Jan Chipchase on The Service Design Show
The Service Design Show is an excellent podcast. This episode with Jan Chipchase, is a special treat. He's a design researcher extraordinaire, founder of Studio D, and author of the recently released The Field Study Handbook.
He highlights the criticality of design-intent, which he feels isn't talked about enough:
"A lot of organisations I've seen that adopt human-centered design, they assume there will be a positive outcome... I don’t think there’s enough questioning of intent of why people are doing it - both on a personal level and then on an organisational level point as well. Human-centered design can be used for good and it can be used for evil, depending on how it's applied. For me the why-to is critically important. If you don't have that in place, you could be doing more harm than good."
On what he wishes will be the impact of the book (which he describes as a how-to/why-to guide), he again talks about intent, responsibility and the greater good:
"I wanna step away from the corporate consulting bullshit that is prevalent in the industry, in terms of human-centered. It's a pretty frank assessment of where we are. And I've tried to de-buzzwordify a lot of the things that are in there. Also at the same time I would like there to be people that have aligned their intent to the greater good and understand their responsibility of going out into the world and affecting change for customers and users. I would like to equip them to do that in the best possible way."
I'm gonna go do what I should have done months ago—buy his book.
