Penetrate and Interpret Service & Experience Design
We were part of the Service and Experience Design workshop, an extensive 10 day workshop helping us understanding what service design is and the various tools that help in understanding and mapping scenarios and come up with alternative experiences. Our focus area was working for People with Disability and we concentrated on Transportation, the reason being is for them to be able to get out of their homes and access other spaces such as workplaces, social spaces they need to commute.
The project was a collaboration with Enable India, a non-profit organisation who work together in impacting livelihoods across 11 disabilities.
Mapping Current Scenarios
In the beginning, we started mapping out the existing system of transport which is accessible by people with disability in both private and public sector and also conduct contextual inquiry to get to know how people with disability access transportation. To understand more about our process and journey, refer the following links -
But,
What is it that I took back from this workshop? How has it impacted my thought process ?
Collaborate and work with People with Disability
I have always had an opportunity to socialise and interact with people with disability, but this time when I went ahead to conduct contextual inquiry my perspective was little different. One of the visit to Enable India, it was conveyed that Disability is a mixture of ability and inability, just like how each one of us have our own share of abilities and disabilities, hence when we are designing we should concentrate on their ability, rather than feeling sympathetic and glorify their disability. Yes, as human beings when we see a person with disability we tend to focus on what is missing, but we should shift our focus on all the various possibilities they are filled with.
Service Design according to my vocabulary
According to my understanding, Service Design is a collaborative approach to design experiences for the customers. Service design helps in mapping and highlighting intangible experiences during a journey of the customer and improving the overall experience. This approach helps in zooming out and looking at the experience from bird’s eye view and understanding the larger context.
For example : An educational Institution, when we map out the stakeholders, we think of Students ( who benefit from the system ), Teachers (who enhance the system), Administration (who have direct involvement in the system), but using service design approach, I was able to map and recognise all other various stakeholders apart from the obvious ones, such as Education Board, Auxiliary Staff, Admin staff etc make up the entire Institution Ecosystem. Though we never get to see the complete functioning of the system, every stakeholder directly or indirectly involved in the ecosystem plays a vital role.
The Journey
This approach helped me in understanding various touchpoints and how each touchpoint plays a vital role in the entire journey. It enabled me to look at the complete journey of the customer in this case, people with disability, the journey from when they step out of home, the various decisions they have to make on the way, the experiences they encounter till they reach their final decisions. This allows you to find out gaps and opportunities.
Is this Sustainable?
Social sustainability is “a process for creating sustainable successful places that promote wellbeing, by understanding what people need from the places they live and work.
– Social Life, a UK based social enterprise specialising in place based innovation
In order to use this approach in design, as a designer I should be cautious about the sustenance of what I am designing. Think about it in the long run? The idea being proposed and deployed, how long will it run in the future? Who is going to invest in it? Are all the stakeholders still going to benefit from the system?
These questions were instilled in me during the exercise and as a group we decided to use the co-operative platform where all stakeholders have a role to play and benefit from the system ( benefit doesn’t always mean monetary )
In conclusion, according to me, Service Design is similar to participatory design where you create an experience and test and validate it with your customer and then keep improving the experience based on feedback. It is an iterative process. As a designer, I need to aware about what value I am offering, What is the value proposition of my service?
