Don’t let service design become obsolete — personal takeaways from SDGC 2018

Design to deliver. The topic of last October’s Service Design Global Conference seems to be a global concern, since it brought more than 800 participants from all over the world to attend, listen to the talks and participate in hands-on workshops. Moreover, it feels that it’s not only crucial for designers, but that it’s largely shared among the innovation community in general, including big corporations’ managers, product owners and marketers.

Service design is now at the peak of its trend — but how can we make it sustainable in a fast-paced world as today’s? We, as designers, need to adapt, and SDGC 2018 gave some tips on how to.

Takeaway #1 // Design is not design until you make something

As Marcus Hormess and Jakob Schneider insisted on, designers should talk less and do more. We shouldn’t really care about what we are called, what terms are used to describe what we do. And of course, “evangelizing” is important in order to enhance awareness.

However, what we designers can do better than talking (or depending on the people as well as talking) is design — aka make things tangible. By bringing the vision to concrete artefacts, you can test, learn, iterate, try out several things in order to seek the ultimate goal: user value. Without prototyping and making things happen in the real world, you can’t prove the veracity of your vision or the usefulness of your concept. By bringing the vision down to concrete things, you can start truly convincing your dissidents.

Takeaway #2 // Embrace and integrate with other disciplines

SDGC 2018 focused a lot on evolving technology. Both Lorna Ross and Zachary Jean Paradis spent some time explaining how we are now entering an era in which we can’t do anything without tech. Everything is tech. Actually, every company now is a tech company — and if you want to still be pertinent and responsive, you need to own the technology, and control its byproduct — data. Tech transformation and awareness are not a choice, it’s an imperative.

To own technology, we need to understand it better — how it works, what are its limits, when it starts to be biased or unfair, and when to trust it. There is such a promiscuity between humans and technology that interactions are frictionless, giving us no time to think, nor process before it’s out there. A little understanding of the technology, but also a deeper integration with devops teams will help us make the right decision.

And it’s not only about tech teams, but every discipline that impacts a product or a service launch today: data, marketing, regulation, support. As designers, we should embrace the change and find a way to integrate and work collaboratively with everyone — for better value. As Patrick Quattlebaum says: “Let go of (our) ego!”.

Takeaway #3 // Systemicity is not necessarily the answer

With the need for innovating faster and faster, design has started to industrialize itself, producing systems and standards to systemize delivery.

Which is not wrong: in production, system design helps to communicate with engineers and hence deliver a service closer to what we envision.

However, as Lorna Ross says it so well, design breaks when it’s standardized and predictable. It’s homogeneous, therefore it becomes a commodity. We should always be designing for a better future, how we wish it to be. And this future is not universal: it is utterly personalized to each context, to each target, and needs to be reinvented every time.

But combining both is not really easy, and the struggle was noticeable in the multiple talks I was able to attend. The talk from Peter Brook and Anna-Lisa Peeters shared the challenge of continuing to be user-centered despite producing and scaling at the same time: service design is slow-paced, whereas production needs to be fast-paced. How can we dream slow while producing fast? At Adidas, they started to generalize agile and customer experience to everyone, making some room to think CX and add it in their KPIs — and take thereby a little time to do so.

In fine, fast-paced industrialization cannot achieve the fine and accurate adaptation of the service to its users and its context, nor enable exploratory research that could lead to innovative journeys. Systemic design is important, but let’s give ourselves time to take a breath and step back.

Takeaway #4 // Make it measurable

Service design hasn’t been the best to bring tangible metrics for evaluating the benefits of it. NPS (Net Promoter Score) has been around for a few decades now and the is only metric to quantify the user, although there are many to quantify the benefits for organizations: number of calls, ARPU ( Average Revenue Per User), OPEX (operating expense), churn rate…

During their workshop, Katie Monteith and Marie Serrano introduced experience factors, in order to measure not only the user value, but the shared value lying in-between user value and corporate value. While doing so, we service designers can also begin to quantify our impact, and therefore convince even doubtful dissidents.

Takeaway #5 // Design outcome cannot be achieved without change management

One of the happy discoveries of SDGC 2018 was that there were a few talks and workshops realized in pairs — a service designer and a product manager/owner. Even though not mainstream, it feels that the value of service design is becoming more and more understood and acknowledged at a strategic level by product owners. In some talks, we could feel that whether the designer or the product manager talked, they conveyed one unique message, complementing each other. This first step in change management — a subject that is usually overlooked in so many companies — is the result of a combined effort and perseverance of all designers not to impose the method, but show how it works, using project outcomes as communication tool to explain, convince and expand their influence.

Because as we all know, without the buy-in of all actors of the chain, therefore without a change of mindset and behavior of all involved parties, true design, hence true innovation, cannot be achieved.

Takeaway #6 // The importance of the structure to be truly innovative

Last but not least, designers’ — and for that matter all knowledge workers’ — motivation is even more crucial to creativity in our modern competitive world. Both Alberta Sorenzo and Stefan Moritz insisted on the importance of the structure hosting the individuals to nurture their talents, to create a safe space for them to grow. A structure that enables them to work on what they are interested in, that trusts them to make decisions.

Because the most important asset in a company is its people. Our work environment should leave some space to thrive, and to fail without consequences — yes everyone says that, but only a few structures REALLY embrace that concept. It’s only then that people can reach a performance that meets their true potential. And only when the organizational goal, the group goal, and the individual goal match, that magic happens.

So, what should we remember from this year’s SDGC?

Service design has gained a lot of interest and more high level acknowledgement than ever before. Challenging times await! It’s time for us designers to find a way to successfully integrate with other disciplines, as SDN is leading the way with its partnership with IxDA. Our biggest strengths are our adaptability and ability to deliver, we should make wise use of them, not to let service design become obsolete. On that note…

Happy new year !

About SDGC

The Service Design Global Conference took place on October 11th & 12th in Dublin.

It aims to explore various topics such as designing to deliver, how we move from service design methods and tools to delivery, management, measurement, and other emerging topics in the field.