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GDE720 W9 | Lecture Review

Kris Knight

Society & Purpose

This week’s lecture involves a review of the field of service design.

WHAT IS SERVICE DESIGN?

Service design is a field that aims to solve problems that are:

  1. User centered: approached through the eyes of the customer (end user, audience, or subject)

  2. Co-creative: all stakeholders and end users are considered and uses a variety of expertise to approach the problem

  3. Sequenced: utilizing a series of interrelated actions

  4. Evidenced: making note and acting on the key moments in the customer’s journey

  5. Holistic: the entire environment is considered

The core component to service design is people: for people and with people. Designers can play an important role in services design as they are seen as natural problem solvers, are honest, willing to collaborate, experiment, and be transparent with regard to a focus on the benefit of any given solution for the intended audience.

There are many tools that can be employed within the field of services design. Below are a list of four that I chose to explore for this week’s Workshop Challenge:

  1. Empathy Map and the Empathy Experience

  2. Card Sort / Issue Cards

  3. Hypothesis Generation

  4. Insides Out

Empathy is critical to any design solution. How can a designer truly know how to solve a problem if they are unable to know the impact of the problem for the audience in the first place? The use of the empathy map and empathy experience overall provides the designer with direct input by placing themselves in the shoes of the customer (end user, audience, or subject). The empathy map can be useful to synthesize the data collected in the field. The tool creates a segmentation of actions: say, do, think, and feel into quadrants for evaluation and assignment. Each data point collected gets assigned a place on the map based on the appropriate, relevant action. Insights can then be gleaned from the patterns that may appear, contradictions or disconnects, or surprising revelations once the exercise has been completed. An example of the Empathy Experience referenced from Matt Cooper-Wright in the Medium Design Research Methods involves a case study in search of insights for a particular cancer drug. The research team wanted to gain insights to the experience of the patients taking the drug. What they found was that each patient interviewed had a different response or unpredictable experience for each interaction with the pill. To empathize with the subjects, the researchers were given pill packs filled with different flavored jelly beans with extreme differences in flavor. This provided the team to have a greater understanding for the patient experience and therefore help to create better solutions. “Designing from a position of deep empathy is both inspiring and humbling.”

The Card Sort or Issue Cards is a technique used to engage in a deeper conversation between researcher and subject. In addition to a regular of a set of interview questions, the cards can be used to inspire input from the subject in a more self-directed way. This provides the opportunity for greater empathy and more nuanced responses as the subject may (or may not) interact with the cards in a way that provides additional insights or details on a more personal level. It can also be useful in mitigating out any subjectivity on the part of the researcher as the cards are placed in the hands of the subject to evaluate and respond.

Hypothesis Generation (or How Might We questions) involves using insights that are already know and turning the perspectives into actionable provocations. The “how might we” questions used in this exercise help the researcher to extend point of view to frame and open up the design challenge.

  • "How" suggests that we do not yet have the answer. “How” helps us set aside prescriptive briefs. “How” helps us explore a variety of endeavors instead of merely executing on what we “think” the solution should be.

  • "Might" emphasizes that our responses may only be possible solutions, not the only solution. “Might” also allows for exploration of multiple possible solutions, not settling for the first that comes to mind.

  • "We" immediately brings in the element of a collaborative effort. “We” suggests that the idea for the solution lies in our collective teamwork.

Insides Out is an approach to circular design thinking that involves taking a part an everyday product to “build empathy and understanding around the implications of disassembly and recover of materials and parts.” IDEO has created a Circular Design Guide to help people evolve to a new, innovative, and critical way of solving problems, ones that address the issue of today and focus on creating the solutions for tomorrow. Insides Out is one of many tools in this new way of design thinking that creates a pathway to identifying new ways to solve problems, create solutions, and help the global community. The dismantling of an everyday item provides an opportunity to ask critical questions such as:

  • Which materials and components could be recovered from this device and reused?

  • Does the manufacturer produce individual parts if you needed to replace only a battery, for example?

  • Is it economically viable to disassemble them in the way you have done?

  • If not, what needs to change to make it so? You might like to consider a range of interventions such as product design, business models, reverse cycle or policy enablers.

Ultimately, the goal is to identify ways to create a more circular solution that mitigates the need to simply throwing it away, keeping a focus on our needs for sustainability and thinking differently about the products we create.

REFERENCE:

Card Sort. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.designkit.org/methods/24

Card Sort. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.designkit.org/stories/50

Dam, R. F., & Teo, Y. S. (n.d.). Define and Frame Your Design Challenge by Creating Your Point Of View and Ask "How Might We". Retrieved from https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/define-and-frame-your-design-challenge-by-creating-your-point-of-view-and-ask-how-might-we

Hypothesis Generation. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://servicedesigntools.org/tools/hypothesis-generation

Issue Cards. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://servicedesigntools.org/tools/issue-cards

Falmouth University (2018). Society & Purpose | Lecture. History and Futures GDE720 19/20 Part-Time Study Block S2 (Falmouth, UK: Falmouth University)

Manzini, E., (2015) Part 1: Social Innovation and Design, in Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation [ebook], Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Available from: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/falmouth-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3339947.  pp. 7–74

Romanoff, M. (2017, February 9). "How Might We" Questions. Retrieved from https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/how-might-we-questions

Stickdorn, M., Schneider, J., Andrews, K. and Lawrence, A., (2011) This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases [ebook], Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Available from: https://www.dawsonera.com/abstract/9789063693169 ., pp. 68–79, 88–93, 108–115, 124–135.

TEDx, Carol A. Wells, (2015) Can Art Stop a War and Save the Planet? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQKNkmuZ7V8

Service Design Tools: Communicating Methods Supporting Design Processes (2009), . Available from: http://www.servicedesigntools.org/repository