Getting the audience into 'Spatial Touchpoint Mapping' as part of our presentation at #SD12 : Image care of @docbaty

Some organisations and practitioners have been effectively practicing Service Design for years. However in terms of its profile as a design practice Service Design is still in its infancy in Australia and New Zealand. As such it was great to be part of the second Australian Service Design Conference, organised by Donna Maurer and Steve Baty, which took place on the 4th of May in Melbourne. Like all the UX Australia conferences, the conference focused on creating a platform for local practitioners to share experiences of actual (service) design projects.

Presentations by DMA on why they love Service Design in the Public Sector, Alex Ritchie’s recount of E2′s multi-channel approach to the redesign of OPSM Services and the story of NAB’s blended design teams were particularly rich in this regard. Kitty Rahilly and I also contributed to tales of service design on the “inside” with a presentation on the Communicating, prototyping and implementing ReachOut.com’s future service strategy. All presentations will be up on the site with audio in the next month or two.

Several interconnected themes seemed to emerge throughout the day which I’ve attempted to capture below. While these didn’t necessarily reveal anything new, they did reinforce some of the skills and value we bring to organisations as designers. They also highlight some of the issues that Service Design foregrounds about design practice (as you’d expect from a SD conference). There was quite a bit of repetition throughout the day across some of these points (and lots of mention about the value of prototyping etc). Although the aim was to showcase empirical experiences of doing service design, some basic theory, grounding or definitions of key service design principles might have also helped frame and build up the level of dialogue somewhat. That said, Iain Baker’s talk on the Value of Consciously Design Services did finely weave together many of these themes in a reflective and provocative way, as he asked people to reflect more deeply and be more robust in the way that they claimed the value of bringing design to services.

The themes in no particular order:

1. The role of visualisation in helping organisations understand themselves.
Sketching and mapping are integral design activities and essential to communicating and progressing design in cross-disciplinary teams. DMA’s presentation in particular demonstrated the power of visualisation in helping organisations and clients reflect on current practices, identify opportunities for improvement and make the decision to change.

2. Going beyond artefacts as deliverables.
Connected to the above the role of artefacts as tools for supporting the ongoing design and delivery of the service was recurrent throughout. Speaking about NAB’s banking prototype @hwakelam noted “we are no longer just producing nice artefacts to put on the wall, the discussions transcend the artefacts now”.

3. Design never ends.
This came up a number of times and while not a new concept  (‘design in use’ has always been at the centre of disciplines such as Participatory Design) it’s easier, and arguably more necessary, to understand how to deliver on this in the context of services and co-creating value, than it might have been when designing a washing machine, for example. Another @hwakelam quote spoke to this well: “Service Design is about ‘all the things’ all the time, & we need new ways of working to do it”.

4. The changing role of designers and agencies.
The relevancy of the traditional agency model has been questioned over the last few years in the context of service design and user experience, which is ongoing, and needs to be driven from within the organisation rather than an external agency. Although this wasn’t raised explicitly, Iain Barker noted that despite this, some of Meld’s biggest clients are those with the biggest internal design teams. Someone (perhaps in the DMA talk) talked about the relationship being one of “partnership”, and the idea that our role extends to capacity building within organisations was reflected in various talks. The notion of Blended Design Teams was perhaps another emerging model, where consultants became ‘co-workers’ and expertise and leadership was shared and pooled in response to the complex and large scale nature of the project. The idea that service design is a connecting field that brings different kinds of practices together was an important aspect of this theme.

5. Service Design is a form of organisational change.
Though other forms of design (of course) also have impact on the organisation at many levels, this is another aspect of design practice that service design highlights. We can’t talk about changes in service, or understand existing services, without engaging in the business model and general ecosystem of the organisation. Iain Barker noted that in nearly every conversation he has with clients the issue of organisational change comes up, and that when talking to Opher Yom-Tov about the impact of design at BT – they were organisational things (not so much product/service).

6. The challenge of delivering effective services in silo’d organisations.
This is a challenge that many practitioners can relate to and was summed up by Iain “I feel like a marriage guidance counsellor sometimes – helping different parts of the organisation get along”. Trent Mankelow of Optimal Usability suggested that the internal structure of client organisations can actually make service design impossible observing “many of our clients are not ready for service design”.  It did make me think that as we (as a profession) slowly get to be engaging with our clients at board room level we can start to draw their attention to this a bit more…perhaps not directly but more at a public, cross-industry dialogue level.

7. Learn fast.
There was a lot of emphasis on failing fast. Iain Barker put a twist on this by suggesting instead we should be talking about “learning fast”, much more palatable to the client than the idea of failing.

8. Clients don’t call it Service Design – they call it customer service.
The lack of recognition for the term service design has been a topic of conversation for years, the fact that it is still coming up perhaps ought to tell us something…?

There was also quite a bit of talk about ” I just worked it out for myself how to do it and started selling it” which again reflects something of the market here in Australia and New Zealand. In Yoko Akama’s promo talk about the Melbourne Service Design Network (a great resource for local case studies – please contribute!) Yoko described the Australian Service design industry as being a bit feral, partly in reference to the absence of formal training here as compared to Europe. Both the conference and initiatives like the Network are an important part of building up a Service Design identity and practice in Australasia. I look forward to the next one and also to more related discussion and action here in NZ.

For further write ups and info on the conference see:

DMA’s Flearnings 

Optimal Usability share their thoughts

@overlobe Storified the tweets from the day

For NZ Service Design chat there is also the Linkedin Group The Big NZ Service Design Hook Up

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Tonight was the second Sustain/Create held at the St Pauls Gallery, AUT. Three speakers, Michael Trudgeon of VEIL, Colin Meurk of Landcare Research and Xavier Meade of Wintech spoke on how we might create and nurture the relationships to ecology within urban development. Each presenter offered their thoughts on the biggest challenges we face in implementing change, as well as what some of the opportunities are. All three had powerful and important perspectives, and Colin’s insights into biodiversity and life ‘post’-earthquake in Christchurch were particularly valuable. Michael Trudgeon of VEIL also offered a pretty exciting perspective on the role of design in particular, talking about the potential for designers to reimagine how we can reuse spaces in better ways, and then use our skills in visualisation and story telling to then share those visions as part of creating space and momentum for change. Michael suggested that, rather than waiting for change from government level, the movement for change towards more sustainable ways of building and living in cities and urban spaces (such as converting our garages into cafes) might need to become like PUNK: a DIY phenomenon that went global.

I’ve storified the snippets of the evening after the jump.

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Cover: Keith Yamashita's book "Why Ceo's are the world's best designers"

At the end of March I had the pleasure of attending the 2012 BetterbyDesign CEO Summit. The summit brings together a range of international and local speakers sharing insights, visions and experiences that can be understood as reflecting a ‘design thinking’ approach to business. Many of those attending come from companies that have a relationship with the BetterbyDesign Design Integration Program and included Deloittes, ANZ, Air New Zealand, Fisher and Paykel, Bobux and Les Milles as well as representatives from various design agencies, peak bodies, universities and the public sector.

Underpinning the summit (and the BetterbyDesign programme) is the commitment to the potential for ‘design thinking’ to transform businesses and create opportunities for innovation, with the ultimate goal of supporting growth for NZ. In opening the summit BetterbyDesign’s Director, Judith Thompson, noted that in contrast to the beginning of BBD 7 years ago, design is now ‘on the table’ in NZ Businesses. Matt McKendry of Deloitte’s described it as “…a movement that continues to get stronger for New Zealand business as we band together to use design as a differentiator in a global market place; something that is critical for our economic prosperity.”

Back page of Keith Yamashita's book "Why Ceo's are the world's best designers"

David Lawee, Vice President of Corporate Development at Google, spoke about the significance of having a ‘purpose’ :  a clear and powerful mission statement that was understood by all employees and embodied in all projects and programs.  It was interesting to hear how little the question of money (as in how much will it make us or how much will it cost) came up within planning and decision making processes at Google even in the early days. This theme was picked up by Keith Yamashita who espoused the role of the CEO as a the ultimate designer, responsible for defining the character of the institution. Keith provided attendees with a beautiful book titled: Why CEO’s make the worlds best designers (pictured above).

All the talks inherently assumed the need for a design approach to be integrated throughout the organisation and from the highest levels. The need for design to be embedded at the centre of, and throughout, organisations in order for design as a discipline to get true traction has been an ongoing conversation, and it was very refreshing and exciting to attend a conference were the ‘design conversation’ was really sitting (more or less) at a CEO level. It was even more encouraging to see most of the speakers challenge the notion of ‘growth’ and ‘prosperity’ as being tied only to economic growth, many of them re-enforcing that the bottom line needs to account for impacts on community, country and planet – without which of course there is no ‘business’.

In this vein, the highlight for me was without a doubt Dr Peter Senge,  author of ‘The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation. Senge  emphatically demonstrated the need for us to focus on the world’s most pressing problems as part of how we think about business (e.g., how many billions of people there will be without access to drinking water soon, as well as our current carbon footprint of 2 planets and climbing). His talk, I think, provided a powerful and much needed backdrop to any discussion about how NZ businesses (and NZ as a whole actually) needs to be thinking about  more than than just ways to *sell more* as a plan for growth, particularly when we are talking about use of primary resources.  The talk by Patagonia CEO Casey Sheahan was also a highlight in this regard.  As Esther of Idealog suggests, Patogaonia is a company claiming Conscious Capitalism that actually seems to walk the talk. Admitting they were of course a polluter, as all big businesses are, Casey then outlined the various different ways in which Patagonia works to reduce their environmental impact and their commitment to never have an item of their clothing reach landfill.

Although it was an impressive line up of mostly Californian male speakers, it was particularly interesting to hear the impact of design thinking and the BetterbyDesign program within New Zealand businesses. Jeremy Moon of Icebreaker and BetterbyDesign Advisory Board member was able to provide a number of insights into how design thinking is reflected in the culture and innovations of Icebreaker. For Icebreaker taking a design thinking approach has meant “democratising design and unlocking creativity in all parts of the business“, including the accounts department – “finance is fun” –  is now  a mantra in Icebreaker for example. Matt McKendry also shared some very interesting insights into how design thinking has been productively disruptive within the culture at Deloitte’s, helping them to rethink the employee experience. The role of physical spaces in facilitating collaborative working environments was a recurring theme throughout the conference. For example, to foster better employee experiences within the organisation Deloitte’s moved away from the one desk, one person, one computer model, creating spaces where people were able to work together.  The potential for design thinking attributes such as play, prototyping, collaboration, visualisation, sketching and design-by-doing to encourage and enable both more productive and more effective ways of working across multi-disciplinary teams as well as to create a platform for innovation and co-creation was re-iterated throughout the various talks.  Interestingly (or not) there was no mention of service design per se – but the notion of co-creation of value and the role of the customer/community member/constituent in creating the services they use was integral within the message of most of the speakers.

Since returning to NZ last year I have been struck by the influence of the BetterbyDesign program in defining and propelling design thinking in NZ. There is a very tight relationship with IDEO and the Standford d.school and Tim Brown again keynoted the CEOSummit this year.  While IDEO and the d.school have done much to bring ‘design thinking’ to the attention of businesses the potential and history of it is much deeper and broader, see for example Lucy Kimbells article Rethinking Design Thinking .

As I understand it there are few other conferences like this round the world and it was was great to see one perspective of the intersection of business and design and the rhetoric of “design thinking” coming to life, particularly within NZ’s businesses.

For a fuller account of the actual talks and speaker highlights check out the following blog posts:

Videos of the talks at the NZTE YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/NZTEvideo?feature=mhee

Lance Wiggs provided a great overview of all the talks http://lancewiggs.com/tag/bbdceo/

Matt McKendrey’s highlights http://mattmckendry.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/better-by-design-summit-day-one/

http://mattmckendry.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/better-by-design-summit-day-2/

http://www.idealog.co.nz/ also has a number of NZBBD related articles (from previous years as well)

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In May this year I will have the honour of presenting alongside Kitty Rahilly and Mariesa Nicholas of the Inspire Foundation at the  Service Design Conference 2012 in Melbourne. Our presentation, Communicating, prototyping and adopting ReachOut.com’s future service strategy focuses on the development of a new service strategy for the Inspire Foundations flagship program ReachOut.

The service strategy was collaboratively developed as a result of an extensive participatory research and evaluation phase headed by Kitty and Mim. In addition to helping develop codesign activities that enabled young people to participate in the strategy development process, my role included working with internal stakeholders to design and facilitate a series of Service Strategy workshops. These workshops assisted the Inspire team to draw together their extensive body of research into a cohesive strategy, as well as communicate, share and prototype the future service. 

In this session Kitty, Mim and I will share the activities and tools that were developed and used in these service strategy workshops. As this project is now in build and implementation stage we will also be able to reflect on the success of these tools and activities  to date in supporting and enabling implementation.  (See the full abstract for more info).

In contrast to Europe there are not (yet) many forums that focus on Service Design in this part of the world so its great to be part of this conversation. The organisers Donna Spencer and Steve Baty have put together a diverse program covering a range of service related topics from working with blended design teams to service enactments and value networks which should demonstrate something of the breadth of this growing field. My only complaint is that it is just one day so quite brief! Included in the line up is fellow NZ’er Trent Mankelow, co-founder and CEO of NZ-based consultancy Optimal Usability as well as many of my favourite Aussie’s. If you can’t make the conference itself it will be well tweeted and I am sure all presentations will be audio recorded and available post the conference.

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While I have to admit I am still making my way through each of the chapters, as far as I can tell to date they  have spent who knows how many hours with who knows how many fantastic volunteers putting together one of the most coherent, extensive and succinct resources on HCI (or Interaction Design) ever available. One of the things I appreciate most about it is that the range of chapters demonstrates the depth of the field and its many different aspects.

But most important is that each chapter is well written, uses accessible language and both text and video to convey key concepts, and is extensively referenced, by someone with serious academic and/or industry credentials. The creators have then ensured a well rounded representation and diverse perspectives on each topic by inviting other experts from both industry and academia as well as greater IXD community to comment and feedback on the chapters. This had led to some lively debate in the comments, and the capturing of further significant references.

Every time I visit the site I am impressed at what they have created. This resource goes a long way to representing the breadth of knowledge and research that exists on IXD & HCI, and connects popular topics with their academic roots, some which extend back more than 40 years. Most importantly it is of high quality and in an accessible format that is available, open and free to anyone with an internet connection. An inspirational example of knowledge sharing. Massive thanks and kudos to the team and all those involved.

References
Anderson, R., & Kolko, J. (2009). ‘On the relevance of theory to practitioners…’. interactions, 16(2), pp. 80-80.

Davis, M. (2008). ‘Why Do We Need Doctoral Study in Design?’. International Journal of Design, 2(3), pp. 71-79.

Hobbs, J., Fenn, T., & Resmini, A. (2010). ‘Maturing a Practice ‘. Journal of Information Architecture, 2(1), pp. 37-54.

Sevaldson, B. (2010). ‘Discussions & Movements in Design Research’. FORMakademisk, 3(1), pp. 8-35.

Yee, J. S. R. (2007). ‘Connecting Practice to Research (and back to Practice): Making the leap from design practice to design research ‘. Design Principles and Practices: An International Journal, 1(1), pp. 81-90.

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They are the kinds of meet ups and distributed global conversations / productions that are only possible thanks to social technologies – but they pick up on a general spirit of sharing, openness, fun and collaboration that are inherent to people who like to create things together, and who recognise the possibilities of starting from nothing to build – who knows what.

The Service Jam runs (roughly)  5pm 24th February to 5pm 26th February

Find your local event on the Global Service Jam site, or

Register for the Hamilton event

Follow us via Twitter @GSJHamilton
or See more info on Our Facebook Page

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[edit: the slides have been temporarily removed - back up as soon as possible! apologies]
The slides are up from our recent presentation at Ozchi in early December. “Developing ReachOut.com’s Future Strategy: A case study in user centred design methods to marry user led and public health program development approaches”. (I say “our” but Kitty and Mim did all the work pulling the pres together I think!). It presents a case study on how user-centred and participatory design methodologies helped bring young people and mental health professionals together to create the future service strategy of Inspires online youth mental health service, ReachOut.

One of the reasons I love working with Inspire is that their approach is inherently participatory and young people play an active and influential role in all aspects of the organisation from governance and hiring to service design, delivery and evaluation. Everything they do is user-led and co-designed, but it is also evidence-based. This means that all design decisions are based on extensive research, integrated with and driven by clinical and social objectives, research, theories and knowledge and the impacts of services and interventions are continually evaluated and iterated over-time. The level of rigour in this presents a lot of design challenges, but is also hugely exciting and rewarding!

Big props to Kitty Rahilly who did a really fantastic job of presenting and representing and making available this annotated slide deck.

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Natalie Rowland and I have just published another article on UX Magazine Johnny Holland about Enabling Codesign. The article was inspired by a workshop on Codesign Methods I ran with Design Masters students at UTS earlier this year that shared some of the methods and facilitation work we do as designers to enable stakeholders to actively participate in the design process.

“The term co-design refers to a philosophical and political approach to design best applied throughout the design life cycle [1].  Codesign builds on the methods and principles of Participatory Design which assumes ‘users’ are the experts of their own domain and should be actively involved in the design process. This article explores some of the methodological tools we use to enable codesign. Specifically, we explore the rationale behind some common workshop techniques used early in the design process, which combine the activities of research and idea generation…” Read the rest of the article on Johnny Holland

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The event was was chaired by Rachel Brown of the Sustainable Business Network (SBN) (@sustbusiness) and there was a stellar line up of speakers including Dr. Idil Gaziulusoy, Dr Stephen Knight-Lenihan, Chris Mulcare and Sir Tamati Reedy.

Each speaker on had only 7 minutes to deliver their message and this made for a really punchy format. They all put forward seriously meaty ideas – it’s impossible for me to do any of the speakers justice but here is a summary of some of the bits that I managed to grab below (apologies if I have misrepresented anything -  apparently the gallery recorded all of it so will add a link when it becomes available).

Dr. Idil Gaziulusoy presented from her research into system innovation for sustainability. She covered a lot in her 7 minutes but key take outs included the need for basing what we do on the science of sustainability, the need to take a systems approach rather than develop isolated solutions (this was a bit of a theme for the evening), the importance of design thinking and what it can offer sustainability and the need for codesign approaches where solutions are developed by the community themselves.

Dr Stephen Knight-Lenihan gave a great overview of the issues that face us in actual embedding any serious change into areas like infrastructure and transport  - explaining how an evidence-based approach isn’t really working. Even though we understand what we need to do to implement significant change (i.e., we have the evidence) recommendations to government on how to do this are diluted through the current process, and what comes out the other end is far from what was originally planned. Another example of the problem being how attempts to seriously cut emissions by 2020 (or whatever the target year is now…) are made redundant by the imperative (for example) to build more roads. All current moves towards sustainability are only marginal until we embed sustainability into our planning. According to Knight-Lenihan an important step is requiring that any new development improve current ecological conditions, not just maintain the status quo.

Chris Mulcare then blew us away a bit with digrams and info graphics pointing out some of the great things that are already happening in NZ with clean tech. Chris’s talk was very hopeful in terms of the opportunity to unlock the extensive potential that already exists in NZ for industrial symbiosis where the waste from one plant or farm becomes a raw material or power source for another. For example what is happening at the Kawerau Mill as well as things like the potential for NZ farms to produce and share their own power based on the waste they generate.

Sir Tamati Reedy (Ngāti Porou) then talked us through some of the key aspects of his research into sustainability as it relates to Maori (and therefore NZ fundamentally). Posing the question: why do some people want to sustain some things native to NZ such as flora and fauna but not sustain the natives themselves….? and (given that culture is always changing) who gets the right to decide what is sustained? In helping us to manage the transition Reedy drews upon Toffler’s Futureshock (1970) to highlight the significance of education (over guns or money) as a means to wield power and effect change as we orientate ourselves towards our new future.

As noted above one of the key themes to come out of the evening was the need for a systems approach – rather than attempting any kind of isolated fixes. This is a central point often overlooked in discussions about sustainability action in my experience. In the discussion that followed the presentation this was picked up in relation to the example of the electric car – while it is touted as step towards sustainable transport – such things are only useful in places where electricity is clean – and at the same time cars = roads & driving which in themselves are not sustainable options or activities. Of course this is just one example of the many complexities involved when you start unravelling what “sustainable” actually means. Importantly these speakers all had some positive suggestions for how to get things moving in the right direction within their presentations.

Apparently the organisers were not sure what the level of interest in the event would be, but it was standing room only so big props to all the speakers and the organisers. Having returned from 10 years away from Auckland and NZ this was a re-introduction to NZ’s design and sustainability scene for me and I was really impressed, looking forward to the next one.

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