Key takeaways from the Service Design Global Conference 2019
Last week, the 12th annual Service Design Global Conference brought the most prominent design thinkers of the world to Toronto, Canada. With the theme, Building Bridges, the organisers wanted to emphasise the role of service design as a change agent — working toward a better world, raising the profile of design to the betterment of people, business, government, and the environment. Here is the report by Kuudes’ Harri Nieminen, Susanna Ollila & Sonja Söderholm.
The reveal of the Service Design Award winners on Thursday evening was the self-evident climax of the summit. Over 100 projects from all over the world were entered this year, facing higher submission standards than ever before. With the project for the code school Hive, Kuudes was one of the four finalists in the category of Non-profit / Public Sector. This time Hive wasn’t among the winners, but it was an honour to be nominated and receive a finalist certificate for the project.
In addition, the conference boasted dozens of talks and discussion about the most topical issues the service design field is facing now. We want to highlight the following three themes that especially caught our attention during the 2-day event.
What can service design do to design better futures?
Ultimately, service design is the perfect tool for tackling the wicked problems our society is facing from climate crisis to business model disruptions.
Amy Sullivan and Shelley Evanson from Fjord hosted a workshop on Foresight Primer where they suggested that in the end, the future mindset is a design mindset — open to possibility, prepared to iterate and able to change. Imagining futures with foresight methodology and tools, we can start talking about different options, and informing strategy work to achieve the preferred future. As they reminded, there isn’t a single future but many possible futures.
“The future mindset is a design mindset — open to possibility, prepared to iterate and able to change.”
Gordon Ross from OXD suggested that service designers are gatekeepers who have the power of deciding who gets to be involved when new services, systems and futures are built (and they should use consideration on how to use it). He suggested that in order to respond to this challenge, we as service designers should take these questions as a practical part of our work. Where are we going? Who gains and who loses and by which mechanisms of power? Is this development desirable? What — if anything — should we do about it?
When creating possible futures, we often lose track of our history. Zita Cobb, in their inspirational story about how Fogo Island Inn came to exist, highlighted how we need to use design to create bridges between the past and the future, and always build on history and heritage. In practice, this can mean using architecture or creating new concepts that build on top of history and heritage, where the local actors with the heritage act as partners in telling the traditional narrative through new means of design.
The all-important inclusivity
Jesse Wente from CBC Radio opened the conference by talking about the importance of diversity and inclusivity, and this was a re-occurring theme during the summit.
MLSE, the parent company for the ice hockey team Toronto Maple Leafs and many others, has approached the concept of sports fandom in a brilliantly different and inclusive manner (Humza Teherany, Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment). They realised that most of their fans are not in the arena watching the game, but rather scattered around Canada and rest of the world — meaning that the fan experience needs to be holistic wherever you are. They have expanded the ways in which fans can interact with the team; the goal is to leverage technology and improve the fan experience and thus widen the global audience.
“We need to design with people, not for people.”
John Powell from Hypergiant talked about the importance of inclusivity in the design process and how we need to design with people, not for people. With this he meant that we need to stop treating people as a means to an end and only focus on the end-users who ultimately are going to pay for the service, but recognise and consider the human recourses needed to execute the service or product. Many also touched on the importance of having a diverse design team to be able to understand the end-users and their different needs in the best possible way.
Influencing behaviour beyond nudging
Behaviour design has more and more emerged as a term. Especially in marketing, nudging has been used for some time now, but currently, there is an increasing amount of talk about influencing behaviour in various ways.
Anne van Lieren from LiveWork shared insights stating that nudging has only short-term effects and it doesn’t change human behaviour easily. We operate on autopilot 95 % of the time, and behavioural changes require repetition to become a routine. To reinforce the behaviour change, she suggested the use of rational overrides — being physical, digital or interactive interventions.
For example, one insurance company redesigned their claim form including both small nudges and clear rational overrides to make sure people are honest. They moved the “I confirm everything I wrote is true” from the end to the beginning of the process to guide the person to the honest path. They also added a chatbot that appeared if the person spent too much time on the claim form, since their statistics showed that dishonest claim-filers usually spent more time filling the form.
Design interventions were mentioned also by Matt Ratto from the University of Toronto. For example, the use of individual and social theories can be used to change your habits. Rational individual design prompts can be information and advice you get about your personal lifestyle habits; having the goal of making you realise what you should do differently to improve your health, such as adding steps, walking the stairs etc. Social design prompts, therefore, can be information shared about other users. For example, a competition between people showing them how many steps others have gained could motivate you to walk the extra mile.
