Probing into service systems and infrastructures — Studio Reflections

This 1-month studio of Probing into service, system and infrastructure was a great learning experience. This studio gave many insights and research concepts into how a new system is planned and how services work.

| Initial Understanding

First week of the studio was an introduction to how service, system and infrastructure are three different entities but still related to each other. This week gave us an insight on how as a designer all the three elements should be considered before implementing the final product as system in a whole is interdependent on all these factors. This studio revolved around applications working on gated communities and all the services they provide.

| The process

Second week was all about finalizing the topic we wanted to work on and for that we had to look into what all parameters have been covered by applications and what domain do we wanted to choose. After analyzing applications like My gate and ADDA, I felt that parameters like accounting, maintenance, inquiry, issues are already covered and are being well managed. But when I thought with respect to individual residents the next thing after basic management was looking into people’s need and how a community as a whole could contribute in it. That was when as a team we decided to take Home based business for residents inside the community as my topic of research. There are many people who stay at home and are busy in their day to day household activities, but some of them want to start something of their own and become home entrepreneurs and gated community being vast enough was a big plus point for this service.

| Learnings

Through surveys we got to mark our target audience and interviews helped in understanding people’s view and their expectation from such a system. Many a times it happens that somewhere, some things are stored in our conscious and we assume to work things in a particular way, these interviews helped me with drawing out that line between assumptions and realities and that proper research is really necessary and all kind of audience should get fit in it.

Also I got to learn in these studio was to focus. Focus on what I actually want to do rather than including other nearby aspects and creating further confusion. Including all the things creates chaos and focusing on a single thing lets us dig deep into the problem and finding out the gaps in the system.

Competitor analysis was also something new for me and helped me in seeing what all services are already out there and how to make something much better and easier for people to use.

Customer Journey Map was quite interesting. Usually when we think of a scenario we think of it on a surface level, but when we have to create a flow out of it, automatically we think of all small steps that we walked to achieve to the ultimate goal. A customer’s journey captures, the timing, emotions and all possible interactions and help us in understanding all the small steps of a customer.

| Conclusion

Finally coming to the service blueprint was something I’ll keep on following for my further system designing project as it makes things quite clear. We know that on doing an onstage action what all is happening around, to support and to make onstage actions work is back-end. It’s like working on stage where you are the director you know the plot, all the scenes but you are also an actor who has to perform on stage.