Our Next Trailblazer: Professor Miso Kim.
A look at service design, its importance, and its necessity in the era of COVID-19.
by Veronica Cihlar, image design by Gabi Homonoff
In taking a look back at our first two nominees from February, Eliana and Mia, it is difficult to ignore just how much has changed within the Northeastern, Boston, U.S., and global communities since. COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus, is a pandemic that first, continues to threaten people’s health and second, invades and disrupts all of our everyday lives.
While it has affected how nearly everybody goes about their daily business, for few people has that dynamic brought more stress than for service and health workers, many of whom continue to do their high-contact jobs despite an increasing threat to their personal safety.
When we nominated Northeastern professor Miso Kim, we had little idea of just how relevant her work in service design would be to our quickly-evolving global situation. Her insight into centering the dignity and autonomy of service workers within service industry systems is pertinent now more than ever.
Veronica Cihlar (VC): “I guess we can get started! I was just wondering if you could give a brief introduction about what you do, and how you first got into design?”
Prof. Miso Kim (MK): “I’m a professor of Experience Design at Northeastern. Currently, I am focused on studying the dignity and autonomy of the service experience — that’s my particular area. I create theoretical frameworks and then write papers about dignity in the human experience, with a humanistic approach to design. I actually majored in Architecture, but then I changed paths a bit, first with Interaction Design and then with Information Design…
On how I first got into design, I think it goes back to the time when I came to America with my dad in the eighth grade. He was in America for one year, and then the whole family came here together. It was a shock to me at the time because when I was younger, Korean and American culture were so hugely different.
Eventually, I came back to Korea, and then I started to think about how one environment is different from the other, and how I was influenced by their cultures… But when I studied architecture, I also realized “oh, so this is more of a physical, material environment.
I felt like the environment that I wanted to study was slightly different — an environment made of meanings.”
VC: “So I did some research on your work, and you also mentioned the field of service design. I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about that and what exactly that is?”
MK: “I think that’s actually a good continuation of my story! It began when I was studying Information Design. At the time, Shelly Evenson, who is one of the founders of the Service Design Movement, was actually teaching at Carnegie Mellon University. I took a couple of classes with her. I learned from her that there’s this perspective that’s a very holistic approach, that looks at more of the intangible, called service design. To me, it looked like the architecture of interaction design: coordinating everything — how people interact, how people interact with materials, how people interact with the environment, how systems work, and I was fascinated…
Service design is still relatively new and it’s continuously being defined and redefined. Many people see different things in service design, but in particular I try to look at it from a humanist framework. I thus got interested in dignity and autonomy because I feel that with services, those values are particularly important, especially looking at the history of “serving.”
I feel like, in the end, we are doing design to enhance the dignity and autonomy of human beings.”
VC: “The values of dignity and autonomy actually segue well into my next question. In choosing from the Trailblazers nominees, we really wanted to highlight the value of empathy within design, which seems to go hand in hand with the values of dignity and autonomy. Could you speak on the role that empathy, specifically, plays in your work?”
MK: “Currently, I’m teaching Experience Design, where we are using the framework of rhetoric. We’ve been focusing on human individual-to-individual interactions, and individual-to-group interactions. It’s all about subjectivity, and how you create a compelling argument — a way of communication. In creating this argument, like ancient Greek scholars suggested, we use the three means: logos, ethos, and pathos.
And pathos is especially about emotions, like empathy — an emotion that brings us together. Sympathy is a feeling about a person, it’s about difference. However, empathy is about being together. You are going to use your designer’s imagination to be in the place of the person. So I would say empathy is a very important quality for a designer.”
VC: “Yeah, that makes sense; I think that if you don’t exercise empathy well enough in design, you run the risk of re-creating equities and making design that’s not completely sustainable, or maybe doesn’t adequately center whoever you’re trying to help. On a different note, I was looking at some of your more specific clients, and I saw that you did some work for the U.S. Postal Service and the Korean government. Thus, I was wondering if you could talk about some of the more interdisciplinary aspects of your work?”
MK: “Service design inevitably requires collaboration between different perspectives, disciplines, backgrounds, and even different assumptions and value systems, because service design looks at things from a higher-level perspective. So for the USPS project, we redesigned a very thick book that contained all of the regulations for the United States Postal Service. In the beginning, we were doing information design, but then we started to interact with different postal workers, the end-users, and the government officers. What I learned was that in the redesign of this book’s structure, we were changing the culture of this organization. We had to take a lot of time to actually learn the differences in the interests and experiences of the people, so that we could make the design and change the culture in a way that catered better to everyone.”
VC: “So this book that contained all of the regulations — did you simplify it and make it more easy to understand? What specifically do you change about it?”
MK: “The book, all of the regulations: they were totally organized and written from the perspective of a machine. In the United States Postal Service, it’s all about mass mailing. There are thousands and millions of pieces of mail being sent every day, and they are all sorted by machines, in a very much factory-like facility. So the book was very much organized and written from the perspective of how to optimize the functionality of this machine… However, it made it difficult for people who were working in the post office to understand its logic. What we did was first use empathy, just like you mentioned, and conduct user research. We learned their perspectives and needs, and their natural human processes of preparing the mail, and then we reflected that within the structure of the redesigned book. Now, it’s easier and more natural for people to use.”
VC: “Within that thread, do you think that service design is an effective framework and will be more important as we see more fields become increasingly automated and machine-driven?”
MK: “That’s a very good question. It’s a hot topic these days, especially with what we are experiencing right now, today, with COVID-19. The culture will change after this. I see that service industries are being hit really hard, and that there will be a real change moving more towards machines, AI, and automation. I think that’s the reason why we need, even more importantly, to think about human values.
In the end, we are making the information and systems to support and enhance human life.”
VC: “Do you think that those values will inevitably be lost when things are more automated, or do you think, if the service design framework is employed correctly, that we can transfer as many of those human values to machine-driven industries as possible?”
MK: “I think in the future there will be more of an emphasis on interface design. Interface design is actually one of the reasons why design has gained so much attention in our popular culture these days. However, more fundamentally, it’s all about creating a new and better experience for people, and helping people to better interact with each other, and with machines and complicated programming. That may be the case with service design as well, where there will be a bigger importance given to designing services for people to better participate in systems.”
VC: “My last question, with the couple of minutes we have left, is about our current situation with coronavirus, and how it’s showing a lot of weak spots in certain systems. Could you offer a kind of critique of that, through a service design lens?”
MK: “To me, this is an opportunity to realize (especially from my research into dignity and autonomy) that service design has discussed a lot about how to make service more customer-centric.
However, this [pandemic] really shows that the most vulnerable population are actually workers: those who have direct interactions with all of these customers without the necessary protection, or who have to stay away from their job without the luxury of online meetings or remote means of participation.
It’s a turning point, to me, to think about what the approach to service design would be from the service worker’s perspective. It will also make us think about the value of direct human interaction. I think this will change the nature of service, and I’m also curious to see what this will bring to the service design field in general.”
