 Hi, I'm Jaswink Mullen and this is the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Arfontein. Welcome to a two-weekly burst of inspiration where you get to learn what some of the world's best service designers are currently doing. We talk about the current state of the industry, the trends that are influencing it, and the challenges that lie up ahead. The Service Design Show is all about helping you to become a better service designer so you can make a bigger impact on the world around us. We bring you a new episode every two weeks on Thursday. So, if you don't want to miss anything, be sure to subscribe to the channel. My guest in this show is Jaswink Mullen. Jaswink is the founder of the Center for Citizen Experience and Citus Strategy, and a consultancy dedicated to transforming service delivery and policymaking through design innovation. For the next 30 minutes or so, we'll be talking about topics like the commodification of design, about business fluency, and finally about how to prototype policy. If you want to fast-forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description, or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. So, let's jump right in. Welcome to the show, Jaswink. Hey, thanks, Mark. Jas, we've just talked before the show, and you told me that you've been interested in service design for quite a long time. Do you actually remember the very first time you got in touch with service design? That's an interesting question. I started in digital doing web things in 1996 and ran into... Like everyone. Yeah, it ran into Jacob Nielsen and Human Center Design that year. And the following year, in 1997, there were some conversations in the United States around something called Advanced for Design that Clement Mock and some other people started up to talk about experience design in a very similar way to what we would talk about service design today, where the idea was, how do we organize multiple touchpoints and channels and people's experience over time in having that thing, whether it's at a hotel or an amusement park or with a business. And so that was really formative in my career to be part of those conversations. I didn't ever get to attend the events themselves, but there was a mailing list and got to be part of that. Actually, running into the term service design, is around the time that we started up the Information Architecture Institute in 2003. I helped out with that with Lou Rosenfeld and Christina Woodkey and a bunch of other friends. And so just surveying what the design world was doing at the time and starting to see that people were sort of realizing that aspiration to do that holistic experience design and starting to see some of the firms coming out through there. And did you see a clear moment where service design for you started to really become a discipline or did it go more gradually? Definitely more gradually as an extension of design. So people who are designing things, whether they were products or whether they were digital, would start to run into places where those things needed to connect for somebody to have a better experience. And so as soon as you got into that opportunity where a client or if you're in-house, the business would say, oh, we need you to look at this too, then you started to see people having to develop that practice, whether or not they called it service design. And of course, services have been designed for forever, but the intentionality around it and bringing a design lens to it, as opposed to say some of the marketing stuff that was really from the 80s. And for me, my biggest moment was in 2005, Peter Mehrholtz, who was an adaptive path at the time, and I were both on the IA Institute board. And we saw some work that Maya Design was doing in Pittsburgh with the Carnegie Library where Aratnagal and Paul, I'm sorry, I forget Paul's last name, had worked with an architecture firm and the library and they had reconsidered the journey of different library patrons through different channels. And so that they had mapped out those journeys. They'd done field research. They'd reconciled things like the signage between the website and the actual space. And they'd done testing on some of those terms so that things like, instead of having a sign that said reference desk, they had a sign that said ask a librarian. And so Peter reached out and said, would you like to do a workshop? And that will sponsor this workshop. And so that was a conversation that really started this convergence of physical face-to-face services and digital and space and how all of those things come together. And I remember talking to him about it and said, I don't know if I could ever do that. We had a user experience consultancy. I'm not sure the market will buy it from here in Canada. And he said, well, why not? And you should go for it. And so from that moment, I started to think of it more even as my own practice and starting to look for opportunities with clients where we could do that. Well, awesome. I don't know if a lot of people know this story. So thanks for sharing. Jess, you've gave me three very interesting topics and I gave you a few question starters and we'll combine those two to make up interesting questions that we can talk about, right? So let's jump right in. And I'll pick the first topic you gave me and I'm always struggling with this word. So let's see if it works. It's commodification of design. Yeah, commodification of design. Well, let's see. We'll say how much. How much? Yeah. What is the question? So I'll make the question. How much will design be commodified? Interesting. So can design be commodified? Can design be commodified? Well, absolutely. Design can be commodified. We are seeing that more and more so. There's a lot of anxiety a couple of years ago on the death of the design firm. As we saw design go more and more in-house and things like the acquisition of Adaptive Path as well as Lunar later that year, later the next year by McKinsey. But that's not necessarily commodification of design. That's recognizing its value. We also see things like 99 Designs where you can go and get design work done for very, very low cost. And some of it is incredible rubbish. But some of it is actually not bad. And so there's this... I think there's a whole ethical question around are we taking advantage of people through platforms like that? And I think the answer is yes, we are. I'm not recognizing the value of it. But if we try to make a moral argument in the market, we're often going to fail. And so we see those pressures where design becomes less of a specialist discipline and more in common. And a large part of that is because of the recognition of the value of design. As design has become recognized, then people say, oh, we need more of that, or I want to do it. And so we have more and more people interested in the field, people who, let's say, they are previously doing the front-end coding for digital products. And they're like, well, I can figure out the interaction design of how something works. I think service design in and of itself is more insulated from that because it's further upstream in the process, but that there's still a lot of those same pressures across the spectrum of design. We see things like... Here's another story that we don't talk about a lot in the community. In 2011, Oracle acquired a firm in Boulder, Colorado called Right Now. And Right Now had some software products that Oracle wanted, but along with the software products, they got a design team led by a guy named John Campbell. And John started to evangelize customer experience and service design within Oracle and with Oracle's customers. So they've set up a website called designingcx.com and have all these great tools for doing customer journey mapping and a facilitation guide for doing your own customer journey sessions and inside an organization just as a sort of a preliminary understanding of the journey, not doing research, but saying we're going to use this as a workshop tool. And in fact, if Oracle thinks you're a customer or a potential customer, John or somebody from that team will come and do that workshop with you. In fact, I got offered a few years ago somebody who is an Oracle salesperson in the UK and reached out and asked if I wanted to run a three-day citizen experience design workshop that they would facilitate for me because I was talking about citizen experience and the public sector and some of the work that one of my clients had done. And so that was interesting and the most interesting part is that all of those workshops that those teams do from my understanding are free. It's like a sales tool. Exactly, it's a way to come in and to help understand the customer, provide value to the customer, but ultimately to sell them on Oracle products and so design becomes a loss leader rather than something that is seen as intrinsic value. And that's actually been historical on the ad agency side, right? Is that the creative aspects of a campaign were tossed in for free and agencies made their money on large commissions on media buys. That model's kind of gone by the wayside in agency land for the most part. But certainly that notion that design is an add-on is there. There's also been that continuum that we were talking about just a little bit earlier of people taking on more design roles closer to delivery of the actual product or service. So I think of design on a spectrum from direction to delivery. And a lot of user experience and service design is kind of peaked in the middle. It's kind of a bridge between, oh, we've got the business strategy and the direction from that. And we need to understand customers and users in order to define a product and a service or connecting a set of products so that people can use it and have a good experience. And the trend I think we're seeing is that those are being split. So rather than there being a peak in the middle, we have some people going upstream and some people going more into the production and delivery side of things. So we have design really embedded in agile sprints and things like that now where before that didn't happen as much. And similarly, there's more designers who are hoping to work at a strategic level. And so where is this heading if we fast forward this three or five years? I think those polarizations will continue where we'll have that middle get thinner and thinner and that you'll either need to work more on the strategic side or more embedded in delivery. And I think one of the risks there is that we're going to potentially lose the bridge between those things. We need to consider how we can keep that bridge in place in our own ambitions to either ship things or to be working on strategic things. The other thing is I think we're going to have more and more people just adopting design as a tool set rather than as a title. And so that you'll have people who use design methods and design tools and design thinking or design attitudes and logic who don't necessarily self-identify as a designer. And that certainly, like even in my own career with SITU, SITU is a management consultancy and that's how I explain it to potential clients is that I'm a management consultant and I can help you deliver better services and better customer experience. So I think you're already moving into a second topic. Just let's tap straight into that and it is the topic of business fluency so when we're talking about management consultants I guess this has to be related somehow. And a question started. I'll say how can we develop business fluency? Let's start by understanding what you mean with business fluency. Well, it's just like fluency in any other language. So you're in the Netherlands and have you ever traveled to a country where you didn't speak the language? It has happened quite a few times. And then comparing that to when you've traveled somewhere and you do speak the language, what's the difference? I guess you feel much more comfortable. You feel much more connected with the people around you. And business fluency is exactly the same where there are conceptual and cultural factors that if you understand them you're able to work with the business much more comfortably. And if you don't understand them then you're going to stumble and to struggle that way. Especially for service designers service design is inherently transformative in the organization. It's kind of a Trojan horse for some pretty big shifts in most organizations. If you say, well, we need to design a new way of delivering a service, that has a lot of ripple effects. And so being able to understand how a business functions and how it operates and the different priorities of that business is really essential if you want to see that service realize the way that you intended it to be. Otherwise you just sort of are handing it off and hoping and that's not very satisfying sometimes. So how do we, because I can imagine for one you have to recognize that you are not fluent enough with the business language. And second thing is how do we educate ourselves? So I think there's two levels of that. One of them is there's conceptual fluency knowing the ideas and the concepts and things like that. So what does somebody actually mean by return on investment? And there's a formula that you can actually say, well, what was the money we put in and what's the money we get out? And that can be hard to track sometimes especially if like me you're working mostly with public sector clients. But it's also challenging when you're working on something like brand or marketing material and not something that actually is a direct revenue generator. But even if you get those numbers there's also a cultural aspect to it. And it's like, well, why did somebody ask for ROI numbers? And it's often like, yes, we need to demonstrate the value but it can often be say a trigger for somebody not being confident in the direction or the process and needing more confidence. Or they're trying to decide between different options and they're looking for some other factors to accommodate that. So of course return on investment being a good thing to determine but can often be a cultural indicator of something else. And so we need to have both the conceptual concepts as well as those cultural things of being able to understand people. So for educating ourselves there's lots of good business books and more and more workshops. And I actually just taught a workshop at the Global Service Design Conference that happened last year in Amsterdam called Learn Speak CEO that provides a framework for folks to triangulate where their work is at and with strategic and executive priorities. I think the other thing, especially on the cultural side is that designers have maybe an advantage over other disciplines where really what we need to do is we need to use our same skills that we use to understand customers or understand users of a service and use them to understand our colleagues within business whether that's in the executive suite or whether it's somewhere else in the organization in operations or product or other things like that. That we need to have empathy. Brandon Schauer who's at Adaptive Path Capital One talks about business empathy of having empathy for the business and understanding those people just like we would get frustrated if we're talking with an engineering team and they kind of dismissed the experience of users and said, oh, we're just going to train them. And we said, no, no, we need to understand them and know what they're doing and what their motivations are. We have to take all those same skills and apply them internally in the organizations that we work with. What do the executives care about? How do they talk about it? What are their priorities? What does success look like for them? Just as much as what does success look like for a customer. Do you think that the need for more business fluency is related to the fact that design is being commoditized? I think the need for business fluency has always been there. I started a blog which has been defunct since 2009, but from 2005 to 2009 I had a blog called B plus D, business plus design. And the reason I started it is because the design thinking conversation was just really kicking into gear in 2004, 2005 with Rotman and IDO and Stanford and Business Week. And just seeing so many designers assert these kind of ridiculous claims of silver bullet solution like if you just did design thinking we would solve this. And so many designers feeling overconfident that if they were just in charge they would be able to fix this. And of course these poor business people just do not have the same insights and the same level of awareness and obvious brilliance that we do as designers. And we still sometimes run into that. I know I'm guilty of that sometimes myself. But that I started to think, well okay that's great that we bring these things but we need to understand business if we're going to change business. But that is even more important today as we see that shift. If you want to become a strategic designer if you want to work in transformation and if you want to actually change the organizations build their capability and their capacity and their culture so that they can sustain new service innovations then you have to have business fluency to be successful. So there's a ton of designers who are ambitious and aspire to do strategic work but are maybe dismissive or maybe don't even understand all the other or recognize the complexity and the skill that other people have in other parts of the business. And so being able to work well in that context is important if you have that ambition to do more strategic work. All right. Yes, let's move on to your third topic that probably less to do with business and more with a topic that is also dear to your heart I guess the public sector and this topic is called prototyping policy. Sure. And I will come back to how can we... One of the favorites, of course. How can we prototype policy? I think this applies in the private sector as well. Policy doesn't have as strong an implication or it's not talked about as much in the private sector but policy is still a really important part of all organizations. It's part of the decision DNA of the institution. How do you decide something? How should we act when we have this kind of situation? So inherently, policy is something that is about behavior. It's about having people act in a particular way. And so the challenge, of course, is getting them to really act in the way that you wanted to. Not just putting in a paper, yeah. Just because you wrote the policy doesn't mean that it's actually the case. And even if you wrote the policy, is it actually getting the kind of outcome that you intended? And so that's a real challenge with policy in both the public and private sectors. Is this actually doing what we want it to do? And so there's a couple things in developing policy. It's like, do you actually understand how the policy impacts the people that are at the other end of it? And sometimes the answer is no. That policy making is, as practiced in most institutions, is carried out by experts who are hired as experts. So to say, okay, you're a policy analyst and you have a set of tools to understand what's going on and then to recommend policies that you think are the best thing. And we can sometimes see organizations and individuals fall into that trap of expertise. I'm being hired as an expert, therefore I should know the answer and not going out into the world to find out what that might look like. So there's definitely a role for things like field research informing it. And I think that one, for me, is easy to see. The trickier thing is once you have a set of insights, how do you actually start to prototype that? Because policy works at a different scale, both in breadth and in time than most of the work that we do as service designers. So a couple of things that I've been working on, one of them is having teams do things like tabletop prototyping but for policy or regulatory context to say, well, show me how you think the system works and giving them, I have a set of cards that stand up on stands and I will sometimes do a custom run of them for that particular client. I was working earlier last year and the year before on food standards and how can we have safer food and so I did cards that had a bunch of different food related things. And then we had people come from government and industry and say how should the system work and what are the places where you're going to have policy impact in the experience that people have. So how does it play out in front of us? Yeah, and so to actually build the system and to be able to talk through where policy and how policy is playing in that system. So that's something that's been fairly successful. The challenge... Why was that successful? Oh, the success is because anytime we engage in that kind of co-design activity, we provide a touchstone or a boundary object that provides a bridge between different perspectives. So instead of just arguing or advocating for different ways of how things work, we can see it in the model or the prototype or the sketch or whatever and you can point to it and say, oh, I don't quite see it that way. And especially when you're doing something lo-fi with tabletop paper level prototyping, you can kind of reach over and say, well, what if we did this instead? It's very fluid and easy for everybody to contribute to but also to have a shared and common understanding that emerges from it. And so that's, I think, where the success comes from is that it's provided that touchstone that has brought a bunch of different perspectives together to find some common ground. So yeah, I think that's why that's been successful in those contexts. The other challenge, though, is how do you go beyond something like that and that's something that I'm still working on. Do I have a few thoughts? Well, of course, we are curious about that and I'm also curious, what's the largest scale prototype you've seen of policy? Well, so policy people don't use the word prototyping but they will use the word pilot. And so that is generally what we are looking at if you start to work on policy, it's like, where could you pilot this or how could you pilot this? And so generally a policy pilot is going to be applied to some sort of subset of whatever you're dealing with. So it might be a regional test, I was working with a government in 2015 and running an innovation bootcamp with a bunch of different ministries and one of the ministries came up with a concept around work zone safety and so there'd be some policy changes there but also some implementation changes and so because they had, in that jurisdiction they'd had some fatalities where people had been speeding through work zones and their initial response had been to put up a bunch of signs and that didn't actually slow people down that much so the insight that people had was, well, signage isn't sufficient because when you're driving you're not engaging like you would be reading something kind of on autopilot so what else could we do? And so the ideas that they came out with they did a tabletop prototype and they're going to look at trying it out just on a section of road and then they're going to do it in a particular region to say, okay, we're going to try it out here. The other thing is to have it be in sort of data to say we're going to have an alternative stream for doing something where there's a different way of tackling something and so we'll put the policy in place for a limited time or for a limited segment of people maybe we'll just do it for, let's say in a social services context we'll only do this with single mothers who have three or more children and then we would look at it for more families later. So what are some of the good resources when people want to learn more about this topic? For looking at policy there is a large conversation globally in policy innovation and design in the public service in particular. There's some hashtags on Twitter around policy innovation and PSI. Which one's your favorite? Well, one of them is just hashtag policy innovation, hashtag PSI Labs and hashtag design for the number four policy. Lucy Kimball, who's in the UK actually wrote a short summary about design and policy. Christian Besson, who's in Denmark as the CEO of the Danish Design Council now but was in government in a place called MindLab edited a book called Design for Policy. I wrote a chapter in 2011 for a book that came out in 2012 the book's usability and government systems but my chapter was on design for policy. And there's actually been an issue of the SDN touch point journal on design and policy. So all those are great resources. That's more than enough to start with, I'd say. Yes, we're running at the end of the interview and I have a final question for you. And the question is basically what is the biggest question that's currently on your mind? What is the thing that keeps you awake? Well, the biggest question on my mind is actually how do we shift both in my own practice and as a discipline to become truly strategic designers? So we have, I think, that ambition. We even have moments when we are but I don't know that it's become expected or common thing yet where a CEO has a challenging innovation problem and they think I should bring in a designer. I don't know that we're at that point yet. Certainly, or the range of problems where the CEO will think that is fairly narrow that you don't get permission to work on those transformational level things sometimes when the expectation is that you're going to come in and work at, say, the surface of a problem. So your question is what do we need as a community to make that transition ourselves? Yeah, so how can we ask bigger questions and how can we solve maybe better problems? That's a good one to end the show with, Jess. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on. What are your thoughts about the topics we just discussed with Jess? What is needed for service design to become more strategic? Let us know down below in the comments. This show is all about helping you to become a better service designer by sharing real-life stories of people that are currently shaping the field. If this is your first time here and you'd like to see more interviews, be sure to check out some of the best episodes and click that subscribe button. For now, thanks for watching and I'll see you in two weeks' time.