How is designed changing as a discipline and profession and
how do we face these challenges and opportunities as a community
we explore these questions and more on design future now from
aiga the professional association for design.
I'm leash on Wong. Our guests this episode are
scheduled to speak on the main stage of the aiga design
conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, March 30th to
April 1st 2020. I caught up with them recently
at a gathering of design thought leaders at NC State University
in Raleigh, North Carolina. We talked about their current
work and how they have applied an expanded their expertise in
communication design to The Wider context of services and
systems. I'm Sarah Gibbons.
I am chief designer at Nielsen Norman group.
I am coming from a background of traditional graphic design and
then I joined IBM and work on their collaboration software did
a brief stint with IBM teaching incoming researchers product
managers developers how to kind of think from a user-centered
point of view and I've recently been at Nielsen Norman group for
about three years, and I've been Been researching and presenting
my research around design thinking service design Journey
mapping Etc Sarah. Thank you so much for joining
us. You've made some pretty big
jumps in your career. What are some of the skills and
knowledge that have enabled you to make these jumps from
traditional graphic design to where you are now with service
design simply put probably the ability to continuously we learn
and I think you have to have a And how you work and your
ability to understand context and make decisions and then pass
that remove all biases and assumptions about the context in
which you're working. So I think that transitionally I
haven't changed that much as a designer, but the world in which
I'm practicing has how have things changed in the world of
design since you've graduated from NC State so junior year.
I was interviewing and I made a paper portfolio.
Bound it the whole nine yards and I went and interviewed and
the person who is interviewing me said I'd like to see this
digitally next time you come in. So I went home that night and I
scanned in everything put it on like a brand new iPad.
I think is like a first edition first edition and I brought it
back and I was flipping through and I think that is a really
small kind of micro example of exactly what I've done at large
which is going Of thing with whatever expertise I have and
then just quickly relearning what table Stakes are and then
changing what I'm producing and the variables that I make my
decisions with but that same girl who went home and scanned
everything in and is the exact same person that I am today.
I'm just applying it at different scales and different
Industries often when we gain something new.
There are also things we have to give up along the way are there
things that you've had to give up in?
Your day-to-day work or in your identity as a designer in order
to make room for the new maybe moments.
I've had to abandon pieces of who I'd always thought I would
be as a designer are probably the pieces that I've always been
the most confident in so that would be my taste when it comes
to kind of visual sense making or my pure graphic design
skills, but what I maybe never realized is that those are so
much more applicable when you're not speaking through the terms
of Visual mediums but when the ability to synthesize a
conversation just like I used to have the ability to synthesize
information into one visual artifact.
I can synthesize a lot of different collaborators into
kind of one idea of consensus or decision.
That's come out of a meeting. So in that way I've changed my
identity a lot but I'm still the kind of the exact same
practitioner using the core skills that I've kind of always
have made me me. Do you have any specific?
Oh geez for Learning and Reinventing yourself when it
comes to strategies for constantly relearning.
I would say a pillar in it is just the ability to be
vulnerable over and over again and the ability to put something
out into the world that may not be perfect and may not be agreed
upon and I may eventually think wasn't the best decision but
that in and of itself was a learning experience and I think
that designers who are able to be vulnerable, especially when
leaning into a significant period of The shin in their
career are the ones that are going to come out of the other
side with more knowledge gained for folks who might be new to
the term. Can you explain what service
design is? Yeah, so I Define service design
as co-creation of value for all stakeholders.
So often times especially in kind of in practice and in the
product World a lot of teams put so much focus on what's actually
delivered to the end user which you think about kind of the
history that makes sense because for a really long time products
haven't been usable and now we're in this age where it's not
just that the experience you put into the world is incredible,
but that experience making it so then stakeholders creators third
parties are the business partners all see and have value
in what's created that is truly service design.
So by directly improving the people It and how it's made
you're going to indirectly create value for end users and
then that of course drives Revenue.
So that's really kind of service design at large Sarah.
Are there any myths or misconceptions about design that
you would like to slay or dispel?
Oh man. I think that common to a lot of
people's belief, but I think everyone is a designer and I
think that everyone just has a different medium in which they
design And I think that that to me is kind of one of the best
ice breakers when I'm working with a new product team to refer
to everyone as a designer and not that they will have the same
rigor or bring the same expertise that I do to the table
but in their own Realms and in their own worlds they do and
that if we can work as two designers peers both bringing
your expertise and matching them together, then that's really
when the magic happens and speaking of magic Here's the
final question. Giving you life right now in
terms of inspiration or motivation what's giving me life
right now is the idea that companies and organizations are
starting to put to put in tension and thought behind how
their design organizations function and I think that this
is tremendous operationally in that we can create culture
that's important and that businesses can start to embed
design at a strategy level. Oh and that I think is we
haven't even started to see the effects of and what that can
mean for the products. We create and the businesses
that the come Sarah Gibbons. Thank you so much for joining us
now a quick break and we'll be back with our next guest.
My name is Jodi for Lizzie. I am the guest ski director and
a professor in the human computer interaction Institute
at Carnegie Mellon University. I am Computer scientists.
My training is an interaction and communication design Jody.
Thank you so much for joining us.
You've written about a concept you call product/service
ecology. Can you unpack what that means
for us? My research on product/service
ecologies tries to encapsulate the concept that we are no
longer designing one thing but that we're designing systems of
interconnected products Services people and resources in the
world. And so that means that design
has really need to shift the way that they think and the way that
they design this work was inspired by my early research on
experience design where we looked at how different
interactions with products form components of an experience and
then as digital technology took off and grew this expanded and
now I think a lot of companies are dealing with this idea that
products and services are linking together.
We need to think about Ways to design purposeful experiences
with them. How does the ecology part come
into the picture the definitions of product and service are
pretty straightforward, but how to ecological systems relate to
what we are designing. So the ecological component of
the product service ecology means that the collection of
products and services and other resources might be different for
each stakeholder and even different at any given moment.
It means that that for some people certain components of a
system take more importance. While others are less important.
It could mean that my view are the way that I move through or
use a system could be different it can mean that some components
of a system might grow our adapt based on what a stakeholder is
doing at any given time. So it's a very flexible concept
and construct for how we can think about designing these
things. Are there specific tools or ways
of thinking that help designers work at this level and scale for
example in service design their service Blueprints and journey
maps are there new ways to help us incorporate this ecology
Dimension. So I view the tools of service
design as a jumping off point to try to make ways to design
product service ecologies. I view service design tools like
service blueprints customer Journeys and stakeholder maps to
really be the typography of service design.
Then we can take them and we begin to layer that and look at
them at a systems level. We begin to draw out aspects of
experience or a set of products and services and we can do what
we call perturb the system. So we design something right
there and this point of the system and then it allows
designers to begin to think about what the impacts of the
other parts of the system might be.
I think another piece is very much storytelling and
representing so modeling and narrative to make the case first
to understand for ourselves as designers what we're doing but
then to talk to others within an organization to give a roadmap
or a representation of how we see things.
So these are the critical tools. I think tools that desires have
been using all along tell us more about what you mean by
perturbing the system. It sounds a bit like poking the
bear or the beehive in a way. Yes, so for me, I think about
perturbing the system as changing a feature within the
system hopefully with an understanding of what might
happen, but also realizing that there may be unexpended
unexpected consequences. So for example, there was a
paper about a church in the Mission District and this was a
church in a neighborhood of very different constituents.
The church was not viewed fondly by the neighborhood and the
church. Did something very simple it
began serving of free breakfast to the community on Sunday
mornings. So this little perturbation a
free breakfast really changed things after this people within
the church membership began to offer free dental and medical
services to the community doors were opened the office for the
church was moved to the back from the back to the front of
the building iconography was taken down some were melted
formed into a chalice. Carried to a neighbouring
church. So there was a really nice
example of a perturbation that led to a sea change something
that people didn't predict and I think we always have the
possibility of doing this and design we may not ever know or
understand what the outcomes of our work will be and I believe
that something that Tony goolsbee spiff called the
solution after next sort of like trying understanding and then
getting ready for the next shift.
In terms of your own career in perturbing the system and
getting ready for the next shift.
What are the opportunities and challenges in being a designer
in the space of technology ecologies and systems?
So now in my role as a director within a computer science cool.
I find that I'm still using the skills and principles of design,
but now I'm designing a culture or an organization and so I'm
bringing my values as a designer to the HCI Institute.
I want to make sure we are empathic.
I want to make sure we apply our work in the real world and most
importantly I want to make sure that people feel heard and they
feel valued within the Ization so really I look at design as a
leadership activity now in my life.
What are some myths or misconceptions about design that
you want to dispel? So one of the myths to dispel
about design is that it doesn't come at the end.
It's not less important design should have a seat at the table
and design should be attended to and respected all along.
So too many times. We have engineering driven
organizations. We have technology driven
organizations that still Leave that there's only a marginal
role for design. I think we really need to dispel
that. And finally what's giving you
life right now Jody in terms of inspiration and hope that's a
tough one because everything is so Grim right now what's giving
me inspiration now is I've been working with individuals with
severe physical limitations and helping them rehabilitate
through yoga and much of it is a direct match.
Certain apprenticeship approach. It's looking at what they're
able to do and responding and how we teach and help them and
that for me is core to the work of design.
And of course, I'm excited by the wonderful people that work
with me and a lot of the research were doing we have a
whole line of research on design and artificial intelligence.
We are for example working with a union to help their members
understand the effects of Automation and their field which
is hotel and Hospitality work. So from that all distill that
we're able to bring design to a real world application really
improve people's lives and that probably has always been
exciting from the first day. I said, I'm a designer until you
know, the last day that I say, I'm a designer Jody for Lizzie.
Thank you so much for joining us and thank you all for tuning
into this episode of design future natl a production of
aiga. professional association for design learn more about our
design conference at design conference dot AIG a.org until
next time I'm leash on Wang