'Service Design' AIGA Experience Design London – Wednesday 23 April 2003 (Design Council, London)
[This report based on notes taken during the event, but should not be directly cited. I also programmed and chaired the event.]
From the event introduction: The things organisations create are becoming increasingly intangible and complex, and people's interaction with them take place through multiple 'interfaces' and over time. These interactions will shape their overall quality of experience, and from their point-of-view the organisation may be the product (as has long been the case in intangible services such as banking). This is the realm of service design. At this event we will ask: how can designers go beyond the creation of just one interface to consider the design of an entire service? How can they convince clients they should extend their role? How can services be prototyped and their success measured? What are the key approaches for service design, and can a (pattern) language be developed?
Bill Hollins
Undertakes management consultancy for Direction Consultants
80% of people work in the service sector. Service design can be tangible and intangible. There is a level of service in all products.
With services production and consumption happen at the same time, thus only 11% of services are exportable. Setup in manufacturing 47% of cost, less in service design. Services can't be stored, thus need to consider demand management. ‘Just in time’ works even better in service sector. Capital inputs don't complain, but people complain when they end up queuing.
Why don't people realise you can design services? [Notes there is a British Standard for service design.] In manufacturing everyone knows what design is (even if they do it badly). But in services many people say you can't design things. In services only one fifth of companies had a written process [not clear if for designing or running services]. People don't write down what they are going to design.
Three-quarters of main reasons for service failure are rooted in poor market research. Almost half do none. Research by “attending cocktail parties is not adequate” is not adequate.
We have a problem: make the new standard the state of the art, or dumb it down? And how can we get people to use it?
In the discussion Hollins cited Alcatel as a good exponent of service design. He also added that standards can't make up for bad products (citing British Leyland). He described service design as an ethos, and a process that ensures you don't miss a step.
Kevin Gavaghan
Specialist in innovation and the development of break-through processes to make creativity work in big businesses and government
“I spent a lot of my life unconsciously taking part in design activities.”
First Direct: we didn't know we were doing service design, just a stepped up version of [something else].
What is service design? It is the highest margin area of design. Why is it becoming more important? Because we are becoming wealthier.
How well equipped are design/ers? Not educated in the broader context. They look only at specifications, not the emerging needs. How to convince clients of their new role? Not a chance. Every ad agency I have ever dealt with want to talk about strategy.
Teaching and learning design? Health, education, criminal justice are key issues for government and we have to get them right. If you are looking where to make your next quid [get into this area].
First Direct story: We used design companies extensively but couldn't find any that spanned the skills we needed. Seeking to put man/woman and machines together. Had to bring together many different systems and bridge them together with a screen on the top, so that people could talk to the customer as if they knew their entire situation. Business design matched the technology design matched the people design. Return on investment got the attention of the board.
Lessons:
- Need a vision, not a strategy, needs someone who really cares about something, dramatic change.
- How do the leaders get formed? Not the management but the [people who make things happen].
- Out of that came an ideology, a common system of ideas, which informed our strategy. When it came to the design brief we knew who we were. Importance of creating an equitable distribution of the wealth.
[Discussed South African project to train black accountants.]
People who call themselves designers are going to have to give the people who call themselves MBAs “a bloody good kicking”. They can only work out what the problem is [and draw some funky chart]. “I would have 10 designers to four management consultants.”
How do people who call themselves designers see. How do they 'feel' what is going on. How do they communicate it to people who 'see'? Maybe we need to work in partnerships.
I am currently designing a design university (the acme of the design process).
Mammoth change after WWI. In Germany one radical solution was the National Socialists. And another was the Bauhaus. How much of what we see now resulted from that.
Processes are important but they are frameworks. How are you going to change your reading when you think about the opportunities of service? If you don't read and provoke yourself "If the answer is design magazines, Stop. If it is the FT that is a start."
[Discussion not summarised.]
Live|work
London-based company focusing on service design, through commercial services projects for clients and research. [Web site]
We are the only company saying we are a service design company. There are no service design buyers, no one is trained to do it. We need to develop the offer, initially through teaching [and developing a language]. Marketing something intangible is problematic.
Moving from designing products to designing services, and service envy. Driving forces: 71% of economy by GDP is services; technology is moving to services (such as Microsoft with .NET); communication technology makes services easier (First Direct was made possible through telecoms technology); services are not a single hit, but about relationships; ecology: making the use of finite resources more sustainable.
Service ecologies: how to move from a [chain] to a value net? For instance Amazon, where once we were just buyers, but are now recommenders and sellers?
Why design services? For people: to create delightful, useful and sustainable services. For the planet: [encourage the move] from acquisition of goods to [intangible values such as emotion].
Services envy: communicating who you are through your services. (Teens spending more on texts than they did on sweets.)
Building a discipline:
- Designing for many actors
- Mapping the value net
- Understanding value exchange
- Enabling relationships
- Designing for use over time: a service is never finished when it is launched, and needs to change over time
- Prototyping service experiences: how to give quick and easy expressions
Projects
ViVi: focus on model-making of services: Experience Prototypes. How do you start services, how do you live with them, how do you stop them? Idea of the postcard to start it. Get CD after a year with all the entire collection. Leaving messages for the owner of the album. [Notes on project not clear.]
Dream: wake-up call is most popular voice service. How about recording dreams? Turns out people are a bit stressed out by being woken up like that. How to tell someone it is OK to hang up?
Loome: wanted to design an emotional flip. Experience prototype was to write to all the companies who had my data. Much of what came back was hand-written. I can do the one thing no one else can do: aggregate it. But companies put lots of hurdles in place to prevent you getting the data.
In the discussion Alistair Jeffs asked if products obsolete and everything is services? Live|work noted that Orange was more important than Nokia, and that lot of service companies becoming commodified. Tamara Giltsoff asked how you incentivise people to input into the service, and how to create desire. Live|work suggested making them an actor, using laws and business structures. Luke Skrebowski asked if they had found clients who you can partner with, and if they had been able to get into the business schools. IDEO was noted as a partner.
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