Changing the Channel
Transmedia approaches allow us to create cohesive stories about what our multi-platform services are and can be.
As I sat in the audience at SDGC 2015, I tweeted short notes, recaps, and responses to the speakers, and I Googled every phrase I didn’t know or project I hadn’t heard of before. I had a lot of fun. What I didn’t think about consciously was that I was participating in a transmedia narrative about the conference, where each link added to the story of what service design is all about.
Sandjar Kozubaev and Zhan Li want service designers to think about pop culture. In a talk that Kosubaev gave at last year’s SDGC, he argued that transmedia storytelling isn’t just for Hollywood. Transmedia storytelling takes place across different channels over time. It involves audiences transitioning from film to book, from theatre to YouTube clip. It’s a way of thinking about entertainment that embraces digital media’s propensity for exploration. Transmedia is also participatory, allowing audiences to define narratives through cosplay (wearing the costumes of favourite characters), fan fiction, story modifications, and other fan engagements — in some ways, transmedia is a co-creation session in slow motion. Participatory designers should take note. As service designers, we can use transmedia as a strategy to tell better and more effective stories. And telling stories means we can better implement the services we design.
Transmedia, a term coined by media studies scholar Henry Jenkins in 2007, describes the practice of spreading a narrative across multiple media channels. If I love Star Wars, I can watch movies, read books, play video games, and dress up as ways to explore the fictional world of the films. Kosubaev used the example of The Hunger Games, a series of novels that have been adapted into a series of films. The marketing for the second film, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, mixed social media, fan participation, and printed advertisements. The fashion of the film’s fictional decadent upper-class city of Capitol appeared on billboards. It also appeared on a Tumblr called “Capitol Couture,” which encouraged fans to upload their own art. The marketers created websites that behaved as if they were in the fiction of the Hunger Games’ world — they coopted the web suffix for the Pitcairn Islands, “.pn” to stand for Panem, the fictional nation where the films take place. Throughout social media, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire presented itself as if the fiction was real. The effect is that fans were able to navigate the narrative in a self-directed way. From the campy Twitter account making announcements on behalf of the world’s totalitarian government, to “CapitolTV,” a series of videos with real YouTube stars set in the fictional world, viewers have a number of options to immerse themselves in the narrative. Each audience member gets to become a part of the narrative and participate in the way each story gets told, similar to the participatory model that service designers use.
“I see the building of transmedia projects as an opportunity to foster collective intelligence,” says Li, “whether that means direct collective participation in an organization’s creativity and content production, or the generation of creative consumers that supports the organization’s messages and goals from the outside.”
Human-centredness is at the core of service design, which lines up nicely with transmedia’s focus on audience engagement. “I see the building of transmedia projects as an opportunity to foster collective intelligence,” says Li, “whether that means direct collective participation in an organization’s creativity and content production, or the generation of creative consumers that supports the organization’s messages and goals from the outside.” For Li, transmedia presents an opportunity for designers to create better services by leveraging organizational knowledge. For service designers, leading participatory research sessions and co-creations brings up new opportunities to seek community involvement in understanding a service. We can seek opportunities to design services around online participation, and use online participation to design services. Jenkins talks about creating plots, characters, and worlds that audiences can access via multiple points of entry.
It can also be a model for us to communicate to clients about service outcomes. When we hand over a service blueprint, a journey map, a slide deck, a short video, a research booklet and a series of prototypes, clients have to take those artefacts and use them to implement organizational change. One way that we can increase shared value is by using the techniques of transmedia storytelling to enhance the stories these outputs tell.
Our work often involves telling two types of stories. One is the story we tell customers or end users about a service through particular interventions, and the other is the story we tell clients about how to implement changes through artefacts. We tell these stories to clients through journey maps, service blueprints, design principles, insights videos, and slide decks. Each of these artifacts provides an entry point to a service. As we create touchpoint-specific interventions, we tell a story to the users of a service.
Consider the experience map from Bridgeable’s 2013 pro bono project, Field to Table Catering. Field to Table is part of Foodshare Toronto, which is an organization dedicated to providing sustainable and accessible food for people of all incomes. Each point in the customer experience falls into a “positive,” “neutral,” or “negative” memory category, demonstrating to the client where interventions need to take place. The lowest points on the chart correspond with key insights about what is going on — the website looked too much like a charity, customers waited two or three days for a reply on their order, and food was too late, too early, or delivered to the wrong location. We can see the narrative that certain parts of the process are breaking down because of the service design story. As service designers, we are in a unique position to reveal this narrative.
Transmedia storytelling takes us to the next logical step. As the customer passes through multiple channels and touchpoints, each one acts like a piece of a transmedia story. The brochure implies crucial things about the catering service, as does the website and the way employees conduct themselves when they arrive on time.
The Field to Table project team designed intervention prototypes for each low point in the map. The website redesign, branding, customer manifesto, and back of the house improvements each do their part to tell the story of how things can be better for the customer experience. They presented each touchpoint redesign to the client, along with a plan for implementation. Telling a story to the client about how to tell their story to their users is a key metanarrative in the work of service design. We have to be able to tell complex stories to be able to effectively create systems change.
Kosubaev spoke about the concepts of spreadability and drillability in transmedia, and we can use those concepts to chart a new direction for service design storytelling. Spreadability is the ability of transmedia narratives to exist throughout society in many contexts. Getting a key stakeholder to tweet about a service redesign or a change in the system spreads the idea further into new contexts. When an organization sees champions of a new approach appearing throughout their horizon, they are more apt to make their services more human centred. Drillability describes the depth of transmedia narratives. If that stakeholder tweet inspires a government minister to want to help implement a design for a new service, they can find a lot of information at key touchpoints. Drillability enables individuals to learn more, drilling down into the details.
As we work to make services better and systems more functional, we can learn from pop culture strategies. Transmedia approaches can help us reach more people and involve them more deeply in the process of making large systems and services more human-centred. When we design services, we want them to have fans.
