Sander Kruitwagen: Service Design at Philips Design
Sander is a senior service design consultant at the Dutch agency Essense. In this role, he has been operating within Philips Design, developing ideas into meaningful value propositions. In our talk, we discussed his background and his daily routine as a service designer.
Sander, please, tell me about your background.
I studied Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology. Today this course is not that unique anymore but back in 2001, it was not a traditional design program. Already there we practiced service design and systems design. We focused on the design of intelligent products and systems.
During my Master’s studies, I focused on user-centered design. I did my graduation project at amBX (Ambient Experiences), an internal venture of Philips. They studied the use of light, sounds, vibrations, and wind to enhance entertainment experiences, especially for PC gaming.
In my project, I examined the use of light to improve experiences in the living room. There were already Ambilight TVs extending the image on the screen with lights around the TV. I studied the ways to transition such experiences to the living room for entertainment and relaxing purposes. During the project, I talked to people about how they used current regular lighting, for example how they set the mood in the room. Then I came up with a design of an interface and tested it with people.
Later on, Philips released Hue Lights. I don’t know how much of my project went into the design of that product. But at that time working on such a project was a great opportunity for me to design for future products and services.
Three years ago I returned to Philips when Philips Design became a client of Essense, the design agency I’ve been working at since 2011. At Essense, we’ve developed ourselves into a service design agency that works very closely together with their customers, almost like partnerships. We provide design support in various ways, like design sprints, innovation accelerators, extended teams, and, in the case of Philips Design, we provide service design capacity. As such, I have been operating within Philips Design on various innovation programs, together with some of my Essense colleagues.
Can you describe your typical day as a service designer at Philips?
I currently work within a Philips innovation program called HealthWorks. It accelerates and derisks breakthrough innovation by developing ideas into meaningful value propositions by discovering consumer and market insights. A multidisciplinary team identifies innovation opportunities and I translate these into relevant designs, ranging from ideas and concepts to digital products and prototypes.
A typical day depends on the phase of the project. We start with getting insights from customers, business stakeholders, and experts. This can be done in workshops, meetings or interviews. We strive to get as much data as possible to get a good picture of the context. This vision is then translated into opportunities. During the design phase, we create solutions for customers or stakeholders, continuously iterating, building and testing.
A big part of my job is about interpreting and representing information, so everyone can see the whole picture, understand it and — together — do something with that.
The healthcare context can sometimes be challenging: it’s not always possible to get in touch with real consumers or patients. It’s a strict environment, so sometimes it’s impossible to conduct a survey or to test the prototype because of legal or ethical reasons. Sometimes we need to rely on external data or other ways to test the concept.
What is the general outcome of your work?
The final result of a project I’m usually involved in is typically a value proposition which has been assessed in terms of viability, feasibility, and desirability. If all of these are deemed positive, we hand the proposition over to the business team and they move the project further to the market. My work can comprise a set of requirements or guidelines for the design of the concept. It could be a service blueprint, including recommendations on how to improve the organization and resources to result in an optimal customer journey.
I am also involved in the design of different touchpoints and channels. In this case, we create a vision to communicate ideas to stakeholders. Sometimes we make a short movie for that. We can show how a future service or product can work and how it can impact people’s lives. But it can also be in the format of a powerpoint deck, as long as it communicates our ideas and can be used as a starting point for further development.
How do you validate the ideas?
We try to involve as much stakeholders and customers as possible to get their view on our solution. We make hypotheses, test them and use the learnings for further improvements or refusing the idea. The way we test varies per experiment. Since most of the time our project is leading to a future vision, it’s not really the typical user testing. It’s more about demonstrating or simulating a vision through storyboards, movies or prototypes and assessing how people respond to this.
Do you take part in the implementation phase?
Usually, not. I work at the front end of innovation, so if the project is promising, it goes to the business and they develop it. Sometimes we keep being involved in the background. At Essense, we do have projects where we take part in the implementation phase. It depends on the type of project, organization, and on our involvement.
What are the main challenges for service designers right now?
One of the biggest challenges for service designers is getting more strategic. We need to work well together with business strategists and top management to move organizations forward. There are some agencies on the market who already do that successfully. And that is the way we at Essense add more value to clients.
We need to find the ways to make service design tools more suitable for a complex context while keeping them simple to see the whole picture.
Another challenge is to make the complexity simple as more and more systems are getting interconnected. The ecosystems around products and services grow exponentially. Everything is getting automated, processes become digitized, organizations’ structure gets more cluttered. It’s now a real challenge to have a clear view on the context, to see the interactions between all the actors and factors.
As service designers, we have a set of tools to help us do this: stakeholder maps, service blueprints, customer journeys, etc. I noticed that today these tools don’t always work as they worked before. We need to find the ways to make service design tools more suitable for a complex context while keeping them simple to see the whole picture.
How do you deal with these challenges at Essense?
At Essense, we’ve recently been focusing on how to address these challenges, and how to better support our clients. In a way, we’ve been examining and improving our own ‘proposition’. Many businesses are looking to create business value or drive growth for their organization. More and more, the key pathway to achieving these goals is to provide customers unique and meaningful experiences.
Many people start to realize that design is crucial for this, but it’s important to recognize that design is not only a skill and a tool but also a mindset. At Essense, we practice design in two ways:
- To understand and envision: where is the innovation opportunity?
- To create and deliver: how to best meet the opportunity?
These ways allow us to guide our customers from framing the purpose to building the solution, by understanding where to focus, what to create, and how to interact.
This results in solutions that originated not from loose ideas, but from understanding the customers’ context and their challenges. Thus we can solve them and deliver customer experience excellence, that helps our clients grow their business.
Images courtesy of Sander Kruitwagen, Essense
