Colour Quotes Analysis

Service Design as the Creation of Active Brand

2009-10-15T11:51:00Z

Service design looks to me to be sitting at a point of bifurcation. The recent launch of a dedicated journal, many conferences, an almost non-stop stream of discussion on numerous blogs and social networks, and an explosion of practitioners are opening the concept to new definitions. This is somewhat inevitable, an emerging discipline tends to stake it’s ground against external boundaries initially, circling the wagons and smoothing over any internal differences. As those boundaries cement somewhat and lose the sense of urgency, the internal differences begin to articulate themselves. I understand this fragmentation as a sign of a maturing discipline, and this article is my attempt to articulate the practice as I see it.

I want to start with a note of dissent. Part of the reason for what I see as an extreme fragmentation of the service design concept is that it was never that clearly articulated to start with. Many practices and viewpoints coalesced under the banner of service as a differentiation from product. The early arguments about the validity of service design largely took the form of a reaction to product design. Within that reactionary normalisation, the word service became a catchall for a number of streams of thought and the differences between those streams weren’t always clearly articulated.

So if we are to take advantage of this moment of bifurcation to strengthen the service design concept, we need to define some of those streams. Service designers may practice one or more of these strands, even within a single project, and I’d by no means say that my definitions were comprehensive or conclusive.

The first I’d identify is the traditional service industry strand. This stream synchronises neatly with experience design and customer service to create a discourse around improving the performative aspects of services. Typical clients in this space include hotels, museums, airlines, retail environments, call centres.

The second stream is represented by what appears to be coalescing as a ‘design thinking’ movement. This movement argues that the embodied skills of the designer offer a unique set of tools for instigating and managing change. By applying these skills to organisational challenges, design can give individuals within service organisations the ability to imagine and effect change. Typical clients for this strand are change management teams in large organisations such as the NHS, banks and telecomms.

The third stream as I see it is the propositional strand. In this discourse, service is best placed to effect strategic innovation due to it’s holistic perspective and freedom from material constraints. Typical clients are innovation teams looking for game changing proposition development. I consider the word service most problematic in this domain however, because it’s precise meanings distort much of the holistic power that is promised by the abstract form. This is also the strand that I am going to concentrate on for the remainder of this article. This is primarily because it’s the strand I most commonly practice in, but also because I believe the reaction against product in this strand creates an internal contradiction with precisely the ecology of product and service that I consider service design’s most compelling feature.

With that groundwork laid, I want to argue for looking at service as a complicated and not entirely satisfactory word describing the relationship between a producer and a consumer. In this abstracted definition, service doesn’t sound a million miles away from brand in it’s most abstract sense. However brand carries plenty of ambiguous weight of it’s own, and the implications of this proposed merger need tentative exploration. What does the service concept offer that brand doesn’t?

Brand as a static concept may not shed much light on service. However, brands are increasingly not static. Service applications such as Nike Plus create an active relationship between consumers and brands. They form complex ecologies involving brand, service AND product. Here the brand becomes more than abstract, it becomes useful. With use, brand evolves into what I call active brand. Note the distinction between this and the concept of branded utility. It’s semantic I know, but the implication of slapping a logo on a function seems to do the concept a disservice.

Active brand is important, because it represents a concrete relation between producer and consumer. Each is tied to the other as long as that activity continues and must continue to contribute to that relationship. The passive brand represented by the creation, production, delivery and yes, use, of a product is replaced by a relationship that may last over numerous product lifecycles.

This ecology perspective, present from the start in service design discourse, is one that needs developing. It needs definition, clarity and focused practice. It’s the most powerful strand precisely because it effectively resolves the reaction against product within service design and establishes the grounds for a merger with brand. Service design can be seen as the creation of active brand. This confusing word Service represents an infrastructure for active brands.

Digital services have a special place in this ecology. They are a powerful platform for the creation of active brand for a number of reasons. They stretch easily over time. They are analogous to the data layer that materially constitutes the relationship between the producer and the consumer. They are easily available, both materially and financially. And they allow compelling and clear definition at the propositional level.

I’ve argued that service design is best thought of as 3 distinct strands, articulated here as Experience, Change and Proposition. The third is the least clearly defined precisely because it attempts to define itself holistically, crossing boundaries with brand. However the evolution of brand into active brand presents the opportunity for merger between service as proposition and brand.

Resolving some of the ambiguous boundary disputes with the larger brand discourse, in a way that retains an important role for service as the platform for use, can help the practice of designing services emerge from this moment of bifurcation stronger and with a clearer message of the value that it can deliver, whether it is called service design or not.

Design + research

2009-09-18T09:23:00Z

“Design doesn’t have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn’t have to be good, but it has to be new.”

I really like this essay on design and research by Paul Graham. It’s an exploration of what’s different between design and what he describes as an active, exploratory form of research.

He’s talking here about the design of a programming language, but what I like is the ease with which he introduces and argues for some of the core principles of design research: starting with needs, prototyping, iteration. He also pushs some buttons with the argument that design (decision) by committee is necessarily a bad thing.

I love the idea that these methods are so cross-disciplinary, so much just a skill set like reading and writing, owned by everyone, not just one group of technicians. Graham elegantly captures the spirit of that idea here.

Codifying design thinking threatens it’s central value of flexibility

2009-06-13T13:08:00Z

Fred Collopy has published a post on Fast Company discussing the similiarities of the emerging design thinking discourse and that of systems thinking, a management-based holistic discourse with resonances in complexity theory.

Fred’s central argument is that design thinking faces an internal threat from the normative desire to codify itself. As a new domain seeks to establish itself, it begins to construct expert knowledge that is arcane to non-practitioners. This codification plays an important social role in legitimising the expert knowledge, and not insignificantly creates a barrier to entry.

Fred argues that this drive to codification in systems thinking led ultimately to an unwieldiness that prevented mainstream acceptance. He warns that design thinking should seek to avoid this trap by “building an arsenal” rather than codifying a single set of principles.

This argument makes some sense to me. The codification of expert knowledge creates an unwieldiness and defensiveness that I think is the anti-thesis of what design thinking should be. If this movement were to emerge as simply a successor to the previous management fad, it would be an immense failure of a singular opportunity to introduce a level of ambiguity and flexibility into our toolkit.

The drive to codification appears to make sense, it seems that what’s needed is to talk the same language, to agree and to build a single edifice. However, in doing that we’d be creating that edifice on the grave of what design thinking can represent, which is the capacity for creativity that rationalism would seek to deny.

What I’d argue we need is to re-validate something of a black box, one that is considerably smaller, de-centralised and democratised, but a blackbox none the less. If design thinking represents anything for me, it’s the power of imagination, hope and inspiration. The ability to consider the future as flexible. Beyond that central thought, codification is a threat to flexibility, and flexibility is the central value that design thinking offers to our toolkits.

Health 2.0: Reformation, not revolution

2009-06-01T11:53:00Z

A special report in The Economist likens the “Health2.0” patient empowerment movement to the way the Reformation opened up the Church in the 16th century.

“Traditional paternalistic relationships between patients and doctors are being undermined in much the same way as the religious Reformation of the 16th century empowered the laity and threatened the 1,000-year-old hierarchy of the Catholic church in Europe.”

Joanne Shaw

Importantly, the article focuses attention not simply on technical innovations such as Google Health or Patients Like Me, but on the social role of an involved and informed ‘citizen patient’.

I’ve argued before that it is this side of the movement which holds the most promise. Specific tools are great news for savvy users, the kind who already get pretty good treatment from the health service. It is the socialisation of empowerment that offers real opportunity for improving the service as a whole.

Disposable theory

2009-05-27T13:56:00Z

Nick Marsh has posted a response to my earlier post about the differences between questions and answers research.

For the record, I’m not suggesting ditching the bodies of knowledge, just the labels.

There’s been so much attempting to bolster the results of exploratory research with the gloss of method in the search of answers that I think we’ve started to dismiss the value of questions. More theoretically oriented researchers have seen these attempts as diminishing the value of their more robust work. I don’t think these turf wars are necessary or helpful.

What I’m arguing for is more transparency and reflexivity about what we are doing. The velocity of client innovation work often means that exploratory work is all that’s being funded. By moving the argument about robustness to a resource issue, we can clear the way for light and productive exploratory work that is of value in grounding emerging project-specific theory.

With velocity as a factor, I find disposable project-specific theory more productive than canned theory that I haven’t had time to adapt to the purpose. That’s my preference for working based on my (lack of) ability to process ideas quickly, it’s not a prescription for anyone else!

Has the pendulum swung, is it time to stop selling exploratory research as truth and have a bit of self-confidence in it’s value on it’s own merits?

Is innovation nature or nurture?

2009-05-13T21:31:00Z

As Microsoft give the BBC a tour around their Future Home, CNet’s Rupert Goodwins asks how such research contributes to Microsoft’s bottom line. He says this kind of fundamental future research is intended primarily as a status symbol. Patronage of exciting, well-funded work and strong cross-over with academia functions more as a branding exercise than productive and bottom-line changing research.

He has some strange examples to back up his argument. He cites some traditional technical R&D from Intel as an example of research that makes a difference. He also cites Apple’s shutting down of Apple Research Labs in 1997 as evidence that corporations don’t need fundamental research. These examples ignore non-technical research by Intel and the undoubted relocation of research activity by Apple.

He does raise an interesting point about the social life of research and the “personality” of research in different organisations. How important is the model of innovation adopted by an organisation in influencing the impact of research on the organisation? Is innovation in organisations nature or nurture?

If one thing matters, everything matters

2009-05-09T14:22:00Z

“If one thing matters, everything matters”

Wolfgang Tillmans

The embrace of participant observation by the design community has provided a source of tension between the disciplines that traditionally engaged in it and the new disciplines adapting it to their uses.

These tensions often confuse method with quality. I want to think about how the merger of these two activities can be re-conceptualised as an emerging third entity and avoid some of the disciplinary wars.

For anthropologists, the surge of interest in ethnography is both a boon and a worry. Interest in grounding innovation (and I’ll leave it at that for the moment) has meant increasing opportunity for the application of methods of engaging with people. If we step beyond the often rhetorical commitment to the needs of people, the simple situation is that capital has recognised the efficiency of grounded and iterative innovation and has increasingly looked to the humanities for methods of doing so.

The design industry has been well placed to respond to this need and they have enlisted the help of the social sciences under the banner of making capitalism serve people better. However the social sciences have a deep seated discomfort with the service of industry (not without reason) and my argument is that it’s this discomfort which lies beneath much of the argument over method in this debate.

However… Once we move into the service of industry, we accept some of the logic of capital by default, whether we like it or not. And part of that logic is efficiency. We must learn to do more with less. This may not apply to all of us. Some of us are fortunate enough to be blessed with long running projects and clients that want the fruits of the academy. For most jobbing design researchers however, we need to coax quality out of often sparse budgets and we need to apply our thinking directly to the practice of design.

Fortunately, this is not and should not be a hopeless quest. In 2003, the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans exhibited at the Tate Britain a show titled, “If one thing matters, everything matters.” This title can and should be a call to arms for those interested in the social and in the ongoing design of what the social will be in the future. Design, art and commerce are engaged in a fundamental re-organisation of the future around the notion of the local and there is simply too much local for the resource intensive model of academic ethnography to catch up. We need new models that are aimed at continuous response. We need to rethink our place in this model.

The idea of the field as a bounded and geographic location is long-contested. We need to abandon the notion that our role as design researchers is to report from one location to another. It’s not reportage, it’s merger. Our role is to exist simultaneously in multiple fields. The ethnography is the entire project and we need to make the most of each instance of understanding and insight that we are able to bring to bear. The arguments that interviews are not ethnography, workshops are not ethnography, only ethnography is ethnography often miss the point that the goal is not ethnography, but engagement and understanding. Frankly, I’m quite happy to just drop the use of the word ethnography altogether, just as I’ve happily dropped the use of anthropology or sociology. These are increasingly market orientated terms and get away from the goal, which is to discern understanding of the past in the service of the future. Maybe what we are engaged in is “designography” and our completed work, our theory is the design itself.

It’s both the understanding and the application of that understanding which is the marker of quality design research, not the deployment of particular methods or theories. I’m not arguing for the return of the heroic designer. But I am arguing that the designer has a role to play, we don’t escape from the role of the designer with the role of the heroic researcher. If everything matters, then each small thing matters too, each thing is a local field and matters and if a designer is able to craft quality from that small instance then that matters.

Quality is the success of what we create out of what we have available, it’s craft and it’s care and it’s passion. It’s not a formula. Research is in the business of answers and despite the philosophical difficulties of that position still appears determined to stay in that business. Design research or whatever this role grows up to be is a different thing and should be in the business of questions. We’re in the business of the future and that’s always a question, we shouldn’t forget it. Answers may be easier to sell, but they have a bad habit of arguing that they are only game in town. If everything matters, then every thing matters and every route to finding that thing matters. Keep finding ways to engage more deeply with the local through whatever means available, following the spirit, not the law, of whatever inspirations you have brought with you thus far. Design research should be art as much as science.

Tools for patient-driven health aren’t enough, we need agents of change

2009-02-24T21:51:00Z

Melanie Swan of MS Futures Group in Palo Alto recently published a paper on emerging patient-driven health care models in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

She writes about the impact of a number of technological innovations on patient empowerment, specifically health-focused social networks, deeper individual health understanding through genetic profiling and self-knowledge through quantified measuring.

The paper provides a good overview of these technologies, including a useful pyramid categorisation of social networking behaviours in the health context: Emotional support and information sharing; Physician Q&A; Quantified self-tracking and Clinical trials access.

She celebrates these technologies as drivers of patient-empowerment. This is where the paper ends and it leaves many problems unanswered.

The principle of my argument is that the technologies she refers to are best thought of as the tools of already empowered ‘patients’, rather than agents of empowerment themselves.

There is promise in these and other technologies. It is important that people are able to take ownership of their health and their interactions with health services. However we can’t afford to assume that technology will automatically provide empowerment. There needs to be an appropriate level of service that actively engages people with lower levels of technical and organisational literacy.

The real key to empowered health is the quest for health literacy. This campaigning and democratic element was missing from this paper. These are early days for people-driven health and although there is plenty to celebrate in technology, we need agents of change as well as tools.

Access the full PDF here

Ken Anderson on using ethnographic translation for strategy at Intel

2009-02-24T16:18:01Z

March’s Harvard Business Review has a short article by Intel’s Ken Anderson. Ken has consistently argued the importance of ethnography as ‘translation’ between tribes, in this case corporations and consumers. Here he highlights discovering questions rather than just answers is useful for strategic way-finding as well as short-term innovation.

“Our job as anthropologists is to understand the perspective of one tribe, consumers, and communicate it to another, the people at Intel.”

Ken Anderson

Read the full article

Designing for imaginary needs

2009-02-11T10:31:00Z

Rob Tannen on Designing for Humans, has blogged some notes about designing interactions with imaginary objects - inspired by Bruce Sterling’s imaginary gadgets series.

I particularly liked his intuition that the Wii controller was in some way inspired by the lightsabre!

The image is a much-blogged one from the showreel of Mark Coleran, one of the most prolific designers of imaginary interfaces for the film industry.

The thing I like most about the imaginary gadget concept is precisely what Sterling talks about in his second installment, The Brazen Head. The unrealised object is capable of fulfilling imaginary needs without the messy business of actually building the technology to do so. The freedom that this introduces to think about what unconstrained needs might be is liberating and productive.

This is exactly what a prototype does, turning imaginary needs into living, breathings ones. The technology can follow.

Driving Engaged service use

2009-02-10T23:29:00Z

I’ve been toying with a model for user engagement that I call 5E. The idea is to give a production focused 5S or lean model a run for it’s money when designing services. The argument is that the focus on efficiency and waste reduction in production can all too easily miss the point in the context of a service. The value for a customer is often located precisely in the deeper engagement that can look like waste from an efficiency perspective.

The model is loosely inspired by the Defra 4E model but developed before I knew that model existed and intended to be used in a slightly different way. Each of the components should be seen as interdependent and non-linear characteristics that are continuous throughout the lifetime of a user’s experience of the service.

Quickly running through it, 5E aims to create Engagement through Education, Empowerment, Enablement and Encouragement. It works as a checklist for services. Get something going for each component and the sum of the parts is engagement. Miss a component and you lose segments of your user community for whom that component is a necessary part of the experience.

It starts with Education. This covers: awareness in the marketplace; any information and decision-making help that potential users require; the entry and learning process to using the service; and ongoing learning towards mastery of the service. Beyond simply attracting new users to the service and getting them signed up, this should be seen from the start as the development of an active user base. The greater a user’s investment in learning your service, the less likely they are to disengage. It should go without saying that this learning should be intuitive and fun and that a large upfront investment without immediate reward should not be required to get started.

Once users pass through a trust barrier and go from simply wanting to try your service, without any sense of commitment on their part, through learning their way around and figuring out how well the service meets their needs, they will begin to develop a sense of belonging and ownership. This is due to the investment they have made and for which they will now begin seeking a return. In order to ensure that they feel their time, attention, and possibly money, was soundly invested, they need to be Empowered. This means reassuring them that their feelings of ownership and belonging are justified and that their investment is worthwhile. Empowered users participate in the decision making process and need to see responses to their developing needs and requirements. This is a significant challenge for service provider but it is essential for engaged users to feel that they have real ownership of their experience in return for their investment.

At it’s core, the service must Enable users to fulfill their needs more easily and more enjoyably. The service should aim to constantly increase the ratio of people making the most of the service by lowering the barriers of entry to advanced use and giving users the capability to optimally design their own level and style of use. Enabling users to meet their needs in their own way will help them stay engaged in the service even as their needs change.

Finally we must remember the hard slog of Encouraging users to maintain active use of the service. Remember: this isn’t hard sell to take up the service or to hand over a credit card number. That has hopefully happened already. This is about maximizing engagement. It’s about motivating users to keep learning, reminding them of their goals and rewarding them for achieving deeper involvement. Think personal trainer, rather than sales man. What are the incentives that drive deeper engagement with your service instead of other competing ones?

Look to tick off each of these elements when designing a new service or improving an existing one, and keep working at each. They address different components of a user’s experience and the greater sum of the parts is engaged and active users.

Ideas on moving beyond user-centred

2009-01-29T09:45:00Z

The first problem I have with user-centred is just simple peevishness at it’s overuse. Stick a picture of a person in the centre of all your diagrams and you’re there. No more work required.

The second gets a little deeper at the reason for my annoyance. Why should cramming all our services and processes in a circle around our user be so necessary? What is it about all those parts of an organisation that they need to be reformed around a user. Truly user-centred design would do away with a lot of the producer-centric elements of organisations but of course, most of those producer needs are essential to their survival or at the very least to their mission. When these forces are in conflict, user-centred gives way pretty quickly.

So we need a way to understand the value that focusing on the user brings, without discounting the competing needs of other stakeholders. More collaborative perhaps. How do we do this without losing the program and liminality that user-centred provides?

A third aspect is the role of spokesperson that the researcher plays. I’d like an adjustment to this. It’s not that I’m uncomfortable with the role, but more that I’m uncomfortable with the claims of the role. I’d like a modifier, a way to mitigate the claim without denying the role. This is particularly true where the demands of time mean that we must speak for people, not with them.

I’m thinking a reformed concept of the ‘field’ might be productive. I’m more comfortable arguing that I can speak for the field. The field is easier to place disclaimers on (based on 1 day in the field). It’s a means of balancing people, objects, places, processes. And it means avoiding a ‘black box’ conversion from speaking for people to speaking for the needs of the project.

Of course, this is all scaffolding. Thinking aloud. The program of user-centred is too important to let us off thinking about people first. It’s just I’m not always sure that user-centric does equal people-centric.

Social Services

2009-01-20T10:53:00Z

It’s kind of rare to actually be able to point to work that I’ve done, so I’m pretty happy to link to this article in the International Herald Tribune on our project at Live|work with Multiple Sclerosis patients in Ealing.

“We felt there had to be a role for design in public services that seemed to have been designed without any consideration for the people who’d use them.”

Ben Reason, Live|work

Full article

Rhizomatic research

2009-01-05T20:11:00Z

Knowledge is often conceived of as crystalline, a perfectly formed and inherently replicable formula, a truth. However I’d argue that another metaphor, that of the rhizome, is more productive and better suited to design research’s focus on the unknown, yet imminent future. I’m thinking particularly of it’s ability to cope with the natural selection of ideas, their real success through growth rather than the idealised positives of crystalline truth. These aren’t essential structures but productive explorations. This is a means of examining the points of intersection, the points natural selection has deemed worthy, without limitations on time. It is this freedom from time that matches it to future research. New lines are equally worthy of attention, for who knows which outcrops may one day be important growths. The Deleuzian metaphor is powerful for precisely these reasons, it is productive for the archaeology of both large and small phenomena, because it does not impose a hierarchy upon them.

What does tuberous research look like? Is it simply more respectful to limited data to propose that we cannot know what it means but can say where we think it might lead? Does this tendency to lines of flight make rhizomatic research inherently better suited to innovation? Better suited to research of the future? Better suited to research which involves the agency of the researcher and/or their clients? This interest in instances and the delineation of the past which informs them makes what of the present? A fleeting point between past and future in which we can take a stab at understanding how what is past may create what is future? This is definitely not crystalline, not a perfectly formed frozen moment, but rather a play with evolving time.

Fieldwork then is all of these things: the discovery of an instance, a line of flight in Deleuzian terms; the archaeology of that specific instance; and the attempt to craft an image of the future along that trajectory. Certainty is the arrival of momentum on the scene, either already present through the aggregation of existing lines of flight, or through the concerted agency of an interested party.

This model appeals to me precisely because of it’s ability to render the future both with and without the presence of agency and with or without the presence of evolutionary ‘luck’. Crystalline knowledge disputes both, opting for the far more problematic, if superficially attractive, concept of truth.

User-scented design

2008-12-04T14:52:00Z

“User-scented design”

My new favourite catch-phrase!