Bolis: When “HOW” is important!
Diary of a Product service system design student
“A claimant to the spring of life must wander much in the darkness. if he is worthy of the spring in the end he will find the light after darkness. Then it will not be necessary for him to follow the light…”
Suhrawardi, (1154–1191)
Here is a personal reflection of two weeks of intense workshop on design methods instructed by Valentina Auricchio, Davide Fassi and Annalinda De Rosa as an introduction for first semester PSSD students of Polytechnic Milan. the course goal was to teach us a handful of tools and methods in order to be used later in next design studios.
Learning service design can be a great challenge for an industrial designer, because it is more about designing the intangible. Although I had the experience of designing services (mostly in workshops and hackathons), I was afraid maybe my knowledge is only about the methods and tools and not the essence of service design. in addition, I thought that service designers put more emphasis on design process rather than the design outcomes. So, when I started the course I tried to challenge these hypothesises and Finally on 8th day I came to conclusion.
Day #8
On this day we had a thought provoking presentation by Virginia Tassinari about Scenarios and how to utilize and create tools and methods to discover possible futures and address societal issues.
What I learned from Virginia was that in dealing with the complexity, unpredictability, and the networked nature of service design, we rely greatly on co-design processes. An important aspect of co-design processes is the production of intermediate artifacts that can materialize as tools or activities. These are the products of this kind of design.
In summery, It means design has its own language and through the tools it can speak to different stakeholders.
Day #1: Designerly ways of seeing
Tool #1: Observation
On the first day I missed the morning class during to not knowing the lecture timetable. In the morning class the students were grouped in different teams and they were assigned to observe the campus to find some issues related to topic “plastic free campus”.
In the afternoon each group presented its observations. Some went far from campus some went for finding deep insights and some tried to find the main problem. However, for me the interesting part was how each group decided to present their findings. In some cases some groups let the listeners to see through their lenses by describing the details of context of images and this was also part of their observation.
“Seeing come before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.”
John Berger, Ways of seeing
Day #2: The Outsiders are here
The day started with a lecture about history of design method, beginning with the design method movement and continuing with a discussion about creative thinking.
One obvious thing in the whole history of design method is that, from the pioneers of design movement to the latest design researchers in the field of design, all believe in the power of intuition and freedom which allows designers to establish their own identity and perspective to create innovative solutions. No one thinks that design methodology can be articulated in o one single approach and they always emphasis that what they propose is only one possible approach.
In the final part of the morning session professor told us about Gianni Rodari and his book The grammar of fantasy and we tried to do one of practices in his book and adapt it to design realm. First we divided in to groups of two and each of us was asked to choose an object; the objects could be anything. Then, groups were asked to make a sentence related to plastic free using those words. after that we changed the group mates and we did the same practice but instead of making a sentence we were asked to design a service or product with two new words.
The groups tried to explain their ideas with a visual story and the results were both speculative and innovative. It was actually like a brainstorming session. This practice is good to remind us that there is no single thing that you can not be inspired by. It means designers can use everything in their surroundings as a source of inspiration to come up with new ideas.
There were some other students who were absent in the first session so the professor put us all in to one group and we chose “the outsiders” for the name because we were from different countries and we were the last group to be formed.
Tool #2: Battle storming
To kickoff the project we used the battle storming tool. The aim of using this tool was to use the tacit knowledge of each of group members to find problems and solutions related to whole plastic free issue.
To start the battle storming first we had to split the group in to two halves, the first half had to find problems and the second had to find solutions. after internal discussion inside each division we got ready for the battle.
First, the problem finders put their sticky notes on the board and then we as the solution providers started finding solutions for each problem. In this process we discussed about each solution and problem and finally we clustered all the ideas in to different groups. and we came to conclusion that the most important area could be the education. The reason behind this is that if you educate people about how harmful plastic is and what are the ways to live plastic free you would prevent the situation to become worse.
Day #3: What is “Product” ,“Service” ,“System” design
On this day we had a presentation by Davide which started from the history of Italian design and how design has been transformed in Italy as one of the world design capitals. It is witnessed that by getting closer to our time design practice is getting more interdicilinary and it’s the result of a change in problems. Todays problems are more complicated and entangled and to be solved they need to be discussed in a multidisciplinary groups. This led designers to go beyond tangibly and deal with the intangibles and the even systems made of both.
Tool #3: Case studies
Our assignment for this day was to find case studies about the topic plastic free. The education criteria which was the chosen cluster in the final part of the battle storming became the initial point for us to discover case studies. However, we were not so devoted to just finding case studies about this topic.
Day #4: Generating preferable futures
Scenario making is one of the tools that designers borrowed from futurology and use as one of the ways to represent and also discover the context in which they want to put their design in. In the lecture about scenarios Davide described that scenario is like a box which defines the boundries of design output.
Tool #4: Positioning map
As a communication strategist who worked in an advertising agency for two years, making positioning maps was part of my daily routine. However, This time it was a challenge for me. Positioning maps in marketing are mostly used to define the competition environment and one of their axes is always about being economic or luxury. In this project we needed to first analyze the case studies and then extract the main values of each in order to find some repetitive patterns which can differentiate the four quarters of map.
After defining the positioning map axes, we had to find out where is the right place to discover more and in which place we want to put our design solution.
Tool #5: How may we question
If you want to solve a problem first you should come up with a right questions. In order to so, we started to make some questions out of the positioning map and the areas which we wanted to focus more. we divided the task in the group so that each one of us had to find at least 5 questions. in the end we came up with nearly 50 questions. we discussed them and clustered them in to different groups and in the end by integrating some of the questions in each cluster we reach the final three questions. At this point it was hard for us to decide the final questions and we needed some ideas from out side the group. Therefore, we asked the professors to give feedback to us.
Tool #6: Living the problem
In one of the case studies the writer suggested in order to really feel How living without plastic might feel it’s better to live it for some days. We got that advice and each group member tried to live plastic free for couple of days. It was nearly an impossible experience and none of us succeeded to continue living plastic more than a day. The reason behind was that most of the things we use these days as our routine and daily life objects are made of plastic and avoiding plastic means you have to go for more expensive or harder to reach options.
Day #5: The END of theories
This day was the last day of lectures about theory of design so In the rest of the document I will Just explain the tools we used in each day of course.
Tool #7: Shared space Platforms
For designers of this age it would be a shame to not use technology. Regarding to this statement our group did a great job. There were two main tools that we used in order to share ideas. One of them was Notion which was very helpful to cluster our case studies and questions and files. The other one UXPRESSIA is a platform which helped us through visualizing some of the tools which I am going to explain later such as: CJM, and Personas.
Tool #8: Brainstorming
For the brainstorming session we Put our Question On the wall on the top of the paper and then we started. In a 15 minute fast brainstorming session what we did was to only avoid judgments and go wild as the instructors asked us to be(we were asked to obey the IDEO brainstorming rules). Actually it worked. when The brainstorming session ended we came up with plenty crazy ideas that leaded us to even crazier scenarios.
Day #6: back to scenario
Tool #9: Generating Scenarios and Vision
To generate Scenarios first we clustered our ideas from the brain storming session. Then, we positioned each cluster to see how they fit on our positioning map and how they are answering our question.
In this part of the process we were still working on case studies so finding better case studies helped us to clarify our question. Based on the case studies and ideas we find an area to discover deeper. Our question was “how may we find use cultural differences and age gaps in the university campus to address the plastic free issue?” and we decided to work on language as a particular part of cultural difference in the campus. we discussed about a vision of a making a unified language to talk about plastic free issue and we wanted to use body language as the signs. First we were pleased but later we thought that we should be more direct because of the target group which question is describing is university students and we have to do some thing about our campus. Therefore we changed our scenario and we decided to work on something which is both cultural and problematic inside the campus and it was nothing except food! The final vision was Boarderless meal or in other terms food tinder.
Day #7: Shadowing people
Tool #10: Interview and persona creation
Based on our vision and scenario first we made an online survey to validate our hypothesis that people like sharing food and tasting new things. Then we found some patterns out of our surveys and we looked for some body who can best fit those patterns. We interviewed 6 people from different countries and from different backgrounds to identify our primary and secondary personas.
One important thing during interviews was that it would be better for us to memorize the questions instead of reading them from paper because most of the times loosing eye contact might disturb the interview from telling deeper insights.
In past it was hard for me to find difference between archetypes and stereotypes but I found a solution. I use 12 Jungian archetypes to describe what are some of the intentions of people and what is not related to those archetypes might be stereotype so I have to avoid using them in creating personas.
Day #8: Mapping the journey
Tool #11: Customer Journey Map
After defining our primary and . secondary personas we had to map their experience of using our service. To visualize the CJM we used UXPRESSIA which has a two month free trial for students and It really fostered the process of creating journey map by giving access to all group members to work on it at the same time.
Tool #12: System map
When using system map keep in mind you have to do it simple!
to start the system map we first put the stakeholders and then we defined their relations. using colors is always a good idea to make the system map clearer.
DAY #9, #10: Just do it
Tool #13: Desktop walkthrough
This tool is about impressing people with what you have done. By this I mean you should show them you were working on this project for 12 days and you did it in the best way possible and this idea is the best idea ever. so you have to go beyond the limits of your service and present it in the most extreme way.
By using these tools you can not become a PSSD designer in one night but at least you can make sure you can understand why some designs work and some don’t!
