Design Rising

I'm John Di Palma, and this is an open externalization of my thoughts and process as I tackle my Master of Design thesis at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada. I believe in the persuasive and transformative power of design methods. Through my thesis, I am exploring how design methods are being used by Service Design consultants to engage non-designer stakeholders (organizations, clients, and users alike) in order to realize the strategic potential of design more completely. I intend for these posts to be a more off-the-cuff than is permitted with my academic work. It always helps for me to give some structure to the immediate reactions that I have to what I see and read. I find that it forces me to come face-to-face with the conflicting thoughts in my mind and, of course, with the thoughts of others as well. Feel free to contribute in the comments!

[designrising-blog]

Alignment and Opportunity - Part 3

The previously-introduced concepts of the service economy, service strategy, service experience, and service design represent an opportunity for design firms to assert themselves as timely, high-value organizational partners. In order to do so, service design consultancies must be intensely aware of the evolving perspectives of their prospective clients, and the context in which they operate. Their modes of client engagement should be carefully coordinated with this objective, as well as the development of a collective conception of the value of service design within the service industries.

This is the final post is a three-part series (Part 1 & 2) that begins to unpack this opportunity space into three areas of paired problem and progress.

PROBLEM: Trimming to Fit

The issues faced by modern service organizations are increasingly complex. Many of them are beginning to decide that a design approach is more appropriate than traditional linear modes of problem solving. The strategic value of design has gained recognition in the business community. However, certain frameworks of appropriating design for businesspeople, such as Design Thinking, have been fraught with confusion and missteps that threaten to negate the credibility of design in this realm. In the long term implementation of the Design Thinking framework, design practice seems to be marginalized and the potential benefits are not fully realized. Organizations that hope to reap the benefits of systems-based design intelligence must look beyond Design Thinking, and toward the embedding of collaborative design practice and design leadership.

Design consultancies must take control of their message as design terminology gains popularity within business and management literature.

PROGRESS: Design Led Organizations

[designrising-blog]

Alignment and Opportunity - Part 2

The previously-introduced concepts of the service economy, service strategy, service experience, and service design represent an opportunity for design firms to assert themselves as timely, high-value organizational partners. In order to do so, service design consultancies must be intensely aware of the evolving perspectives of their prospective clients, and the context in which they operate. Their modes of client engagement should be carefully coordinated with this objective, as well as the development of a collective conception of the value of service design within the service industries. This series of posts unpacks this opportunity space into three pairs of problem and progress.

PROBLEM: The Uncertainty of Disciplinary Evolution:

As design practice matures, the value of a design approach is developing from project- / deliverable-based value and toward knowledge-based value. As a consequence, design can be seen by some to be more difficult to grasp than ever before. However, this shift is also enabling designers to have greater impact in some organizations, through projects that transcend the scope of traditional design deliverables. Designers must be able to communicate this shift and expansion in design practice as one of holistic cohesion rather than abstraction.

PROGRESS: The Crystallization of a Discipline:

Some designers have organized around a loose set of methods, clients, and projects, under the banner of Service Design. They recognize the opportunity represented by the service economy, and the need to adapt for this context. This emergence reflects the increasing realization of designers’ strategic value within a range of business sectors, and involves consideration of, and often collaboration with, varied stakeholders. It is an emergent field that is not quite yet a discipline. It is distinct from Design Thinking, yet they overlap in a few key principles - namely, the experience of value from the user perspective. Service design practitioners must yet formalize and communicate their value relative to, and distinct from, other areas, which would, ideally, include a generally common set of practical methods.

[designrising-blog]

Back to the drawing-board

Design companies are applying their skills to the voluntary and public sectors

Yes, we may all have read articles like this before in our favourite design / business / creativity / innovation blogs and niche publications. Still, reading such articles in The Economist (and the one previously-posted from the New York Times) is interesting because they demonstrate that a significantly broader readership is ready for these discussions. And they are, in themselves, examples of how to make that happen.

Are these writers / publications conscious of their interpretation for these audiences? Or are they of this less design-savvy perspective, and therefore naturally able to communicate on this level? I suppose the same could be asked of every journalistic piece, and the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, where the expertise and value of journalism lies. Anyway, that's getting a bit off topic.

[dszuc]

Expanding the Definitions of Design

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Using the design process in new contexts is more than a passing fancy.

[designrising-blog]

Alignment and Opportunity - Part 1

The previously-introduced concepts of the service economy, service strategy, service experience, and service design represent an opportunity for design firms to assert themselves as timely, high-value organizational partners. In order to do so, service design consultancies must be intensely aware of the evolving perspectives of their prospective clients, and the context in which they operate. Their modes of client engagement should be carefully coordinated with this objective, as well as the development of a collective conception of the value of service design within the service industries. This post, along with two future posts, will break this opportunity space into three pairs of problem and progress. So, without further delay:

Designers may hide their methods from partners, with the rationale that the apparent messiness may be off-putting and lead to confusion and distrust. However, for the professional designer, creative activities are central to their process, and integrated into unique design methods that support constructive and abductive reasoning. Knowledge is quickly developed and communicated experientially, through the iterative creation of prototypes and visual artifacts, which also increase confidence, perceived control, and promote commitment to the project. By involving clients in design methods, service design consultants could take advantage of these characteristics of design methods to engage their clients, integrate with and leverage client capabilities, and disseminate their value proposition.

PROGRESS: Compelling Involvement

Participatory design methods involve non-designers and serve to coordinate research objectives with those of empowerment. Some researchers declare that the complex and adbuctive nature of design work means that it is methodologically necessary to practice design participation. The relationship between the participating stakeholders, including the facilitating design experts, can be considered as an equally important aspect of the design project, or even as a project in itself. These integrative qualities may have led to the significant propagation of participatory design methods in service design, but the extent to which they are regarded and leveraged as strategic tools of client engagement is unclear.

[designrising-blog]

Brief Introductions (Part 2) - Service Experience and Service Design

Service Experience

Services live and die by the engagement of their users - fulfilling experiences encourage users to engage deeply with services and to return, while frustrating and inconsistent experiences will drive them avoid a service and to seek a competing alternative. The varied points of interaction within a service contribute to the overall user experience, which is sometimes regarded as the customer journey. The characteristically user-centric approaches of designers enables them to address services from this perspective, and designers are expanding their influence within organizations through this proposition. As the propagation of services forces competition based on rich and rewarding user experience, service organizations are increasingly responsive to the purported relevance of a design-led approach. Through service-led strategy and user-centered services, the fundamental measure of organizational success is shifting from economic efficiency to experience effectivity and affectivity. Organizations that succeed in this realm aim to orient their operations toward providing users with seamless, cohesive experiences across their channels of interaction, encouraging sustainable construction of value with satisfied, loyal users.

Service design seeks to coordinate organizational infrastructure and capabilities as systems that support customer experience. In doing so, service design reflects the implications that wider economic shifts - from manufacturing to information and service economies - have within design industries (Mager, 2008). Service design consultancies’ ability to engage their clients is a form of interdisciplinary design collaboration that can be addressed through specific design methods. These methods may include participatory design methods, which strategically engage non-design stakeholders in design activity, and have significantly developed in service design contexts. Participatory design will provide a useful framework for the evaluation and analysis of service design activity.

Mager, B. (2008). Service design. In M. Erlhoff & T. Marshall (Eds.), Design dictionary: Perspectives on design terminology (354 - 357). Basel: Birkhauser.

[designrising-blog]

Brief Introductions - The Service Economy and Service Strategy

Service Economy:

The service sector is vastly and increasingly dominant in the economies of many developed countries (Saco & Goncalves, 2008; Salter & Tether, 2006 as cited in Kimbell, 2009). The categorization of industry into primary (resource extraction), secondary (manufacturing), and tertiary (services), can be traced back to ancient times, along with the notion of value co-creation between service providers and their clients (Katzan, 2011). The varied service touchpoints of organizations serve as channels through which they interact with others, including individuals and other organizations, thereby asserting and defining their place in the economy through the social construction of value.

In a competitive landscape, corporations must coordinate their long-term aims and short-term operation. They must be engaged with their corporate strategy and continually reflect upon their ability to realize this strategy though their corporate structure, capabilities, and offerings. A system of designed artifacts, coordinated to constitute a service experience that is, in turn, the manifestation of a distinct value proposition, is a fundamental strategic framework (Fraser, 2012). Correspondingly, design processes are increasingly recognized as having value toward developing many levels of corporate strategy (Bürdek, 2005; Sanchez, 2006; Seidel, 2000; Junginger. 2008; Lockwood, 2009). Service strategy involves the coordination of disparate touchpoints, stakeholders, and resources, contributing to the necessary complexity of service projects. The great scale and interconnectedness of these projects is such that the organizational characteristics of service providers become entangled and expressed in their service offerings or - to use terminology that illustrates this point - their service manifestations. Therefore, if services are addressed with sufficient rigor, they are inseparable from organizational strategy.

[lindsay-vee]

Free eBook from Stefan Moritz. Enjoy!

[designrising-blog]

The key word in the title is PRACTICAL.

This book - authored by the current Director of Service Design at Veryday - predates most of my service design sources by over two years (published in 2005!). yet it's still very comprehensive. It traces the disciplinary roots, provides frameworks or current practice, and even outlines an array of tools and methods.

To me, that speaks to the importance of design in practice, and therefore the need for practice-based research. Significant and reflective disciplinary development can and does occur through real design practice; tracing the academic origins of service design through citations would provide an inadequate picture. It's a bit ironic that design studies, as an academic field, serves to reflect upon the practice of design, and often remarks at how uniquely reflective design practice is in itself.

In order to respond to this, I think that it's important to strive for a practice-orientation in design studies research- to appeal to practitioners as directly as possible, both as research participants and as the intended audience of the research findings.

[roosalehtinen-blog-deactivated2]

Great picture about roots of service design tools.

http://creativecompanion.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/business-design-tools/

[mgekeler]

Nice viz of the diverse roots of service design methods…

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The links / sources that got left behind in the cross-platform re-blogging are also worth a look:

There are a lot of possibilities, tools and methodologies while working on your business model, online strategy, service design or ideation project. Here are some nice tools and online platforms for inspiration or to help you get started:

Business Design tools:  www.businessdesigntools.com The design of a business is divided in 6 Phases where Designers, Clients and Customers should collaborate together in order to develop product/services that really address customers needs. The 6 Phases are: frame, explore, ideate, strategy, co-design, delivery.

Business Model Generation:  www.businessmodelgeneration.com This is also a fantastic book and an iPad app is in development. In the meantime you can use the PDF download of the canvas and a nice presentation with the basic items to make a start.

Service Design Tools:  www.servicedesigntools.org This website is the result of the research activity done by Roberta Tassi during her graduation thesis. Service Design Tools is conceived as an open platform of knowledge, to be shared with the design research community.

[designrising-blog]

MDes Ending - Thesis Writing Continuing

I've been writing quite consistently for the past 20 days now and, just today, I revisited article that has a lot to offer to my thesis research. I've included a portion of my literature review (in its current pre-first-draft state) that explores the different ways that this article contributes to the context of my own study: practice-oriented research, service design consultancies, client engagement, etc.

Articles that are so directly related to my thesis topic are quite difficult to come across. This can sometimes distract my writing toward more tangential subjects or (more often, and more difficult to catch) the expansion of the scope of my literature review toward content that is better suited the Introduction section. Articles like the one addressed below help to reinforce the real focus of my research, and encourage me to reevaluate what I've written to ensure that it is of comparable relevance. As a result, my Introduction chapter has been growing to a size that I didn't expect, but I'm becoming more satisfied with the general flow - from the intro, to the lit. review, to my contributions - than I could have expected before beginning to write.

I hope to blog a few more samples / works in progress as I continue these long days of writing. For now, here are a few paragraphs regarding the mentioned article:

  Han (2009) expresses the importance of practice-based research in the area of service design, thus undertaking case-study research. Han also recognizes the processes of knowledge creation and knowledge sharing as central to service design. Han commits to this notion to a great extent, stating that service design is defined by its complex social context, which designers must engage with and respond to with appropriate methods. Through a multiple case study of British service design agencies, Han identifies two approaches for managing stakeholder involvement: leading and facilitating. These approaches are said to be fluidly employed, influenced to a great degree by the service designers’ objectives of knowledge generation and dissemination. An example of this is the agencies’ fundamental focus on supporting decision-making of their clients. This was said to arise from the designers’ recognition that the service will be left to be run by the client organization who must, therefore, be competent in its delivery and familiar with the new service environment. Service designers were found to consider the delivery of the service as a critical aspect to the design of the service, and the engagement of stakeholders was considered regarding how it might contribute to this end.

The approach of service designers as facilitators was found by Han to be aligned with service designers’ imperative to leverage the existing organizational structure of their client. Han’s case studies revealed that the service design agencies aimed “to facilitate the local service providers to find their voice and claim ownership in the service system” (Han, 2009, p 9). The approach of leading is related to the generation of knowledge by the service designers as in primary user experience research, which might be shared in subsequent facilitation-led phases of stakeholder engagement.

Han’s study considers the engagement of multiple stakeholders as a whole, making little differentiation between them other than whether or not they are service ‘users’ in the traditional sense, as that category is identified as the basis for most previous studies on the engagement of stakeholders by designers. Despite acknowledging that clients are considered primary stakeholders, Han chooses to focus on the engagement of multiple stakeholders, including a range of internal client functions, external suppliers, even including a research question that allows for the expansion of this list. Perhaps as a result, the study does not explore the specific methods utilized by the service designers beyond the broad categorization of engagement approaches into facilitating and leading.

Han, Q. (2009). Managing Stakeholder Involvement in Service Design: Insights from British service designers. First Nordic conference on service design and service innovation. Oslo.

[designrising-blog]

The MDes pushes on and, like Mike, I've taken another stab at visualizing the areas of my research. The centre of 'Interdisciplinary Design Impact' is, of course, my intended contribution. In the case of my study, it may also refer to the interdisciplinary impact being made by service design consultants through participatory methods.

The rest of the terms have a similar ambiguity / multiple meanings. I figure that sort of complexity is still a drastic improvement over last time out. Of course, it will all be made clear in the thesis...

[doblinmonitor-blog]

Deloitte has acquired substantially all of the business of Monitor, including Doblin

We are pleased to announce that Deloitte has acquired substantially all of the business of Monitor. The new combined practices will operate under the Monitor Deloitte brand, resulting in a new global presence in strategy consulting.

Learn more.

Receive Monitor Deloitte information.

Inquire about Monitor Deloitte career opportunities.

*All content on this website is currently being reviewed for migration to Deloitte.com.

[designrising-blog]

Not sure if this is an instance of Design Rising, as it were, or the opposite. Only time will tell, but I'm hopeful that Doblin (an innovation consultancy and recently-acquired subsidiary (?) of the management / strategy consulting firm Monitor) will not only continue its design-driven perspective, but also that Deloitte may learn a thing or two from their user-centered methods.

It will be interesting to see how Deloitte leverages the design-driven capabilities of Doblin, a Monitor Group member. All manner of consulting can benefit from user/activity-centered methods, and the insights and engagement that it can drive. Although Doblin may be a relatively minor aspect of the Monitor acquisition, Deloitte now has a leg up in positioning itself to lead global consulting firms in this growing field of design-driven practice.

[humaninterfaces]

What is UX design

User experience (UX) is how a person feels when interacting with a product or application. As a UX designer we study and evaluate how users feel about a product, looking at such things as usefulness, usability, design and efficiency of performing a tasks and so forth. (read more)

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While some seem to think 'UX' is the realm of digital interface people, I prefer a definition that resembles the one illustrated here. I might rearrange or replace a few of the keywords (for example, 'Design') but it's close enough to be interesting.

[thoughtyoushouldseethis-blog]

Much food for thought in this documentary examining the state of the world of interaction design. I pop up with a few thoughts, but I was much more interested in the opinions of the likes of the ever-fantastic Blaise Aguera y Arcas, architect of Bing Maps, and Andrei Herasimchuk, director of design at Twitter.

[designrising-blog]

I'm home for the holidays with family right now, and this slick video has already helped my mom get a better grasp of what it is that my brother and I are always going on about. It provides an accessible breakdown of the link between interaction design and service design. I'm finding that it's easier to communicate these links when using hypothetical future scenarios of The Internet of Things, as in this video. Otherwise, if you provide evidence of the incremental steps that are currently laying the foundation,  staying within the paradigm of the screen, people tend to assume that the "design" of service design and interaction design refers to graphic on-screen elements.

It was especially amusing to see that this video way produced by Microsoft Windows Phone Design Studio. That reminded me of another video from Microsoft, which was much too glass/sci-fi/screen-obsessed, with little regard for the underlying ecosystems, behaviours, and services. Just another layer of appreciation for this video, perhaps as a signal of large organizations like Microsoft realizing the holistic impact of design.

[designrising-blog]

How Practitioner-Oriented Interview-Based Studies Promote Progress in Service Design Research

Blomkvist, J. & Holmlid, S. (2010). Service prototyping according to service design practitioners. Second Nordic Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation. Linköping, Sweden.

Before delving into to details of its own primary findings, this article first provides an overview of research method trends within the field of service design research. Due to the relative freshness of this field, especially considering the year of publication, such a brief overview is not only possible, but also very instructive to student researchers and other academics who recognize both the excitement and responsibility that come with the opportunity to contribute at this early stage. The authors describe a progression from theoretical assertion and discussion of service design’s own existence as a field on to empirical studies, particularly through case study methods. This development is said to coincide with the maturation of the practice and practitioners that are the subject of said studies.

Interview methods are then introduced as a means of investigating more specific and in-depth aspects of service design by appealing directly to the voice of the practitioners. These practitioners have inspired research of their field by proclaiming that it is indeed unique. The study of the nature of this message itself is enabled, now that the practitioners themselves are being studied rather than the de-personalized theoretical foundation of the discipline. The interviews presented in this paper reveal a discrepancy between how service designers respond to direct and indirect questions about their practices– a detail that would perhaps be inaccessible through case study methods. This layer of insight enables the researchers to critically reflect on the behaviors of the practitioners instead of acting as mouthpieces for their professional motives.

A new area of research, such as service design, should be particularly sensitive to the requirement of establishing academic credibility. This can help to encourage further academic interest and participation. Research through interview methods can help to maintain a close relationship with the studied community while, at the same time, clearly framing them as research participants, thereby encouraging researchers to be mindful of their potentially conflicting interests.

[designrising-blog]

'Finalizing' My Thesis Proposal - Service Design Just in Time

My thesis proposal has undergone a few quick iterations in the last little while. I'm sure that it will continue to change and refine, but it's unlikely that it will maintain this pace. The research questions are particularly unfixed considering that I hope to let my research participants guide my focus based on their focus... at least to a certain extent. This in keeping with a constructivist framework, targeted at the investigation of subjective meanings, social constructions, and dynamic social identities.

The most obvious and significant change is the inclusion of service design. This discipline / practice serves is a design-oriented replacement to the business-centric terminology that I was previously dealing with... but I think that's best saved for another post. So enough of the preamble - here's the exciting bits that, I hope, can stand alone and get you up to date! Abstract Service design seeks to coordinate organizational infrastructure and capabilities as systems that support customer experience. In doing so, service design reflects the increasing realization of designers’ strategic value within a range of business sectors, and necessarily involves consideration of, and often collaboration with, varied stakeholders. The organizational integration of service design consultancies – their partnership with their corporate clients – is a form of interdisciplinary design collaboration that can be addressed through specific design methods. These methods may include participatory design methods, which strategically engage non-design stakeholders in design activity, and have significantly developed in service design contexts. Participatory design will provide a useful framework for the evaluation and analysis of service design activity. This practice-oriented research will investigate how service design consultancies utilize participatory design methods, and how such methods affect their approach to client engagement / relationships. Perspectives of service design consultants will be solicited through interviews and surveys, which will be qualitatively analyzed alongside their consultancies’ publicly available corporate literature. Scope of Topic The objective of this research is to examine the use of participatory design methods in service design consulting by gathering practitioner perspectives from service design consultancies, and by making an analysis of the intentions, implications, and opportunities for the alignment of such methods with organizational integration.

The driving question of this research is: How are participatory design methods being employed by service design consultancies? This over-arching question can be broken down into the following sub-questions:

To what extent do service design consultancies leverage participatory design methods for objectives of organizational integration and client engagement?

What other design principles and methods inform service design consultants’ approach to client engagement and client relationships?

To what extent is there a conflict between the authority of design expertise and the democratizing and empowering ideals of participatory design?

[thoughtyoushouldseethis-blog]

Designers create solutions – the products and services that propel us forward. But artists create questions — the deep probing of purpose and meaning that sometimes takes us backward and sideways to reveal which way “forward” actually is.

Well, hello there, can o’ worms. Nice to see you again.

Designers and artists seem to love to immerse themselves in the “but what is it?” question of their very identity. And in a piece for Wired, RISD president John Maeda leaps right into the fray, arguing that now that everyone has come around to the idea that design matters, design, well, no longer matters quite so much.

If Design’s No Longer the Killer Differentiator, What Is? is an interesting piece with some smart ideas. But it also concerns me in that I think its central thesis is, well, wrong. Yes, of course artists play a pivotal role in our society, provoking us, delighting us, making us think, making us laugh, helping us to re-imagine our world and current reality. But Maeda’s separation of the two disciplines (above) seems unconvincing — mainly because I’d argue that the very best designers are also extremely adept at asking the questions that really matter. Only then they marry that skill with the ability to translate insights into solutions for the real world.

Frankly we need those kinds of people more now than ever, along with executives who can both understand the field’s potential, and support and sustain those trying to do it. Design needs visionaries, but it also needs professionals who understand the realities of business. It certainly doesn’t need to take a giant step backwards to the days of old in which practitioners were mainly known for bitching about why their pesky clients were getting in the way of their vision with tedious practical-minded issues such as how the hell something might actually be brought to market.

As for the idea that everyone now understands that design is a clear differentiator? Please. Look around you. The power of good design might be a hot buzz-phrase, but it sure isn’t a reality in most areas of our lives. Would it be at all possible to stick with the tough work of showing how and why design matters before trying to start a new bandwagon rolling?

Chris Riley wrote a good response on his blog: “Design may no longer be the killer differentiator but we still need to solve the problem that design was designed to solve: human connection.” For now, I’d argue it might be a little premature to stick the nail in the coffin of design, and it’s a bit sad that the discipline’s own senior figureheads seem to want to do just that.

(via thoughtyoushouldseethis)

This post says everything that I wanted to say about the John Maeda article. So this is a hearty "here here!".

Maybe the only thing I can add is a question: Why is it that some people seem to think that when "everyone has come around to the idea that design matters, design, well, no longer matters quite so much."? It has become difficult to approach articles by Maeda's one-by-one, as they are becoming somewhat of a frustrating trend. Like Nussbaum's 'Design thinking is a failed experiment. So what's next?' I can't help but feel that such declarations do not originate from a design-grounded perspective.

Popular figures like Nussbaum earned design a lot of recognition and some credibility in wider circles, but now the discipline is beginning to face the backlash that ensues when these crowds move on to the next thing. By so quickly abandoning what appeared to be their cause, these sources are confirming peoples' worst fears about irresponsible and whimsical designers.

Advocates for design recognize that this is a long-term project and that there is still plenty of work to be done. We think that the broadening of the field is a good thing. From our point of view, the growing number of varied experts enriches the field. This is because our primary concern is not the development of a popular readership, but the development of design itself. Lucy Kimbell's Rethinking Design Thinking articles (Part I and Part II) evaluate the changing landscape of design thinking through a distinctly designerly lens. That is true design leadership.

Alright, so maybe I did have a few more things to say...