Service Designing the Support Economy
From Push through Pull to Partnering
This is the script of a presentation I made to the Service Design team of a financial institution. It was meant to be a quick introduction to ways of thinking about Service as interactions between people as opposed to a more UX way of thinking about services as self-service digital platfoms
I have researched and taught Service Design for 20 years. I have the privilege of being an academic so when I practice service design as part of applied research projects, my colleagues and I are able to work in ways often not afforded by commercial contexts. I will talk today about what I think is happening in Service Designing but from that non-commercial perspective. In many ways, this is an updating of arguments Shoshana Zuboff made in her book with James Maxmin, The Support Economy.
From servicization to social service design
In the early 2000s, my research was focused on sustainable design, but not just making products less harmful; it was instead more focused on systems changes that would reduce the materials intensity of our societies — in other words, how to live with less stuff, less ‘standing stock’ and less ‘throughput.’ The primary hypothesis at that time was that sustainability required shifting from linear ownership-based ways of living to more circular usership based ones. This meant convincing manufacturers and householders to shift from retail businesses to service economies. We called this back then, servicization. The aim was to design service systems that people would prefer to use over buying, using, storing, maintaining and disposing of things.
While doing that work, I came to realise that there was an emerging sub-discipline of design here, called Service Design. The Service Design Network for example was founded in 2004. I presented a paper with Lara Penin on using theatre techniques to think through power dynamics at a Service Design stream of a conference in 2009, and started teaching Service Design as part of the Integrated Design degree program at Parsons in 2010.
When I returned to Australia, I took up the Directorship of the UTS Design Innovation Research Centre. DIRC focused on pro-social design, meaning interventions into organisations and communities that disafforded anti-social behaviour and fostered instead collaborative interactions.
I say all this to indicate that my focus on Service Design has always been on Design for Change. I, with colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, refer to this these days as Transition Design. As university-based designers, concerned about the equitable sustainability of our societies, we see our task less as servicing current desires and more about helping people change how they live and work.
This more activist approach to design might seem distant from, or anathema to, customer-centredness, where the task of the designer is merely to facilitate what a customer wishes to do (in ways that their sponsoring organisation can make money from). However, I do not think that there is an unbridgeable gap between the service designing that I have had a chance to do over the last decades and the commercial industry of service design. I think this for two reasons, one to do with the history of design, the fact that design has always been about changing people; and the other to do with the present and near future, what my experience suggests people are desperately wanting from services, whether commercial, government or in-between.
PUSH
Designing has always been proactive about changing people. The modern profession of design began as marketing. Someone invented something, making use of a new technological infrastructure, like pressed steel, plastic or electricity. The task was then to explain to appropriate market segments the value of that new product. The ‘explaining’ was more ‘show’ than ‘tell’ and so was applied to the form of the product and not just to the setting for promoting it. The value that the design demonstrated was not just about its sale price, but incorporating that product into a new way of living, a new ‘lifestyle.’
All this was very much ‘push’ from the supply side. It took some time before designers started ‘centring’ the use-value of what they were designing. One version of ‘user-centred design’ is ‘user testing,’ which is more about the limits to which users can be pushed. It is only when the design starts with the user and their use-case, what was initially called activity-centred design, that the process starts to become more ‘pull’ from the demand side.
PULL
User-centredness on the design side was combined with customer-centredness on the business side, especially in the context of digital platforms. At this point, the issue was not just the usability, but the quality of the user-customer’s experience (UX/CX), something that was codified through Lean Agile Startup methods on the one hand, human-centred Design Thinking on the other.
The task of the designer become being ‘relentlessly customer-focused,’ helping the business specify the customer’s jobs-to-be-done and then as much as possible servicing those requirements in the most automatedly revenue-generating ways, with as much stickiness and occasional delight as will maintain a +30 NPS, etc. In my experience, this tends be the UX-based version of Service Designing.
Though all this makes the needs of the user/customer starting and end point of designing, it tends to focus on a reduced version of the human: homo economicus — an individual with fixed needs behaving according to the Logics of Convenience and Choice.
The result has been an almost-standardization of customer journeys and UIs, often the result of behavioural economics stereotypes manifested through drag-and-drop design systems.
For instance, the assumption of much UX research is that there are things that user/customers will not, or will not prefer to, do. However,
People not wanting to x,
could be
People don’t know to x
People don’t know how to x
People can be helped to x
People can come to want to x
People who, in changed situations, would need or want to x
PARTNERING
Even though design appears to have shifted from push-based marketing to pull-based ‘don’t make me think,’ there are nevertheless many approaches to design-driven innovation that have remained more change oriented, though I would not characterise these as ‘push,’ but rather as ‘partnered.’
LX
Despite UX aiming at affordances that are intuitive, most significant new innovations require ‘social learning’ over time, with particular attention needed to prevent ‘negative transfer.’ This requires partnering with users through the learning-to-use-well process.
Changing Customers
Michael Schrage suggested that authentic innovation comes not from the question of what does someone want to do, but, what does someone want to become? Whilst the question is customer-centred, the answer is more a matter of supporting a transformation, a process that requires being proactive, suggesting and prompting changes, being a partner in that change.
Surprise of Self-Recognition
Sometimes design is thought of as problem-solving, but at its best it is more about problem-reframing, and sometimes even problem-finding. If you know what you want, you do not need a designer, you need a fabricator, a builder, a coder. Designers help clarify what you want, or rather what you need. Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman very beautifully described designers as being ‘of service’ when they manage to produce for you something you did not know was what you really were after. Again, this should never be a push, but more like a partnering.
My recent experiences working with banks, primarily in relation to vulnerable customers, have taught me that people are wanting, and needing, more partnering.
Scams
Digital Transformations have aimed at getting, if not requiring, customers to self-service. This freedom often entails increased risk and responsibility, something now evident in the pervasiveness of scamming. Scam prevention teams are a new frontline of service provision that attempts to rebuild partnerships with customers for their own protection.
Financial Wellbeing
Banks these days often have more real-time data about someone’s day-to-day activities than any other entity, such as government agencies or the healthcare system, even smart homes. As a result, banks can often discern ‘lifestyle’ risk patterns before anybody else, and so have an opportunity, if not an obligation, to act on that information on behalf of their customers, as a supportive partner.
Insurability
Climate risk is moving from predicted to current and from political investments to household insurance premiums. People who have invested decades in making a home in certain places around Australia are soon, if not already, going to need to relocate. For fiduciary reasons, banks will often have to be the initiators of those conversations, supporting people through those transitions.
Energy Transition
Households have been leading the transition to renewables faster than the infrastructure has been able to adapt. As a result, the value proposition of rooftop solar + battery, etc, changing somewhat unpredictably. As distributed energy is transaction system, banks can and so should be partnering to help people get shared benefit throughout the transition.
THE SERVICE LOGIC OF CARE
All this suggests that Service Designing should be less about the Logic of Convenience and Choice and more about the Logic of Care and Control. Care is when someone makes decisions for you. Control is when you feel secure that you have sufficient knowledge and ability to make decisions. These are two sides of the same thing. As a customer — or a citizen — you want to feel as though it is in your control to cede control when being cared for (as opposed to caring being covert form controlling — dependency).
This suggests that Service needs to be dynamic. Sometimes the customer needs full service, sometimes the customer wants to be able to do it themselves. The same customer may sometimes be capable, sometimes vulnerable.
The human of human-centred is not just a bundle of needs requiring automatic (or anticipated) servicing; rather some people sometimes delight in things being done for them, sometimes feel a sense of accomplishment in being able to do it for themselves, an often get meaning by being able to do it with and even for someone else.
Miso Kim characterises this by saying that the key quality, that can be judged aesthetically, of a service is dignity, whether it dignifies all involved.
There are three principles for this kind of Service Designing:
1) Customers are partners in value creation, not revenue centres. So service designing is not merely about designing service provision for fixed customers, but designing customers — or rather, designing the routines that customers learn to help the service happen (‘helping the helped help the helper help them’)
2) The other side of ‘customers acting as a employees’ to help realise the service, is that employees need to be treated as customers’ (EX, shared value)
3) Service Designing is about people, in relation, supported by platforms, not platforms displacing people. (And so also not synthetic people)
At the conclusion of this presentation there were excellent questions on situated disability (the fact that, whilst the lived experience of disability is not equivalent, nearly everyone who does not currently identify as disabled goes through periods of their life that render them vulnerable and so in need of supporting services and not just frictionless self-service UX), and the way non-health services, like financial services, are starting to confront situations of complexity and risk that require ‘partnered’ decision-making similar to health (if not directly having health consequences — e.g., financial stress). We talked about what something half-way between financial advice and financial counselling might be, but also the regulatory protections that constrain innovation in those kinds of services. I finally drew attention to the ‘Liberated Method’ — design from a person’s lived experience of negotiating multiple services and design toward a supporter who helps curate those multiple services — which I had only just seen the night before:
