Get to Know Speakers: Interview with Clive Grinyer from RCA

Royal College of Art’s Head of Service Design Clive Grinyer who also will deliver a Keynote speech at Virtual UXistanbul 2021; answered our questions.

Hello Clive, could you please introduce yourself a little bit?

I am the Head of Service Design at the Royal College of Art in London. Before that I have worked in the US, Europe and Asia in a variety of design consultancies including IDEO and my own company Tangerine and with larger organisations such as Samsung, Orange Mobile, Cisco and Barclays Bank.

How is A-Day-In-The-Life of The Royal School of Art’s Head of Service Design?

I’ve been the head of the course for a year and a half and as you can imagine, it’s been quite an exciting time — not as I’d planned it! A typical day will start with a “stand up” with students — on Zoom of course. Students are currently all over the world but this is a chance to come together. I like to share things that are on my mind and hear back from them. We have been very successful in continuing our projects with an amazing range of external organisations so I run through each of the project teams to hear who they are doing.

At some point in my day I will be talking to potential new partners who would like to run projects with our students and we have excellent relationships with many studios and organisations who are employing service designers. As well as teaching theory, the essence of the course is the chance to work with real companies on real problems and setting up these projects every term takes a lot of preparation.

Service design is continuously developing and I spend a portion of every day reading and scanning for new ideas and experts to come and share their views or lecture to students. We’ve developed new tools around speculative design and have added lecturers on System Thinking and Diversity and Inclusion in the last year.

I am often preparing for my Service Design Masterclasses — these are very intense but huge fun and we get through the whole service design process in 2 days. I run them for public audiences, individual companies and across the RCA too.

Once a week I get to interview a great designer. Last year we started Service Design TV (SDTV) on YouTube and have many fascinating speakers over the last few months — this is open to everyone to watch live or on recording on the RCA Service Design YouTube channel.

And there is always a talk, research paper or a conference to prepare for!

What is the most sensational thing of this role, from your point of view?

The course, I’m delighted to say, is very popular and we attract some amazing students from around the world and they are without doubt the best thing about the role. To be a good service designer you must not just learn the tools but also the behaviour that leads to change. Working with students as they go on the journey and understand how and when to apply tools but also develop their sense of curiosity, courage and creativity and leave ready to make a difference to the world is a very satisfying thing to be involved in. Seeing students be successful after they have left is a real joy.

You’ll be delivering a Keynote at 7th UXistanbul. What will be your speech’s subject and contents in general? What will be the key takeaways?

I’ll be talking about the role of design in the digital and technological world that we often refer to as the 4th Industrial revolution. Many of the processes we use, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and machine learning, are invisible and difficult to predict. They make us nervous and sometimes cause harm. In researching Blockchain and digital identity, I became interested in how we can reconnect to invisible processes. I’ll be sharing principles for how we can design these technologies to be easier to control, manage and adopt in a way that is useful, less harmful and more successful.

What are the main backfires of employing “enhanced” technologies while creating “Invisible Interactions”?

Those systems are beginning to have real influence on society and problems are arising. From fears of surveillance to data theft, bias and the lack of transparency in decision making, the advantages of automated decision making are being diluted by how poor those decisions often are. There are tremendous opportunities for highly personalised experiences, deeper trust and better personal security but these are under threat through poor design. Design humanises technology and can make it safer and attractive — something we can trust and use to our advantage.

Even though we’re familiar with the concepts like AI, Blockchain do you have recommendations for the audience to “prepare” for your talk? Books, articles, videos?

There is very little design research in this area. Blockchain and AI is seen as a technology topic or concerned with Crypto currency but it is actually a societal issue and the impact on Healthcare, Finance and Education is already being felt.

There are many excellent books on the use of data and my friend Chris Downs of Normally has recommended a couple for my students.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think
by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
by Professor Shoshana Zuboff

You can find my Blockchain paper at https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/4621/

Anything you may want to add?

I’m really looking forward to taking part in this conference. It’s a chance to develop our thinking together and address how design tools can help technology serve us well.

More information on Clive and his Keynote on UXistanbul available here: https://uxistanbul.org/clive-grinyer/