What the Snoopy Museum teaches us about systems design
A reflection on systems starting from design thinking
I remembered that the Snoopy Museum was much closer to Tokyo Station where my family usually stays when we visit the capital. We had visited once before but forgot to buy advanced tickets. It was not, as Google Maps told me earlier this year, an hour away by express train. My memory had not failed me: turns out it was moved from Roppongi area in September 2018 and re-opened at the end of 2019 at Grandberry Park mall in the Machida district.
It was a chilly January morning, the day after my birthday to be exact, when we spent JPY 510 (THB 153 or USD 4.77) per train ticket and set off to the only official satellite Snoopy Museum outside of Santa Rosa, California. At the Minami-Machida station, we were greeted by yard signs of Snoopy befitting a political candidate during election season. Though there were plenty of wayfinding in English and Japanese, they were unnecessary — we just followed the crowd that all but emptied the train.
We walked about 10 minutes through a large shopping complex to get to the Museum and stood in the long line outside. We made it a solid 20 minutes before 10 AM, the timed entry on our tickets and the museum opening hour. Soon, the orderly check-in process sorted us into four lines with no particular algorithm and we were off to a brisk walkthrough the history of the talking beagle and his human friends.
All in all, the experience took just shy of an hour (we did not attempt to “Find Snoopy!” through the app, nor did we coincide with the hands-on crafts workshop schedule). Stories were read, pictures were taken, souvenirs were purchased. One exclusive edition of a fluffy Snoopy replica accompanied me home.
Writing it out loud here, the experience seemed mediocre —the trip was longer, it was chilly, we walked through a concrete jungle, to wait in line after line, and didn’t get much “wow” beyond a few photo ops.
But that’s not how I remembered the visit. I had a great day. Why?
“Design thinking doesn’t work for systems”
What prompted me to revisit my experience that day is a criticism of design thinking that it is all — and only — about satisfying the needs of the individual. It might be helpful to think about this through the lens of a design brief, for a Museum (client) that is about to re-locate:
How might we redesign the experience of the Snoopy Museum?
A design practitioner tasked with this challenge might execute such a project through the following steps:
- Empathy: Identify who attends the previous museums from existing ticket data and clarify their personas e.g. suburban parents with kids, Japanese teenagers who read comics, tourists from neighbouring countries.
- Define: Find out what their current journey is like in deciding to visit the Museum and during their stay. What value did they get out of the visit? What aspirations are fulfilled?
- Ideate: Imagine how we can delight the visitors and design the entire journey of “visiting the Snoopy Museum” from scratch
- Prototype: Create a mock experience of the Museum, like a landing page leading to a physical pop-up exhibit to solicit feedback
- Test: If we have any say at all, we would work make suggestions on the new location of the Museum
The last step is critical in talking about design thinking as a precedent to systems thinking. Without it, these classical “design thinking” steps, rightly deserve one particular strain of critique that an executive at a Bangkok-based consulting agency once used to dismiss my excitement for design thinking. To paraphrase him:
We’re moving on from design thinking. It doesn’t account for stakeholders — systems thinking is where it’s at.
As I understand it, systems thinking, in business parlance, is inspired by the methodologies used in the social impact world where there is equal emphasis on social and economic value exchange between people. An example a systems-led project that I’ve worked on is in distributed solar energy in remote areas of Uganda.
The project started with empathizing with end-users —mostly farmers — about how they are using energy and their day-to-day needs, and then with stakeholders who come into contact with them such as NGOs, telecom companies, government agencies, distributors.
The research phase culminates in a stakeholder map of people and institutions who provide and derive value from each other — exchanging data for money, or funding for access to new markets. Based on this map, we proposed to our startup partner a traveling tech delivery and maintenance crew that can reach remote, under-electrified areas to distributing small-scale solar energy kits.
From this experience, I would define systems thinking as a methodology to create a platform solution that accommodates the needs of an interconnected web of stakeholders.
In the shadow of systems thinking, then, design thinking and its singular focus on empathy at the individual level can appear primitive. In the case of the Snoopy Museum, it seems like design thinking mandates that we design for the visitors of the Museum and them alone.
I disagree.
As design practitioners are well aware (and are wont to do), a part of good design project is to expand the scope to include an individuals’ interactions with other stakeholders. One way to to achieve this is by asking: What else does a persona need?
We can take a persona, say that of the “suburban parents with kids”, and consider their entire day spent around the Snoopy Museum. How would they get to the Museum? What else would a family need to get done — weekly groceries, work-related purchases? How would we like them to feel at the end of visit — like it’s a big road trip or just another leisurely day with a special attraction?
We can easily expand the scope of the original prompt to something like:
How might we design a stress-free leisure day out for suburban families with young kids around their visit to the Snoopy Museum?
With this prompt, the design team need not limit themselves to satisfying needs / aspirations within the boundaries of the Museum.
For instance, the self-explanatory Find Snoopy! app can be extended beyond the walls of the Museum to the surrounding shopping complex to accompany people as they go about their day.
Moreover, a persona’s aspirations can inform decisions about where to relocate to. Parents might want to create outdoors experiences for their kids so they can go camping together one day, or they might feel unnecessarily pressured to end their day early so they can stop by a market for groceries. Both (imaginary) insights would point to Grandberry Park: a mall with an outdoors ice rink in the winter and a fresh market.
Of course, the choice of retail brands, produce in the markets, games in the arcade, and a million other factors are not entirely up to the Museum. At this point in our hypothetical brief, we could summarily address the same prompt from the perspective of the shopping complex.
Designing around Snoopy: A family’s day out
Back to the main story — the Snoopy Museum as a designed journey. I do not claim to know the decision-making behind the new location. As a user, though, the surrounding shopping plaza Grandberry Park with its 234 retail stores makes a lot of sense.
Thinking about our prompt earlier, it’s clear why the Museum would choose this complex. The suburban family with young kids, for instance, may or may not interact with the following elements to address their needs for a stress-free leisure day out:
- Car park (need to transport groceries items in bulk)
- Supermarket (need to get food for the week)
- Outdoors ice rink (need for adventurous moments of bonding)
- Fashion retailers (need to prepare for work attire)
- Restaurants and (need to re-energize)
- Arcade center (need for family time)
- … and many more.
These are all services that either satisfy a need (e.g. getting groceries) or fulfill an aspiration (e.g. bonding time) all in one convenient place. Design thinking: check.
Significantly, these also involves a multitude of stakeholders such as local producers of food (supplier), employees (labour), national brand chains (supplier), local government (road infrastructure), etc. Systems-thinking: we’re getting there.
The most obvious conclusion from this story is that users’ needs during the day can hardly be constrained to one “need statement” mapped onto one solution. Even if you are tasked with designing the new Snoopy Museum experience, that experience happens in context of other needs. My own family, as foreign visitors, were completely satisfied by the day’s offering. Snoopy was our attraction. Restaurants were our sustenance. The supermarket with local produce was our little moment of discovery.
Replace the Snoopy Museum with any other products or experience — waste-free retail store, mobile NYT crosswords, a design workshop, a cafe, a subway train service — and we’ll find that they don’t work in a vacuum either (a fidget spinner might come close). There are people a.k.a. stakeholders that relies on and derives from the “thing” you’re designing. As a practitioner, it is our job to be aware of who these are and how to work with them. Design thinking doesn’t ignore the system by limiting the scope to individual’s needs. Rather, design thinking discovers a starting point based on real people, not the be-all and end-all of a project’s outcome.
This misunderstanding comes from the business-led scoping of the problem statement. To bring design thinking to the systems-level, we have to be curious about how to expand the boundaries of our project (read: reframe our brief). Most of all, we have to be patient with the wide variety of needs from different users and stakeholders because our job then, should we accept, would be to connect everyone over the things they need to get done to be happy.
The less obvious conclusion for me is that designing a good experience necessitates a system-like thinking, by someone, even if that person or team has limited control over what they can do. As we have seen in our hypothetical discussion, designing for a good day around the visit to Snoopy Museum will involve a whole network of stakeholders.
The simplest thing is to do is ask: how else can we delight you?
