When you have 2 coffee shops right next to each other, that each sell the exact same coffee at the exact same price; Service Design is what makes you walk into the one and not the other.

The price, is of course the key issue cited by the opposition to the complete neglect of a discussion about how businesses might become more innovative or (as they arguably already are) become more collaborative in the face for such competition. Apparently margins are already heavily stretched in most of the town’s existing businesses. But as Marc’s quote and Joe Heapy’s article in DMI Review last year highlight, if people feel they are getting better value, or better service, they will be prepared to pay more and further, businesses will do well to lead on this initiative rather than adopting a negative approach to these proposals. The public outcry has been on the one hand a hugely admirable demonstration of Totnes’ community spirit, rivalled perhaps only by a similar mass-mobilisation over the summer by parents and students at the local secondary school against the re-introduction of school uniforms (‘KEVICC Students are not Uniform‘) and it is great to live somewhere were you feel that these issues are at least debated. Indeed the coffee campaign has also exceeded the impassioned defence last year in the national press of a series of blue gnomes on one of the town’s roundabouts in a town also claimed recently to be ‘one of the least competitive in Britain‘.

However, as a designer interested in the design of services and the role that services can play in developing new businesses and growing existing ones, I am deeply uncomfortable living in a town that, by the efforts of its most vocal protagonists seems to be selectively opposing the whole concept of the service economy for some heavily romanticised and backwards looking view of itself. That said, I am conflicted for the fact that it is, as the No to Costa Campaign are arguing, exactly this ‘backwardness’ that is Totnes’ unique selling point in a broader tourist economy that pitches Totnes against the charms of Paignton or Newton Abbot in the surrounding area.

Having taken a bit of time to ponder the respective merits of the argument from both sides and conduct some ad-hoc design research which has totted up something in the region of 15-35 rival food/drink businesses within the centre of town (depending on how you count them). It is of course at a basic level, possible to empathise with why some of these already stretched businesses feel threatened by the arrival of Costa and how its arrival seems to ominously sound the alarm of an impending array of faceless high street brands and chains arriving in the town to exorcise it of its independent coffee shops and boho charm. This view is also easy to understand in a town of only 7,500 (albeit with a strong local and seasonal tourist trade), yet these figures and the charm and variety of many of the existing establishments (and indeed, Totnes as a town itself) also indicate a market for eateries and coffee shops that make it easy to see why, despite the local opposition, Costa want a piece of the action.

Having conversed with a number of people around town about the situation and absorbed the arguments, sometime vitriol and on the other hand heard about numerous examples of Costa’s previously callous corporate behaviour, it is interesting to observe the culture clash at play between one of the most recognisable of Britain’s high-street brands and that of the ‘values’ of the most vocal/threatened citizens of a town that has almost a similarly national reputation for being alterative and anti-competitive. What we are seeing here is the same tension that I perceive often plays out in the balance between the design of high quality product-oriented design and that of low-margin, high-volume service businesses. The difference being, that selling coffee is no longer a high-margin business.

What’s interesting in this debate is that the boundary of the service experience is being drawn in different places by the different stakeholders. With the No to Costa campaign saying that for the £2.20 you will pay for your cappuccino in Totnes, you are receiving an experience of drinking such a coffee in a highstreet that is free of any of the usual high street chains. Whilst Costa are arguing that people will know what they can expect of the Costa experience and therefore will spend more time (and money) interacting with other businesses and touchpoints in Totnes thereby adding value to both the Totnes economy, and, it has to be said Whitbread PLC, Costa’s parent company.

My perception in reflecting upon the above one line definition of service design as the difference between two coffee shops is that in this day and age there is room for both these two types of business in a thriving local economy and that a polarisation to either extreme is destined to provide bad experiential value for customers, either in terms of the cost and quality of their coffee, or in terms of their experience of the environment in which they are drinking it. The marketplace for coffee shops and eateries in Totnes is already heavily saturated (in the business sense!) – the introduction of Costa to this marketplace will just force those businesses already there, to seek new sources of differentiation and if handled well could see a massive growth of the Totnes brand, through efforts to add value to, and consolidate the ‘independent Totnes’ experience in the face of mass market competition. I would have hoped that rather than a massive campaign of negativity, that the opposition movement could have focussed on the potential for increased collaboration and innovation amongst local businesses that this development presents.

If, as the No To Costa Campaign argue, one of Totnes’ key differentiating features as a town and as a venue for coffee and food is in the town’s alternative and individual approach, then it is up to the independent businesses to take ownership of that and consolidate that brand, using it to differentiate against the greater reliability and efficiency of Costa’s high-volume operation and the economies of scale it can provide. Indeed, most people I’ve spoken to have said as something of an aside, that they value Costa (more generally) for the fact that you know exactly what you are going to get, and that like any decent service-oriented business or consumer brand that there is a consistency in their offer that is by no means guaranteed any time you set foot in an independent retailer.

The Food and Drink industry represents one of Britain’s biggest manufacturing industries and in a town with few other industries or sources of employment, building a reputation as eccentric and anti-competitive is only likely to alienate further sources of investment in the town and the surrounding area. On the other hand maybe the Totnesians are right to assert that shunning the ‘brand-led’ service economy is the only way, in this day and age, for local economies to create value or sources of differentiation? I don’t agree myself. But what do you think?

Much of my work over the past few years has been at the fuzzy front-end of this process, looking at how the design process can become more ‘social’ and the process of design can become more democratic, or participatory, as a result of some of the technological and social innovations of the recent past, or with the intention of the products and services of an organisation being more closely matched to the needs of their users. Examples of this work include the (now rather passe) incorporation of social media tools within the ideation or concept generation phases of the design process, for example, or to cite another example, exploring the role of increased social engagement throughout the product and service delivery process to support greater knowledge transfer and repeat business. I have also worked to incorporate new technologies within conventional product and service delivery processes within a number of different organisations.

“In becoming so engrossed in these sorts of challenges it is easy to lose sight, I feel, of the basic fact that there are many professions and product-development processes that are considerably less codified than design practice is. Furthermore, I have also fallen foul of people mistaking my role to be ‘something to do with the website’ rather than engaged in the development of products and services, which might in some part rely on web systems or web technology.”

In explaining the value that I (and other designers) create within this process I keep coming back to Roger Martin’s Funnel, which I’ve sketched out above, with reference to the traditional product design process I was taught at University (Pugh, 1991) and a more recent ‘service-oriented design process’ that was developed by Hannington and Martin (2012) and perhaps through its terminology takes account of the fact that the more socially or service oriented the design challenge the less concrete the process utilised tends to be. Whilst I continue to be interested into more complex investigations of the boundaries of design and the elucidation and reification of the role of design in overcoming the limitations of more traditional user-centred or product oriented approaches to design, for example. It is also affirming, I think, to stop and reflect on the simplest things that designers can do irrespective of the context in which they are working to help organisations move their ideas or shared knowledge through this ‘funnel’. Stopping and reflecting on a fantastically simple definition of the things that designers have to do, in the course of tackling more complicated projects is also important for helping others understand the role that the designer is playing in the process and supporting them to see why that is valuable.

Never was the simplicity of what designers do more clearly spelt out than in the recent episode of Grand Designs on Channel 4/More 4. Usually, I find the definition of design that the presenter Kevin McCloud espouses here as very traditional, being as it is a programme heavily rooted in the context of architecture and the ‘marking out’ of the physical world. Usually, and perhaps unfairly, I find the representation of design as almost cringeworthy in its simplicity. But, in this recent episode, as the featured home-owner undertook a wild, and hugely entertaining and charismatic attempt to rebuild an Irish castle working entirely from ‘a plan’ that at least until the end of the programme resided near entirely in his own head and was therefore subject to change at the slightest whim, I was struck by McCloud’s reminder of what design at its best and simplest contributes to the world: The ability to visualise and clarify ideas in other forms. Whether those ‘other forms’ are drawings, 3d prototype models, post-it note customer journeys, pixel perfect mobile interfaces or fully realised and costed product-service propositions, in its essence design is about ‘marking out’ ideas in new forms (design comes from designare, the ‘to mark out’ in Latin). In enabling people to share, troubleshoot and expand their ideas in other forms, design fulfils its broader, modern day purpose of enabling people to tackle greater technical or social complexity.

This dilemma, within the context of design and design practice is something that I have spent a lot of the past four years thinking about in the course of my part-time MPhil in Design Research studies, which I successfully concluded in November last year.

The article from Tetradian proposed a ‘pseudo mathematical equation’ building on Dan Pink’s interpretation of Deci and Ryan’s Self Determination Theory – both of which posit (using slightly distinct terminology) that all human behaviour, and specifically all human intrinsic motivation is directed by a desire for greater autonomy, (social) relatedness and (self) competence or the interplay of these three innate drivers. The equation Tom posits is:

M = f(A + R + C)

Where M = (intrinsic) motivation, a = autonomy, r = relatedness and c = competence.

I leveraged this same definition of intrinsic motivation in the course of my research, and in the process of developing a framework to support design practitioners to conceptualise the impact of their work on human motivation. You can see in the diagram below how these three constructs of Autonomy, Relatedness and Competence form the ‘Intrinsic’ dimension of human experience as synthesised in my research. So Tom’s equation got me thinking for the first time in a year or so about motivation again, and as others have been recently, about how such an equation could help elucidate further the manner in which designers can actually shape or define human experience.

My thinking has largely been exploring how adopting Tom’s ‘pseudo mathematical notation’ to define the intrinsic aspects of human experience discussed above, could also be applied to the ‘extrinsic’ aspects of human experience. Such extrinsic dimensions of experience and the systems applied to organising or visualising them are often referred to in the design literature as affordances.

The three components that I identified in the course of my own research were those of physical experience (typically the domain of industrial designers), the ‘hardware’ or architecture and physical touchpoints of an experience. Following this, there are also the cognitive aspects of experience, typically the domain of interaction design professionals and designers who are concerned about the interfaces within product-service eco systems, the so-called ‘software’ of human experience. Finally the third dimension of human experience shaped by designers is that of the ‘Organisational Designers’, what might be considered the ‘operating system’ of human experience, or alternatively considered as the backstage functions of service experiences – the logistics and operations or supply chain management that contribute to the design and delivery of product-service systems and enable them to by scaled, distributed or syndicated.

By the same level of simplicity that Tom adopted for the above equation of intrinsic human experience I therefore propose that extrinsic human experience, or the aspects of service or experience design that designers can directly shape and influence can be summarised as follows:

D = f(P+ C+ O)

Where D = design, P = physical experience, c= cognitive experience and O = operations (the repeatability, scalability or familiarity of the product-service proposition). This, to any designer is a pretty intuitive observation and summation but one that I think lends itself, in much the same way as my visual Framework of Motivational Design was intended, to support designers to conceptualise the impact of their design on the motivation of stakeholders, and thereafter, to be able to identify distinct aspects of product-service systems on which to focus their design activities to add value to the overall product-proposition.

What do you think? Does this definition of the design of experiences make sense to you? Are there any aspects of user-experience that are missing from the above conceptualisation? Please use the comments below to build a discussion around this model and to share your own reflections on the question of how designers can better motivate user behaviour to generate value for businesses.

For those who might not be aware Superfast Cornwall is a pioneering project in the South West of England to explore the impact of ‘superfast’ fibre-optic broadband on rural economies. For more information about the project as a whole you can click here.

The Arts and Craft Department at Falmouth is interested in exploring the benefits for individuals working within the craft industry of this new technology, and BT as the chief funder of the Superfast project is particularly interested in measuring the financial impact, or benefit of this new technology.

Given my own experience in developing web platforms, and the use of digital technology to support product development and social innovation such as This is Service Design Thinking and NHS Go London, I was particularly interested in this project not least for the fact that it is actually seeking to measure empirically the benefit of these platforms to the businesses and the region. I also explored a few case studies of how digital platforms such as Kickstarter and Etsy are themselves transforming the craft value chain by, in the case of Kickstarter, transforming the consumption phase of the craft process to a point prior the the production and distribution of the artefact.

The project itself has focussed on the role of digital technology in supporting greater collaborating and cocreation amongst crafts people in the region, particularly with a view to supporting them to utilise digital manufacturing technologies, much like Maklab (Fablab in Scotland) for example. My experience has tended to be in either using digital technology to understand patterns of user behaviour or consumption, or using digital technology as part of the design process to support greater ideation and creativity, this concept of digital technology as a tool to create a focal point and knowledge exchange platform for crafts people in the region and further afield is very reminiscent of a lot of my work on the ripfa Interactive Platform and for the reason Research and Evaluation Service.

The project is planning to use Gross Value Added (GVA) as the metric of economic impact, which for the macro-level at which this project is reporting i.e. at a level of regional productivity I can understand, but one of the chief parts of my talk and my work in scoping this project, centred on how digital technology can support greater economies of scale in craft production and greater efficiency within the regional craft supply chain, as well as supporting leaner models of product development. In addition to the social value that online discussion forums and social media collaboration that bringing Superfast Broadband to this region might provide for its craft practitioners, I am particularly interested in how digital technologies can also unlock value from other aspects of the product development process.

If you are interested in seeing my complete presentation, which includes details of the process that I think that the folks on the Superfast Project could adopt in undertaking this project and developing this platform, please drop me an email or get in touch via any of the social media links at the bottom of the page. If you want to know more about any of the projects that I have worked on and which I mention here, again please just get in touch, or have a look at my Web Portfolio.