Mind the gap — reflections on the Service Design Global Conference 2017 in Madrid
The biggest challenge for Service Design right now is not designing relevant, valuable services. The biggest challenge is integration, connection to the business that has to deliver the service.
Service Design has developed into a form of design with it’s own toolset, skillset and mindset. It has grown in popularity and it seems like everybody and their mother is now doing user research, crafting customer journeys and designing service blueprints. Service Design is scaling. That was the topic of the Service Design Global Conference this year in Madrid. But if there is one thing that stood out for me at the conference is that design is easy and delivery is hard. The biggest challenge is to bridge the gap between the design of a service and the reality of delivering that service by the organization.
It’s all about the delivery
There was one small remark in the final presentation by Kerry Bodine that points to a fundamental definition question about Service Design that could hold back the further, successful, sustainable growth of Service Design as a craft. Kerry pointed out that there was one person on the Service Design Award judging team that said: “This is the Service Design Award, not the Service Delivery Award.” This relates to a typical tendency in many design fields: to focus too much on the deliverables, to fall in love with the things you design. Designing beautiful artifacts is the easy part and it’s the part that gets you awards and super hero status. So it’s tempting to limit the scope of design to designs. But design can have a far greater impact if you focus on aligning with the organization that has to deliver the service. If you solve problems the business is facing instead of trying to fill your portfolio, you can provide much more value and Service Design can play a much more strategic role within organizations. But the transition from designs to organization and strategy requires new skills from the designer.
New skills for Service Designers
In her opening keynote Louise Downe stated that Service Design is not about the ability of a Service Designer to design a service, but about the ability of an organization to deliver that service. After that, Jeff Keeley talked about how some of the skills that are required for successful Service Design are taught in business schools and other parts in design schools. But it doesn’t end with connecting design and business. Service Designers also have to understand the medium they are working with. Since more and more services become digital, Service Designers have to understand the technology stack that is necessary to deliver digital services. That brings us to the triangle that Derel White and Rob Brown of BBVA talked about: at BBVA people can’t start an innovation project if they don’t have the triangle in place. Each project needs design, business and technology expertise in the team. In this interaction the Service Designer can play a key role. Xènia Viladàs pointed out that Service Design can have the most impact and relevance if it can own the overarching perspective. She said that she found that the key skill of a Service Designer is his/her ability to zoom out and connect.
“Service Design is not about the ability of a Service Designer to design a service, but about the ability of an organization to deliver that service.” — Louise Downe
“Own the overarching perspective.” — Xènia Viladàs
Step out of the design bubble
To connect to the business side, we need to not be the agency (Sarah Drummond), not come in and force our ways onto an organization, but mix, partner, collaborate. Designing and delivering a service means that you have to break down silos in organization. But on the other hand we are creating more silos in design: Marc Stickdorn talked about how we have Service Designers, Design Thinkers, Strategic Designers, Business Designers etc. These distinct design silos don’t help organizations and are not what we should focus our energy on. Judith Bastiaans and Meddie Versteeg from ING talked about this when they said they did not want pure Service Design in their organization, but a new mindset based on Service Design and Design Thinking to drive change. In my own talk at the conference, I talked about that design can be the engine that drives transformation in organizations, but that this works best if we are able to mix design with current best practices in business. But, like Mikko Koivisto from Hellon said in his talk: this requires stepping out of the design bubble.
“Don’t be the agency.” — Sarah Drummond
“Step out of the design bubble” — Mikko Koivsito
Don’t get stuck in a drawer
If we don’t step out of the design bubble and acquire new skills, Service Design agencies will be stuck at designing beautiful services that end up in drawers. Stina Vanhoof talked about how enthousiast clients can be in their workshops and showed us how great their designs looked. But she also talked about how they were having trouble getting to the delivery phase. Design workshops are fun and exiting. When people step out of their daily routine and start sticking post-it notes on walls, creating prototypes with lego and are able co-create and to provide their knowledge, they become exited. But when the resulting designs are not aligned with the business reality of existing structures, business cases and politics, the designed services never get delivered. These designerly activities can be fun, but if we cannot take it one step further, scaling of Service Design will be limited.
“We don’t have enough knowledge to really have impact in an organization. Most tools are aimed at sparking interest.” — Stina Vanhoof
In-house design challenges
But not only agencies face integration issues. Big organizations that were present at the conference like the English Government, IBM, BBVA and Capital One, are investing heavily in in-house design teams and are struggling to integrate design. The first struggle is to find designers and persuade them to work at large corporates that don’t have the cool, hip and dynamic image that designers are looking for. This can be solved with campaigns, work conditions and the promise to work on huge impact design problems. But it doesn’t end with just hiring hundreds of designers. When designers enter a large corporate they enter a hostile environment. People are not used to design while design is brought in to change the culture. People don’t like change and design doesn’t come in with a lot of credibility when it comes to solving business problems. But if you successfully take this hurdle and the culture starts to pivot and design becomes a main driver for transformation, you are faced with a scaling problem. If everything is a service (Service Dominant Logic), every project becomes a Service Design project and requires Service Designers. And there are just not enough Service Designers to go around. At BBVA they already employ 150+ designers, but with that design is spread too thin. They need at least four times that much at this moment to staff all their innovation projects. To organize design at this scale, these organizations have a Chief Design Officer in place. It’s his job to bridge the gap between design and business at the executive. At BBVA Rob Brown uses design to change the corporate culture by implementing policy to put design at the heart of projects.
“We will not do anything without the triangle business-technology-design.” — Rob Brown
Ignorance is holding design back
George Aye (the one on the picture at the top of the blog) is the founder of the Greater Good Studio. In his talk he explained that the fundament of his agency is to do good with design. On the one hand this means not designing great stuff for bad companies/ideas. And on the other hand this means consciously using the impact design can have to make the world better. Design operates within an ecosystem of power in organizations and in the world. Being ignorant about power holds design back. Designers have to be able to zoom out and understand the power designs can have in the business reality and the ecosystems surrounding it. You can’t get away with just making a design if you want real impact. You have to execute in reality, the business and technology reality.
“If we don’t understand power, we look like bozo’s.” — George Aye
Great challenges lie ahead
We have to step up and bridge the gap between business and design because the demand for design is only going to get bigger. All of the challenges we are going to face with new emerging technologies like AI, Blockchain and VR all need design. Technology is very apt at answering the question what can be done, but we need design to help answer the question what things should be done. Peter Fossick urged us to rethink the role of the designer is a world governed by algorithms, agents and bots. Both technology and the changing business reality are putting high demands on design to help. If we can deliver the goods, the value proposition of design will rise to the next level. But for that to happen we must stop talking about Service Design and just use design as a driver for change. We must stop focussing on our tools and deliverables, but execute in the business and technology reality. The financial, health and public sector are screaming for designers to help them to embrace the challenges of the 21st century. Designers are getting a seat at the boardroom table and are able to co-create corporate policy. Design is on its way to become fully integrated in organizations (see diagram below), but we are not there yet. There is still a gap to be bridged.
Xènia Viladàs talked about Buchanan’s four orders of design and explained that Service Design is placed in the 3rd order. If we zoom out a little more and consider the ecosystems of organizations, if we don’t just design services but ecosystems and organizations, we can be where the disruption occurs and have more impact (in the fourth order). Service Designers are well placed to take the impact of design to the next level. We just have to evolve a little bit.
“We should rethink the role of the designer.” — Peter Fossick
This is my personal reflection on the Service Design Global Conference 2017 in Madrid. I was fortunate enough to be able to give a presentation at the conference myself with my partner in crime Marc Dolman. You can find the slides here and the slides of the other presenters here. I used a picture taken by the organization of the conference, more pictures can be found on their FlickR. You can learn more about the conference, the program and all the speakers of the website of the Service Design Network.
I work as a Strategic Design Consultant at Zuiderlicht. For more content, you can follow me on Twitter or on LinkedIn .
