v o l u m e 6 | n o . 3 | 1 5 , 8 0 e u r o

December 2014

Blurring Boundaries

Empowering BBVA with a 360° Work Experienceby Juliane Trummer, Sofia Loreto

How to Design Social Relationships for Disabled Citizensby Mette Reinhardt Jakobsen, Laila Grøn Truelsen

Building Brand Futuresby Jenny Comiskey, Chris Grantham

Touchpoint

Volume 6 No. 3

December 2014

The Journal of Service Design

ISSN 1868-6052

Publisher

Service Design Network

Chief Editor

Birgit Mager

Editorial Board

Simon Clatworthy

Ray Fisk

Jesse Grimes

Roberto Saco

Project Management

Hanka Meves-Fricke

Art Direction

Miriam Becker

Jeannette Weber

Cover Picture

hyperspace328 / flickr.com

Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Unless otherwise stated, the

copyrights of all images used

for illustration lie with the

author(s) of the respective

article

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touchpoint 6-3 3

from the editors

test

As it continues to grow and mature, the discipline of service design is facing the challenges that confront teenagers everywhere. Who am I? Where do I belong? Whom are my schoolyard friends? (And – perhaps – whom are the bullies that are best avoided?)

The first challenge is one of identity and recognition. While service design was first described a couple decades ago, there are only a handful of agencies that can trace their practice of service design earlier than 2004 – a mere ten years ago. Educational programmes have been established slowly. And businesses have embraced the discipline at varying rates around the world.

However in this issue of Touchpoint, we’re not concerned with that first challenge. While there is certainly work to be done in further raising the profile of our work, the gains in recognition in just the last three years have been considerable. As a result, there is much less “navel gazing” than in service design’s formative years, and the discussion of identity can move to a more interesting level: What can service design learn from related disciplines (and some that seem unrelated at first glance)? That’s the second challenge, and the focus of this issue.

A regular contributor to Touchpoint, Kerry Bodine is perhaps the standard bearer for service design within corporate America. During her time with Forrester, she worked to raise the discipline’s profile and helped the US catch up with more mature service design markets such as the UK and northern Europe. In a 2013 post titled “Service Design: The Most Important Design Discipline You've Never Heard Of”, she contrasted it against product design: “Product designers create tangible things: tennis shoes, teapots, and tablet computers. Service designers create intangible experiences: the series of interactions that you have as you book a flight, pay a bill, get a driver’s license, or go to the doctor. Service designers also design the behind-the-scenes activities that enable those experiences to be delivered as planned.”

It’s that broad scope of experiences (and therefore touchpoints) that service designers work their magic on – and the wide range of tools and methods they apply – that means the practice is complex and continually evolving. And because it crosses paths with other disciplines, service designers can learn and benefit from other fields, and vice-versa.

On the topic of “service design vs. UX design” many column-inches have already been written (and valuable new perspectives are presented in the following pages). More recently, the worlds of customer experience (CX) and service design have been bumping up against one another. But further still from service design – yet no less interesting as partners – are approaches such as Agile and enterprise-level strategic design. I invite you to learn more about them in the Feature section.

On a closing note, this is the final issue of Volume 6 of Touchpoint. Volume 7 will launch in 2015 with some long-awaited improvements to the journal: More open access to our archive, exciting new digital reading platforms, and more printed copies in the hands of Service Design Network members. We look forward to seeing you next year.

Blurring Boundaries

Birgit Mager is professor for service design at Köln Inter­national School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany. She is founder and director of sedes research, the centre for service design research at KISD, co­founder and president of the Service Design Network and chief editor of Touchpoint.

Simon Clatworthy has built up the Service Design field at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), which has won a 6th place in the recent international Red Dot rankings. He has developed the AT­ONE innovation method and is a leader of the Norwegian Centre for Service Innovation (CSI).

Raymond P. Fisk is professor and chair at Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas, USA. His research has focused on service marketing, service history, service theatre and service design. In 2005, Dr. Fisk won the AMA SERVSIG Career Contributions.

Jesse Grimes has fourteen years experience as an interaction designer and consultant, now specialising in service design. He has worked in London, Copen­hagen, Düsseldorf and Sydney and is now based in Amsterdam with Dutch agency Informaat.

Roberto Saco is the principal at Aporia Advisors, a management advisory in South Florida (USA). His clients reside mostly in North America and include organisa­tions in the financial and pro­fessional services, as well as large industrial concerns. Jesse Grimes for the editorial Board

2 imprint

3 fromtheeditors

6 news

kerry’stake

10 Converging on Customers? Not quite yetKerry Bodine

cross-discipline

12 Empowering BBVA with a 360 work experienceJuliane Trummer, Sofia Loreto

feature:blurringboundaries

18 Establishing Rituals of Co­creation Joumana Mattar Moukarzel, Pierre Hervouet

22 Co­creating Value In The .Co EraHarnish Jani

26 Shifting GearsLinnea Vizard, Shannah Segal

30 How to Design Social Relationships for Disabled CitizensMette Reinhardt Jakobsen, Laila Grøn Truelsen

36 UX Design with a Service MindsetJulia Birks

40 Agile Service Design Thinking and DoingBrian Gillespie

44 Bridges and BarriersLouise Taylor, Kat Henderson, Meg Thomas

48 Service Design, Agile and Lean StartupSimon Gough, Markus Edgar Hormess, Adam St. John Lawrence, Bruce Scharlau

54 Designing the Business Around the ExperienceMike Clark, Milan Guenther

58 Building Brand FuturesJenny Comiskey, Chris Grantham

62 Service Design goes AgileJens Otto Lange

66 People, Activation, Execution: The Layers of Service DesignFlorian Vollmer

70 Integrating Brand and Service DesignMartin Jordan, Christian Vatter

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contents

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88

92toolsandmethods

76 Mobile Diary StudiesNicola Dunlop

80 Strategic PES – Product­Experience­ServiceRicardo Mejia, Jody Parra

86 Labour Centered DesignSiri Betts-Sonstegard

educationandresearch

88 Consulting with Designers Created New Organisational EnergyKarsten Bech

profiles

92 Interview: Lia Patrício

insidesdn

96 Service Design GourmetArthur Yeh

97 The Second Service Design Japan Conference 2014Atsushi Hasegawa

Insider

‘servicedesignforinnovation’–innovativetrainingnetworktolaunch

twonewnationalchapters

The Innovative Training Network (SDIN-ITN) has received funding from the European Commission’s Marie Curie Grant. The network involves nine partners and will start on January 1st, 2015. It will run for four years. The grant is about 2.3 million euros in total. On the academic side, the network involves six pioneering universities in ser-vice design and innovation: Porto (coordinating university), Cologne, Karlstad, Lancaster, Linköping and Maastricht.

Three innovative organisa-tions from the non-academic side are asked to join the project: Country Council of Värmland (public services), EDP Comercial (energy utilities), and IBM (ICT). Learn more about SDIN in the Profile  on page 92.

We are excited to announce the launch of two new national chapters!

SDN France is coming back! Two years after the Global Confer-ence in Paris, a chapter has been formed in France. New faces and boundless energy will strengthen service design and SDN activities from Paris to Nîmes. The chapter is currently undergoing a three-month build-up phase and invites the French service design commu-nity to join.

SDN St. Louis has already passed the build-up phase. With is strong background in experience strategy and founders from both service design experts from business and academic background, SDN St. Louis is building up a network of leaders and executives. The SDN St. Louis chapter will focus on service design that supports the talents of the city.

We are looking forward to our new chapters actively strengthening service design in their local areas. Visit our website to learn more about SDN national chapters:  www.service-design-network.org/national-chapters

France

St. Louis

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pioneersreceptionatsdgc14

socialmediaco-creation

On Monday, October 6th, the Service Design Pioneers Recep-tion took place in Stockholm’s City Hall. The reception was co-hosted by the city of Stockholm. This event brought together pioneers who have been working in service design for the last 20 years. These practitioners and visionary experts come from all over the world. The pioneers reception offered for them the opportunity to meet, network and share experiences and knowledge. The head of the City Council held a welcoming speech. The attendees enjoyed a guided tour in the City Hall where the Nobel Prize ceremony takes place.

Perhaps one of the biggest acts of co-creation during the Service Design Global Conference in Stockholm did not take place at the venue but online. Taking a glance at social media, it is clear that the event resonated not only with participants but also with a remote audience. Nearly 3,000 posts tagged with the event’s official hashtag #SDGC14 resulted in more than 3.5 million impressions during the conference. So what drove people to share their experiences? Keynote speakers provoked by far the most reactions. At times it seemed that the audience was live-broadcasting the event on Twitter and Instagram, streaming almost every second quote and slide presented by speakers. They helped

bringing the panel discussion online, tweeting their questions and the replies of panellists. Likewise the Moleskine notebooks, given to everyone in the welcome pack, and promised Rosenfeld Media books as awards for contributions encour-aged quite a number of participants to visualise their notes creatively in the form of sketch-notes.

On the following two pages we invite you to take a look at the confer-ence highlights, either to mitigate the post-conference blues or simply out of curiosity. And who knows, you might come across your own tweet!

Learn more about the social media co-creation at the  Service De - sign Global Conference 2014 and vi sit

  www.service-design-network.org

touchpoint 6-3 7

SDN teamed up with its Nordic chapters to host this year’s global conference in Stockholm, Sweden. Over 600 leaders and practitioners from around the world joined us to explore the theme Creating Value for Quality of Life.

“This was a big collaborative effort. I’m very thankful to everybody that participated. It felt extremely inspiring to be amongst this great crowd and I believe we have a huge opportunity to improve life around the world with service design,” said conference chair Stefan Moritz from Veryday.

Enthusiasm for the event was great from the start, with tickets selling out two weeks prior to the opening of the conference. And many participants said their expectations have been exceeded. “We put a lot of thought into the overall experience, ensuring time and space to share, encourage networking and participa-tion,” added conference producer Magnus Bergmark from Doberman.

Prior to the conference, three introduction seminars offered the possibility to get familiar with the basics, get answers from experts on questions and the value of service design. SDN also hosted its mem-bers’ day with activities linked the newly-launched Special Interest Groups (SIGs) focused on the areas of healthcare, finance, public service and service design implementation.

The conference offered great speeches and talks. Highlights included Mark Levy from Airbnb talking about employee engagement, Fred Leichter from Fidelity Investments, Kigge Hvid on how the design of services can improve life for people, Nathan Shedroff on defining value, Shenyen, a Buddhist monk, talking about quality and time, Wim Rampen from Delta Lloyd sharing deep personal insights and many more. Denis Weil held the closing talk reflecting back on the two-day event and sharing his perspective on how service design can reach the next level.

Aside from experiential highlights like healthy food, artisanal espresso, live sketching and yoga, an ambulance drove straight into the venue to introduce the patient expe-rience workshop. Some of the other popular hands-on workshops focused on empathy, defining the value of service design, waiting experiences and employee engagement.

Overall the conference atmosphere was excellent; participants enjoyed a global spirit and vibrant sharing and networking atmosphere. You’re invited to check out and follow the discussion and reflections at the conference website, as well as find videos of presentations.

 www.service-design-network.org

Insider

creatingvalueforthequalityoflife.servicedesignglobalconference2014

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Converging on Customers? Not quite yetThe disconnects among today’s customer-centric disciplines

When I learned about the field of user experience in the

mid 1990s, its primary objective – making technology

easy to use – was easy for me to grasp. My education in

cognitive science, psychology, and computer science gave

me tools and frameworks that I could immediately apply.

Service design took a bit longer for me to grok. Shelley Evenson first introduced me to the discipline while I was a grad student at Carnegie Mellon and she was a visiting professor. Seven years later, when I first started writing about service design for Forrester Research, I fumbled for a definition that went beyond “the design of services.” (And, yes, I know that using a word in the definition of itself is a terrible idea.) Today, I describe service design as both a mindset and a methodology, fo­cused on defining ideal customer journeys and the ecosystems that are required to deliver and support them.

Customer experience also proved a bit tricky for me to define at first, especially given its overlap with both user experience and service design. But the design of new and/or improved customer interactions

is just half of what this discipline entails. Much of the customer experience work that happens on any given day centers on managing existing interactions — listening to customer feedback, prioritizing customer issues and the investments required to fix them, and measuring the impact of all of these efforts on the business.

At its core, customer ex pe­rience is about changing the culture of the entire organization so that employees and executives behave and make decisions with customers top of mind. One customer experience professional at a large financial services firm recently told me that he spends about 50 percent of his time educating his organisation about what his team is doing, why they’re doing it, and what impact it will have — and another 10 percent training people on specific customer experience skills.

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

One additional customer­centric discipline has emerged and is growing rapidly: customer success. I ran across a job posting for VP of Customer Success in early 2013, around the time of the world’s first customer success conference. (About 300 people attended that event — and the same conference drew nearly 1000 attendees this year.) I assumed that the company was just looking for a customer experience exec by a different name, and didn’t think much of it. But earlier this year, I realised that while the two disciplines are related, customer success is another animal altogether.

The first major difference is that customer success teams are primarily found in software­as­a­service (SaaS) companies, while customer experience teams exist in companies where software is not the primary product/service being delivered. SaaS companies are typically subscription based, and one day a SaaS executive figured out that customers were more likely renew if they actually received value from the software they had paid for. (Eureka!) This realisation, plus the availability of real­time analytics to track individual customers’

touchpoint 6-3 11

kerry’s take

Kerry Bodine is a customer experience expert and the co-author of Outside In. Her research, analysis, and opinions appear frequently on sites such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company. Find her on Twitter at @kerrybodine.

software usage, led to the first customer success teams and an entire ecosystem of tech platforms that determine “customer health,” which is essentially a score that indicates how much value customers are getting on an ongoing basis. Haven’t logged in for several weeks? Your customer health score will go down, and you might get a call from your customer success manager to see what’s going on.

And that brings us to another major difference between the disciplines. Customer experience was born from marketing, with an eye towards engendering customer loyalty and, as a result, increasing revenue. In contrast, customer suc­cess hails from sales and has a laser focus on driving renewals. As is often the case, their respective heritages influence how these two disciplines think and behave. For example, customer experience professionals struggled for years (and, I’d argue, still struggle today) to prove the busi­ness value of their work. Customer success teams have no such issue — they can tie their activities directly to churn reduction, revenue, and growth. I’ve really never seen such a numbers­focused bunch as these customer success execs.

KERRY’S TAKE

On the one hand I’m thrilled to see yet another customer­centric business discipline emerging. And yet I’m incredibly frustrated by the lack of integration and collaboration between these fields. From my conversations with leaders and practitioners at mega corporations, SaaS startups, and design agencies around the globe, I’m sure of one thing: We’re not converging on customers.

At large corporations, user experience and customer experience teams work in isolation from each other. Many customer experience teams focus solely on customer experience management tasks, largely ignoring the field of service design. Most of the newly minted customer success managers aren’t even aware that the field of customer experience exists — and proactively designing customer interactions (outside of their primary software product) is the last thing on their minds.

Each of these disciplines is caught up in its own little world, each with its own vocabulary, tools, and yardsticks. We’re circling each other — and largely reinventing the wheel in the process.

SO WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?

I would venture to guess that you, dear reader of Touchpoint, are interested in service design because you want to make a difference — within your organization, within your community, or within society at large. But service designers can’t do this alone. To realize our collective vision, we must take the lead in joining forces with other like­minded disciplines.

This edition of Touchpoint is a great start. How else can service designers bridge this gap? If you have ideas, please reach out. I’d love to continue the conversation. •

touchpoint 6-312 test

BBVA´s move to its emblematic new Madrid headquarters,

designed by the Pritzker price-winning Swiss architectural duo

of Herzog and De Meuron, implied not only a change of space

but a change of culture, too. Madrid-based product and service

innovation agency Mormedi was called in to define a fluid

employee and visitor experience that would increase happiness

and productivity through a combination of solutions covering

three key dimensions: the workplace, technology and culture.

Empowering BBVA with a 360° Work ExperienceHow a spatial move created an opportunity for a cultural change

Juliane Trummer is strategy director at Mormedi. She has been working for more than nineteen years at the interface of industrial design and design strategy and specialises in helping clients create delightful customer journeys by adding value to their service and product offerings, as well as to their business.

Sofia Loreto is senior strate-gist at Mormedi, combining a background in design, psychol-ogy and marketing reinforced with strong design research and strategy experience. With fourteen years of experience, she has become an expert in identifying stakeholders’ unmet needs and transforming these into actionable insights for successful product and service innovation.

During the research phase, we quickly realised that a change of space alone was not enough to trigger the cultural change the bank was trying to achieve. The answer was to design solutions that would enable the employees and visitors to make full use of the potential of this new environment by learning to use new tools, but also – more importantly – new behaviour and patterns of collaboration.

FOCUS AND APPROACH

In early 2013 – seven months before the completion of their new headquarters – BBVA approached us with a challenge: the bank wanted to study stakeholders’ needs in more detail in order to define a seamless 360° employee and visitor experience. The objective was to improve brand perception, happiness, motivation, efficiency and productivity through

spatial, digital and cultural­change solutions. These were to be empowered by the latest technology and focused on five key areas that had been identified as improvement points of the employee and visitor experience:

1. Access to the headquarters from home2. Workplace environments3. Meeting rooms4. Printing and digitalisation islands5. Business centre (focused solely on the

visitor experience)

BBVA hoped that this project would be much more than a simple move: they sought a real transformation that delivered upon BBVAs new values – concepts like ‘transparency’, ‘mobile work’ and ‘digitally supported environment’ – and an approach that

touchpoint 6-3 13

cross-discipline

could be exported to other headquarters around the globe.

Our approach was based on in­depth primary and secondary investigation involving forty­eight employees, eleven departments and three workshops. Interviews captured the diverse perspectives from directors to management and staff levels. Fieldwork included six guided tours to current BBVA office buildings and a running pilot, as well as visits to the ‘evolving’ construction site.

Secondary research included a best­practice benchmarking activity and a trend study that was focused on identifying cultural, technological, spatial and cultural shifts. A detailed architectural and urban study of the building and surrounding areas was also carried out.

IDENTIFYING KEY CHALLENGES

The research phase helped Mormedi to identify a number of key challenges:first of all, the fact that the project formed part of a much bigger transformation that the bank was undergoing implied considerable cultural change within a sector known for being quite hierarchical and traditional. The move embodied a new philosophy that emphasised a more democratic and agile culture of collaboration: focus on results and the shift to becoming a ‘digital bank’. As a part of this cultural change, the bank decided to move to an open­plan office format and to do away with private offices for director­level employees. They also introduced a ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) policy and made a significant step by being the first bank in the world that completely moved to Google as a

Access Work Desks

Printing & Digitalisation Hubs

Business Centre

Meetings Rooms

Figure 1.

Critical improvement

areas that were part

of the project scope.

touchpoint 6-314

common working platform. These changes all required employees to break away from their habits and learn new tools and ways of working.

As a result, employee expectations vacillated between anticipation and scepticism, fuelled by practical issues, such as the fact that access to the new building was to be more challenging due to its location on the outskirts of Madrid. In addition, doubts surfaced regarding some of the key aspects of the ‘new ways of working’ culture, such as the lack of privacy in an open­plan office and the fact that working with new digital tools required an investment of time that slowed productivity at first.

Based on these findings, we realised that, in order to make the move a success and to go beyond a superficial level, it was instrumental to keep in mind the practical, as well as the emotional, needs regarding solutions that would empower the future employee experience.

USER PROFILES AND EXPERIENCE MAPPING

Based on the insights from our field research, we created four high­level employee typologies based on

key characteristics such as their level of mobility, emphasis on management versus content focus, priorities and general and technological needs.

When it came to mapping the cur­rent experience, identifying pain points and conceptualising solutions, this user framework enabled us to take into account the point of view and needs of the different types of employee who work at BBVA.

After a thorough experience analysis, we created a series of diagnostic maps for the five project areas: Access, Workplace, Meeting rooms, Printing and digitalisation islands and the Business Centre.

The maps each specified the experiential and contextual origin of all pain points, the type of solution within three possible solution categories (digital, spatial, or cultural), the level of investment in terms of money and time, alignment with cultural shift, solutions that were already being developed, relevance to employee typologies and, finally, whether the solution was helping punctually or transversally at several points of the experience.

BUILDING A SEAMLESS EXPERIENCE FOR

EMPLOYEES AND VISITORS

Based on these maps, we created a solution for each identified pain point within the new employee and visitor experience. These solutions were documented on individual cards that summarised all the relevant information:

1. Improvement area (Access, Workplace, Meeting rooms, Printing and digitalisa­tion islands, or Business Centre)

2. Solution type (spatial, digital, or cultural)

Figure 2. Solution cards.

touchpoint 6-3 15

cross-discipline

Figure 3. Experience maps.

3. Solution name4. Description of the original pain point5. Visualisation of solution6. Time and money investment needs7. Profile relevance 8. Punctual or transversal character

In order to tell the complete story of the new employee and visitor experience, we joined together the individual solutions into seamless experience maps.

ENSURING CLIENT ‘BUY-IN’ AND INTEGRATION

By running client workshops at key moments, we en­sured that BBVA stakeholders stayed involved and ‘on board’ throughout each step of the process: insight identification, ideation, co­creation, validation and,

finally, prioritisation. Through collaboration with BBVAs technology consultants, we were able to trans­late our insights into a set of implementable solutions. But, most importantly, by applying a thorough process of listening to users and understanding their needs, we were able to come up with solutions that are both meaningful and relevant to employees and visitors.

After sixteen weeks, six client workshops, 184 pain points and 112 concepts, the 71 final solutions were prioritised for implementation within a closing client workshop. With one­third of the headquarters now occupied and two­thirds still under construction, we are currently working with BBVA on the detailed development of some of the proposed solutions, with special focus on digital signage and orientation within the campus. •

  Feature  

 Blurring Boundaries    Concepts at the edges of service design    such as UX, CX, SDL, Lean and Agile 

touchpoint 6-318 test

Both  service  design  and  agile  are  processes  that  uncover 

insights  and  initiate  conversations,  whether  internally  or 

externally,  in  order  to  identify  what  is  most  valuable  to  the 

user and then proceed to design and deliver  it.  In this article, 

we  investigate  the  dynamics  between  different  stakeholders 

in the design, development, and delivery process and propose 

the ‘5 Rs’ approach to the project lifecycle in order to maintain 

alignment, collaboration and quality output.

Establishing Rituals of  Co-creation Integrating service design and agile methodologies

Joumana Mattar Moukarzel is the principal prototyper at Mirada Madrid, where she is engaging SMEs and NGOs in participatory processes to empower them to implement design-led solutions within their companies.

Pierre Hervouet: ‘agilitator’ and founder at Agile Lebanon, has extensive experience with over twenty-five years in management, promoting approaches based on collaboration, communication and staff empowerment.

Take a moment to look around you and settle in: the meeting is about to start and everyone from HR to client services, brand management and the financial manager scrambles to present their perspective. It takes a while to realise that we’re all heading towards the same destination, some with spreadsheets, and others with post-its. Sometimes we meet at the crossing points and fail to recognise one another’s intentions. How, then, can we go about instigating and enhancing rituals of co-creation?

Let’s start by identifying the relevant stakeholders within the project lifecycle, their priorities as well as their moments of discomfort.

The brand witnesses the entire project lifecycle, and observes first hand the change in consumer behaviour after the design intervention.

MOMENTS OF DISCOMFORT:

• No activation of internal brand engagement with employees, creating dissonance between projected values and experienced ones

• Resistance from the internal departments to activate new strategies, viewing these recommendations from the external/internal sources (service design, agile development team etc.) as hostile

• Slowness in adapting and integrating client feedback and not following up on customer service

The service designer receives a request from the brand manager to enhance a service experience and goes about assembling the right team of experts to understand the context, define user needs, and prototype new service solutions.

touchpoint 6-3 19

blurring boundaries

MOMENTS OF DISCOMFORT:

• Uncovering insights that are beyond the brand vision and scope and that do not fit with the current brand positioning

• Not moderating the internal conversation between brand employees following the service design intervention to resolve the friction and blame over for the breakdown in service

• Low team belonging, since the team members do not always have a history of working together and can be recruited specifically for the project at hand

The agile development team receives a brief from the service design team containing user needs and requirements and they prioritise the actions with the most value, iterating and delivering working software.

Identifiying and mapping out stakeholder 

priorities lead to alignment between the 

brand, service design team, agile team and 

user groups.

CO-CREA-TION

BRANDVALUES

SCOPE

SCOPEBRANDVALUES

COSTS SCHEDULEROI

CO-CREA-TION

TIME TO 

MARKET

TIME TO MARKET

ROI

CLIENT PROXYAGILESERVICE DESIGN

MANAGER

Agile coach

Ethno-grapher 

       HR    Brandmanager

Service designer

CLIENT

BRANDVALUES

QUALITYOUTPUT

PRICE

USER GROUPS

Newuser

Loyaluser

Unsatisfieduser

QUALITY OUTPUT

Accounting

DeveloperDeveloperResearcher

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MOMENTS OF DISCOMFORT:

• Difficulty in visualising the project in a 360° environment

• Coordinating with the designer as part of the team and not an external party

• Extending the efficiency in the realisation process to efficiency in the conceptualisation phase (difficulty to discover unexpressed needs)

The end user experiences the brand development and gives continuous feedback through rating, recommendations, and willingness to pay for the evolved service experience across all touchpoints.

MOMENTS OF DISCOMFORT:

• Resistant to change, and not willing to adopt a new behaviour

• Not loyal to the brand and prefers short-term rewards• Cautious about providing more information about

themselves, but wanting tailor-made experiences

Each stakeholder has different objectives: for example, in agile, the focus is on the team dynamics (inside-out approach), while in service design, the process is user-centric (outside-in approach). Furthermore, each discipline is focused on solving its own challenges: for IT, the agile mindset created an efficient process that reduced redundant coding and time to market by having well defined objectives. As for design decision-making, service design has come to offer an overview of the user needs, integrating them with market opportunities to justify the cost of investing in design.

touchpoint 6-320

So how does this reflect on the overall project lifecycle? How can we transform these moments of discomfort into moments of delight?

In this spirit of continuous improvement, each discipline starts by shifting from a ME-first to a WE-together attitude, levelling the playing field so that everyone is both teacher and student, facilitator and user. Now belonging to the same team, we co-create a culture of collaboration and exchange starting with the question: what can we learn from each other and how can we get the most valuable result for all?

In order to create and maintain a holistic vision of the project, we are prototyping the ‘5 Rs’ model to emphasise value creation for all involved, not just covering blind spots with colourful post-its.

PROTOTYPING NEW PROJECT DYNAMICS: THE 5 RS:

• Requirements: clearly identifying the project scope, values, and user needs in order to guide decisions as to what actions will add most value to the brand

• Realisation: Handling the design, development and execution of the project using all the insights, user stories, and requirements received. Stakeholders involved include: suppliers, internal team leaders, designers, developers, etcetera

• Reference: guardians of the vision, keeping stakeholders aligned while iterating new scenarios and prototypes, giving feedback and supervising handovers

• Responsibility: shared among all stakeholders,

Requirements

Realisation

Reference

Rituals

Responsibility

Service Design       Agile

Stakeholder dynamics are represented in  

the 5Rs model.

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emphasises the value delivered and does not end when the handover is completed. It grounds all stakeholders in the holistic project vision and ensures value creation and delivery is to the highest standards from start to market release

• Rituals: established to celebrate people-centred pro-cesses and to maintain momentum while prototyping uncertainty, these customisable experiences encourage respect, trust and collaboration while acknowledging the space for leadership, co-creation and support. Ritu-als enable dynamic visualisation of project progress, encourage cohesion and team building and celebrate accomplishments and milestones

Rituals have two main objectives: creating alignment (clarity of vision, shared project ownership throughout iterations) and ensuring smooth handovers (flow of communication, feedback and deliverables) among all stakeholders. Some rituals are maintained throughout the project lifecycle while others are customisable and adaptable for each of the project phases.

The proposed rituals, below, have been selected to integrate into the busy time schedule of the working teams, providing a toolkit of games1 and exercises2 that can be deployed as internal workshops generating maximum value and impact.

For example, an NGO seeking to launch a digital platform contacts a service designer and a digital agency. Running on a tight deadline, all stakeholders actively create a trust-based collaboration that is reinforced by a ritual throughout the project lifecycle.

We begin by clearly identifying the role of each member and engaging them to co-create and display the Team Totem. Then, using the Design the Box exercise, we identify key insights about the platform, its benefits, target market, competitive landscape and unique selling proposition using different sides of the box.

These insights are validated by conducting a walkthrough in order to discover the users’ moments of delight and discomfort. Consequently, the agile team

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blurring boundaries

Prototype these rituals for deployment throughout the 

different phases of the project lifecycle.

By J

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is able to propose a variety of digital solutions, and the client selects one using the Buy the Feature exercise. That solution is then prototyped and subjected to the time-boxed iteration review.

Throughout the whole process, we conduct the Per-fection Game; asking the client to rate the process from 1 to 10, then explain what they liked about it, as well as what needs to be improved in order to reach a perfect score.

The result is a holistic process where all stakeholders share the responsibility for the platform development and leave with horizontal knowledge transfer and pride in the outcome!

TAKEAWAY POINTS

• Establish a common glossary: some words have different meanings in each discipline, therefore jot

1 2 6PROJECTSTART

FRAMINGNEEDS

DEVELOP& VALIDATE

PROTOTYPING& SCENARIOS

CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT

SD LEAD SD LEAD AGILE LEAD AGILE LEAD MARKETING LEAD

MARKET RELEASE

HANDOVER HANDOVER

REQUIREMENTS REQUIREMENTSREFERENCE REFERENCE

REALIZATION REALIZATION REALIZATION REALIZATION

-Team totem-Team Roles -Graphic facilitation-Elevator pitch

-Project charter-Design the box-Mind mapping-Customer journey map-Stakeholder maps-Future backwards-5 Whys

-Product roadmap-Touchpoint matrix-Evidencing-Design brief-Prune the product tree

-Desk walk through-I’ll know it when I see it (IKIWISI) -Day in the life of-Roleplay

-Perfection game-Iteration planning-Iteration review-Buy the features

-Pause, play, forward-New customer journey-Speedboat

-Team charter -Stand-up meeting -Retrospectives -Definition of doneONGOING RITUAL

ITERATIONS: Minimum viable product

SD SUPPORTBRAND SUPPORT

3 4 5ITERATIVE PROCESS

ITERATIVE PROCESS

Project Lifecycle

down and agree on the terminology used to avoid misunderstanding and frustration

• Maintain momentum: rituals become rituals after continuous implementation, especially when the need to perform urgent tasks arises. Make them fun, encourage proactive leadership and aim to delight. You and your team are worthy of love and appreciation, too! Timebox and appropriate the 5Rs!

• Integrate team members: people who contribute to a specific project want to belong to the core team. Make time for empathy and encourage knowledge transfer. Consolidate team values and make space for individual growth and evolution. Trust your team members and hold each other accountable

• Evolve roles: based on the different needs of the project, acquire new people, and new skillsets.

Embrace a multi-capacity approach over multi-tasking and finish one task before attempting the next. Rotate team members into different leadership positions and uncover the hidden facilitators, negotiators, decision makers, supporters, and managers

• Don’t forget to de-role: once a task is completed, enable closure by inviting team members to consciously step back from their role, while keeping everyone focused on the common objective and integrating feedback. Use the stand-up meetings to formally announce handovers and share best practices

• Align continuously: the price of alignment and clarity is time spent refining processes, acknowledging and celebrating people. Always remember: human-centred teams, not just human-centred processes! •

References1 http://www.innovationgames.com2 http://www.gamestorming.com3 http://agileatlas.org

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This  article  addresses  how  service  design  benefits  from  syn-

ergies  of  overlapping  domains  which  have  like-minded  focus 

on value creation and optimisation, to help service designers 

deliver experiences at system, process and product level. With 

practical lessons learned from the recent launch of FreshRealm, 

a  national  fresh  food  delivery  service  in  the  United  States,  it 

presents  how  value  can  be  co-created  by  service  ecosystem 

partnerships  by  incorporating  principles  from  lean  manufac-

turing, supply chain optimisation, business model regeneration 

and cloud computing.

Co-creating Value in the  ‘.Co’ EraSynergising service design with value focused disciplines

Harnish Jani is Director of Design Strategy and Research at RKS. With global expertise in using design as an empathetic, strategic and creative catalyst, he is passionate about helping organisations innovate and transform their businesses, brands, and internal cultures to design and deliver holistic user experience solutions and services across transmedia platforms. TACKLING A MASSIVE INDUSTRY WITH

LEGACY ISSUES

The founders of FreshRealm, a technology start-up, approached RKS with a vision to make fresh food a possibility for all and to reduce the waste in the system by re-evaluating the supply chain of the largest industry in the world. We started by studying the complex supply chain, from growers, to pickers, to shippers and consumers. Weeks of extensive primary research helped us formulate critical insights impacting both the economic and consumer benefits. Our studies revealed that over forty percent of all food grown perishes before it reaches the market. Secondly, although there is a growing

consciousness of eating healthily, seventy percent of Americans’ calories still come from processed foods1. Lastly, there is a lack of online fresh food delivery options. For 2013, eMarketer estimated U.S. retail e-commerce sales to be a total of $259 billion, but only a mere $5.8 billion contributed to online food and beverage shopping2. Consumers have been willing to try online fresh food delivery solutions, but clearly have not found one that works.

ADDRESSING MACRO & MICRO LEVEL

CHALLENGES

All previous attempts at bringing fresh food directly to consumers without wast-age, at low cost, in a shorter time and with

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blurring boundaries

convenience had failed for multiple reasons. We realised that challenges had to be overcome at multiple levels:• System level: addressing these challenges would

require a food market leader to shorten the ten-day cycle in their existing supply chain.

• Process level: unlike processed food, which is shipped on demand, fresh food is not manufactured and stocking it ahead of time would lead to wastage. Thus, supply and demand have to be fulfilled through a real-time process.

• Product level: shipping fresh food requires tracking cold temperatures, maintaining hygiene, cleanability, tamper-proofing and optimising space for food varying from whole produce to freshly prepared meals that come in different sizes, weights and volumes.

CREATING HOLISTIC SOLUTIONS THROUGH AN INTERPLAY

OF OVERLAPPING DOMAINS

These challenges defined the need to pursue best practices from related overlapping industries.

We drew inspiration from lean manufacturing and supply chain optimisation philosophies to borrow prin-ciples of waste elimination and identified activities and entities which were not contributing to value creation.

The cloud platform, which is more commonly used in the consumer sphere for ubiquitous computing and on-demand content consumption, was considered for connecting new and old ecosystem players via an e-commerce-based online food management system.

Business model regeneration inspired the possibility of dynamic pricing based on demand and supply fluctuations. The year-long collaboration infused in FreshRealm a vision for the future of food made possible by a temperature controlled, reusable shipping vessel and a B2B2C cloud-based technology platform. The result is faster distribution, fewer preservatives, reduced food waste, and nation-wide eradication of fresh food deserts. The solution comprises:

FRESHREALM VESSEL

Designed to be emptied, resealed, returned, sanitised, refurbished and reused, the FreshRealm vessel is both a sustainable and economical alternative to current disposable packaging methods. It utilises drinkable ice packs that keep food cold at 40° F for forty hours without any electricity, dry ice or disposable toxic gel packs. Its weight and size are optimised to be shipped

MARKET

2 DAYSField to Table

REFRIGERATOR TRUCK

DISTRI-BUTION

WAREHOUSE

LOCALDISTRIBUTION

COLD STORAGE

STORE INVENTORY

HOMEREFRIGERATOR

5% Total Food Loss75% More Food

HARVEST PACKING

CONSUMER

CONSUMER SHIPPING

FreshRealm  is  a  just-in-time,  national  fresh  food  delivery  service  made  possible  by  a  temperature 

controlled, reusable shipping vessel and a B2B2C cloud-based technology platform.

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through existing carriers like FedEx and UPS, while still supporting a viable business model.

FRESHREALM CLOUD

A cloud-based platform eliminates the traditional verti-cally integrated chain and establishes a new connected national network of partnerships with five key facilities across the U.S. that have been supplying established institutions with fresh, prepared food for over ten years. This enables the service to reduce the time it takes to reach the consumer by eighty percent and increases the amount of available fresh food by seventy-five percent, generating a massive increase in efficiency.

CROWDSOURCED CO-DROP DELIVERY NETWORK

Designed to unify communities, the FreshRealm service has also developed a co-drop network to allow people to group orders in the vessel that can be delivered straight to the customer for the same price as a trip to the grocery store. It maximises the economics of shipping full vessels to different locations, so that your fresh produce follows you.

GIFTING AND GRATITUDE FOR A .CO MOVEMENT

Expressing and sharing gratitude are built into the cloud technology platform and vessel-return system. Reusing vessels saves money, which then goes into a gifting fund that participants can help create and decide how it is spent for the 48 million people in the U.S. who go

hungry. FreshRealm fosters a culture of co-creation, gifting and gratitude expressed through the company’s communication strategies and its .co tag which stands for cooperation, collaboration, and co-creation.

LEARNING THROUGH PRACTICE TO INFORM FUTURE SERVICES –

THE DISRUPT MODEL

Addressing the project challenges required both systemic and creative thinking. Instead of introducing one solution, it required myriad inter-disciplinary outcomes that needed to complement and connect multiple elements in the ecosystem to deliver holistic service experiences across physical and digital touchpoints. It demanded a conscious effort to employ service design thinking to back-end processes, which, in turn, would impact front-end consumption. Key learnings are formulated in a model called DISRUPT, which is an acronym encapsulating the key principles listed below. For those interested in creating the next service disruptions, I hope that this may serve as easy-to-remember model that you can add to your already existing service design toolkit.

1. Define the end-to-end value streamServices are rather complex to deliver compared to shipping a physical product. Map the different entities that exist in the service ecosystem at a system level and identity their role, interrelationships and interdependencies in the value generation process.

Some key snapshots of the design process involved in the development of FreshRealm Service.

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blurring boundaries

2. Identify the value drivers of partners and consumersDistinguish whether the customers and the consumers are the same entities or are different. With FreshRealm being a B2B2C service, we had to understand that the customers (the buyers of the vessels and the providers of fresh food) were not the consumers (the ones who ulti-mately consumed the fresh food). Research the key desires and aspirations of ecosystem players, so as to understand what pull and push forces will drive value creation.

3. Scale up and scale downAs seen in case of FreshRealm, opportunities could exist at various levels and just might be waiting to be tapped. Start with a systems-level view of the value stream, analyse and brainstorm new possibilities for change. Then scale down at a process or product level and critically review each interaction between entities. Scale up again and repeat.

4. Remove, reduce, reroute, replicate and reorganiseGoing lean for new services means identifying inefficiencies, bottlenecks, wait times and disrupters that deter value creation. One can remove entities, reduce inefficiencies, reroute process exceptions and replicate standardised tasks for both consumer-facing interactions and back-end processes. Ultimately, reorganise the entities to ensure that the service flow will be smooth and value-creation will be optimised.

5. Use new business models with creative cautionWe initially considered replicating a direct transition from a traditional bricks-and-mortar service model to an e-commerce solution that worked well for other industries. However, fresh-food industry challenges were multi-level and we had to repeat principles 3 and 4. Creating new business models is a very enticing exercise and should certainly by encouraged but, at the same time, the proposed new models need to be critiqued and evaluated. What might be a successful model for one industry may not be a successful one for yours through just plug-n-play.

6. Promote continuous experimentation, improvisation and pilotingNew service experiences may end up having many unknown outcomes, both good and bad. One won’t find out until the new models are actually put in practice. For FreshRealm, we created numerous prototypes and ran multiple pilot runs of fresh food delivery to discover new findings every time. Creating a culture of experimentation can help get buy-in from multiple entities much faster and can make the design process more engaging and productive.

7. Tap creative partnerships before capital expenditureDelivering the FreshRealm service was made possible by connecting an existing network of expert partnerships to collaborate in new ways rather than creating new entities requiring significant capital expenditure. In an era of connected consumers and collaborative consumption, delivering services requires a collaborative interplay between connected service ecosystem partners who can co-create new value propositions.

In conclusion, while the use of Lean principles and supply chain optimisation philosophies have been in existence for years, mostly focused on the production of value creation through physical objects, they have not been implemented widely for services. The FreshRealm project provided a refreshing perspective to the design of solutions, showcasing that the different value-focused disciplines are interdependent and can synergise service design efforts. •

References1 Warner, M. (2013). Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the

American Meal. Scribner; 1 edition.2 eMarketer. (2013, April 24). Retail Ecommerce Set to Keep a Strong Pace

Through 2017 - Available at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Retail-Ecommerce-Set-Keep-Strong-Pace-Through-2017. Accessed August 15th 2014

touchpoint 6-326 test

Service  design  (SD)  and  user  experience  (UX)  are  intimately 

related. This  relationship  is  symbiotic – one practice often  re-

veals the need for the other – and, when executed together, the 

potential for rich, valuable interactions between an organisation 

and  its  audience  increases.  However,  current  business  pro-

cesses  may  not  encourage  this  interplay  in  meaningful  ways. 

How might we, as designers, create more traction for our clients 

by aligning the gears of SD, UX and business? In this case study 

of our work with a large retailer, we examine the intersection of 

user experience and service design consulting. We propose that 

the  need  to  create  compelling,  omnichannel  experiences  in  a 

digital world requires a fundamental shift in business practices. 

Shifting GearsOrganisational barriers to integrated service design and UX

Linnea Vizard is a user experience designer at Usability Matters. She explores how we can develop meaningful interactions in the digital age. People, systems and design methods fascinate her.

Shannah Segal is a principal at Usability Matters. Her clients include media, education, travel, retail, non-profit, financial and other organisations. She is currently completing a Master of Design degree at OCAD University in Toronto.

In our complex digital environment, user experience design engagements often uncover the need for service design ap proaches and tools. Integrating many cross- functional channels to create a seamless experience for users requires thinking and approaches that are familiar to service design practitioners and a reasonable stretch for many UX designers. However, as our work with this client revealed, some established work streams such as procurement and project management can thwart UX and SD coming together in a advantageous way.

THE OMNICHANNEL SPANNER

An omnichannel experience can be defined as one that is manifested across many touchpoints, both digital and physical. Our client’s understanding of omnichannel meant involving multiple digital or media channels (website, mobile app, customer emails, direct mail, printed flyers, digital flyers, signage, etc.) However, in reality, the mandate is broader than that. Digital experiences are intimately integrated into the physical world, especially when the business in question is a bricks-and-mortar

touchpoint 6-3 27

blurring boundaries

retailer with a long legacy. Our primary research with customers and front-line staff identified their expectations around connected systems and processes, which an interface focused on engagement alone cannot deliver.

Digital initiatives are often at the forefront of the new challenges in building desirable, differentiated experiences. In many cases, a digital engagement is the first time a business is faced with something that cuts across various business units and silos. Digital builds functional connections that didn’t exist before. In today’s world, not only are people likely to switch between using an app and a website, they are often directly linked. Digital has shaped consumer expectation of complete sets of linked information, regardless of how it is captured or accessed.

EXPECTATIONS OF A WELL-OILED MACHINE

For example, for our client, testing with users revealed the consumer expectation that cashiers will have full visibility into the loyalty rewards system at the point of sale. The loyalty programme barcode was seen as a gateway to connected information. However, these are separate systems that do not interconnect, causing service delivery challenges. Those on the front line are effectively blind and cannot deliver the cohesive service end users

expect. When we look at these issues from a UX angle only, we lean heavily on manipulating an interface to try to solve what is in fact a systemic process issue.

A further example we came across through user research is the tendency for customers to make ‘if/then’ assumptions about database systems. If a product can be looked up online, then customers expect to be able to access functionality like stock checking on the website.

“Suddenly customers expect cohesion across human and computer systems, from shipping to stock level to the front line worker, including relevant third party inputs.”

Service blueprint developed for the overall customer experience.

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In reality, these are discreet systems, and for a massive retailer offering a huge range of products and services, the technical challenge of building out even one component of the system requires a high level of investment and time. Suddenly customers expect cohesion across human and computer systems, from shipping to stock level to the front line worker, including relevant third party inputs. Service design can deliver value by helping to frame, identify and design for this level of complexity.

THE NEED TO GREASE THE WHEELS

Digital catalyses the need to make fundamental shifts in business process, towards integrated systems, culture and process. This shift is necessary to be able to deliver compelling omnichannel

service experiences. However, UX design is often not mandated to do this work. In many cases this level of organisational and process change is very slow.

Service design techniques and methodologies provide us with tools to reveal what needs to happen and why. In the case of our client, the development of a service blueprint at the beginning of the project revealed the need for two separate mobile and web-development vendors to work together to ensure the end result would be a holistically aligned experience for consumers. However, a lack of understanding and buy-in to the (admittedly unfamiliar) service design tools we presented meant that our service blueprint was regarded with alarm, then, sadly, dismissed. Our client did not easily identify the value of the artefact, and

Disorganised

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blurring boundaries

spending time building and understanding this tool was not seen as a useful activity. When we presented our large, complex, sticky-note laden blueprint, the beginning of seeds of interest and discussion occurred, but were quickly shut down in favour of continuing with a more traditional UX process focussed on building interface ele-ments. We see this as a missed opportunity to have used the service blueprint to more clearly identify the need for the mobile app and responsive web vendors to work together to create an integrated experience.

Instead, this realisation came much further down the line, when various project artefacts revealed the lack of cohesion in experience. The client’s mobile app and responsive web prototypes, upon comparison, were fundamentally different in information architecture, functionality, nomenclature and labelling.

A coordination effort ensued, in which our role was to facilitate the alignment of these experiences. At this point, however, the project management processes did not really allow for the type of work that needed to be done. Resolving the cohesion issues was not seen as a viable option, due to impacts on budgets and timelines. Clearly communicating the need for and value of understanding the entire system at play in creating a customer experience across channels earlier in the process may have mitigated some of these issues.

GAINING TRACTION

Throughout our engagement with this retailer, we learned that service design tools and methods offer ways of fram-ing very complex cross-functional challenges in organi-sations. We identified several barriers to the efficacy of service design and user experience as parallel practices.

Diagram illustrating the potential 

to move towards a more unified 

customer experience by leveraging 

SD and UX tools. 

However, it is challenging to have integrated service design and user experience design when projects are procured and managed in discreet chunks. For truly omnichannel service delivery, vendors need to understand their work as situated in a wider context. We saw that sometimes meeting an internal deadline is detrimental to providing a cohesive customer experience. Service design can deliver value in tandem with UX by identifying the right problems to solve and creating realistic timelines.

Another barrier is the lack of buy-in and understanding of service design deliverables. We need to find ways to introduce the right deliverable, at the right time, without alienating stakeholders. As practitioners, we need to identify ways to communicate the value of service design tools. One possible tactic is the notion of the ‘double deliverable’, the idea being that you present the client with a familiar deliverable, in tandem with a novel piece of creative thinking or deliverable that you feel is valuable.

We saw that the desire to build omnichannel experiences creates a great opportunity to introduce service design thinking. Big organisations are complex and messy. Service design offers approaches that allow us to frame and solve high-level system and process problems as well as augment the value delivered through more tactical user experience design work. We are more certain than ever that service design and user experience can offer exceptional value by delivering excellent customer experiences when used together. •

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The  Designing  Relationships  project  shows  how  design  think-

ing made a real difference to a group of physically and mentally 

challenged  residents  at  a  Danish  municipal  care  home.  The 

project  was  a  cross-disciplinary  collaboration  between  de-

signers and public actors to develop relationships for severely 

disabled residents in Vejle, Denmark. Throughout the project, 

all parties worked closely together to understand what kind of 

social  relationships  give  meaning  to  the  residents  who  are  a 

target group having difficulties communicating with their sur-

roundings. What made them happy, how did they manifest their 

enthusiasm and which social relationships did they particularly 

appreciate?

How to Design Social Relation-ships for Disabled CitizensA cross-disciplinary teamwork success story

Mette Reinhardt Jakobsen is a communications consultant currently working at the Danish media agency Periskop. She is the author of several books on innovation and has an MA in media studies from the University of Aarhus.

Laila Grøn Truelsen is leader for social inclusion at the Design School Kolding. She is also a project consultant for designing relations and other prestigious service design projects. She has an MA in communications design from Design School Kolding, Denmark.

The evaluation of the project’s results shows remarkable improvements in the residents’ wellbeing and in the process the project has received several awards.

A NEED FOR FINDING NEW WAYS OF WORKING

”We were told hospitality was an issue or, rather, the lack of hospitality at our facility was an issue,” says Trine Erichsen, leader of the Danish municipal care home Skansebakken. The care home has forty-five severely disabled residents requiring extremely demanding care.

Usually, these residents have high priority in the Danish welfare model

but, ever since the financial crisis in 2008, it has been a challenge to meet the level of care for the residents’ optimal quality of life. Therefore Skansebakken, under the supervision of the local Vejle municipality, teamed up with the Design School Kolding and the National Board of Social Services to investigate how service design might help provide a better level of service to the residents at Skansebakken within a restricted budget.

Ultimately, the project was an even bigger success than first expected. But, before reaching this final destination, there lay ahead a long and winding road

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blurring boundaries

Laila Grøn Truelsen 

doing field research with 

resident Jens Kruse.

of work, understanding and breaking down existing work habits for the participants from Skansebakken.

HOW TO DEFINE A GOOD RELATIONSHIP

“The overall goal was to ensure that the residents would build a series of relationships with other people in order to improve their quality of life. Definitely a challenge, given that many of them have very limited communication skills. Still, maintaining human relationships – both strong but also more peripheral acquaintances – is a human right and is what brings meaning to the existence. We therefore were asked to

find a way to design relationships for the target group.” explains Laila Grøn Truelsen, LAB team leader for social inclusion at the Design School Kolding and one of the designers participating in the project.

Trine Erichsen, leader at Skansebakken, completes this observation: “Before entering into this cooperation, we had a rather limited perception of the term ‘relationships’. We purely saw it as the bond between our residents and the professional staff. But we were aware that, even though our care-giving was fulfilling, the level of connections our residents had to the real world was limited. Apart from us and their closest family, the

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existing connections that residents had were almost zero.”

She recalls that there was quite some scepticism among her staff prior to the designers’ arrival: a scepticism that only grew when a team of two designers decided to begin an extensive fieldwork project of anthropological observation lasting three weeks at the care home. “We were surprised to hear it would be designers moving in,” Trine Erichsen recalls, “the general idea we had about designers was of people making fancy clothing or coffee mugs, so we had a tough time convincing our staff the observation was a good idea. Many employees were afraid to be disturbed or perhaps even supervised in their daily work.”

THE NEED TO CREATE CHANGE

The initial scepticism lingered even after the first results came back. “We met quite a few crossed arms (resistance),” designer Laila Grøn Truelsen remembers, when she describes the presentation of the first batch of results, not least because one of the major findings was the lack of hospitality at the care home. Only once in three weeks had somebody offered the design team a cup of coffee – an oversight that led to a general debate on how to best welcome guests – but also on how to be a good guest at Skansebakken, given the very particular circumstances and many safety restrictions at the facility.

The major findings from the three weeks’ observations are condensed into the following three key points:• The residents’ lack of language.

Testing of a social prototype, sup -

ported by a volunteer and her dog.

In  order to communicate with their surroundings they needed translation of their needs and wishes.

• The care home should function as both a home and a workplace. This creates a very specific environment that is not always easy to balance.

• The lack of hospitality is an unfortunate by-product of the protective atmosphere at Skansebakken. The staff had been used to protecting the residents against the prejudice of other citizens, and thus the care home has learned to close its door rather than invite people in.

These insights served as a starting point for the development and design of a series of social prototypes that should resolve

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blurring boundaries

the issues and that should help Skansebakken to become a more integrated part of the surrounding society.

CREATING A COMMON UNDERSTANDING

One important step towards successful implementation of the designers’ suggestions was finding a common understanding of the term ‘social care’. Therefore, different users were included in developing the prototypes.

“We created so-called ambassador teams for each of the four units we have at Skansebakken,” says Trine Erichsen. “Different employee categories were represented in each team. We had a management team that worked on the different ideas, and we leaned upon advice from other stakeholders who all represented other kinds of relation-ships [to] the ones we [provide] as professional staff. We included the residents’ relatives and also the local priest and some of the drivers who are used to accompanying the residents whenever they have an outing.”

The designers made sure to use a high degree of visualisation in presenting findings throughout idea generation and prototyping. A way of presenting results that, according to the Skansebakken management, had the function of a ‘mirror’ constantly held up in front of the employees to reflect old ways of acting. The visual, physical models were put forward as a key factor for success in the project evaluation. As it reads in one of the evaluation papers: “The use of design methods and the continuous visibility of changes to come made it clear to both employees and management where the project was headed at all times.”

THREE PROTOTYPES PRESENTED

A need for voluntary workers was rapidly established. These were regular visitors who could create new and

less-formal relationships with the residents. Therefore, the designers focused on developing tools that could facilitate this contact so that the relationships would become as independent as possible and not require the employees’ intervention.

After a long and thorough process, the designers came up with three prototypes under the common title: ‘The Feast – how to receive guests and how to be a good guest at Skansebakken’:• An iPad-based communication tool• An activity-tool designed for each unit• A plan for engaging multiple volunteers to gain more

participants for activities

AN IPAD IN YOUR POCKET

The iPad tool came from the insight that the residents have no real language but still have a need to com-municate. The hardware was selected, since the digital interface allowed for easy adjustment and future changes to the content. Also, the mobile aspects were taken into consideration. Each resident could carry an iPad with them, for example in a special pocket on their wheelchair. Individual, closed Facebook accounts were created for each resident on the iPad, since this seemed to be an eco-nomical and versatile way to give a voice to each person: “We chose Facebook because it’s commonly known to both relatives and employees. All residents have created an account, and this means whenever someone wishes to communicate, they can first check the account. Previous guests, or staff, make sure to always write an update: ‘Saturday we went to watch animals at the Zoo’ for example, or ‘Monday night we had lasagne, which I liked very much’. This gives a whole new basis for communica-tion, and you can also post pictures from the different

“Apart from us and their closest family, the existing connections that residents had were almost zero.”

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life events. That way it’s easy to engage conversation: ‘I can see here’s a picture of you at the zoo – how exciting’. Of course, it meant we had to purchase some tablets and make sure all staff knew how to handle them at first, but the investment was worth it,” says Trine Erichsen.

A SPECIAL ACTIVITY TOOL

The activity tool is a board placed in every unit indicating meaningful activities in which to include the residents. Many visitors are uncertain which activities are appropriate with severely disabled people, and the result is sometimes an awkward meeting based on ignorance and, perhaps, prejudice. Such a relationship does no good to anyone, therefore, the activity tool is filled in by the employees and has suggestions for a series of activities that are both helpful and meaningful to anyone: baking a cake, walking a dog, singing to each other, having a footbath or being accompanied to a football match or a concert are all examples of such value-creating activities.

AN UN-PAID FRIEND

A volunteer cannot be described as a prototype as such, but, still, the process of engaging a large number of steady volunteers was key to the successful implementation of ‘The gathering at Skansebakken’. The volunteers were needed both to visit the residents and thus be involved in these activities in the community and also to help engage the community in activities at Skansebakken.

At first the idea of a volunteer corps presented some organisational challenges, recalls Trine Erichsen:

“Opening up for volunteers gave us a whole new view on our own professionalism. We had to take a closer look at our own role: what exactly are we supposed to do? And some unions also tried to muscle in because they were afraid these free workers would replace our employees. But that wasn’t the case. Engaging volunteers has [freed up] time, so our employees have gained more hours for those residents in need of extra support.”

In the pilot phase of the project, all six residents built strong relationships with a volunteer. This number is now up to twenty-five out of the forty-five residents, according to the care home manager. But maintaining motivation among the staff to engage volunteers is an ongoing process, she also admits: “Building a true relation-ship takes time. This also means our staff need to help by sending a text message to the volunteer afterwards saying ‘Thanks for the visit, looking forward to seeing you again soon’, just as you would do yourself. And, of course, it means our staff [stay on site]: now it’s the volunteers going on excursions. Some staff have reacted with remarks such as ‘Why do they get to do all the fun stuff?’ And here you need to remember who it is who should have the fun: it’s not our employees, it’s our residents. And if our employees can help build a relationship ensuring a lot of fun things happening for our residents, they have done their job well. But I have to repeat it a lot,” says Trine Erichsen.

EVALUATION AND AWARDS

What makes the project at Skansebakken a success is the fact that the tools created by the designers have made

“Opening up for volunteers gave us a whole new view on our own profes-sionalism. We had to take a closer look at our own role: what exactly are we supposed to do? And some unions also tried to muscle in because they were afraid these free workers would replace our employees. But that wasn’t the case. Engaging volunteers has [freed up] time, so our em ployees have gained more hours for those residents in need of extra support.”

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blurring boundaries

a difference and are still in use a year after the project finished. Also, we’ve measured a true improvement in quality of life for those residents having obtained a relationship with a new person, based on the WHO (World Health Organisation) scores for quality of life.

As one mother put it when interviewed for the local municipality’s newsletter: “Good heavens! […] the Facebook profile makes it so much easier for the family to follow our son’s everyday life. We use it whenever he comes home to visit us on weekends, because it gives us such a good basis for talking about what he has been doing since the last time we saw him.”

Also, the care home has begun opening up to the surrounding community, which helps break down barriers and prejudice towards severely disabled citizens. For example:• Local high-school students helped create Facebook

profiles for the residents• A day care worker comes on regular visits with a group

of toddlers

• A lady brings her dog to visit• The residents have participated in a local sports event,

with volunteers as wheelchair pushers• A local choir does its weekly practice at Skansebakken,

providing free musical entertainment for the residents

All of these outcomes are evidence of a better service to the residents without any increase in costs. As a result, the project received the Danish Municipalities Innova-tion Prize in 2013. And Designing Relations has lately been nominated for the European Zero Award as well.

In conclusion, the project in itself has meant a change for the better. And, in general, meeting the designers has been an eye-opener for all the staff at Skansebakken, according to Trine Erichsen: “The project has showed us how to attack a challenge through a designer’s perspective. It has meant a lot to the ways we [work] and how we perceive our own role as service providers. You could say, it has made us aware that we should constantly be looking at how we can find new, innovative ways of doing our work.” •

Joan, project member, preparing  

pancakes for the residents.

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Whilst a broad service design process is the ideal approach for 

any service organisation, the reality is that many organisations 

opt only to design for a given channel or touchpoint. A traditional 

UX approach serves you well when designing the best-possible 

experience for a given touchpoint. However, due to scope and 

constraints, UX often lacks the context of the customer journey 

in which that touchpoint is used. In this article, we’ll find out how 

to approach UX with a service mindset to deliver outstanding 

client  results,  and  develop  long-term  partnerships  that  make 

services better. 

UX Design with a  Service MindsetDesigning touchpoints as part of a holistic service

Julia Birks works at Hiser in Melbourne, Australia, on UX and service design projects spanning government, transport and health sectors. She is member of the committee for the Service Design Melbourne Network and started the first women’s gridiron (American football) team in Victoria.

There’s an argument I’ve had many times with a colleague of mine: he hates the names that designers give to the many factional splits that our specialties take us down. He reasons that if you’re to take the term ‘UX‘ – as in User Experience

– literally, then isn’t it really all just the same thing? Isn’t it all just designing stuff for people and trying to create better experiences?

Whilst I agree in principle – because who really needs another acronym that ends in ‘X’ to confuse clients: UX, IX, CX, anyone? – many clients still see UX as a specific domain. Traditionally, UX has concerned itself with interfaces and interaction, focusing on the design of a digital touchpoint or

channel of engagement, with users at the centre of it.

But users don’t simply interact with one touchpoint in isolation, nor do they follow a clear sequential path through the channels your business offers. Good UX recognises that different users will have different needs in different contexts and that all of these interactions fit somewhere into a much larger journey, from first awareness, to first use, right up to power-user status! And so it goes that ‘traditional’ UX bleeds into service design, because service design looks at the wider picture and allows us to deliver a truly end-to-end experience that is customer focused.

However, clients still come to us and want us to design a single touchpoint

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blurring boundaries

within a service, and we often face the challenge of how to deliver a high-quality experience within a limited scope.

THE ROLE OF UX IN SERVICE DESIGN

At Hiser, we’re constantly evolving how we can look at services to deliver better experiences. Many organisations prob-ably have something similar on their walls or sketchpads, but for arguments' sake, see our service model below.

This model spans front-of-house touchpoints and service delivery and back-

of-house infrastructure, staff training, support and maintenance, with UX being but one activity required to successfully deliver a service. Within any given service, you might have a multitude of UX projects. Let’s take public transport, for example.

You’ve got all the usual suspects: websites, apps, platform displays, support systems and intranets. Usually a client asks for help with one of these touchpoints (website) or perhaps even a small, logical grouping of them (desktop site/mobilesite/webapp).

Hiser’s view of holistic services.

The Anatomy of a Public Transport ServiceThe Anatomy of a Typical Service

Customer Facing Staff

SupportStaff

SupportingSystem

Customer Systemand Products

Customer Facing Staff

“things”

front of house

back of house

“people” “things”

bh

“people”

SupportStaff

Managers

HRCommercial

Maintenance

Communication Tools

CMS

Scheduling System

MobileApp

Wayfinding

WebsitePlatformDisplay

Intranet

CSOsCleaners

Drivers

SupportingSystem

Customer Systemand Products

SupportingSystem

Customer Systemand Products

front ofhouse

back ofhouse

Communic

Scheduling System

MobileApp

WayfindingUX

TYPICALLYLIVES HERE

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But what happens when there are other systems, tools or interactions that connect to the touchpoint you’ve been asked to design? And what if those systems, tools or interactions themselves aren’t especially user-friendly?

We did some work recently for a government department. They asked us to conduct an expert review on a product display: UX bread-and-butter work. We did the review and found many opportunities for better UX: improving the content hierarchy, simplifying the layout and changing the messaging escalation, to name just a few.

But we dug a little bit deeper and we uncovered assumptions about a variety of other systems and processes across the service: registration made it really hard for users to validate their signup with staff and people assumed that users would want the same information on the website as they would on the display.

Issues such as these aren’t necessarily hard to fix, if found early on. The trouble is, not enough people think to look for them, because too many organisations design each touchpoint in isolation from others, and without determining how the touchpoints should interact. People make too many assumptions or are biased by stereotypes about how users behave when engaging across the breadth of a service.

It’s great to design an interface that you’re really proud of, but if it falls over due to a poor service experience that surrounds it, then that really sucks.

HOW DO YOU GET CLIENTS TO CONSIDER A SERVICE DESIGN

APPROACH?

Often, getting a client on board to this way of thinking is as simple as introducing the approach and reassuring them. Typically, it’s either something they didn’t know they needed to consider in the first place or they didn’t have the tools to visualise and communicate it.

In the case of our government client, we built up trust through the business development process and raised the subject of service analysis in the kickoff meeting. We reassured them that our primary focus would be getting the UX right, but that we would love to briefly review the wider service, and raise any issues that we found.

Then, when we had completed the UX work for them, we constructed a really simple user experience flow diagram in Axure to show them where their display design fitted into the service, highlighting which other service components the display’s success would depend upon. This resulted in informed and passionate discussion in the findings meeting, where we explored details, technical considerations and priorities.

If you demonstrate to a client the kinks in the chain, more often than not they’ll heed your advice. Even if they don’t have the time or budget to fix things straight away, you’ve raised the issue, and they can then prioritise accordingly. This approach helps generate greater trust, because clients see you’re genuinely trying to help them. After all, most bad service experiences aren’t a case of people deliberately doing bad things: they’re just not thinking about the broader picture to begin with.

Observing  a  multitude  of  passenger  behaviours  

at Darling Harbour.

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blurring boundaries

HOW TO DESIGN AT THE FRINGE OF UX

In a perfect world, our clients would have the budget to conduct detailed, service-wide user research, because they’d understand the importance of a holistic service experience. The reality, however, is usually far from this. So how do you find the time and capacity to wrap a service mindset into a UX budget? We have found that a basic service analysis can be conducted in only four additional hours of work.

1. Start smallDon’t get overwhelmed: start small, with simple research. If you’re designing UX for a public transport display, begin by brainstorming other touchpoints that might impact the display’s success: timetables, wayfinding, lighting and so on. Then get out on your local bus, ferry or train: observe how passengers interact with the display, but also with the other touchpoints. Capture inconsistencies and look for things that are confusing. Even as little as an hour on the ground will give you plenty of findings.

2. Conduct rapid analysisSpend an hour and undertake a rapid analysis of your findings. Don’t focus on having all the right answers now: simply determine what the issues are that require further discussion. I prefer to use affinity diagramming, but use whatever analysis process works best for you. Map interactions between the touchpoints, how they depend on one another for successful service delivery and track any other glaring issues that you found.

3. Visualise with simplicityWe often use something as basic as a flowchart to show a high-level customer journey, with callouts that show points of confusion or where two touchpoints meet and there is a gap in the handover. Whilst detailed journey maps are terrific, you’re unlikely to have time for one on a ‘lean’ UX budget, so focus on capturing only what’s important and don’t worry about the details just yet. See what you can illustrate in an hour using Axure, InDesign or even PowerPoint. If you focus on rapid results rather

than perfection, you can produce quick visuals that convey key moments of truth and provoke discussion with your stakeholders.

4. Help clients become service advocatesGet an extra hour with your client and dedicate it to the bigger picture. Use your simple visuals to start a conversation and walk through the service with them. Emphasise that this process is about learning more, pre-empting challenges for their team and helping to consolidate their view of the service. Drill down to details where necessary and don’t be afraid to challenge clients’ assumptions on how users behave.

WE WISH WE’D GOTTEN YOU IN EARLIER

Some designers loathe giving away an extra half-day of work, but at Hiser, we don’t see it that way. The extra effort is our way of saying thanks for trusting us to help shape their touchpoint, as well a gesture of goodwill: we want you to the the best you can be.

It shows we are in it for the long haul, and many of our clients give us repeat business for this reason. They see that we want to grow their service capabilities and value the bigger picture. Our government client, upon seeing our first high-level analysis of their service, simply responded with: “We wish we’d gotten you in earlier.” That was a pretty proud moment for the project team.

Personally, I’d love to see more businesses engaging in longer-term partnerships with design agencies that are based on trust and mutual growth. This requires clients to evolve their perceptions of the roles and value of designers, but also for designers to show that we care enough to deliver outstanding work that makes for holistically better services. •

touchpoint 6-340 test

While  service  design  continues  to  mature  as  a  distinct 

standalone design practice, its greatest value moving forward 

may be as a supra-practice, an integrating agent that is powered 

by  designers  additionally  educated  and  experienced  in  other 

design disciplines. Service design educators, such as Savannah 

College  of  Art  and  Design,  are  putting  together  innovative 

programs  that  are  attracting  undergraduate  and  masters 

candidates  from  multiple  design  disciplines,  in  particular 

graphic,  industrial  and  interaction  designers.  Practitioners 

working  in  multi-disciplinary  teams  continue  to  develop  new 

tools and methods and evolve long-standing ones.

Agile Service Design Thinking and Doing

Brian Gillespie is a strategic design consultant with a focus on service/digital design. Brian holds an MBA in Design Management from the University of Westminster, is on the advisory board of DMI and is a mentor to the Savannah College of Art and Design’s service design program.

Ultimately, it will be the degree of human-centredness that binds design practices together to produce an integrated design vision of the future.

Though all design disciplines pay attention in varying degrees to the user, customer or consumer, it is the service designer who arguably pays the broadest attention to their needs. It has always been at the core of service design to think holistically about the overall experience an individual will have while interacting with the entity delivering the service. This experience is now being delivered through an ever-increasing number of digital and physical channels. However, channels are integrating at a speed that

outpaces how well design practices are integrating to actually deliver an integrated, seamless and consistent experience. Because integration of experience across these channels is fundamental to the overall success of this multi-touchpoint service ecosystem, service design is in a position to drive the creation of the connective tissue that binds the elements of experience together. Service design can become a supra-design practice and lead the way, not just in channel experience integration, but also practice integration by inspiring models for integrated design consultancies. Designers who think and act like service designers by inclination are more likely

touchpoint 6-3 41

blurring boundaries

BrandMarket

Products

Customer Company

Front of House Back of HouseServices

Environments

Communications

Digital & Physical Touch points

to be able to cross discipline boundaries and collaborate successfully in integrated customer experience projects staffed by designers from multiple disciplines.

The more difficult challenge for multi-disciplinary design and innovation firms is deciding how to structure their strategy practices and processes, especially in scenarios where the agency is being challenged to identify new opportunities. The structure and skill set of the strategy team needs to be considered differently, depending on how fuzzy or focused the opportunities are. In fuzzy front-end type projects the strategy team ideally and typically remains agnostic about the

possible solutions and avoids putting too much detail into the vision. When the opportunity is more focused, the strategy tends to contain more assured insight into the potential tactics and manifestation of the opportunity. Design practice and solution-agnostic strategists, expert in contextual research and analysis, will need to find ways to engage strategy specialists in order to deliver greater fidelity in the conceptualisation and visualisation of possible tangible futures addressing the opportunities identified. This can lead to more timely strategy implementation. The challenge is knowing when in the strategy process to exchange agnosticism for belief in the insights that can strongly

Connecting the  

service experience.

touchpoint 6-342

Total Experience Blueprint: Agile Service Design Thinking and Doing

Steps in the Journey

User Needs (Stories)User Actions (Epics)

Fron

t of H

ouse

*B

ack

of H

ouse

*

Phys

ical

Dig

ital

Pers

onal

Ope

rati

ons

Mar

keti

ngIS

Web

, App

, So

cial

, etc

Prod

ucts

Envi

ronm

ents

Cus

tom

er-

faci

ng S

taff

Sprint 1 Sprint 1

Sprint 2

Sprint 2

Created by Brian Gillespie © 2014*Front and back of house structures are hypothetical

Sample Team, Sprint 2: Service Strategist, Product Designer, UX Designer, Developer

in the drivers seat as they partner with their industrial design and service design colleagues to create integrated digital/physical products and services.

The rise of Agile and Lean as methodologies for software product development and the efforts by UX designers to integrate these with the best practices of user-centred design in advanced technology projects has also led to interesting process mash-ups. Where it has typically been challenging is finding the time to integrate strategy into Agile, the introduction of Sprint zero and even pre-Sprint zero provides the time and space for

suggest an implementable design future. Can service designers lead the way in addressing this challenge?

Digital designers have been addressing it in their efforts to evolve UX strategy and design processes into the Agile and Lean processes of their software developer colleagues. Because our connected world is being driven by digital technology user experience/interaction designers who continue to mature and evolve the design of digital experience and interactions, are finding that the skills and methods they have developed in the design of web, mobile, and social experiences now puts them

Agile service design thinking and doing.

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blurring boundaries

strategy formation and ensures that the implementation sprint plan can be built upon a total vision of the experi-ence. Within the sprints, the core activities of envisioning, prototyping, testing and iterating are fundamental to design thinking, but find themselves in a rapid series of design ‘doing’ cycles. There are opportunities for design-ers to further push the envelope here.

Strategists, user-experience designers and service designers have all relied on personas and customer jour-ney maps to express their research analysis and visu-alise experience strategies. Both design artefacts have matured significantly in the past ten years. The service blueprint, on the other hand, has mostly remained a tool of the service designer and has focused on the delivery of pure services. With the further blurring of the digital and physical customer experience of a business across prod-ucts, services, environments and communication, there is the potential to evolve the service blueprint as a tool to envision the complete customer experience. In addition, it can also point the way to identify the collaboration points for multi-disciplinary design teams. In this form it becomes the total experience blueprint.

The total experience blueprint is the detailed exposition of the simple front- and back-of-house illustration that summarises the complete customer experience of a business. Mashing this up with Agile, the first step in the strategic roadmap captures the MVS or minimum viable service. The major steps and stages of the experience delivered over time and place can be regarded as the service or experience ‘epics’. The nodes in the grid relate back to a set of user stories and describe

the experience that delivers on the promise of these stories. Sprints can be compiled from a compact and logical grouping of experience nodes, which, in turn, can point to the required design team composition for each of the planned sprints. Think of this as a layer on top of the blueprint and potentially entitled the ‘service design implementation blueprint’. The major challenge with this approach is the scalability of the total experience blueprint. Maintaining a single document that describes a single simple service experience is a lot more manageable than trying to visualise a complete and integrated total experience of a business or organisation. Document sizes become incredibly large and designers must rely on expensive and unwieldy large-format printer output for viewing and sharing. The challenge moving forward will be to find ways to manage the scale issue, whether by breaking the blueprint down and sequencing in major groupings or possibly by creating content-managed digital service blueprints that can be accessed by multiple team members over time and maintained on a publishing plan tied to the sprint plan.

‘Agile Service Design Thinking and Doing’ will likely never catch on as a buzz phrase but it arguably points to an interesting direction in terms of further innovating our design processes and methods to tackle the ever-more complex challenges of designing for this 21st century world of ours. Please feel free to share your experiences! •

The challenge is knowing when in the strategy process to exchange agnosticism for belief in the in-sights that can strongly suggest an implementable design future.

touchpoint 6-344 test

From the big picture down to the smallest detail, service design 

and user experience may appear to come from opposing ends 

of  the  design  spectrum.  But  a  group  of  design  practitioners 

brought together to work on the future of digital healthcare have 

discovered when and how the methods of these very different 

design  disciplines  can  positively  challenge  and  complement 

each other

Bridges and BarriersThe challenges of combining service and UX design approaches

Louise Taylor is a design manager at Newcastle University’s MoveLab, where she leads on the design of physical activity interventions.

Kat Henderson is a design manager at MoveLab, leading on a physical activity clinical trial and currently completing her PhD.

Meg Thomas is a user experience consultant who has led user-centred design projects for a range of FTSE100 companies and public sector organisations.

MoveLab is a physical activity research group based within the Institute of Cel-lular Medicine at Newcastle Uni versity, Newcastle upon Tyne. In November 2013, service designers Louise Taylor and Katherine Henderson and UX designer Meg Thomas joined the MoveLab team and were tasked with working on the development of a new digital healthcare proposition centred on a mobile app. Our differing approaches, applied methods and processes led us to experience a crash course in each other’s disciplines. The boundaries of disciplines were crossed and, as a result, the project was viewed from a dual perspective.

SHIFTING FOCUS

The main difference we observed between service design and user experience was the point of focus. To the UX designer, the digital system is

the centre of everything and off-system touchpoints are considered secondary: a point of ‘hand off’ where another team takes up the baton. The service designers in our team sought to situate the mobile app we were developing within a broader service ecosystem, from the point where the user first hears about the app to their engagement with the app management team through mobile, web, paper-based and in-person communication.

This expanded area of focus challenged our UX designer, who found herself looking beyond the analogue, yes-no interactions of clicks and swipes to the emotional drivers and motivations behind every finger press. It also felt a lot more difficult to test a service proposition than a mobile app: we could create an image to simulate the screen of a mobile device quite simply, but the context around that device, the day-to-day events

touchpoint 6-3 45

blurring boundaries

and distractions of home, work and personal life that can make it difficult or even impossible to engage with a service, could not be simulated so easily.

RE-OPENING THE BOXES

The work of the UX professional has a certain procedural elegance: tasks are assembled into logical lists, with each item ready to be ticked off as completed. Even design iterations are approached in a structured manner. This approach came in striking contrast to the multi-layered and circular approach of the service designer. While our UX designer sought to

‘tick off’ and ‘box up’ the tasks, her service design colleagues had the tendency to keep opening those boxes back up. In UX, the designer connects with their user through a screen, and changing a detail on that screen is quick, easy and cheap. But in a service design context, changing even the smallest detail can have huge economic and logistical consequences. From a UX designer’s perspective, this felt unscalable, and unmanageable.

‘FROM SCRATCH’ VERSUS ‘FROM THE LIBRARY’

The range of resources and tools avail-able to the UX professional came as a surprise to our service designers. We were excited to discover resources such as www.whatusersdo.org, an online remote user-testing service. Our service designers soon realised that this testing platform could also be valuable as a research tool, and utilised it to collect feedback on a range of current services, helping us to understand where best to position our new mobile app. Other valuable tools introduced to us by our UX designer included online card sorting Applying UX tools within a service design process.

touchpoint 6-346

software (http://optimalworkshop.com) and design pattern libraries.

The fact that so many of the UX resources we were discovering were generated from within the UX community and then adopted as industry-standard, was inspiring, and led us to question service design’s approach to the creation and distribution of its own resources. Within UX, methods such as paper prototyping, guerrilla usability testing and remote testing of low fidelity prototypes have been validated through practice and now form a core part of project plans and statements of working methods. There are toolkits and online resources available to service designers (such as Roberta Tassi’s Service Design Tools www.servicedesigntools.org and Namahn and Design Flanders’ Service Design Toolkit www.servicedesigntoolkit.org), but we found ourselves questioning whether service designers are really championing knowledge sharing as successfully as the UX community.

Like many service designers, our team members came from backgrounds in the creative design disciplines: Kat from product design and Louise from web and graphic design. Perhaps because so many service design practitioners come from these creative design backgrounds, we have a tendency to relish the process of generating new and delightful tools, artefacts and design activities to engage with research and co-design participants.

It is possible that we are in danger of repeatedly reinventing the wheel and that our iterative processes prevent us from coming together to create a coherent and shareable standard of service design methodology.

THE PROBLEM OF PROCESS

A common challenge for both our UX and service design team members was to successfully engage project partners in our process work. We generated a large and varied amount of documentation through the process of developing our mobile app, from photo-story walkthroughs of the proposed user experience to written reports on our user research and detailed functional specifications.

While this documentation was distributed amongst our extended project team of exercise researchers, health psychologists and technology experts, we were still struggling to engage them in valuable conversations that would move the project forward. We had stumbled our way towards a common language within our service-UX design team, but communicating in that language across another, much broader, disciplinary boundary remained difficult.

The output that finally seemed to bring everyone together was a Flinto prototype of our proposed mobile app. Flinto prototypes simulate the experience of interacting with an app on the device itself, allowing people to install and then

A photo-story illustrating the user’s route to engaging with our mobile app.

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blurring boundaries

click through screens in a very realistic manner. Producing this prototype was time-consuming and not ideal, as such high-fidelity prototypes run the risk of closing down people’s creative and critical thinking around a project, as they can start to view the prototype as a final product. On this occasion, it proved to be a risk worth taking, as the prototype helped us to communicate our concept for the app and capture useful feedback enabling us to make further refinements. This common UX deliverable finally allowed the team to move forward, despite there being a much richer picture of the service available through the service design documents.

The shared challenge of docu-menting and communicating our process work proved to be a valuable point in our team’s collaboration, when we began to see where our differing methods had worked together to help us progress towards the goal of defining a new mobile app speci-fication. The value of undertaking a ‘show and tell’ to an external audience also highlighted the value this could have had at the outset of our work together, as a sharing of past work and current methods early on would have helped us to acquire our common language more quickly.

A MERGING OF METHODS

UX is often viewed as an add-on to a project or as one small aspect of its delivery. You are unlikely to hear a piece

of work described as ‘a UX project’ in the way that we might talk about ‘a service design project’, and UX designers don’t often look to other disciplines for new methods and approaches. From our work together on this mobile app project, our UX designer has come to value the holistic viewpoint of service design, looking beyond the digital to the broader perspective of the human factors influencing those interactions. For the service designers within our team, who had resisted the pressure to quantify their vision for the mobile app service too soon, we could now see the value of the rigour and detail our UX designer had brought to the work. Her methods led us to engage in much-needed decision-making process that ultimately allowed us to move the project forwards.

Now that we have finalised our mobile app specification, our team is about to embark upon an Agile development process. Prior to their introduction to UX, the dissection of tasks and focus on incremental detail inherent to Agile would likely have proven a serious challenge to our service designer’s instinct to pull back and view the ‘big service picture’. However, as a mixed team of service and UX designers, we feel fully-equipped to focus on realising the detail within our mobile app while retaining a clear vision of its role within the broader service offering. •

touchpoint 6-348 test

Following on from MoDAL Meetups and associated discussions, 

our  goal  is  to  stimulate  discussion  about  how  these  three 

disciplines can best work together.

Service Design, Agile and  Lean StartupA discussion about bringing together different disciplines

BACKGROUND

In October 2013, we met to discuss what service design, Agile and Lean could learn from each other. We were service designers, Agile coaches, and a scattering of people from the wide spectrum of Lean (but mostly focusing on Lean Startup). With our diverse backgrounds, we were bound to approach the topic from different directions, but we found common ground and continued the discussion, online and face-to-face.

Service design, Agile and Lean share many of the same principles, particularly in relation to validated learning and uncertainty. In each discipline, early indications of failure are opportunities for quick course correction, to be sought out rather than resisted. The tools and processes offered by each are designed to enable learning opportunities on feedback loops of varying lengths.

Fail-fast approaches are a revision of W. Edwards Deming’s ‘Plan-Do-Check-Act’ (PDCA) cycle: we plan our expected outcome, do the planned process, check the actual output against expected outcome and act on any results after we

Simon Gough is director of Redfront.

Markus Edgar Hormess is a founding partner WorkPlayExperience.

Adam St. John Lawrence is a founding partner WorkPlayExperience.

Bruce Scharlau is director of the MSc Software Entrepreneurship at the University of Aberdeen.

complete root-cause analysis of significant differences between actual and planned results. Each discipline integrates a version of this cycle into its core process. Service design places an emphasis on the co-design of services and iterates through prototyping. The Lean Startup approach uses hypothesis-testing to clarify business assumptions and correct customer development in its speedy search for a sustainable business model. Agile, with its focus on people and how teams work together, uses tests and developer practices like pair programming to build quality into the software and to shorten the feedback loop of development.

In our discussions many of the main principles seemed the same and many tools were (or felt) familiar, but some of the core ideas also seemed to conflict with each other. Service design often assumes

– at least initially – the validity of a small number of qualitative examples, which rubs against Lean Startup’s hypothesis testing with quantitative analysis. Service design, believing in the value and truth of users/customers, clashes somewhat with the Lean Startup approach, which

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values perceived market size based on what people do and not what they say they will do in the search for a sustainable business model. This can become potentially disrespectful, with co-creative partners feeling like lab rats as the firm pivots from one hypothesis to the next and users/customers lose a service.

Despite some apparent conflicts, there is much to gain from finding a way to bring the three disciplines together. The inherent tensions between them provide opportunities for exploring fundamental concepts in developing services and products. In the following discussion, we use the definitions and ideas found at SDN, leanstartup.com and the Agile Alliance1.

COMMON IDEAS

Each discipline brings a message of a common path through their process using generally accepted, standard tools. However, there is no one tool in each discipline to rule them all. Each discipline argues that its own core process should be tailored to the needs of each team and the current context of their work. Each discipline assumes that we are discovering learning as we proceed because of the non-linear journey of our work.

Delivering value in conditions of extreme uncertaintyBusiness value is what the client desires. However, new projects often work in unknown areas where effective planning is difficult and so seek to reduce the uncertainty as they proceed along their discovery process. Lean Startup strives to find a sustainable business model, while Agile looks to reduce the riskiest remaining assumptions

and service design seeks to understand the user / customer experience as much as possible. Each, in its own way, seeks to build confidence in the decisions going forward by reducing uncertainty and re-prioritising tasks as they learn more about delivering value in the project.

Validated learningEach discipline knows that it makes assumptions about its users/customers, which need to be confirmed. Lean Startup tests hypotheses as part of its build-measure-learn process; Agile creates small slices of the project to show and discuss with users/customers to confirm it’s meeting business value; and service design prototypes experiences with users/customers throughout the process to ensure business value is being met. Each employs prototypes and observed behaviour to aid decision-making and to iterate production versions as a way to confirm the learning.

Start small, fail forward and minimise wasteAccording to Reinertsen2, we learn more from failure than from success. We want to do many small experiments of low value, which can be iterated into a bigger product/service. We want an ongoing process to remove that which does not deliver value. Agile does this with test-driven development, Lean Startup forces us out of the building to test our assumptions with potential customers and service design does this with low-fidelity prototyping and other tools. All disciplines aim to test assumptions before too much investment.

TOWARDS A COMMON FRAMEWORK

One of the statements that came out of the first MoDAL get-together was: “I still don’t know how to get the job done.” After all, regardless of what we understand about each of the approaches, what most practitioners want to know is how to apply the right tools to a project and get the best results.

So, how might we apply a combined approach to a project? One way is to try and visualise a complete project flow, incorporating all three disciplines (something we

“Each discipline brings a message of a common path through their process using generally accepted, standard tools. However, there is no one tool in each discipline to rule them all.”

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tried out in a less formal way at our first get-together). One such visualisation is that offered by Nordstrom3.

Our own version of a holistic visualisation is presented below. In this diagram, the outer labels of the circles (Users, Experience and Capability) represent the driving factors in each discipline, while the intersection points (Use Alignment, Asset Alignment and Experience Alignment) represent the intersections of the disciplines at critical points.

The model assumes that a project may start anywhere (for example from user observation, founder ideas or team capability) and, depending on the scale and scope of the project, it is possible to either follow a single circle (with the intersections providing checks) or to hop around each circle, without entering the triangle, to maximise the perspective of each discipline.

1. Need Alignment (Service Design/Lean Startup inter-section) represents the intersection of co-created value and core business model. This might also relate to the Value Proposition/Customer Segments part of the Busi-ness Model Canvas).

2. Asset Alignment (Lean Startup/Agile Methodology intersection) represents hypothesis-driven prototypes or MVPs. In other words, what can realistically be

created from hypotheses, given the technical and team capability.

3. Feature Alignment (Agile Methodology/Service Design intersection) is concerned with the depth and feature set; what should be developed, within the constraints of capability, to meet the requirements of value co-creation.

KEY PROJECT COMPONENTS

TeamsThe team is always the starting point, whether it’s the Lean Startup team of founding partners and their drive to build a sustainable business model, the Agile and service design team working across departments aiding communication to deliver on external requirements or the organisation employing service design to effectively co-create its services to gain better stakeholder buy-in. Agile, however, probably provides the most solid set of approaches and ideas for team optimisation, focusing as much on the people who do the work as the work itself.

Ideas and explorationInitial ideas may come from the firm’s own needs, the business founders, clients, observation or elsewhere.

Lean Startup

AssetAllignment

FeatureAllignment

NeedAllignment

Capability

Hypotheses

Stakeholders Agile Methodology

Service Design

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Wherever the idea has come from, how is it treated differently by the three disciplines?

The Lean Startup approach focuses on the basic idea and explores how it can be developed into a sustainable business model using tools like the Business Model Canvas, or through customer discovery. Service design offers a wealth of tools, from ethnography to generative workshops, to explore the needs more deeply. At this point, the Agile discipline uses similar ideas to those used by service design to ideate divergent proposals in the problem space.

Experiments and prototypesHow does each discipline deal with testing ideas? Lean Startup takes a scientific approach, formulating and testing hypotheses. Service design uses design tools to plan, but relies on prototypes to move from ideas to feedback loops. Agile’s approach is to move beyond the

prototype as just a trial idea and to achieve a functional version at each development stage. In the early stages, this might be as much about configuring the team as it is building out ideas.

Development and iterationsThe learning path to this point will have had setbacks, diversions and surprises. The idea will have been transformed by the journey as each of the three disciplines helps to shape the idea into a sustainable concept with its own version of a minimum viable product. As the development of ideas continues, earlier low-fidelity prototypes will be refined with higher-fidelity ones.

DeploymentWe may transition smoothly from ‘development’ to ‘deployment’ without any formal announcement.

The first MoDAL Meetup in  

Berlin, October 2013.

MoDAL Meetup led by We Question Our Project at Leancamp 

Barcelona.

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A service may improve over time as rough edges are smoothed out. Lean Startup will seek to move from early adopters across the chasm to the early majority of users, but there will still be the hypothesis testing of ideas to improve and develop a sustainable business model. service designers will continue to develop deeper understanding of users, building on touchpoints and orchestration to create a meaningful service. The Agile team will be improving their process of development, integrating user-centric considerations of service design while ensuring that the core business value concerns of the Lean Startup approach are not lost along the way.

SUMMARISING THE CONTRIBUTIONS

The table below is offered as a starting point in summarising where each discipline can best learn from each other.

CONCLUSION

Developing a common approach, incorporating the best of all three disciplines and achieving all this without conflicts is a mammoth task and unlikely to apply comprehensively to most projects. However, a key aspect of the business environment, where learning itself is a core skill, is openness to peripheral ideas and techniques that help businesses realise value for their stakeholders.

…can teach… Lean Startup Service Design Agile

Lean Startup

µ

Lean Startup can teach SD about: 

> getting to the core value proposition 

fast

> reality checks through early market 

prototyping

> speed

> metrics

> ‘killing your darlings’

Lean Startup can teach Agile about: 

> concentrating on the ‘what’ more than 

the ‘how’

> speed

> validating assumptions about uses, 

architecture, etc

Service Design

SD can teach Lean Startup about:

> getting buy-in via co-design 

> the importance of experience and 

how to prototype it

> diversity of ideas

> challenging your assumptions, e.g. 

through research

> communication across silos

µ

SD can teach Agile about:

> paper prototyping and getting ideas 

in front of people sooner rather than 

later

> making complexity understandable

> not assuming you know the answer –  

it needs to be shown to people

Agile Agile can teach Lean Startup about:

> turning a proposition into a scalable 

product

> working as a team and managing 

the human side of things as noted in 

next column

Agile can teach SD about:

> more functional teams 

> challenging your own process

> getting it done & tracking progress

> treating people as important diverse 

individuals who can be trusted to do 

the right thing

> prioritisation and assessing time 

investment 

µ

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Each of the three disciplines has grown in complexity, and each has factions around its proprietary tools and resources. However, adherence to a single approach misses the point that each situation is unique and should inspire its own process based on the project in hand. In this regard, the core ideas of the three disciplines offer a wider, and useful, perspective on project development.

The cross-fertilisation is already happening; sometimes one or two disciplines can be spotted together at conferences or in papers: a service design talk at a Lean and Agile event, or maybe a chapter on Agile development in a service design book. Our own exploration at the intersection of these three disciplines is ongoing. We have presented some of the commonalities and paradoxes here by way of an invitation to engage, not only with different discussions, but with different communities.

We have always envisaged MoDAL4 primarily as a way to bring people together and, hopefully, by continuing in this way, we will be able to collectively explore what a greater dialogue might look like. •

References1 Service Design : http://www.service-design-network.org/intro/ Lean Startup: http://theleanstartup.com/principles Agile: http://www.agilealliance.org/the-alliance/what-is-agile/

2 http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Principles-Product-Development-Flow/dp/1935401009

3 http://secure.nordstrominnovationlab.com/pages/our_process_told_as_our_team_s_timeline

4 Join the dialogue at https://www.facebook.com/groups/modalmeetups/

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Transformation  of  enterprise  ecosystems  has  been  a  major 

topic  in  conferences  and  publications  related  to  the  service 

design  community.  Designers  recognise  that  keeping  up  to 

the  promise  of  delivering  great  service  experiences  requires 

adoption and transformation. We need to get a large and diverse 

group of actors on board, and change the way they do business 

to  achieve  transformation  at  scale.  This  sparks  the  need  for 

getting closer to the enterprise, while maintaining the focus on 

customers and users that comes natural to service design. To 

deliver, we have to take design practice to the enterprise level: 

expand our methods and tools, find new allies, and find ways 

to effectively bridge strategic design with tangible outcomes.

Designing the Business Around the ExperienceThe advent of strategic enterprise design

Enterprises are attempting to incorporate digital channels, new customer insights and a much faster rate of change into their business models. In daily business, however, interactions with private and public sector organisations are often complex due to 'Enterprise Awkwardness': organisational silos, bureaucracy, IT legacy and technical islands and resistance to change, which prevents us from shaping coherent customer experiences. Even straightforward activities, such as booking tickets for a journey, paying your taxes, subscribing to health insurance

or resolving a problem with your energy supplier require customers to embark on a laborious journey.

Enterprises lose track of the conversation, get stuck in inflexible procedures, communicate in bits of incomplete information and often ultimately fail to deliver what they promised. Such experiences happen with companies, government institutions or other types of enterprises, making them appear slow rude, and inhumane. While most of these failed relationships are simply annoying and just make you go somewhere else, some have a profound

Mike Clark is a business technologist with sixteen years experience navigating the gap between business and IT. His background in business architecture, combined with his ability to bring simplicity, enables him to position organisations to win in today's competitive digital world.

Milan Guenther is partner with eda.c, a strategic design consultancy based in France and Germany. He is the author of the book Intersection, about strategic design in complex enterprise environments that introduces the Enterprise Design Framework.

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impact on people’s lives. They result in lost customers, demotivated employees or even scandals being echoed in mass media.

ARCHITECTING AN ENTERPRISE

Tackling this challenge puts us into a much larger playing field than the immediate service environment. Beyond designing a good service, we look at realigning the various moving parts of enterprise ecosystems and pushing them towards a meaningful, sustainable and achievable future state. The complex and volatile nature of such systems quickly becomes overwhelming, with brands, processes, stakeholders, culture, content, products, technology or touchpoints being just tiny parts of a much larger puzzle. If we want to bring our designs to life, we need to shift the enterprise implementing them1.

In an attempt to tackle the complexity and dynamics of an evolving enterprise, the disciplines of enterprise and business architecture emerged, enabling the organisation to bring all the various moving parts together. Business capabilities and the term 'business model' have become part of everyday language amongst stakeholders. Through the use of consistent terms and

the introduction of specialist tooling, organisations were at last able to build an integrated model of the enterprise. For the first time, stakeholders, in partnership with the business architect, were able to use holistic views to prioritise business and IT transformation programmes, build strategies with a clear view of horizontal organisational impacts and perform rapid impact analysis, providing transparency into complex challenges that cross traditional organisational unit boundaries.

To put together such a variety of views takes significant effort and is something rarely seen by stakeholders. Underneath the covers are sets of complex mappings of the various enterprise aspects, but in a structured approach. To make it part of the fabric of the organisation requires adoption, which makes softer skills as important as the content. Brokering with staff, and coming to an agreement on terms, can prove to be difficult. These difficulties can be attributed to the awkwardness of the enterprise, but have to be overcome to ensure content can live beyond just a pretty set of process or capability diagrams.

BRIDGING THE GAP

Whilst business architecture has clearly made a difference for operational design, its reach has not extended to the end customer. The integrated content adds value to stakeholders, but the service levels provided to customers have, in most cases, remained the same. All that has been achieved is that organisations are slowly starting to understand what they have and how it is connected. The content created, although connected, stops at the capabilities of the organisations. Concepts such as experience and needs are missing, which results in a very well connected, but limited, inside-out view of the world.

Organisations soon realised this gap, and started turning to service design, with an overall aim of delivering a service that met their customers' – and potential customers' – needs. Although a design approach offers great value, the design field often lacks the implementation perspective. The lack of common terms and alignment to the actual business model can

A typical commercial enterprise.

Partners Competitors

CustomersChannels

Other Stakeholders

SuppliersYour Organisation

Management

Employees

Investors,Government,Public

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lead to gaps when implemented. This logical thinking is where business architecture can play a significant role that helps to fill the void between the outside world and internal delivery.

Every customer need and desired experiences and outcomes can be captured consistently, aligned to the offerings the organisation provides and traced down to the inner workings needed for delivery. The viability of being able to meet this need, can be reviewed against the existing business architecture, which would highlight business capability gaps. Combining the business architecture with service design enables us to focus on the experience of the customer, with an alignment to business delivery.

THE ENTERPRISE DESIGN IDEA

The challenges service designers face in shifting enter-prises make a clear case for such an integrated approach, bringing together the key aspects and views needed to bring a design to life. A key challenge consists of collabo-ratively exploring potential futures with relevant stake-holders and practitioners of related disciplines. Because relationships fail or succeed at the enterprise level, it is also on this level that they need to be considered.

In order to capture this complexity, eda.c developed a set of twenty interrelated aspects loosely corresponding to disciplines and approaches used in strategic design work. The resulting Enterprise Design Framework has been developed with real world projects in mind, and represents a map going from strategic 'big picture' views on the enterprise, down to its rendering in tangible outcomes. On three intermediary layers, conceptual aspects allow us to bridge the gap between high-level thinking and concrete outcomes: explore the anatomy of the enterprise ecosystem, apply different frames to define the problem, and build a design space of opportunities and ideas.

When working with complex enterprises, we have to embrace different domains, to create shared models and a common language and to design our processes and methods to respond to specific situations of outside-in and inside-out alignment. We need to opportunistically

pick the methods and tools that provide the most value, from disciplines as diverse as business architecture and customer experience, organisational change and processes, or interaction design and branding. The framework seeks to be a map of concerns, domains, expertise, techniques and methods to integrate into a strategic design process. First published in 20122, it has been applied and tweaked with organisations as diverse as SAP, Toyota Europe, the United Nations3, as well as start-ups and medium-sized businesses.

Basing this process on a shared reference model enables us to cut through the shared concerns, and facilitate a dialogue with users, customers and decision makers, moving from strategic considerations down to tangible outputs. Whether we are dealing with a large-scale change or designing a single minimum viable product or service4, we can jointly define the desired to-be state in the enterprise ecosystem to make informed design decisions. Beyond simply communicating a vision, the models, prototypes and stories we produce have to trace outcomes and impact across the different aspects and concerns and to convey the underlying meaning for all enterprise actors involved or affected.Beyond integrated methods and deliverables, we are

Alignment through integrated views.

CustomerOutside in Inside out

OfferingsCapabilities

ChannelsProcesses

Brand Promise

NeedsBrand Experience

ExperiencesMotivationsConstraints

Organisation

Full Alignment

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The Enterprise Design Framework

exploring new modelling tools, potential 'killer artefacts', and integrated design management frameworks. After a successful first international Intersection conference in spring 2014, we are looking to refine and extend the framework with partners like Livework, DMI and Quali-Ware (a leading enterprise architecture tool vendor). If bridging gaps, tracing complexity and tackling enterprise challenges appeal to you, please do get in touch! •

References1 Dave Malouf (2014): 'Why I design for the enterprise and you should too'. On medium.com http://bit.ly/YAC3TG

2 Milan Guenther (2012). Intersection – How Enterprise Design Bridges the Gap Between Business, Technology and People. Boston: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

3 Milan Guenther, Dennis Middeke (2014). 'Designing Future Enterprises' in Digital Enterprise Design & Management (pp. 3-14). Springer International Publishing.

4 Mike Clark (2014): 'organizations pursue the complete solution'. Blog Post http://bit.ly/1p00eQw

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identity

actors

business

communication

signs

architecture

touchpoints

people

information

things

experience

services

function

interaction

places

content

structure

operation organisation technology

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The  speed  of  disruption  requires  organisations  to  continually 

define their future by building it today, discovering new paths 

forward as close to the market as possible. While small-scale 

organisations and start-ups have mastered the art of this, large 

organisations still struggle to embrace exploration in the face 

of uncertainty. When defining what is next for an established 

brand,  there  is  often  a  tendency  to  default  to  big  visions, 

strategies on paper or small experimentation around the edges. 

Without  a  platform  to  intentionally  explore  the  future,  the 

evolution of the organisation is often largely guided by politics, 

outdated tech infrastructure and operational functions, rather 

than around potential value. 

Building Brand FuturesBrand learning labs help organisations prototype the future at the intersection of purpose, experience and capabilities

Jenny Comiskey is an experienced innovation leader and director in the IDEO London studio. She collaborates with clients to establish new platforms to foster innovation, incubate future offerings and launch new ventures.

Chris Grantham is a brand thinker and strategist, working as a senior design lead in IDEO London. Having worked in brand communications and classic brand strategy, Chris is fascinated by the process of developing a brand’s strategy and actions together.

Creating an integrated prototype of the future and using that as a learning platform can be a useful tool for organisations to explore new directions, connect solutions across functions, create focus on what matters to customers and to have confidence in taking bigger leaps forward. A 'brand learning lab' helps large organisations embrace the ethos of operating like a start-up. With little investment, it is possible to simultaneously hack together new combinations of purpose (why: the intention), organisational capabilities

(how: the assets and platforms) and experience (what: the interactions).

A brand learning lab involves creating a full-scale mock-up of the experience, where different elements such as staffing, environments, digital tools, messaging and products work together to demonstrate the system as a whole. The focus is not on prototyping just the elements, but rather testing the value of the entire offer and the new role the organisation might play, allowing customers and employees to experience it first hand. They can take the form of a

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full-scale simulation, a spin off venture or a live prototype of a new signature offer

The process underpinning this approach is straightforward and familiar. It begins with defining hypotheses inspired by customer insight, creating the minimum signature experiences to realise new value and launching integrated prototypes to learn from. The biggest difference, however, is that hypotheses should be explored at the level of the future of the organisation or purpose of the brand.

Brand learning labs can help to:• Ensure impact and intent are linked by

testing the value with customers and using their feedback to focus on what matters most

• Create belief in shared goals by getting internal stakeholders and external partners working as a team toward building the future

• Accelerate progress by testing the potential of the future today and acting on learning

Brand labs ensure that intention and impact are linked from the outset, testing elements working in tandem to shape a new, unique offering. Vision and execution and back-stage and front stage all evolve together, with feedback from customers and stakeholders shaping both.

When Walgreens recently committed to the ambitious vision of becoming a destination for everyday health and wellness, it required a significant leap forward. While the potential was there, delivering impact would require transitioning from speed and efficiency of convenience-based

transactions to supporting ongoing dialog and a broader scope of health and wellness services. In order to get beyond assumptions about the future, two full-scale prototypes were created before launching a pilot. In each instance, they were able to test all of the elements working together to deliver on a new intention, working out what to enhance, create or connect. Through testing, the importance of building trust and approachability became clear. A few key elements were critical to help enable this. First, the pharmacist was brought out from behind the counter to be more accessible and to host more in-depth conversations. A new health guide role was introduced, while spaces (such as private consult nooks and de-emphasised check-out) and tools (such as iPad applications and discussion guides) were all designed to invite new dialogue with patients. Ultimately, these changes in experience were essential in setting Walgreens up to truly shift their role.

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Our collaboration with a global hospi-tality organisation has shown that brand labs play a vital role in enabling collaboration in order to build shared belief. Creating a tangible version of the future that everyone can see, feel and touch is essential for getting internal stakeholder and external partners working as a team toward that vision. Moving quickly from abstraction to real interactions grounds everyone in a truly shared view of what is possible.

Guest experiences, made up of many touchpoints across booking, arriving and staying, require multiple functions across the organisation to commit to change. Envisioning a new hotel brand needed to be a collaborative effort throughout. Initial signature moments were created with input across guests, hotel staff and a core team made up of operations, brand and commercial leadership. Full-scale hotel prototypes were built, where environments made out of foam-core, digital mock-ups and staff roles played out together. The resulting prototype experience meant the larger impact was truly felt and understood by all of the team members. This generated significant belief and courage for new directions. The belief then turned to momentum for further investment as extended stakeholders, from owners to investors, changed their view of what their brand was capable of becoming. The prototype has served as a continuous platform for collaboration across execution partners. F&B consultants, HR staff trainers, architects and IT are able to evolve the work, all the while maintaining a clear view of the bigger picture and their contribution to it.

A brand lab can also be treated as an entirely new venture with greater freedom to pursue new di rections outside of the day-to-day, while staying closer to the market. Having a safe place to test potential is necessary to accelerate progress, getting beyond the complexity and assumptions around the current model.

When State Farm wanted to create a new offering to connect with millennials they launched Next Door. Ultimately, Next Door was designed as a live learning lab to help the parent State Farm better understand the millennials’ financial needs. Taking cues from the assets of the large organisation, including aspects of the core values and consulting capability, an entirely new operating model, staffing approach and core interactions were created.

Designing and refining the purpose, experience and organisation happened continuously throughout the project. Prior to the launch, a full-scale prototype was created to focus the offer and key interactions. It helped to clarify the purpose around financial coaching and inform the expression of key moments that were designed to support it. As any new venture, especially one shaped to learn, will evolve over time, the live launch was also designed with flexibility in mind. To encourage ongoing iteration, flexible furnishings were incorporated and a research director role put in place to capture learning. The 'lab' has served as a living model to stay connected to this new market, as well as to generate ongoing insight to inspire and inform the larger organisation.

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A few principles to keep in mind when launching brand learning labs:

• Start with hypotheses about the future: each new integrated prototype should be driven by a provocation about the future and your role in it. Have a clear point of view and use that as fuel to discover and learn from the market.

• Build on the organisational DNA: use the current cultural values and foundational assets as inspiration. Stay connected to the current organisation without being stifled by it.

• 'Fake' the system: building rough prototypes helps to demonstrate how the parts work together and to understand the value of the whole and surface interdependency. Focus on creating the key experiences at the right level to learn from, 'fake' aspects as needed, while staying small enough to be simple.

• Enable collaboration: the prototype should be a vehicle for stakeholders to

align around a common purpose, see their part in the bigger picture and to commit to delivery.

• Evolve with learning: don’t just build, make sure feedback is fuel for change. Whether it is live in the market or in a simulation environment, customer and staff feedback it should inform how both the elements and the intent might better align with people’s needs.

In summary, a living brand learning lab can serve as a unique platform for reinvention, allowing organisations to test the future without disrupting the current model or getting caught up in incremental change. For a relatively small amount of space, time, and money, organisations can explore how purpose, experience and capabilities uniquely interweave, demonstrating where their brand could go by building it today. •

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Service  design  defines  the  why  and  the  what  of  software, 

Scrum suggests how to implement and refine it. Both provide 

an iterative approach that is based on user feedback through 

early testing, and they both challenge the way designers work 

with developers.

Service Design goes AgileWhy service design is a perfect match with agile software  development

Jens Otto Lange is a design facilitator at GuentherLange. He helps teams to co-create innovation for the digital age, working on behalf of such clients as Airbus, Axel Springer and Otto. Jens initiated Service Design Hamburg and contributes to the MoDAL Network exploring the intersection of lean, agile and service design.

GOING AGILE TO REDUCE RISKS

While navigating through the ‘fuzzy front-end’ of innovation, there’s a high risk of failure, since data from the past plus some assumptions about the future are all you have in terms of knowing how your customers might use your product or service. This is true for every kind of innovation and it’s particularly true for software. That’s why software development teams were among the first to apply agile planning methods. Today, Scrum is the most popular implementation of Agile. It’s a way of reducing the risks associated with complex projects through dynamic adaption to change. Instead of a traditional waterfall project management that specifies every software function upfront, then codes it over months or years for a big-bang release, Scrum shortens the release cycle to a maximum of 4 weeks to enable early feedback by users and business stakeholders. It is a data-driven approach to learning that

enables you to make better decisions about the future.

DISCOVERING THE VALUE OF UX

In Scrum, there is the development team, the ‘Scrum master’ to facilitate the process, and the product owner: people like Paul. The software engineer is responsible for one of the mobile app products of an Internet start-up. In user story-mapping sessions1 with his business stakeholders, Paul drills down their requirements into user stories. User stories describe a requirement from a user’s perspective. Paul is the guy who decides which user stories are to be put on a prioritised list of requirements that his product should meet, called the product backlog. Paul “is the sole person responsible for managing the product backlog.” 2 But Scrum doesn’t tell Paul how to identify the most valuable features or how to involve designers. In practice, most development teams have found that it helps a lot to let a designer enrich

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blurring boundaries

written user stories with some design concepts upfront. Since James Jesse Garrett suggested The Elements of User Experience3 in 2000, UX has been widely adapted by organisations as a functional role. But how to manage collaboration between designers and developers in a Scrum setup?

SYNCHRONISING UX WITH AGILE DEVELOPMENT

Joanna is a designer. Originally, she started out designing visuals. Later, she was involved in concept work. When Joanna joined Paul’s team, she introduced personas, user journeys, wire framing and user research. She learned quickly that designers and developers bring along a different mindset. While she was working on the product as a whole, designing well thought-through, pixel-perfect deliverables to ensure consistency, she was puzzled about how much developers were focused only on the feature they were coding and that they did not really appreciate the value of design.

Paul and Joanna adapted UX to the Scrum sprint cycle. Furthermore, design activities were divided into strategic and operational jobs. A UX team was established and staffed with experts for user research, interaction design, copywriting and visual design. On the operational level, Paul and the Scrum master helped Joanna’s UX team to apply Agile UX, introducing a staggered track mode of Scrum. Ongoing user research and ideation were synchronised with the rhythm of the Agile sprint planning. Designers worked two sprints in advance to specify user stories with design drafts that help developers to code much more effectively, support them while they code and review the quality.

On the strategic level, Joanna supported Paul to sharpen the vision of the product and the features that should be built. They introduced a product discovery pro cess, starting to 'go out the building' to speak to users, explore problems and generate ideas to solve them. In addition, Paul started to run his user story mapping sessions with stakeholders based on Joanna’s user journeys.

FOLLOWING A LEAN UX APPROACH

Paul’s company is an advocate of Lean Start-up4, a way of building a start-up as part of an empiric, scientific process: stating a hypothesis about what might work with customers, developing it, measuring it and learning how to improve the product/market fit. ‘Lean’ is a term derived from lean production in manufacturing, and it essentially means avoiding any kind of waste. That’s why, just lately, Paul began applying Lean UX5 with Joanna: in other words, incorporating lean principles with UX.

Lean UX shifts the focus from merely delivering documents to better experiences, for example, avoiding deliverables like detailed wireframes and design specifications upfront in favour of doing ‘just enough’, to learn quickly how to adapt. For Joanna, it meant shifting work from in-depth user research and glossy, well thought-out wireframes, screens and journeys to lean-design studio paper and whiteboard sketching with the whole team, as well as frequent guerrilla user testing, taking over a new role as a design thinking facilitator to co-create with the whole team.

To reduce waste, Lean UX focuses on experiences 

instead  of  deliverables.  Designers  are  becoming 

design  thinking  facilitators  of  co-creation  on 

paper  and  whiteboard  instead  of  suppliers  of 

glossy, pixel-perfect design documentation.

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SERVICE DESIGN TO SCOPE AND STRATEGISE

Designing the user experience in a lean and agile manner is fine. But since Paul is responsible for a mobile app, he faces additional challenges. How does his product interact with his company’s other products, like the web interface or the tablet app? Which features on which devices make sense, and how are they connected to one other and to the backend? And how does all this work go hand in hand with marketing, sales, and customer service? That’s where Joanna brought service design into play.

Although service design has been around for more than a decade now, it found broader acceptance in software development only in recent years. Since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, the mobile Internet has been a main driver of this trend. Digital services via smartphones have become more ubiquitous in our daily lives than ever before. As a result, mobile devices are giving rise to service offerings that have not been attractive as a business before or that have even been unthinkable. This ubiquity has increased the complexity of software-based services enormously. If you think about software as a digitalised sequence of a broader service experience with both physical and digital touchpoints, the service design mindset helps to understand the interactions between users and software much better, since it goes beyond the limits of the screen’s pixel frame and describes the bigger picture of user needs, feelings and situational context in time and space.

Paul and Joanna applied service design by creating customer journeys that embed every physical and digital touchpoint. As a result, Paul and his team became very aware of how his mobile product contributes to the service experience as a whole. Joanna’s customer journey evolved into a ‘living’ service blueprint canvas in their office, visualising pain points in how the different digital products and business departments support the service experience. This helped Paul to keep the bigger context in mind while moving forward with his team.

For Paul, service design shifted UX to a new level, not only looking at screens, but at what is around and behind the device while it is being used, and what happens before, during and after it is used. His team

added some new functionality to the product that emerged from a better understanding of the user’s context, and it eliminated some feature creep, because they understood why it was not used.

SERVICE DESIGN GOES LEAN AND AGILE

Joanna and Paul introduced service design as a framework for product discovery and product-to-service alignment, adding more quality and effectiveness to the product teams. Each product team is staffed with UX designers now. Executed in a lean way, designers have become facilitators of co-creation and service design has become the third force in Paul’s company, along with business and product development. And now Joanna is involved in strategic discussions with the board. Just lately, they have been discussing renaming the UX function to service design. But that might take a little while yet … •

References1 Jeff Patton (2003). http://www.agileproductdesign.com/presentations/user_story_mapping/

2 Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. https://www.scrum.org/Scrum-Guide3 Garrett, Jesse James (2002, New Riders Publishing). The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web

4 Eric Ries (2011, Crown Business). The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

5 Jeff Gothelf (2013, O’Reilly). Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience

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In recent years, many software-driven 

organisations introduced a UX function 

to support their agile product develop-

ment teams. Service design adds a new 

strategic layer to UX, ensuring consis-

tency and a strategic fit. 

Design maturity of software-driven organisations

Product Development

MarketingSales

Customer Service

Service DesignCross-functional

Co-creation

E.g. service blueprint

Product Development

MarketingSales

Customer Service

Lean & Agile UXUX in dev team

Co-creation

E.g. paper prototypes

Product Development

MarketingSales

Customer Service

UX DesignUX team

Deliverables

E.g. wireframes

Product Development

MarketingSales

Customer Service

Visual DesignOne designer

Deliverables

E.g. graphics

Design resources

Customer-facing departments

Product development team

© JensOttoLange.de 2014

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Service  design  is  the  design  discipline  most  dependent  on 

true  collaboration  across  practice  lines.  Service  design  has 

three  collaborative  layers:  people,  activation  and  execution. 

Identifying  these  layers  can  help  define  the  underlying 

qualities of a service design engagement and allow for better 

communication of  the value of service design  to other stake-

holders. This article focuses on these three collaborative layers, 

concentrating  less  on  methods  and  processes  and  more  on 

integration  and  communication  around  those  layers.  Practi-

tioners and client organisations will find this layer model useful 

for planning and executing engagements.

People, Activation, Execution: The Layers of Service Design Perpectives on effective service design integration

Florian Vollmer is chief experience officer and a principal at InReality, an Atlanta-based customer experience strategy and design firm. Florian teaches service design and design management at Georgia Tech's Industrial Design programme, and frequently gives talks at other academic institutions, leading businesses and conferences. Florian holds a Masters of Industrial Design and has studied at various uni versities in Europe and the US. Service design is growing quickly in

key markets, with major business consultancies acquiring service design firms or building in-house capabilities. Despite being a major source of innovation in the European public sector and some areas of the private sector, service design is still frequently misunderstood by business stakeholders on both sides of the Atlantic: it faces either a semantic lack of understanding or is perceived as redundant to other creative functions. One example of this phenomenon lies in the fact that the North American business community very much recognises the value of a well-managed customer

experience function, but frequently fails to make the connection that service design is the creative discipline that will get them there.

This misunderstanding is problematic for the continued growth of a young discipline, because it is the non-pioneers who now most need to understand the value of service design as a consulting service or business function. The service design community needs to emphasise the systems focus of the practice: it is the unique point of differentiation. The layer model helps communicate this systems character of service design.

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blurring boundaries

THE PEOPLE LAYER

The most successful service businesses, such as Quicken Loans and Southwest Airlines in the U.S, fundamentally understand that robotic, impersonal ‘service by the book’ will always have an air of inauthenticity, even with the best training. Both direct and indirect stakeholders need to be believers in the reason behind, and the outcome of, a service design initiative. A service designer can have the greatest impact here, by creating this necessary alignment among stakeholders early on in the process or initiative. This invaluable stakeholder alignment is the people layer. Primary tools that can create this alignment include stakeholder relationship maps and co-creation processes.

For example, on a project focused on making internal innovation processes more effective, a service design team helped the head of innovation of a major hospitality chain work through a stakeholder and relationship map: truly working on identifying the inner workings of his organisation. The service design team took a couple of different organisational and process-oriented perspectives to this relationship map. When they shared the different models and associated pain-and-gain points with the client, the client understood the importance of bringing an extended set of stakeholders to the early stages of various innovation initiatives, an insight that drove the re-imagination of internal innovation processes.

In this people layer, a service design team acts as manager, facilitator and business consultant, and most likely touches organisational design, creating business value by promoting early alignment and engagement in the process and using methods like stakeholder summits and facilitated innovation workshops. It enables human-focused synthetic thinking, opening up new innovation pathways.

THE ACTIVATION LAYER

Service design is most effective when it functions as a catalyst for translating business strategy and human needs and desires into the design of a network of connected touchpoints. Systems and partners intersect at the activation layer, and analytical thinking matches solutions with the underlying business processes needed for execution. It is here that we can draw a clear line between the unique system perspective of service design and the core characteristics of adjacent disciplines:

• CX (customer-experience design and management) really focuses on just the customer interaction, whereas service design considers a wider net of related interactions of multiple stakeholders

• UX (user-experience design) has established itself as the discipline striving for simplicity and usability within specific digital touchpoints

• ID (industrial design) works on the physical object level

To clarify practice boundaries, service designers will always do well to highlight the systems elements of their discipline. Whether it is a customer journey canvas or a service blueprint, the systems dimension that is core

The Service Design Layer Model:  

The model helps communicate the impact of 

service design engagements on stakeholders, 

functions and business processes.

People Layer Synthetic Thinking

Analytical Thinking

Agile & Continouos

Activation Layer

Execution Layer

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to service design should always find its manifestation within those deliverables.

Another example: a U.S.-based kitchen and bathroom tap brand was in need of a differentiating retail sales associate (RSA) experience at the human level. From a strategic corporate level, it needed to open in a new retailer with more than 200 locations. When the service designers at InReality (full disclosure: I am the CXO and a Principal at InReality) took on these two challenges, they operated in the activation layer and created a new, RFID-driven customer experience that enabled new interactions between the customer, the RSA and a digital interface. This innovation brought the product into the desired new retail locations and created a better experience between RSAs and customers.

When operating in the activation layer, service designers fulfil functions of account management (managing expectations), systems thinking and system design. They bring value by finding unexpected sources of innovation through the combination of human and business needs.

THE EXECUTION LAYER

Rapid iteration has helped unleash a never-before-seen innovation culture in the software and app world.

Flexible technology platforms now enable this rapid iteration culture within service design implementations. The execution layer closes the loop between technology-driven rapid iteration and people-focused service delivery, which happens from the core of the organisation. As such, a service design team will have to stay very determined to maintain the integrity of an experience concept while navigating the business environment 1.

Service prototypes and simulations are a core component of any service design development process. The service design community has widely implemented agile concepts like ‘service in beta’. By executing agile project management principles with an extended set of shareholders, service designers can most successfully pierce through the ’service design grit’: the hard work of making a service innovation a reality. Working with customer service managers and other stakeholders, the delivery of a new and engaging service experience is the ultimate expression of creating value for an organisation.

As an example, when working to innovate a new in-store customer experience for a major international furniture retailer and manufacturer, InReality’s service design team moved quickly through the people and activation layer. The key deliverable in this case was one interactive, digitally-driven, physical touchpoint.

People Layer

Activation Layer

Execution Layer

The Service Design Layer Model,  

Adjacent Disciplines View: 

The layer model can be used  

to dynamically clarify, structure 

and plan collaboration with 

adjacent disciplines.

SDMulti-Stakeholder Systems  

Design and Execution

Service Management & Marketing

UXDigital 

Touchpoint Design

CXCustomer-Centric 

Ideation

DTStructured Innovation

ID/ VisCom

Touchpoint  Design

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blurring boundaries

Working on a transatlantic deployment of the touchpoint involved production vendors, technology partners, corporate executives, training teams, logistics teams and store-level management. Engaging holistically with all stakeholders early in the process cut down implementation time from months to weeks and ensured store-level success.

Work on the execution layer should be approached with lean project-management principles. Tools like epics, stories, a shared quality control responsibility and burndown charts help create shared ownership by all project participants. Only when a service design team stays deeply involved through this layer do they create true value for a client organisation. After the service is ‘birthed’, other stakeholders like business and service managers can slowly take over responsibility, allowing the service designer to refocus on the activation layer and measure ongoing success, briefing on iterations and the planning of new supporting services or touchpoints.

ONGOING EXECUTION

An equally important, but often overlooked, component of service design is the notion of ongoing service iterations after initial deployment. Really, this is the continuous aspect of a service design deployment. Ongoing execution

requires combining measurement with analysis and a committed service design team, as well as integration with business owners and service managers. In this deployment phase, a project manager trained in Agile and familiar with core service design and modern research tools is the lynchpin of a successful team. Ongoing execution requires the service design team to continuously jump back and forth between all three layers: the execution layer, the activation layer, and the people layer.

IN CONTEXT

Service designers align business and human-centred objectives and create the entire system necessary for a new or better service.

Communicating the value of this systems dimension from the core of the activation layer, the most impactful service design groups will integrate deeply with the people and the execution layers for enduring business success. •

References1 S. Diller, N. Shedroff, D. Rhea: “Making Meaning: How Successful Business Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences, New Riders, 2008, Pg. 122 f

People Layer

Activation Layer

Execution Layer

The Service Design Layer Model, 

Timeline View: At the beginning 

of a service design innovation 

process, the service designer 

needs to focus on all three layers. 

As the service matures, more and 

more responsibilities can be fully 

delegated to other stakeholders.

Stakeholder Responsibility

Service DesignerFocus

StakeholderResponsibility

Time >  Goal Setting Development Beta Iteration Deployment

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Service design is still a rather young discipline. As it matures, it 

evolves, diversifies and expands. In this article, we propose one 

possible  direction  this  expansion  can  take:  the  integration  of 

service design and brand communication. Looking closely, the 

two approaches are similar  in many ways. For example, both 

have a strong user orientation and both contribute to business 

value. Yet they differ strongly in the way they act upon the user: 

influencing actions versus influencing perceptions. Integrating 

the two perspectives might not only create a new field for both 

service designers and marketers, but might also create value 

for users and businesses at the same time. 

Integrating Brand and  Service DesignA unified approach to influencing actions and perceptions

Martin Jordan helps businesses and organisations to create better user, brand and service experiences. Currently, he works as a senior user experience designer for Nokia’s HERE unit and connects service innovators at Service Design Berlin.

Christian Vatter is a brand consultant and user psychologist on a mission to make companies more relevant for people. He is managing director of Rlevance, a marketing and innovation consultancy committed to brand growth and great customer experience.

SERVICE DESIGN: INFLUENCING ACTIONS

Service design is widely defined as a practice to create useful, usable and desirable services1. In the development of these services, a potential user’s perspective is adopted to research user needs. These needs are then best addressed in resulting offers that solve a specific problem or fulfil a certain task for the individual. At the same time, service design considers the business perspective, for example by including the provider and its employees in the co-creation of an offer. A service should be effective and efficient at the same time, for both the user and the service provider.

An important aspect of services is the interplay between user and provider: no service exists without a user’s action and the subsequent interaction of both sides.

BRAND AND COMMUNICATION PLANNING:

INFLUENCING PERCEPTIONS

Brand and communication planning shares much in common with service design. As a discipline it focuses on an understanding of consumer attitudes and behaviours towards commercial goods and services. Originally called account planning, the approach arose in the late 1960s in UK advertising agencies, out of a need to integrate the

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blurring boundaries

customer’s perspective into the process of advertising development2. Nowadays, so-called planners or strategists have a wider scope of work and can be found in agencies of all communication disciplines, from corporate design to brand development, from traditional to digital advertising. Brand and communication planning creates understanding by conducting qualitative or quantitative customer studies or using existing customer research data. It looks at the brand-customer relationship and its mechanics from a buying-centred (as opposed to usage-centred) perspective. It creates strategies of how to use messages and media efficiently and effectively. So, just like service design, brand and communication planning is user-centric and has the goal to create a desirable product for its users: the communication. However, it differs significantly, because its task is to create an image and, thus, a certain perception of a product, service or organisation. Brand and communication planning influences perception rather than altering reality, offering a perceived value instead of an experienced one.

AN INTEGRATIVE APPROACH

Because there are commonalities be-tween the two approaches, it seems fruitful to consider integration. Service design concerns itself with usefulness, us-ability and desirability and, in a business context, profitability and cost-efficiency, but often does this at an operational level. Brand communication, in turn, whether tactically or strategically, is mostly concerned with the promise and is concerned very little with its delivery,

leaving it somewhat unbalanced. How-ever, it does consider customer retention and long-term loyalty. Combining the two approaches could lead to brand com-munication/action that not only gives a promise, but also delivers on it. It could also lead to services that not only fulfil user needs, but that connect more easily with other touchpoints to tell a consistent story, be part of a coherent brand experi-ence and, thus, generate long-term value for the brand. As a consequence, service development would be deeply rooted in the brand strategy and be able to create highly coherent expressions through communication and appearance, as well as by behaviour. The combination would

Comparison of brand and communication planning and 

service design – levels and fields of work.

strategic level tactical level operational level

verbalbrandexpressions

infl

uenc

ing

perc

epti

ons

infl

uenc

ing

acti

ons

visualbrandexpressions

behaviouralbrandexpressions

ServiceDesign

Brand &Communication

Planning

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result in brand experiences that are in sync with brand messages.

ZAPPOS: DELIVERING WOW EXPERIENCES

The US online shoe and clothing shop Zappos operates in accordance with its core value of “delivering wow through ser-vice3.” It communicates this through TV commercials, for example, but delivers the brand promise on a regular basis through the actions of its service representatives, synchronising promise and experience across all important touchpoints. In one case, a customer who recently underwent medical treatment on her feet ordered six pairs of shoes to determine which ones would work with her condition. In a call with the customer, a Zappos representa-tive learned about her condition and sent a large bouquet of flowers, wishing her

well and hoping that she recovered from her treatments soon. The customer was also upgraded to Zappos VIP Member status4. While this appears to be an extraordinary example – a random act of kindness – it also seems to be a common practice for Zappos because there are many further cases documented in blogs, articles and books. The integration of ser-vice and communication works for Zappos as a closed loop. Zappos creates expecta-tions through advertising, fulfils them through service experiences and again in turn creates stories that are spread by people as word-of-mouth communication.

BENEFITS OF AN INTEGRATED BRAND AND

SERVICE DESIGN APPROACH

An evolution of service design towards a brand-and-communication perspective

Customer service centre at Zappos.

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blurring boundaries

would allow service designers to broaden their scope of work, collaborate with other business specialists and apply an enhanced working process. This would give service design a different impact, because it could acquire a new, more strategic role within the value chain. For services and customer interactions, this means that promises need to be translated into experiences that are in sync with other communicative brand expressions, but that are also aligned with other interaction patterns of the brand. In a previous article, we proposed a way to facilitate this translation by applying service design thinking in the definition of corporate behaviour from one-to-many to one-to-one interactions5.

On the other hand, for communication planners, the service design approach and its tools permit the stimulation of action and behaviour, rather than just thoughts and emotions. It puts the brand into the hands, not just the heads. It would consider the entire transaction, from lead generation to usage and, above all, it would create a useful, unique and dependably positive brand experience that is necessary to convert a prospect into a loyal customer. The joint approach truly balances both the business and user perspective. It allows the development of sustainable offerings that satisfy the user, contribute to the business and eventually create brand equity.

The first steps in this direction were already made with offerings that are, at the same time, tool as well as communication. For example: Fiat EcoDrive, KLM Meet & Seat and Tesco’s virtual subway store in South Korea. By bridging a whole range of domains –

like the discipline of planners and service designers, the physical and the digital world, business and user needs – they provide useful and, at the same time, advertising brand experiences. •

References1 Stickdorn, M. & Schneider, J. (2010). This is Service Design Thinking, p. 30ff. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.

2 Habberstad, H. (2000). The Anatomy of Account Planning. Retrieved August 21, 2014, from http://royalsocietyofaccountplanning.blogspot.de/2009/05/welcome-welcome-lets-start-with-anatomy.html.

3 Zappos (2008): Zappos Family Core Values. Retrieved August 20, 2014 from http://about.zappos.com/our-unique-culture/zappos-core-values/deliver-wow-through-service.

4 Conradt, S. (2012): 11 of the Best Customer Service Stories Ever. Retrieved August 20, 2014 from http://mentalfloss.com/article/30198/11-best-customer-service-stories-ever.

5 Jordan, M. & Vatter, C. (2013). ‘Corporate Service Design’ in Beyrow, M., Daldrop, N. und Kiedaisch, P. (Ed.), Corporate Identity und Corporate Design (p. 92-103). Ludwigsburg: avedition.

Tools and Methods Service design techniques, activities and deliverables

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Nicola Dunlop is a user experience analyst with User Vision, Edinburgh. She specialises in improving the customer experience in multiple scenarios with a developed interested in user behaviour research and interaction.

A diary study is a form of human behaviour research that relies

on users documenting personal experiences over a prolonged

period of time. Diary studies have been used in multiple

scenarios within service design and are typically known to

be physical toolkits. However, reaching for physical artefacts

such as a notebooks or disposable cameras in day-to-day life

has never been a natural human behaviour. This often results

in multiple usability issues associated with the physical diary.

Today, we are more inclined to express ourselves online via

various mobile applications such as Facebook and Twitter.

Therefore, the toolkit has now embraced these developments

by becoming mobile, providing a much more robust platform

to gather user insight. The following article will reflect on the

opportunities, challenges and benefits of applying this digital

research within service design research projects.

Mobile Diary StudiesCapturing in-the-moment experiences

In its mobile form, a diary study is a much more accessible platform for users to engage with. Around 71 percent of the population aged between eighteen and fifty-four within developed countries own a smart phone (Fig 1). In this group, approximately 93 percent of those aged between twenty-five and thirty-four have down loaded multiple apps to their devices.

This illustrates the extent to which users of all ages relate to mobile platforms,

particularly younger generations. The recording and sharing of our day-to-day activities via social networking apps is now seen as a natural behaviour and one that is now embedded into how we interact with the world. In some cases, this interaction has manifested itself in a certified addiction, with users becoming dependent on their mobiles for social contact and recognition. Bryan Burrough highlights the extent of this dependency

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tools & methods

within his novel iDisorder, stating that seventy percent of those who report heavy usage on mobile devices experience “phantom vibration syndrome”: the illusion that a phone has vibrated to notify of a status update or notification, when, in fact, it has not. This high depen-dency supports the application of using the mobile plat-form as a research tool. As an online ‘friend’, the count less social updates and notifications may pose nothing more than light reading to fill in the lonely gaps of day-to-day life, yet to researchers they are the missing puzzle pieces to learn how users think and interact with our world.

Mobile diary studies break down the barriers of communication between researcher and participant. Previously, with the physical toolkit, diary studies were issued and then returned as completed after a defined period of time. The lack of communication between

researcher and participant during this time was a known pain point, resulting in irrelevant information being posted back. With mobile diary studies, the researcher is able to view a live stream of posts and respond directly to participants with personal messages, ensuring the content is relevant to the study. Researchers are also able to prompt interaction and to ensure that the data has been recorded at the time of occurrence by sending personalised notifications or reminders to those who are lacking input. This not only keeps participants engaged in the study, but also ensures strong, valuable data. While it takes time to read and react to the multiple posts added each day, it is an endeavour that ensures a wealth of insight.

Where relevant, the researcher can act as a catalyst in stimulating discussions between participants. Similar to posts on Twitter or Facebook, participants are able to

Summary poster highlighting the advantages of mobile diary studies over traditional methods.

Mobile Diaries StudiesMultiple Advantages over Traditional Methods

Accessibility

Issues withTraditional Methods

Benefits ofMobile Studies

Benefits ofMobile Studies

Benefits ofMobile Studies

Benefits ofMobile Studies

Requires user to adopt new behaviours

Makes use of existing and

current behaviours

Issues withTraditional Methods

Often recorded retrospectively with

data being remembered inaccurately

Enables instant documentation ‘in the moment’

Issues withTraditional Methods

Often single media format

Multimedia platforms

Issues withTraditional Methods

Disconnected with the facilitator

Facilitator can react direct to participants Generates on online

community

Recall Richness Communication

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view and engage with each other’s posts, creating an online community for help, advice and social engagement.

With such close and constant access to customer behaviour, a project can seamlessly embed user insight throughout the design process. Mobile dairies support an agile approach (rather than a waterfall one), where fast iterations of products are generated based on the input of real users. Heightened productivity also occurs, because evidenced-based research is used to engage relevant stakeholders early and often within a project.

The pictures, voice recordings and videos are a true representation of the user and therefore easily enhance an otherwise impersonal customer journey map or persona, making out-comes compelling and fun to digest.

CHALLENGES

There is a range of mobile research apps currently on the market, making

it difficult to determine which one is best suited to a project. When debating such a decision, it is best to consider the aim of the study along with the user demographic.

Although smartphone usage is heavily embedded within today’s culture, it must not be assumed that the toolkit is appropriate for all user demographics. To ensure optimum results, the researcher must first be confident that targeted users are proficient in their use of smartphones, otherwise paper-based methods may be more appropriate.

In addition, the mobile application must be easy to use, providing a seamless user experience. If there is any doubt or confusion on the part of the participant as to how the app works, it will act as a barrier, discouraging user participation and feedback. Background research is recommended to ensure that the user experience around the app is smooth and intuitive.

Smartphone owners that have never downloaded an app by age groups (Developed countries)

Source: Deloitte Global Mobile Consumer Survey, Developed countries, May – July 2013

Weighted base: Smartphone owners (main phone): Belgium (690), Finland (467) ,France (969), Germany (997), Japan (603), Nehterlands (1136), Singapore (1632), South Korea (1587), Spain (1242), UK (2392), US (999)

8 %

18 – 24 25 – 34 55 – 44 45 – 54 55 – 64 65+

7 %

5 %

0 %

10 %

15 %

30 %

20 %

25 %

11 %

16 %

22 %

29 %

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tools & methods

SETTING UP AND MANAGING A STUDY

A diary study allows researchers to document related behaviours around the main task being researched, helping to form a more holistic understanding of the complete customer journey.

Therefore, any additional questions that may help in developing this insight should be identified before beginning the study. Questions should be framed in a way that affords users the flexibility to document behaviour in varying social contexts, ranging from the privacy of their living room to their local bus stop. By doing so, participants will be more inclined to document their experience as it happens, resulting in more authentic feedback.

From a researcher perspective, the participant feedback should be effectively managed to support an agile approach. As the study evolves over time and the posts increase, it becomes more of a challenge to quickly update and incorporate them into the project. This process can be helped by the ability to ‘tag’ or ‘flag’, allowing key insights to be categorised and highlighted.

CONCLUSION

Without a doubt, there are numerous benefits to adopting mobile diary studies when conducting remote

user research, however they do not come without their challenges. While there are many additional factors to manage from the researcher’s perspective within the mobile platform, the greater involvement facilitates better insight in the end. •

References · Deloitte, (2014) The smart phone generation age gap: Over 55? There is no

app for that, London · Chu, Sanna (2013) How Often Do You Check Your Phone? Locket App Data

Shows Users Unlock Smartphone 110 Times Per Day, iDigitaltimes.com Accessed August 2014

· Burrough, Bryan (2012) iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us, Palgrave Macmillan

Smartphone penetration in developed countries as of May – June 2013

Source: Deloitte Global Mobile Consumer Survey, Developed countries, May – July 2013

Weighted base: (Respondents from all age groups) Belgium (2000), Finland (1000), France (2000), Germany (2000), Japan (2000),Netherlands (2009), Singapore (2000), South Korea (2011), Spain (2000), UK (4020), US (999)

80 %

18 – 24 25 – 34 55 – 44 45 – 54 55 – 64 65+

79 %

0 %

20 %

80 %

40 %

60 %

70 %

57 %

43 %

71 % (18 – 54 average)

37 % (55+ average)

34 %

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Ricardo Mejia, PhD fellow at IDStudioLab in Delft University of Technology – TUDelft. He is strategic designer with experience as independent consultant, as advisor for the government, as director of R&D+i in the private sector and as researcher at different universities.

Jody Parra, Autonomous consultant. He is product/service designer with experience as independent consultant in innovation management for business and organisations through strategic design.

The National Design Program, NDP, as part of the Ministry of

Commerce, Industry and Tourism of Colombia, promotes “design

as an innovation driver for SMEs through the development of

projects, workshops and by providing information in this field,

within three strategic lines: knowledge transfer, promoting

successful cases, and public policies.”1 The Strategic PES tool

that is presented below was developed within the first line to

tackle design-driven innovation projects. It has been applied

in several workshops and subsequently as part of the Integral

Design Tutoring Project (See Platform, 2012).

Strategic PES: Product- Experience-ServiceA visual tool to support SMEs through service-dominant logic

SMEs AND INNOVATION: A PARTICULAR

APPROACH IS NEEDED

SMEs play a central role in the European economy. They are a major source of entrepreneurial skills, innovation and employment (European Commission, 2005). Despite its importance, the body of knowledge about innovation has been developed with large enterprises in mind. Moreover, design-driven innovation is con-sidered a privilege of the most advanced and specialised sectors of large enterprises. Thus, it is necessary to build specific tools and approaches that allow innovation and design a closer proximity to SMEs´ reality.

Comparative analyses between SMEs and large enterprises have been conducted by assuming they are opposite

in nature and by establishing polarities between them regarding their scale, maturity, complexity and capacity. How-ever, beyond these differences, all modern organisations face the same challenges of innovation, an ongoing dialectical ten-sion between two needs: exploiting, and exploring. Exploiting is finding a benefit in the present within a safety framework to "make money today" and exploring is looking for future opportunities within an uncertain context to “make money tomorrow” (Cornella, 2013). The way organisations resolve such tension, espe-cially regarding their knowledge, charac-terises their potential to innovate.

On the one hand, there are ‘diver-gent’ organisations: those that separate

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exploitation and exploration as independent units, and that provide them with specific resources and depth of expertise, seeking to reduce and isolate risk and allowing them to use innovation as a function: ‘to innovate’.

On the other hand, there are "convergent" organisations, where exploitation and exploration are mixed, integrated and developed across the board of the organisation. Since they share the same resources, these are mobilised in an emerging and organic way to take advantage of opportunities. These organisations, either by vocation or necessity, take innovation as an attitude and culture: "to be innovative".

THE INNOVATIVE SMEs: A TACTICAL MODEL

Those SMEs with specific conditions that decide to face the innovation challenge are often structured as convergent organisations: ’innovative organisations’.

From different perspectives, we notice an emphasis on people with four groups of specific interests: markets, leaders, teams and competitors. Market empathy, leader vision, team creativity and competitor monitoring are the approaches of innovative SMEs.

This characterisation allowed us to establish an analytic quadrant on which to build four basic content blocks to manage the organisational strategic reflection: why (values underlying the organisation); whom (stake-holders’ value ecosystems within the organisation); how (knowledge, resources and skills to create values) and what (supply structure).

We found out that although SMEs are character-ised as having a flatter structure than large enterprises, they keep the same decision levels (strategic, tactical and operational). Moreover, they focus on the tactical level, which ensures agility and flexibility, to maintain prox-imity and connection to the market and to connect the entire organisation.

A VISUAL METAPHOR: THE FISH AND ITS ECOSYSTEM

We use the metaphor of a living being – a fish – whose goal it is to move forward and interact with its stake holders within a specific context (ecosystem), to communicate in a meaningful way the idea of ’innovative organisation’. This metaphor facilitates a strategic con ver sation between designers and entrepreneurs and allows the measurement of areas of reflection in a visual way.

The main conceptual strength of the fish is the duality between head and tail. The head represents the sense of purpose that leads the strategic direction. The tail acts as a steering wheel that drives the enterprise according to the market forces.

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An enterprise is not only the organisation itself, but also the set of actions it undertakes within a specific context. It is a contextual entity and thus defines its framework and time-based courses of action to achieve its objectives. For this reason, the metaphor is extended from the fish to the ‘ecosystem’ as a contextual representation within which other areas of strategic reflection appear.

The main objective of strategic planning is to be understood not as something absolute, but as something relative to time and context. This is achieved by identifying its boundaries (shape and size of the opportunity territory boundaries), routes, pace and destination (possible future scenarios), by viewing these decisions unfolding in time and by establishing their implications.

STRATEGIC PES, A VISUAL TOOL AND PLATFORM TO DRIVE

INNOVATION THROUGH DESIGN

Strategic PES stands for Product Experience Service. In Latin America PES is pronounced the same way as pez which means ‘fish’. It is a visual tool and platform to visualise, analyse, diagnose and plan enterprise projects, together with the enterprise as a whole. It uses the ‘fish’ and ‘ecosystem’ model to connect different approaches and ways of design, which, in turn, allows the enterprise to create, offer, deliver, capture and communicate value in a relevant, meaningful and consistent way.

It is divided into the following parts:

THE HEAD: THE BRAND

The brand is understood as a tool to connect the values, mission and vision of the company, installed as a driving force for the future. Its challenge is to be a sense-making lens that yields coherence between the projected value (identity) and the perceived value (image) as well as between their present values (mission) and future values (vision) (Roscam, 2013).

THE TAIL: THE USER

Design approaches the customer as a user rather than as a consumer and creates both with them and for them. It seeks to understand the behaviour of the value exchange (interaction) between user and organisation throughout a cycle, in which many stakeholders must also be satisfied. The main challenge of the tail is to map stakeholders, flows and exchanges within the ecosystem and to identify nodes that allow control and balance.

THE BODY: THE EXPERIENCE

Service-dominant logic proposes a line of reasoning where any sort of enterprise is perceived as a service enterprise. It is argued that there are no product enterprises offering goods or services, only service enterprises that (a) offer services, directly or (b) offer services, indirectly, by using products as a means to provide services (Valgo and Lusch 2014).

Service is understood as the basis of the exchange value, as an interaction happening at a specific time and with a given duration that allows access to a benefit. Understanding the experience on a tactical level allows it to articulate, on the one hand, the value delivery at an

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operational level by means of products and/or services. And on the other hand, it also articulates the value capture at a strategic level through business models. The main challenge of the fish body is to shape the journey, and coordinate the ecosystem’s interactions in order to deliver a solid, seamless, and meaningful experience through it.

THE STRATEGIC PES DESCRIBES AN INNOVATIVE ENTERPRISE AS

A BRAND-LED, USER-DRIVEN AND EXPERIENCE-ORCHESTRATED

ORGANISATION

By deploying the Strategic PES and the ecosystem we could visualise a time-based strategic relationship between the whole and the parts and how it can be addressed to chart the roadmap.

The strategic PES works in the following way:

1. Discovering the value of the users and the brand essence and, from there on, defining boundaries and destinations.

2. Building a bridge between brand and users by means of this experience and thus being able to specify products, services and business models.

3. Unfolding decisions over time to establish gaps and inconsistencies with a view to setting further opportunities.

4. Tracing possible strategic paths to establish various journeys in order to reach a clear goal.

The Strategic PES acts as a tool or as a platform, depending on the state of progress of the project. First of all as a business diagnostic tool to evaluate the company as a whole, discovering relationships between stakeholders. Secondly as a platform to design paths and

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to plan a strategic set of actions in the short-, medium-, or long-term. This strategic plan is set up in accordance with the gaps, inconsistencies and findings that have been found during the analysis.

The ‘gap’ is understood as an empty space in the organisation, for example something unresolved,. An

‘inconsistency’ is a non-strategic oriented relationship between some of the components of the organisation, for instance a product in the portfolio that does not represent the value of the brand. The ‘finding’ is an opportunity of intervention that could build bridges between gaps and inconsistencies and align them strategically through the service-dominant logic.

OBSTETRICIA Y GINECOLOGÍA LTDA: A CASE STUDY

O&G Ltda. is a medium-sized organisation located in Bogotá that provides assistance in different subspecialties of gynaecology and obstetrics. Relying on the best human talent, it is an important name at a national level: the firm has been a technology leader for years. It claims that, in 2015, it will be a company that will have increased its own infrastructure, will be recognised in the area for the quality of its services that will make it a centre of excellence on an international level in providing specialised medical services, clinical laboratory services and teaching and research.

The company took part in the design tutoring project with the intention of gaining insights regarding a comprehensive service based on a new experience for pregnancy check-ups (ultrasound exams).

A set of four-hour-long workshops were organised with the board of the company in order to apply the Strategic PES and analyse its findings. The team found a well-structured company with a high level of expertise that desired to know more about its customers and intended to establish a more empathic relationship with them. An explicit strategic plan and a full set of values were already defined, along with a well-balanced portfolio of services, and supported by strong internal capabilities.

As a result of several interviews, observations and customer journeys, the patient’s family was defined

as an extended customer instead of focusing just on the pregnant patient herself. Different personas were created in order to visualise the needs, expectations and aspirations of each family member regarding the ultrasound exam.

A comprehensive blueprint of the service, including several definitions of the most important touchpoints, was the main deliverable at the tactical level. Some general suggestions about the company’s long-term vision and the definition of design requirements for the interior design of the new offices were the deliverables of the strategic and operational levels, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS, FINDINGS AND CHALLENGES

Since 2011, different versions of the Strategic PES have been developed. After their intensive application as a tool in 79 Design and Innovation Workshops for Business Competitiveness carried out for 4123 business people, and their trial in the Integral design tutoring project with com-panies like O&G Ltda, their relevance for SMEs is evident, especially in three different and complementary levels.

First of all, as a tool to give support and facilitate the knowledge transfer process about design and innovation. Because of the lack of knowledge about these topics within SMEs, one of the most important challenges in an innovation project is to set up an explicit common language. The Strategic PES helps defining and placing into the right position the most important elements of the value proposition.

As a visual approach, the tool gives the business person the possibility of having an overview of the company and to understand the complexity of their business and its relationships with stakeholders.

SMEs are more focused on immediate gratification than on long-term fulfilment, focusing on the present and trying to meet their social obligations. This sort of short-term orientation is tackled by the tool acting as a metaphor, bringing the possibility of envisioning a long-term strategy focusing on the future, “willing to delay short-term material or social success or even short-term emotional gratification in order to prepare for the future.”2 At the end of the exercise, the business

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people were aware of their company in a more holistic and empathic way.

For O&G Ltda. in particular, the tool was important in order to discover and exploit new possibilities in its portfolio of services, and to improve the new service as part of its business strategy. This sort of unified vision is important in order to reinforce the value creation platform of this type of enterprise.

The authors will develop a more structured platform that surrounds the tool and give it more support in order to introduce SMEs to service-dominant logic. •

References1 Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism of Colombia, http://www.mipymes.gov.co/publicaciones.php?id=935

2 Long-Term Orientation vs. Short-Term Orientation: Hofstede's Definition · Cornella, A. (2013) Cómo innovan los mejores. Ideas x Valor = Resultados.

Barcelona: Libros Infonomia. · European Community (2005). The New SME Definition, User Guide and

Model Declaration. Enterprise and Industry Publications. European Community. Retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/sme/files/sme_definition/sme_user_guide_en.pdf

· European Union. (2012, January 1). Sharing Experience Europe Policy Innovation Design. SEE Platform Bulletin.

· Lush, R and Vargo, S. (2014) Service Dominant Logic. Premises Perspectives Possibilities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

· Roscam, E. (2013) ‘Brand-Driven Innovation’ in Advanced design methods for successful innovation. Lausanne, Switzerland: Ava academics.

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She looks at me, emotionless, and flatly says, “Be well.”

These are strange parting words from an employee

man ning the register at a busy New York City pharmacy.

I watch to see how every person leaving the check-out

counter is treated with the same flat send-off. Obviously

it is a script that every employee is mandated to recite

as customers leave: a script designed by the chain of

pharmacies as a reminder to customers (and staff) of

the company’s ‘wellness’ brand identity. However, this

element of service fails to take into account the person

reciting the script and their emotional state while

delivering it. This is a common oversight when designing

services.

Labour Centered DesignDesign for frontline service workers as 'user'

Emotional dissonance is caused by the disconnect between emotions experienced by an employee and the customer’s emotional reaction desired by an employer. The emotional dissonance with which the line ‘be well’ is delivered becomes almost comical or sadly ironic. The employee herself seems almost unwell as she delivers it. Suppressing one’s own emotions in order to perform a job is referred to as emotional labour. The excess of

emotional labour linked to emotional dissonance has a range of negative psychological outcomes 1.  

I understand all too well the emotional labour that comes with service work. I have spent over ten years working in the service and hospitality industry, putting myself through college and, recently, graduate school, where I used my experience in service to inform my master’s thesis in transdisciplinary design at Parsons the New School

for Design. My thesis, entitled Labor Centered Design, reframed designing for services to include the habits, motivations and emotional state of the person providing the service. It explored the development of new tools, methodologies and lenses to approaching service design from the perspective of the labourer. I tested my theories in the complex system of incentivising service through tipping in American restaurants.

From personal observations and readings, I understood that service staff in restaurants encounter and react to a range of emotions within the work of a single day and that these emotional ranges are suppressed in order to do their job. My first investigation was to create server journey maps that mapped out the flux of emotions by giving participants each a set of tables that ranged in difficulty and asking them to map their emotional reaction to each table. I wanted to identify the emotional labour and variations of emotional reactions that occur throughout a typical night of service. The journey maps were inspired by current service design tools that map out the habits and emotions of the end user in a system.

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tools & methods

One of the insights from this research is that there is an extreme difference in emotions experienced by the server, from table to table. This often happens because of things that are largely outside the server’s control (e.g. the kitchen never receives the order from the server because of a technological error). Through this mapping exercise, I was able to identify common pitfalls in communication, technological errors and mishaps that cause unnec-essary tension between customer and employee. These are the spaces in which design could intervene to aid the server and positively affect customer experience.

The image is an example of emotional labour mapping conducted with service staff, highlighting the variety of emotions that occur when breakdowns in technology impact their interactions with customers.

There are several important economic impacts of emotional labour, including high turnover rate and poor customer retention due to bad service. These are common problems that affect all service industries. In my own history in the restaurant industry, I saw waiting staff bounce from restaurant to restaurant. The role requires a

high level of emotional labour with little reward, resulting in a scenario which offers very little variation and deflates the employees. Employees in the service industry face an inhospitable work environment, and this results in high turnover, low loyalty and high levels of burnout. I witnessed people routinely not showing up for work and walking out on a job in the middle of a shift.  

In her article on service infrastructure, ‘Servicescapes’, Mary Jo Bitner explores how designing for infrastructure can greatly impact the person working in the service industry: “Managers continually plan, build, change, and control an organisation’s physical surroundings, but frequently the impact of a specific design or design change on ultimate users of the facility is not fully understood2.” The concept of servicescapes should encompass not only the spatial environment but relational and emotional factors:

servicescapes should be expanded to include those things that directly impact the labourer, such as relationships, emotional dissonance and emotional labour. As a service worker and designer, I see huge potential in designing for emotional labour and relationships, which would have broad-ranging impact on a growing sector of our economy. •

References1 Kiely, S. (2008, Spring). Emotional Labour: A Significant Interpersonal Stressor. Australian Psychological Society. 30(2), 16-17.

2 Bitner, M. (1992) Servicescape: The Impact of Physical Surroundings on Customer and Employees. The Journal of Marketing, 56,(2), 57-71.

Siri Betts-Sonstegard is a freelance innavation consul-tant and designer currently working at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She is a guest lecturer at Parsons

the New School for Design where she lectures on designing for labour.

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Service design is commonly perceived as service interfaces

designed for intangible products that are, from the customer’s

point of view, useful, profitable and desirable, while they are

effective, efficient and different for the provider. service design

relates both to end users outside an organisation, as well

as the internal stakeholders – particularly employees – and

organisational structures. An example of how service design

can be applied within a company can be found at OJ Electronics,

a Danish manufacturer of electronic heating and ventilation

systems. During a one-day workshop run by designers, the

organisation was taught how to create better structures for

innovative thinking.

Consulting with Designers Created New Organisational EnergyHow service design can also be about self-service

“WE WANT INNOVATION”

OJ Electronics employs more than 150 people in its Danish headquarters and across subsidiaries in the UK, US and Poland. The company has a long tradition of technology-driven innovation but, over the past few years, a strategic desire to work more efficiently with user-focused innovation has grown within the company. In order to do so, they needed tools to make the access to the customer insights smooth and easy to apply. The problem was that they had no idea how to go about creating such a cultural change within the company.

Through local networking, collaboration began with the nearby Kolding Design School. Besides nurturing future design talents, the school has a special unit of design consultants, named D2i – Design to innovate, that helps local Danish companies and organisations develop and implement design strategies for better and more impactful services.

At first, OJ Electronics had an out-of-date perception of the designers’ abilities. They planned to build a special meeting room, dedicated to creativity, and expected D2i would help with the more aesthetic aspects, such as decorating

Karsten Bech is project manager at D2i – Design to innovate – at Kolding Design School. He specialises in design and creative skills as an innovation driver in small and medium-sized enterprises.

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the room and facilitating some innovation processes. But, at the initial meeting, the company were presented with an extended vision of what the design team could offer.

“Service design only has a true value if it can be implemented across professional platforms. This again is only possible if there is a ’design-culture’ within the organisation. Providing companies and organisations with a hands-on understanding of design thinking is thus the first step of any successful service design project,” explains Kim

At the end, the participants

design the user journey using

LEGO.

Aagaard Holm, a design consultant at D2i, who was in charge of the project with OJ Electronics.

“We wanted to introduce the company to an extended understanding of design: that design is not just about concepts and styling, but can also be applied to designing services and strategies,” he says.

In order to challenge the perception of design being purely about aesthetics, D2i has developed a one-day workshop named Design Consultations, and this approach was used with OJ Electronics.

education & research

90 touchpoint 6-3

GETTING MORE THAN EXPECTED

“We were in the process of looking at tools to optimise our product development.” Mette Munk, Head of Product Management & Marketing at OJ Electronics recalls.

“Likewise, we wanted to create a stronger ‘organisational energy’ so we, as a company could get more and better ideas for innovation. We wanted the different departments to be better to exchange and co-create. We expected the designers would provide us with creative tools, but we got so much more from them: we learned how to redesign our internal processes.”

This added value becomes evident when one looks at the approach that was taken. The first consultation took place at OJ Electronics and no fewer than twelve people participated, from management, marketing, product and R&D departments. Following a prepared agenda, they spent seven hours exploring different design disciplines such as symbol drawing, cultural probes, persona creation, idea generation, mock-up and prototyping and storyboard creation.

Kim Aagaard Holm, who moderated the workshop, says:

“Beforehand, OJ Electronics had this idea of establishing an ’innovation room’ at their headquarters. But innovation [does not just emerge] from a room. Even the best and most comfortable physical conditions do not in, [themselves], give birth to new ideas and innovation, if the company culture does not follow. We, therefore, wanted them to rethink their structures so they could start ’playing seriously’, with a true, constant desire to innovate at all levels of the company. Therefore, the entire consultation was focused on how to improve daily processes and activities that could be used and shared across functionalities and [the] hierarchy within OJ Electronics.” He also explains that the design consultation had the effect of creating a strong sense of ownership over methods, allowing OJ Electronics to continue with the design thinking approach, after the workshop had ended.

NEW PROCESSES UP AND RUNNING

Since then, OJ Electronics have begun using tools that were introduced to them. As Mette Munk says: ”We took the methods that seemed the most easy to adapt to

Opening tools

Closing tools

GOALPreferred future

STARTCurrent situation

D2i’s structured design process

helps to guide the companies in

using the design tools on their

own.

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Design process tools for working with design-driven innovation

in SMEs.

our current work processes and created a series of tools based on these: idea generation, personas and storyboards. We made large prints which can be put up in any of our meeting rooms, and we have made a small leaflet with ’recipes’, explaining how to use these tools, including how to work [in a very structured manner] with design tools and methods. It has truly improved our innovation processes, because we now are able to work with design methods and creative input across all disciplines. Even our technical engineers – whom you might suspect would be reluctant to adopt

such playful, creative approaches – have received the new processes very well. It was almost like our organisation was craving this kind of input, and we already have two real development projects in our pipeline that emanate directly from this new way of working within our company.”

Back at the Kolding School of Design, Kim Aagaard Holm applauds the cultural change the company has achieved: “This is what the design consultations are all about: introducing tools and methods for better services, whether it’s at an internal or external level. And, not least of all, introducing new ways of

thinking. This reduces the corporate fear of doing things a little differently [to] what is advised in theory books on business strategy. We want to help the companies help themselves to use design thinking as a driver for growth and innovation.”

ABOUT THE DESIGN CONSULTATIONS

Since the design consultations began in March 2011, the design consult-ants at D2i have helped more than 100 Danish companies to reorganise their ways of thinking and doing, as well as changing how they see their customers and their business. The range of companies is wide: public as well as private, from school boards to reptile zoos to airline companies. All participants were surprised when discovering the value of the design processes and in putting themselves in the customer’s or the user’s place. As a result, the con-sultations make companies realise the economic potential of employ-ing design at a strategic level. •

education & research

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In this issue’s profile, Touchpoint editor Jesse Grimes speaks

with Lia Patrício, Assistant Professor at the University of Porto.

She is one of the leading members of the Marie Curie Service

Design for Innovation - Innovative Training Network (SDIN-

ITN), which falls under the European Commission’s Horizon

2020 framework.

Interview: Lia Patrício

I've recently heard that you've been successful in securing funding from the European Commission for a

"Service Design for Innovation" project to be carried out by your university and eight other partners. Can you share some more information about this training program?

Indeed, the Marie Curie Service Design for Innovation Innovative Training Network (SDIN-ITN) was recently accepted for funding within the Horizon 2020 framework. SDIN aims to fully leverage service design creative power to foster innovation. As you know,

Lia Patrício is assistant professor at the University Porto. Her research interests are service design for the customer experience and for complex service systems and value networks. She has coordinated several service design projects, such as the design of the Portuguese Electronic Health Record, and is the coordinator of the Marie-Curie Innovative Training Network entitle Service Design for Innovation, starting in January 2015 for four years.

service design is a growing academic and professional field with great potential to foster service innovation. However, service design and service innovation frameworks are still dispersed, and better integration and systematisation is needed for widespread usage across organisations.

SDIN is a research training pro-gramme that integrates service design and service innovation in a multidiscipli-nary approach. The SDIN network will specifically address the development of service design for innovation methods and tools, the design for increased stake-

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profiles

holder participation in value co-creation and the design of complex service systems and value networks.

The SDIN network involves nine partners and will start on January 1st, 2015 and will run for four years. On the academic side, the network involves six pioneering universities in service design and innovation: Porto (coordinating university), Cologne, Karlstad, Lancaster, Linköping and Maastricht. On the non-academic side, the project will involve three innovative organisations: County Council of Värmland (public services), EDP Comercial (energy utilities), and IBM (ICT). Each partner will host an early stage researcher (ESR). The nine ESRs will have the opportunity to conduct research in both academic and non-academic environments, and will take advantage of the diverse set of competences of the network partners. This will ensure both academic excellence and managerial relevance of project results.

For service design practitioners and the non-academic members of the Service Design Network, the world of academia can feel somewhat distant from their day-to-day work in the field. This training programme sounds like it will directly impact the commercial practice of service design and bring innovation into organisations throughout Europe. The grant itself is also for a significant amount of money in total: €2.3 million euros. What do you envisage as the ideal outcome once the project is complete?

The amount is a significant invest-ment in the service design and innovation

area. The core of the project is the devel-opment of an innovative training program involving the individual PhD interdisci-plinary projects with strong involvement of non–academic partners. The network will also create a new set of courses in the SDIN area, new workshops, conferences and dissemination events open to the pub-lic, which will hopefully build the basis for the development of a European-wide doctoral programme in the area.

All researchers will spend at least ten months in the non-academic sector. The research projects will have a direct impact on the creation of innovative services, or the application of service design and innovation methods and tools to real-world situations. Research projects cover a diverse set of areas, such as customer involvement in healthcare, service ecosystems in the utilities sector, or innovative services based on wearable technologies. This strong involvement of the non-academic sector ensures that both the training and the research results have strong impact on both academic programs and organisational practices.

The network will help organisations tackle the increasing complexity of their environment through the human-centred, systemic and creative approach of service design. It will also systematise and evolve service design methods, so they can be more easily applied by organisations. To this end, the results will be shared with the community through open activities and conferences and the development of a service design for innovation toolbox. The objective is to share the results with the service design and innovation community at large, in order to produce

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spillover effects beyond the partners of the network.

For those practitioners that have had very little contact with the academic world of service design, what do you recommend they do in order to benefit from (and support) the work that is being done in design schools and universities such as yours? What can be done to bridge these worlds so that they mutually benefit each other?

In the research projects I have been involved in, we have always worked with companies (retail, banking, ICT), or governmental organisations (e.g. the Portuguese Ministry of Health). My experience is that companies are sceptical at first. Service design is still a new field and the intangibility of the service process is still challenging.

In the first meetings, managers frequently ask: “What are the deliverables, the outcomes of the project?” But once managers get involved in the project, they start recognising the creative power of service design with its visualisation tools and its human-centred, systemic approach.

I believe bridging the two worlds requires both academics and practitioners to be open and willing to understand, assimilate and answer each others’ concerns and needs. Both sides have much to learn and gain from this mutual co-operation, but they need to overcome the initial barriers. Projects like SDIN are excellent opportunities to bridge this gap and provide the experience and tools needed to overcome early misalignments of communication and expectations. All partners are very

enthusiastic with the SDIN network and hope it will boost the role of service design in innovation, both in academia and in organisational practices.

The theme of this issue of Touchpoint is ’Blurring Boundaries’. We wanted to further explore the disciplines that share some qualities with service design and to hear how their intersections might inspire our readers. Your roots are in service science and service engineering, and this SDIN project shows that you are now deeply involved in service design. What triggered this shift in your interests?

My background is in business, but I did my PhD in industrial engineering and management, related to the design of technology-enabled services. Through that experience, I came into contact with researchers from management, engineering and design. My first approach to service design built upon service management, such as blueprinting and interaction design, the latter addressing the technology components of service interactions. After my PhD, I worked in several service design projects with a multidisciplinary set of researchers – from design, management, psychology and engineering – and became increasingly interested in service design approaches that leverage the human-centred, creative and iterative design thinking process while integrating multidisciplinary perspectives from service science, management, design and engineering. I have also been involved in the creation of a masters degree in service engineering and management at

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profiles

the University of Porto, where I have been teaching new service development and design since 2008.

Service design provides a power-ful approach to creating new service futures, but designing and implement-ing new services requires the work of multidisciplinary teams and the involve-ment of different organisational areas. The concepts created through service design then need to be implemented by service managers, marketeers, software engineers and other members of the organisation. Service design has evolved as a multidisciplinary field, but I believe further work is needed to incorporate these multiple perspectives into the design process and also to communi-cate with other areas for service design implementation. In this regard, the strong visual and modelling methods and tools used by service design can provide valuable help in this process. •

touchpoint 6-396 test

The Service Design Gourmet project was initiated by

the Service Science Society of Taiwan in 2013. Gourmet

relates to the ease of involvement and the convenience

in getting what you like: just like cooking your favourite

meal. We started the platform with the theme of 'new

opportunities and challenges in service design'.

Service Design GourmetMade by every participant

Open space technology was used as a main process to motivate participants to engage. No agenda was set before we opened the space. This way we invited participants to raise their own issues on the theme. The way the workshop was conducted led to interesting changes in the participants’ behaviours. Following the traditional way of hosting an event, the host always has some idea of how it will be structured. When people have to put their own issues on a wall and others can see them, they switch their role from being mere participants of the event to being the host of the event.

The participants in Service Design Gourmet from Taipei were focused on questions such as ‘What is service design?’ and ‘How do we use service design?’ They put great efforts on the capability of service design. The group from Tainan

raised issues like 'I want to use ser-vice design to improve Tainan!’ and ‘What is the relationship between an organic farm and its customers?’ They had great interest in the appli-cation of service design to their daily life. The pooling of different imagina-tions, expectations, opinions, and questions helped us to define service design in Taiwan and what service design means to our people.

In 2014, Service Design Gour-met collaborated with Service Design Network and organised a series of unForums. SDGC13 videos with Chinese subtitles let participants quickly get an impression of it. The first unForum had 'Transformation' as its theme, with about fifty partici-pants. Taiwan’s transformation from goods-dominant to service-dominant thinking is a challenge for the coun-try. The participants’ main concerns were ‘How can we bring service

design thinking into student’s col-laboration?’, ‘How can we help rural areas facing transformation ?’, ‘How can we gain confidence between col-laborators?’ and ‘How can we get rid of the ODM mindset?’

The value that we focus on is the development of service design by local practitioners. Service is closely connected to culture. Even in Taiwan, there are differences in perspectives in term of service (eg. between Taipei and Tainan). •

Arthur Yeh is director at Taiwan’s Service Science Society, facilitating interdisciplinary teams to work better on service innovation and service design. He focuses on creating value in co-creation service systems in social and business environments. He also runs the training workshop for both public and private organisations to spread the impact of service design.

touchpoint 6-3 97

inside sdn

On 14th September 2014, the SDN Japan

Chapter held the second National Service Design

Conference in Japan at the Hiyoshi campus of Keio

University, close to central Tokyo. One hundred

and fifty people from businesses, agencies and

academia participated, and tickets were sold out.

The Second Service Design Japan Conference 2014

From the business side, there were not only digital service providers, but also product manufacturers such as car manufacturers and audio-visual product manufacturers. The conference was held jointly with the International Conference on Serviceology (ICServ2014) of the Society for Serviceology.

Prof. Birgit Mager, president of Service Design Network, pre-sented the keynote to the audience. Then, Mr. Takemoto from Kokuyo Furniture Co. Ltd., a large furniture manufacturer in Japan, spoke about a collaboration space that they had produced. He mentioned that they created this space as a prototype for their new business and they were in the process of evaluating it. Mr. Tanaka, design lead of IDEO Tokyo, introduced the projects SF72, IDEO.ORG, and OpenIDEO. He illustrated IDEO's various faces. Ms. Gibo, who

is the managing director of Noom Japan, gave the third speech. Noom produces smartphone applications for those on a diet. During their customer research they found out how difficult it is for people to stick to their diet. So they started to design an application to help support people. The final speaker was Mr. Yama-guchi, the president of Insightforce Inc., a brand consulting agency. He explained how to construct a brand strategy from a customer experience viewpoint. In Japan, a CEO's brand strategy is more understandable than service design strategy, even though both of them mean similar things, so his story was useful for the audience.

During the panel discussion, moderated by Mr. Hironori Iwasa (a representative of SDN Japan Chap-ter), Mr. Iwasa asked the speakers about running projects, how to develop business models from scratch

and how much involvement and responsibility to business is required when participating in projects.

We considered that not only the success stories but also their failures and conflicts would be useful for the audience. At the afterparty, the participants could meet and exchange experiences. •

Atsushi Hasegawa, Ph.D. is an information architect, president of Concent, and the representative of the SDN Japan Chapter. He is also a board director of Human Centred Design Organisation Japan, an author and a lecturer at several universities. Through his activities, he is a UX leader in Japan.

The panel discussion by presenters.

Japan

buy touchpoint online!

Order online at www.service-design-network.org/read/touchpoint-shop

Touchpoint, the SDN Service Design Journal,

was launched in May 2009 and is the f irst

journal on service design worldwide. Each issue

focuses on one topic and features news and

trends, interviews, insightful discussions and

case studies. Printed issues of Touchpoint can

be purchased on the SDN website.

www.service-design-network.org

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May 2011

Learning, Changing, Growing

• Being Led or Finding the Way?Mary Cook and Joseph Harrington

• Better Services for the PeopleSylvia Harris and Chelsea Mauldin

• Using Service Design Education to Design University ServicesJürgen Faust

0101

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May 2013

Deep Dive: Collecting Relevant Insights

The Service Design PromiseBy Ben Reason

Purpose-Driven Research as Key to Successful Service DesignBy Stefan Moritz and Marcus Gabrielsson

When Design and Market Researchers Join ForcesBy Remko van der Lugt and Gerrita van der Veen

Organisational Change

• Overcomingthe‘Monkeysphere’ChallengeJesseGrimesandMarkAlexanderFonds

• InnovatinginHealthCare–anEnvironmentAdversetoChangeFrancescaDickson,EmilyFriedman,LornaRoss

• ServiceTransformation:ServiceDesignonSteroidsMelvinBrandFlu

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September 2011v o l u m e 3 | n o . 3 | 1 2 , 8 0 e u r o

January 2012

Service Design Creates Break­through Cultural Change in the Brazilian Financial IndustryBy Tennyson Pinheiro, Luis Alt and Jose Mello

Learning the Language of Finance Gives Your Ideas the Best Chance of SuccessBy Jürgen Tanghe

Designing Human RightsBy Zack Brisson and Panthea Lee

From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet

v o l u m e 5 | n o . 3 | 1 5 , 8 0 e u r o

January 2014

Beyond Necessity, the Beauty of Service

Discovering the Beautiful in ‘Service as Expression’by Kipum Lee

Aesthetics, Provocation, and the Social Enterpriseby Terri Block, Elsa Wong, Spencer Beacock

True Beautyby J. Paul Neeley

Business Impact of Service Design

• ServiceDesign–TheBottomLineLavransLøvlieandBenReason

• HowHumanIsYourBusiness?SteveLee

• StuckinaPriceWar?UseServiceDesigntoChangetheGameinB2BRelations.LotteChristiansen,RikkeBEKnutzen,SørenBolvigPoulsen

v o l u m e 2 | n o . 2 | 1 2 , 8 0 e u r o

September 2010

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Service Design and Behavioural Change

• Designingmotivationormotivatingdesign?ExploringServiceDesign,motivationandbehaviouralchangeFergusBissetandDanLockton

• DesignandbehaviourincomplexB2BserviceengagementsBenShawandMelissaCefkin

• ChargingUp:energyusageinhouseholdsaroundtheworldGekevanDijk

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May 2010

s e r v i c e d e s i g n n e t w o r ktouchpoint | the journal of service des ign � 1

FirstIssue

Touchpointt h e j o u r n a l o f s e r v i c e d e s i g n

What is Service Design?

• DutchDesign:TimeforaNewDefinitionMarcelZwiers

• Design’sOddCoupleFranSamalionisandJamesMoed

• ServiceDesign:FromProductstoPeopleLavransLøvlie

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April 2009

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Health and Service Design

• AhealthyrelationshipLavransLøvlie,BenReason,MarkMugglestoneandJohn-ArneRøttingen

• DesigningfromwithinJuliaSchaeper,LynneMaherandHelenBaxter

• RevealingexperiencesChristineJanae-Leoniak

• Greatexpectations:ThehealthcarejourneyGiannaMarzilliEricson

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October 2009

s e r v i c e d e s i g n n e t w o r k touchpoint | the journal of service des ign � 1

Touchpointt h e j o u r n a l o f s e r v i c e d e s i g n

Beyond Basics

•MakeyourselfusefulJoeHeapy

• DoyoureallyneedthatiPhoneApp?MarkJones

• ServiceDesign2020:Whatdoesthefutureholdand(how)canweshapeit?BruceS.TetherandIleanaStigliani

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January 2010

s e r v i c e d e s i g n n e t w o r k

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September 2012

Service Design on Stage

A Performing Arts Perspective on Service DesignBy Raymond P. Fisk and Stephen J. Grove

Boom! Wow. Wow! WOW! BOOOOM!!!By Markus Hormeß and Adam Lawrence

The Lost Pleasure of Randomness and SurpriseBy Fabio Di Liberto

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May 2012

Eat, Sleep, Play

Design Principles for Eating SustainablyBy Michelle McCune

Hospitality Service as Science and ArtBy Kipum Lee

Reinventing Flight. Porter Airlines: a Case StudyBy Christopher Wright and Jennifer Young

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September 2013

Designing Citizen-Centred Public Services

Social Innovation in Local Government: Sustaining SuccessBy Julie McManus and Emma Barrett

Public & Collaborative: Designing Services for HousingBy Chelsea Mauldina and Eduardo Staszowski

Are Free Public Libraries Still Needed?By Mikko Mäkinen and Richard Stanley

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Connecting the Dots

• Service Design as Business Change AgentMark Hartevelt and Hugo Raaijmakers

• MyPoliceLauren Currie and Sarah Drummond

• Service Design at a Crossroads Lucy Kimbell

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January 2013

Cultural Change by Service Design

LivingServiceWorlds¬HowWillServicesKnowWhatYouIntend?ShelleyEvenson

CompleteSmall,AffordableandSuccessfulServiceDesignProjectsByChrisBrooker

ATimeMachineforServiceDesignersByJuliaLeihenerandDr.HenningBreuer

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April 2014

Transformation through Service Design

Real-Time Service Designby Lydia Howland

Go Deep or Go Homeby Joel Bailey

The New Seriousness of Designby Lee Sankey

http://www.service-design-network.org/read/online-articles

The articles published in Touchpoint since its first publication are available online! The formatted Pdfs of single articles are now downloadable at no cost for SDN members and can be purchased by non-members. You have the opportunity to search articles by volume and issue, by keywords or by author!

free accessfor

sdn members!

download single articles

Buy the Touchpoint Collection and, in one

fell swoop, get the whole back catalogue of

Touchpoint ( from the Vol. 1, No. 2 to Vol. 6 No. 3)

as well as a subscription to the Volume 7 at an

irresistible price!

About the Service Design Network

The Service Design Network is the global centre for recognising and promoting excel-lence in the field of service design. Through national and international events, online and print publications, and coordination with academic institutions, the network connects multiple disciplines within agencies, business, and government to strengthen the impact of service design both in the public and private sector.

Service Design Network Office | Ubierring 40 | 50678 Cologne | Germany | www.service-design-network.org

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THE VALUE OF THE SDN MEMBERSHIP

The Service Design Network is the leading institu-tion for expertise in service design. The SDN is a partnership of professionals and an open-minded, knowledge-sharing network. Through national and international events, online and print publications and coordination with academic institutions, the network connects multiple roles within agencies, business, and government to strengthen the impact of service design both in the public and private sector. What can you expect as an SDN member?

ENGAGE & CONNECT• Share your professional profile• Meet fellow members• Join a local community

NETWORK• Choose from three types of membership• Profile your company within the SDN• Post and browse job openings

CONFERENCES• Member pricing for our Annual Global Conferen-ces with an exclusive Members’ Day • Discounts at partnering conferences• National Chapter events

READ AND DISCOVER• Touchpoint journal in print and online• Periodic email newsletters and active social media• Case Study Library and articles database

By becoming an SDN member, you support the development of this burgeoning design discipline. Learn more and join by visiting www.service-design-network.org!