 In this episode, we'll be talking about the influence of AI on service design. We'll talk about the need for new business models and we'll talk about using anthropology to create impact even if there is not enough time to do research. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Emma and this is the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design organizations that put people at the heart of their business. The guest in this episode is Emma Eigen Klar. The reason I'm so excited to have Emma on the show is because she's a super-experienced professional who brings the anthropology lens to service design. So as I mentioned in the opening, we'll cover a lot of different topics ranging from AI, business models to anthropology. And after watching this episode, you'll have a better understanding of the three undercurrent trends that are now profoundly shaping service design. So hope you're ready because we're going to jump straight into the chat with Emma. Welcome to the show, Emma. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And not a guest from Canada, Toronto. We've had quite a few. How is that that so many service and design oriented people are coming from Canada these days, Emma? I would have to say that Toronto seems to be a burgeoning hotbed of professionalization in this space. Any clues to what has caused that? Was there an inflection point? Honestly, I think it's just one of those constellation of factors. I think idea-couture, places like Bridgeable, the Moment, Mars. I don't know if you know about Mars, which is our innovation hub. Sidewalk Labs has set up, Google Alphabet has set up a smart city prototype here. Yeah, I don't know. I guess just a bunch of things came together and there seems to be a real confluence and it's great. I can imagine. And then recently, the service design conference, which was held in Toronto, probably also helped a little bit. Emma, you said something about idea-couture and we've had, not just someone, we had them and from idea-couture, Iris Moody on the show. What is your, for the people who don't know who you are, could you give like a super brief introduction? Sure. My name is Emma Akin-Clar. I am the Chief Anthropologist and SVP of Human Insights at Idea-Couture, which is now a cognizant interactive company. Awesome. Well, and for people who want to know more, just check your LinkedIn profile probably or Google it. I will make sure to add all the relevant links down below. This, I haven't prepared you for this question, so I'm curious if you have an answer to this one, but do you remember the very first time you got in touch with service design? The very first time I sort of discovered service design was probably, you mean as a discipline? As a word? As a term? As a, yeah, epic. So it was in 2007 at the Ethnographic Praxis and Industry Conference. It was held in Chicago that year. And this was after I had completed my dissertation, had my first child at the same time, realized that academic career was probably not the route I wanted to take, went to this conference called Epic. There was a collection of amazing ethnographers and service designers there, and it was a rapid immersion into the field. 2007, that's the year when I sort of started 2006-2007, so you were early on the ride. Yeah, yeah. And then I learned about it on the job, to be honest with you. It was the sort of thing where we would sell something that we would understand our client to need. Maybe we hadn't done it exactly that way before, and there was a lot of learning by doing and partnering and collaborating with amazing clients to do some really great service design work. I think that's how we roll, learning on the job, otherwise it gets boring pretty quickly. Emma, we're going to talk about, we're going to add some ethnography, anthropology. Those are probably the most hardest words to pronounce when you have a sore throat. We're going to add that in this episode, but we're going to start off with a topic which might sound a little bit strange to people who have just heard your background, but let's do it anyway. Are you ready? Yes. Okay, so what could this be? What could the strange topic be? It is the topic of AI. AI, yes. And do you have a question starter that goes along with this one? You have the original, can you show them up? Yeah. Can you see it? Okay, yeah. Okay, shall I launch a question? Please do. Okay, so spending some time thinking about the ways that service design and AI are intersecting. How can we use AI to innovate services and experience design in ways that are ethical, inclusive, and humanizing? You're setting the bar pretty high. I didn't say I knew the answer. Know that I'd like to ask the question. So what are some of the... Let's start by understanding your notion of AI. Like, what do you foresee in the relationship between AI and services? Some initial ideas? Yeah, so when I think of what we do in the service design space, we think about, let's say, the journey that a human goes through, whether they're a customer or a patient or a user of a tool in a system. And we think through the touchpoints and we like to be able to anticipate whatever experience will be encompassed in any given touchpoint. I think that AI is in some spaces already being used in this way, but to gather data and then be able to make decisions about the kind of experience that are released at any given touchpoint or between touchpoints. So I was reading online different ways that this is being imagined. So think through... You're a patient and you're waiting. You've seen a general practitioner and you need to be... You need to go see a specialist. Imagine if there was some sort of AI through your patient journey that might be... You might be taking log of your symptoms and it might be able to prompt different things for you to do in order to get to the right specialist or between appointments, ways to care for yourself based on the kinds of daily logs you might have. That's a bad example that I just made up off the top of my head. Essentially, I think what I'm talking about is a way for decisions to be made around the kinds of prompts and touchpoints. We're providing people from a service and experience perspective that are fed by algorithmic interpretation of people's data, which I think on one hand it's an amazing way to think about enriching a service experience, personalizing a service experience in ways that an individual doesn't need to personalize themselves. No one wants to go in and fill out a series of things in order to pattern the journey for themselves, but to be able to provide that highly personalized set of touchpoints through that kind of decision making would be amazing. But on the flip side, we know that there are a lot of ethical issues involved with the way that AI and machine learning gather data. I guess the kind of bias that goes in, it's what you put in and what you put out, is what you put out. What is your biggest concern regarding the ethical implications? I guess on my first instinct, my reactive concern is, is this inclusive or is it discriminatory? What kinds of people are able to produce the data in order to release this kind of powerful decision making and service experience for themselves? And who's left out of this? So who doesn't have access to the kinds of technologies or who just doesn't use these systems in the way that they need to be used to produce data that would be able to unleash these kinds of real time service design experiences? Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. We're going to get a group of, I don't know how to call them, but the advanced service consumers and like the traditional service consumers that don't get the benefits of, well if there are benefits of AI augmented experiences, sort of, right? Yeah, I think, yeah, it's just thinking about, you know, does everyone use the right systems and the right tools in the right ways to be able to participate in these kinds of service experiences? And if we're raising the bar, when you think about things like health and wellness, when you think about financial wellness, when you think of all the places and industries where service design is applied, and if you start creating a series of data-driven, AI-driven experiences, if you're not participating in that or if you're not able to use these tools in, if you're differently abled or if you are, you know, restricted in any way, then there's a whole world of experiences that you're now cut off from and you can no longer access. That's just the first thing that comes to mind. I'm sure there's many more, but that's sort of the one that stuck with me first. In public sector environments, I'm sure that there are policies that would sort of safeguard this, that would be a safety net. Let's hope so. Yeah, in commercial settings, this would be a bit different, I guess, right? Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, you can imagine a world where, you know, when you have an iPhone, you're able to participate in a platform that enables these kinds of outcomes. But, you know, what if you don't have an iPhone? What if you don't have a smartphone? What if your digital literacy or digital participation is quite low for a multitude of reasons? You know, one would hope, you know, there would be governmental safeguards about this kind of thing, but you also know that municipalities are racing to become completely digitized. And one would hope that that tension is at the forefront of design in this space. So what does this mean for us as service designers? Should we ignore new technologies as AR? No, I think that we need to broaden. So I don't, okay, I would question how might we broaden the canvas in which we apply our capabilities as service designers? So what is, what does service design need to be and do to, first of all, make sure that the data and the algorithms that we're creating are robust and receiving information from the most broadest group possible. But also let's think through exactly on this problem, right? So I think that as service designers, we are quite adept at solving exactly these kinds of problem statements and just making that an area of focus specifically. I wouldn't shy away from the technology, but I would take it as a really interesting productive and creative challenge. How do we ensure that in a world where AI is being used to deliver these kinds of service experiences, you know, let's challenges ourselves to make it as inclusive and nondiscriminatory as possible. A final question regarding AI. Is it, is there a fundamental difference with other technologies? Like in any piece of technology that you introduce as a service provider, like you're always throwing up a barrier or potentially throwing up a barrier? Like, is there something intrinsic to AI from your perspective that makes it different? Yeah, and I do, I think, I guess, I want, there's a good question and I wonder in the ways that when you start having this system and this tool be able to make decisions without intervention, that feels instinctually different to me. And, you know, there's that whole black box issue around. Yeah, yeah, it transpires, right. Yeah, that feels different to me. All right, this is definitely. It's a good question, because maybe it's not all that different. And maybe we're fetishizing the difference. So as we ponder this, I think it would be worthwhile to look to places like Inclusive and Universal Design to see best practices in how those kinds of concerns have already been mitigated. So that maybe we're not fetishizing the technology itself. Yeah, I'm guessing that a lot of, again, public service organizations who have moved a big chunk of their services to their digital space, to the online space, have had dealt with similar questions. Sure. And the last thing I'll say on this is that the issue about data privacy and security, I think, is pretty prominent in ways that maybe other technological interventions are not. A topic definitely worth exploring more in the coming years on the show. But let's keep it at this and move on to topic number two, which is the topic of business model, business models. Yes. Which question starter goes along with this one? What if? Okay, so my question comes from the context of the professional service delivery of service design. So I am a consultant and we do service design for clients. My question is, what if clients slowly stop wanting to buy service design and instead want to do it themselves? Which is happening? Yes. I'm seeing, as I'm sure you are, definitely a trend, if you will, in that direction that our clients are less and less interested in the one or two off project, definitely seeing, at first it was a desire for a learning by doing project where we might do a piece of service design for them and then wrap a capability building, training, template making project around that. More and more, we're seeing that our clients are embedding and creating their own service design capabilities in house. And I think that the first reaction might be to be overly concerned about that, but we've played around with different commercial models and I actually think it's an amazing opportunity for the clients that we have that do have internal service design teams, some of the most rewarding work that we have the opportunity to participate in. When your client isn't someone that you need to, there's nothing wrong with having to teach a client while you're doing something, but when that area of focus can go away and you can truly learn from each other as craftspeople, that's been a wonderful experience and we do a lot of work in Canada actually with TELUS. Oh, yes, yes, Judy. So it's such a pleasure working with Judy and her team. They are sophisticated practitioners of this craft and so when we come together, we learn from each other and we don't have to spend all that time teaching them why we're doing what we're doing. It's just, you can just get into a rhythm and go and it's great. So that's the one piece that I think is wonderful about our clients having internal service design projects and in that sense, when we're working in a model like that, we're just doing work that they don't have the capacity to do themselves. But there's another thing that we've been playing around with, which is more like an embedded pod model. So rather than having, you know, a defined SOW against a statement of work or a contract against a particular business challenge in that sense, that sort of fixed bid model, we're working in a specific problem, we have to define the work ahead of time. We have to say, we have to scope the work, we have to say it's going to take this many people, this many hours, these are the activities we're going to do, these are the outcomes that they're going to be and this is how long it's going to take us. The tough thing about that, as I'm sure you've experienced is it doesn't allow you to really react and be nimble as you unpack the problem and perhaps reframe it. Sometimes the things you need to do are different than the things you thought you had to do before you were immersed. Often the amount of time it would take to renegotiate that contract to do what you need to do, it's not even worth it. You pivot to the degree that you can within the scope that has been agreed to and that's how we worked for the better part of a decade. What we're seeing when we embed a pod of capability in with a client, it's more like a retainer model and we might say you can have a service designer, an anthropologist and maybe a foresight strategist and these people will embed in your service design team or your design team what have you for X amount of time. We get to truly play the role of a service designer. We get to respond, react, change what we're doing and not have to worry about that predefined scope. I find that it's a much more authentic articulation of what we're meant to be doing as service designers when we're freed from the constraints of that SOW in that pod model. I'm seeing something similar happening very close by. My biggest question regarding this, what kind of client does this take? This isn't suited for every organization or every client. What are the characteristics of these clients that actually have the confidence to embark on this type of model? It's a client with a more mature internal design capability. That's who it is. It's the client that has gone through their phase of buying this to developing it as an internal capability, to having design embedded in their own processes that they now realize the benefit of. It's in a way, it's staff off in a way. It's like staff implementation. You can look at it in that way which has some negative connotation sometimes. I look at it as we just get to embed and truly partner with a client. I guess the things that need to be true are a mature and established internal design or innovation capability is where this is best suited. How would you describe the value that you're adding then as an external body to the team? Why aren't they embedding these skills as well? Why do they still want to partner with an external consultancy? I think we have internal skills as well, but often it's just a capacity issue. They realize that across their own portfolio and across their own new product development or new service development process, whether we're doing this work in an insurance space right now, we're doing this work in a pharma space right now where they just don't have the capacity. They don't have enough people to address the need that they're seeing from the rest of their business. By bringing in external, they don't have to hire internal and have that, it's a temporary need that they may have. We bring with us new, slightly new ways of doing things so that they may have a service design capacity, but they may not have strategic foresight as part of that. You might bring in something a little bit different. It's still a learning opportunity for their teams because we're typically working collaboratively with some folks there. They get to learn from us and we get to learn from them as well. Sure. How big is the shift in business model from a consulting perspective? I don't know, what are the biggest challenges in making this transition towards this model? Except for finding the clients, I guess. Yeah, it's about finding the clients and it's just about being comfortable with the ambiguity of not having a predefined scope of work. What we can say is, we're going to predefine the capability that we're giving you and we can talk about the activities and outputs that each capability knows how to produce. You can save yourself that way. You can say, these are the typical research activities and these are the typical research outcomes so that whoever you're putting in there isn't going to suddenly be asked to do something that they're completely unfamiliar with. You can have those kind of agreements, but you just have to be comfortable with the ambiguity of not knowing what problem you're solving until you get there. In a way, that's great. We spend months, God, sometimes years going back and forth with a client trying to define a scope of work and the problem changes and changes and then finally you sign it. And then it changes again. Yeah, when you do it this way, all of that problem framing that you're doing pre-contract is now paid for. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, and it's great. I think the one thing when you think about from a talent perspective, sometimes these projects may end up being longer because they're not actually projects. So while the benefit for someone who's in a pod might be a really amazing kind of collaborative relationship with a client where you truly get to understand the business that you're participating in, that's an amazing community, flip side is you might get bored because whereas before you were putting off and on at say three, four, five months, you know what I mean? You may be somewhere a little bit longer and you would lose that nice variation. So it also requires a certain type of service designers. Yeah. I'm curious and what to challenge people who are listening on watching this. Leave a comment if you see a similar pattern. I do, like I said, very closely. So this is definitely a shift that is happening. Yeah. All right. There's a lot of opportunity in it though. Are you ready to move on to the third and final topic, Emma? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Because we're on the home turf for you right now with the topic of anthropology. Yes. Yes. Hold on. Okay. Yes. How far? How far? How far up and down or across the innovation or design arc does anthropology span? And how did the impacts change depending on where anthropology comes in? Sorry. Still a little bit cold, but I'm trying to grasp this. What do you see when you say anthropology within the innovation arc? What is the mental picture that you see? Yeah. So any sort of service design or innovation, general arc, you have your discovery phase, your exploration phase, you've got your design, you've got your build, you've got your implementation, just general, right? Usually there's some form of iteration in there. For a long time, so we do anthropology in service design. We do sort of a design anthropology where we are using ethnographic methods to explore the broader contexts that shape any particular experience with product or service. And we believe that in what we've seen is that by understanding these broader contexts, we're able to often reframe our understanding of the challenge in the first place and provide much more relevant experiences for the people that we're designing for. When we started this work, it's been around 11 years for me in this space. We were doing much more of the exploratory discovery phase to help define the problem before the thing was even conceptualized, before there was even a thing to think about, right? So we know that if anthropology or design anthropology comes in at that phase, it's really about problem framing using a broader context and understanding of the broader context of human experience. But this might be a product of how we work now in the context of Cognizant, which is a technology organization. But we had already started to see this with our clients prior to our acquisition, that there's more of a need and more of a push for faster projects, faster outcomes. I don't know if you're seeing the same thing, but less appetite for longer work, and often more of a desire to start with the prototype where it's like, here's the thing, let's go see what we can from a user or patient or human, whatever is perspective, and then let's, what's the MVP? How do we iterate and put it out really quickly? So we've been able to flex our muscles in that space as well when we're almost doing anthropology as UX research, where we're saying, okay, we already know that we're going to be releasing a service or an experience that looks like this. How might we incorporate that contextual understanding at that point? And then sometimes we're brought in even later, like here's the thing and we're just refining it, right? We're able to, I think, provide a very differentiated set of understandings, but I do question our ability to reframe the problem the further down we go to the innovation arc or the service design arc down that process. And so, as I see clients wanting less time on these projects and just tell us how to fix it, how to make it better, how to optimize it. Sometimes I wonder, are we diminishing the impact of what we're capable of doing? Is there an alternative if this is what clients are asking for at this moment? If this is what clients are asking for and then this is the need and as we know as service designers, you have to address the needs. And I think the challenge is to continue to think about when I think about what the power of anthropology is in this space, it really is that contextual understanding. For us, when we're brought in after the thing already, what kind of research do we need to do to have people to be able to understand those broader contexts within which the experience is being used and brought to life? A lot of times we do that by having people imagine how they're going to use this thing. We might provide an intervention or some stimuli to help them imagine what their future use with this thing might be. And then as people are talking through their imaginings of how I might use this dashboard or how this patient support program might impact my life, we use their imaginings as our field of ethnographic exploration a little bit. So that's how we overcome it a bit, which is really just ethnographically probe their future imaginings with this thing. I wanted to say that the type of research turns from exploration into validation. But with this, there is also a middle ground, like you can still do sort of exploratory, I don't know, how would you describe this type of research? Yeah, we talk about them, it's not our terminology within the design anthropology discourse and literature. I think it's Joaquin Hals coined the term ethnographies of the future or ethnographies of the possible, where we are almost at a validation stage, but in order to validate, we still think we need that broader context of understanding that it's not enough to say, is this working, is this not, it's to push a little further with that ethnographic lens to say, imagine how this might be used by you, what might a future day in the life with this thing, and to validate through that broader contextual lens of the future imagination, we think is probably the best way to continue to apply that anthropological and ethnographic rigor. And to sort of hope that people will start seeing the value and start questioning if this is the right problem we should be solving in the first place, right? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Emma, I know again a question that you haven't prepared for, but is there a question you have for us, the viewers and listeners of the show, is there anything you'd like us to think about, ponder upon, maybe in relationship to the previous topic? Well, I guess I'd be just really, I feel like my experience as a service design professional is limited to the little world that I live in and the clients that I serve. I'm just really curious about how other people are seeing service design evolve as it becomes professionalized, as it becomes a discipline. I think what's really interesting, when you think about what happens when something becomes a discipline, it becomes standardized. And you're starting to see a standardization of this discipline as it becomes more professionalized, but design is inherently something that shouldn't be standardized. Well, we can do a separate episode on that. Yes, I'm curious from everyone else's perspective as the discipline evolves and professionalizes and as we become more standardized in our approach, what are we doing as a body to make sure that what's powerful about design isn't lost in this process? That's a really important question to ask. Thanks, Emma. For people who are excited about what you just told and want to get in touch with you to further discuss or ask questions, what's the best way to get in touch with you? LinkedIn, I think. LinkedIn works. Okay, so I'll make sure that all the relevant links are down in the description of this episode. Emma, thanks so much for sharing what's on your mind these days, the questions that you have. Yeah, it was a pleasure having you on. Yes, thank you so much for inviting me. This was fun to chat through. Thanks so much. Happy to hear that. Thanks, Emma. All right, thank you. So what is your take on Emma's question? Leave a comment down below and join the conversation. We need comments from people like you. If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with just one other person today. You'll help to grow the service design show community and help me to invite more inspiring guests like Emma. Thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode over here. See you in that video.