Third International Service Design Northumbria University

1
Designing for Real People Research into
Emerging Methods and Practices

• Third International Service Design - Northumbria
  University
• 2nd-3rd April 2008

2
Welcome and Introduction

• Professor Robert Young
• Third International Service Design - Northumbria
  University
• 2nd-3rd April 2008

3
INTRODUCTION AND CONTENTS

• Over the last two years, the ISDN series of
  events has formed an exciting platform to explore
  the emerging field of Service Design. The very
  first ISDN, in March 2006, looked at Service
  Designers - who were these people and what were
  they doing? ISDN2 followed in November 2006, and
  explored the relationship(s) that Service Design,
  as a design sub-discipline, might have with
  business.
• ISDN3 will investigate broader issues that
  contemporary designers face, with special focus
  on how designers are addressing the complex
  situations that arise when designing with what
  John Thackara of Dott 07 calls 'real people' - as
  opposed to 'users' - in the design process.
• For our workshop we've invited some doctoral
  researchers to share reflections on their recent
  design research work, and we're structuring the
  event to maximise productive debate about the key
  issues arising when designing in this way.

4
SETTING THE SCENE BRIDGE BETWEEN ISDN1, 2 3

• The broader purpose of NU concerns the nature of
  design practice to support the role of design in
  society
• A focal interest is the development of
  appropriate descriptions of service design
  content and process to improve the designers
  ability to navigate and contend with complex
  projects, including the relationship to people as
  subjects and objects of research
• Approach - is the perspective of the design
  practitioner and their sense making requirement
  for theory and knowledge to support design
  practice
• Research interest in the epistemology of design
  practice - including its relationship to
  real-world problems
• Relationship to other disciplines, their
  philosophy and method

5
KEYNOTE CONTENT IN ISDn1

• Service Innovation through Design Thinking - Prof
  Tim Brown, IDEO US
• Signposts for the Next Decade - Dr. Andrea
  Cooper, Design Council
• Pioneering Service Design - Chris Downs,
  LiveWork
• Objects of Service - From Subjects to Objects and
  Back Again - Prof. Steven Kyffin, Philips Design
• Designing Design in a Complex World - Dr. Bob
  Young, School of Design, Northumbria University
• Better Services Happier Customers - Oliver King
  The Engine Group
• Redesigning Public Services - Jennie Winhall RED
  at the Design Council
• Designers! Who Do You Think You Are? - Kamil
  Michlewski of Northumbria University
• Subject and some content has since been repeated
  in
• Carnegie Melon - Emergence Conference Sept 2006
• CIID - Service Design Symposium March 2008

6
WHAT IS SERVICE DESIGN - ISSUES EMERGING FROM
ISDn1

• Designing with people not for people
• Designing with multi-disciplined teams
• Learning to listen before acting
• Service Design needs a sophisticated
  multi-dimensional model of content and context
  issues not just design process elements
• Design students are becoming concerned more about
  issues to be addressed by design rather than
  learning the skills of a traditional design
  discipline
• If product design requires a developed sense of
  seeing manifested through the act of sketching,
  then service design requires a developed sense of
  listening manifested through the act of
  storytelling.

7
DEVELOPMENTS BETWEEN ISDn1 ISDn3 - DOTT 07

• Dott's community projects Urban Farming, Low
  Carb Lane, MoveMe, OurNewSchool, New Work,
  Alzheimer100 and DaSH (Design and Sexual Health)
• Dott Festival closing presentation by Prof. Ezio
  Mancini Dott projects are a vital example of
  design with communities - constructing community
  engagement - rather than design for constructing
  new products.
• Two of the six projects were concerned with
  social inclusion - health and wellbeing issues
  rather than sustainability issues.
• The main legacy of the projects was the
  transforming effect that engagement in the design
  process had on the lives and attitudes of
  community participants.

8
DEVELOPMENTS BETWEEN ISDn1 ISDn3 - PHD STUDIES

• New doctoral projects established
• Northumbria Studentship - investigating the
  relationship between service touch-points and the
  way they are experienced and portrayed, which is
  now focusing on the design of edge services
• Northumbria / Design Council co-sponsored
  Studentship - investigating the emerging design
  methods and process employed in the Dott 07
  Public Commission projects
• Subsequent Northumbria Studentship investigating
  the - capacity of transformation service design
  to move beyond social science methods in support
  of communities of craft practice in rural India.

9
QUESTIONS ADDRESSED AT ISDn2

• How can services be prototyped? (from both
  demand- and supply-side perspectives).
• What kind of data is useful to the designers of
  a service, and other stakeholders in the service,
  during the design process?
• What criteria are used to define a service as
  successfully designed? (i.e. profit-turning, easy
  to use quality of user experiences,
  ecologically sustainable etc.) 
• What methods - visual or verbal - or conceptual
  are available to help articulate complex
  systems?
• Plenary
• In what ways do the design of public and private
  sector services differ?
• What influences the perception of risk amongst
  public and private sector service design
  sponsors?

10
SAID OXFORD SERVICE DESIGN PROJECT

• Final workshop presentation in Oct 2007
• Discussion of Service Design from the perspective
  of design method and theory.
• Follows arguments made by Hugentobler and Jones
• Jones view of design methods The purpose of a
  design process to provide an adequate way of
  listening to the users and to the world.
• His view of Rightness of content, process and
  context issues

11
JONES VIEW OF RIGHTNESS

• ..design is a meta-process occurring before the
  product exists that can predict enough about the
  future to ensure that the design can have the
  same quality of rightness that we see in natural
  organisms.
• Is this an appropriate analogy for service
  design?
• Jones was one of the first design researchers to
  model different levels of design complexity
  beyond components and products to encompass
  systems and communities.
• He also exhorted designers to be more aware of
  the impact of their work on society at a systemic
  level.
• Jones, identified the need to appreciate products
  by understanding their whole.
• He talked about the social, economic and
  political basis of the existence of a single
  product in order to address human needs.
• He recognised a need for change as a result of
  the increased complexity of new products brought
  about by technological developments.

12
CRITICISM OF CENTRIC APPROACHES

• Criticism of artefact-centred approach
• Rather than human centred
• Or eco-centred
• Criticism of design that is too business
  centred- palpable tension between human-centred
  service design thinking and business centred
  strategic management consultancy at SAID
• Criticism of design which focuses on
  self-centredness - expression of self is
  advanced instead of an approach based upon
  responsible service for a communal good rather
  than self gratification - referred to as
  author-centredness (Hugentobler 2004).

13
PROCLIVITY OF THE DISCIPLINES

• Question is there a natural lean of business to
  private sector business contexts and that of
  design to public sector service?
• Conspicuous consumption in service of product and
  artefact creation in the world of global business
  as opposed to inconspicuous consumption in the
  context of service transformation in the world of
  public sector services - polarises the debate.

14
OTHER QUESTIONS FOR SERVICE DESIGN PRACTICE

• What we can learn from public service
  explorations that include diverse communities of
  interest, e.g. Dott?
• Can service design methods connect inconspicuous
  consumption and people to policy.
• Are edge services particularly instructive?
• Are there limits to the application of service
  design approaches and methods?
• Can transformation service design methods go
  beyond the utility of methods from other
  disciplines to effect policy into practice, data
  into better qualities of experiences for real
  people in real-world contexts.

15
RIGOUR IN SERVICE DESIGN PRACTICE?

• Methods may support conceptual idea development
  but they do not provide the tools and techniques
  that we need to analyse complex service ecologies
  or for developing more human-centred solutions
  and dealing with multidisciplinary design
  situations (Hugentobler 2004).
• Service Design as a field of practice is ill
  defined - the rigour of good service design
  method and process has not yet been identified
  (Jonathan Ive, 2007)

16
HOW DO WE GET RIGOUR IN SERVICE DESIGN PRACTICE?

• Design research asks how do we make the shift
  from designers as executants to designers as
  executives in the context of designing services?
• Hugentoblers prognosis is that this cannot be
  done without the introduction of systems thinking
• More recent work points to the need to consider
  the hybridisation of design methods and social
  science methods
• In the world of designing, reasoning might catch
  up with conceptualisation, meanwhile service
  design practice continues to happen, - or not!

17
KEYNOTE ANNA MERONI

• Approaches to and reflections on sustainable
  social innovation and service design