Touchpoint Vol. 12 No.1 - Embracing Change

vol 12 no 1 | october 2020

Embracing Change

10 EMBRACING CHANGE WITH A GROWTH MINDSET Kerry Bodine 16

CONSEQUENCE Lorna Ross 34 MOVING BEYOND LUCKY Pascal Soboll

DESIGNING FOR

Touchpoint Volume 12 No. 1 October 2020 The Journal of Service Design ISSN 1868-6052

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

Published by Service Design Network

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Publisher Birgit Mager

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Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes Project Management Moira Douranou Art Direction Miriam Becker www.studio-mint.de Jeannette Weber https://jeannetteweber.de Cover Miriam Becker Jeannette Weber Cover Image Miriam Becker Jeannette Weber Original boat image by rawpixel.com

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

Embracing Change

It goes without saying that 2020 has been a tumultuous year so far. And to pick out the most consequential of changes, the impact of an invisible virus on just about every aspect of our lives has been unprecedented. It has forced each and every one of us to adapt to new ways of working, and new ways of living. And as an organisation, the Service Design Network has been greatly affected. We've seen our Chapter events move online, introduced online training through the SDN Academy and have even had to transition our annual Global Conference into an online format. At the start of this year, we were beginning production of a brand new issue of Touchpoint, on the theme of service design and systems thinking.

However, as a non-profit, our operating budget is tied closely to proceeds from our traditional conference. With that income drastically reduced, the SDN had to reduce expenses across the board. That meant putting our planned issue on hold.

Instead, what you have before you is a unique curation of past Touchpoint contributions, that resonate with the here and now. Under the theme of 'Embracing Change' – which is also the theme of this year's Global Conference – we have selected articles that relate service design to the topics of the day.

What role does service design play in addressing challenging healthcare dilemmas, or in disaster preparedness? How do service designers design for unknown futures in a methodical way? And how do we further strengthen our practice to be more engaged, create more impact and tackle complex problems? In the following pages, I hope our past contributors help provide some relevant – and timely – answers.

Your continued support of the SDN is greatly appreciated, and it is through membership, attendance of our events and even donations that you make it possible for us to bring Touchpoint to you. We hope that you overcome the stresses and strains of 2020, and emerge a stronger person – and a stronger service designer – into 2021.

Jesse Grimes, is Editor-inChief of Touchpoint and has thirteen years’ experience as a service designer and consultant.

He is an independent service design practitioner, trainer and coach (kolmiot.com), based in Amsterdam and working internationally. Jesse is also Senior Vice President of the Service Design Network.

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

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

Jesse Grimes

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Thoughts from the Publisher

Over the past three decades we have seen major changes in the context of the service industry and service design, and I have had the pleasure of experiencing many of these changes first-hand.

As the world itself undergoes unprecedented change, I wanted to take the opportunity in this short article to reflect on the changes I’ve seen in the world of service design.

The paradigm shift The paradigm shift from product and technology orientation to service orientation is one of these major changes. In the late 1980s, I worked as an organisational developer at Hewlett-Packard and was able to witness how this product- and technology-oriented company discovered the customers and the systems of these customers!

People don't want to own hardware, they want the benefit in use. And so I was able to accompany the organisation as it underwent major changes that influenced the corporate culture, structures, processes and even the qualifications of its employees. And above all, of course, the reconfiguration of Hewlett-Packard’s offers!

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The transformation from analogue to digital services It is hard to imagine today, but in the 1990s, services were in fact mostly provided at the place of their production, in a direct relationship between provider and user, and were relatively unstandardised. Digital technologies were in their infancy, and customer journeys were mostly about meetings of people in physical places, or via telephone. Since the turn of the century, the digitisation of services has brought about a radical change. Service design has grown alongside this development, and the people-oriented use of digital technologies has become one of the big issues. User journeys are hybrid, fluid transitions between different access points.

The transformation from external consultant to internal specialist In the early 2000s, the first service design agencies were established.

And already in 2007 I came across the first job advertisement for a permanent service designer in a company! Today, in-house service design expertise has become commonplace within innovative organisations.

Correspondingly, service design agencies have had to reposition themselves in response to this growing ‘internal’ competition, and at the same time find opportunities for collaboration.

The transformation of process and method to cultural and organisational change In early years, service design projects were often focussed at the service’s interface with its user. However, it soon became clear that the explorative, creative, iterative and holistic approach of service design has the potential – and even the necessity – to initiate and accompany major organisational and cultural change processes within organisations.

t h o u g h t s f ro m t h e p u b l i s h e r

The transformation from qualitative methods to technology- and databased exploration The human-centred service design approach has traditionally emphasised the qualitative exploration of systems and people: Depth instead of breadth, and holistic and open-ended questions instead of narrowly-structured approaches. This approach has proven successful in identifying and conceptualising real fields of innovation. Today we have the possibility to triangulate the exploration in service design using big data and technology-based methods. And we are expanding out toolset accordingly.

The transformation of 2020 This year we are confronted with the changes imposed by a pandemic.

We embrace this change, despite all the suffering that it brings. In no time at all we have adapted – and are continuing to learn – how we transform the peoplecentric, physical and collaborative approach to service design into new, primarily-digital contexts.

Of course, we all assume that in the foreseeable future the physical

world, with its personal contacts and direct encounters, will once again return to becoming our primary workspace. But we will never lose the experience and knowledge we have gained during this unique circumstance. Instead, we will build on it and embrace it in our practice as we go forward.

We are pleased to announce that the Service Design Academy (SDA) is the first-ever organisation accredited by the Service Design Network (SDN)!

Through our Organisational Accreditation initiative, the SDN recognises the authority and quality of SDA in the provision of service design education and qualification.

SDA is a service design educational

Birgit Mager, publisher of Touchpoint, is professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany. She is founder and director of sedes research at KISD and is co-founder and President of the Service Design Network.

institution committed to creating positive impact through interactive, practice-based learning. SDA was founded in 2017 and is based at Dundee & Angus College, Gardyne Campus in Dundee, Scotland.

We congratulate SDA and look forward to a fruitful collaboration!

Interested in your organisation being considered for accreditation by the Service Design Network?

Contact us for more information: accreditation@service-designnetwork.org

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The Service Design Imperative Is service design another specialisation within the design discipline, or is it somehow reshaping design itself, transforming both what we mean by design and the role and responsibilities of designers? Applying design practice to the other 80% of the economy, especially public services, which represent around half Nick Leon is head of service design at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London.

Nick began his career as an industrial designer at IBM, moving from designing products then services, through to developing entire new businesses in his role as business development director for IBM’s Global Services division in Europe.

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Jamin Hegeman, SDN Leadership Team member, shares his thoughts on how the theme of ‘Embracing Change’ is also shared by this year’s Service Design Global Conference,

of that, is likely to stretch the boundaries of the discipline. But is design going further than that?

In this essay I will explore a greater context for service design, driven by unprecedented social, environmental and economic imperatives, the opportunities for service transformation that digital technologies present and the implications for redefining design itself.

We face unprecedented challenges at this time: stresses on the environment, shrinking resources for a growing and increasingly urbanised and ageing population, rising inequality and outdated financial systems. Our planet will not redesign itself: it will take the ingenuity of designers — blending design for people with technological innovation — to address these issues.

Similarly, we are experiencing a unique combination of digital technology innovations, which in the last ten years have collectively surpassed all the innovations in information technology

in the previous four decades, from six billion mobile phone accounts globally to the rise of social media, the realisation of the internet of things and the exploitation of big data. We have tools to transform existing services and to innovate new ones, and the imperative for these innovations in the public realm, driven by need, and in the private sector, driven by global competition, are more intense than ever. However, governments are struggling to address these challenges, focusing their efforts on managing today’s public services and the public purse rather than tackling the big social and environmental issues. The most innovative technology firms, as well as big mobile operators, financial services and global energy providers are shaping the way we live and interact, our culture and society and our environment, both positively and negatively, far more

than our politicians. These firms need innovation to survive, and the designer is crucial to their capacity to innovate.

Never has design had such a powerful role to play, but seizing the opportunity comes with responsibility.

A values-based framework Designers cannot be agnostic with regards to these opportunities, as well as to the issues that are facing us. While our discipline has always focused on creating new levels of value for our clients and their customers, we also have to reflect on our values. Are our interventions adding to the challenges we face, or helping address them? Service design means engaging at a systems level, not just a component level. To make a meaningful impact requires designers with deeper and broader skills. It needs designers with the capacity to shape strategy, not just the form of products or the physical manifestations of a service touch point, or workflows.

The choices that designers make need to be value-based, not only about value creation. Designers must recognise the social and environmental impact of their design decisions, as well as seeking out opportunities to actively engage with these issues. As designers, we must combine the creation of value within an explicit framework of values. We

pride ourselves on being the ones most connected to society and contemporary culture, so it is a special responsibility that falls on us.

Customer experience — consequence or intention Designers are taught to start by exploring a problem area at a systemic level, identifying opportunities for design intervention and framing the specific problem that they will address. We learn to start by designing the experience before figuring out the characteristics of the solution that resolve the problem. This experience-led design model is even more important in a world where services are the dominant form of consumption, the dominant sector for employment and the greatest contributor to our economy.

With a few notable exceptions, until now designers have mostly played a subsidiary role in the design of services.

Designers are often involved in the design of the touchpoints of a service, individual products (and the interaction with them), communications and marketing materials, and interior, environmental and retail design. The user or customer experience has been a consequence of the design of the products, the processes and programming, the places and the skills of the people. This experience itself was not explicitly designed, rather it resulted from

Nick Leon

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12 – The Service Design Imperative In this essay, Nick Leon takes a step back to look at the still-young discipline of service design and makes an impassioned plea for service designers to address the challenges of our time. He also touches on areas of expansion for service design practitioners - such as systems design and business model innovation - that themselves become core themes of Touchpoint in the years ahead.

and how it has impacted the con­ ference planning.

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Participatory Foresight and Service Design

In 2020, change is the new normal. As de­ signers and people who create services, change is an opportunity to rethink the status quo and push boundaries.

This year, we’re hosting our first virtual conference. We are embracing the change that’s needed and looking for opportunities to continue providing a platform for the service design community to share, learn, and change the world together.

We will be hosting the main content day over 18 hours to make the live event more accessible to people across the globe. We are engaging with our Chapters, partnering with services like the Service Design Show and The Service Design Podcast, and embracing the virtual context to engage our audience in new ways. We hope to facilitate a dialogue around all the change we are experiencing across the world, from the pandemic to social justice.

We have the ability to create the change we want to see in the world. From empathy to delivery, service design gives us the processes and tools to do so. Embrace change with us during our first virtual global conference, where we will feature a diverse set of speakers, activities and topics ranging from service design fundamentals to provocative reflections on our changing world.

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This article introduces participatory foresight and discusses its interrelation with co-design methods and service design

Dr Tuomo Kuosa is strategic and participatory foresight expert at AlternativeFutures/ Ubiverse Ltd. Tuomo got his PhD in economic sociology from the Turku School of Economics, Finland, in 2009. After that, he worked for the Singaporean government for a year as a foresight expert. Since 2011, he has worked in the AlternativeFutures/Ubiverse (www.alternativefutures.fi) consulting company, which merges strategic and participatory foresight with ideation, concept design, service design and fast prototyping.

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Foresight as a grounded source of ideation The word foresight was mentioned for the first time in a BBC broadcast in 1932 by visionary author H.G. Wells, who called for the establishment of “Departments and Professors of Foresight”. This makes the term one of the oldest in the field of futures studies.

The first characteristic of any good foresight is its ability to generate new ideas that are simultaneously out-of-thebox and grounded. Secondly, foresight is meant to provide a holistic spectrum of interesting events that we can expect with a certain level of certainty. The role of such grounded future knowledge is increasingly becoming the firm foundation for any new services, productor business concepts, participatory ideation and concept design.

Today, the term foresight refers to a systematic process whereby one attempts to say something comprehensive and grounded about the future probabilities, change drivers, change factors, interrelations and options for actions.

The guiding principle of all foresight is that, in almost all cases, the future cannot

be predicted as it is not here yet. But the future can be created through the actions of today and, therefore, can be partly known, too. And much of the future is here already in today’s values, objectives, drivers and trends, and that can be studied systematically.

The process of foresight is meant to be systematic and holistic, and it is supposed to integrate hindsight, insight and forecasting in a meaningful way. The ‘backbone’ of foresight is (hind)sight, which is about more or less systematically understanding the past and the processes and constraints of change. The ‘body’ of foresight is (in)sight1, which is an attempt to comprehensively understand the true nature of the present and its structures, actors and drivers. The ‘eyesight’ of foresight is (fore)casting, which refers to understanding the probable pathdependencies of the existing trends and phenomena. One more key component of foresight is the attempt to pack holistic

1 Simmonds, W.W. Clive (1993). Monograph. Insight Analysis, September 1993, 2–3.

understanding into well-defined alternative scenarios, visions and actions.

There are three main types of foresight: strategic foresight, deskwork foresight and participatory foresight.

1. Strategic foresight 2 refers to customer-oriented

projects with well-defined targets. It aims to produce strategically viable policy alternatives for public or private decision makers in power who want to stay in power, and who want to win political, military or economic battles. In strategic foresight, the alternatives are strategic and quite often secret and they are created either in cooperation between experts and decision makers or just by external experts.

2. Deskwork foresight refers to an academic approach of integrating systematic futures thinking to a particular detached research project, planning process or report writing. Hence deskwork foresight, which is especially common in futures studies, refers to a selfcontained project that is done by experts without close cooperation, either with the hands-on stakeholders and practitioners or with the paying clients and decision makers. In deskwork foresight, the alternatives are created for academic or public purposes by experts.

3. Participatory foresight refers to broad stakeholder involvement and empowerment in a desired futures visioning, anticipation and co-designing process. It encourages employees, customers, citizens, activists,

2 Kuosa, Tuomo (2012). The Evolution of Strategic Foresight – Navigating Public Policy Making. Surrey, Gower publishing; Voros, Joseph (2001).

Re-framing environmental scanning: An integral approach. Foresight, 5 (3) 2001, 10-21.

Tuomo Kuosa

NGOs, etc. to tackle identified problems and to promote preferred visions from a grass roots-level perspective.

In participatory foresight, the alternatives are created together with stakeholders.

The Evolution of Service Design, Co-design and Design Thinking Service design is a relatively new field of expertise.

It has mostly developed over the past 20 years. The deepest historical roots of both design and service design are in arts, crafts, and organised planning. Later, the actual concept of design with many of its sub-areas, such as architecture and jewellery as well as textile, furniture, and graphic design started to emerge. Then, service-business development, service marketing, industrial design, and especially ergonomics, interaction design, usability design, and information design grew out from the thick root of design. Eventually, service design was formalised, together with its two sibling or rival concepts, design thinking and co-design.3 Service design has stronger European roots. The actual concept of service design and the idea behind it originates from the domain of marketing research.

3 Kuosa, Tuomo & Westerlund, Leo (2012): Introduction. In Tuomo Kuosa & Leo Westerlund, Service Design – On the evolution of Design Expertise. Lahti University of Applied Sciences Series A, Research reports, part 16; Kuosa, Tuomo & Koskinen, Jari (2012): Design Tree.

In Tuomo Kuosa & Leo Westerlund, Service Design – On the evolution of Design Expertise. Lahti University of Applied Sciences Series A, Research reports, part 16; Design Tree (2012): Evolution of Service Design Expertise. In Service Design Magazine (2012). Lahti University of Applied Sciences Series C, Articles, reports and other current publications, part 107, poster folded between the magazine. Available online.

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30 – Participatory Foresight and Service ­Design Reaching back to early 2014, well before Touchpoint dedicated an entire issue (Vol. 10 No. 2) to how service design techniques can be employed to ‘design the future’, Dr Tuomo Kuosa writes about participatory foresight and how it can be used to imagine possible futures.

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From Skills to Mindsets: Grappling with Complex Public Problems At Uscreates, we are currently seeing two trends within our client base. Firstly, the demand for design in public innovation contexts is expanding beyond the design of a specific service, into the transformation of the systems that sit around it. Secondly, public sector organisations are increasingly interested in building Jocelyn Bailey is a Senior Consultant with expertise and research background in social design and design for policy. At Uscreates she works with a range of government and public sector clients on strategic change projects. Her PhD is a critique of the use of design in policy contexts in government.

Cat Drew is Delivery Director at Uscreates. Previously, Cat has been Head of Projects at the UK Government's Policy Lab, and worked in other policy roles in No.10, Cabinet Office, GDS and the Home Office. She has a post-graduate education in design and has led design capability-building projects.

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their own design capability internally around service design and systemic change. We’d like to reflect upon this second trend and its implications for our own practice and beyond. We’re looking at our own organisational mindset and learning culture for ideas about how best to support capability-building around design in non-design professionals.

Today’s problems are complex Today’s problems are increasingly complex, meaning the appetite for service design – and the way it reframes challenges and solutions – is growing.

But as well as being commissioned to redesign services, we are increasingly being asked to work on challenges that go even further, and build capability in client teams and organisations. There are a number of drivers we can see behind this trend: Implementation and sustainability of — change. Implementing user-centred services often means changing the cultures of organisations and the ways in which people work within them.

An increased focus on preventing problems before they happen and building organisational resilience, means that frontline staff need to change from being ‘gatekeepers’ of resources to problem-solvers and enablers.

We need to deal with systems as well — as services. Social outcomes can rarely be improved by a single service alone.

The complexity of problems means that sometimes a service design approach on its own is not enough. Services sit within systems, and the outcome that the service is trying to achieve will often be influenced by a myriad number of things that sit outside of them.

To achieve change effectively, public service design needs to grapple with complex social and political structures and governance (Chen et al 2015). It must map interdependencies and understand incredibly diverse populations and individuals with complex needs. We need to involve a broader constituency of partners: policymakers, procurement, finance, HR, etc.

The need for ongoing transformation. In a time of — austerity, public servants can no longer make small ‘salami slicing’ cuts, but need to completely rethink the model of how the public sector meets public needs (this is also known as ‘transformation’). This requires a constant culture of innovation and learning within their organisations, rather than on a project-byproject basis.

These challenges are visible in a number of recent projects. To take one example, we’ve been working with a local council that wants to shift its entire organisational culture to one of early intervention, prevention and resilience. We’ve been supporting them to start this shift in values through a series of conversations with everyone from street sweepers to the Chief Executive.

We’ve been working with another local council which wants to introduce and embed human-centred and agile ways of working so that its staff can respond to a range of policy problems with fresh thinking and a problem-solving attitude.

And we’ve been working with a large charitable foundation to support systems change and system learning – a socio-cultural intervention designed to deliver quality improvement – in health and care.

Mindset, attitudes, cultures, values. Rather than just redesigning services, we’re increasingly being asked to

change cultures. Often the distinction we see between our own organisational practice and that of client organisations is rooted in culture, habits and mindset. So at the moment we are actively reflecting on our own, in order to understand what we can do to support clients.

The Uscreates mindset At Uscreates, every project is different, with its own plan, set of tools and methods (sometimes invented specifically for that project) and theory of change.

However, underpinning this variety is a particular mindset, which – compared to our respective professional experience outside of design – is quite specific to this kind of disciplinary culture.

Partly this comes from the educational background of the directors, Mary Cook and Zoe Stanton. Exploring this through her own PhD, Mary Cook quotes her former tutor (Matt Ward, 2010, BA Design at Goldsmiths): “When people say why aren’t you teaching service design at Goldsmiths, my response is that we are teaching the things that service design came out of, which is engaging in a social, contextually-orientated way, being sensitive to and understanding the context in which you are designing. That’s where it comes from. And that’s why a lot of our students are really good at moving into the area and doing well at it. We think creating an agenda within design that engages in political and social agendas of understanding what the world is, and how you place yourself in it, is at the heart of our course and has been for 15 years.”

During 12 years of practice, this has translated into a set of (now-substantiated) beliefs about how we think problems get solved and change happens: by thinking differently, acting quickly, and collaborating with others.

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50 – From Skills to Mindsets: Grappling with Complex Public Problems UK-based agency Uscreates has long worked with public sector clients, and knows well the challenges of championing the value of design in sometimes-difficult contexts. In this article, the two authors talk about how they answer the need to develop in-house design capabilities, and the requirements to complete projects successfully.

inside this issue

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Designing for Consequence

Successfully Implementing Service Design Projects

How to plan for the enduring effect of design in complex systems

Clarification

PHASE 1

KEY PREREQUISITES

Interventions

PHASE 2

UNDERSTAND & DISCOVER

Alignment

Support

PHASE 3

ENABLE & DEFINE

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PHASE 4

REINFORCE & DELIVER

Design Methods for Strengthening Social Cohesion

Figure 1: KUER model with its four phases and main activities

Essential preconditions and influencing factors Though currently considered very different design arenas,

Why is the success rate in implementing service design projects

services are frequently the window into systems. When a

still low? Why do brilliant concepts fail when it comes to anchoring

customer engages with a service, they are, in fact, being drawn

them in the daily business of the client organisation? Where are

into the top layer of a system. Like a giant iceberg, the service is

the barriers to implementing service design projects and where

what has been made visible, what can be known.

Lorna Ross, a graduate of The Royal College of Art (London, England), has 24 years' experience in design, design research and innovation, with the past twelve years focused on health and healthcare.

She is a strategic leader in directing the discovery and implementation of transformative, user-centric care models at the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation.

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are the optimisation potentials? And are there any influencing factors that service designers should consider in future projects?

It is just a tiny fraction of a much more chaotic system hidden beneath the surface. This is never truer than when someone encounters healthcare services.

They collide with a system so obscure, so daunting in its complexity that the experience itself can be disorienting at best but more typically, terrifying.

How they navigate the system is through the service cues we design. We allow them just a select glimpse of the whole, with the complexity hidden so as to not confuse the user. We design the access and influence points to direct and focus their involvement and to manage their inputs only where the system can tolerate them. In healthcare, this is done because the system has evolved to be simply too confusing to explain, and with this confusion comes increased volatility.

Existing as two parallel universes, the needs of the system often contradict the needs of the user. In the healthcare system, we optimise to mitigate risk, to keep people safe. This can be experienced

as impersonal, standardised, and routine.

The choices we make, every minute, every day, for every patient are ones that we know to be right but their logic or value is not perceivable to patients.

As designers of services, we must understand the system that the service supports and the behaviours it perpetuates. Often we must question that system as much as we reflect it. It is not sufficient to build a service that considers the end user experience but more one that exposes the system and makes it tangible, understood and accessible.

Service design when done well focuses on giving the user power, control and influence. It offers options and choice by demystifying the systems and inviting the user to feel invested and engaged in its success. We have found that once a user understands the hidden drivers of healthcare services that are significantly more likely to act in concert with them.

In healthcare, the potential for an empowered and informed user to

Finding answers to these questions and better understanding Tina Weisser works as an innovation and systemic organisational consultant in Munich. She is a lecturer at various universities and is certified as Service Design Master Trainer (SDN). t@feedyourmind.eu

Existing as two parallel universes, the needs of the healthcare

Wolfgang Jonas is Professor for Design Studies (Designwissenschaft) and head of the Institute of Design Research at Braunschweig University of Art. His research focus lies on systems thinking, scenario building and the development of practice-based design research.

system often contradict the needs of the user.

catapult the industry to new paradigms is so potent that the opportunity for service design is less a one of successful translation and more of radical adaptation.

The design of compelling, meaningful and effective healthcare lie less in clever interfaces and tools to the existing system and more in allowing the user to determine through their actions where real value lies.

Design, like science, is a tool for understanding, as well as for acting. It offers us a process by which complex and confusing issues can be examined and considered from intersecting perspectives. Good design rarely focuses on fixing things, but rather more on transforming things. The subtle, but important,

difference is that, in complex systems, most things break for a reason, probably because they were not adding value and so the system is trying to rewrite the story without them in it. Take, for example, the patient who keeps turning up in the emergency department despite numerous directions to seek care services through their primary care clinic. Though considered a deviant in the eyes of the clinician, they are in fact a super-user of sorts. They have determined that the just-in-time services offered in an emergency department are significantly more compatible with their family’s unpredictable healthcare needs than the limited fixed hours of a clinic. When users forge new

test

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Birgit Mager is Professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany. She is founder and director of sedes research at KISD and is co-founder and president of the Service Design Network.

the complex topic of implementation was the motivation behind a three-year international study. The results are 24 influencing factors and the ‘KUER’ implementation model.

Designing for impact means designing for implementation. Today, the focus of most service design projects is on the first phases – only around four percent1 of the methods applied in service design focus on implementation. It is therefore likely that service designers will need to expand their methodological knowledge and skills in order to be more successful in the future. Dealing with this complex issue requires the integration of new skills and approaches. Because the implementation of new concepts requires organisational and cultural changes for the client organisation, techniques from the areas 1 Martins, R. (2012). Poster at Design for Next, EAD 12 Rome.

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16 – Designing for Consequence: How to plan for the enduring effect of design in complex systems Applying an appreciation for the nature of complex systems, as well as the challenges created when one tries to influence them through design, Lorna Ross writes here about service design within healthcare settings. Systems thinking and service design are touched upon in the pages of Touchpoint in later issues, and the next full issue following this one will be dedicated to the topic.

of systemic organisational development and management consulting can be particularly valuable.

Study design and approach Within the framework of a three-year qualitative study, implementation projects of complex service design concepts were examined at the intersection of external service design consulting and its clients (for-profit organisations).

With the support of approximately 50 experts from the areas of service design practitioners (Hellon, Livework, Dark horse, IDEO, etc.), service providers (EON, BMW Group, Océ, etc.) and business and organisational consulting (Capgemini, Etventure, OSB-I, etc.),

explorative interviews and workshops were conducted to identify influencing factors, frequent barriers and future potentials. The many factors found were reduced to a set of 24 and examined for their interrelationships by using sensitivity analysis, an effective system analysis tool designed by systems researcher Frederic Vester2 .

Sensitivity analysis recognises that client organisations are not only embedded in complex environments, but are themselves complex socio-technical systems. There is broad scientific agreement that due to the complexity of organisations, the consideration of system relationships provides essential insights and perspectives for successful change initiatives. Through a systemic approach3, many of the obstacles occurring in service design projects could be explained. Also 12 general lessons can be derived for practical use.

spatially for future projects. On the other hand, a result-oriented success is when the new service design concept is introduced into the company's typical way of working, accepted by users and reconfirmed by measurement that it meets criteria such as efficiency, user satisfaction, or return-on-investment (ROI). It becomes obvious that there are different areas of application and success in service design, which in turn depend on the goals and capabilities of the client as well as external consultants. The reasons found for failure are just as numerous. Obstacles may exist on the client side as well as on the service designers’ side. For example, the lack of experience and implementation maturity of external service designers, internal resistance or decision-making dilemmas of top management, lack of user acceptance, or a better offer from competing brands.

Results: Objectives and obstacles A crucial question is what success can mean in the context of service design implementation. Targets can be purely process- or result-oriented, or a combination of both. Examples of process-oriented success are when employees learn service design methods, spaces for co-creative work are established within the client company, and the organisation prepares for cultural change. In these cases, the successes would be based on the fact that the client organisation becomes familiar with new methods and prepares itself procedurally and

Results: 24 influencing factors Recurring patterns and general influencing factors (see Figure 3 ) could be identified despite the heterogeneous projects found in practice. These factors were examined for their effect upon each other and their influenceability.

Six of them can be described as necessary ‘hygiene’ factors and eighteen as ‘desired’ factors. The hygiene factors are key prerequisites that must be present to favour result-oriented implementations. Ideally, they must be considered as early as the contract clarification stage in Phase 1. Because, as expected, not only one or two factors were found, it becomes clear that service design projects are not happening in an isolated and context-free space.

In many cases, service designers spend several years working on individual touchpoints before commissioning and successfully implementing end-to-end, holistic

2 Vester, F. (2007). The Art of interconnected thinking: Tools and concepts for a new approach to tackling complexity.

3 See also Luhmann. N. (1984). Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Simon. F. (2015). Einführung in die systemische Organisationstheorie.

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20– Successfully Implementing Service Design Projects: Essential preconditions and influencing factors Bringing a service design project through to a successful completion is all too often a challenge, due to a wide array of factors. In this article by Dr Tina Weisser, she reports on a threeyear international study to discover what makes service design projects successful, and presents her findings in the ‘KUER’ implementation model.

A service design approach to community-based resiliency Illustration of the check-in service design concept in use during a Using a co-design process, we created a model for a new

crisis, showing co-ordination efforts.

community-based service focused on disaster preparedness for New York City neighbourhoods most impacted by climate change. The project is designed to bridge the gap between isolated, medically-fragile residents and advanced care/services.

Aran Baker is a designer and urban practitioner who works in the intersection of climate change, equity and public health. She has an MS in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons School of Design in NYC, and is a Civic Design Fellow with IDEO and the Knight Foundation.

Using this project as a case study, we explore opportunities for service designers to connect institutions and players at different scales across a vertical divide. We also explore concepts of interdependency and how to build and strengthen social cohesion while empowering community. We hope to provide a new lens on the service design co-creative process, bringing a much-needed social focus to the global resiliency conversation.

Valentina Branada is a Chilean designer passionate about using design strategies for social advancement. She explores collaboration and participation in the design of public services, using her practice to understand systems, empower, provoke, and open new dialogues. Valentina has an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons.

Challenges facing isolated residents During climate-related emergencies, many of NYC’s residents, such as seniors and those with illnesses and/or disabilities, become isolated in their homes, without a pre-existing mechanism to identify or treat them. This problem was acute in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn during Hurricane Sandy, in 2012.1 Geographically isolated, Red Hook has a 45% poverty rate, high levels of asthma and diabetes, and Brooklyn’s largest public housing development. The storm’s damage left the

neighbourhood without access to medical care. If it wasn’t for a medical student’s efforts going door to door with intake forms, over 350 people would not have received the medical care they urgently needed.2 This project grew directly out of that grassroots effort.

Around 400,000 NYC residents live in areas prone to flooding. Furthermore, the frequency of climate-related events is projected to intensify, including hurricanes, and – of primary concern – heatwaves. Despite this, there is no citywide mechanism or strategy in place to meet the needs of isolated, medically fragile residents in these crises. Climate change is a socio-spatial issue – not everyone is impacted equally. The problem of climate, equity and access to care is complex, and each community has unique needs. This means that universal, one-sizefits-all solutions do not work.

Service proposal and vision Using Red Hook as a case study, we envision a neighbourhood-wide support network, comprised of residents who check-in on medically-fragile and elderly neighbours in advance of summer heatwaves, the autumn hurricane season and winter storms. The purpose is to help them stay prepared, empowered, and connected to services. Our goals are to 1) bridge the gap between isolated residents and first response, and 2) embed disaster preparedness and climate change knowledge into everyday life and build social cohesion. Although what

Hurricane Sandy: a Community Response in Brooklyn, New York.” Journal of Urban Health.

Social cohesion In the global resiliency conversation, there has been an over-emphasis on physical infrastructure solutions, such as flood walls, floodgates and engineering solutions, but not enough emphasis on social infrastructure, social cohesion and the capacity of communities to plan ahead.

Eric Klinenberg defines social infrastructure as: “The people, places, and institutions that foster cohesion and support.”3 The strength of our social infrastructure – our social connections and communication networks – will undoubtedly save lives in future climate change events, and we need to recognise its importance. The role of social cohesion in post-disaster recovery has been widely studied by scholars,4 but its role in pre-emptive efforts has not yet been explored in depth.

Through this project, our goal has been to design a strategy and supporting methodology to strengthen social capacity given these collective challenges we face.

3 Klinenberg, E. “Adaptation: How can cities be ‘climate-proofed?’” The

1 Schmeltz MT, González SK, et al. “Lessons from

2013;90(5):799–809

we are proposing is entirely new, we seek to integrate with (and build upon) existing social networks and local organisations.

2 Kraushar, ML and Rosenberg, RE, “A Community led medical response effort in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. Cambridge University Press, 2015

New Yorker 5 (2013) 4 Aldrich, D. Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-disaster Recovery. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012

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26 – Design Methods for Strengthening Social Cohesion: A service design approach to community-based resiliency While many service design articles and case studies come from familiar sectors such as finance, this article from 2017 looks at how service design can play a role in disaster preparedness in the civic context. The authors, Aran Baker and Valentina Branada, show how in-depth work with stakeholders and citizens improved how a specific neighbourhood of New York City is now better able to cope with climate-related emergencies.

embr ace change

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Preferable

Moving Beyond Lucky How systems thinking can help design for ‘wicked problems’

As the service design field becomes more successful at solving complex challenges, there’s one elephant that’s getting hard to ignore: User-centred design is inherently a bottom-up approach, in which we extrapolate insights from individuals and apply on a large scale. This can be spectacularly successful. However, hitting the bullseye with every project is difficult because it relies on knowledge gleaned from a small subset to generate solutions that must work in a real-world context and at scale. In addition, desirability — which is our key value measure and at the heart of Design Thinking — changes as we work on more complex briefs.

While understanding users’ desires is necessary, it’s by no means sufficient to finding a good solution. Stakeholders, organisations

Cost caused by a few patients threaten entire health insurance

and regulatory bodies must also be considered to determine

system

different. Developed independently of design, system thinking is a well-established academic discipline in its own right that brings together experts and facilitates their input with the aim of gaining a big picture overview, identifying the best leverage points and tracking change towards impact from the beginning. And – as it turns out – it is wonderfully compatible with Design Thinking.

Diving into this particular case with the insurance company, we began with ethnographic research to understand the high utilisers' perspective. It was truly eye-opening: the people we met were barely able to keep their lives together. The typical user was unemployed, drifting in and out of homelessness, chronically ill with at least one disease such as diabetes and/or obesity. They usually had a history of behavioural problems and drug abuse, too. We quickly learned that many triggers lead them to call emergency services or visit the emergency room, but by no means were their reasons all medicalrelated! Some occasionally went to the hospital simply because they didn’t have a place to sleep. Or they would call emergency services because, in a crisis, they just didn’t have anyone else to talk to.

The Service Design Maturity Model

This is particularly apparent in healthcare, where a service may be desirable for a patient, but must also meet other criteria such as integration into hospital processes, being accepted by insurance providers and conforming to privacy and other laws. Gathering the necessary knowledge through ethnographic research alone is unrealistic.

These limitations become ever more apparent as we’re trusted with bigger and more intractable challenges. As designers, we have now ‘earned our seat at the table’

as Google Ventures’ Kate Aronowitz said in a recent Fast Company article1 . But to hold this place, we must consistently prove that we can identify the best opportunities to pursue. We need to reliably identify the ‘right thing to do’ before we go and ‘do that thing right’. This means expanding our toolbox beyond intuition, experience and, sometimes ... sheer luck.

Can design help? That’s exactly what this insurance company wondered when they approached Daylight Design and our collaborators at CodeName Collective.

With a challenge of such scale, reach and potential impact on people’s lives, what better opportunity to prove our worth? Countless authorities – from politicians and insurance leaders to mathematicians and healthcare experts – have tried to solve this crisis, yet success has so far eluded everyone. It is a truly ‘wicked problem’. So how can we as designers be rightfully confident that we can make a difference? Enter: systems thinking.

1 ‘Designers Finally Have A Seat At The Table. Now What?’ in Fast Company, 8 January 2018

Systems thinking While there’s much talk today about ‘designing systems’ and ‘systemic design’, systems thinking is altogether

Futures Thinking: A Mind-set, not a Method

The Service Design Maturity Model

A strategic framework to embed service design into an organisation

Jules Prick is partner at Koos Service Design with over ten years of international experience in research, branding and service innovation.

He founded Koos Service Design in Amsterdam in 2009, following his passion to create meaningful services. jules@koosservicedesign.com

companies. We have helped some of our clients, including a

Explore

Prove

Scale

Integrate

Thrive

utility company and the Dutch Railways, achieve this ambition.

Introducing the Service Design Maturity Model The model consists of five stages that show the process of embedding service design into an organisation and structures the transformation towards a service design-led company. The model helps to identify the current stage of maturity

preferability.

but more than that, it might offer us a new way of seeing the

Portuguese telecom provider, a leading European bank, an energy

through four pillars, which then serve as guidelines for further maturation.

— People and Resources – The extent to which people, budget, time and facilities are available and dedicated to service design activities.

— Tools and Capabilities – The extent to which service design methodologies and tools are applied within the organisation, and the level of required skills and capabilities that are needed to apply service design.

Organisational Structure – The extent — to which the organisational structure allows and facilitates multidisciplinary service design work and the assigned roles that are needed to do so.

Metrics and Deliverables – The shape — and form of service design deliverables and the extent to which metrics and

categorise different future scenarios according to likelihood and

reflecting the complexities of the design challenges that we face.

world that we design for.

design. This has resulted in a growing desire amongst organisations that ‘understand’ service design to embed it into their

Design practices are becoming increasingly future-focussed, Futures thinking can offer us tools and methods to help with this,

organisations have started to understand the value of service

Implementing service design capabilities is a somewhat unexplored territory for many service designers. When reflecting upon those projects, we observed striking similarities amongst them and soon began formulating a framework: The Service Design Maturity Model. We set out to create a model for successfully embedding service design at scale within organisations, including actionable advice on how to overcome barriers.

Plausible

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

Possible

by Joseph Voros, the ‘Futures Cone’ is a visual tool that helps to

In the past years, many organisations have been working on

Niels Corsten is Service Design Lead at Koos Service Design. He has contributed to service design projects in telecom, banking, mobility, insurance and healthcare industries, amongst others.

He is currently involved in embedding service design in organisations, working toolkits, training programmes and on-the-job coaching. niels@koosservicedesign.com

Probable

Embedding futures thinking within design practices

projects to improve service experiences. Increasingly, large

whether an idea has potential.

Daylight, Code Name Collective

Pascal Soboll leads Daylight Design’s Munich office.

Trained as a product designer and a physicist, he is deeply fascinated by the symbiotic potential between science and design.

His favourite innovation fields lie at the intersection between social change, technological development and organisational strategy.

He regularly speaks on the subject of Design Thinking and creative leadership.

How to make Obamacare viable?

Consider the challenge presented by so-called ‘Obamacare’ in the United States. Mandated in 2010 and implemented in 2014, it has put the U.S. Medicaid health insurance system under huge financial strain. In fact, in its current incarnation, it’s not considered financially viable. In the heated political debate about whether Obamacare should be retained or abandoned, cost – unsurprisingly – is one of the major bargaining chips.

A core problem? Individuals under the Medicaid programme known as ‘high utilisers’ incur a large percentage of system costs. For one large U.S. health insurance provider, five percent of users represent 55 percent of their total costs! Excessive emergency room visits (each costing around $5,000) and frequent emergency services calls by this user group trigger expensive responses.

KPIs are in place and being utilised to stimulate and facilitate service design.

The four pillars are tied to each of the maturity stages and show the transformation process towards a service design-led organisation. The five stages are ‘Explore’, ‘Prove’, ‘Scale’, ‘Integrate’ and ‘Thrive’.

Explore – Crusaders within the organisation are — exploring service design as a new methodology and unite with other service design enthusiasts in order to start a first initiative.

Prove – Painstaking pioneering to get service design — established in the organisation, with service design projects and the creation of evidence of its value.

Scale – Service design expands throughout the — organisation through unifying tools and methodologies and teaching of its capabilities.

Integrate – The siloed organisational structures — are torn down and transformed into a design-led

foundation. Service design is embedded in the daily way of working through integrated systems and metrics.

Thrive – Service design now thrives in the organisation — through leadership and experimentation, and service design is ingrained in the company culture. Methodologies are being evolved as the organisation is pushing the service design envelope.

In the following section, each of the maturity stages is described, showing what you would experience within each stage, and what is necessary to progress towards the next stage.

Stage 1: Explore What it’s like

In an organisation where service design is non-existent, there is no responsibility, no budget, no time and no facilities available to carry out service design. But above all, there are no people or capabilities. Individuals across the organisation encounter service design through

Zoë Prosser is a Futures Researcher at Andthen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increasingly, future-oriented practices are influencing the design disciplines of today. ‘Foresight’, ‘futurism’, ‘futurology’, ‘anticipation studies’ and ‘futures 1 Rushkoff, D. 2018. Why Futurists Suck. Futurefest, 7 July, London.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High utilisers are usually challenged by the complexities of life.

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34 – Moving Beyond Lucky: How systems thinking can help design for ‘wicked problems’ Touching again on healthcare, author Pascal Sobol follows up from a talk given at the SDN’s Service Design Global Conference held in Madrid, and uses the lenses of systems thinking to better understand so-called ‘wicked problems’ and tackle them through better design.

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40 – The Service Design Maturity Model: A strategic framework to embed service design into an organisation Presented at SDGC20 as a talk, and based on years of client project experience, this paper from authors at Amsterdambased agency Koos presents a model for quantifying the maturity of service design within a given organisation.

Building on more general design maturity ladders elsewhere, it focuses tightly on service design, with valuable insights for any in-house service design teams trying to increase their impact.

46 – Futures Thinking: A Mind-set, not a Method: Embedding futures thinking within design practices Designing for change calls for both a nimble approach and a new mind-set. In this article, the authors describe how they have adopted the principles of futures thinking to their practice, and share with readers two overarching ways they do so.

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7

26

Clarification

16

PHASE 1

KEY PREREQUISITES

Interventions

PHASE 2

UNDERSTAND & DISCOVER

Alignment

Support

PHASE 3

ENABLE & DEFINE

PHASE 4

REINFORCE & DELIVER

20 10 KERRY'S TAKE

20 Successfully Implementing

Service Design Projects Tina Weisser, Wolfgang Jonas, Birgit Mager

10 Embracing Change

With A Growth Mindset Kerry Bodine

2 IMPRINT

8

3

FROM THE EDITORS

4

THOUGHTS FROM

THE PUBLISHER

6

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

6

Embracing Change Jamin Hegeman

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12 FEATURE:

EMBRACING CHANGE

26 Design Methods for

12 The Service Design

Imperative Nick Leon

16 Designing for Consequence

Lorna Ross

Strengthening Social Cohesion Aran Baker, Valentina Branada

30 Participatory Foresight and

Service Design Dr Tuomo Kuosa

c ontents

34 Preferable

Probable Plausible

46

Possible

34 Moving Beyond Lucky

Pascal Soboll 40 The Service Design

Maturity Model Niels Corsten, Jules Prick

46 Futures Thinking:

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

50 From Skills to Mindsets:

Grappling with Complex Public Problems Jocelyn Bailey, Cat Drew Touchpoint 12-1

9

Embracing Change With a Growth Mindset

My city was one of the first in the US to shut down.

On March 16, San Francisco officials announced that a “shelter in place” directive would begin at 12:01 am the following morning. Like many others wanting to stave off potential boredom, I stopped by my local games store to pick up a jigsaw puzzle. (I chose a serene beach scene reminiscent of the upcoming vacation I knew I’d soon need to cancel.) On my way to the checkout counter, something caught my eye: a Rubik’s Cube.

I’d had a Rubik’s Cube when I was kid, but despite my many attempts had never learned to solve it. Now, faced with the prospect of not leaving my house for weeks or months, it seemed like the perfect time.

I found an online video and committed myself to memorising a short sequence of movements every day until I got to a complete solve.

I was shocked when just one week later, I was routinely solving the cube in less than three minutes — even while multitasking in front of Netflix!

Admittedly, this wasn’t the most momentous of feats, especially considering that the world record currently stands at a seemingly unreal 4.22 seconds. But it gave me a sense of accomplishment 10 Touchpoint 12-1

in a world that had suddenly turned upside down. You CAN teach this old dog new tricks!

In her book Mindset: Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential, Dr Carol Dweck shares her 30 years of research on two distinct mindsets. The fixed mindset is one of believing that your qualities — like how smart you are or how well you can cook a spinach soufflé — is set in stone.

You were born with a certain set of innate talents and abilities, and you’ll never surpass those imposed limits. When I was a kid, the fixed mindset was strong in me.

I couldn’t solve the Rubik’s Cube, I assumed that it was beyond my abilities, and I gave up on trying.

In contrast, the growth mindset is one of believing that you can develop your qualities, both through your own efforts and with help from others (like the nice people who made videos on how to solve the cube so that I didn’t have to figure out the algorithms myself). Yes, some people are more athletically or artistically inclined than others, but we can all improve and grow in these areas. I’m happy to report that I’ve developed more of a growth mindset over the decades — and when I saw the Rubik’s Cube on a shelf this past March, I knew instantly that I’d be able to solve it if I simply set my mind to it.

Dweck explains that the growth mindset — the belief that intelligence of any sort can be developed — leads to a desire to learn. That desire, in turn, creates a tendency to lean into challenges and persist in the face of setbacks. And what has 2020 been if not chock full of challenges and setbacks? The changes brought on by the pandemic have been tough for us all as individuals and for the organisations we work for.

Fortunately, the growth mindset can be applied to organisations as well as to individual people — and this may just be the lifeline that many organisations need to survive (dare I say thrive?) in our new normal.

Dweck studied employees in growth mindset organisations and found that they were 65 percent likelier to say that their companies support risk taking

k e rr y ' s ta k e

and 49 percent likelier to say that their companies foster innovation compared to employees working in fixed mindset organisations.

And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella credits much of the company’s success since his appointment in 2014 to a sweeping cultural change initiative that methodically shifted the organisation from a fixed to a growth mindset.

As service designers, we have the opportunity, or perhaps the imperative, to help organisations that need to shift in order to meet their customers’ (or citizens’ or students’) changing needs throughout the pandemic and beyond. Creating a more growthoriented culture is one important step. Here’s how to get started: Focus on process, not just results.

— Yes, results are important.

But as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day — and anyone can make a good decision or drive a successful implementation once. But can they do it repeatedly? A focus on process will help employees achieve results more consistently — and give them a clear focus for making changes if they’re not hitting the mark.

— Share what employees have learned from failures. I live near Silicon Valley, where startup veterans wear their failures as badges of honour. And while there’s some controversy over

whether failure should really be celebrated or not, the fact is that employees and teams will fail.

When this happens, encourage them to identify the reasons why and what they could do differently next time — then share this information across the organisation so that others can learn from it.

Invest in training. A growth — mindset and training go handin-hand. This could be training on a specific methodology (like journey mapping), a management technique (like coaching), or any number of other valuable topics.

Spending time and money to help employees develop new skills sends a clear message that growth is important to the organisation.

Screen candidates for a growth — mindset. One of the most effective ways to change an organisation’s culture is to be selective about who you let in. So, in addition to screening for job-specific skills and knowledge, look for employee candidates who express key markers of a growth mindset, such as curiosity and a passion for learning.

I’ve found the principles of the growth mindset helpful, both personally and professionally, during this difficult period of change — and I hope you will, too. Next up for me: Shaving another minute off my solve time. Wish me luck!

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

Follow Kerry on Twitter at @kerrybodine.

Adopt the language of “yet.”

— Adding “yet” to the end of an otherwise negative statement — like “I can’t solve the Rubik’s Cube… yet!” — creates a not-sosubtle shift in our thinking and encourages employees to think about future possibilities.

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The Service Design Imperative Is service design another specialisation within the design discipline, or is it somehow reshaping design itself, transforming both what we mean by design and the role and responsibilities of designers? Applying design practice to the other 80% of the economy, especially public services, which represent around half Nick Leon is head of service design at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London.

Nick began his career as an industrial designer at IBM, moving from designing products then services, through to developing entire new businesses in his role as business development director for IBM’s Global Services division in Europe.

12 Touchpoint 12-1

of that, is likely to stretch the boundaries of the discipline. But is design going further than that?

In this essay I will explore a greater context for service design, driven by unprecedented social, environmental and economic imperatives, the opportunities for service transformation that digital technologies present and the implications for redefining design itself.

We face unprecedented challenges at this time: stresses on the environment, shrinking resources for a growing and increasingly urbanised and ageing population, rising inequality and outdated financial systems. Our planet will not redesign itself: it will take the ingenuity of designers — blending design for people with technological innovation — to address these issues.

Similarly, we are experiencing a unique combination of digital technology innovations, which in the last ten years have collectively surpassed all the innovations in information technology Nick Leon

in the previous four decades, from six billion mobile phone accounts globally to the rise of social media, the realisation of the internet of things and the exploitation of big data. We have tools to transform existing services and to innovate new ones, and the imperative for these innovations in the public realm, driven by need, and in the private sector, driven by global competition, are more intense than ever. However, governments are struggling to address these challenges, focusing their efforts on managing today’s public services and the public purse rather than tackling the big social and environmental issues. The most innovative technology firms, as well as big mobile operators, financial services and global energy providers are shaping the way we live and interact, our culture and society and our environment, both positively and negatively, far more

embr acing change

than our politicians. These firms need innovation to survive, and the designer is crucial to their capacity to innovate.

Never has design had such a powerful role to play, but seizing the opportunity comes with responsibility.

A values-based framework Designers cannot be agnostic with regards to these opportunities, as well as to the issues that are facing us. While our discipline has always focused on creating new levels of value for our clients and their customers, we also have to reflect on our values. Are our interventions adding to the challenges we face, or helping address them? Service design means engaging at a systems level, not just a component level. To make a meaningful impact requires designers with deeper and broader skills. It needs designers with the capacity to shape strategy, not just the form of products or the physical manifestations of a service touch point, or workflows.

The choices that designers make need to be value-based, not only about value creation. Designers must recognise the social and environmental impact of their design decisions, as well as seeking out opportunities to actively engage with these issues. As designers, we must combine the creation of value within an explicit framework of values. We

pride ourselves on being the ones most connected to society and contemporary culture, so it is a special responsibility that falls on us.

Customer experience — consequence or intention Designers are taught to start by exploring a problem area at a systemic level, identifying opportunities for design intervention and framing the specific problem that they will address. We learn to start by designing the experience before figuring out the characteristics of the solution that resolve the problem. This experience-led design model is even more important in a world where services are the dominant form of consumption, the dominant sector for employment and the greatest contributor to our economy.

With a few notable exceptions, until now designers have mostly played a subsidiary role in the design of services.

Designers are often involved in the design of the touchpoints of a service, individual products (and the interaction with them), communications and marketing materials, and interior, environmental and retail design. The user or customer experience has been a consequence of the design of the products, the processes and programming, the places and the skills of the people. This experience itself was not explicitly designed, rather it resulted from Touchpoint 12-1 13

the choices made in other design and technical disciplines.

In other words, it was consequential not intentional. The opportunity for service designers is to turn this around, making the service experience intentional, and specify the systems, processes and organisation to fulfil it. As designers, it means we have to extend our service design skills and build expertise in systems design, organisational behaviour, strategy and change management.

Designing for four different categories of value When we design services we need to understand not only users and the context in which they live their lives, but all the other people who have a stake in the solution or who interact with users, especially those who deliver the service. Services can only be delivered successfully if those who deliver them — Are able to contribute value of their own to the service, enriching the service proposition and the recipient’s experience — Believe in the intrinsic value of the service for the user or society so that they are fully invested in the relevance and meaning of the service — Feel valued by their organisation and its management to enhance their personal motivation and self-esteem — Can align their personal values with the organisation’s values If any one of those four expressions of value is missing, the service experience will ultimately fail, and it is the designer’s role to ensure all four expressions of value are present.

Because the people delivering the service need the capacity to convey value, as well as to create value for the recipient, personally, the service experience cannot be defined in a wholly deterministic way or by the blueprint alone. This requires designers to have expertise in organisational behaviour and management to ensure this is explicitly designed into the service proposition.

People-centred design is not just about designing for 14 Touchpoint 12-1

the recipients of the service. Designing for those who deliver the service can be equally important, as argued by Rosenbluth and Peters in their influential book, The Customer Comes Second, (Harper Collins, 1992).

New and complementary skills Service designers need to enrich their core discipline with complementary skills: — Systems design to enable designers to deconstruct the current service and user experience and reconfigure, refresh or even replace it entirely with one that fits with the lifestyle of users or the operating environment of the organisation — An understanding of organisations and organisational behaviour, so that designers can innovate the processes, practices and resulting organisations that will be responsible for the delivery of the total user experience — Business-model Innovation: recognising that the propositions cannot be independent of the business model associated with the provision and delivery of the service — Design management: because each touchpoint may involve different products, visual communications, the design of multiple interactions with physical and digital media, as well as the spaces, places and processes people will use to deliver the service, the service designer also has to be an expert design manager, focusing on the total user experience and coordinating all the other disciplines to achieve this goal.

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Trans-disciplinary teams Designing product/service systems and the business models that enable them means crossing boundaries between design disciplines, business and engineering. It means changes to the processes and practices, not just of designers, but rather how firms innovate and organise themselves.

This has implicit challenges as we share different working practices and cultures, but it is crucial that designers create bridges to those disciplines, especially if they are to lead the innovation.

A final reflection We are living in extraordinary times.

The challenges of environmental and climate change, an ageing demographic, pressure on resources, rapid urbanisation and issues of social and economic exclusion require action. Our world is not going to get better on its own.

Designers have the biggest-ever design job, as well as a responsibility to design a better world and the way we live on it. Every design choice is an opportunity to make design truly meaningful and to resonate with people’s lives, as well as helping to transform our world.

This requires designers to argue the case for change cogently, with compelling evidence and expertise on these complex issues, and to demonstrate both thought, as well as organisational leadership.

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Designing for Consequence How to plan for the enduring effect of design in complex systems

Though currently considered very different design arenas, services are frequently the window into systems. When a customer engages with a service, they are, in fact, being drawn into the top layer of a system. Like a giant iceberg, the service is what has been made visible, what can be known.

Lorna Ross, a graduate of The Royal College of Art (London, England), has 24 years' experience in design, design research and innovation, with the past twelve years focused on health and healthcare.

She is a strategic leader in directing the discovery and implementation of transformative, user-centric care models at the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation.

16 Touchpoint 12-1

It is just a tiny fraction of a much more chaotic system hidden beneath the surface. This is never truer than when someone encounters healthcare services.

They collide with a system so obscure, so daunting in its complexity that the experience itself can be disorienting at best but more typically, terrifying.

How they navigate the system is through the service cues we design. We allow them just a select glimpse of the whole, with the complexity hidden so as to not confuse the user. We design the access and influence points to direct and focus their involvement and to manage their inputs only where the system can tolerate them. In healthcare, this is done because the system has evolved to be simply too confusing to explain, and with this confusion comes increased volatility.

Existing as two parallel universes, the needs of the system often contradict the needs of the user. In the healthcare system, we optimise to mitigate risk, to keep people safe. This can be experienced test

as impersonal, standardised, and routine.

The choices we make, every minute, every day, for every patient are ones that we know to be right but their logic or value is not perceivable to patients.

As designers of services, we must understand the system that the service supports and the behaviours it perpetuates. Often we must question that system as much as we reflect it. It is not sufficient to build a service that considers the end user experience but more one that exposes the system and makes it tangible, understood and accessible.

Service design when done well focuses on giving the user power, control and influence. It offers options and choice by demystifying the systems and inviting the user to feel invested and engaged in its success. We have found that once a user understands the hidden drivers of healthcare services that are significantly more likely to act in concert with them.

In healthcare, the potential for an empowered and informed user to

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Existing as two parallel universes, the needs of the healthcare system often contradict the needs of the user

catapult the industry to new paradigms is so potent that the opportunity for service design is less a one of successful translation and more of radical adaptation.

The design of compelling, meaningful and effective healthcare lie less in clever interfaces and tools to the existing system and more in allowing the user to determine through their actions where real value lies.

Design, like science, is a tool for understanding, as well as for acting. It offers us a process by which complex and confusing issues can be examined and considered from intersecting perspectives. Good design rarely focuses on fixing things, but rather more on transforming things. The subtle, but important,

difference is that, in complex systems, most things break for a reason, probably because they were not adding value and so the system is trying to rewrite the story without them in it. Take, for example, the patient who keeps turning up in the emergency department despite numerous directions to seek care services through their primary care clinic. Though considered a deviant in the eyes of the clinician, they are in fact a super-user of sorts. They have determined that the just-in-time services offered in an emergency department are significantly more compatible with their family’s unpredictable healthcare needs than the limited fixed hours of a clinic. When users forge new Touchpoint 12-1

17

pathways in the system it is typically because they have figured out the most direct route to value for them.

If we want our service systems to succeed and scale we need to design for internal fragility, competition and obsolescence.

It has been an enduring experience of mine, consistent across the five innovation labs I have worked at, that the paralysing anxiety of managing risk while innovating complex systems, biases groups strongly to favour additive rather than subtractive concepts. Universally, there is greater tolerance for innovations that promote additional elements than those that challenge the value of existing ones. Complex systems grow increasingly complex simply because of the risk in destroying things.

These systems tolerate huge redundancy and inefficiency to maintain the status quo.

No one knows this more than the nursing staff in our hospitals, burdened by the increasing demand for customised standardisation, transparency, customer service to compliment the more standard delivery of exceptional service outcomes, they find 18 Touchpoint 12-1

themselves crippled by the cumulative effect of trickle down service innovation and, most disturbing of all, at increased risk of error and burn-out.

I have recently been struck by how effectively service designers create maps (often giga-maps) and models of the system they are hoping to innovate, but when they move towards proposing solutions their thinking becomes less dynamic. It may be that the thinking and seeing tools we have developed are so comprehensive that they lay bare possibilities that our ‘doing’ tools do not know how to manage.

To use a medical analogy, our treatment tools lack the precision and sophistication of our diagnostic tools.

I would pose the possibility that we should think about designing less for mitigating risk or managing uncertainty and more for having an enduring effect. We need to utilise our advanced skills in seeing cause and effect, not only when we study systems, but also when we attempt to transform them.

A designer’s systems view is less the discrete parts and more the dynamic relationships between them. When

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I would challenge the service design community to become less enamoured with our ‘seeing’ tools and work quickly to advance our expertise in the ‘doing’ or impact tools

considering any action, you can estimate both the desired effect and also the indirect effects equally. Often, to effectively adjust dynamic systems, it is better to design for consequence, for a cascading impact, that for local or direct effect.

An example of this from our work at Mayo is an experiment that we ran with expectant mothers, where we gave them access to foetal heart rate monitors 24/7.

This was framed to the OBGYN department as a simple efficiency in reducing the demand for reassurance, particularly during the final trimester. What it did, in fact, was to fundamentally challenge the existing care model where the tools resided with the institution and access to them constitutes the service. Here, the experiment of transferring the location of the tool in the system away from the clinician and to the patient was effective, not only in solving the immediate problem (demand for reassurance) but it more importantly had the consequence of triggering a fierce appetite in the patient population for more control. The overly medicalised and professionalised aspects of pre-natal care in low-risk

pregnancy were called into question and a seemingly benign experiment had a snowball effect that rippled through the entire care model. So much so that, when these mothers delivered, they were loath to engage with paediatric services as they, too, practiced a similarly institutionalised and professionalized infant care model.

Having had the experience of control and autonomy, the patients were significantly more dissatisfied with the absence of this and became powerful advocates for reform. The impact and effect of this experiment was to activate the patient as change agent and allow for the implications of the concept to ripple out in a cascading series of triggers.

I would challenge the service design community to become less enamoured with our ‘seeing’ tools and work quickly to advance our expertise in the ‘doing’ or impact tools. In the future, as service and systems design become more complex, we will be asked to tackle greater and greater problems. We must understand how to design for effect, for enduring impact, for… consequence.

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Successfully Implementing Service Design Projects Essential preconditions and influencing factors Why is the success rate in implementing service design projects still low? Why do brilliant concepts fail when it comes to anchoring them in the daily business of the client organisation? Where are the barriers to implementing service design projects and where are the optimisation potentials? And are there any influencing factors that service designers should consider in future projects?

Finding answers to these questions and better understanding Tina Weisser works as an innovation and systemic organisational consultant in Munich. She is a lecturer at various universities and is certified as Service Design Master Trainer (SDN). t@feedyourmind.eu Wolfgang Jonas is Professor for Design Studies (Designwissenschaft) and head of the Institute of Design Research at Braunschweig University of Art. His research focus lies on systems thinking, scenario building and the development of practice-based design research.

Birgit Mager is Professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany. She is founder and director of sedes research at KISD and is co-founder and president of the Service Design Network.

the complex topic of implementation was the motivation behind a three-year international study. The results are 24 influencing factors and the ‘KUER’ implementation model.

Designing for impact means designing for implementation. Today, the focus of most service design projects is on the first phases – only around four percent1 of the methods applied in service design focus on implementation. It is therefore likely that service designers will need to expand their methodological knowledge and skills in order to be more successful in the future. Dealing with this complex issue requires the integration of new skills and approaches. Because the implementation of new concepts requires organisational and cultural changes for the client organisation, techniques from the areas

1 Martins, R. (2012). Poster at Design for Next, EAD 12 Rome.

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of systemic organisational development and management consulting can be particularly valuable.

Study design and approach Within the framework of a three-year qualitative study, implementation projects of complex service design concepts were examined at the intersection of external service design consulting and its clients (for-profit organisations).

With the support of approximately 50 experts from the areas of service design practitioners (Hellon, Livework, Dark horse, IDEO, etc.), service providers (EON, BMW Group, Océ, etc.) and business and organisational consulting (Capgemini, Etventure, OSB-I, etc.),

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Clarification

PHASE 1

KEY PREREQUISITES

Interventions

PHASE 2

UNDERSTAND & DISCOVER

Support

PHASE 3

ENABLE & DEFINE

Alignment

PHASE 4

REINFORCE & DELIVER

Figure 1: KUER model with its four phases and main activities

explorative interviews and workshops were conducted to identify influencing factors, frequent barriers and future potentials. The many factors found were reduced to a set of 24 and examined for their interrelationships by using sensitivity analysis, an effective system analysis tool designed by systems researcher Frederic Vester2 .

Sensitivity analysis recognises that client organisations are not only embedded in complex environments, but are themselves complex socio-technical systems. There is broad scientific agreement that due to the complexity of organisations, the consideration of system relationships provides essential insights and perspectives for successful change initiatives. Through a systemic approach3, many of the obstacles occurring in service design projects could be explained. Also 12 general lessons can be derived for practical use.

spatially for future projects. On the other hand, a result-oriented success is when the new service design concept is introduced into the company's typical way of working, accepted by users and reconfirmed by measurement that it meets criteria such as efficiency, user satisfaction, or return-on-investment (ROI). It becomes obvious that there are different areas of application and success in service design, which in turn depend on the goals and capabilities of the client as well as external consultants. The reasons found for failure are just as numerous. Obstacles may exist on the client side as well as on the service designers’ side. For example, the lack of experience and implementation maturity of external service designers, internal resistance or decision-making dilemmas of top management, lack of user acceptance, or a better offer from competing brands.

Results: Objectives and obstacles A crucial question is what success can mean in the context of service design implementation. Targets can be purely process- or result-oriented, or a combination of both. Examples of process-oriented success are when employees learn service design methods, spaces for co-creative work are established within the client company, and the organisation prepares for cultural change. In these cases, the successes would be based on the fact that the client organisation becomes familiar with new methods and prepares itself procedurally and

Results: 24 influencing factors Recurring patterns and general influencing factors (see Figure 3 ) could be identified despite the heterogeneous projects found in practice. These factors were examined for their effect upon each other and their influenceability.

Six of them can be described as necessary ‘hygiene’ factors and eighteen as ‘desired’ factors. The hygiene factors are key prerequisites that must be present to favour result-oriented implementations. Ideally, they must be considered as early as the contract clarification stage in Phase 1. Because, as expected, not only one or two factors were found, it becomes clear that service design projects are not happening in an isolated and context-free space.

In many cases, service designers spend several years working on individual touchpoints before commissioning and successfully implementing end-to-end, holistic

2 Vester, F. (2007). The Art of interconnected thinking: Tools and concepts for a new approach to tackling complexity.

3 See also Luhmann. N. (1984). Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Simon. F. (2015). Einführung in die systemische Organisationstheorie.

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customer experiences. When projects fail, it is reasonable to assume that either one or both parties weren’t ready for implementation, or that the hygiene factors were simply not yet fulfilled at the time.

Results: The KUER implementation model To date, there is no model in service design research that offers a comprehensive analysis and structure of the influencing factors in the implementation of projects. Based on the empirical results, the KUER model was developed, consisting of four phases and main activities (see Figure 1). KUER stands for ‘Key Prerequisites’, ‘Understand & Discover’, ‘Enable & Define’ and ‘Reinforce & Deliver’. In addition, Figure 2 presents the factors and their relationships. Looking at the KUER process model, it becomes apparent that the entire process begins with the clarification in Phase 1 (‘Key Prerequisites’), but that the phases do not have to follow each other linearly because setbacks and feedback must be taken into account. In Phase 2 (‘Understand and Discover’) a temporary project organisation (‘safe space = physical and mental space for new ideas and thoughts unfamiliar to the organisation and co-creative working’) is set up and extensive diagnostics are carried out. Users, the client organisation and economic parameters must be analysed. Solutions developed in Phase 3 (‘Enable and Define’) are tested in rapid cycles with users, employees and relevant stakeholders and evaluated at decision nodes using a three-dimensional selection mechanism.

As activities to support the process and its orientation are used iteratively as required, the transition to the integration Phase 4 (‘Reinforce and Deliver’) is seamless.

Results: 12 lessons learned A systemic approach to the implementation process helps service designers to achieve a better understanding of the interaction of systemic elements and their causes. The basic insight that there is an unmanageable number of social (groups such as departments) and psychological systems (the individual actor/human) colliding is an important aspect because the connectedness of the individuals involved depends on it. If systems thinking is applied to service design practice, the following lessons (which are all closely interwoven) can enrich daily project work.

Lesson Number 1: Six necessary hygiene factors

It became apparent that the following six hygiene 22 Touchpoint 12-1

PHASE 1

PHASE 2

Clarification

Interventions

Service Design Consultant Client organisation

1

Implementation maturity

2

Compliance: C-level sponsorship

3

Implement. management all phases

11

User diagnosis

12

Organisational diag.

13

Business diagnosis

7

Stakeholder management

8

Communication level, connectivity

9

Human-centered mindset

10

Clarity of roles & responsibilities

4

Temporary project organisation

14

Enable employees

5

Inter-divisional staff involvement

15

Participatory, iterative work (co-creation)

6

Personnel capacity

16

Employee commitment & acceptance

Problem space & analysis

temporary organisation

KEY PREREQUISITES

17

Goal clarification

18

Expectation management

19

Internal ambassadors

UNDERSTAND & DISCOVER

factors are essential for a successful implementation: 1) Implementation maturity, 2) Compliance/C-level sponsorship, 3) Implementation management at all phases, 4) Temporary project organisation, 5) Interdivisional staff involvement and 6) Personnel capacity.

Lesson Number 2: Implementation starts on day one

The foundations for implementation are already set at the contract clarification stage. It should be investigated whether (and up to which iteration) the six aforementioned hygiene factors could be sufficiently present. An iterative service design process calls for ‘iterative contracting.’4 If one considers the change curves in the change literature, it becomes clear that integrating something new takes a significant amount of time. It is

4 Mager. B. (2018). Keynote at Service Design Conference, Helsinki Finland.

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Figure 2: KUER process model showing the factors and their

PHASE 3

PHASE 4

Support

Alignment

User Value

relationships

Business Value

Lesson Number 4: Working against the system logic creates resistance

Organisational Value

20

Prototyping & selection management

Decision gate

Future, solution, and test rooms

22

Reflection management

ENABLE & DEFINE

21

Three dimensional selection mechanism

Reduced future and test rooms

23

Transformation management

24

Compensation concept

Integration & realisation

REINFORCE & DELIVER

therefore important to accompany the implementation process from start to finish when the new concept is reconfirmed through measurement, testing and anchored in the organisation’s day-to-day activities.

Lesson Number 3: Client organisations cannot be controlled linearly and are always context-dependent

Client organisations have their unique history and reason for existence. Therefore, it is crucial to thoroughly diagnose the organisation (e.g., existing culture, stakeholder expectations, expected resistance) and to build upon their knowledge.5 Client organisations as ‘living systems’ cannot be controlled from the outside, because they cannot be reduced to being mere simple machines.

5 Mager, B. (2010). Service Design and Behavioural Change.

Touchpoint Vol. 1 Nr.3: 73-75.

It becomes evident that different ‘worlds’ – i.e., system logic, languages, terms, cultures and working methods – meet temporarily when external service designers collaborate with the employees of a client organisation.

Resistance from employees is the norm rather than the exception when new and foreign elements are introduced.

The unknown endangers the status quo of every ‘living system’ and can create great fears.

Lesson Number 5: Systems and people are oriented towards the meaning they give to things

Tangible prototypes can help employees and executives understand both rationally and emotionally the opportunities and risks of a new service design concept.

Because the evidence and the design of service design concepts are closely interwoven, prototyping and storytelling are of fundamental importance: they have the strength to make the abstract vivid for non-specialists and to support social interaction processes. In practice, the prototypes must make the ‘meaning’ of the idea applicable to the organisation, in order to reduce uncertainties.

Lesson Number 6: Connection capability

Understanding each other is trivial but indispensable.

It is advisable to clarify common terms that include both the service design process and internal abbreviations or terms. External service designers should also develop a sense of the existing corporate culture so as not to be unintentionally irritating and incomprehensible. Being able to communicate with executives is an essential prerequisite.

Lesson Number 7: Closeness - distance dilemma

Systemic organisation consultants emphasise collaborative approaches, because as employees are empowered by learning new skills and methods, organisational learning takes place and resistance diminishes. Service designers must, therefore, work with the clients in unusual proximity, but always keep enough of a distance to avoid being dragged into the client’s problems. The temporary Touchpoint 12-1 23

implementation maturity

Compliance c-level sponsorship

implementation management all phases

temporary organisation

inter-divisional staff involvement

Interaction of skills (processes), human-centered culture and amount of experience with implementation work on both sides (external consultant and client organisation).

Ensure that staff have permission to devote their time without conflict with day-today business and other commitments. Ensure permission for establishing a temporary organisation, involv. of key persons and budget.

Consider implementation from the beginning, all 4 phases iteratively encompassing. Take into account waves of resistance. Establish long-term project cooperation and relationships because ‘service design work is never done.‘

Install secure areas and spaces (suitable for creative teamwork, test lab). Encourage enthusiasm and establish a common language. Support fresh, non-organisational thinking and integrate an ‘outside-in-perspective.‘

Involve all relevant employees in the process right from the start. Reinforce and respect the team spirit, team dynamics and individual system logic. The aim is to identify and clarify existing gaps between departments.

ClarifiCation

ClarifiCation

ClarifiCation

ClarifiCation

ClarifiCation

1

2

3

4

5

Personnel capacity

Stakeholder Management

level of communication

Human-centered mindset

Clarity of roles & responsibility

Ensure sufficient capacity of appropriate employees across departments and disciplines (apart from dayto-day duties).

Identify all important stakeholders, both internal and external (organisation, users, etc.) and integrate them throughout the entire process. Tools: stakeholder mapping, force field analysis or emotional weather maps.

Establish a level of comprehension and connectivity: clarify service design terms and terms used by the organisation (including departments). Create easy to understand glossary.

Develop an innovative mindset. Principles: Openness for change and experiments, empathy for users and nonlinear thinking. Making ideas tangible through visualisation and promoting a culture of action.

Clear allocation of roles and responsibilities for all participants (in- and external team) enduring the complete development and implementation process.

intErVEntionS

intErVEntionS

intErVEntionS

intErVEntionS

ClarifiCation

6

7

8

9

10

User diagnostics

organisational diagnostics

Business diagnostics

Empowering employees

Participatory, iterative work (co-creative)

Identify, check and integrate iteratively user needs and real-time feedback throughout the entire project duration.

Understand and maintain internal ethnography, complexity, dynamics, logic, culture, rules, working methods, power relations and processes. Try to understand/find out why employees build up resistance.

Understand and calculate drivers, strategy, vision, competitors, business case etc.

Understand and calculate the complexity of the system.

Make potentials and benefits quickly measurable (‘quick wins‘).

Service design method coaching and training.Transfer of know-how (focus on usercentric). Process support and consulting when needed. Initiate team coaching as an accompanying support function.

Participatory working in a temporary organisation and beyond (integration of disciplines and departments).

Motivating employees to develop ideas and to be ‘idea owners‘.

intErVEntionS

intErVEntionS

intErVEntionS

SUPPort

SUPPort

11

12

13

14

15

Employee commitment & acceptance

Goal clarification

Expectation management

internal ambassadors

Prototyping & selection management

Create energy for change, risk-friendliness and openness for new ideas. Potential development, motivation, a sense of optimism, ‘bottomup‘ enthusiasm.

Align strategy, vision with potential solutions. Differentiate between short- and long-term objectives. Create transformation roadmaps early enough. Make goals visible and tangible within temporary and mother organisation.

Identify and synchronize expectations, priorities, goals and time frames of project sponsors. Consider the possibilities and abilities of the organisation. Show realistic expectations and different perspectives.

Appoint, train and empower internal ambassadors in the temporary organisation, motivate them to inspire and motivate others in the mother organisation with the help of tangible prototypes and strong visualizations.

Prototyping allows a meaningful selection. Quick wins support the process. Find out who decides what and why. The risk is minimized by a realistic comparison of the solution approaches at the decision points.

SUPPort

SUPPort

SUPPort

SUPPort

aliGnMEnt

16

17

18

19

3-dimensional selection mechanism

reflection management

transformation management

Compensation concept

At the decision node, KPIs, business case, organisational capabilities, user needs and the added value of all participants are compared and orchestrated. Prototypes and business cases make benefits tangible and proof is provided.

Reflection work guided by one or more responsible persons. Iterative critical alignment of goal, strategy, differences, process, status, emotional status of staff and resources. Tool: e.g. cross-impact analysis (acc. to Vester).

Estimate the impact of the new concepts on the required movement for the organisation, the effort, demand, employees, structures and resources in a timely manner. Tool: e.g. migration matrices.

Rewards and recognition for employees must be tailored.

Try to understand, consider and activate the motivation of the employees.

aliGnMEnt

aliGnMEnt

aliGnMEnt

aliGnMEnt

21

22

23

24

Figure 3: Brief description of the 24 influencing factors found and four categories Figure 3:interventions, Brief description of the influencing within the four mainthe activities Clarification, Interventions, clearing, support and24 alignment.

Thefactors category clearing contains six hygiene necessary if you aim for a result-oriented success‘hygiene’ - the implementation Supportfactors and Alignment.

Clarification contains the six so-called factors. of a service design concept.

24 Touchpoint 12-1

20

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organisation provides a good framework for this close cooperation. Through early involvement, employees can experience user problems first-hand, recognise their own meaning in the insights found, and thus develop the necessary acceptance for the possibly new or even uncomfortable changes ahead. A crucial result is a shared awareness of the identified problems. Service designers can experience a first wave of resistance when they conduct the diagnosis of the client’s organisation (or, e.g., an existing user journey), using a purely external view without the participation of internal employees.

Lesson Number 8: System logic = survival

If systems (clients) are confronted with their external image (results of user research), which usually involves a lot of negative aspects and an extensive collection of failures, a defensive attitude can spread among the employees, because this can be seen as an attack against the existing system. The system tries to protect itself and restore its balance to ‘survive’. It has been reported that service design projects often come to a halt or lose the necessary priority for the client at exactly this point.

Lesson Number 9: Each action is an intervention

Every activity, such as stakeholder interviews or cocreation workshops, are interventions. However, an effect may only become visible or noticeable in the client organisation at a later point in time. This highlights the strong networking of actors and actions as well as the fact that unintended consequences can arise.

Lesson Number 10: Risk minimisation

Executives must be supported in decision-making and risk assessment. The prediction that the developed concept can be economically relevant in the market, satisfactory from the user's point of view and successful for the organisation regarding skills, remuneration and general conditions within the desired time window, must be proven repeatedly in the process. The more the system logic, culture and interdependencies are understood, the higher the probability of being able to reduce uncertainties and thus convince top management.

Lesson Number 11: Three-dimensional consulting

Ideally, service designers support in three ways: as process, specialist and mindset consultants. Depending on time and role, they can provide both conceptual and

process-related support so that employees remain able to work and process reliability is guaranteed. If service designers are not responsible for or do not want to control the process, a successful later implementation is questionable.

Lesson Number 12: Prepare disciplinary borders!

For service designers who are leaving the process at an early stage, because their focus is on conceptual work, it is crucial to think ahead and prepare the disciplinary boundaries for the concepts to not end up in the drawer as “corporate entertainment,” as Melvin Brand Flu (from Livework) calls it.

Outlook The KUER model can be used at any time in the process to enable the actors involved to explore new perspectives about the project, to reflect together or to derive options for action. Systematic reflection can promote learning processes and contribute to improving the readiness for implementation. Knowledge of the interrelationships and influencing factors can be used to set up or adapt individual success criteria for service design projects.

This prevents negative consequences and unrealistic expectations at an early stage, and preserves both the quality and reputation of the service design approach and the service designers.

Service designers have excellent capabilities and methodological approaches to support organisations in change projects. Therefore, it is an advantage for the success of transformations if they are accompanied by an innovation project using a human-centred design process. Service designers who want to support the implementation of projects must acquire skills from organisational consulting – especially business management and systemic consulting – or expand their service portfolio together with partners. Connectivity with the company's top management and employees at all levels of the hierarchy must be ensured throughout the process. A fundamental insight is that organisations as social systems cannot ultimately be specifically controlled from outside or by service providers. They can only change themselves and successfully implement concepts.

On the long way there, however, client organisations have a great need for professional support.

Touchpoint 12-1 25

Design Methods for Strengthening Social Cohesion A service design approach to community-based resiliency Using a co-design process, we created a model for a new community-based service focused on disaster preparedness for New York City neighbourhoods most impacted by climate change. The project is designed to bridge the gap between isolated, medically-fragile residents and advanced care/services.

Aran Baker is a designer and urban practitioner who works in the intersection of climate change, equity and public health. She has an MS in Design and Urban Ecologies from Parsons School of Design in NYC, and is a Civic Design Fellow with IDEO and the Knight Foundation.

Using this project as a case study, we explore opportunities for service designers to connect institutions and players at different scales across a vertical divide. We also explore concepts of interdependency and how to build and strengthen social cohesion while empowering community. We hope to provide a new lens on the service design co-creative process, bringing a much-needed social focus to the global resiliency conversation.

Valentina Branada is a Chilean designer passionate about using design strategies for social advancement. She explores collaboration and participation in the design of public services, using her practice to understand systems, empower, provoke, and open new dialogues. Valentina has an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons.

26 Touchpoint 12-1

Challenges facing isolated residents During climate-related emergencies, many of NYC’s residents, such as seniors and those with illnesses and/or disabilities, become isolated in their homes, without a pre-existing mechanism to identify or treat them. This problem was acute in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn during Hurricane Sandy, in 2012.1 Geographically isolated, Red Hook has a 45% poverty rate, high levels of asthma and diabetes, and Brooklyn’s largest public housing development. The storm’s damage left the

neighbourhood without access to medical care. If it wasn’t for a medical student’s efforts going door to door with intake forms, over 350 people would not have received the medical care they urgently needed.2 This project grew directly out of that grassroots effort.

1 Schmeltz MT, González SK, et al. “Lessons from Hurricane Sandy: a Community Response in Brooklyn, New York.” Journal of Urban Health.

2013;90(5):799–809

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Illustration of the check-in service design concept in use during a crisis, showing co-ordination efforts Around 400,000 NYC residents live in areas prone to flooding. Furthermore, the frequency of climate-related events is projected to intensify, including hurricanes, and – of primary concern – heatwaves. Despite this, there is no citywide mechanism or strategy in place to meet the needs of isolated, medically fragile residents in these crises. Climate change is a socio-spatial issue – not everyone is impacted equally. The problem of climate, equity and access to care is complex, and each community has unique needs. This means that universal, one-sizefits-all solutions do not work.

Service proposal and vision Using Red Hook as a case study, we envision a neighbourhood-wide support network, comprised of residents who check-in on medically-fragile and elderly neighbours in advance of summer heatwaves, the autumn hurricane season and winter storms. The purpose is to help them stay prepared, empowered, and connected to services. Our goals are to 1) bridge the gap between isolated residents and first response, and 2) embed disaster preparedness and climate change knowledge into everyday life and build social cohesion. Although what

2 Kraushar, ML and Rosenberg, RE, “A Community led medical response effort in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.” Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. Cambridge University Press, 2015

we are proposing is entirely new, we seek to integrate with (and build upon) existing social networks and local organisations.

Social cohesion In the global resiliency conversation, there has been an over-emphasis on physical infrastructure solutions, such as flood walls, floodgates and engineering solutions, but not enough emphasis on social infrastructure, social cohesion and the capacity of communities to plan ahead.

Eric Klinenberg defines social infrastructure as: “The people, places, and institutions that foster cohesion and support.”3 The strength of our social infrastructure – our social connections and communication networks – will undoubtedly save lives in future climate change events, and we need to recognise its importance. The role of social cohesion in post-disaster recovery has been widely studied by scholars,4 but its role in pre-emptive efforts has not yet been explored in depth.

Through this project, our goal has been to design a strategy and supporting methodology to strengthen social capacity given these collective challenges we face.

3 Klinenberg, E. “Adaptation: How can cities be ‘climate-proofed?’” The New Yorker 5 (2013) 4 Aldrich, D. Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-disaster Recovery. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012

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Top-down

Meso

Bottom-up

Diagram created in collaboration with Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Parsons School of Design.

Built at the ‘meso’ level Our research in Red Hook and into the citywide preparedness and response system revealed a large gap in the ‘meso’ sphere. The meso sphere is a social space between government (policy, law and regulative frameworks), private initiatives that include provision of professional medical services, and community (everyday practice, social networks and self-organised citizens groups). For example, community-based non-profits operate in this sphere. There aren’t enough mechanisms for traditionally top-down government initiatives to communicate and work effectively with bottom-up, grassroots initiatives, and vice-versa.

For example, in times of crisis, it often takes days for the US government’s disaster-relief agency (FEMA) and other aid organisations to reach the communities they serve. The ‘Occupy Sandy’ relief effort showed us that responses which integrate local social networks work better than top-down approaches.

As service designers, we have a unique opportunity to work in this space, building platforms to connect stakeholders at both the city and community levels, through a process whose core values and principles embodies the transformation we want to create.

The meso sphere is a social space between government, private initiatives and community

28 Touchpoint 12-1

Unique approach of service design in resiliency To build this meso level platform, we first developed a design process embedded in the community we were designing for, built around community collaboration and feedback.

The term ‘design’ in this context refers to both the tangible material products developed, as well as the methods and design process as a whole. We employed a co-design methodology, inviting multiple stakeholders into the creative design process from the outset, including (most importantly) Red Hook residents, whose feedback and collaboration are essential to the ultimate success of the final proposal. In co-design, we are primarily focused on the role of the designer as facilitator in a process of co-creation, which sees people as experts on their own experiences and contexts.5 We realised it was not enough to include different stakeholders in the design process, but we also needed to go further and establish a continuous presence in the neighbourhood and gain residents’ trust. To accomplish this, we: — Recruited an advisory team comprised of medical, design, law and disaster preparedness experts — Conducted a series of design-led workshops at the local public library and senior centre, with an open call to participate — Used stakeholder mapping to understand residents' assets and resources in times of crisis, establishing a feeling of ownership in the service from the beginning — Attended community events, such as ‘Old Timers’ Day’ and sporting events, as well as hosted public meetings — Participated in information sessions about health and preparedness to present the project and gather feedback Invited several residents to work with us as part of a — paid core team Maintained an online presence through a Facebook — page and website

5 Akama, Y, et al. “Design-led strategies for brushfire preparedness.”

Paper presented at EARTH: FIRE AND RAIN, Australian & New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, Brisbane – 16 – 18, April 2012

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Community engagement was one of our largest challenges. This is because Red Hook residents are weary to participate due to their experiences with previous resiliency initiatives which resulted in no visible improvements. Our participatory design process and tools (see accompanying imagery) offered a tangible alternative for residents to actively participate and engage.

While developing this community-based network, we also needed to align with both local organisations/ services and with citywide service providers and first response services, thereby establishing our meso level platform. For example, for the service to be effective, it needs to work with the NYC Department of Emergency Management, which co-ordinates response efforts at the city level. We also worked with stakeholders at the NYC Department of Health, and at the Governor's Office of Storm Recovery, among others.

Through stakeholder mapping with Red Hook residents, we were able to better understand the neighbourhood’s assets

Photo by Nathan DeHart.

and resources

Expanding horizons Through sharing these insights, we intend to expand the horizons and contexts where service designers can make an impact. In this case in particular, to use service design to help transform the resiliency sector. We need new, adaptive models that strengthen social cohesion and self-sufficiency at the neighbourhood level, while creating important linkages and communication channels with government and citywide service providers. Service designers have the unique ability to connect traditionallysiloed institutions and players, while empowering community through a participatory design process and creating models based upon real needs.

At its heart, this project creates a new value proposition based on interdependency and trust: Only together, in an organised fashion, can we do something about the collective challenges we face. We hope this project can serve as an example and open up new possibilities for collaboration.

Learn more about the Red Hook Check-in concept at www.redhookcheckin.org

Touchpoint 12-1 29

Participatory Foresight and Service Design This article introduces participatory foresight and discusses its interrelation with co-design methods and service design

Dr Tuomo Kuosa is strategic and participatory foresight expert at AlternativeFutures/ Ubiverse Ltd. Tuomo got his PhD in economic sociology from the Turku School of Economics, Finland, in 2009. After that, he worked for the Singaporean government for a year as a foresight expert. Since 2011, he has worked in the AlternativeFutures/Ubiverse (www.alternativefutures.fi) consulting company, which merges strategic and participatory foresight with ideation, concept design, service design and fast prototyping.

30 Touchpoint 12-1

Foresight as a grounded source of ideation The word foresight was mentioned for the first time in a BBC broadcast in 1932 by visionary author H.G. Wells, who called for the establishment of “Departments and Professors of Foresight”. This makes the term one of the oldest in the field of futures studies.

The first characteristic of any good foresight is its ability to generate new ideas that are simultaneously out-of-thebox and grounded. Secondly, foresight is meant to provide a holistic spectrum of interesting events that we can expect with a certain level of certainty. The role of such grounded future knowledge is increasingly becoming the firm foundation for any new services, productor business concepts, participatory ideation and concept design.

Today, the term foresight refers to a systematic process whereby one attempts to say something comprehensive and grounded about the future probabilities, change drivers, change factors, interrelations and options for actions.

The guiding principle of all foresight is that, in almost all cases, the future cannot Tuomo Kuosa

be predicted as it is not here yet. But the future can be created through the actions of today and, therefore, can be partly known, too. And much of the future is here already in today’s values, objectives, drivers and trends, and that can be studied systematically.

The process of foresight is meant to be systematic and holistic, and it is supposed to integrate hindsight, insight and forecasting in a meaningful way. The ‘backbone’ of foresight is (hind)sight, which is about more or less systematically understanding the past and the processes and constraints of change. The ‘body’ of foresight is (in)sight1, which is an attempt to comprehensively understand the true nature of the present and its structures, actors and drivers. The ‘eyesight’ of foresight is (fore)casting, which refers to understanding the probable pathdependencies of the existing trends and phenomena. One more key component of foresight is the attempt to pack holistic

1 Simmonds, W.W. Clive (1993). Monograph. Insight Analysis, September 1993, 2–3.

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NGOs, etc. to tackle identified problems and to promote preferred visions from a grass roots-level perspective.

In participatory foresight, the alternatives are created together with stakeholders.

understanding into well-defined alternative scenarios, visions and actions.

There are three main types of foresight: strategic foresight, deskwork foresight and participatory foresight.

1. Strategic foresight 2 refers to customer-oriented

projects with well-defined targets. It aims to produce strategically viable policy alternatives for public or private decision makers in power who want to stay in power, and who want to win political, military or economic battles. In strategic foresight, the alternatives are strategic and quite often secret and they are created either in cooperation between experts and decision makers or just by external experts.

2. Deskwork foresight refers to an academic approach of integrating systematic futures thinking to a particular detached research project, planning process or report writing. Hence deskwork foresight, which is especially common in futures studies, refers to a selfcontained project that is done by experts without close cooperation, either with the hands-on stakeholders and practitioners or with the paying clients and decision makers. In deskwork foresight, the alternatives are created for academic or public purposes by experts.

3. Participatory foresight refers to broad stakeholder involvement and empowerment in a desired futures visioning, anticipation and co-designing process. It encourages employees, customers, citizens, activists,

2 Kuosa, Tuomo (2012). The Evolution of Strategic Foresight – Navigating Public Policy Making. Surrey, Gower publishing; Voros, Joseph (2001).

Re-framing environmental scanning: An integral approach. Foresight, 5 (3) 2001, 10-21.

The Evolution of Service Design, Co-design and Design Thinking Service design is a relatively new field of expertise.

It has mostly developed over the past 20 years. The deepest historical roots of both design and service design are in arts, crafts, and organised planning. Later, the actual concept of design with many of its sub-areas, such as architecture and jewellery as well as textile, furniture, and graphic design started to emerge. Then, service-business development, service marketing, industrial design, and especially ergonomics, interaction design, usability design, and information design grew out from the thick root of design. Eventually, service design was formalised, together with its two sibling or rival concepts, design thinking and co-design.3 Service design has stronger European roots. The actual concept of service design and the idea behind it originates from the domain of marketing research.

3 Kuosa, Tuomo & Westerlund, Leo (2012): Introduction. In Tuomo Kuosa & Leo Westerlund, Service Design – On the evolution of Design Expertise. Lahti University of Applied Sciences Series A, Research reports, part 16; Kuosa, Tuomo & Koskinen, Jari (2012): Design Tree.

In Tuomo Kuosa & Leo Westerlund, Service Design – On the evolution of Design Expertise. Lahti University of Applied Sciences Series A, Research reports, part 16; Design Tree (2012): Evolution of Service Design Expertise. In Service Design Magazine (2012). Lahti University of Applied Sciences Series C, Articles, reports and other current publications, part 107, poster folded between the magazine. Available online.

Touchpoint 12-1 31

The concept was introduced for the first time

by Shostack4 in 1982. She proposed the integrated design of material components (products) and immaterial components (services). This design process can be documented and codified using a ‘service blueprint’ to map the sequence of events in a service and its essential functions in an objective and explicit manner. Furthermore, modelling and blueprinting offer marketers a system that can lead to the kind of experimentation and management necessary to service innovation and development.

Design thinking is an American approach. To be more specific, it is an invention of the IDEO design agency, now further developed and studied in d.school: Institute of Design at Stanford. In d.school, design thinking means a practical approach to understanding the processes that can be linked to the development of any organisation, product, or service.5 In d.school, design thinking is a process rehearsed in collaboration with students and customers. At its core are doing, radical collaboration and empathy towards the enduser, with prototyping and testing having important roles as well. Students are taught to come up with ideas quickly. Sometimes, they are only given a few minutes for creative concept development.

Co-design has traditionally referred to designing with, for and by society, supported by a societal, cooperative ambition to become more sustainable. Nowadays, it also refers to an upstream and downstream method, to an idea of giving a voice to those traditionally not involved in the design process and a set of process and tools for collaborative engagement of users and stakeholders.6

4 Shostack, G. Lynn (1982). How to Design a Service. European Journal of Marketing. Vol. 16, Iss: 1, pp. 49–63. Re-framing environmental scanning: An integral approach. Foresight, 5 (3) 2001, 10-21.

5 Kelley, Tom (2001). The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Desing Firm. New York, Crown Business.

6 Fuad-Luke, Alastair (2012). Co-Designing Services for a City. In Kuosa & Westerlund (eds.), Service Design: On the Evolution of Design Expertise. Lahti University of Applied Sciences Series A, Research reports, part 16. p. 104.

32 Touchpoint 12-1

Participatory foresight and the future of design and service design Based on the results of our three year ‘ServiceD’ project (2009-2012) within the EU’s Central Baltic Interreg IV A Programme and the Design Tree (2012) roadmap that summarised our new understanding of the field’s development, we may argue that there is a paradigm shift going on. Design results will transform the design world towards the immaterial, and tangible object design such as design of mugs is no longer the main issue. In the service design world, the prevailing core is everincreasingly ideation and rapid concept design, and there is a lot of emerging pioneer work underway. The future of service design points towards the emerging ubiquitous computing society, alongside with emerging participatory economy or ‘prosumerism’, which states that the ordinary customers can be the producers at the same time.

We may argue that the role of participatory foresight, the method of sense-making and grasping the future possibilities together with stakeholders, is increasing in service design, as it is an intermediating level between strategic foresight and co-design type of methods (see Figure 1).

Hence, it is a true method of user empowerment that doesn’t exist in traditional design or service design work.

The biggest strength of participatory foresight is in its ability to first show what are the growing phenomena and potential seeds of change of certain business areas or themes. Next, the threats and opportunities that this future knowledge carries are assessed and mapped together with representatives of all relevant stakeholder groups. Then the ideation process, which is based on the grounded and mutually assessed foresight knowledge, can begin. This ideation phase should be followed by a phase in which we assess together what ideas are the best and therefore suitable for rapid concept design.

Finally the most promising concepts can be tested in rapid prototyping phase. These new alternative concepts and prototypes may contain service design products, interior design products, strategy products, scenarios for developing the whole business, solutions to imminent problems and a list of actions needed for this year, next year, The year after that, and so on.

embr acing change

Strategic foresight

Megatrends

Kuosa / AlternativeFutures 2013

Changing phenomena

Participatory foresight Threats and opportunities

Co-design / participatory design workshops

Drivers

Re-activity

Emerging issues

Pre-activity

Seeds of change

Pro-activity

Wild cards

Scenarios

Assessing and opening up the potentials of the emerging things.

All stakeholders involved

Effectiveness

Service design

Relevance

Rapid concepts

Progressiveness Cost-efficiency

Architecture

Rapid plans

Etc.

Communication

Strategies Fast prototypes pilot

Strategies Comprehensive map to the emerging future

Alternative tracks of actions

Ideas

Relevance Timeframe

Test or assessment

Prosumerism crowdsourcing

Design thinking

Interior design

Digital interphase design Business plans Most viable ideas and concepts are put into action

Figure 1. Participatory foresight as an intermediating method

Touchpoint 12-1 33

Moving Beyond Lucky How systems thinking can help design for ‘wicked problems’

As the service design field becomes more successful at solving complex challenges, there’s one elephant that’s getting hard to ignore: User-centred design is inherently a bottom-up approach, in which we extrapolate insights from individuals and apply on a large scale. This can be spectacularly successful. However, hitting Pascal Soboll leads Daylight Design’s Munich office.

Trained as a product designer and a physicist, he is deeply fascinated by the symbiotic potential between science and design.

His favourite innovation fields lie at the intersection between social change, technological development and organisational strategy.

He regularly speaks on the subject of Design Thinking and creative leadership.

the bullseye with every project is difficult because it relies on knowledge gleaned from a small subset to generate solutions that must work in a real-world context and at scale. In addition, desirability — which is our key value measure and at the heart of Design Thinking — changes as we work on more complex briefs.

While understanding users’ desires is necessary, it’s by no means sufficient to finding a good solution. Stakeholders, organisations and regulatory bodies must also be considered to determine whether an idea has potential.

This is particularly apparent in healthcare, where a service may be desirable for a patient, but must also meet other criteria such as integration into hospital processes, being accepted by insurance providers and conforming to privacy and other laws. Gathering the necessary knowledge through ethno­ graphic research alone is unrealistic.

These limitations become ever more apparent as we’re trusted with bigger and more intractable challenges. As designers, we have now ‘earned our seat at the table’ 34 Touchpoint 12-1

as Google Ventures’ Kate Aronowitz said in a recent Fast Company article1 . But to hold this place, we must consistently prove that we can identify the best opportunities to pursue. We need to reliably identify the ‘right thing to do’ before we go and ‘do that thing right’. This means expanding our toolbox beyond intuition, experience and, sometimes ... sheer luck.

1 ‘Designers Finally Have A Seat At The Table. Now What?’ in Fast Company, 8 January 2018

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How to make Obamacare viable?

Consider the challenge presented by so-called ‘Obamacare’ in the United States. Mandated in 2010 and implemented in 2014, it has put the U.S. Medicaid health insurance system under huge financial strain. In fact, in its current incarnation, it’s not considered financially viable. In the heated political debate about whether Obamacare should be retained or abandoned, cost – unsurprisingly – is one of the major bargaining chips.

A core problem? Individuals under the Medicaid programme known as ‘high utilisers’ incur a large percentage of system costs. For one large U.S. health insurance provider, five percent of users represent 55 percent of their total costs! Excessive emergency room visits (each costing around $5,000) and frequent emergency services calls by this user group trigger expensive responses.

different. Developed independently of design, system thinking is a well-established academic discipline in its own right that brings together experts and facilitates their input with the aim of gaining a big picture overview, identifying the best leverage points and tracking change towards impact from the beginning. And – as it turns out – it is wonderfully compatible with Design Thinking.

Diving into this particular case with the insurance company, we began with ethnographic research to understand the high utilisers' perspective. It was truly eye-opening: the people we met were barely able to keep their lives together. The typical user was unemployed, drifting in and out of homelessness, chronically ill with at least one disease such as diabetes and/or obesity. They usually had a history of behavioural problems and drug abuse, too. We quickly learned that many triggers lead them to call emergency services or visit the emergency room, but by no means were their reasons all medicalrelated! Some occasionally went to the hospital simply because they didn’t have a place to sleep. Or they would call emergency services because, in a crisis, they just didn’t have anyone else to talk to.

Cost caused by a few patients threaten entire health insurance

Can design help? That’s exactly what this insurance company wondered when they approached Daylight Design and our collaborators at CodeName Collective.

With a challenge of such scale, reach and potential impact on people’s lives, what better opportunity to prove our worth? Countless authorities – from politicians and insurance leaders to mathematicians and healthcare experts – have tried to solve this crisis, yet success has so far eluded everyone. It is a truly ‘wicked problem’. So how can we as designers be rightfully confident that we can make a difference? Enter: systems thinking.

Systems thinking While there’s much talk today about ‘designing systems’ and ‘systemic design’, systems thinking is altogether

Daylight, Code Name Collective

system

High utilisers are usually challenged by the complexities of life.

Touchpoint 12-1 35

The firemen we spoke with (usually first responders to emergency services calls) confirmed that, while they always rush to the ‘scene’ as fast as possible, in many cases, they recognise the address of frequent users, and have a pretty good idea about how serious the ‘medical emergency’ will be before they arrive.

Having tuned our intuitions, we dove into systems thinking, inviting interdisciplinary experts to a series of workshops to identify the bigger picture. While they shared insights on hospital routines, organisational hurdles, financial structures, regulatory restrictions and more, we captured the dependencies emerging from these discussions. A big, messy map emerged.

As system thinkers, we look for patterns. Of particular interest are ‘causality loops’ that can represent vicious circles, or self-reinforcing patterns that might require alteration if sustainable change is to occur.

Dependencies and causality loops For example, in bringing together experts from the social and medical sectors we learned that unemployment often leads to debt and bad credit ratings. These ratings are in turn a major factor in homelessness. Not having an address impacts people’s ability to be registered with a primary care physician. For chronically ill patients, this leads to missed appointments for regular check-ups, which can cause deteriorating health. This in turn causes frequent emergency room visits making it hard to keep a steady job, and propelling the cycle further.

Causality loop indicating how lasting change can occur

36 Touchpoint 12-1

Recognising causality loops allows us to gain an overview of such complex dependencies. They also provide an opportunity to identify leverage points that should be addressed to most effectively enable lasting change. For instance, if we could intervene in the hospital’s emergency department to identify individuals caught in this loop — and somehow help solve their housing issue, giving them an address — rather than just focusing on the more immediate health problems, then we could break the vicious loop and put them on a trajectory of improving their lives overall. This would include, but not be limited to, their health situation.

While this is just one causality loop example, housing is indeed known to be one of the key ‘determinants of health’, i.e. a crucial factor in improving overall health.

There is one additional benefit of establishing causality loops: They inherently provide a theory of change. By this we mean that in describing the causal links within the loop step-by-step, we also form an understanding of what the effect will be if we managed to tweak any point in the chain. Knowing this, we can define which changes down the line we can expect and which metrics we should be monitoring as early indicators of progress.

This potential to track the impact of any intervention is crucial, especially as there is hardly ever just one relevant causality loop. Multiple loops co-exist and are usually connected with each other in obscure ways. This is precisely what makes the overall behaviour of a complex system so notoriously hard to predict.

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Conceptual sketch of resulting service

Prototypes of service tools

Touchpoint 12-1 37

Applying systems thinking and design thinking in alternating sequence

So how should we evaluate the success of our imaginary emergency department intervention? The classical approach would suggest that we either: a) track engagement with the system (a poor measure of impact), or b) track the long-term trend in unemployment among the chronically ill. This would be a frustratingly slow exercise and a poor measure of causality as the trend could be influenced by any number of other drivers.

Having established a step-by-step theory of change, however, allows us to track success in a meaningful, yet short-term way. In our example we might decide, for instance, to track the percentage of missed primary care appointments among our identified target group. While this would not constitute impact yet, it would be an early indication that we have started to nudge the system in the right direction. Apart from providing an important basis for iterating our designs on, having early indicators of success can also be invaluable for securing follow-on funding during lengthy, often publicly-funded projects.

A service to stabilise members’ lives Discussing many systemic issues such as the one described above, we arrived at an overall solution for the ‘high utiliser’ challenge: a service that supports patients not just with acute health problems, but also helps in stabilising their lives more broadly. Concretely, it helps on three fronts: medical, social (including housing) and behavioural. By helping with these key determinants of health, we will improve their overall wellbeing and many medical costs will be avoided.

The service will be delivered by interdisciplinary teams consisting of two nurses, a social worker and a psychologist. Every team looks after a few dozen patients (or ‘members’, as we call them). We expect each member 38 Touchpoint 12-1

to use the service for a limited time, and only during periods of instability before ‘graduating out’ when they reach sufficient stability again.

This theory of change should lead to a significant decrease in ‘high utilisers’ visiting hospital emergency departments, or calling emergency services for the wrong reasons. Despite being a high-touch service, savings within the overall healthcare system should be substantial, contributing to making Medicaid — and with it Obamacare — financially viable.

Our health insurance client is committed to rolling out the service and first teams have been hired. Members have been identified and a first pilot is taking place right now, using many physical and digital prototypes we designed for the service teams, members and other stakeholders. Together with our client, we will be tracking the pilot’s effectiveness through a number of well-defined change indicators throughout the system.

Early indications are positive and indicate value well beyond Obamacare itself. This has led our client to commit to full implementation, regardless of the outcome of on-going political debate. Thanks to systems thinking, an enlightened client, great partners and the input of many fantastic experts has enabled us to create value for people in need, no matter how the political battle ends.

Combining systems thinking and Design Thinking While systems thinking and Design Thinking have no shared history, there are commonalities and differences that make the methods extremely compatible and powerful when used together. Both accept complexity as something to be embraced, rather than avoided. Also, both trust in an iterative process, which allows for a

stepwise approximation towards the right solution, rather than expecting it to be flawless out-of-the-box.

Equally important are the differences between the two: systems thinking is an expert-based approach, which consciously paints a neutral, global picture to understand the system clearly, emphasising analysis and theoretical understanding of challenges. Design Thinking, on the other hand, excels in capturing individual experiences on a granular, emotional level and is geared towards action in making, testing and re-making.

The best way we have found to combine the two in real life is to apply them in an alternating pattern, creating a symbiosis of analytic capabilities with creative muscle.

As outlined, Design Thinkers need an approach to systematically analyse complex challenges, and systems thinkers need to bridge the gap between ‘diagnosis’ and ‘action’. Bringing the two together has the power to create lasting, meaningful change.

SERVICE DESIGN AWARD 2020

The Service Design Award 2020 submissions are open from mid-February to 31 October 2020.

As in the previous years, an inter­ national jury will be looking for exceptional service design projects and best-case practices from professionals and students. Use the opportunity to submit your own great work and have the opportunity to celebrate on stage at SDGC2021 in Copenhagen!

Getting started Should you be curious to learn more about systems thinking, there are resources to help you dive in. Daylight Design, in collaboration with The

Project summaries of

Omidyar Group, has created a systems thinking

all finalists and winners

workbook detailing how to get started with adding

are available on the

systems thinking tools to innovation initiatives.

SDN Award web page

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(www.service-design-

com/a-handbook-of-systems-thinking/

network.org/servicedesign-award-2019-

Be aware that systems thinking is time-

finalists). You can

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in the SDN podcast

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(www.service-design-

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Touchpoint 12-1 39

The Service Design Maturity Model A strategic framework to embed service design into an organisation In the past years, many organisations have been working on pro­­jects to improve service experiences. Increasingly, large ­organisations have started to understand the value of service design. This has resulted in a growing desire amongst organi­ sations that ‘understand’ service design to embed it into their Niels Corsten is Service Design Lead at Koos Service Design. He has contributed to service design projects in telecom, banking, mobility, insurance and healthcare industries, amongst others.

He is currently involved in embedding service design in organisations, working toolkits, training programmes and on-the-job coaching. niels@koosservicedesign.com

Jules Prick is partner at Koos Service Design with over ten years of international experience in research, branding and service innovation.

He founded Koos Service Design in Amsterdam in 2009, following his passion to create meaningful services. jules@koosservicedesign.com

40 Touchpoint 12-1

companies. We have helped some of our clients, including a Portu­guese telecom provider, a leading European bank, an energy utility company and the Dutch Railways, achieve this ambition.

Implementing service design capabilities is a somewhat unexplored territory for many service designers. When reflecting upon those projects, we observed striking similarities amongst them and soon began formulating a framework: The Service Design Maturity Model. We set out to create a model for successfully embedding service design at scale within organisations, including actionable advice on how to overcome barriers.

Introducing the Service Design Maturity Model The model consists of five stages that show the process of embedding service design into an organisation and structures the transformation towards a service design-led company. The model helps to identify the current stage of maturity

through five pillars, which then serve as guidelines for further maturation.

— People and Resources – The extent to which people, budget, time and facilities are available and dedicated to service design activities.

— Tools and Capabilities – The extent to which service design methodologies and tools are applied within the organ­ isation, and the level of required skills and capabilities that are needed to apply service design.

Beliefs and Behaviours – The degree to — which the organisational views, rituals and habits promote service design.

Organisational Structure – The extent — to which the organisational structure allows and facilitates multidisciplinary service design work and the assigned roles that are needed to do so.

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The Service Design Maturity Model

Explore

Prove

Metrics and Deliverables – The shape and form of — service design deliverables and the extent to which metrics and KPIs are in place and being utilised to stimulate and facilitate service design.

The five pillars are tied to each of the maturity stages and show the transformation process towards a service design-led organisation. The five stages are ‘Explore’, ‘Prove’, ‘Scale’, ‘Integrate’ and ‘Thrive’.

Explore – Crusaders within the organisation are — exploring service design as a new methodology and unite with other service design enthusiasts in order to start a first initiative.

Prove – Painstaking pioneering to get service design — established in the organisation, with service design projects and the creation of evidence of its value.

Scale – Service design expands throughout the — organisation through unifying tools and method­ ologies and teaching of its capabilities.

Scale

Integrate

Thrive

Integrate – The siloed organisational structures — are torn down and transformed into a design-led ­foundation. Service design is embedded in the daily way of working through integrated systems and metrics.

— Thrive – Service design now thrives in the organisation through leadership and experimentation, and service design is ingrained in the company culture. Methodologies are being evolved as the organisation is pushing the service design envelope.

In the following section, each of the maturity stages is described, showing what you would experience within each stage, and what is necessary to progress towards the next stage.

Stage 1: Explore What it’s like

In an organisation where service design is non-existent, there is no responsibility, no budget, no time and no facilities available to carry out service design. But above Touchpoint 12-1 41

all, there are no people or capabilities. Individuals across the organisation encounter service design through external trainings or workshops, amongst others. This results in some knowledge and expertise in service design being present within the organisation, although it is minimal and scattered.

What to do

Finding and uniting with other enthusiasts is the biggest common barrier in this stage, because the organisational structure won’t allow multidisciplinary get-togethers.

Meetups or ‘Service Jams’ can be used to explore service design, scout other enthusiasts and sway newcomers.

With those first sparks, it is crucial to follow the energy and nurture those first followers. Don’t waste your energy getting everyone excited, but instead start doing service design with a small group that is engaged. We’ve noticed that it is important not to ask for permission in this stage, because you risk prematurely killing the movement.

Stage 2: Prove What it’s like

The key of this stage lies in proving the value and laying the foundation for service design. The first enthusiasts form a multidisciplinary project team, even though they are still dispersed and separated by silos. To establish

service design, its value needs to be proven to each individual. That’s why it is often experienced by pio­ neers as something akin to trench warfare. Many teams tend to put a focus on process and deliverables such as customer journey maps and service blueprints, which actually counteracts the necessary focus on results.

Many organisations don’t manage to progress beyond this stage, leaving enthusiasts stuck mapping out customer journeys in minor projects throughout the organisation.

What to do

A common barrier is the focus on process instead of results. The risk of putting together service design enthusiasts on a project is that their focus becomes demonstrating how great the process is, rather than demonstrating the real business value. Because a large part of the organisation is still unaware of service design and its value, it should not be set in the spotlight until it can be explained through business value.

Therefore, we suggest running ‘Trojan horse projects’ (referred to as ‘stealth projects’ by Marc Stickdorn).

Trojan horse projects are service design projects in disguise. This means not naming them with service design terminology, such as ‘customer journey project’, but rather recognisable business activities, such as ‘onboarding optimisation’. This allows the team to experiment, fail and focus on actual value. It’s paramount that this evidence is measurable in relevant business metrics (such as cost reduction or revenue growth).

Only when significant impact has been made can the team start evangelising both the results and the pro­cess.

Service design agencies often collaborate with organ­ i­sations during this stage of maturity, because they offer the necessary capabilities and improve the project’s chances of success. We helped a health insurance com­ pany (who thought it was ready to scale capabilities) to run a series of trojan horse projects to be able to sell the business value of service design before scaling up.

Stage 3: Scale What it’s like

Proving the value of service design before scaling up capabilities at a Portuguese telecom provider 42 Touchpoint 12-1

More people get interested and involved in service design and capabilities spread outside the initial team of enthusiasts. The first employees start to specialise in service design and a CX department forms, in which the first customer-centric KPIs become defined.

As more service design initiatives are started, spaces

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a toolkit that fits the company processes is needed for a successful company-wide implementation.

With a unified language at your disposal, it is of the essence to start training the organisation, but don’t force everyone to become a service designer. We often apply a simple three-level model, in which we develop basic service design literacy, advanced service design application and service design leadership.

Stage 4: Integrate What it’s like

Teaching employees of a large bank about service design during the Scale stage

In this stage, it is time to systematically integrate ser­ vice design into the company way of working. Service design is now decentralised and present in each team, and the majority of employees are engaged with the methodology and are utilised in a structured way. Dedicated service design budgets are now in place across teams or departments. Customer-centric KPIs are now being adopted throughout the organisation, which goes hand-in-­hand with assigning customer-centric responsibilities to C- level.

What to do

get hijacked as project rooms. The transition goes hand-in-hand with silos that start to suffer under multidisciplinary teams. Additionally, employees start to feel that service design is interfering with the existing way of working. We have seen this happening in a collaboration with the CX team of an energy company, who sought to scale service design in the entire organisation. When we introduced a tailormade toolkit, we stumbled upon resistance of people that hadn’t yet been convinced of the value of service design. We had not yet managed to successfully evangelise its business value to the wider audience.

What to do

To facilitate the growth of service design within an organisation, it’s best to spread the former project team throughout the company and start running multiple projects. The risk of service design becoming popular is that unaligned initiatives are started throughout the organisation without a unified language. That’s why it is important to start creating a common method­ ology that everyone can use. Where standardised toolkits may be sufficient for the first few initiatives,

This stage calls for a definite transformation of the silo-based organisation into one in which agile teams are assigned to customer journeys. It assigns the role of ‘Journey Owners’ to systematically work on the improvement of service experiences, thereby creating a service design continuum. Moreover, a community is built to maintain the unified way of working and facilitate the sharing of new service design knowledge. It is best to create an internal community, because openness about failure and experimentation are critical.

When many people are working on the improvement of services, the organisation runs the risk that different teams do similar work. This situation demands that systems are put in place that allow for both consistency in service innovations and the prevention of repetitive work across the organisation. Great examples are design systems, research systems and service patterns. Service patterns define standardised service experiences and internal processes to be applied to repetitive parts of a service. The British government portal GOV.UK applies service patterns to common services, such as applying for something, submitting documents or verifying identity.

This makes the wide breadth of services more consistent for citizens and more manageable for local authorities.

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1 2 3 4 5 Explore

Prove

Scale

Integrate

Thrive

People and Resources

Tools and Capabilities

Beliefs and Behaviours

There are some service design enthusiastists, but the majority is not involved. There is no budget, time and facilities dedicated to service design.

Knowledge of service design is scattered throughout the organisation, mostly self-acquired through books, articles or trainings.

Dominant beliefs are business-focussed and risk-avoidant. There is little collaboration and creativity and decision-making is driven by hierarchy.

Generally, there is a siloed organisational structure. No systems and responsibilities regarding service design have been assigned.

Customer-centric metrics and deliverables are non-existent.

First project team of enthusiasts is formed, often in collaboration with a design agency. Budget and management buy-in are still missing.

First capabilities (sometimes adjacent to service design) are being bundled in the project team, mostly coming from multiple people.

Beliefs about customers have a predominantly functional focus. The value of a holistic view and collaboration are being established.

The first multidisciplinary team is being formed. First initiatives are taking place, regardless of organisational structure.

First project often creates first deliverables, like a customer journey map. First measurable results are often lacking.

Increasingly more people get involved and incidental budgets are created for service design projects.

Rooms and facilities are being hijacked.

Capabilities are spreading outside of the initial team.

First employees start to specialise and CX / SD departments are being formed.

Beliefs around the customer are mainly transactional.

Decision-making is increasingly based on empathy and customer centricity.

Interference with the existing way of working is felt.

Silos starts to suffer under the demands of multidisciplinary teams.

Project results are becoming increasingly apparent. First customer-centric KPIs are set specifically for the CX/SD department.

The majority of people is engaged with service design and teams have dedicated service design budgets and facilities in place.

The company has a unified methodology and aligned capabilities.

The capabilities are now decentralised, and are present within each team.

There is an emerging experiential focus on the customer.

Experimentation is cultivated through a strong customercentric vision.

The silo-breaking structure is fully institutionalised.

The teams have ownership and mandate over their (part of the) service.

Customer-centric KPIs go companywide, which stimulate a multidisciplinary culture. Customer centricity is now represented on C-level.

Everyone is involved in service design and is aware of his / her impact on customer experience.

Methodology can be let loose, as employees act from the right beliefs and mindset.

Focus on the customer is now relational, where customer obsession is evident on all levels across the organisation.

The new organisational structure allows for close cocreation of service experiences within and across teams.

Each initiative is tied to customer-centric metrics that contribute to a better customer relation. It is important for the entire C-suite.

A snapshot: The five pillars explained per maturity stage

44 Touchpoint 12-1

Organisational structure

Metrics and Deliverables

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Stage 5: Thrive What it’s like

When everyone is involved in service design and it is integrated into the way of working throughout the entire organisation, it can now thrive. It has risen above its role as methodology and became ingrained in the culture. The new organisational structure allows for close co-creation of service experiences in each team, where each initiative is tied to customer-centric metrics and deliverables. Service design is not just represented at C-level, but customer centricity has become an important KPI for the entire C-suite. A Dutch e-commerce company that is well-known for its customer-centricity is CoolBlue. CoolBlue CEO Pieter Zwart has said, “We are not an online retailer, we are a customer journey agency. We want to be a leading example of a customercentric business. Ultimate customer satisfaction is not just a metric or a goal, it is part of our corporate culture.”

What to do

In this stage, it is no longer a matter of managing methodologies and processes but safeguarding the customer-centric culture and core principles. The organisation can allow for experimentation with new tools and methodologies, simply because the mindset is right. Whereas in previous stages it was important to share project evidence and value, now you can focus on nurturing the sharing of knowledge and building a learning community. Thriving in service design is now about inspiring others and reinventing the game.

3. Combine movement and mandate

Many organisations exhibit a bottom-up movement when it comes to service design. The most common barriers are in the hard work necessary to prove the value of service design to each individual employee, as well as working against organisational struc­t ures that don’t allow multidisciplinary work. Prove service design to higher management to create mandate to then open the path for further implementation.

However, a top-down approach to service design doesn’t always result in easier implementation. At a leading bank we worked with, the agile team structure was implemented top-down to show commitment to multidisciplinary customer-centric work. However, the employees were neither shown the evidence of service design value nor were they trained with the capabilities to act upon the structural transformation. They are now catching up to do so.

4. Mind the changing role for service designers

The maturity of an organisation has great implications on the role of service designers. Moving through the maturity stages, the role of a service designer changes from scout to hands-on doer, to trainer, to facilitator, and ends at leader. Each of those roles requires a different mindset and capabilities. Our profession is changing.

Conclusions and learnings This model has already greatly helped us to structure transformations for our clients by defining their situa­ tion and overcoming barriers to maturation. The most important learnings can be summarised as: 1. Determine where you’re at

Be aware that the maturity stage can differ across company departments, teams and even people. Differences in maturity across the organisation often explain tensions or resistance occurring during transformation.

An extended version of this article is available online at

2. Work the weakest link

We advise always focussing your efforts on the part of the organisation that is least mature, to prevent enlarging the gap and creating more resistance.

www.service-design-network.org /community-knowledge.

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

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

Zoë Prosser is a Futures Researcher at Andthen.

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

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

46 Touchpoint 12-1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Preferable

Probable Plausible Possible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Touchpoint 12-1 47

Credit: Illustration by Lizzie Abernethy

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

48 Touchpoint 12-1

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

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

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

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

2. Understand the changing system

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

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

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

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

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

3. Using possible future scenarios to communicate and share our own, and our collaborators’, visions.

This forms and strengthens our culture with clients, audiences, and each other by helping us share complex or abstract ideas.

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

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

Touchpoint 12-1 49

From Skills to Mindsets: Grappling with Complex Public Problems At Uscreates, we are currently seeing two trends within our client base. Firstly, the demand for design in public innovation contexts is expanding beyond the design of a specific service, into the transformation of the systems that sit around it. Secondly, public sector organisations are increasingly interested in building Jocelyn Bailey is a Senior Consultant with expertise and research background in social design and design for policy. At Uscreates she works with a range of government and public sector clients on strategic change projects. Her PhD is a critique of the use of design in policy contexts in government.

Cat Drew is Delivery Director at Uscreates. Previously, Cat has been Head of Projects at the UK Government's Policy Lab, and worked in other policy roles in No.10, Cabinet Office, GDS and the Home Office. She has a post-graduate education in design and has led design capability-building projects.

50 Touchpoint 12-1

their own design capability internally around service design and systemic change. We’d like to reflect upon this second trend and its implications for our own practice and beyond. We’re looking at our own organisational mindset and learning culture for ideas about how best to support capability-building around design in non-design professionals.

Today’s problems are complex Today’s problems are increasingly complex, meaning the appetite for service design – and the way it reframes challenges and solutions – is growing.

But as well as being commissioned to redesign services, we are increasingly being asked to work on challenges that go even further, and build capability in client teams and organisations. There are a number of drivers we can see behind this trend: Implementation and sustainability of — change. Implementing user-centred services often means changing the cultures of organisations and the ways in which people work within them.

An increased focus on preventing problems before they happen and building organisational resilience, means that frontline staff need to change from being ‘gatekeepers’ of resources to problem-solvers and enablers.

W — e need to deal with systems as well as services. Social outcomes can rarely be improved by a single service alone.

The complexity of problems means that sometimes a service design approach on its own is not enough. Services sit within systems, and the outcome that the service is trying to achieve will often be influenced by a myriad number of things that sit outside of them.

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To achieve change effectively, public service design needs to grapple with complex social and political structures and governance (Chen et al 2015). It must map interdependencies and understand incredibly diverse populations and individuals with complex needs. We need to involve a broader constituency of partners: policymakers, procurement, finance, HR, etc.

T he need for ongoing transformation. In a time of — austerity, public servants can no longer make small ‘salami slicing’ cuts, but need to completely rethink the model of how the public sector meets public needs (this is also known as ‘transformation’). This requires a constant culture of innovation and learning within their organisations, rather than on a project-by-­ project basis.

These challenges are visible in a number of recent projects. To take one example, we’ve been working with a local council that wants to shift its entire organisational culture to one of early intervention, prevention and resilience. We’ve been supporting them to start this shift in values through a series of conversations with everyone from street sweepers to the Chief Executive.

We’ve been working with another local council which wants to introduce and embed human-centred and agile ways of working so that its staff can respond to a range of policy problems with fresh thinking and a problem-solving attitude.

And we’ve been working with a large charitable foundation to support systems change and system learning – a socio-cultural intervention designed to deliver quality improvement – in health and care.

Mindset, attitudes, cultures, values. Rather than just redesigning services, we’re increasingly being asked to

change cultures. Often the distinction we see between our own organisational practice and that of client organisations is rooted in culture, habits and mindset. So at the moment we are actively reflecting on our own, in order to understand what we can do to support clients.

The Uscreates mindset At Uscreates, every project is different, with its own plan, set of tools and methods (sometimes invented specifically for that project) and theory of change.

However, underpinning this variety is a particular mindset, which – compared to our respective professional experience outside of design – is quite specific to this kind of disciplinary culture.

Partly this comes from the educational background of the directors, Mary Cook and Zoe Stanton. Exploring this through her own PhD, Mary Cook quotes her former tutor (Matt Ward, 2010, BA Design at Goldsmiths): “When people say why aren’t you teaching service design at Goldsmiths, my response is that we are teaching the things that service design came out of, which is engaging in a social, contextually-orientated way, being sensitive to and understanding the context in which you are designing. That’s where it comes from. And that’s why a lot of our students are really good at moving into the area and doing well at it. We think creating an agenda within design that engages in political and social agendas of understanding what the world is, and how you place yourself in it, is at the heart of our course and has been for 15 years.”

During 12 years of practice, this has translated into a set of (now-substantiated) beliefs about how we think problems get solved and change happens: by thinking differently, acting quickly, and collaborating with others.

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We would characterise this in a number of ways: A — curiosity to learn and explore what lies beneath people’s actions. Seeking a deep human understanding at the heart of a change question.

— Seeing opportunity in collaboration, and co-designing where possible.

— Living with ambiguity, holding off on jumping to a solution and resisting setting a predefined course of action.

— Finding ways to think differently about a situation and reframing questions.

— Being humble about our ideas so they can change.

— Saying ‘I don’t know’ and asking others what they think.

Recognising that some things might fail but learning — from that.

Starting with something imperfect, and testing — it quickly with others in order to learn and move forward.

Developing tools and techniques that reflect a mindset These attitudes manifest themselves through our ways of working. Service design tools are great exemplars of these principles, and are really useful for creating empathy and bringing the user into the room. They draw attention to and explore the interface between the organisation and the individual, and are able to quickly mock up a service idea and get feedback.

However, our ‘tools’ aren’t static, codified things; we understand our approach as a kind of inventive practice.

As well as innovating to explore solutions, we are constantly changing, evolving and re-purposing the tools and techniques to get there. Inventing both the means and the end. Furthermore, we are not only drawing on design.

The complexity of problems we face requires us to look to other fields – to politics, behavioural economics, systems thinking – and see how we can adapt our tools to those contexts, or bring in techniques from those domains.

For example, we are exploring how we can combine data science and design research to create a richer picture of people’s behaviours. We are using speculative design to re-imagine adult social care. We are incubating 52 Touchpoint 12-1

social enterprises so they achieve financial stability, as well as co-designing the services to begin with. And we are cultivating a deeper organisational understanding of political change and the flows of power we exhibit through an internal learning project.

So we are evolving to meet the needs and changes we see in the external environment, becoming more multidisciplinary and educating ourselves beyond design.

However, we are doing that with the same mindset, which means that as we are learning by doing or adapting practices from elsewhere, we are creating new practices.

How do we build this curious, learning and collaborative mindset?

First of all, we recruit for mindset as well as skills.

Our interview questions are based around the trio of ‘head, heart and hands’. We want people who are confident in what they do know, but also curious about what they don’t. People who will deliver high quality work, but who are not afraid to try something new, fail and learn.

Second, we (sometimes) recruit outside of design.

65% of Uscreates employees have a formal design background from a wide range of design disciplines, and the rest come from a variety of disciplines from journalism to behavioural economics, policy-making and marketing. We don’t have a formal training programme in service design when people join, but we actively promote a learning culture that supports people to try new things and share what they’ve learned. Our learning takes a variety of forms: — Educating ourselves about new approaches: We are actively encouraged to attend a wide variety of events.

We invite external speakers into internal ‘lunch and learns’ and team members give regular presentations about their own interests and expertise. People are also supported with a budget for formal training when necessary.

— Experimenting in a safe space: we have launched our R&D Lab ‘Hatch’ where we can conduct research into new design methods (for example speculative design) as well as new technologies (such as AI in healthcare).

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Abstract

Active

Concrete

Reflective

conceptualisation

experimentation

experience

observation

How we support clients

listening to a

trying techniques out

prototyping,

analysis,

to learn

presentation,

in a safe space,

work shadowing

reflective session

sharing case studies

role play

attending events,

Hatch R&D Lab

How we learn

developing new methods

Agile reflective sessions,

lunch’n’learns,

to tackle new challenges

client feedback,

3 x 3 x 3,

on projects

sharing new methods at team meetings

training courses, new team members

Our learning and client’s learning through the lens of Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory

L — earning through doing: we are constantly innovating new practice through our projects, as complex challenges demand that we pull in different techniques or work with different partners.

— Reflecting and sharing: most importantly we learn from our experimentation, and share back to the team.

Our agile methodology includes bi-weekly reflection sessions on each project which we then share back with the wider team.

Building a design mindset with clients These four approaches broadly reflect Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle, supporting people to: learn about something in the abstract, try it out in a safe space, apply it in a real context, and reflect on how it went. Our strategy to date with clients has also been based on this theory of learning and we try to lead by example, involving clients in our projects, and supporting them to reflect on how they’ve gone.

Increasingly we are also actively building their capability through projects, supporting them to take a more leading role. We might start out with a presentation about a new method, then let them try it out in the safe space of a workshop, or through role play, then use it for real, with built-in sessions for coaching and reflection.

The skills and tools that we teach them are experiential

markers that point to a new kind of mindset. However, we recognise that in order for a new mindset to embed itself, it needs to go beyond individual behaviour and requires system, structure and process change within the broader organisation.

We are starting to develop tools for measuring our capability building, starting with a basic confidencemeasure. We know that confidence does not always correlate with ability in a linear way throughout a learning process. People can start off quite confident that they know how to use design techniques, but once they start experimenting, their confidence dips before increasing once more as they become more experienced.

This relates to the cycle people go through from being unconsciously incompetent (‘I don’t know how to drive and I’ve never needed to’), to becoming consciously incompetent (‘I’ve realised I’d like to drive but have no idea how’), to becoming consciously competent (‘I’m concentrating all the time on my driving during my lessons’) to becoming unconsciously competent (‘I can drive without really paying attention to what I’m doing’).

We try to match our approach to the support that people need throughout this cycle: once they enter the active experimentation phase, (conscious incompetence) a more coaching and enabling role from us is required.

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Confidence level

5 4 3 2 1

Before

Abstract

Active

Concrete

Reflective

conceptualisation

experimentation

experience

observation

Example of reflective confidence journey mapping, based on Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory

Conclusion The market and contexts for service design are changing rapidly in the UK, and designers need to constantly re-educate themselves to keep pace with what’s required on complex change projects. At Uscreates, we do this through supporting an active learning culture. We also think this mindset is what fundamentally sits behind our approach to design, and change itself. When clients ask us to support design capability-building, we are drawing on this learning culture, and experimenting with ways to teach and embed a different more designerly mindset.

This is partly done through service design tools and techniques, but we need to be ever more multidisciplinary in order to tackle complex problems.

Chen, D. -S., Cheng, L. -L., Hummels, C., & Koskinen, I. (2015).

Social design: An introduction. International Journal of Design, 10(1), 1-5.

Cook, M.R. (2013). The emergence and practice of co-design as a method for social sustainability under New Labour. PhD thesis, University of East London.

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