand attributes is relatively easy. For example, Continuum Innovation created mood boards when developing 2ovens2, a new restaurant concept targeting a younger dining audience, for US-based Italian restaurant chain Bertuccis. Carefully chosen photos depicted four key elements of the

desired 2ovens vibe, helped align internal Bertuccis stakeholders and guided the design of touchpoints as diverse as the dining space, menu and website.

FORRESTER’S TAKE

Companies that want to differentiate their service experience need to go beyond find-and-fix efforts that result in incremental improvements.

They need to innovate the service experience by visualising and refocusing on their business model and brand.

•

References 1 www.businessmodelgeneraton.com 2 ‘Live Labs’: Prototyping Environments to Measure Customer Experience by Tony Driscoll and Craig LaRosa in Touchpoint Vol. 5 No. 1 p.30

Kerry Bodine is vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research and the coauthor of Outside In. Her research, analysis, and opinions appear frequently on sites such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company.

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A Prescription for Making Innovative Medicine Relate Facilitating communication across disciplines using service design

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.”

Robert McCloskey, author of Make Way for Ducklings Allison Matthews is service designer at the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation. Prior to attending architecture school at the University of Minnesota, Allison attended medical school at the Mayo Clinic.

Diane Klein is design manager at the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation.

Trained as a scenic designer at Hamilton College, she attended the Yale University Business Perspectives for Creative Leaders programme.

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THE PROJECT

THE MEETINGS

Patients, caregivers, physicians, nurses, administrators, architects and project managers communicate differently and use fundamentally different languages based on their backgrounds, perspectives and priorities. The ranges of personal cognitive styles are well documented: logical and methodical versus intuitive and quantitative and numerical versus qualitative and emotional. When a lack of useful shared terms enters the mix, collaboration, innovation and progress becomes virtually impossible. This situation plagued a comprehensive team of stakeholders who invited service designers from the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation (CFI) to collaborate in developing the Phoenix Advancement Project (PCAP) a 200,000+ square-foot consolidated cancer centre for the Mayo Clinic’s Arizona campus. Tasked specifically to help improve the patient experience, CFI found our real value lay in looking at the needs of the patients, providers (physicians, nurses and other staff ) and also in facilitating communication between various stakeholders.

The PCAP project’s intent is to create a completely new facility and new ways of operating that will respond to coming changes in healthcare reform with a dramatically improved patient experience. Departmental teams of clinical staff were partnered with representatives from Operations, Project Planning and Design, Systems and Procedures and CFI to understand how to transform their practices and with new and improved offerings.

At early programming meetings, discussions revolved around square footage, something doctors and nurses do not really understand, except as a measure of spatial currency. Using a vocabulary based solely on quantitative measures of area as opposed to a lexicon that included experiential measures and descriptors creates high barriers to understanding and collaboration. People with sincerely positive intentions ended up in escalating conflicts of demand and refusal. A typical conversation involved statements such as: “We currently have

Allisontest Matthews, Diane Klein

cross-discipline

1,200 square feet. To improve outcomes and experience we need 25% more.” This was followed by a standard reply: “We have limited space. Why do you think you need that many square feet?” A discussion was being had where neither party could make headway.

TOOLS

To free teams up to think differently, we created a series of tools to uncover previously unknown areas of opportunity. Some tools target reframing a conversation, while others focus on moving a discussion along.

These tools, developed to change the trajectory and nature of the conversations, give the workgroups the ability to express patient needs. The team is now truly developing a future state.

Three tools outlined below, ‘What If?’, ‘Persona Pairs’, and ‘Patient Journey Cards: from Symptom to Aftercare’, are for progressive stages of the design process.

‘What If?’: A brainstorming tool Instead of talking about office space versus clinical space or desks and chairs, this tool asks the team to think of all of the things we would hope to accomplish in an ideal world. It asks ‘why?’ and ‘why not?’. Using this tool, we create a framework and a language to get at real needs, both met and unmet. Conversations shift

from, ‘Check-in will need more room for staff’, to, ‘Maybe there’s another way to do this.’ We are now figuring out ways to check in faster, planning alternative waiting spaces and thinking about things for patients and their families to do between appointments. We can run lowfidelity experiments to try things out.

‘What If?’ at a glance • What it is: a paper-based tool aimed at shifting conversations from practical to aspirational.

• Why we use it: to develop a common aspirational language.

• The big win: setting the tone for conversations.

• When to use it: to kick-off meetings, for understanding current vs. ideal workflows, with diverse groups.

Persona Pairs ‘The needs of the patient comes first’ is a core Mayo value, and Mayo does an outstanding job fulfilling a patient’s clinical needs. CFI uses a human-centred focus to transform the experience and touchpoint 5-2 13

Patient Persona Pair delivery of healthcare. But how do you invite the patient, the most important stakeholder, into each team conversation?

It is impractical to bring patents into every meeting, so the ‘Persona Pairs’ tool was developed to give a voice to patients and their caregivers. Patients rarely act or make decisions alone. Key healthcare interactions involve both a patient and caregiver, so we match representative patients and caregivers to create Persona Pairs. Persona Pairs are compiled from active research, ranging from patient interviews to workbooks, and surveys. Each Persona Pair included a simple story to personalise the patient and caregiver needs on their healthcare journey.

Using the Persona Pairs in meetings flips conversations from ‘I know my patients and my patients prefer this’, to ‘It seems Dorothy and her husband would like to explore these options’.

The teams were able to quickly see things through someone else’s eyes.

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Persona Pairs at a glance • What it is: archetypes to create patient personas and caregiver persona pairings. Each one is intended to represent a class of people with similar needs. They are amalgamations of real stories from real people’s experiences.

• How we use it: to generate ideas and to evaluate them.

• The big win: getting a new perspective without bias, shifting the conversation from department needs to patient needs.

• When to use it: to get at customer needs.

Patient Journey Cards: from Symptom to Aftercare Patient Journey Cards: from Symptom to Aftercare, tie the interests and concerns of all the stakeholders together in an interactive tool. By focusing on questions and concerns of the patients throughout their healthcare journey, along with goals, obstacles and areas of opportunity within the institution, we create something for team members to push back on in meetings.

cross-discipline Patient Journey Card

Patient Journey Cards at a glance What it is: Cards designed to represent important moments, questions, opportunities and concerns in the patient journey both in the current state and the ideal state.

How we use it: As a conversation starter to help ‘think big’.

The big win: Helping the group think about an ideal state.

When to use it: During the co-creation of new processes.

5. Get stakeholders to open up to the possibility of change. Get them to suspend their disbelief by providing tools that allow them to more concretely and collaboratively discuss a future state. Help team members step into someone else’s shoes. Once a team can understand each other’s perspectives, the conversation is productive and working together is satisfying and even fun.

WORDS OF WISDOM OR, ‘THINGS WE LEARNED THE HARD WAY’

CONCLUSIONS – IT’S ALL ABOUT THE

1. The win is setting the tone for conversations that lend themselves to innovation.

2. Understand how each stakeholder thinks and set up situations where they can be comfortable. If your stakeholders typically use structure, provide structure to the conversation.

3. If the first tool doesn’t work try another one. Not every tool works for every group. It’s difficult to predict which tool will work. Bring backups. Bail early when necessary.

4. Bring tools, provocative ideas and half-baked concepts to early meetings. Give people something to push back on to get a reaction from the group.

CONVERSATIONS

Everything we are doing is to make conversations easier so the teams can innovate a future ideal state for PCAP. That includes the tools we use, the tools we abandon, the research we bring back to the group and the experiments we try, whether they end in success or failure. It is about letting each team member drop their own preconceived constraints and begin talking about a future state in a common language.

•

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Government ICT: From Infrastructure to Service Enabler

Mel Edwards is principal at Design Managers Australia.

She has practiced and built service design capability in the public and private sector including insurance, industry bodies, taxation, human services, transport and local government.

The public sector executive looked at their telephone and said: “It’s just a plastic box on a desk until there are services connected to it – we need to make sure both those things happen.” And so began our long-term relationship with the Australian Taxation Office’s (ATO) Infrastructure group.

One risk to organisations that are striving to be customer and service-centric can be too much focus on externalfacing touchpoints and services, such as a website. We believe that for any organisation to be truly customer and service-centric, a focus on all layers of a complex organisation is critical, both the customer-facing external touchpoints and the internal organisational capabilities.

SERVICE DESIGN IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR

Justin Barrie is founder and principal at Design Managers Australia. He’s worked with clients in taxation, policing, scientific research, water management, human services, health, sports, industry development and local government.

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Design Managers Australia (DMA) has spent the last decade working with the Australian public sector to make a difference in people’s lives by applying service design practice and shaping services in areas such as taxation, environmental management and human services.

This case study explores how we’ve applied service design practice and thinking in an Information Communication and Technology (ICT) environment. It demonstrates how the work we have done has helped to shift the test Edwards, Justin Barrie Mel

mindset of senior ICT executive leaders from managing the delivery of technology products to being enablers of service and business outcomes.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is responsible for administering a range of taxation and superannuation services for businesses and individuals.

In this context – as in any complex organisation – ICT is critical for both enabling and delivering these services.

‘Infrastructure’ includes foundation services such as networks, centralised computing hardware, end-user technologies, phones and other devices. These are the very things taxpayers, businesses, intermediaries and the ATO supporting staff use to understand, comply and effectively access service delivery.

In 2009, a significant organisational shift occurred with an outsourced multi-vendor environment introduced to deliver the different and increasingly complex Infrastructure platforms and services. This shift resulted in a number of implementation challenges including

cross-discipline

usiness Need Identified ‘ATO Plan’

prioritise/engage

EST Mgmt Cttee

I Prioritise for Impact Assessment

FWP

(current)

Triage Cttee

EPMO

TAA

TA

EAS

Collaboratively assess impact from Infrastructure perspective

IPO

Proj #1

Proj #4

System Maintenance

DR

IPO

Service Catalogue

D

Monitors & assures spend

I

Type of Work

CC

Q1

Q2

‘work engagement Option 1 agreement’ (incl WR, quote, ATP)

D

IPO C&R

D

Q3

Q4

Watching Brief

a need to focus on collaboration between outsourced providers, pressure for benefits realisation and expectations of innovation in infrastructure delivery.

Condition of State The multi-vendor infrastructure environment is managed by ATO Service Operations (SO) a group ultimately responsible for the delivery of ICT infrastructure, such as call-centre facilities, through outsourced provider arrangements. They came to us seeking a new way to approach infrastructure delivery to ensure it consciously supported the business of the ATO and was not just an old ICT view of products from vendors.

Contracted Services Capacity Management System Maintenance & Disaster Recovery

DESIGNING THE SERVICES SYSTEM FROM WITHIN

With SO as partner and collaborator, three significant shifts in mindset have stood out, both for us and for SO. Visualisation to explore and create shared meaning Dubbed the ‘Jelly Baby’ diagram (see above), we were able to describe the multi-vendor environment at a visual level that people from different perspectives and disciplines could relate to. Though having the hallmarks of a process map, it was actually articulated as an experience map. This difference meant we could sequence activities in non-process language and show the entire ecosystem while focusing on the specific internal

Captures

SP

If single service bundle, SP works direct with EA (if App-led) Design & Requirements Activity

D

Option 2

SPO PL

SP SPM

Change EST Forward Work Program Small Change - Infrastructure EA Support & Server Provisioning Provider Improvement Projects

Run

(if App-led)

MNS

Capability, Strategy

Provides Technical Assurance across solution development

Requirements

Monitors/ Reports Progress

EUTS

Service Management ‘Portfolio’ ESMC

SPM

EA PM

D

Proj #10

Contracted Services

TA

Facilitates request

Run ‘Portfolio’ Capacity Planning

E

Proj #3

SPA PM

(if Tech-led)

Impact Assessment (incl ROM, high-level reqs.)

E

Change ‘Portfolio’

Updates

EPMO

EA

SO Resource Management Schedule

Prioritises & allocated Resource

FWP

(updated)

Collaboratively assess impact from Applications perspective

EA

D

E

Collaboratively assess impact from Technical Architecture & Assurance, Trusted Access perspective

Seek Impact Assessment

Reports

detailed design/monitor

Prioritise for Impact Assessment (if outside Triage remit)

Change Articulated

I

assess / high-level design

SP

View of Service Operations in the End-to-End (extract)

If multi-service bundle, SPO PL facilitates activity, with EA (if App-led)

service that enabled the other services.

The visualisation became a tangible meeting of ‘what we say we do’ and ‘what we actually do’. Not everyone agreed with all of the detail in the map, but the conversation it created was invaluable because the visualisation not only helped the decision-makers involved make sense of their world, but also enabled them to discuss and assess the impacts of change.

This continues to be proven with the ‘Jelly Baby’ picture still referenced as shorthand for what the designed state looks like.

During this work, it was important for us to be clear that our job was not to validate or fix what they did (or didn’t) do, but rather to reflect back to them what actually happened so that it could be a starting point for exploring different options and scenarios towards service ecosystem maturity.

Designing for an operating model paradigm shift ICT can sometimes allow itself to become the downstream providers of product. touchpoint 5-2 17

When critical questions arose around the specifics of how the portfolios of infrastructure delivery are managed and organised for response, the opportunity arose to embark on a new detailed service design project that would provide SO with a tangible way to re-define themselves as providers of services.

The concept of an Infrastructure Portfolio Office (IPO), a group responsible for making sure complex enabling services could be delivered sustainably, had been identified in other work. In fact, it had already been implemented without any design work.

We worked with an ATO team of non-designers and technical subject matter experts from different disciplines. Over six weeks, we collaboratively explored, prototyped and developed a range of key design elements including the IPO service offer, value proposition, service element breakdown, user typologies and operating principles. The result provided a significant paradigm shift for our clients, compelling them to adhere to strict

Workshopping service concept with different teams

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value propositions and structures, but realising through this that an IPO with a focus on service could offer a platform for engagement across the organisation. More significantly, Service Operation’s thinking evolved from ‘how does the multi-vendor environment operate’ to ‘how do we support the ATO’s business outcomes through a service-enabling multi-vendor environment’.

Reframing ICT service to meet business need Good design is confrontational, because it challenges how people and functions may see or define their role in a service system.

This was particularly relevant when we embarked on exploring how ‘The Business’ (translation: everyone outside of ICT) could play a more active role within the ICT environment.

Understanding and articulating the experience of The Business was critical in an organisation where ICT is operating with a range of other organisational drivers, such as: • Key operational areas having deep experience as the ‘end-user’ of technology providers.

• The increased outsourcing of taxation activities to intermediaries such as tax agents and accountants, or to citizens.

• Increased delivery of services in a whole-of-government setting.

Rather than simply report back on what The Business could do to be active, the challenge presented by our work was, instead, to reframe the position of the ICT group. It shifted from an ICT-centric view to a view that focuses on presenting opportunities to better support The Business for ATO outcomes.

cross-discipline

CHANGE

Putting business outcomes at the centre of ICT service delivery

Collaborative to improve

Translation of the Business need ICT Delivery Framework

what we can do to drive the business forward.

RUN Reactive to resolve

MAINTAIN

what i’m working through via service management.

We were then able to describe an evolving roadmap of work for how Infrastructure could be delivered better with Business and for Business.

The combination of the challenge of new ways of seeing their role, the concept of being part of a service system, and the detailed roadmap for change became a catalyst for how they actually needed to change.

SERVICE DESIGN AS THE ‘HOW’ PROCESS

In this case study, we’ve explored the value of service design to find, show and describe the middle ground that connects the ‘plastic boxes’ to customer and citizen outcomes, and it’s where our client has found significant value and new ways of thinking. While the topic of this program of work is ICT-specific, the service design methods are applicable across a range of industries because, at heart, the work was about understanding service need and the desired business outcome.

As Craig Fox, Assistant Commissioner, Service Operations said: “You challenged us to think differently. … You said, unless you change the ecosystem this

what we can do via service management to address systemic issues.

Responsive to solve

capability has to work within, it’s not going to work.” We believe that good service design results in people being able to make decisions that are right for them and their circumstances, whether it is the customer, the citizen, the call centre operator, the business analyst, the team leader or the manager. In this case, solutions provided through the multivendor environment are going to be of a higher quality because they have stopped being about the ‘box’ and have started being about the service that the box enables for staff and customers.

•

For this case study, we would like to acknowledge the generous input and partnership of Craig Fox - assistant commissioner, service operations, Jim Mahon - director, infrastructure portfolio office, and Kristin Auguszczak – director, business strategy and improvement.

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Feature

Designing Citizen-Centred Public Services Discover how service design is being employed to make government services more citizen-centred.

Connecting Practice and Policymaking Creating the government of British Columbia Digital Service Strategy

Jess McMullin is founder of the Centre for Citizen Experience, a strategic design consultancy dedicated to the public sector.

Alex MacLennan is acting executive director for strategic policy and Initiatives in The Ministry of Technology, Innovation and Citizens’ Services of British Columbia.

Dominique Bohn is director, Design for the User Experience Design Team in the Ministry of Technology, Innovation, and Citizens’ Services.

Blair Neufeld is director, Information Architecture for the User Experience Design Team in the Ministry of Technology, Innovation, and Citizens’ Services.

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The British Columbia Public Service (BCPS) is developing its Digital Service Strategy that shapes how services are holistically designed across channels. Establishing service design as a recognised practice within the BCPS is an integral aspect of implementing the strategy and builds on existing user experience practice. Service design methods also informed and shaped the initial strategy itself. The authors are part of the team working on the strategy and its implementation. We share our success factors, process, lessons learned and our next steps.

We anticipate that this will spark a discussion within both the service design community and the broader public sector about how best to build bridges between strategic policymaking and the professional practice of service design and how to build service design capability and capacity within government.

THE NEED FOR SERVICE STRATEGY

Governments face significant challenges, such as resource limits, rising expectations of citizens, demographic shifts due to an ageing population, a shrinking tax base, and complex social challenges such as globalisation, economic uncertainty,and climate change. In addition to these challenges,

democratic governments face increasing disengagement from the electorate. Lower voter participation shows increasing indifference to the government. Media coverage and peer conversations often frame the government negatively, both demonstrating and causing a lack of confidence in it. This lack of confidence undermines the government’s credibility and increases costs. To demonstrate: one participant in our research called three times in one day with the same question to ensure that she got consistent answers.

For the British Columbia Public Service, the strategic response to these challenges is Citizens @ the Centre1, which anchors three shifts in the government that aim to provide better services and

Jess McMullin, Alex MacLennan, Dominique Bohn, Blair Neufeld

designing citizen-centred public services

efficiency success use quality

Quality provides the foundation for efficiency decision making: citizen participation, service innovation and business innovation.

Foundational initiatives were put in place to propel transformation in the public service including ‘Open Data’, ‘Open Information’, ‘Citizen Engagement’ and an iInternet strategy based on a new approach to the citizencentric web. The service-innovation shift, of which the internet strategy represents the initial efforts, is centred on finding opportunities for self-service by focusing on the needs of the citizen rather than the organisation.

SUCCESS FACTORS OF DIGITAL SERVICE STRATEGY

The ‘Digital Service Strategy’ builds on these foundational initiatives, and develops capability within an organisation to design and deliver valuable digital services to both citizens and government.

Governments worldwide are trying to understand why they have not achieved anticipated outcomes around the shift to digital: in many jurisdictions the results from digital investments have been far short of the value that

digital has brought to the private sector.

For example, government call centres are often swamped with simple queries and transactions that create backlogs, which prevents staff from spending their time providing more valuable services.

Compare this with Dell’s next-day onsite warranty service, which lowers call centre pressure using a remote diagnostic tool to reduce troubleshooting time and ensures that repair technicians are dispatched only for cases that actually require them.

Governments face significant risk when they embrace the digitisation of services, but the potential for meaningful positive transformation and the increasing expectations of citizens demand that this shift occur.

At its best, the Digital Service Strategy can help counteract the pressures on government by providing better outcomes for stakeholders and facilitating the reallocation of resources.

By transforming the service experience by adopting new tools and perspectives, we can reframe challenges, avoid wasted efforts, find new opportunities and increase value for the public. By becoming the channel of choice, digital service will allow for more efficient and effective use of scarce resources and provide services that citizens will prefer to use. touchpoint 5-2 23

In examining the industry, other jurisdictions and BC’s own context, we uncovered five primary success factors that can improve digital return on investment and mitigate risks in our approach: 1. Focus on quality: understand citizens’ needs 2. Integrate digital service holistically 3. Connect policymaking and frontline service delivery 4. Build organisational process and capability FOCUS ON QUALITY

Designing with a singular focus on efficiency increases the risk of developing services that citizens are less likely to use.

The path to better outcomes for citizens and government starts with quality. When we build quality services that add value to the citizen experience, they are more likely to be used and used successfully.

Only through repeated success will digital service become the channel of preference, which will allow for better demand and resource management. This is how we will realise efficiency.

Understanding the components of a quality experience is the starting point in allowing governments to prioritise their efforts.

UNDERSTAND CITIZENS’ NEEDS

It is easy to become distracted in the novelty of emerging digital capabilities, from mobile devices to social media to ‘Big Data’. That novelty can overshadow the real reason for utilising digital services: creating public value by enhancing the citizen’s experience with their government.

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A comprehensive understanding of the citizen experience and citizen values in service delivery not only allows us to build services to meet those needs, but also enables us to prioritise our efforts.

Experience-led insight allows us to design self-service in the interactions in which government personnel are not essential to the experience. This helps to ensure resources are available to citizens for their most complex and critical needs and to support citizens those who are unable or unwilling to self-serve.

When we recognise that experiences span the entire system of government, and when digital integrates as part of the holistic system, value is realised.

INTEGRATE DIGITAL SERVICES HOLISTICALLY

Successful experiences come from approaching services holistically: throughout the entire system, reaching across all programs and channels. Many digital initiatives falter when they are perceived as something separate and independent from the entire business of government. Yet, when digital channels falter, their users shift channels to more expensive delivery options like call centres and service counters. Minimise this channel shift by designing digital as an enabler that is connected as a larger experience across touchpoints (people interact with government).

One pivotal transition for successful implementation of the Digital Service Strategy is shifting the view of service design as a surface interface question and instead seeing service design as a practice to address integrated service architecture.

designing citizen-centred public services

citizen needs and value drivers

strategic planning and prioritisation

continuous improvement

service experience design

service delivery service build

Intentional design of holistic service architectures helps close the gap between decision making and actual frontline services.

CONNECT POLICY-MAKING AND FRONTLINE SERVICE DELIVERY

Governments must develop more effective tools to manage the direct implications of policymaking on service delivery, and the service experience of citizens. Too often, these are treated as independent pursuits, and the resulting disconnect is felt by the citizens. Understanding the implications of decisions at any level of an organisation allows alignment of those decisions in a way that provides a quality experience. Service architecture is a systemic consideration of the interrelated impacts on the service experience from frontline service delivery, technology, process, policy and legislation.

It provides an end-to-end alignment between all the elements needed to deliver a service. This bridges the gap to bring policymaking and services closer together, enabling better decisions and better overall delivery.

Closing the gap between intention and implementation demands more than working on individual projects: it requires a shift in organisational processes, capabilities and behaviours.

BUILD ORGANISATIONAL PROCESS AND CAPABILITY

Single projects can be tremendously successful in producing specific outcomes. They are even more valuable when they enable future success by integrating with other ongoing project efforts. To achieve integration, we need to cultivate a clear, repeatable and understood approach to how we design and deliver services that can be scaled to the enterprise. This capability is not only needed in the specialists designing services and their supporting architecture, but requires the wider public service to build competency about the use of design. This means accessible design tools and perspectives that integrate with an existing toolset. We are integrating service design and other established tools ourselves as part of our strategy process.

OUR PROCESS

We have carried out an extensive business discovery process, a proof-of-concept service design project and have defined our initial strategy. Our goal is to implement a service lifecycle that incorporates service design principles with other complementary tools in what we call the ‘Optimal Service Model’. Internally, we engaged a management consultancy to support our business discovery, analyse international research, review jurisdictional practice, and interview dozens of senior leaders throughout the government. touchpoint 5-2 25

The Optimal Service Model provides a framework that uses service design principles to create integrated service architectures.

We engaged external subject matter experts to work with our own user experience team to run a small three-week service design project. This project provided a frontline-and-citizen perspective that also informed our strategy conversation and shaped the strategy itself.

For that project, we collaborated with a government branch to deliver a rapid multi-touchpoint assessment of their service, including print, web, call centre and front counter. Conducting design reviews, interviewing and observing citizens and working with their staff to complete the assessment has allowed us to use the tools to distil opportunities to improve overall service delivery, and enable valuable digital service offerings.

We gathered evidence to drive insights about each channel for both current successes and future opportunities and documented findings through a research summary and a large-format experience map.

Although this is a typical service design project, unlike most projects, the primary goal was to utilise the outcomes to inform our government-wide strategy and the broad strategic policy decisions that would support it.

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USING SERVICE DESIGN TO INFORM OUR OWN POLICYMAKING

One of the success factors we outlined above is connecting policymaking with frontline service delivery. Our service design proof of concept helped us accomplish that goal during this strategy effort.

The first hand evidence gathered in our service design project informs and anchors the broad organisationscale conversation in the reality of daily service delivery and its impact on real people’s lives. This demonstrated how the application of user experience design techniques can expand and enhance broader service architecture.

The project also served as a proofof-concept to demonstrate the value of this approach as we communicate the overall strategy across government. The impact of frontline service evidence creates a positive feedback loop: when executives experience firsthand the value of this type of process, it becomes a more valuable and vital decision-making tool.

designing citizen-centred public services The experience map integrated frontline research so that executives could easily see both an overview and supporting details of direct service delivery.

Incorporating service design into the decisionmaking process has helped establish a strategic orientation that will enable changes to individual services, and to the entire service architecture of the organisation.

This maturation of our user experience practice and integration of service design in our toolset is already paying dividends. This early success encourages us that there are greater opportunities in the future for service design to help bridge policymaking and frontline delivery, both within the BC Public Service and in the broader public sector.

LESSONS LEARNED

We have learned several key lessons as part of this process.

1. Build on our track record.

BC has a track record of earlier success, particularly in implementing user experience design to consolidate our web presence. This foundation has made it much easier to expand our work to begin addressing channels and services holistically 2. Small changes create capacity for bigger transformation.

Our past work has also created a greater transformation capacity within different lines of business across government. Doing small things differently has prepared the public service to commit to a bigger change.

3. Integrate public-sector toolsets.

Service design is far from the only useful tool in the public service. This service innovation shift works to integrate various tools, such as Lean and citizen participation, and that integration increases the value of the entire methodology.

4. Evidence and experience mapping are powerful change management tools.

Visualising the service experience through mapping and direct evidence helps frame the conversation, allowing decision-makers to integrate high-level concepts and daily frontline needs.

NEXT STEPS

Our initial strategy direction has been endorsed, but there is still a significant amount of work. We have four main efforts that we are working on: First, we are using corporate transformation planning to communicate this strategic shift, and to surface the best opportunities for implementation; Second, we are looking at opportunities to further engage citizens about our strategic direction and what they value from digital services; Third, we are defining the internal business model to create capacity, competency and sustain this effort, and are identifying pilot projects to inform and improve the model; Last, we will continue our on-going efforts to establish digital capabilities that are informed by citizen need and support digital services experiences.

By adopting service design in both practice and policymaking in the BC Public Service, we expect that our Digital Service Strategy will create public value, improve service outcomes and increase the capability of government to deliver the service innovation shift required for public service transformation.

•

Reference 1 Government of British Columbia. (2010). Citizens @ the Centre. [Online] Retrieved May 22, 2013, from http:// www.gov.bc.ca/citz/citizens_engagement/gov20.pdf.

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Michael Sedelmeyer is a senior business operations analyst at EMC Global Services. His core focus is on strategy and innovation in services.

Making Service Design a Solution for Government Program Managers Understanding barriers and challenges to government service innovation With government organisations increasingly responding to challenges by innovating within their services, how do we ensure that citizen-centred design plays a central role in this rising tide of innovation? Clear communication and mutual understanding between service design professionals and the civil servants who manage government programmes is key to ensuring that it occurs.

INNOVATION IN GOVERNMENT SERVICES

Increasing complexity, diminishing budgets, shifting demographics and changing needs and expectations of citizens are pressuring civil servants tasked with managing government programmes to develop new government services and change the ways in which old services are delivered. However, these government programme managers face discouraging barriers to innovation. Not only do citizens often exhibit ambivalence toward their role as innovators, government organisations rarely face direct competition. These factors can preclude a civil servant’s desire to innovate. Additionally, the failure of a new service programme often becomes a newsworthy event, 28

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Michael Sedelmeyer test

attracting attention from the press and political opponents. Likewise, if a new service programme demonstrates relative success, the lack of a single common measure of success – particularly one as pervasive as profit is in the private sector – makes it difficult to compare outcomes across radically different government services.1 These factors all conspire to reinforce risk-averse behaviour and can lead civil servants to overlook (or avoid) service innovation as a means to improve citizen-centred services.

The good news is it does not always have to be this way. There are promising signs that governments are beginning to embrace their role as service innovators. Whether a city government creates an office tasked

with supporting innovation activities across its entire organisation, similar to the City of Boston’s Office of New Urban Mechanics2 or a national government develops an advisory council on government innovation, as a number of governments are beginning to do, these organisations are taking steps toward recognising and legitimising their role as innovators. It is then the mid- and upper-level programme managers within these organisations who will play key roles in coordinating and executing subsequent service innovation efforts.

RIDING A RISING TREND OF GOVERNMENT INNOVATION

These changing circumstances raise an important question for those of us who see service design as a powerful tool for enabling citizen-centred services: how can we ensure that the multidisciplinary tools of service design play a central role in this rising tide of government innovation? A relationship built around clear communication and mutual understanding is central to ensuring that this occurs. On one side of this relationship are service design professionals who must understand the needs of government programme managers and decision makers. On the other side are government programme managers who must understand the value that service design can bring to their organisations and citizens. The first side of this relationship is important for ensuring service designers speak to the needs, resources and realities of a particular civil servant.

The second side is important to make explicit the reasons the civil servant must care about service design.

designing citizen-centred public services

Strategic decisions in government programme management must satisfy three key elements.3

a. value

ADDRESSING A PARTICULAR INNOVATION ENVIRONMENT

To more effectively communicate the value of service design to civil servants, it is important to identify two characteristics of their work environment: 1. You will want to understand the scope and structure of organisation-wide innovation efforts that have been implemented as well as any particular programmatic themes to their organisation’s innovation efforts. Do they view innovation as something that drives only efficiency or something that also improves quality and experience? Do they view innovation as synonymous with new technologies or do they take a broader view?

This will help you position service design within the familiar language and processes to which they are accustomed. It will also help you to identify the context within which to frame service design and, if needed, contrast it with their current definitions of innovation.

2. You will also want to draw as clear a line as possible between the benefits of service design for a particular civil servant’s programme and the overarching objectives or vision of their organisation’s top leaders.

Too often, government leaders mandate an agenda of innovation, but engage in little meaningful or continuous communication with those in their organisation about how to carry out that agenda in a way that aligns with larger organisational goals.

Communicate to the realities of a civil servant’s work environment.

service design professional

government organisation

objectives processes resources perceptions needs

civil servant (programme manager)

b.

c.

legitimacy & support

operational capacity

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Being able to address these characteristics of a civil servant’s environment will also allow you to begin addressing the strategic elements that underlie decisions in the management of government programmes. For any innovation to be considered both feasible and favourable by a programme manager, it must satisfy the following three elements. It must (a) align with the value proposition of their organisation and provide clear benefit for their efforts and resources. It must (b) draw from a sufficient source of legitimacy and support inside and outside their organisation in order to ensure backing for the innovation. And it must (c) be within the operational capacity of their organisation in order to ensure that the innovation can be tested and implemented.3 Therefore, by directly addressing the characteristics of a civil servant’s work environment, you begin building an argument that also helps to legitimise service design as something that is both feasible and favourable to integrate as a core component of their programme’s and their organisation’s wider service innovation efforts.

•

1

This framework for understanding barriers to government innovation is drawn from Altshuler, A. A. (1997) “Bureaucratic Innovation, Democratic Accountability, and Political Incentives.” In Innovation in American Government: Challenges, Opportunities, and Dilemmas, edited by Alan A

Altshuler and Robert D Behn. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

An overview of the City of Boston’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and their current municipal innovation projects can be found at http://www. newurbanmechanics.org/boston/.

3 This strategic decision model for public sector management is drawn from Moore, M.H. (2000) ‘Managing for Value: Organizational Strategy in Forprofit, Nonprofit, and Governmental Organizations’. Nonprofit and Volunteer Sector Quarterly, 29 (1), 183–204.

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Lea Ward is the creative director at Cnote (www.cnote.nl), a customerexperience design firm located in Amsterdam. Educated at Yale and INSEAD, Lea has over 30 years of working experience in creating better customer experiences at companies like Procter & Gamble, Ahold, ING and AirFranceKLM. Her work has been recognised in numerous newspapers including The Guardian, NRC Next and the Wall Street Journal, and her team won the Interaction Design Award in New York in 2012. She writes a blog on trust and the customer experience at www.buildingtrustequity.com

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designing citizen-centred public services

This Time, it’s Different A Dutch service tackles inter-generational poverty

How can governments encourage those who have been dependent on social assistance for years to find their own way in society? The Dutch city of The Hague looks to answer that question with a new service.

THE CHALLENGE

The programme stressed the higher goal of establishing a better future for their children to increase motivation.

‘Door-to-Door for Change’ is a pilot project that targets 150 families in The Hague who have been on social assistance for at least three years. The goal is to have 15% of these parents find work and 50% increase their community engagement through volunteer work or neighbourhood activities. Research suggests that having parents work and getting them involved in the community increases the chance that their children will work when they grow up.

To be successful, Door-to-Door for Change addressed two difficult questions: 1. How to inspire parents – who have been fully dependent on the state for years and are often socially isolated – to participate in their community or find a job?

2. How to enthuse social workers who have been working with these clients for years and who may be skeptical of ‘yet another initiative’?

Jan Donders from Social Services in the Hague turned to Cnote, a service design firm in Amsterdam, to help answer those questions. Together, they created a service that is significantly different than other ‘back-to-work’ programmes, in several ways: • Neighbourhood focus – social workers visit families in their homes and propose activities that will bring parents one step closer to work or to increased involvement in the neighbourhood. Examples include visiting a day care centre to

Lea Ward

touchpoint 5-2 31

“By visiting people in their home, in their neighbourhood, I enter their world. It makes it easier for them to take the first step.” social worker find out about child care or volunteering to help clean the local church or mosque.

• Intrinsic motivation as guiding force: from the outset, participants are asked why they would like to work if they could, in effect identifying their own personal ‘What’s in it for me?’. This contrasts to a more traditional approach that assigns work without considering the underlying motivation to work.

Frequently articulated motivations for wanting to work include: “To become a role model for my children”; “To feel healthy again” or “To earn my own money.” These motivations are used to guide and shape the programme that participants follow to find work.

• Interactive design: many participants in the programme are socially isolated and passive, so the service uses engaging tools like flash cards to help participants voice their thoughts while encouraging a dialogue between participants and social workers.

• Open communication: the programme uses a visual language with simple text in an informal, non-bureaucratic style.

This creates a more human relationship between family and social worker.

HOW SERVICE DESIGN HELPED IN FOUR STEPS

A core team, including social workers, managers and designers, followed a structured design process to ensure that the service would have the best chance of success.

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Step 1: Understand needs The team delved into the needs of the two groups who are key to the project outcome: the families and the social workers.

The families: the team reviewed 50+ in-depth interviews among people long dependent on social assistance, in order to gain insight into the different attitudes, objectives and capabilities.

They identified six distinct ‘customer groups’, based on shared attitudes and needs with respect to working and/or getting involved in their community.

The largest is the ‘Single Mothers’ group, who often have limited education and understanding of the Dutch language. They have become reliant on social assistance over time and may not understand the practical steps for finding work or arranging for day care.

Based on the interviews, the team surmised that this group benefits from positive coaching, combined with pragmatic, concrete steps towards action.

Another group is the ‘Sofa Citizens’, parents who have lost contact with the outside world and have become so socially isolated that they start to believe in their own mental and physical barriers. This group needs to have their concerns taken seriously, while at the same time needs to be encouraged to take small steps that build up their confidence, enabling them to move out of the house and into the neighbourhood.

“I haven’t worked ever since I delivered my first [child]. It’s been over six years now and I have some health issues, too. I’d like to get out of the house more often, but who would want

designing citizen-centred public services

‘Motivation’ and ‘Obstacle’ cards

to hire this single mum with hardly any work experience? Where do I look for a job or some volunteer work? I just don’t know where to start.”

The social workers: these professionals are a committed and highly experienced group. Many have worked exclusively for the city, and many of them have become used to the procedures and forms that come with city work. Given this, the service uses new tools that put forms aside and encourage an active dialogue between client and social worker.

The materials visually focus on the end goal of finding work, so that social workers look at the total process, rather than on just one interaction or home visit.

Since social workers often see clients failing to find work and slipping back onto social assistance, it was important to consider how to motivate the team for this admittedly challenging task. The training materials highlighted the fact that the pilot helps both the parents and the children and that success could mean changing a young person’s life forever.

or an activity that increases community engagement. In creative sessions, the core team learned to design a total journey that would achieve the goal of getting parents to become more independent, rather than, for example, a single protocol for a home visit. This start-to-finish design approach had two benefits: First, it made it clear that the social workers would need to play a role right through to the end of the journey, whereas the original idea was to have their role stop after referring the participant to a community organisation.

A participant holds on to her selected motivation cards and discusses them with the social worker

Step 2: Design the journey, focusing on the end goal With the needs understood, the team turned to designing out the journey, from the start, when a parent is invited to participate in the programme, to the finish, when a parent has found work touchpoint 5-2 33

These organisations are short on resources, and do not have the same end goal as the social workers (eg. Get the parents to work), so the chance for success was limited. Instead, the team decided to keep responsibility for the end result with the social worker, and add in follow-up moments with participants and local organisations to make sure that goals were met.

Second, the design process helped create a journey that provides the support that participants need to complete the programme. For example, instead of just sending a formal letter to announce the programme, the team decided to have social workers send a personal postcard 48 hours before the first home visit. This helped to reduce possible anxiety about the home visit: this gesture starts to build a bond even before the social worker’s visit.

Step 3: Design materials that support the journey The materials are designed to guide, excite and empower both parents and social workers to achieve their goals.

For example, he social worker has a participant pick three cards that best answer the question, “Imagine, if you could work, why would you want to?”.

This helps the participant find his voice and enter into a dialogue with the social worker. who asks: ‘Why is feeling healthy your most important reason for wanting to work?’ There are also cards to discuss obstacles that stand in the way of finding a job, such as ‘Debts’ or ‘Language’.

This enables participants to talk about personal issues involving their health and mental or social situation.

The outcome of this first exploration is captured in ‘My Plan’, an interactive book that defines what participants want to achieve and that marks their progress. For example, the social worker connects participants’ goals to concrete tasks like ‘Find the Volunteer Board at the local community house’ or ‘Visit the local day care centre and enquire about the waiting list’. On subsequent visits, the social worker discusses how the participant experienced the task and decides on the next task in ‘My Plan’. This continues until the participant has reached their goal of finding work or volunteering in the community.

My Plan booklet, with the My Situation page that records goals, obstacles and interests 34

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designing citizen-centred public services

Step 4: Train, measure and adjust The service ensured that social workers were fully prepared to start the programme. A handbook takes social workers step-by-step through how the programme works. It also introduces the different participant groups and how their needs differ. In iterative training sessions, the social workers are able to try out the new materials, for example, mastering how to use the card game or fill in the ‘My Plan’ booklet.

Additionally, a measurement plan was designed to track progress.

An independent agency measured the parents’ participation levels before, during and after one year, to assess whether the programme was achieving the goal of getting parents more involved in their community.

RESULTS

The programme started in January and, based on initial feedback, the pilot will be extended in July to 350 families, adding eight additional social workers to the original team of four. This initial success stems from creating a service that builds on the needs of both the social worker and the participant. Not surprisingly, both are enthusiastic. Social workers find that the program helps participants overcome passivity, while keeping them on track.

“If someone sees the card about violence displayed on their kitchen table, it’s no longer a taboo, and they are free to talk about it. Some participants actually hold their goal cards to their chest and say: ‘if only, if only!’.” – social worker The participants who were interviewed experienced it as “completely

The handbook social workers take with them to home visits includes all materials needed to conduct a home visit

different” to other city services and experienced hope and motivation.

“Receiving the postcard, having her come to my home... deciding on small steps I can take right here around the corner, this feels different.” – Mrs. M. In summary, using a service design approach, the team created a pilot that focuses participants and social workers on their goals, gives them the tools to get there and moves them from an initial skepticism to an enthusiastic conviction that this time truly is different.

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Viable: Balancing Community Experience and Government Strategy

Darren Menachemson is a principal at ThinkPlace, a leading strategic design consultancy that works with government agencies to architect the user experience of public services.

Darren has worked on many of Australia’s largest Government programs designing systemic change in healthcare, social disadvantage, renewable energy, taxation, law enforcement and international aid.

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Every day, people across the planet interact with a range of public systems that have been designed (and are operated and regulated) by governments and their partners. These are ‘Big S’ systems like the health system, the tax system or the social welfare system: amazingly complex amalgams that come together to provide critical services for people. In one way or another, they touch people’s lives and shape the communities we live in.

At ThinkPlace, much of our work is about bringing government and the community together to design changes into public systems that will powerfully and positively affect both service deliverers and the service users. And it is in this collaboration where things tend to get even more complicated: in our experience, there is a deep conceptual difference between how government and how citizens understand public systems.

This difference in expectations emerges strongly when we perform citizen research studies and public co-design activities.

Far from being something negative however, each of these different perspectives is a critical element of effective, sustainable design. Both perspectives must be harnessed to deliver public value.

Darren Menachemson test

In this vein, designing services is about avoiding compromises that create poor service outcomes. Instead, government service designers must find new balance points where citizen and government needs and preferences are met, in tune with each other.

HOW THE GOVERNMENT UNDERSTANDS “VIABLE” SERVICE DELIVERY, AND WHY CITIZENS THINK DIFFERENTLY

Governments have a natural and understandable inclination to think of the design of public service delivery as being naturally tied to the structure of the government machinery (agencies, programs etc) that delivers and regulates it. In this way of thinking, services are carved up and clustered by agency or program and inherit a particular set of contact channels, branding, service

designing citizen-centred public services

differing perspectives Government and the community see public systems and services very differently. Both perspectives are needed to find the right balance point that will lead to a viable design.

viable design cost, strategy, administrability

need, preference, exprience

Harnessing the perspectives of government and the community

metaphors, service quality expectations, terminology, rules, technology platforms, citizen identities and process flows accordingly.

In this view of the world (and given a particular policy outcome being sought), there is a strong tendency to define what a ‘viable service’ is from a cost perspective (‘Can we afford it?’), from an administration perspective (‘Can we work in this way?’) and from a strategic perspective (‘Will this take us where we want to go in the longer term?’). All of these are valid viewpoints, but there’s a fundamental piece that is missing: the service experience perspective.

It is perhaps unsurprising then that when, say, a person is diagnosed with a chronic health condition, their experience with their government can be administratively messy and fragmented.

They may need a range of services to educate, inform and support them that do not fit neatly into the administrative boundaries of a single agency. For example, they may need to access social

payments through the welfare system, carer services through the community system, hospital and ancillary services through the health system and negotiate flexible arrangements (for example, with the tax system) during the course of their recovery to help them meet their obligations in times of hardship.

When people and their families are in this position, they do not want to grapple with a complex series of citizen/government interactions. Common themes that we hear from people describing a viable government service are that it must: • Be easy to access and easy to use.

• Be integrated to reduce repetition (e.g. a citizen telling the same story over and over again, or registering again and again).

• Provide fundamentals consistent with other, related services (e.g. the same terminology for the same concepts).

• Smoothly flow with other services or, even better, have multiple outcomes (even if they are cross-agency or cross-program) emerge from a single service interaction rather than (as one user puts it) having a service “relay race”.

This all sounds fairly reasonable: unfortunately, the public systems involved are so horrendously complex that these qualities can be difficult to implement consistently. touchpoint 5-2 37

LESSONS FROM DOWN UNDER

Australia is a good case study of a maturing government investment in service design. Pioneered by the Australian Tax Office around the turn of the century, the systematic application of co-design approaches to public systems has found traction with major agencies that are concerned with border management, social protection and many other areas of public administration.

The quality that makes Australia particularly interesting is that, in agencies that have adopted design, it has been used not just at an interaction level (e.g. designing a usable form/website or a particular service flow). Rather, a design approach and community-centric thinking is increasingly injected into the most senior strategic conversations. And the power of this is enormous.

“Australia is a good case study of a maturing government investment in service design.”

In our experience, exposing senior government officials to the stories of the citizens they serve can be a powerful catalyst for innovation and change. For one thing, the realities of what it means to be (for example) a student or a small business, homeless or chronically ill, a public transport user or a rural dweller, can precipitate a dramatic rethinking of how citizen-government touch-points should work.

This rethinking is because empathy for and understanding of the lives of citizens shifts the conversation from one that is inward-focussed and 38

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administration-centred to outwardly-focussed and community-centred. This shift can, in the course of time, lead to services that are less inclined to bewilder or frustrate, and more inclined to satisfy and value-add.

In short, it can guide a design that is viable both for the government and for the citizen.

The benefits for citizens in this paradigm are big, but it is the benefits and efficiencies for the government that this type of thinking creates that are, quite simply, astounding.

When governments assume a strong outwardfacing philosophy as the basis for public system/service design, they tend to embed very healthy characteristics: • Better-targeted interventions: by understanding the citizen’s life journey, agencies can systemically target small problems before they become big problems. This means they can be resolved more quickly, less painfully, and ultimately at a lower taxpayer cost, in ways that may have never otherwise occurred to the service agency.

• Increased voluntary compliance: by harnessing citizens’ natural ways of operating, rather than forcing them into an unfamiliar and uncomfortable interactions, government can reduce the cost and complexity of regulatory compliance. This means that people are far more likely to work within the rules, reducing the need for costly compliance management processes.

• Increased efficiency: by thinking about the citizen view of service rather than the agency view, innovative opportunities to consolidate service channels and interactions (for example, allowing citizens to achieve multiple goals in a single service interaction that would otherwise have been split up by agency or program structures) can naturally emerge as sensible solutions.

• Removal of low value administration or policy: creating a sophisticated understanding of citizen need means that service investments can be focussed on those measures and approaches that add the highest public value. Investment in areas that sound like a good idea but, in fact, carry very little community outcome can be more confidently identified and avoided, rolled back or simplified.

designing citizen-centred public services

sources of mutual benefit Where outward-facing design philosophies can work for the Government and the community.

Earlier intervention

Increased voluntary compliance Increased efficiency Removal of lowvalue offerings

It is for reasons like this that the Australian government is starting to invest in governmentwide design infrastructure, like DesignGov, a centre established by the most senior levels of public administration governance to explore the use of systemic design to transform public sector approaches.

TRANSFORMING PUBLIC SYSTEMS AND PUBLIC SERVICES

Our experience in applying design approaches to major public sector initiatives has led us to strong conclusions about how design can be used to shape and transform public systems.

1. Build senior public officials’ fluency regarding the community as a critical first step to transforming public systems.

2. In this respect, ethnographic research and codesign approaches become irreplaceable tools.

Involving senior officials in these types of activities can help them build up both a well of community knowledge and give them the insight that they need to create a watershed of cultural change within their organisations.

3. Build acceptance that the citizen is the natural integration point for government services.

Understanding the full complexity of and across large government systems can be very difficult. But we can

Finding mutual value in the design of public services and public systems use the citizen experience as a lens through which all that complexity can be ‘tamed’ and sensible decisions about integrated service design can be made.

4. Talk about the benefits of community-centred design both from a community and a government perspective. Good design is about finding a new and often innovative equilibrium where the system makes compelling sense from both the community and the government perspectives, all at once.

We need to become very good at making this point and bringing the case studies that demonstrate it to the table.

5. See community-centring as a fundamental part of agencies’ strategy cycle. This means that we must have a long term vision and investment strategy for our public systems that is keenly aware of the community experience, and creates transformative value for all participants, all at once.

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designing citizen-centred public services

From Public Service Design to Public Policy Design Opportunities and challenges of service design in government A worldwide movement is growing between design and the public sector. It’s not just about design in urban planning or in public spaces. It’s about service designers tackling bureaucracy, casting a new perspective on traditional methods of public management, and promoting user-driven approaches at every stage of the policy process. This is unchartered territory not only for designers, but also for a certain number of top-level managers and civil servants who see design as a possible missing link in the public innovation process. However, the market remains narrow because of the shrinking budgets in public administrations, leaving many players in a tenuous situation. The main challenges, however, come from within: the development of the sector depends on cultural shifts, such as transforming design practices, changing our vision of public administrations and creating new kinds of partnerships and innovative business models.

LETTING A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOOM…

A workshop focused on procurement, organised by la 27e Région with the civil servants of the regional government of Rhône Alpes (Lyon)

What is the link between IDEO and MindLab? One is a pioneering consultancy, founded in California that opened up new horizons for ‘design thinkers’. The other is a Danish governmental lab that uses design to transform government.

Both are part of a small global movement with a few dozen other players who have been trying to embed citizen-centric de-

Stéphane Vincent, Romain Thévenet

Stéphane Vincent and Romain Thévenet co-founded La 27e Région, a not-for-profit innovation lab supported since 2008 by the 26 French regional governments and the European union.

After a first experience in media companies, Stéphane Vincent has worked for local and national authorities and consultancy dedicated to the public sector. He is the author of several reports and books dedicated to innovation, design and IT. Romain Thévenet is a graduate MA of industrial design from Ensci, Paris. After working in the ecodesign and service design sector, he decided to focus on the design in the public sector. www.la27eregion.fr

test

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Aalto Design Lab

Demos

1995 1996

Zentrum für Sozial Innovation Ensci

Policy Connect

1997 1998

Demos Engine Service Design Design Wales Innovation Unit Mindlab Design Wales

Funky Projects

Grrr

STBY Us Creates

DOTT - design council

NHS

Denokinn

Laboratorio per l’innovazionne Future Gov

Snook

La Cité du Design La 27e Région Talking Things Imagination Lancaster

2000 2001 2002 2003

DSAA Jean Monnet - Yzeure Conseil Général du Val d’Oise

Local authorities

Governments

Nesta 1508 LiveWork De l’Aire Strategic Design Scenarios Kennisland Centre d’innovation Gdynia

2004

Think Public

2005

The Young Foundation

2006 2007 2008 2009

La Fabrique de l’hospitalité 2010

Plausible Possible

Agencies

1999

2011 2012 2013

DESIS Network Yellow Window

Silk

Participle

Innobasque

DSAA Le Corbusier - Strasbourg

Helsinky Design lab

Medea Living Lab

User Studio

Design Territoire Alternatives European Design Innovation Initiative Cornwall Council

Government Digital Service

Exp. Group on public Sector Innovation (CE)

Public Autorities

Conseil Général de Loire Atalntique

Expert committees

Non profit

Schools

Abstract from “Design for public policy: 100 people, 70 organizations, 15 countries”, an infographic by La 27e Région, June 2013 - Full infographics on www.la27eregion.fr

le Timesca

Design for public policy: timeline sign into public administrations for nearly the past 20 years.

BACK TO THE ROOTS OF PUBLIC-INTEREST DESIGN

Despite their extremely diverse backgrounds, all of these players promote the same cross-disciplinary and sociallyanchored design approach. The origins of this vision date back to pioneers like the Austrian-American designer Viktor Papanek (1927-1999), who stressed the importance of designers’ societal responsibility and strongly pushed in favour of sustainable design, not for an elite, but for people with real needs. This vision pertained to product design and created vocations in new kinds of services, targeting social needs, healthcare or 42

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environmental issues. Years later, a small-but-growing number of design students are perpetually striving to unveil alternative design methods focused on public interest. Many of them plan to work not only for NGOs and social business, but also for governments and administrations.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF DESIGN FOR POLICY

The paths of both design and politics have crossed several times, such as when Tony Blair, British Labour Leader, launched ‘The Third Way’ in 1994. He wanted to promote a liberal notion of socialism that recognised individuals as socially interdependent, with a strong emphasis on social innovation as a way to shift the relationship between citizen and state. Originally inspired by sociologist Anthony Giddens, this theory saw the light of day in 1993 with help from Geoff Mulgan, founder of the Demos think-tank and journalist Charles Leadbeater.

Both became strong advocates of service design as a way to set social innovation in motion. With many years of

designing citizen-centred public services

experience behind them in the field, Mulgan, formerly in charge of the Young Foundation, now heads up Nesta and Leadbeater was a co-founder of Participle.1 Another country, another story: this time, it is Denmark, where a culture of social dialogue has been deeply rooted for generations and where design was embedded for the first time at the governmental level in 2002. Through its cross-disciplinary team of designers, sociologists and researchers, the MindLab brings citizendriven approaches to ministry-initiated policies. Other early advocates for design in policy include the Design Council, and the British Education Ministry’s Innovation Unit in the UK. LOOKING FOR THE ADMINISTRATION’S MISSING LINK

Ever since these pioneers laid the groundwork, interest in public sector design has risen. But what makes design so interesting for the public sector? One reason is that people working in government and for local authorities are rather good at many things like administration, planning or governing, but have fewer skills when it comes to conceiving things: that is, using a process that would start with a better understanding of user practices and end with a service that truly meets expectations. You do not learn this kind of thing in schools that specialise in political science or public administration. That’s why the ‘citizen exploration / co-design / prototyping / testing’ design cycle is a must for many of the public managers who have tested it. For governments and administrations, design-embedded social innovation represents not only a creative method, but also an opportunity to renew the way policies are devised and executed.

DYNAMIC SECTOR, NARROW MARKET

Design for policy and public interest are dynamic fields.

All over the world, many people work hard to promote design and social innovation in the public sector. A heterogeneous community led by several groups and non-profits organises barcamps and triggers debates and exchanges on methods, tips, visions and ethics in public policy design. Two reports have been launched this year in the UK within the space of a few months. Both pro-

mote the development of design in the public sector, and give recommendations to governments.2 The European Commission opted to follow suit with several initiatives, such as the European Design Leadership Board, while a growing number of administrations and governments have chosen to create design labs or hire designers.

However, design for policy has not grown significantly as a market. In the UK, where the story began more than 15 years ago, fewer than a dozen agencies, either somewhat or entirely focused on design for policy, co-exist in the whole country with very few new creations during this period and even some notable closures. The agencies are generally made up of small teams, including freelancers.

They suffer from a paradoxical injunction: on the one hand, design represents a fantastic opportunity to fulfil the new mantra employed by every government in the world: ‘Do better with less money’. On the other hand, public investments are shrinking by 10-20% – if not more – all over Europe, and the budgets dedicated to traditional consulting services, audits and evaluations are not being redirected toward new skills and abilities, such as within service design and social innovation.

IS YOUR PRACTICE OF DESIGN ADMINISTRATION FRIENDLY?

Given the hypothesis that design for policy won’t grow naturally as a market through a classic supply/demand model, what can be done to stimulate the demand for design in the public sector? And how can the risk of promoting design as an over-hyped method with oneshot effects and no long-term vision be avoided?

Actually, many signs show that change could only come from the practitioners themselves. Designers who want to transform public policy need to gain experience in politics and inside administrations. They need to avoid the mindset that the public sector is a homogeneous bureaucracy and realise that there are opportunities among the different levels of government. Designers will find many allies in the new generation of civil servants and officials, many of whom are real champions and ‘intrapreneurs’ who don’t have to be ashamed when compared with social entrepreneurs from the private sector. touchpoint 5-2 43

Design for Policy: Some of the Players in Europe and the World Governmental (or para-governmental units): Government Digital Service, Nesta (UK), MindLab (DK), Design Thinking Unit (SIN), DesignGov (AU), Office of Personnel Management Lab (US), Dubai Model Centre, etc.

Do-tanks and think-tanks: on the national level, including Demos, Young Foundation (UK), Tacsi (AU), Kennisland (NL), La 27e Région (FR) or in connection with cities or local authorities, such as Sitra in Helsinki (FI), SILK in Kent (UK), La Fabrique de l’Hospitalité (FR), Midtlab, Roskilde (DK), the brand new MaRS Solutions Lab (CAN).

Non-profit : Public Policy Lab, Public Interest Design (US), Social Innovation eXchange-SIX (UK), etc.

ADMITTING THAT DESIGN IS NEVER NEUTRAL

Another challenge is that there is no neutral way to be a designer. Whatever your level of consciousness, both your values and your practice of design will have major effects on the consequences of your work. Does a design job consist of cutting costs and driving efficiency or is it also about empowerment and democracy for citizens? When working in the public sector, designers must think in terms of values, such as the public interest, common good and democracy and not only in terms of those pertaining to performance and results. Citizens are not consumers.

Design for policy requires a specific ethics and is based on values that are significantly different from those in service innovation or marketing-led design.

BRAND-NEW CULTURE OF DESIGN

Private agencies: 100% devoted to the public sector, such as Participle, Think Public, Innovation Unit, FutureGov, Snook (UK), Design Territoires Alternatives (FR) or, in part, such as IDEO (US), Live|work, Engine, Uscreates (UK), Bridgeable (CA), Think Place (AUS), User Studio (FR), Strategic Design Scenarios (BE) and myriad freelance designers, sociologists, social entrepreneurs, etc.

Public agencies: Design Council , Design Wales (UK), Cité du Design (FR), Danish Design Center (DK) In-house designer(s): Cornwall (UK), LoireAtlantique (FR), etc.

Design schools, academics: D.School, Harvard i-Lab, MIT Media Lab (US), ENSCI-Les Ateliers (FR), Desis Network, Politecnico di Milano (IT), Aalto University (FI), Imagination Lancaster (UK), Medea Design Lab (SE), Warwick Policy Lab (UK), etc.

Expert committees and lobbyists, including: The European Commission (responsible for having launched the European Design Innovation Initiative and the Expert Group on Public Sector Innovation), Policy Connect (UK), etc.

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In the past 30 years, competition has become one of the core values of society. A serious number of new jobs have resulted from it, in addition to a fair share of consequences from pressure being too high, both on natural resources and on humankind. Based on a high level of competition at each level in the public sector, a management model called ‘New Public Management’ came out in the 1980s, backed jointly by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and President Ronald Reagan in the United States. According to most of the researchers, this model has reduced flexibility and put pressure on civil servants without consistent results on the spending and performance fronts and, ultimately, has left citizens yearning for more.

Other values, such as cooperation, are now taking centre stage. While there is a strong need for fields such as marketing, advertising or account management, in a competitive age, cooperation requires other skill sets that enable dialogue, empathy and creativity. This is where design can excel: it can help to better gauge user experiences, harvest new ideas from rapid prototyping into policy processes and incorporate systems thinking in administrations, whose organisation tends to revolve around a silo mentality.

Yet despite their qualities, some observers suggest that most design schools and institutions underestimate

designing citizen-centred public services

the fact that a brand new approach of their course offerings is required. Nesta Head Geoff Mulgan recommends practical improvements3: “Designers now need to find a humbler tone, to pay more attention to results, to attend to the ‘deep craft’ that’s needed for successful public innovation and to recognise that they are most likely to achieve their best within teams bringing together complementary skills.” One could add that designers involved in public-interest projects should maybe reconsider the principle of copyright and adopt open source licences more adapted to the ideal of common goods.

FROM COMPETITIVE TO COOPERATIVE DESIGN

Apart from encouraging this new culture, what can public and private organisations do to leverage design in an effort to transform the public sector? The challenge is not just about introducing design into each silo of the system, like promoting public service design, but shifting this competition-based system to one based on greater cooperation that enables re-design. It also refers to devising an approach that reunites regional, national, and international levels that would, in the end, breed a kind of common platform involving actionable projects on many levels: • In schools and universities: by giving rise to dialogue and creating joint training between disciplines, such as design, political science, sociology and management and by supporting action-research programs dedicated to the public sector design process; • In the design community: by launching a peer-topeer learning process through national/international clusters, cooperatives and social science parks that bring together cross-disciplinary designers, politicians, and civil servants, and whose focus, in lieu of quantity, is on practice, quality, cause-and-effect relationships and professionalisation; • In governments and local authorities: by promoting cross-disciplinary labs with an open governance and diversified funding, and by changing the educational model in schools of administration; • In consulting: by calling traditional consulting models and contracts into question again, shifting to open-

“[...] cooperation requires skill sets that enable dialogue, empathy and creativity. This is where design can excel: it can help to better gauge user experiences, harvest new ideas from rapid prototyping into policy processes and incorporate systems thinking in administrations, whose organisation tends to revolve around a silo mentality.” source documentation and well-known publications and by inventing more democratic public-private partnerships and collective action-research programs.

In combination with others, these different levels could be part of a bigger picture with more coalitions of organisations and people than just governmental and institutional initiatives. Should this happen, then we may just have what we need to carry out Papanek’s wish: “As socially and morally involved designers, we must address ourselves to the needs of a world with its back to the wall, while the hands on the clock point perpetually to one minute before twelve.”

•

References 1 “L’innovation sociale à l’anglaise : de la “New Britain” à la Big Society, Emile Chabal, Cambridge University, http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/ec295/innovationsociale. pdf “Design for Public Good” by a consortium called SEE, and “Restarting Britain 2” by the Policy Connect think-tank 3 “Design in public and social innovation: what works, and what could work better”, Geoff Mulgan, www.nesta.org.uk/library/documents/ GMDesignWhatWorksWhatCouldWorkBetter.pdf 2

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What Service Design Can Do for Evacuation Facilities Findings from the Great East Japan Earthquake

Among the various issues after the Great East Japan Earthquake, one of the most serious issues was the evacuation facilities. Many opinions were canvassed from the residents, including complaints about facility management by the municipal government and requests for improvement. Suitable management of the evacuation facilities is a necessary service that the government should provide to the citizens. Hitachi, Ltd. has proposed how the government could design the management method from the viewpoint of the residents.

DESIGN OF SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE

SERVICE DESIGN FOR EVACUATION

Hitachi’s Design Division creates designs for a broad range of products, from home appliances to entire public systems. Recently, the division has focused on a series of services, unifying devices and their operations in the field of social infrastructure, which consists of facility systems, such as power plants and railroads and Information Communication Technology (ICT) systems for education and healthcare. The work on evacuation facilities emerged from this social infrastructure practice.

FACILITIES

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On 11 March 2011, Japan experienced an unprecedented earthquake centred in the Tohoku region.

There were serious issues in the management of evacuation facilities, which were opened in places such as local school gyms. However, the management of evacuation facilities was not handled adequately and ended up simply providing ad-hoc responses to the post-disaster recovery. Hitachi collaborated with Sendai, the largest city in Tohoku, to implement a fact-finding study and to develop a solution model

Yukinobu Maruyama test

After the Great East Japan Earthquake, 290 evacuation facilities were opened in the City of Sendai and up to 106 thousands evacuees stayed there at a time based on the principles of of service design, focusing on evacuation facilities that had received the largest number of requests from citizens for improvement.

APPROACH

The following issues were found when conducting the fact-finding study on evacuation facilities five months after the disaster: 1. All evacuation facilities in Sendai were already closed when the study began 2. Evacuation facility issues differed from one disaster region to another 3. As time passed, the memories of the people affected by the disaster became less clear A workshop was held using a customer journey map as a platform to discuss solutions. The map described various events that occurred at seven evacuation facilities. The first step was creating the base map from the city

designing citizen-centred public services step 1 Providing information step 2 Support from neighborhood associations and social workers

many

step 3 Closing of designated refuge area/aggregation step 4 Post-aggregation individual counseling few people opening

closing

A conceptual diagram that shows the four necessary steps toward the closure of refuge facilities

officials’ daily reports and the progress of infrastructure restoration, while the second step was describing the living conditions of evacuees through interviews with the town chairmen who were in charge of the evacuation management. The third step was verifying and supplementing this information with the opinions of people who knew the conditions of the disaster areas and the backgrounds of operational problems, such as firefighters.

ing phases: reaching the facility, staying there and leaving.

The city of Sendai and Hitachi reported the results of the workshop, which was held from the summer of 2011 to the end of the year. Sendai used the report to create postearthquake recovery plans and disaster prevention plans, while Hitachi is currently planning resident services and the operation of lifeline facilities such as energy and communications, along with information solutions.

ROLE OF SERVICE DESIGN

RESULTS

Through the workshop, participants often mentioned that it was the first time that they had been made aware about the entire picture of the evacuation facility problems.

There were two things that the participants discovered.

The first was the expectation that people had for the roles of the evacuation facilities. Most evacuees perceived evacuation facilities as places where the municipality offers services for regional residents. In reality, however, these facilities accepted ten times the number of evacuees expected, including tourists. In addition, prescribed responsibilities and procedures did not work because the city officials were also affected by the disaster. The second was the change in the needs of evacuees in the evacuation facilities. In general, evacuation facility management provides disaster response assuming that the evacuees can return home in a few days: they did not assume that the disaster response would be prolonged for six months, as was the case in this instance. Management learned that the goods and services required by evacuees changed from the time of the disaster to their leaving of the evacuation facility. The needs changed according to the follow-

To design an evacuation facility as a resilient touchpoint for evacuees, it is necessary to revise role assignments and distribution of resources among evacuees, evacuation facility managers, governments and businesses.

Assuming limited resources during an emergency, service design develops rational and creative solutions without polarising the users and service providers. Examining the evacuation facility management from service design perspectives helps to integrate government and civilian knowledge and to develop visions through creative thinking, while facilitating government service administrators to identify the essence of the issues. This will become a driving force for the improvement of government services that are indispensable for people’s lives.

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Yukinobu Maruyama is unit leader senior designer at Hitachi, Ltd, Design Division. After building his career as a product designer, he was instrumental in the foundation of the Hitachi Human Interaction Laboratory. He has being a pioneer in the field of service design and is currently managing various design projects for infrastructure, including energy, transportation and healthcare.

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Public & Collaborative: Designing Services for Housing Enhancing Affordable Housing Application Processes with Community-Based Collaboration

Chelsea Mauldin is executive director of the Public Policy Lab, the first U.S. non-profit organisation dedicated to improving the design and delivery of public services.

Previously, she has led an economic-development organisation, overseen government partnerships at a public-space advocacy group and consulted to municipal and national agencies in the United States.

Public & Collaborative: Designing Services for Housing was launched in 2012 by the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) research laboratory at Parsons The New School for Design and the Public Policy Lab, a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving public services through design. Generous support was provided by the Rockefeller Foundation's New York City Cultural Innovation Fund. This project is affiliated with a global research effort of the DESIS Network, an international network of design schools and organisations focused on design for sustainability and social innovation.

PROJECT CONTEXT

Eduardo Staszowski is an assistant professor of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design and co-founder and director of the Parsons DESIS (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) Research Lab, a research laboratory at the New School University in New York City that conducts research into the ways in which design and social innovation can promote more sustainable ways of living.

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As the United States’ largest municipal housing-development agency, HPD’s primary mission is to expand and improve the affordability, availability, and quality of housing in New York City by encouraging development and preservation of the housing stock and enforcing the city’s Housing Maintenance Code. By providing capital and leveraging investment, HPD undertakes the preservation and development of hundreds of thousands of units of affordable housing. Families and individuals can apply for affordable homes that HPD has worked with developers to test

finance. The agency is also responsible for administration of the nation’s fifthlargest Section 8 rental-voucher program, a federal program providing low-income families with a subsidy that covers much of their rent. In addition, when crises force residents to evacuate their homes, HPD provides emergency shelter.

The end users of HPD’s services are the people of New York City. However, HPD’s engagement with New Yorkers includes interactions not only with residents, but also with a wide array of intermediates and representatives: tenant associations, community-based

Chelsea Mauldin, Eduardo Staszowski

designing citizen-centred public services

Public & Collaborative 26

Lottery & Lease-Up Services

27 Designing Services for Housing

LOTTERY & LEASE-UP TOOL KIT Equip applicants with the tools and information they need to better understand their eligibility for affordable housing and more easily fulfill the requirements of lottery and lease-up process. Include tips to understand income requirements, documentation checklists, process maps, and timelines that increase eligibility, align expectations, and empower more effective applicants. Concepts developed by Kristina Drury and Yasmin Fodil.

PEOPLE’S HOUSING WEEK EVENTS & KIOSKS Organize regular, weeklong campaigns to educate, inform, and excite people about affordable housing in New York City. Provide an onsite kiosk for test-driving HPD’s new Housing Connect web site, as well information and advice about eligibility, and opportunities for discussion and sharing stories. Concepts designed by John Goddu, Marissa Hatch, and Eli Rosenbloom at Parsons The New School for Design.

User-friendly educational tools, along with community-based and in-person outreach mechanisms, may assist New Yorkers in successfully identifying and completing an application for an affordable unit that matches their income, household size, and other eligibility criteria.

INCOME CRITERIA ASSISTANCE

Implement a system of offline supports to increase potential users’ awareness and adoption of HPD’s new online Housing Connect service. Deploy kiosks or street teams for applicants who don’t have Internet access, and provide low-tech instructions for those with less digital literacy. Concepts developed by Kristina Drury and Yasmin Fodil.

Illustration by Amy Findeiss.

ONLINE LOTTERY OUTREACH

Partner with a financial services organization, such as H&R Block, to provide expert advice to affordable housing applicants with questions and concerns about income requirements for affordable units. Alternatively, supply user-friendly written advice, rules of thumb, and checklists to help applicants accurately understand income concepts. Concepts designed by John Goddu, Marissa Hatch, and Eli Rosenbloom at Parsons The New School for Design, and by Public Policy Lab fellows Kristina Drury and Liana Dragoman.

Support third-party organizations and individuals who provide assistance to people applying for affordable housing.

Train these assistants to follow consistent procedures and supply correct information to applicants. Recommend that developers provide application assistance during marketing period. Concepts designed

by John Goddu, Marissa Hatch, and Eli Rosenbloom at Parsons The New School for Design, and by Public Policy Lab fellows Kristina Drury and Liana Dragoman.

During the Discovery phase, team members developed a speculative ‘kit of ideas’ for possible enhancements to the affordable housing application process. These ideas formed the foundation for further development in the Design phase

organisations (CBOs), policy experts and elected officials and housing professionals such as developers, bankers and property managers. Residents and their representatives engage with HPD through a host of channels, ranging from in-person conversations to email and the distribution of print materials.

services and to explore ways to facilitate the involvement of community residents in the development of housingrelated services in neighbourhoods with significant public and private sector investment leveraged by HPD. This work was carried out over three phases, beginning in 2012 and extending into 2014.

PROJECT PHASING

Phase 1: Exploration Phase 1 work involved inquiry into the full scope of services that HPD provides. From February through May of 2012, the project developed along two interrelated tracks: the first track revolved around a hands-on collaboration among fellows and staff of the Public Policy Lab, Parsons faculty and HPD. The second program was a more independent research initiative by Parsons faculty

Public & Collaborative represents an opportunity to explore the needs and perspectives of affordable housing stakeholders by talking to city residents and housing professionals about issues, developing possible solutions then testing service concepts to see how and if they work. The project’s goals were twofold: to assist HPD in delivering more effective, efficient, and satisfying

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Amy Findeiss, Parsons DESIS Lab

APPLICATION AMBASSADORS OR ‘HOUSING SHERPAS’

Over the spring and summer of 2012, Parsons students and Public Policy Lab fellows carried out a series of research and design activities with members of the public and housing professionals

and students, with opportunities for the Public Policy Lab fellows and HPD to observe and respond.

A lecture series organised by Parsons brought together leading European design experts – Ezio Manzini, professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy; Christian Bason, director of Denmark’s MindLab; David Boyle, a fellow at London think-tank The New Economics Foundation; and François Jégou, scientific director of the French public innovation lab 27e Région – with New York City policymakers and academics to explore the intersection of social innovation and public services.

Each lecturer also held small-group presentations with students, fellows and HPD leadership.

Two courses at Parsons during the Spring 2012 term provided students with the opportunity to collaborate with the project team. Working with HPD staff and fellows, students explored mechanisms for engagement with the agency, assessed current service offerings and generated ideas for improving points of service. A second class explored ways to promote more connected and successful communities, particularly by enabling residents’ involvement in the design and delivery of collaborative services. A series of videos produced by the students highlighted community assets in the South Bronx neighbourhood of Melrose, including social entrepreneurship, cultural diversity and channels for community-based learning.

Public Policy Lab fellows carried out in-depth interviews and a discovery workshop with HPD staff, then synthesized their findings with concepts developed via the students’ work to generate a set of five possible areas for Phase 2 and 3 efforts. An assessment process with HPD revealed an agency desire to focus on enhancements to the application process for affordable units coming to market, so that became the goal of subsequent work.

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Phase 2: Design During the summer and autumn of 2012, the fellows led interviews and workshops involving HPD leadership, front-line agency staff, staff at CBOs that offer housing assistance, housing developers and current-or-potential users of the agency’s services. These co-design exercises were intended to identify challenges in the application process, generate ideas for enhancing services and to rapidly prototype and test proposed solutions. The fellow team synthesised findings from this work, selected the most promising ideas, refined those concepts and developed preliminary implementation proposals for pilot projects by HPD and community partners.

Phase 3: Implementation & evaluation Over the course of 2013, HPD will be carrying out pilot programs to test the efficacy of the proposals. The Public Policy Lab fellows will provide design support during implementation, monitor process and impact and draft evaluation reports. In early 2014, Parsons will host a conference to bring together community members, academics, designers and policymakers to report on the pilot outcomes and discuss public-sector innovation.

RESEARCH & DESIGN APPROACH: PARTICIPATORY & ITERATIVE

The project’s primary research methods were qualitative and participatory in nature. Interview sessions and co-design workshops were organised in order to identify information gaps, areas of confusion, ‘pain points’ in the current process and to gather insights that would inform and inspire design solutions.

Participants included developers of affordable housing, staff at CBOs, New York City residents, applicants to HPD’s affordable housing services, HPD leadership and front-line agency staff.

Parsons DESIS Lab & Public Policy Lab

designing citizen-centred public services

Specific design-research activities over the course of the project included: • Observations of HPD service spaces.

• Assessment of HPD online interfaces and application materials.

• Examination of HPD communication channels’ content, accessibility, and communications strategy.

• Brand and content audit of HPD information materials.

• Professional practice research into service design for the public sector and design precedence for future recommendations.

• Assessment of affordable housing policy, analysis of data collected by HPD and other desk research with housing-related resources.

• Site visits to the HPD field office in Brooklyn and to HPD developments in the Bronx.

• Observations and interviews with developer and HPD staff at a lease-up interview site, also in the Bronx.

• A group workshop with 20-30 HPD policymakers.

• More than a dozen one-on-one and small-team interviews with HPD and HDC leaders, division heads and staff.

• On-the-street interviews, in Manhattan and the South Bronx, with several dozen past and potential affordable housing applicants.

• Multiple in-class working sessions and critiques with Parsons students, faculty, fellows and HPD staff.

• One-on-one and small-group interviews with several community-based housing organisations, located in the South Bronx and in Chinatown.

• Design workshops in the South Bronx with more than a dozen past or potential applicants identified by CBOs. • A design workshop with more than a dozen frontline staffers from multiple housing-development organisations.

During and subsequent to these engagements, the fellows created multiple versions of most aspects of the proposals and the supplemental resources. These rounds of design research, creation, presentation, and revision ensured that the informational materials, implementation plans and related strategies were vetted in full by HPD and received input from other stakeholders.

OVERVIEW OF THE PILOT PROPOSALS

The pilot projects developed by the Public & Collaborative team are intended to help New Yorkers more successfully navigate the affordable housingapplication process. These proposals are designed for collaborative implementation by housing developers, CBOs and HPD and its sister agency, the New York City Housing Development Corporation (HDC). The proposals seek to generate efficiencies for service providers and, above all, to extend the reach of the City’s affordable housing program to a greater number of eligible New Yorkers.

The pilot proposals recommend that HPD enhance the application process for affordable housing by: 1. creating new, human-centred informational materials; 2. encouraging hyper-local marketing by developers; 3. supporting community-based ‘housing ambassadors’; 4. forming a street team for in-person HPD outreach.

In combination, the proposals create a knowledge-sharing infrastructure that enables the dynamic and reciprocal exchange of information between residents, community-based partners, housing developers and HPD leadership and front-line staff. touchpoint 5-2 51

ASSUMPTION

Create a Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure Develop Human-Centered Informational Materials

ACTIVITIES

Conduct Hyper-Local Marketing

Support Housing Ambassadors

Encourage Info Accessibility & Exchange through Asset Based Collaborations

OBJECTIVES

Deploy a Street Team Account for Applicants’ Lived Reality

Enable Informed Decision-Making

INTENDED SHORT-TERM OUTCOMES

Stronger Support for Community Groups in Providing One-on-one Assistance to Applicants

Greater Access to Clear and Consistent Information for Applicants

INTENDED LONG-TERM OUTCOMES

Increased Awareness of HPD’s Affordable Housing Program

Improved Comprehension of Application Requirements and Processes, as well as Applicant Rights and Responsibilities

INTENDED IMPACT

More Eligible Applicants Apply for and Accept Affordable Housing Units

Each pilot proposal seeks to support a robust infrastructure for New Yorkers to share knowledge about the affordable housing application process. A number of design principles, identified during analysis of design research, are the glue that ties the infrastructure together and that are meant to guide the pilots’ implementation.

If proven effective during piloting, HPD can use these principles as a foundation to shape the design of future community outreach and interactions.

professionals – are recommended as a primary mode of active information exchange (in addition to the official channels HPD currently provides). These forms of interaction put a human face on a seemingly complicated process. In addition, the newly proposed informational materials attempt to guide and equalise person-to-person conversations with accurate and usable information.

Applicants are provided with tools to manage their application process holistically and within the context of their ‘everyday’ interactions.

Account for applicants’ lived realities The team recognised that New Yorkers do not apply for affordable housing from within a vacuum, but from the context of their daily experiences. An applicant’s view of the application process for affordable housing is intimately tied to the realities of their life and how they perceive government and its services in general. Further, the affordable housing application process requires applicants to interact with multiple private and public organisations to complete an application.

In response, the pilot proposals have been designed to connect with individuals in their everyday environs, rather than asking applicants to step into more official surroundings. Person-to-person interactions, ideally with trusted CBOs, peers or neighbours – as opposed to solely digital distribution or formal presentations from

Enable informed decision-making through human-centred information design Many applicants understandably have difficulty following the complex details of affordable housing application processes. To mitigate this complexity and enable informed decision-making, all of the pilot proposals address informational needs across various communication and distribution channels and formats.

The following tenets guided the visual and content design of the proposals’ informational materials specifically: • Provide consistent, up-to-date, and straightforward information in human terms • Create highly visual material for diverse readers • Communicate processes clearly and in a timely manner through reasonable expectation-setting with applicants

GUIDING DESIGN PRINCIPLES

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Yasmin Fodil & Jennifer Rose, Public Policy Lab

Assess via Formative Evaluation of Pilot Plans

designing citizen-centred public services The proposals developed for agency pilot testing by the Public Policy Lab fellows support a theory of change that calls for a robust knowledge-sharing infrastructure Encourage information accessibility and exchange through asset-based collaborations Agencies do not need to be the sole distributers of reliable program information. Indeed, systems of coproduction can be supported among service partners (CBOs and developers) and members of the public. As one constituent learns new information, they become an ambassador or teacher of that knowledge to others, enabling residents to be active participants in the process by honouring their expertise and role in the exchange of information.

The person-to-person, everyday approach used by the pilot proposals relies on the varying scales at which HPD and its partners – including CBOs, elected officials, developers and marketers – reach or interact with potential applicants. The proposal for housing developers targets the immediate vicinity of a development: community groups are encouraged to reach out to all members of their neighbourhood network and the city agency is asked to focus on outreach that spans neighbourhoods and income groups.

EVALUATION & OUTCOMES

The pilot plans will be implemented over the second half of 2013. They are trials on the part of HPD to understand whether creating a knowledge-sharing infrastructure results in a more informed public, an increased understanding of and trust in the application process and better service delivery during the affordable housing application process.

The planned project evaluation is intended to enable HPD to understand what works and what doesn’t work from a process and usability perspective, in order to modify the proposals prior to full-scale implementation.

Within the context of a formative evaluation, the project team will attempt to evaluate the extent to which the proposals lived up to the project’s theory of change.

By the end of this process, HPD hopes that residents who participate in this project’s pilot programs will have a clearer understanding of the application process for affordable housing and will better understand how and when to access HPD’s services.

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Jennifer Rose, Public Policy Lab

The pilot proposals recommend that the agency deploy a suite of new, easy-to-understand informational materials to assist New Yorkers in understanding the affordable housing process; an early mock-up of a proposed 'process map' is shown above touchpoint 5-2 53

Mikko Mäkinen is an award-winning concept designer and copywriter in brand design agency Kuudes Kerros. He was deeply involved in the ‘Rethinking the Library’ project.

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Richard Stanley is an independent strategic and tactical business-to-business writer whose interests have been forged in an international career of film and television production.

designing citizen-centred public services

Are Free Public Libraries Still Needed?

Helsinki rethinks a 150-year-old service concept Everybody’s been in a library, though some of us were kids at the time. We all have a firm idea of what’s behind the doors - a dull warehouse of books, whose linoleum floor and hard high ceiling echo with the isolated footsteps of shy visitors. One careless cough, and an irritated librarian will glare at us over her reading glasses.

Shhhh!

These days we have the world’s information at our fingertips almost wherever we are. That information comes in bulk – more than 50 trillion books worth of information are added every year.

So what we need are experts to guide us through the thickets of raw data and lead us to better stories. Forget the library as a repository, think of it as a service.

The programme stressed the higher goal of establishing a better future for their children to increase motivation.

The brief for this massive project was challenging: “More and more people have grown apart from libraries. What can be done?”

The traditional library meant impressive architecture, and a clearly public space. In reality, people wanted to feel at home.

The solution was a new service and space concept, the citizencentred design of an urban living room open to all of us. A space that holds the rich legacy of the library and adds new qualities which help us to learn, explore, relax, work or just to hang out.

In an extensive two-year development project, the creative work was carried out in a group of 40 people from Helsinki City Library and a multidisciplinary team of designers from Kuudes Kerros.

The latter is a Finnish strategic brand design consultancy that translates consumer insight into service concepts, visual identities, retail environments, packaging and brand communication.

Mikko Mäkinen, Richard Stanley

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Childrens department

A PLACE THAT STORES AND GENERATES KNOWLEDGE

Finnish public libraries have always been independent – socially, politically, institutionally and culturally.

They respect personal privacy, diversity and different perspectives. They exist to improve the wellbeing of society as a whole. Helsinki libraries have always been free to all, regardless of wealth, profession, age or gender.

However, this was a passive value and the team began to envision how the library service could become a creative, innovative cultural facility in which each and every customer is key. Such positive contact could only be achieved by putting the users ahead of the books.

The library could remain as storage for stories, but also become a service that generates knowledge and guides users through that knowledge.

Analysis of the challenges and benchmark concepts revealed six key development areas: a clear and relevant service promise, an enjoyable service experience guided by professionals, content for diverse target groups, an open and flexible space that was fun to discover, a fresh and relaxed visual identity, and the marketing and communication of the new image. These development areas were further refined into the broad areas of service, spatial behaviours, and the visual concept.

‘YOUR GUIDE TO A WELL OF KNOWLEDGE, STORIES AND SPIRITUAL REFRESHMENT’

The design process started with comprehensive research on the expectations of both customers and personnel. The target was to meet the expectations of today’s customers by creating an inviting environment, improving customer 56

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friendliness and the service experience, and above all to reduce bureaucracy.

The starting point for reception staff was “ask me.” Listening would be vital – any and all questions would be answered. Staff would need to understand and explain the entire range of services, and to provide a face and personality for the library in making both new and old customers feel welcome. The staff members would guide, excite and encourage, but also allow customers to spend their time as they choose. The service promise: ‘Your guide to a well of knowledge, stories and spiritual refreshment’.

Making the library exciting was a common theme of early workshops and one of the key elements of the emerging personality of the new library. A library should be a living culture where people talk about interesting matters, and try on new ideas for size – a living culture that would include serious information, captivating stories and life enrichment. The new library should inspire the breaking of boundaries, not the reinforcement of them.

THE BEST PLACE FOR A BOOK IS IN THE HANDS OF A CUSTOMER.

Good service requires a creative problem-solving ability relevant to the customer. This calls for situational awareness – knowing how to adjust behaviour and language to make the customer feel at home. The front desk staff also need to be visible and accessible, and all services should be presented in an easily identifiable and uncomplicated format.

These new roles for the staff came in a service blueprint based on customer needs and expectations.

designing citizen-centred public services

Customer Journey Map

A handbook for staff was also created to help them understand the new way of working. The new service process was designed and visualized as a customer journey map – a visual depiction of how the library’s various customer groups make their way round the library.

FOCUS ON SPATIAL BEHAVIOUR

The second major area of investigation focused on how space was typically used, and how it could be improved.

Traditionally, a public library was an acoustic experience where every tiny sound was amplified. Space, surface and furniture design allowed acoustics to be controlled. The new space was designated with a noisy end and a quiet end to assist in acoustic separation.

The new library demanded space flexibility for multiple uses. It had to be a place for people, rather than for the books and their classification. People wanted places to meet and talk, spend time with a friend, or a comfy chair to sit and work or draw, surf the web, play music, or code.

The space had to be open and readable, with a clear system of colourcoded signage to help users find what they seek quickly, without diminishing their joy of discovery. Staff would also play their part in opening up the space flexibility – by physically accompanying a customer to the relevant information in response to a question, rather than pointing from behind a desk.

A REVISED IDENTITY

The service and spatial concepts are amplified by the revised visual identity, clear signage and even the work wear of the staff. The rethought library offers a

cosy environment and an enhanced service interaction in a variety of stimulating spaces. It also incorporates digital technology, helping users make the most of their experience.

The Library’s existing quotation mark logo was kept at the heart of the new Library identity, supported by fonts, colours and a grid system to create a refreshed look of the library. Images of people in imagined situations replace images of books and the physical library environment, to create a vivid atmosphere.

These colourful journeys of the imagination into various reading situations and experiences each generate a story. The invitation is to sit down for a while in a comfortable chair and let ideas take flight. The aim is for users to feel “This is my library”.

POSITIVE FEEDBACK

The first pilot library launched in December 2010 in Oulunkylä, a suburb north of the capital. So far the feedback from customers has been very positive – the new library is seen as cosy, inviting, and visually tempting.

The new concept has been widely recognized, particularly by the one of the most distinguished design awards in Finland – the Fennia Prize 2012. The concept also won a silver award at the Best of Finnish Advertising and Design in 2010, in the Service Design category.

The relevant parts of the new and proven concept will be implemented in other Helsinki City libraries, as they come up for renovation.

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You can find out more about Helsinki City Libraries at: http://www.hel.fi/hki/Kirjasto/en/Etusivu

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Restructuring Britain Chaos and incrementalism in service design

“ ‘Disjointed incrementalism’ characterises public service design: where services are altered and adapted by changing political drivers, professional fashions, shifting institutional norms and boundaries and the biased lessons of past experience”

“ Housing and education systems, along with ideals of religion and social behaviour, have been all-but forgotten as unnerving vestiges of idealism.”

“Restarting Britain 2: Design and Public Services” by the Policy Connect think-tank

All the usual disclaimers aside (few would argue that this report isn’t needed, nor that it contains a lot of really good points), this quote from the latest UK Design Commission report worries me. What is wrong with responding incrementally to ‘shifting political norms’? Aren’t shifting political norms supposed to respond to shifting social norms? And, more broadly, isn’t ‘incrementalism’ disjointed? Isn't that how evolution works?

The quote fits in with a re-emerging attitude to design that appears to believe that the world can be strategically planned, pieceby-piece. To do this, it’s argued, design needs to become ever more ‘strategic’: morphing from UI to UX, from service design to system design.

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test

I don’t care how you label it, but this is modernism by any name: a belief that the world can be designed by a small number of people towards some definite, knowable end-state. A belief that – for all the simplicity it brought – wielded debilitating authoritarianism and institutionalism with equal measure.

Strange, then, that we should start to talk about it in the context of public service.

Modernism created simplicity in the things we didn’t care very much about. Its successes were narrowly defined systems within the public space: transport, gas, oil and water. The problems it faced may have become larger or more complex as the network grew, but they were unlikely to change form completely.

Louise Downe

Bar some famous examples, we’ve watched those other, more amorphous, structures that modernism tried to change revert to disorder from years of neglect, weather and weeds. Housing and education systems, along with ideals of religion and social behaviour, have been all-but forgotten as unnerving vestiges of idealism.

That feeling that generally the world is ‘progressing’ is surely one of the greatest lies in history. We move forward, that’s true enough. Things change, no one would argue with that. But a constant, consistent move forward for the better? ‘Progress’ is a trajectory of change and, not only that, a certainty that the body of that change is somehow moving in one direction.

designing citizen-centred public services

The problems we face today are those same problems that brought down modernism. We can’t control them with one solution, strategy or ‘five circled grid’.

They aren’t moving in one direction, none of us are.

But just because you can’t control something, doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.

Progress in science happens because we accumulate a collective body of knowledge. But in traditional, twoparty politics we don’t learn from the other team: we react to them. And, when our own team finally does get into power, the mechanisms of the state take so long to change that we struggle to see any direct cause and effect, making it hard for anyone to learn from anything.

But when we change things directly on the ground we can observe cause and effect. Over time, we learn what works and what doesn’t. This is disjointed incrementalism. The kind that cannot be shoehorned into any single strategy, program, work-stream or project and can’t be used as a way of measuring the performance of middle management or of avoiding complexity. This is a world where politics is functional, not content based. Where the daily reshaping of a search algorithm may define a constituent’s point of view.

We’ve yet to define what this incrementalism might mean. We know

it will involve many people and systems over time, which, in turn, will create its own problems.

It’s not incrementalism that we need to fight, but the seeming insignificance of these small, collective decisions. Perhaps we will start to take the incremental decisions we make with more care and consideration and, who knows, things might change.

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Louise Downe is a designer, thinker and maker at Engine, where she spends her time identifying patterns in human behaviour and making things to fit in with it. She has been involved in the creation of new financial services, rethinking broadcasting and health and is an occasional government advisor on technology.

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Becoming a Citizen The benefits of being explicit on how immigration policy works

Anders Kjeseth Valdersnes is senior service designer at Livework. After delivering one of the world’s first master’s theses on service design, Anders was part of the founding team at Livework’s Nordic studio in Oslo. Anders has a passion for well-designed public services and has designed a range of touchpoints being used by millions of Livework’s client’s customers.

Ben Reason is co-founder of Livework and over the past eight years has directed his passion for social impact projects into delivering successful change for the public sector.

He graduated from Liverpool John Moores University with a BA in Fine Arts, following this with an MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice from the University of Bath.

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Unlike a commercial service, the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration’s (UDI) primary goal is not to please individuals, but it still needs to engage them to succeed. If the engagement is poorly considered, then both the immigrants and the immigration service bear the cost in lost time, money and reservations. The service needs to be easy to navigate for an efficient and effective use.

The experience of immigration is fundamentally defined by the policies that the country sets into law. Immigrants need to navigate these policies, which will define both whether they will be successful in their ambition to immigrate, and the rules they will have to comply with during the process.

Identified below are seven steps to effectively designing for immigration policy and related procedures that are also applicable to other complex public services. The steps are derived from work conducted by Livework, a service and business design firm.

1. START WITH THE BIG PICTURE Early in 2012, UDI seized a golden opportunity: knowing that the following years would include organisational restructuring, new local offices, a new visual profile and a new website, the directorate wanted to ensure that the Anders Kjeseth test Valdersnes, Ben Reason

needs of its users became a common thread across all initiatives.

Livework took on the challenge to define the principles of how the UDI’s complex service should interact with its users. To do so, we too, needed to start with an understanding of the big picture.

2. LISTEN! (EVEN THOUGH YOU ALREADY KNOW MOST OF IT ) It was evident that qualitative user insights alone could not do justice to the incredibly diverse group of people who are in contact with UDI every year, so Livework employed data and quantitative analysis. To find the patterns and commonalities across factors such as nationality, age and life stage, Livework ploughed through years of surveys, reports, and statistics. We looked at complaints, and joined service staff onsite to truly understand what frustrated people and how their experiences aligned

designing citizen-centred public services

Livework joined UDI staff at the service centre, learning of common frustrations and frequently asked questions from applicants

with their initial expectations. For instance, one third of the users surveyed had major difficulties dealing with written language, a struggle that was not a surprise to the surveyors. How this difficulty affected the overall performance of the services, however, was less clear.

3. DESIGN SERVICE INDEPENDENT OF POLICY Policy is determined by the Norwegian parliament. It is ever-changing and complex, creating a legal landscape that immigrants can find daunting. For instance, a husband trying to move to the country where his wife and children live can find it quite stressful to follow the process while trying to avoid costly legal mistakes. A clear solution to such problems is to change immigration legislation so that it is clear and simple.

However, because this is out of the scope of service designers, the tremendous opportunity for UDI is to deliver its services in a way that makes the process understandable, predictable and easy to use, regardless of the policy in effect. For instance, for immigrants like the husband above, UDI employ specialist caseworkers to help them navigate the maze of applicable laws and amendments.

4. IDENTIFY AND COMMUNICATE CLEAR SERVICE PRINCIPLES

Early in the project, Livework considered how we could promote our findings and conclusions to the whole organisation.

We needed an approach to guide each and every decision that would affect the UDI service. To develop this approach, we needed to identify clear, logical and well-communicated service principles.

Livework did so by consolidating the common themes of our work into ten principles that clearly outlined the most important considerations when developing and delivering services for UDI users.

5. SHARE THE RESPONSIBILITY Because of the nature of UDI’s services, it is rare that users have a strong desire to use them. Its service is always one of necessity, and successful service design for UDI is very much about managing expectations. The task for touchpoint 5-2 61

Ten principles for coherent services A good user experience is not just about receiving a positive answer to an application or short case processing times. These principles describe how our users want their interaction with us to be, and they should guide us in everything we do.

Each of the ten service principles were illustrated and explained, using quotes from their users and examples of touchpoints for each of UDI’s channels

The most important thing for me as a user is that you 1. ensure that the immigration administration forms a coherent whole 2. are clear about what you are going to do, what I should do, and what I should not do 3. help me to understand where I am in my application process and keep me up to date about my case 4. give me a realistic estimate of how long things will take and explain why I am waiting 5. use plain language and visualisations to make complex matters easier to understand 6. ensure that the services are accessible to everyone 7. way around your system 8. give me concrete answers and put general information into context 9. are proactive and help me before problems arise 10. ensure that I am treated in the same way and given the same opportunities as other users

“It was a huge difference in the information I was given at the embassy and here in Norway…

Down there they just gave me false expectations!”

Applicant (32)

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every touchpoint in UDI should be to empower its users.

Generally, in any system that is service related, being transparent about how the processes works is a good idea.

When using a system that is the sole determining agency that decides whether a husband will live with his family or not, it is essential. Livework’s recommendation was that UDI must, in all communication, be explicit about what it will do, what a service user must do and, of equal importance, what a service user must not do (for example: don’t leave or continually reenter the country while your application is being processed).

Liverwork’s other recommendation to UDI was that responsibility should be placed on the experts. As stated earlier, the directorate knows the rules better than anyone else, so it should take the responsibility to actively solve problems before they grow bigger. In addition, because it serves people from many different cultural backgrounds, it should ensure that everyone is treated equally and is provided the same opportunities regardless of the applicant’s resources, network, understanding or persistence.

6. BE PREDICTABLE One of every bureaucracy´s perceived worst enemies is waiting time, and UDI is no different. It puts a significant emphasis on reducing waiting times and the caseworkers are under constant pressure to decrease the backlog of applications.

From a user point of view, it is well documented how most people perceive waiting: not knowing why you’re waiting makes the wait all the more frustrating, and not knowing the length of time you will be waiting makes it feel even longer. UDI’s users describe waiting as pressing the pause button for your life, and more than

designing citizen-centred public services

half of all contacts to their service centre were from users inquiring if there were any updates on their case.

Almost as important as reducing waiting time is being explicit on why and for how long the user will be waiting. The principles designed by Livework also guide UDI to give people notice when their case progresses, and provide the applicants easier ways to check the case status themselves.

7. UNITE THE WHOLE SERVICE ECOLOGY Livework’s first principle for UDI was possibly the hardest one, asking it to make sure the whole immigration administration worked together. In one way, this extended far beyond the limits of its mission, but to become a citizen, people will need to deal with range of public services including embassies, the police and the government. Since UDI sat at the centre of this complex system, it was best suited to make sure each actor set the right expectations and that all agencies provided correct information to the applicants. Uniting such a complex organisational infrastructure around one set of principles is a very tough challenge.

Fortunately, after Livework developed the principles for UDI, the principles took on a life of their own. With dedicated commitment, the communication department and service coordinators promoted this list of its users’ ten most important needs. All project mandates now needed to state benefits and challenges for users before receiving approval from the board of directors. The principles were now a part of every tender that UDI put out, making it obligatory for all vendors to follow and support the same path. UDI began spreading the principles through eLearning courses for all employees, also available to all embassies, which are

“Defining the service principles allowed us to pull in the same direction across departments and made it easier for everyone in UDI to grasp our users’ needs.”

Tone Opdahl, senior adviser, The Communication Unit, Norwegian Directorate of Immigration

most often the very first touchpoint for many new Norwegian citizens. This year, the principles will be transferred to The Ministry of Justice and Public Security, The Ministry of Children, Equality and Social Inclusion and The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, keeping the same goal in mind for a larger part of the service ecology.

The challenge for the UDI was to place users and their needs at the heart of service development. By committing the organisation to a shared set of principles, they now had a clearer view of what matters to applicants, regardless of policy.

At the same time, the principles gave the whole immigration administration a shared language to carry out new initiatives. In summary, the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration is now better positioned to makes the process of becoming a new citizen less painful.

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designing citizen-centred public services

Social Innovation in Local Government: Sustaining Success Local governments in the UK are changing rapidly. Due to budget and staff cuts and changing expectations, local public services need different, more innovative approaches and systems to provide effective services to their residents. Take, for example, Kent County Council (KCC).

DESIGNING FOR PEOPLE, WITH PEOPLE

Kent county extends from London to the South-east coast of England, with a population of approximately 1.5 million.

KCC is known for its innovative practices in the public sector. The council aims to continue to develop and innovate by connecting service and policy development with people’s daily lives and experiences.

In 2007, KCC asked Engine Service Design and a new internal team to develop a people-centred process that would explore, prototype and implement a new approach to policy development and gradually embed it across departments. Together, we envisioned and developed a ‘Social Innovation Lab for Kent’ (SILK) to help KCC meet its objectives, measure emerging from central government and design services that people truly need. ‘The Lab’ would involve residents, council teams and other service providers in actively collaborating in the design of new services.

Still in operation after six years, SILK’s objectives remain largely unchanged. SILK continues to collaborate and initiate human-centred programmes, including coordination of a number of projects, working side by side, with Kent residents while maintaining critical links to the public sector agencies. These projects include a implementation of a ‘Bulk Buying’ initiative, improving offenders’ resettlement accommodation, creating a time bank to earn credits for volunteering and supporting the housing needs and aspirations of the elderly. For example, SILK is currently working on a countywide ‘Dementia-Friendly Communities’ programme as part of a national government priority.

CHALLENGE

People’s lives are complex. The systems and legacies of local government itself are based on siloed approaches that fail to address interconnected issues holistically.

Despite people’s efforts to improve residents’ lives, the existing systems

Julie McManus , Emma Barrett

Julie McManus is knowledge & marketing coordinator at Engine Service Design.

Julie creates compelling stories from our work, drawing out insights and learnings to share across the Engine team and the wider world.

Emma Barrett is programme manager at Social Innovation Lab for Kent. Emma is involved in all of SILK’s projects and initiatives. She specialises in multi-agency and cross-sector approaches, championing the SILK approach for truly citizencentric results.

Get in touch with SILK at silk.team@kent.gov.uk

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The SILK methodology, toolkit and supporting method deck

and processes do not support collaboration, making it a real challenge for teams to coordinate and encourage buy-in. New methods and approaches are needed to drive collaborative working and tackle complex issues creatively.

The SILK methodology, therefore, needed to address cultural and organisational change, as well as developing creative design tools. For sustained success, the projects needed to engage users and demonstrate clear benefits, while also involving the right people to reach solutions, from council staff across teams to residents and service providers from every sphere.

SILK also needed to demonstrate, communicate and champion the success of the methodology. SILK’s aims, process and responsive approach had to inspire without intimidating, tell stories through long-term impact and clearly communicate its effects on staff and working practices. The Lab could then be uniquely placed to affect organisational change from the bottom up. A networked approach to communication was key to achieving this, gaining support and advocates and encouraging adoption to embed and sustain its collaborative and customercentred approach across KCC. APPROACH

Engine and SILK began to explore the existing operations of KCC, interviewing a cross-section of staff to draw out insights across departments and levels. We found that many people already employed a strong customer-centric approach, but not across teams or involving residents in the process. We gathered communications and tools already used within KCC and began to envision how to en66

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hance these existing behaviours using a shared, common language, a simple structure and an accessible approach.

The SILK methodology also needed to be reactive to the range of challenges encountered every day within KCC. The team explored a process that would be defined by a specific challenge and use insights from the people that it affected, across the phases of ‘Initiate’, ‘Create’, ‘Test’ and ‘Define’. We began to compile a ‘method deck’ of creative and engaging tools, drawing on practices from design, innovation, community engagement and project management that were simple and accessible for a variety of people. We also produced a SILK methodology and project planner to support collaborative working at every level, with collective involvement and shared ownership of decisions.

Engine and the SILK team then determined how The Lab would communicate its aims and principles across the council. We focused on engaging others with inspiring stories of the approach, its accessibility and how it enhances existing good practice while providing clarity away from the multiple systems and processes in people’s day-to-day roles. By inspiring, rather than intimidating, council teams, residents and service providers, SILK could build support and communication networks, make incremental changes from the bottom up and provide success stories for advocacy and buy-in. The teams also produced a range of training modules to present within the council.

The SILK methodology was implemented, tested and modified via two live projects in the county, engaging staff, customers and service providers and supporting the new SILK team in learning and developing their own peoplecentred design skills. The approach was refined based on

designing citizen-centred public services Engaging staff and customers of Kent’s ‘Gateway’ services Engaging the fathers of Sheerness

feedback from staff and residents, and the projects provided clear results of what the methodology could achieve for the SILK team to communicate across the council.

DESIGNING SERVICES WITH DADS, FOR DADS

‘Sure Start’ centres are government-funded, pre-school centres that also provide help and advice on child and family health and parenting. However, due to limited contact with fathers, the centres often struggle to understand and provide for fathers’ needs. SeaShells centre in Sheerness initiated a project with SILK to explore the kind of support fathers needed and how it could provide it.

Engine and SILK planned the approach for the project and aligned it to other KCC objectives and projects, planning ahead for future communications, support and funding channels.

The project team then engaged its key assets: the dads of Sheerness. We held a beer-and-pizza night to bring in local dads for informal discussions about their day-to-day lives with their kids. Using tools from the method deck, including community mapping, personas, service evaluations and touchpoint templates, together we identified key needs to help co-create service proposals with the dads.

Further, we developed a proposal for a community ‘Go’ card. This was envisioned to be a free service, accepted by local businesses for discounts on products and activities and providing frequent and tailored updates about upcoming local events and activities, helping dads to manage and plan the time spent with their children.

The project also identified areas of organisational change to improve and sustain ongoing service delivery for fathers. A key lesson learned from this project was that you cannot predict what success will look like. The Go card could not be implemented due to changing circumstances in the area but, as a result of the project, SeaShells employed a fulltime dad’s support to apply the project insights and provide father-friendly communication and feedback channels.

This worker went on to set up a network of dads’ support workers across Kent.

CREATING A CULTURE OF SERVICE

Kent County Council had already established an innovative ‘Gateway’ programme, providing a one-stop shop for residents to access council services at their local Gateway centre. With two Gateways running and another three planned to open, KCC asked SILK and Engine to refine the Gateway proposition to ensure consistent customer service across locations. touchpoint 5-2 67

SILK and Engine used key customer insights from the two operational Gateways and gathered further customer feedback. This helped to define the demographics of the audience and their views on staff, information provision and environments. The team then interviewed staff for their perspectives on management and training, systems and processes and the integration of other services within the Gateway. The insights informed the project’s vision: to improve the ability to respond to customers’ needs.

This empowered frontline staff to enrich and improve experiences themselves.

SILK and Engine structured a process to develop a workshop and service planning tool, ‘Insight to Idea’ (I-to-I).

This enabled the staff to create their own co-creation sessions to improve Gateway services, create dialogue across teams at different levels and build capacity and a culture of service innovation tailored to the needs of local residents. The process also provided a fresh approach compared with traditional project management tools, demonstrating the shift from the transactional to the transformational, to manage real change based on key insights.

The I-to-I tool was tested and refined in co-design workshops, including service advisors, registrars and the original Gateway development team. We used several engagement tools, including scenarios, personas and customer journey maps, for different needs, such as ‘choice’ (Internet, courses, volunteering) and ‘necessity’ (housing, benefits, bereavement). The teams also identified current and future challenges for the Gateways, such as more customers, new services and capitalising on technology.

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Sessions were scheduled for the new Gateway locations, facilitated by existing Gateway staff from the co-design teams. The I-to-I tool was delivered with supporting templates and guidelines for co-development, defining clear actions and tips for facilitators. There are now nine Gateway locations across Kent and two mobile Gateways, meeting needs with great customer services for residents across the county.

RESULTS

Six years later, SILK is still going strong, developing and coordinating new work programmes across Kent County Council. A survivor of continued programmes of cost reduction in UK public services, its very presence speaks to its success.

SILK is recognised worldwide for its innovative approach and results, with people from over 30 countries regularly accessing the methodology and success stories on its website, http://socialinnovation.typepad.com/silk/.

The SILK team is currently hosted within the Families and Social Care Strategic Commissioning Unit, working on a countywide Dementia-Friendly Communities programme as part of a national government priority. This provides SILK with an opportunity to respond to the challenges faced by people living with dementia, demonstrating how the SILK methodology can be applied in practice to an illness

The Insight-to-Idea tool

designing citizen-centred public services

Planning for the long-term and the next generation

that requires a whole systems approach, cutting across education, social care, health, business, community and family. To highlight UK Dementia Awareness Week in May 2013, SILK championed ‘Maidstone Mentors’, a service developed as part of the Kent Dementia Co-production Project, headed by people with dementia and providing one-to-one peer support for the recently diagnosed. The scheme was co-developed with people with dementia and supported by SILK and the Alzheimer’s Society’s local branch in Maidstone.

Maidstone Mentors has been trialled for several months and aims to be rolled out across the county, supporting people in the transition between receiving a diagnosis and accessing support.

SILK also contributes to global research and discussions about social innovation. Emma Barrett recently spoke on service design at an event in Slovenia that develops networks between industries, enterprises and universities. She met up with design students who had developed a tool for people living with dementia and is currently exploring opportunities to test this in residential care homes in Kent.

SUSTAINING SUCCESS

Engine and SILK have learnt a lot about social innovation in local government through the process of setting up The Lab and sustaining it over time. With the global economic climate, these initiatives and innovations are needed now more than ever. We believe The Lab has been successful due to its clear principles, approaches and aims: designing for people, with people, to co-produce the services, support or opportunities that people really need.

The Lab was designed to adapt to a range of challenges, to be agile and reactive across a range of teams and departments, embedding processes and demonstrating success incrementally across the council.

The approach itself is genuinely satisfying for staff and residents, providing the means, the encouragement and the benefits of creative approaches in a space away from the typical working day. SILK provides a step back from a challenge: complimenting existing working practices, it also introduces new ones in a process that supports involvement, ownership and results that directly affect people’s lives.

SILK has evolved over time. Its experiences across Kent have been absorbed and applied, including how to demonstrate and communicate that true value is in the intangible and the experience of being involved. The SILK ‘method deck’ is now used to test and spot patterns retrospectively, before a new iteration is produced next year. SILK’s tools and methods will be continued to be assessed, incorporating insights from other organisations that have used it, with new ones added and existing ones updated to respond to new challenges.

SILK continues to look to the long-term: in May 2013, SILK Publishing was launched. Its first book, The Dementia Diaries, whose editorial board includes young carers and participating families, is a collection of stories about young people and their experiences with dementia.

It was published to increase levels of understanding in the next generation. It is an example of a creative approach that challenges assumptions and designs a solution that will resonate over time, through positive impact on the lives of real people.

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Tools and Methods Service design techniques, activities and deliverables

Introducing the Service Architecture Review Method Applying trade-off analysis in service design

Simon Field is a DBA student at the University of South Wales and an Executive Partner at Gartner. His research project explores the application of software evaluation techniques to the domain of service design and is sponsored by Public Service Management Wales and the Office for National Statistics.

How does one choose a preferred service design solution? What characteristics should be used to compare competing designs?

And from whose perspective should a service be evaluated?

Most services have many stakeholders, each of whom has their own perspective on the service. This is especially true of public services, where stakeholders may include service recipients, delivery agencies, their partners, ministers, other politicians, civil servants and taxpayers. This article describes one attempt to address these issues, inspired by parallels between the domains of service design and software architecture.

In her now-celebrated article ‘How to Design a Service’1, Lynn Shostack highlighted the similarities between software design and the emerging field of service design. She suggested that tools and concepts from the software domain could be modified and used to design services. I was reminded of this when puzzling over the multi-dimensional nature of services and how to evaluate them and, as a former chief IT architect now exploring the domain of service design, it occurred to me that the tools and concepts from software design have evolved since that suggestion over 30 years ago.

The role of the software architect took hold in the 1990s, developing in

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Simon Field test

recognition that software is expected to resolve complex and often conflicting requirements for many stakeholders whose concerns range from costs to functionality, from performance and reliability to adaptability and ease of use.

Doesn’t that sound familiar to service designers?

Software architects have developed formal evaluation methods so that potential solutions can be examined and evaluated prior to their implementation. These draw out the essential compromises and trade-offs that any design will inevitably entail, ensuring that stakeholders make an informed choice when selecting one design instead of alternatives.

tools and methods

functionality Suitability Accuracy Interoperability Security Functionality Compliance

reliability Maturity Fault Tolerance Recoverability Reliability Compliance

usability Understandability Learnability Operability Attractiveness Usability Compliance

efficiency Time Behaviour Resource Utilisation Efficiency Compliance

maintainability

adaptability

Analysability Changeability Stability Testability

Variability Installability Co-existence Replaceability

Maintainability Compliance

Adaptability Compliance

Service Quality Model adapted from ISO 9126-1 This struck a chord with me, and also with the team at the UK Border Agency (UKBA) who had been tasked with redesigning a key part of the service that they provide to individuals who seek asylum on entering the United Kingdom. So, we decided to apply an adapted version of the Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method, originally developed by the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, to evaluate competing design options for a service.

The method provides a framework with which to analyse competing solution architectures, focusing on their differences from the perspectives of the most important quality characteristics. Software architects use the concept of ‘quality characteristics’ to explore the suitability of a proposed software architecture in the context of the demands that will be placed upon the resulting software system. Often known colloquially as ‘the itties’, they typically include characteristics such as ‘suitability’, ‘maintainability’, ‘reliability’ and ‘usability’.

This project sought to test the use of these quality characteristics in the domain of service design, where they would provide perspectives from which to explore the suitability of competing design options.

Following good project practice, we commenced with an analysis of stakeholders. This took the form of a short workshop involving a multi-disciplinary design team, including the project sponsor, team managers, and experts from within UKBA. Twenty-eight stakeholders were identified, split between stakeholders within UKBA such as the case owner, senior management

and responsible ministers, and external stakeholders, including the applicant, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and local agencies providing housing and social services.

Given the importance of trying to satisfy the conflicting demands of so many stakeholders, we decided to extend the evaluation method so that tradeoffs could be explored from the differing points of view of the stakeholders, as well as from various quality characteristics.

A second workshop created the context for the trade-off analysis by developing a set of scenarios that together describe an aspirational and excellent service. This workshop should have ideally included representatives of the various stakeholders, but the nature of this service and the stakeholders involved prevented this. To overcome this limitation, the team allocated stakeholder roles to each other, requiring members to additionally ‘put themselves in the shoes’ of their chosen roles throughout the workshop.

The workshop documented 21 scenarios that were then classified according to a set of quality characteristics. An earlier study2 had explored the relevance of an international standard model of software quality characteristics to the domain of service design and, in a continuation of the findings of Lynn Shostack, found a remarkably good fit. The resulting model, shown in the figure above, involved changes to just two words, and allowed the team to consider the requirements from every angle. touchpoint 5-2 73

The model was not just used to classify the scenarios. It also played a significant role in helping the workshop participants to articulate a rounded set of requirements, prompting them to see the service proposition in new ways. It is relatively easy to think of scenarios that directly affect customers and customer touchpoints. Less immediately obvious, but often just as important, are scenarios that illustrate requirements from other perspectives. For example, the ease with which staff can be trained in the new service or the ability to make changes to the service after it has been implemented.

Walking through the model in the context of the service proposition helps the team consider the service from every angle and ensure that a 360-degree view has been considered.

The team then considered the importance of each scenario, answering the question ‘what would be the impact if the design adopted was unable to implement the scenario satisfactorily?’.

Consensus was easily reached, and answers were agreed on the scale: ‘Insignificant’, ‘Minor’, ‘Moderate’, ‘Major’ and ‘Disastrous’.

The last activity of this workshop was to consider the importance of each scenario to each stakeholder. Different stakeholders have varying levels of interest in each scenario: for example, scenarios that result in cost reductions may be of more interest to management than to applicants.

We now had a context in which to evaluate competing design options.

This evaluation approach does not place any constraints on the options or the methods used to develop them. The team 74

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took a month to arrive at four possible design options, and then reconvened to consider them in a trade-off analysis workshop.

The first part of this workshop involved a detailed presentation by each design lead, followed by a crossexamination by the team, to ensure that every participant had a good understanding of each proposed design option. Once again, team members adopted additional roles to ensure that different stakeholder perspectives were considered. The trade-off analysis involved the use of a spreadsheet tool containing the context information captured earlier.

Readers may recognise the ‘impact’ assessment conducted in the earlier workshop from a commonly used risk model, where risk exposure is represented as the product of risk impact and likelihood. One of the earliest uses of this simple formula was in the Delta Works project in the Netherlands in 1953.

Advice from Dutch mathematician David van Dantzig led the project to use this approach to assess flood risk. It has since been widely adopted in a variety of forms in engineering and project and corporate risk management, and features, for example, in UK Government guidance on risk management3.

Once we had a set of competing design options, participants were able to add the ‘likelihood’ element, so that each design option could be considered as a set of risk trade-offs, in terms of both the quality model and the stakeholders.

Each scenario was revisited and debated in the context of each design option. A likelihood rating was agreed for

tools and methods

each scenario / design option combination, describing the likelihood of failure to deliver a satisfactory solution to the scenario using the following scale: ‘Unlikely’, ‘Possible, but not likely’, ‘Strong possibility’, ‘Highly likely’ and ‘Almost certain’.

The spreadsheet calculates the risk for each scenario / design option combination, and, since each scenario has been categorised using the quality model, aggregate risks for each quality characteristic are calculated and displayed. Stakeholder perspectives are also shown graphically, as the relative importance of each scenario to each stakeholder has been previously agreed.

One can easily gain the impression that the tool dominates the discussion and dictates the outcome.

This is not the case. The tool is a guide to assist debate and to highlight the trade-offs that might not otherwise be apparent. While the risks are, indeed, calculated numerically, the tool uses colour to highlight graphically the key messages revealed in the analysis without drawing undue attention to numerical details. Ultimately, it is people who have responsibility for decisions, and the tool can only highlight risks and opportunities: it cannot identify possible mitigations. But it can help ensure that all the relevant risks are considered.

In this case, the tool and, more importantly, the discussions that it provoked, did identify key risks and opportunities inherent in the different design options put forward for analysis. Indeed, the workshop prompted the creation of an additional design option that combined features of two of the competing solutions. As the project sponsor at UKBA said: “The output of this process [gave] me strong ammunition for a business case…but also [gave] me a ‘left field’ idea that, as it happens, is much stronger than I'd ever thought before, and is absolutely worth implementing.”

As with software architectures, any one design option will inevitably favour some characteristics at the expense of others, and this method and its supporting tool can ensure the identification of these at an early stage in the design process and provide a sound basis for the selection of a preferred design.

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“The tool is a guide to assist debate and to highlight the trade-offs that might not otherwise be apparent.”

References 1 Shostack, G. Lynn (1982). ‘How to Design a Service’.

European Journal of Marketing, 16(1), 49-63.

2 Field, Simon (2010), ‘Can Software Architecture Review Methods Apply to Service Design?’ International Conference on Exploring Services Sciences 2010, Springer-Verlag, 111-124.

3 Office of Government Commerce (2010), Management of risk: Guidance for Practitioners, ISBN 0113310382, The Stationery Office.

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Social Work: From Services to Screen How casework software benefits from service design research

Andrew Cramer is senior user experience designer at Case Commons (casecommons.org).

Andrew is a designer focused on product and service design for government agencies. He earned his M.Des from Carnegie Mellon University. In addition to his professional work, he is an adjunct professor at NYU Wagner School of Public Service where he teaches design thinking to public policy graduate students.

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Developing product-service hybrids is an emerging practice that offers organisations a rich connection to their customers. This article explores how an integrated product and service design view is informing a citizen-centred approach to social work software development within the larger context of government human services. Through ethnographic and participatory research methods, designers can glean deep product insights by observing the system of services that occur off the screen.

The landscape of social service IT systems in the United States is dominated by case management software focused solely on policy compliance over user experience. Current software appropriately fulfils important regulatory requirements, but falls short in fulfilling the needs of social workers in the field. The Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), a leading philanthropic organisation dedicated to child welfare, is working to improve the current state of social services nationwide.

By funding the development of digital products in tandem with service design, the AECF is driving child welfare innovation with social workers and ultimately the children they protect at the centre of the design process.

Case Commons, a non-profit technology startup incubated by AECF, applies a product-service hybrid approach test Andrew Cramer

to improving social services through products that are designed as an inseparable part of the service system. This approach allows designers to improve both child welfare software and service design in tandem. The design team at Case Commons developed ethnographic and participatory design research methods to gain an empathetic understanding of how case management tools can provide an array of digital touchpoints along the child-welfare service journey.

BEYOND HEURISTICS

A foundational goal of Case Commons is to develop case management software that is human centred and easy to use. We view the amount of accurate and timely data that is entered into the system by caseworkers as a metric to judge the success of our digital products. Often the problem

tools and methods how do department of child services employees spend their day?

Activity streams based on samples logged every 30 minutes with 8 workers across 2 days in October, 2012.

Communication

Field Work

Casework Software

Lunch

External Systems

Miscellaneous

caseworker

8 am

12 noon

6 pm

12 noon

6 pm

all worker roles

8 am

Logging the day-to-day activities of social workers highlighted how much time was spent in the field away from their computers of missing or inaccurate data can be addressed through usability testing that informs continuous improvements to the user interface (UI). After replacing the Department of Child Services legacy IT system for our client state in 2012, our analytics indicated persistent data issues despite UI improvements. The design team’s initial inquiry into the contributing factors pointed to a larger disconnect between the software itself and the core competency of DCS in providing child welfare services. Social workers held on to their legacy perception of IT systems primarily as repositories for retroactive data entry rather than viewing their new case management software as a tool for planning services and for reflecting on data.

UNDERSTANDING THE SERVICE CONTEXT THROUGH ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH

To address this disconnect, the design team realised that a deeper understanding of social workers in the field was required in order to embed their case management software as a driving digital touchpoint integrated into the larger system of child welfare services.

The design team conducted ethnographic and participatory research with the goal of gaining insight into ways to design products that encourage social workers to experience case management software not as a bureaucratic obligation but as a tool that enhances their ability to provide services. We used the following research methods in state and city child welfare agencies across the United States.

SHADOWING

In order to design for the services that social workers provide daily, we followed workers throughout their dayto-day routines. A challenge we faced in doing this was keeping a low-key presence while remaining close enough to understand the perceptions and decision patterns workers used throughout the various interactions within their provided services. A key insight we found while shadowing was the large amount of time and planning that occurred outside of the office and offline. Whether investigating an allegation of child abuse or facilitating a parent visitation with a child removed from their touchpoint 5-2 77

A person’s workspace provides visual prompts and act as a tangible framework for discussing how they work

home, often the most critical data was collected by social workers during intensely sensitive scenarios while in the field. We gained a deeper empathy for the emotional and physically demanding roles played by social workers while supporting at-risk families. We began to realise how mobile technology could easily be perceived as cold and inappropriate during these critical interactions in the field where social workers need to develop a personal connection with children and facilitate parents in providing a safer environment. We began to think about intermediate locations where workers could enter data, such as in their car immediately after a home visit or during the long waits often required at parental court hearings. We mapped the services provided by social workers by logging where and what type of activities each type of social worker was engaged in every half hour. These activity logs painted a clearer picture of when and how our case management software was used within these provided services.

workers to project their thoughts about what they were doing onto paper and on screen without disrupting the work itself. One way we addressed this was to have key prompting questions handy to encourage explanation of the activity they were currently engaged in without overwhelming workers with pointed and leading interview questions. We began to see ways in which office layout supported or hindered an informal support system of communication between social workers and supervisors based on the proximity of cubicles.

We also observed instances where reference data was posted for quick access, which gave us insight into what data should be readily available on screen within our digital system. Often workers would receive calls that required them to break away from the casework they were currently engaged in and jot down notes on a different case. This insight led to our development of a digital note-taking feature that could be accessed from anywhere within our system with a single click.

CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY

CONNECTING PRODUCT TO SERVICE THROUGH

In order to observe social workers when they weren’t in the field and to observe workers with office roles, we used contextual inquiry as a framework for understanding their paperwork structure. We asked workers to give us a tour of their desks to see how they physically arranged their work and where data entry and retrieval still occurred offline. These desk tours acted as physical prompts to structure storytelling of their daily processes and workflows. The challenge we faced while observing these tasks was to encourage

PARTICIPATORY DESIGN

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Case Commons’ key strategy in promoting the adoption of social work software as an integral touchpoint in the larger child services context is to create products that make data immediate and useful to social workers in the field. Designers at Case Commons have developed a creative toolkit for participatory design to help social work managers imagine ways in which data could better inform their team’s strategy to improve services that impact a child’s experience in care. The use of creative toolkits as

tools and methods

physical artefacts upon which people’s thoughts, desires, and emotions can be projected, is an effective method of engaging participants in creative expression in order to elicit insights that they might otherwise be unable to articulate. The creative toolkit included a playful set of laminated widgets and buttons that participants could adhere to a small whiteboard with magnets. The whiteboard was framed by a browser image, providing a bluesky window for team managers to create their dream data tool while storytelling the services they provide.

a natural hierarchy as participants had to decide which widgets could fit on their whiteboard ‘browser window’.

• Participants were encouraged to think out loud and continue to storytell while they were creating. The act of creating and playing with the creative kit facilitated these narratives, which provided meaningful connections to how data might better aid in the management of child services.

CREATIVE KIT ELEMENTS AND INSIGHTS

The following list details elements that made the creative toolkit an effective method of eliciting product and service insights during participatory design research.

• Each session began with a guided narrative that gave us insight into the useful roles data and metrics have in team management. By first narrating how they use data today, the participants were in a frame of mind to generate blue-sky ideas with the creative toolkit on how a digital product might make data more useful to the services social workers provide.

• By seeding the kit with generic graphs, charts, and social work terms, we were able to observe what elements of the kit participants naturally gravitated towards and what social work concepts were important, without our direct intervention.

• The style and scale of the creative kit was important in creating an accessible set of artefacts that could be written and drawn on that were evocative of a general user interface (GUI) without feeling restrictive or overly technical in appearance. The scale also invoked

NATIONAL IMPLICATIONS

As Case Commons continues to build product-service hybrids for child-welfare agencies across the United States, a paradigm shift in the perception of casework software from repositories for retroactive data entry to fully integrated tools for implementing services and data reflection is imperative. Service design research provides a critical framework to align software with caseworkers’ core mission of providing services vital for the safety, permanence and wellbeing of children. Indeed, government workers across the broader human-services spectrum would benefit from products that reflect a deeper understanding of the services they provide.

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Participants arranged and drew on the creative toolkit elements to help express their ideas for an ideal analytics tool. They selected graphs and social work terms that were meaningful to them touchpoint 5-2 79

Introducing Dialogues A technique for delivering better government services

Mark Fonds, a previous contributor to Touchpoint, has a background in design and psychology. Mark works as a service designer at Informaat where he is applying service design to help government agencies with their transition to a 'digital by default' government, improving service to its citizens.

Peter Bogaards has been an online content curator avant-la-lettre in various UXrelated fields for almost two decades, choosing what he thinks is interesting, relevant or remarkable to share. Peter works as a curator, editor and coach at Informaat.

This article is about a new technique in design projects for citizen-centred government services: the ‘dialogue’. We will introduce dialogues to the service design community and share our lessons learned in using this technique. We also want to explore how dialogues create a shared understanding and commitment among designers and internal stakeholders.

Our article acknowledges the challenges many professionals in government services are facing and it details how the use of dialogues can be a successful response for design, technology and the client institution itself. Furthermore, we will explore how dialogues sit alongside other more familiar service design methods and tools, and how they are especially well-suited to the design of government services. To clarify our use of the term, we see ‘dialogues’ as a discrete set of interactions between a service provider and a service consumer, much in the way that ‘dialogue’ describes the conversational exchange specified in a screenplay or script. This is different to ‘dialog’, the user interface term.

1. SHOWCASE UWV Through the government’s Uitvoeringsinstituut Werknemersverzekeringen (UWV) department, you can apply for unemployment benefits that provide

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Mark Fonds, Peter Bogaards test

financial support while you seek a new job. The UWV is tasked with creating transparency in the labour market and bridging the gap between available jobs and jobseekers through (online) tools.

Your unemployment money depends on using these tools properly. If you fail to demonstrate your jobseeking activity, the agency can curtail or revoke your right to the benefit. Reductions in staff, offices and budgets have led the UWV to move towards a service model that is increasingly digital. Citizens, however, have been vocal in their complaints about service quality.

Despite good intentions, the UWV can frustrate jobseekers who must depend on it in hard times. The transition of complex public services to digital channels and touchpoints has resulted in a confusing landscape of legacy portals. Furthermore, both jobseekers and job providers complain regularly about the UWV’s digital touchpoints having poor usability, usefulness and value. And, moreover, the

tools and methods

dialogue profile name: change address

dialogue diagram service phase: using

description: A person is moving to another house at a different postal address. Therefore, his/her address needs to be updated. The person submits the new postal address to the system.

name: change address

service phase: using

no

start

end

yes change

save

Dialogue profile and diagram

users of its services – a cross-section of the entire Dutch population, whose interactions with the UWV are often triggered by unpleasant life events or circumstances – still expect the same level of service from governmental digital touchpoints as they’re getting elsewhere. These growing pains don’t just belong to the UWV: they are a typical challenge for most government agencies trying to redesign their services for digital infrastructures. Moving 20th-century bureaucracy to 21st-century infrastructure is a grand challenge. Over the last three years, we worked with various departments at the UWV to introduce service design as a way to design better online services.

And, although we are very positive about what service design brings about, we were also tested in our patience, perseverance and practical inventiveness to implement service design into the inner workings of the organisation. In our experience, using dialogues as a technique for design, communication and decision-making made all the difference. And their value as a design tool – which we will now discuss – complements their value from a ‘business’ point of view as well: In a world of ever-increasing touchpoints, dialogue-based design delivers a consistent experience.

2. WHAT ARE DIALOGUES? The origin of dialogues in service design is grounded in our design and development work in enterprise environments. We discovered that in order to orchestrate touchpoints in services, a specific layer of abstraction was necessary. Development teams in particular were already familiar with reusable patterns, templates and code snippets: dialogues share a certain level of abstraction with these elements. When breaking down events, we identified in the phases of citizen journeys, the most

elementary units we found were dialogues. So we started to structure dialogues and put them into use.

The structure of dialogues For the purpose of service design projects, dialogues have a structure, expressed in a diagram. The three recurring parts of a dialogue are its beginning (the necessary or helpful preconditions to be able to start and complete a dialogue), its flow (a sequence of actions and decisions made by participants, as the dialogue progresses) and its ending.

Within a dialogue, actions elicit reactions or responses from participants, which are called steps.

Therefore, a dialogue is a logical sequence of steps taken, in this case, by a government service provider and a citizen. A dialogue has a profile that contains its identifier (a name phrased as a verb+noun pair, such as ‘Change Address’), the service phase it belongs to, and a description (formulated in natural language and part of the narrative structure of the service, such as ‘A person is moving to another house at a different postal address.

Therefore, his/her address needs to be updated. The person submits the new postal address to the system.’).

In addition, dialogues have a diagram depicting the flow of actions and decisions made by participants.

For communication and specification purposes, a dialogue diagram visualises all steps, as well as user and system decisions, insofar as these decisions impact the perspective, experience, and behaviour of the user. Any government service can be broken down into a sequence of dialogues, logically structured into phases a citizen goes through. For example: ‘Orienting’, ‘Registering’, and ‘Using’. Dialogues are therefore useful abstractions, used in understanding a service as being made of its touchpoint 5-2 81

dialogues

register log in

change address

...

channels website

V

call centre

V

V V

print face to face

V = touchpoints

old address new address submit

V

touchpoint: dialogue ‘change address’ on the website

Dialogues can be supported on multiple channels. For the instantiation of a dialogue on a specific touchpoint, a visualisation or prototype can be shown component parts so that they may be better understood and designed. Initially, dialogues created during service design are just high level, serving the purpose of identification, description and orchestration. Over time, dialogues are further detailed, specified and enriched towards implementation. Like use cases in software engineering, dialogues have clear starting and ending points, and therefore have pre- and post-conditions.

Pre-conditions outline requirements that must be met before the dialogue is started. For example, a newborn baby needs a name before a dialogue to register its birth can be initiated. Similarly, post-conditions describe the circumstances once the dialogue has been completed. For example, the situation of having received a registration confirmation.

The flow of a dialogue is the progression through actions and decision points by the participants. In designing with dialogues, actions are named, using a controlled vocabulary that improves consistency and communication among designers, developers and other stakeholders. In dialogues for person-to-system interactions, there are two kinds of actions: user actions and system actions. User actions are labeled with terms such as ‘Select’, ‘Enter’ or ‘Submit’. System actions are named with verbs like ‘Calculate’, ‘Delete’ or ‘Retrieve’. Each action in a dialogue is carried out by either the system or the user. More general actions that are not channel- or touchpoint-specific can belong to either participant, such as ‘Read’, ‘Write’ or ‘Wait’.

Decisions are an important part of dialogues. They are the outcome of rules applied at certain points within the dialogue. In the context of government services, identifying decision rules for the system comes from decisions made by the agency itself, whereas rules from 82

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citizens are derived from user research, insights and testing. Both for actions and decisions, their granularity is decided by a multidisciplinary design team through shared understanding and consensus. The combination of steps and decisions taken by the system and the citizen are their behaviors, and they make up the dialogue as a whole.

Dialogues, channels and touchpoints How are dialogues connected to channels and touchpoints? Actually, they’re not: they are channel- and touchpoint-agnostic. They are, however, fundamental building blocks of the service.

In our process, we consider a channel as a medium of information, communication, and interaction.

Channels, therefore, have unique characteristics, setting the design constraints and defining the design space of that channel. Dialogues are not directly connected to channels, but linked to them by means of the touchpoints in which they occur.

Examples of channels are print, a public website, a call centre and ‘face-to-face’. Designing dialogues for print implies making use of the medium’s portability, familiarity and availability. Designing dialogues for digital media uses characteristics such as connectivity, mobility and computation. Designing for face-to-face interactions harnesses their physicality, ambiance and accessibility.

In principle, one channel is not necessarily better than another. To determine which channel is the best in which to deliver dialogues, factors such as cost, feasibility and intended experience are analysed. Touchpoints emerge at the intersection of dialogues and channels.

For us, a touchpoint is an embodiment of a dialogue

tools and methods

service phases

en

di

ng

“I lost my job. I need income and a new job.”

channels and touchpoints

or

dialogues

“I worry how to pay the bills.

I’m anxious about finding a job.”

ien tin g

experience drivers

preparing

using

citizen needs

“I’m reading and understanding the explanation about unemployment.”

“I’m reading it on my ipad in a coffeeshop.

I just made a call to the helpdesk.”

g

re

in

gi

iv

st

ce

er

re

in

g

Step 3: The service ecosystem

waiting

being accessed through a specific channel. From the channels mentioned previously, examples of touchpoints are a paper form for requesting unemployment benefits, a native mobile app to submit an updated address or a service counter for checking in. Furthermore, a dialogue can only be completed on one touchpoint. Conversely, channels can facilitate one or more dialogues. For example, a service counter in a town hall can be used for multiple services, in the same way that a public website can be used for requesting a driver’s license or for making an appointment with a civil servant. Modelling dialogues as discrete units will make it easier to orchestrate touchpoints across channels, and sets the stage for consistent experiences across web, mobile and other touchpoints in the future.

3. HOW DO WE USE DIALOGUES? So how, where and when are dialogues used and what makes them powerful? Let’s look at our design process and see how they fit in and what role they play.

First step A first step in designing a service is to establish the ‘service essentials’ – the key properties to which the service should adhere. An example is ‘Be transparent and inclusive’. These essentials apply to all citizens.

Furthermore, they are mandated at the European, national and departmental level and are formulated for

specific projects. Besides ones dictated from the outside, essentials can be sourced from research into citizens’ needs as well as (international) benchmarks and best practices. During design, service essentials function as heuristic principles and guidelines to decide which services, dialogues and touchpoints a government agency must deliver. Furthermore, service essentials support a shared understanding and commitment among all stakeholders. Service essentials are a tool to help designers to define the ‘irreducible core’ of a service.

Second step The second step is to establish a deep understanding of users through research, and to capture these in citizen personas, a widely-used tool amongst service design practitioners. During research, these personas are used for encapsulating all relevant research data and for identifying all dialogues in the service. During design, they are used as a reference to identify which ones constitute the irreducible core of the service.

Third step The third step is to describe the service in a ‘service ecosystem.’ Based on work carried out with internal stakeholders and citizens, the multidisciplinary design team creates the citizen journeys and identifies their component phases. This step allows designers to see which dialogues are supported by which touchpoints.

An ecosystem depicts either state of a service: its current state or a future state. For the current state, dialogues are identifiable in the dialogue lane of the ecosystem, which shows their associations to phases and touchpoints. touchpoint 5-2 83

current ecosystem

future ecosystem

future dialogue overview

dialogue profile

(level of detail 3)

(level of detail 2)

(level of detail 1) service phases

en

service essentials

n di

g

name: change address

channels phase and touchpoints

dialogues or

dialogues

Enrolling and requesting unemployment benefit

Registering for benefit notification

g

requesting unemployment benefit

preparing

using

Finding and understanding the “work-folder”

tin

experience drivers

tions itera

Reading information about unemployment benefits

ien

orienting

citizen needs

finding work

description:

CV Maintaining

Jobseeking

Knowing rights and duties

Viewing notifications

Learn ab

Recieving from

service phase: using

name: change address

service phase: using

no and A person amount Calculate is moving to anothernohouse at a different yes of benefit duration postal address.

Therefore, his/her address needs to be start end yes change save updated. The person submits the new postal address to the system. change save

Jobseeking activity reporting

profiel updaten

enforcing

Undergoing jobseeker’s spot-check

er

re

in

g

Papier alleen voor digibeten

st

iv g

re

in

gi

ce

...

waiting

Step 5: From the current to a future state of the service Fourth step With all the dialogues identified, the design team makes a distinction between primary and secondary dialogues. Some dialogues are indispensable and define the core of the service, whereas others enrich the service in various ways, but are not necessary per se. This identification activity is critical in defining the scope of the service, and – to use a motto of the UK government service design approach – “Government should only do what only government can do.” 1 Designers can also identify dialogues that occur across multiple services. An example of such a dialogue is ‘Submit jobseeking activities’. The precise way in which it is instantiated depends on the specific service, the service phase, and the touchpoints involved.

Designers and stakeholders use dialogues as externalised models of the services involved, building shared understanding, commitment and a common language.

Stakeholders such as legislators, system architects and civil servants use dialogues to assess the impact on their domains, responsibilities and practices. With dialogues, stakeholders understand what must change in order to deliver the best services for citizens. Multidisciplinary teamwork is critical for successfully completing this step. This often means having at least one board-level manager 84

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who is a ‘digital believer’ and knowledgeable on citizen experience.

Fifth step In the fifth step, the set of identified dialogues needs to be developed and shown at three levels of detail: (1) All new dialogues in the phases of the ecosystem, (2) All dialogues in a dialogue overview and (3) Dialogue diagrams for individual dialogues.

The first two visualisations are directed at toplevel management so that they can understand the decisions to be made in implementing the service. The third visualisation is suited for system architects to understand the infrastructural requirements that they are going to be responsible for. Once all levels of detail are communicated throughout the organisation, one or two rounds of thorough review and organisation-wide agreement on the dialogues are necessary.

Sixth step Once there is consensus on the core of the service and its dialogues, it must then be decided which touchpoints on which channels will be supported through dialogues.

Once touchpoints and dialogues have been decided upon and specified, the prototyping process can start.

4. BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES In our design projects with government agencies, we increasingly find that working with dialogues is relevant, valuable and useful. People react to them well, and engage with them easily. Dialogues are beneficial because they are channel- and touchpoint-independent and agnostic. They can be discussed without having to refer to specific characteristics of a touchpoint. Secondly, the

tools and methods

re-usability of dialogues is high. For example, dialogues such as ‘Identify citizen’, ‘Pay bill’ or ‘Find answer’ can be implemented in touchpoints across multiple channels.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, using dialogues requires all involved parties to be citizen-centred. It forces many to change their perspective.

While most service designers might be unfamiliar with dialogues, they simply require a subtly different mindset. It is quite common to think about services in terms of the physical and digital touchpoints involved.

Unfortunately, thinking only in terms of the features, functions and capabilities of those touchpoints has several disadvantages: the commonalities of services and touchpoints are identified very late, too late or just not at all. The touchpoints become the focal points, instead of the citizens, their needs and drivers. Furthermore, emerging technologies create the necessity to rethink existing touchpoint concepts completely, whereas the underlying dialogues manifest themselves just as a new kind of touchpoint. And besides this changed mindset, a specific design skill is developed when working with dialogues: designers become proficient at working at differing levels of abstraction or granularity. Identifying and describing the commonalities and differences of services and dialogues is like identifying the universals and

particulars in philosophy. Identifying common characteristics, behaviours or facets as distinctive is a major design challenge. Designers learn abstraction not only through practice, but also through applying heuristic principles. Principles based upon understanding citizen needs and drivers, the domain, the differences between mental models of citizens and system models, and all technical constraints.

Designers experienced in writing use cases already have a good foundation for working with dialogues. However, we do see challenges for technology and government organisations. People responsible for systems and infrastructure as well as legislation need a deep understanding of the dialogues they are supporting, and they must be introduced to this technique. This remains as a big hurdle in our projects. But we are convinced that using dialogues provides an adequate response to all of them.

•

1

https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples#second

@

channels face to face paper form

touchpoints Check in at a Counter

website

Submit benefits request

email

call center postal mail

Meeting confirmation

Job opportunity

sms

Confirmation letter

Question about a topic

twitter

Webcare question

Reminder for appointment

.....

.....

Step 6: The relationships between channels and touchpoints

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The Experience of Creative Citizens Empowering people by co-designing services for everyday life

Daniela Selloni is a Ph.D. candidate at Politecnico di Milano. Her research interests cover service design and design for social innovation, focusing on collaborative services, co-design with local communities and place development. As a freelance service designer, she currently acts in an advisory capacity for public and private organisations.

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Creative Citizens (www.cittadinicreativi.it) is an experiment underway in Milan within a community of residents located in a particular neighbourhood (Zone 4). This applied-research activity has set up a local centre in a farmhouse, the Cascina Cuccagna, to act as a public office for service design and to connect ordinary citizens with designers, stakeholders and institutions.

Here, a series of co-design sessions have been set up to deal with different topics that are connected to existing initiatives. The main goal is to generate a collection of everyday services co-designed and co-produced with the active participation of citizens, envisaging a possible intersection with the public sector and/or facilitating the birth of original service start-ups.

The Creative Citizens project originated as a result of the Ph.D. research conducted by Daniela Selloni at the Politecnico di Milano under the auspices of the POLIMI DESIS Lab group in the field of service design and design for social innovation. The objective was to perform research outside universities, in direct contact with the city and its residents and to attract and include members of society.

Daniela Selloni test

THE CITY AS A PLACE OF SERVICES AND BOTTOM-UP INITIATIVES

Characterised by new needs and desires, the city of Milan is currently undergoing a profound transformation. Citizens are the champions of a new urban design age that is witnessing the birth of bottom-up initiatives. These initiatives are contributing to reshaping society towards engagement and empowerment. Initiatives such as Creative Communities1 and Collaborative Consumption 2 can be attributed to the recent economic crisis, which has motivated many people to find less costly solutions to their needs through new forms of activism, self-production and sharing.

The discipline of service design can help transform these informal activities into real collaborative services, “... services where the end-users are actively involved and assume the role of service co-designers and co-producers.�3

education and research

The Creative Citizens exhibition at Cascina Cuccagna for Milan Design Week 2013

Paper-cut objects created to present Creative Citizens to the neighbourhood

The Creative Citizens project takes place in a space that symbolises Milanese activism, the Cascina Cuccagna, one of the sixty farmhouses owned by the Municipality of Milan, situated right outside the former city walls. Thanks to a bottom-up initiative, the Cascina has been revived: now it is a green oasis in the centre of the city and a real piece of countryside in an urban area. Cascina Cuccagna aims to become a permanent laboratory for civic participation and a new public space that will welcome and support the creativity of individuals, groups and associations by offering spaces, equipment and collaboration.

Currently, the farmhouse is undergoing a transformation and is organising residency opportunities for original projects with the same mission.

CREATIVE CITIZENS: AN APPLIED RESEARCH ACTIVITY OF SERVICE DESIGN

Creative Citizens has responded to the call for the assignment of temporary spaces in the Cascina, presenting a program focused on participatory design between designers and local communities by using the tools of service design research. An ongoing experiment involving a community of twenty citizens with weekly meetings began in March 2013. Creative Citizens has brought the expertise of researchers at the service of ordinary people into Cascina Cuccagna, creating a laboratory of solutions for daily life, improving existing services and designing new ones.

In each session, there is a temporary set design to simulate service situations: it is a simple path of creative participation, precisely because everyone can become a ‘designer of their daily life’, at least for a few months, while having fun at the same time.

Creative Citizens is now collecting and experimenting with ideas in various service areas: food systems, zero-mile tourism, goods and skills sharing and legal advice, all of which are connected to simple daily touchpoint 5-2 87

Creative session for designing a platform for sharing skills and tasks

tasks: they are linked to existing services such as time banks, purchasing groups, local shops, markets and fairs.

The methodology used within the experiment is a set of combined participatory techniques, including co-design and community-centred design, in an effort to facilitate the shift from engaging to empowering people.

The research context is informal and thus quite different from the academic one. It requires a specific adaptation of methods and tools, making them more appealing and easily understandable. The activities are organised into three sessions: ‘Ideas Table’, ‘Listening Table’ and ‘Meeting Table’, to find answers to various questions.

• Ideas Table: this table illustrates a collection of service ideas to be offered to the municipality or to young startuppers. Examples include:

• How do we organise a neighbourhood platform for sharing skills and tasks?

• How do we set up a local distribution system of fresh and local food?

• How do we empower people to organise zero- mile tourism services within the urban area?

• Listening Table: this table classifies needs and desires.

From the resulting catalog of opportunities, it is possible to gain insight about contexts and behaviours.

For example, what new needs arise in everyday life?

• Meeting Table: this table is used to augment efforts and produce synergy, garner encouragement and suggest improvements to existent activities. This support is provided not only on the ‘professional’ side but also on the emotional side because establishing connections among initiatives is the easier way to activate the mutual process of teaching, learning and sharing skills, platforms and places. Sessions with citizens and strategic players are organised, involving local committees, neighbourhood associations and small shops. For example, who are the people already active in the neighbourhood?

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A PUBLIC AGENCY FOR SERVICES LOCATED IN A HYBRID ZONE BETWEEN MARKET AND SOCIETY

The Creative Citizens project is innovative in the Italian context, where the interweaving of design and civic activism is not common. Also, the idea of creating a meeting space for citizens, designers, stakeholders and institutions is somewhat innovative because, in Italy, there is a lack of a hybrid zone between the market and society, the amateur and the professional and between profit and non-profit.

Furthermore, the choice of starting from the existing activities and rethinking them using service design research tools is uncommon. This collaborative approach can be considered unconventional because it involves identifying, collecting and designing services with and for people, trying to include citizens in every stage and constantly searching for creative ways to involve them. Another important aim, as designers, is to generate beauty, not only in products but also in services by creating

education and research Generative tools used during a creative session

a “lovely place”4, pleasant and generative of sociality, a place where the aesthetic quality is the harmony that comes from exceeding expectations.

The experience of Creative Citizens aims at shaping a model of public agency for services to be applied to the neighbourhood of Zone 4 and the city of Milan and at exploring the possible contributions of service designers in the co-production of services for the public sector partnering with the local community.

This laboratory in search of a definition can take the form of a ‘Fab-lab for city services’, a sort of public bureau potentially linked to institutions and other urban hubs collecting activities and characterised by designer involvement at the service of citizens.

The role of designer is not only that of a facilitator within the community or that of an urban activist: above all, the designer brings a vision, a key contribution in fostering social innovation.

•

Inspirational tools used during a creative session

References 1 Meroni, A. (edited by), (2007). Creative Communities. People inventing sustainable ways of living. Milano: Edizioni Polidesign.

2 Botsman R. & Rogers R. (2010). What’s mine is yours. How collaborative consumption is changing the way we live. London: Collins.

3 Jégou F., Manzini E. (2008). Collaborative services. Social innovation and design for sustainability (p.30, 32). Milano: Edizioni Polidesign.

4 Cibic, A. (2010). Rethinking Happiness (p.21). Milano: Corraini Edizioni.

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Interview: Varun Malhotra

Varun Malhotra is a founder and principal at Changeis Inc, where he oversees all aspects of strategy and service delivery operations for the company, and consults with senior management across Changeis’ government clients. Varun holds a Master in Business Administration (MBA) from Georgetown University and lives with his wife in Arlington, Virginia, USA.

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A guest editor for this issue of Touchpoint, Varun Malhotra is a Principal with Changeis (www.changeis.com), a Washington, D.C. based management consulting firm that focuses on the public sector. Through engagements with large US government agencies, he has championed service design techniques as an effective way of engaging stakeholders and aligning strategy to operations. Here, Jesse Grimes speaks with Varun to hear his thoughts and experiences on the theme of citizen-centred government.

Through your consulting work in Washington, you have an insight and influence in how some techniques borrowed from the field of service design are being used in US government. From your perspective, can you tell us more about the role and use of service design in the areas in which you work?

Indeed Jesse. First, I want to take an opportunity to acknowledge you, Birgit, Claire, and many others behind

Touchpoint for the excellent work you are doing to highlight the importance of this profession. It has been a great experience to collaborate on this edition and I hope our readers get a lot of value from it.

To answer your question about the role and use of service design in our space, I think it is absolutely necessary and honestly a key differentiator for us (did I say that out too loud!). We are in a perfect storm, with increasing

profiles

requirements and a challenging fiscal situation. In almost all parts of the government, from healthcare to air traffic control, the need for personalised, mobile, and on-demand services is rising, while the budgetary pressures are so severe that ‘sequestration’ or automatic spending cuts have been instituted. For me, a key component of the solution is service design thinking.

Inevitably, our customers are primarily focused on gaining efficiencies, while enhancing their service offerings. In these cases we have resorted to service design thinking, tools, and techniques to create effective solutions. For example, we are engaged in helping transform the supply chain that supports the US aviation infrastructure. There is a tremendous amount that goes into operating over 66,000 facilities that enable air traffic control and we use service design techniques such as affinity diagrams, simulations, stakeholder maps, shadowing, etc. to develop effective strategies.

We are also seeing a growing trend towards functional realignments in the public sector through the establishment of centres of excellence or "shared services" organisations, and an important aspect to keep in mind is the applicable use of service design both with an organisation's external customers and its internal customers.

Can you tell us some more about the work you're doing with the Innovategov.org platform?

InnovateGov is our platform to foster innovation in the public sector. It is a corporate social responsibility effort for our company, Changeis, where we have provided the seed funding and are continuing the initial set of editorial work. The goal is to create a space to share thought leadership from across disciplines and industries that inform public sector managers about best practices that can be applied towards enabling more efficient and effective governments. We think innovation is not only about creating something new, but also finding creative and cross-disciplinary solutions based on existing practices and applications.

“I think that service design is absolutely necessary and honestly a key differentiator for us” For those interested in contributing and collaborating with us, please feel free to contact us or visit the site at www.innovategov.org.

Compared to smaller countries with government-focused service design issues, the sheer size of the US government must make it difficult to implement any real change in service provision. What advice do you have for those trying to bring about change and make government more citizencentred?

The key piece of insight is to know who the customer is and making sure their expectations are met.

Lastly, you've had a chance to see examples of service design-led initiatives from outside the USA, from the many contributions we've had to this issue of Touchpoint. What have you learned that you'll take with you and apply to your ongoing work?

Overall, I have been impressed with the quality of content in the journal and took something away from each.

I learned a lot and have already begun to incorporate some ideas into our current work. The use of experience mapping and developing citizen communities to drive service design are just some of my key takeaways.

•

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test

inside sdn

Service Design Network Japan Conference 2013

Within two days of their release, conference tickets for the first SDN National Chapter conference in Japan were sold out! This is reflecting the industry’s keen interest in service design in Japan.

Around 180 participants met at Recruit Holdings Co., Ltd, Tokyo, on May 11th. The event opened with keynotes by Professor Birgit Mager, President of SDN, and Professor Masanao Takeyama, co-head of SDN’s Japan chapter, followed by presentations of case studies by three companies and four parallel sessions of workshops and tutorials. Professor Mager and Professor Takeyama’s speeches were literally the foundational keynotes on service design in Japan. Both speakers addressed the influence that service design is having on how companies think.

Three companies presented impressive case studies: The Hitachi Design Department presented the first case study: situation surveys of evacuation centres in Sendai City, an area affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, employing a service design approach.

Hitachi Design’s research method provided effective information sharing and visualization of the situation, for a context that was otherwise difficult to grasp. The report described how this approach successfully discovered infrastructure bottlenecks in the evacuation centers.

Sony shared a case study where they made improvements to user experience. During the development of Sony Tablet, the completion of basic usability improvements via the human centreddesign process uncovered a more fundamental issue of ‘conveyance of expected value’. Sony described their successful solution to the problem through the

visualisation of a Core UX Story and the establishment of an ‘Open-the-BoxExperience’ package design.

Recruit presented their service design approach: Recruit is one of Japan’s largest life-event information service providers, and its business scope encompasses an expansive range of services, including job transfers, used car sales, hotel bookings and housing sales.

For their presentation, Recruit introduced the Ribbon Diagram Framework, an original service design framework that describes their process of incubating new services and products.

Throughout the conference, the participants engaged in enthusiastic discussions, during which the genesis of Japan’s service design community could be tangibly observed.

•

Atsushi Hasegawa is Information Architect / President of Concent, Inc. Ph.D. in Cognitive Science. Board director of Human Centered Design Organization in Japan (HCD-Net) and lecturer of Musashino Art University and Tama Art University.

Atsushi Hasegawa

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Dragon Hunters: Jamming and Public Service

From 4-6 June 2013, federal ministers, mayors, senior public officials and the French Prime Minister’s Office joined around 600 designers and citizens in 35 cities in the first Global GovJam. Their stated mission: to “rock the public sector.”

In 48 hours, 121 new government services were prototyped around the theme HC SVNT vNES. Montreal jammer Antonio Starnino was skeptical of the support for a voluntary event smack in the middle of the week: “But we got a great turnout, great people, great projects, and everyone had a great time.” Australian federal government minister Kate Lundy (Industry and Innovation) agreed via Twitter: “Awesome people and outcomes.”

The Global GovJam had a humble beginning in 2012, after innovation specialists Mikaela Griffiths, Ruth Mirams and Wayne Larkin of the Australian federal government were the first government officers to host a Global Service Jam. They saw the application of jamming in a government context and got together with WorkPlayExperience (Global Service Jam initiators) and Sydney’s Protopartners to set up a pilot event in Canberra.

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In their view, the rapid, collaborative, human-centred approach of the Jam was so useful, it became obvious that this would be a popular way for public servants to actually work with citizens and design specialists to build something new: “Making large scale transformative change in the community should involve the government.” said Ruth Mirams.

“There are plenty of people in the public sector who want to innovate and make change.”

While design in government is not new in itself, Iranian multiplejammer Saleh Amini is quick to point out that out that not all countries are fortunate enough to have national design institutions or international design firms to champion the approach: ”The Global GovJam brings the opportunity for countries like Iran to bring the whole world closer in both sharing knowledge and updating each other on design

processes, methods, tools and case studies”, he says. “It is useful for jammers in all countries to bring these to the attention of decision makers to enact change locally.”

Italian jammer Francesco Corolla highlighted the strength of Global GovJam in prompting new conversations: “ScicliGovJam was terrific, jammers and hosts had so much fun and the quality of the projects presented at the town hall ‘forced’ the local authorities to open a collaborative conversation with the people of Scicli.”

While governments are intent on focusing on outcomes, Jammers are always quick to emphasise that the designs themselves are not the only valuable results of Jamming.

Mik Griffiths: “The buzz on social media, the serious conversations, the crazy videos, the valuable insights all make the Global GovJam a unique experience. It gives public officials the chance to come to work as a whole person, not just a job title.”

Ontario public servant Melissa Tullio said: “I observed a lot of human emotions at the

Adam Lawrence, Markus Hormess, Mikaela Griffiths, Ruth Mirams, Christophe Tallec

m.org

a www.govj

inside sdn

GovJam co-initiator Markus Hormess coaches jammers at the GovJam pilot in Canberra in 2012

Photo: Canberra GovJam

Photo: Global GovJam

Jam: frustration and epiphanies, annoyance and happiness and everything else in between. But I think I can confidently say that everybody who spent time at the Jam had fun. This reinforces, to me, that you can have fun and be incredibly productive at the same time. In fact, I think we need to have more fun in the Ontario Public Service to really unlock our creative potential.

“Many people in service design are interested in engaging with the public sector,” says Jam co-initiator Adam Lawrence, “but public servants are wary of designers seeing Gov merely as a cash cow. The Global GovJam provided a ‘Safe Stpace’ where designers and gov people could get to know each other’s worlds, tools and issues without fearing the hard sell. The international participation and positive buzz from other global jams also soothed uncertainty. And the Jam also engaged citizens to work – not talk – alongside the specialists to create meaningful outcomes.”

The next Global GovJam will take place around June 2014.

Photo: Sarah Stern

Los Angeles GovJammers prototyping services on the streets of LA

•

by Adam Lawrence, Markus Hormess, Mikaela Griffiths, Ruth Mirams, Christophe Tallec

Australian Federal Minister (Industry, innovation) Kate Lundy (4th from left) with Canberra GovJammers touchpoint 5-2 95

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Touchpoint, the SDN Service Design Journal, was launched in May 2009 and is the first journal on service design worldwide. Each issue focuses on one topic and features news and trends, interviews, insightful discussions and case studies. Printed issues of Touchpoint can be purchased on the SDN website. www.service-design-network.org

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By Be

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volume 4 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro

volume 4 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro

volume 4 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

May 2012

September 2012

January 2013

an

By Stef

t Marke n and rces r Veen Desig When hers Join Fod Gerrita van de rc an Resea van der Lugt mko

By Re

Eat, Sleep, Play

Cultural Change

by Service Design

Service Design on Stage

Design Principles for Eating Sustainably

By Michelle McCune

A Performing Arts Perspective on Service Design

Living Service Worlds ¬ How Will Services Know What You Intend?

By Raymond P. Fisk and Stephen J. Grove

Hospitality Service as Science and Art

By Kipum Lee

Shelley Evenson

Boom! Wow. Wow! WOW! BOOOOM!!!

Complete Small, Affordable and Successful Service Design Projects

By Markus Hormeß and Adam Lawrence

Reinventing Flight. Porter Airlines: a Case Study

By Christopher Wright and Jennifer Young

By Chris Brooker

The Lost Pleasure of Randomness and Surprise

A Time Machine for Service Designers

By Fabio Di Liberto

By Julia Leihener and Dr. Henning Breuer

volume 3 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro

volume 3 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro

volume 3 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

May 2011

September 2011

January 2012

Organisational Change

Learning, Changing, Growing • Being Led or Finding the Way?

From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet

• Overcoming the

‘Monkeysphere’ Challenge

Mary Cook and Joseph Harrington

Jesse Grimes and Mark Alexander Fonds

• Better Services for the People

By Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt and Jose Mello

• Innovating in Health Care –

Sylvia Harris and Chelsea Mauldin

Service Design Creates Break­ through Cultural Change in the Brazilian Financial Industry

an Environment Adverse to Change Francesca Dickson, Emily Friedman, Lorna Ross

• Using Service Design Education

to Design University Services • Service Transformation:

Jürgen Faust

Learning the Language of Finance Gives Your Ideas the Best Chance of Success

By Jürgen Tanghe

Service Design on Steroids Melvin Brand Flu

Designing Human Rights

By Zack Brisson and Panthea Lee

01 01

volume 2 | no. 1 | 12,80 euro

volume 2 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro

May 2010

September 2010

Touchpoint

volume 2 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

the journal of Service Design

Service Design and Behavioural Change

Business Impact of Service Design

• Designing motivation or motivating

• Service Design – The Bottom Line

design? Exploring Service Design, motivation and behavioural change

Connecting the Dots • Service Design as Business

Change Agent Mark Hartevelt and Hugo Raaijmakers

Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason

Fergus Bisset and Dan Lockton

• MyPolice

• How Human Is Your Business?

Lauren Currie and Sarah Drummond

Steve Lee

• Design and behaviour in complex

B2B service engagements

• Service Design at a Crossroads

• Stuck in a Price War? Use Service

Ben Shaw and Melissa Cefkin

Lucy Kimbell

Design to Change the Game in B2B Relations.

• Charging Up: energy usage in

Lotte Christiansen, Rikke B E Knutzen, Søren Bolvig Poulsen

households around the world Geke van Dijk

service design network

to uc hpo int | t h e jo urna l o f s ervi ce d es i gn

1

volume 1 | no. 1

April 2009

Touchpoint

First Issue

the journal of service design

volume 1 | no. 2 | 12,80 euro

October 2009

Touchpoint the journal of service design

volume 1 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

the journal of service design

Health and Service Design

What is Service Design?

Beyond Basics • Make yourself useful Joe Heapy

• A healthy relationship • Dutch Design:

Lavrans Løvlie, Ben Reason, Mark Mugglestone and John-Arne Røttingen

Time for a New Definition

January 2010

Touchpoint

• Do you really need that iPhone

App?

Marcel Zwiers

Mark Jones

• Designing from within Julia Schaeper, Lynne Maher and Helen Baxter

• Design’s Odd Couple

• Service Design 2020: What does

Fran Samalionis and James Moed

the future hold and (how) can we shape it?

• Revealing experiences Christine Janae-Leoniak

• Service Design:

Bruce S. Tether and Ileana Stigliani

From Products to People Lavrans Løvlie

• Great expectations: The healthcare

journey Gianna Marzilli Ericson

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Buy the Touchpoint Collection and, in one fell swoop, get the whole back catalogue of Touchpoint (Vol. 1, No. 2 to Vol. 4 No. 3), along with a subscription to Volume 5, at an irresistible price!

download single articles The articles published in Touchpoint since its first publication are available online! The formatted Pdfs of single articles are now downloadable at no cost for SDN members and can be purchased by non-members. You have the opportunity to search articles by volume and issue, by keywords or by author!

free acces s for sdn membe rs!

http://www.service-design-network.org/read/online-articles/

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About Service Design Network The Service Design Network is the global centre for recognising and promoting excellence in the field of service design. Through national and international events, online and print publications, and coordination with academic institutions, the network connects multiple disciplines within agencies, business, and government to strengthen the impact of service design both in the public and private sector.

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