GDE720 W10 | Lecture Review

April 24, 2020

Research & Reveal

This week’s lecture included a conversation with Hefin Jones, a service designer and collaborative researcher.

HEFIN JONES

Hefin Jones began his service design career in university. He enjoyed the collaborative nature and immersion possibilities when working with people in their communities. He used his project Cosmic Colliery to engage a community in Wales around the fictional notion of reimagining a closed-down coal mine into an astronaut training facility. His work immersed him into this community, spending long periods of time in conversations with young people, former coal miners, families, youth center directors and operators, local governments.

By using fiction, Jones hope was to allow for deeper, more meaningful conversations around how the community could think differently about its culture, history, networks, relationships, and practices. What made this project most successful was Jones’ willingness to allow for space for long and meandering conversations to take place. To provide room for people to imagine and engage in dialogue. He expressed the necessity to listen, and not bring your own biases about the project into the foreground.

A take away for Jones was the projects opportunity to engage the marginal voices, in this case, the youth of the community — unable to vote — and finding ways to create agency and advocacy on their behalf.

His advice for service designers starting out is to prioritize listening, leaving bias out as much as possible, having a responsibility to the subjects and subject community and to be willing to allow for variances and evolution to take place within and beyond the project.

REFERENCE:

Clarke, A., (ed) (2017) ‘Chapter 6: Prototyping the Social: Temporary and Speculative Futures at the Intersection of Design and Culture’ in Design Anthropology: Object Cultures in Transition, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 87 – 98. Available from: https://www.dawsonera.com/abstract/9781474259057

Clarke, A., (ed) (2017) ‘Chapter 4, Valuable to Values: How ‘User Research’ ought to change’, in Design Anthropology: Object Cultures in Transition, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 53 – 67. Available from: https://www.dawsonera.com/abstract/9781474259057

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

McQuiston, L., (2015) Visual Impact: Creative Dissent in the 21st Century. London: Phaidon. Available from: https://content.talisaspire.com/falmouth/bundles/5c62b80d69df506330522374

GDE720 W9 | Workshop Challenge

April 23, 2020

Society & Purpose

This week’s challenge was split into two tasks:

Task 1: Research User-Centred Design Processes or Tools
- Research three user-centred design processes or tools that can be used to discover a core need or problem e.g. customer journey maps, service safaris, a day in the life, cultural probe, double diamond.
- Select one process and write a short 100-word description to illustrate how it can be used to discover an insight or challenge.
Task 2: Research Existing Campaign or Service Design Project
- Research and select one existing campaign or service design project that tackles a social problem and analyse its effectiveness. Please remember to include information about any user-centred design processes that may have been used and the impact it brought about.
- Write a 300 – 400 word description with screen grabs to illustrate your research findings.

EMPATHY MAPS

TURNING BOOKS ON THEIR HEADS: INSTA NOVELS

In 2018, The New York Public Library partnered with the independent advertising and creative agency, Mother New York, to reimagine four literary classics intended to meet their younger audiences where they are: Instagram.

The problem presented by NYPL was to engage their younger audiences in a way that they’ve never had before and to break down the idea that the library is a dusty old place filled with dusty old books. Their partnership with Mother New York lead them down a path of discovery and finding new ways to reach their audience. Mother New York’s team looked at how best to tell a story in Instagram stories. They looked at typography, both size, color, and hierarchy to create the best possible reading experience. They leveraged Instagram’s native user experience of tapping within stories to move pages forward and back. And set off chapters with clever animations to keep the reader engaged and delighted.

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The design research on this project must have been intense, but the efforts clearly have paid off. The library’s audience grew by over 75% during the initial launch of the Insta Novels and readership in the 300,000s. I would imagine that numerous design thinking tools were employed to realize this project. Having the known insight that their audience in the younger demographics had an unfavorable point of view of the library, using a tool such as “How Might We” to brainstorm new ways to engage this cohort would prove useful. The use of empathy maps after any journey maps or shadowing experiences could yield data that point the agency towards insights given how this audience thinks, feels, acts, says, and does with books as well as social media. Issue cards could be utilized to garner in-depth input from test subjects about how they prioritize reading, reading platforms, and their preference for learning new ideas or storytelling more specifically. Finally, the use of some circular design thinking could be employed to find out a more sustainable method to creating readership with a younger, more technically savvy audience. The researchers could literally dismantle (gasp) a classic novel and dissect its manufacture from paper source, production, distribution, and environmental impact all of which might have lead them to the idea that Insta Novels provide more circular economy for the New York Public Library and have a much smaller impact on Mother Earth.

We’ve been around a long time, and we have a reputation, so when we sort of subvert expectations, I think it really delights people.
— Richert Schnorr, director of digital media for the New York Public Library

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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

GDE720 W9 | Lecture Review

April 23, 2020

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:

User centered: approached through the eyes of the customer (end user, audience, or subject)
Co-creative: all stakeholders and end users are considered and uses a variety of expertise to approach the problem
Sequenced: utilizing a series of interrelated actions
Evidenced: making note and acting on the key moments in the customer’s journey
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:

Empathy Map and the Empathy Experience
Card Sort / Issue Cards
Hypothesis Generation
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.