What I learned after studying Service Design at RCA for 1 year
Hi, I’m Sharon. I graduated with a BA in Diplomacy in 2019 and I am currently studying Service Design MA at Royal College of Art.
In this article, I want to reflect on what I have learned this year, including:
1. The course structure of RCA Service Design MA
2. My reflection during the Covid-19 outbreak
3. My learning in this year
The course structure of Service Design at RCA
There are about 70 students from various fields, such as product design, industrial design, business management, business consultants, government departments, information engineers, and UX designers. Due to the diverse background composition, you can always see the sparks of ideas igniting. I enjoyed the lively, vibrant, and positive atmosphere of the department.
In terms of curriculum structure, it is mainly project-based and supplemented by courses, such as Design Research, Understanding Problems and Opportunities for Value Creation, Stakeholder Analysis, Service Strategy, Prototyping, and Communicating Service Propositions. In addition, you can attend Practitioner talks every Wednesday night to understand industry trends, and the necessary abilities to adapt to the changing environment from the perspective of alumni.
Every group can discuss their schedule, their working pattern, and the project progress. There are 45-minute group tutorials each week, helping you clarify the project direction under the tutor’s instruction. In every term, you can showcase the process and deliverable outcome of your project in the interim and the final review. What I really like is that you can always learn from the work of other groups, exchanging experiences and knowledge between different projects in the presentations.
Under the course structure, we focused on one project in each term and started to collaborate with the clients in the real world from Term 2.
Everything went well until the outbreak of Covid-19. In my project, we worked on solving social isolation among the older generation with the aim to motivate older people to build social connections through mutual support in the community centre. However, after the Covid-19 outbreak, the government had to close community centres for the safety concern, which means that we had to redefine the problem and pivot our proposals.
My reflection during the Covid-19 outbreak
It was indeed very frustrating when we found our two-month work was mostly in vain. At the same time, the entire United Kingdom was in panic, and the course plan was constantly changing with government policies.
Even though the situation was full of uncertainty and anxiety, there were some unexpected benefits. Because the courses were moving online, we didn’t have to spend time commuting and we then got extra time to discuss and investigate the project direction. Finally, we reframed the problem and pivoted the service proposal. And the following are the lessons I learnt from this unforgettable experience.
It’s better to face the problem than complain about the situation.
It is easy to complain about the situation, but it is difficult to come up with a solution. We put much effort into building a network to get resources since it was harder to conduct all the research online, looking for entry points, and more importantly, thinking about alternatives that cannot actually be conducted offline. As the project was related to community building, our tutor suggested that we pay attention to the existing online social platform and think about the other possible breakthroughs. We also found that there was an active social mutual aid network, and residents proactively established online communities among the neighbourhood through WhatsApp and Facebook. Through these platforms, people could easily connect and provide support. I was really impressed by this vibrant social energy and it makes me think more about how to facilitate people’s initiative for social change in the future.
We then recognized that the urgent need for solving social isolation amongst older people during the pandemic was to engage them in the digital world and support them to use online services. We joined these networks, recruited interviewees, and prototyped our new service approach. With the support of these enthusiastic residents, our project finally proceeded smoothly.
It always seems difficult before you take action, and there will be many doubts in your mind, but when you take the first step, changes will begin to happen.
Language is not a barrier to communication, attitude is.
When working remotely, we cannot talk face to face and feel the spirited working atmosphere when being in different spaces. At this time, communication is key to maintaining a good working pattern. It’s really important to quickly organize your thoughts and fully express them.
However, don’t worry about your English pronunciation or incomplete grammar. Just be confident to express your ideas because your teammates will always respect your opinions. If you are willing to talk, no one will judge you on your dysfluent English.
Work is a part of life. Plan your ideal lifestyle.
In the past, I always felt that it was important to find a work-life balance. However, during the quarantine, there was no obvious separation between life and work in terms of time and environment. We usually woke up in the morning holding the computer in the bedroom, working all the way to bedtime. At this time, I realized that work is actually a part of life. Instead of waiting for the holiday, it is better to create an ideal daily life and create a ritual in life, such as meditation in the morning, making a hearty breakfast to welcome the beginning of a day, planning a daily walking map, exploring the surprises in the city.
I found that it was very important to spend time organising my thoughts every day, reflecting on what I was doing, why I was doing it, and what I learnt from it. I noticed my growth and my own shortcomings, then I went to find resources to study. Learning is no longer a painful obligation to fill up the emptiness of inferiority in my heart, but a stepping stone towards the unknown continent which is full of delightful surprises.
My learning in this year
I would like to share my learnings in this year full of twists and turns as a summary of this long article.
Success doesn’t lie in the ability, but in the will
I was not always confident, and I often questioned my abilities while studying abroad. However, I had no time to worry about whether I could do it after the project started. Having gone through the so-called “difficulties”, I realized that the boundaries are indeed defined by myself. The ways to succeed don’t lie in the ability, but the decision of “doing or not doing” it. When you want to stay in the comfort zone, you will also lose the opportunity to grow.
Find your position, rather than frame your role in team
In the service design field, teamwork is really important. In the past, I was often a project manager or researcher before. However, when working with a PM who was more experienced than me, I could not help but feel lost, thinking about what abilities and value I could contribute to the team. After working with different teams this year, I found that I don’t need to define my own title and role in a team. Because when you frame yourself in a role, you also limit the possibility of exerting yourself.
Instead, try to be a supporter of the team and switch your position flexibly. When playing different roles in a team, you can observe what other people do and learn from your teammates (like how they manage their work, how they conduct research, how they facilitate communication), and gradually become a trustworthy team player.
The importance of Systems Thinking
On the journey of learning service design, I also discovered the importance of Systems Thinking. There has always been no clear scope and definition of service design. As time and experience evolve, you will have different interpretations of this field. My current opinion is that Service design provides a comprehensive and integrated problem-solving thinking process. Its methodology is based on principles of human-centred approaches and systems thinking. It takes all users and stakeholders related to the topic into account and proposes a solution that brings value to all the service participants.
In order to find the leverage point to solve complex problems, systems thinking plays a very important role, helping you understand the whole context. Without understanding the outline of the entire problem, it is easy for us to propose a shortcut solution to a problem and then lead to more problems to be solved.
Take Taiwanese education, for example. Students study hard to get good scores to enrol in good colleges, however, they don’t know the meaning of study under the current education system, and feel lost in the end. Before jumping to the solution of reforming the education system, we should first understand the values, established cultural customs and class differences in the society, the perceptions and expectations of different stakeholders (teachers, parents, students, policymakers…) in education, then find the intervention point in the complex system.
Only when we understand the whole system and the interaction between elements and networks in it, can we achieve long-term and sustained impact.
The integration of service design with other fields
From January to March 2020, I was fortunate to be able to take a Behavioural Economics and Decision Making course at London Business School under the program cooperation between RCA and LBS. Behavioural Economics and Decision Making are mainly about delving into the decision-making process from a behavioural and psychological perspective, looking into designing nudges to help people make better decisions. After taking the course, I discovered that behavioural economics can be widely used in the service design field.
BE and SD both are methods to transform human behaviour insights into behavioural interventions. However, how the two interpret and apply these insights have different applications. Service design will take a holistic view of the user’s journey and propose a complete and comprehensive solution (go wide on the whole experience), while behavioural economics will focus on a moment and think about how to achieve a better result (go deep to optimize a single decision).
From my understanding, we can use behavioural economics to help us:
- Identify obstacles: recognise and eliminate invisible obstacles that can affect people’s decisions
- Find opportunities: Behavioral economics provides a new perspective to examine decision-making moments, making you think about how to design these moments, and use nudges to achieve the best results. It allows users to move toward the desired results.
- Verify design and iteration: Use behavioural economics to design experiments, judge variables, and understand user behaviour through A/B testing until the best design is found by testing these variables.
There are many articles about how to combine service design and behavioural economics on the internet so I will stop here before I embarrass myself. I just want to highlight that there are many possibilities for us to integrate various disciplines into the service design, and to never see service design from only one perspective.
At the end of the article, I want to summarize my year one journey with a small paragraph: “ Be honest about who I am, be bold to step out of my comfort zone, be rigorous and robust with my work and thought.”
I look forward to embracing the challenges and learnings in the following year at RCA.
