What happened at Canada’s first service design conference.
The day has finally come: Canada got its very own service design conference, #inFLUX, and here in Canada, we like to kick things off with a bang.
Let me tell you a little bit about my background and why I’m writing about this event. I am originally from Calgary, Alberta but have spent the last five years studying in the U.K. I recently (as in, the week before last) finished my Master’s degree in Experience Design at Hyper Island in the U.K. Essentially, you could easily call it a service design degree as well. Since I have moved back to Canada, I am interested in how the industry compares and am excited to be figuring that out.
Let’s get to it.
The day kicked off for me as most conferences do: walking into a room not knowing anyone even though they all seem to know each other. Much to my disappointment, there are four main sections to the speeches of the conference as well as four main workshops and they run co-currently, meaning you couldn’t attend everything. You could also only attend one workshop. After deciding which talks I felt somewhat alright with missing, I opted for the workshop that seemed to garner the least interest (more on that later).
After securing myself an excellent view of the stage, the opening remarks kicked off with a short talk from SDN Canada committee members Chris Ferguson and Nisha Haji. Let me just say that I spend a lot of my time trying to explain what I studied and what I do and never have I heard service design so clearly explained as by these two (I guess they know what they’re talking about). The theory is that products are easy to compare, but services? Not so much. That means that the differences between services are often invisible and the designer’s role is to manage the risk of that invisible space.
The role of a designer is managing risk for a world that’s in flux.
Title drop.
From there, David Soberman, of the Rotman School of Management where the conference was held, gave additional opening remarks. He further refined the definition of service design when he described it as applying design principles to business in the areas of service, strategy, and organization. I feel like this is a really elegant way of explaining the value of service design to non-designers.
One thing that struck me from his remarks was the large focus on training business students to think like designers. Of course, this makes sense as he comes from a business school. However, as someone who has spent as many years studying design as I have, I can’t imagine that simply teaching business students to apply design thinking can rival the foundation of applying that kind of thinking for years on end to a variety of situations. Similarly, you wouldn’t be able to give a designer a crash course in business and expect that level of experience to rival those with degrees in the subject. This got me thinking about all the different paths that one can take to service design and how each individual’s background can add something unique to the practice. Therefore, it’s possible that the best team of service designers that one could create would include individuals who came to the practice through different routes and can combine that expertise in business, design thinking, and other disciplines to inform the practice. Essentially, for service design to grow, particularly in Canada, we must value service designers that come from a myriad of educational backgrounds.
Institutions in Flux
The first “section” of the day was entitled Institutions in Flux and centred around the question: “Can service design be used to manage and adapt traditional institutions and business models?”
I’m going to go with a hard yes on that one, but let’s find out how.
This section showcased several examples of companies that centre on service design practices and thinking to deliver value. First up was Christine Zoltok of Breather, which has a really interesting USP in that their moniker is “the future of office space”. Her talk was about delivering good end-to-end experiences in a high growth context. I was really interested when she spoke about how her team uses Slack to better interact with their customers and each other. Even though I am an avid Slack user myself, I still learned a lot. The bot-fed Slack channels they use show them how their service is being consumed in real time which, of course, helps them meet the needs of those users all that much quicker.
Jason Fiske, of Farm Credit Canada, gave an inspiring talk about turning the FCC into a service design driven organization, essentially convincing 2000 people to change the way they work. This was a really important example to demonstrate that service design in practice isn’t always in the context of a flashy startup — it can be applied to all sorts of ventures. He brought up a few important points to those looking to do the same:
- Don’t try to do it alone: collaborate.
- Bring those you are trying to change into the process.
- There is no surefire way to do it and there’s a lot of making it up as you go.
Next, Rotman grads Christine Wheatley, Asha Srikantiah, and Andrea Leitner of Fidelity Labs spoke about a few case studies under their belts. With an example about estate planning, they showcased how service design can be implemented in the communication of complexity. In another example about artificial intelligence, they re-framed what can be seen as a huge potential disruption into an opportunity. They pointed out that the core needs of people won’t change despite tech advancement, further solidifying in the minds of the audience the requirement of staying in touch with those needs.
Practice in Flux
Practice in Flux tackled the question of “How do we communicate the value of service design?” This certainly peaked my interest as someone who foresees a long career future of doing just that. This section was set up as a panel moderated by Josh Greenhut of Bridgeable. Panelists included Tamsin Smith of Harmonesse Service Design, Joelle Stemp of Yu Centrik, Jonathan Veale of Civic Innovation YYC / City of Calgary, and Richard Z’Graggen of LVL Studio.
Almost immediately into the commencement of this panel, Tamsin Smith echoed a lot of what I have been feeling and thinking since starting to explore the service design industry in Canada. Originally from the U.K., she spoke about how the European service design industry is generally thought to be a holistic view of a business but in Canada we haven’t quite figured out how to articulate the practice in a similar way. From my own experience in the U.K, I can already tell from the atmosphere of the conference that service design in Canada is much more business-focused in a quantitative way as opposed to a qualitative one. It’s true: we may know what we’re doing but we’re still not sure how to communicate it in such a way that it’s valued by those we are trying to “sell” it to. The panel discussion generally bounced back and forth between whether to be upfront and direct about service design and what it is, or whether to use established vocabulary that is already understood to sneak the practice of service design in under a larger “good business” banner. Strong arguments can be made from both sides in terms of the best approach to get people on side. I tend to take the side of the purist: that the practice and principles of service design can only grow if we clearly communicate what it is instead of trying to parade it as something else. There is enough confusion of terms in this industry; we don’t need any more.
Regulations in Flux
The third section, regulations in flux, showcased the question “Can service design provide a path forward amidst complex regulatory and policy changes?”. In the first talk, the very entertaining Gordon Ross and Kevin Conn spoke about their experience working with service design in British Columbia’s justice sector. Maybe it’s because they work with a lot of lawyers, but one of the main premises of their talk was the idea that “design is a form of argumentation” and that it should involve evidence and sound facts to make a compelling case. Again, this tied back into the previous panel talk about the different ways to promote service design, particularly to those who aren’t necessarily design-savvy. From what I could ascertain from their talk, these two seem to be striking a good balance between considering their audience when implementing service design while staying true to the practice. Additionally, it’s really great to hear about stories from the public sector. There’s a lot of good and important work to be done there.
The next speech featured Susan Bartlett and Elizabeth Turcotte talking about the relationship between Bridgeable and American pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb. After a few minutes of us Canadians secretly reveling in our reasonably priced prescription medication, we tuned in to some significant insights about the healthcare industry and the benefits and challenges that come with the shift to a patient-centric model. On one hand, people are taking a more active role in their healthcare, which can be good, but sometimes they are not necessarily prepared to do so. It’s an interesting challenge to engage with and involve patients while still making sure the expertise of doctors takes centre stage. In response to these thoughts, the women also highlighted the development of a “universal patient language” but more than just creating it, they convinced the company to share the findings, essentially making it open source (you can find it here: http://www.upl.org/). This kind of attitude towards business and innovation is really forward thinking and it’s nice to see steps in this direction.
Rounding out all of these interesting examples was Jess McMullin of Situ who wrapped this section up by speaking to us about service transformation. He walked us through the delivery, foundation, and bedrock of making an organizational shift and using service design as a “Trojan horse”. My favourite quote from him: “Ask bigger questions to solve better problems.”
People in Flux
The final section of the day revolved around the question “Does service design provide a way to understand and satisfy people’s changing needs and expectations?” For this section of the conference, I left the area of the main speeches to attend the workshop Exploring Relationships as a Service led by Linn Vizard and Elina Lawrie of Bridgeable.
When I initially got my ticket, the stack for this workshop was the highest, for whatever reason, as workshops held earlier in the day “sold out”. I am intrigued by things that are different or less expected and so I was most interested in what unique things I might learn in this workshop. However, when the time came, the workshop was completely full with some people standing outside the door hoping others wouldn’t show up so they could get in (evidence that observation in design research does not always produce accurate conclusions).
The activity of the workshop was very closely tied the the reigning question of People in Flux as it directly dealt with expectations in relationships and how that can differ between the parties involved. If you’re familiar with the business model canvas, this won’t be too much of a leap for you. We filled out a “relationship model canvas” which essentially analyzes your relationships with others in a similar way to how the BMC analyzes businesses. Some really interesting discussion came out of this surrounding perspectives: will the person I’m writing about have a similar canvas to me? Maybe the next iteration of this workshop is to come with someone and fill it out together. My unsuspecting friends don’t know what they’re in for! Overall, it was great to end the day with an activity. It felt a little strange to be examining a relationship in this way, but strange is often good in this context.
Concluding Thoughts
As a practicing vocal feminist, the first thing I have to do is to commend the organizers on is the gender diversity of panelists: virtually 50/50. Way to show how it’s done.
Secondly, it’s difficult to capture this day overall (without writing a novel!). There were a lot of different perspectives that came to the table and a myriad of interesting discussions had. Part of this is because of the intention of the organizers to bring together people from across the country, which I think is really important and lovely to see. For me personally, it was great to see Jonathan Veale and Jess McMullin representing Alberta in a design context. I implore the conference to keep sight of this principle in the years to come. It’s no big secret that Canada could improve our service design industry overall but this conference is a great first step in doing just that. Uniting a country as vast as ours is hard, but are we service designers or are we not? During the panel discussion, only 20% said they call themselves one. I’m going to call a metric on it: let’s aim for 40% next year. I’ll see you there.
