We live in a world where everything is and will become a service.

Technology led the charge, with hundreds of Software as a Service (SaaS) startups making up the bulk of our economy. Healthcare-as-a-Service (HaaS) thrived in COVID-19, fundamentally changing how we deliver healthcare. In the next ten years, generative AI will unleash more AIaaS businesses than we have ever seen.

So if we live in such a world, what does that mean for designers of services or service design tools? What does it mean for an equitable service?

Service blueprints (a hallmark tool of Service Design) are having a little moment after Brian Chesky at Airbnb shared a service blueprint of the Airbnb service. Service Designers and agencies responded with their slew of “we do this too” and yay for service blueprints posts. We’re chiming in and asking what could service blueprints (and service design more broadly) look like when equity is at the center?

TLDR or Keep Reading
If you want to jump into our take on a service blueprint that prioritizes equity from the get-go, here is a template we created that questions the typical service blueprint.

If you want to warm up into the topic and nerd out with us about what it looks like when equity is at the center of a service blueprinting process — keep reading.

There are a few aspects of a tool like the service blueprint that we want to design away from: visibility, disposability, and choice and instead turn toward: transparency, investment and agency.

Bringing the Invisible to Light

Equitable service design acknowledges the invisible aspects of services, illuminating the unseen efforts and hidden facets that ultimately contribute to a user’s experience. The unsung heroes in the background, the backstage workers, and the subtle touches in service delivery often go unnoticed.

While we believe deeply in the power of empathy as a tool to better understand our customers. And while many of us put a lot of energy into capturing every interaction and emotion to ensure we truly understand their journey.

Could it be that in our laser-focused efforts to really “get” our customers, concentrating solely on them, we might unintentionally overlook the empathy required for the people crafting, delivering, and realizing the value we aim to provide?

Let’s take the line of visibility often present in many service blueprints. On the surface, it looks at everything behind the scenes of the service. However, it can often work like a class system, creating a harmful hierarchy of care.

We need to see the line of visibility and not use it as an excuse to hide the less shiny parts of a service. It should provide what people need when needed, but it should do so through an empathic lens that actively illuminates the unseen and champions those who typically exist outside the spotlight. No matter how minor or seemingly unimportant it may seem, every touchpoint in service design results from human creativity and labor. We respect the dignity of every person involved by realizing this, and we firmly believe that nobody is disposable.

This approach puts value on the people who make services possible, not just the people who receive the service. It means nurturing an ecosystem where everyone feels valued and respected, from the service designer to the frontline worker, from the back-office personnel to the user.

Participation by and more fundamentally inclusion in the decision making and design are essential in order to design toward visibility and agency.

Moving beyond tokenistic co-creation: Promoting Inclusivity and Agency in Service Design

Our views on where knowledge and insight reside within an organization shape how we design. Knowledge can come from many places: staff who interact with the customer, staff who are behind the scenes, the customer, etc. Yet how we co-create or include people in the development and design of a service can alter which voices, ideas, and concerns matter and which do not.

We risk flattening people’s lived experiences when we design alone. Accessibility, cultural sensitivity, and socioeconomic factors must be considered for good and equitable service design. To do this, services must be easy for everyone who needs them, based on consent, and not limited by physical ability, language skills, or anything else that might affect how someone experiences a service. With cultural sensitivity as a cornerstone of service design, we can ensure that services respect and respond to users’ diverse backgrounds and unique needs.

By doing so, service design can evolve from a tool for solution delivery into an instrument for driving systemic change.

The Journey Ahead

The future of equitable service design demands a commitment to systems that design toward transparency, dignity, and agency.

Every person, every action, and every part of the service experience is important.

It’s our responsibility when mapping a service and practicing service design, to illuminate them, to stand against disposability, and to foster a culture of dignity and visibility. Let’s challenge our design processes and tools to help us do just that.

About Us:

This article was written by Nagela Dales of OpenHouse and Catherine Collins of Moxie — together we are determined to create inclusive tools that transform how teams work. We consult, train and coach teams.

OpenHouse was founded to create a world with equity centered businesses. For us equity means every founder receives what they need to develop to their full business and creative potential.

Ideas with Moxie is an agency that believes that people who have experienced the challenge are the best to approach solving it.

Equitable Service Blueprints: Designing Against Disposability was originally published in Moxie Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As we start meeting in-person or in hybrid work spaces, I have started to review some of my favorite in-person workshops, which brings me back to this observation exercise.

Observation is a research method that teams will lump into their research bag of methods. Yet, when teaching observation to new teams or designers, what is shared as an observation often borders on a judgment imbued with that individual’s biases or premature conclusions.

We created the exercise below as an attempt to distinguish between observation and the inferences or interpretation of that observation.

Here is how it works:

The following instructions assume an in-person setting, however it can be adapted to remote or hybrid workshops.

01 Have participants take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left hand side of the line, ask participants to title it “what I see” then on the right hand side, to write “what I think this means.”

02 Ask for a volunteer to come with you into a space where the group cannot see you. Whisper the following instructions to the volunteer: “Go back to the group, sit in a chair, place your arms at 90 degrees, and round the hands slightly and move your fingers up and down irregularly.”

Note: When instructing the volunteer, the key is not expressing “as if you’re going to type,” but to actually state the observable behavior. You could also hand the instructions to the volunteer on a piece of paper, however, I like the drama it creates with the whispering.

03 When the volunteer and the facilitator return to the group, the volunteer takes a seat in front of the group and starts to act. The group is asked to write down what they see, and what they think this means. After 7 seconds, whisper to the volunteer a few more tasks like, move your right toes up to the sky and then back down to the floor a few times.

04 After applauding the volunteer, ask the participants to first share what they saw. “Fingers moving!” “Foot tapping.” Piano playing.” “No, computer typing.”

For the last two suggestions, ask: “Is this what you saw?”

After asking, “is this what you saw?” some of the participants will often share, “it’s not playing the piano, it’s moving fingers from side to side,” “it’s moving the foot,” and they will start to say the behaviors or actions that they observed. At this point, switch to asking what this means. People will often share “playing the piano” or “it means they are working on the computer.”

Here, participants start to recognize the difference between their inference of the data and the data itself. The data is the behaviors (moving the foot up and down, moving the fingers irregularly, arms at 90 degrees), the inferences are how they interpret the data (piano playing, typing, etc).

05 Participants then pair up and take turns being the observer and then being observed. Note: the one being observed in the pair is allowed to use 5 words maximum (if they choose to use any language at all).

06 From there, have a conversation about what one looks for when doing field research and conducting observations. Looking for what behaviors researchers may see and then also seeking the conscious separation of what one may think this means. Even more importantly, in our teams of researchers, it is necessary to discuss how our biases influence the inferences we make.

Note on the Debrief: Every time in the debrief participants ask what I tell the volunteer thinking that I instructed typing or piano playing. By telling the volunteer the observable behavior it reinforces how much we invent through our inference.

Time: Timings are intentionally not included. As a facilitator try to sense when it’s time to switch. In general, this exercise can take at least 10 minutes.

Are there exercises that you’ve started to turn back toward? That you’ve adapted for in person, remote or hybrid workshop settings?

Catherine is Founder of Moxie — furthering ideas that matter to your customers, employees, ______, stakeholders, patients, etc.

For more exercises or information on upcoming workshops visit Moxie’s website.

What We See ≠ What We Think It Means: An Observation Exercise was originally published in Moxie Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How many people can an online workshop really handle?

We’re often asked the question: “how many people would you suggest for a workshop?” For that we have an answer that takes into consideration the context of each situation — unfortunately not one magic number 😉

When it comes to facilitating online, we’re continuing to experiment with the tech and human limits and reflect below on our experience leading a facilitation session for master students at the Royal College of Art in London.

The Challenge

Scale a facilitation class of 40 participants to 70 participants.

In a previous semester, we had taught remote facilitation techniques to 40 Royal College of Art Service Design master students. We had two separate workshops with 20 people.

The following semester the course grew to 70 students. Due to scheduling we could only have one session. This required us to tweak and evolve our content to fit the larger group, and the needs of the platforms we were going to work in.

What exercises would we need to shift given the scale? How many facilitators would we need for the workshop? How many Zoom breakout rooms would we have to create? How many Mural boards? Below are four main reflections on the session.

Shift where the exercises take place.
The exercises shifted slightly, however, what really changed was where the exercises took place. With the scale and time constraints it made sense to have most of the interactions take place in breakout rooms instead of the main room. Exercises and debriefs happened in breakout rooms. The main room centered on setting people up for the next exercise, with a light debrief on what had been discussed in breakout rooms.

As facilitators, this felt a bit like we were conductors rather than coaches at times, so it was hard to get a sense of the feeling and dynamics of the overall breakout groups.

Assume the tech won’t be able to cope.
We planned for the fact that Mural probably couldn’t cope with 70 people populating stickies on one board at the same time. There was no way of testing this in advance, so we had to assume the worst and plan accordingly. We designed all our activities in separate Mural boards for groups of teams — so that there would only be a max of ~20 people on each board. This did mean we had to be pedantic with our preparations and particularly clear with our instructions and links. A few people certainly got lost along the way, and jumping between programs and Mural boards left some participants with a feeling of dis-jointed-ness. It would have been simpler to have one Mural board for each team for the whole time, rather than flick between different boards for different activities. For one of our activities we switched to Google Slides thinking it could withstand 70 people in one document. To our surprise, Google Slides had trouble handling that volume of collaboration.

Have a facilitator simply for technical difficulties.
As predicted, bandwidth failed for some of our participants. This meant we needed to continually reallocate participants into their breakout rooms. A learning here: it’s particularly helpful to have an extra facilitator just for handling these technical aspects.

Crowdsource answers to questions.
You simply won’t have time to answer everyone’s questions about a particular topic (facilitation/workshop leadership in this case). Create ways that you can use the collective intelligence of the participants to answer the burning questions.

As a part of their pre-workshop assignment, we asked participants to submit a key question they had about facilitation. We were able to cluster questions into common themes ahead of time and participant groups were assigned to a theme area based on their questions. During the session, we ran an activity where they discussed and recorded their answers. We had time to go to a few groups, and those answers are now open for all to see and go back to.

While we don’t have a definitive number to the question, how many people can a remote workshop handle — hopefully some of our reflections open up the nuance that we’ve experienced with this question.

What has worked for you in your sessions?

Catherine Collins and Holly May Mahoney facilitate remote and in person experiences with designers, students and professionals alike.

https://www.ideaswithmoxie.com

How many people can an online workshop really handle? was originally published in Moxie Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The systems and societies that we live in don’t just end up racist, they are designed that way.

As designers, we have a duty to deconstruct and redesign the white supremacist structures that oppress Black, Indigenous and People of Color in our society. We have a duty to not just design for diversity, but to design for justice; regardless of the products or services we create.

We believe Black Lives Matter. We seek justice for Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and Black people who have died, and continue to die under a system that does not protect and serve the lives of Black people. These include racist policing policies, the criminal justice system as well as inequitable housing and education policies.

As designers, action researchers and educators, we see a civic responsibility to contribute our skills to change the systems and institutions that have oppressed Black people for centuries.

Below are the ongoing actions we are taking at Moxie to be anti-racist and support Black lives. For context, Moxie is a human centered design agency focused on social impact. Our collective of designers and action researchers are a network of people who collaborate on certain projects under the Moxie umbrella. Here are our actions:

1. We commit to developing a practice of being anti-racist, which to us means: educating ourselves and collaborating with organizations who are committed to racial justice.

2. We are continuing to listen, reflect on our own biases, and educate ourselves on how to actively be anti-racist and support Black lives.

3. We commit to stepping beyond our individual bubbles and typical networks and actively seek out Black, Indigenous or People of Color researchers, facilitators, visual designers, service designers, to collaborate with on projects. If you know of someone we should collaborate with, please let us know. Even if you don’t consider yourself a designer in the traditional sense, but are drawn to these topics we would love to hear from you.

4. We will consciously seek out and collaborate with organizations who pursue racial justice regardless of their ability to pay for services.

5. We will continue our donations to the ACLU and have recently donated to MPD150 as we believe in both programmatic and systemic change. When working on a moxie project, we will apportion 1% of that project’s income toward racial justice organizations.

6. We are offering a workshop on remote facilitation Thursday June 25th from 10:00 am — 12:30pm EST; all of the proceeds will go to racial justice educators Mariame Kaba, Rachel Cargle, and Layla Saad. Tickets are 20 dollars, register here.

We invite you to hold us accountable with feedback, ideas and thoughts on ways in which we can improve.

Design our way out of white supremacy

Design our way towards social justice

Yours,
Team Moxie

Systemic Racism & Design was originally published in Moxie Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A few facilitator notes on running a remote ideation session.

For the past few weeks we’ve been offering HOW sessions on questions like, How can my team run a remote ideation session? Participants have ranged from educators and consultants to lawyers, — all folks working to involve their customer in the design of their service.

Below are nine notes that we’ve (Holly May Mahoney and Catherine Collins) compiled on running a virtual ideation session.

01 Arrival Exercise: As people are joining in for their first time, give them a fun task to do to make use of the inevitable 5 to 10 minute delay. This might be less of a challenge as more people get used to working with digital design or conferencing tools, but with first timers it’s helpful to have an arrival exercise.

02 Flip between digital and analogue: Just because you’re virtual doesn’t mean that all of the exercises need to be digital. You can also use pen and paper even in a remote environment. We ran a few warm-up exercises like 30 Circles with pen and paper and it worked well.

03 Do some exercises that get energy into each physical space: whether that’s drum rolling on the desk a few times or making a few collective noises, it will help create some of the physical energy that is often present after a warm-up. You can even get people to stand-up and stretch — just like in-person workshops it’s useful to help people energize between exercises.

04 Alternate between pairs, trios, etc: Zoom has a fabulous breakout function to put people into smaller groups. Use it to draw on techniques like “1–2–4-All” from Liberating Structures.

05 Co-facilitate: Have a co-facilitator so that you can balance content, responding to participants and the inevitable technical issues / gremlins that are bound to pop up.

06 Timing: Keep the sessions to 120 minutes with a bio break in the middle. 60 minutes is definitely too short for an ideation session and 90 felt tight. 120 minutes felt just right and gave plenty of space for a thoughtful debrief.

07 Tech: Choose what works best for your participants, and consider the participant’s knowledge and accessibility of different platforms. Mural or Miro are helpful whiteboards for making ideas visible. For lower tech, Google docs, sheets or forms can also work.

08 Be human & present: Just because we’re remote doesn’t mean we need to be robots. Try to use your video camera if you can, looking right into the camera to create a sense of connection. Of course working from home these days might not always make that possible, but when you can, have your video on.

09 Test, iterate, test again: Thank you to those who participated and whose feedback helped shape every iteration. We pulled together our content based on a short survey, experience facilitating together in person and online, and a few hypotheses of what people might need. The feedback and iteration shaped our work as much as the prep and research beforehand.

If you’re interested in a HOW session with your team or a public session sign up here or reach out to catherine@ideaswithmoxie.com

This post was co-written by Catherine Collins and Holly May Mahoney.

Moxie is a design collective that specializes in design education and social impact projects.

Facilitator Notes — Remote Ideation was originally published in Moxie Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Community Potluck has Moved! was originally published in Moxie Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re part of the team at Moxie collaborating on early childhood education.

Hi! was originally published in Moxie Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.