 In this episode, we'll be talking about the limits of service design, the big paradox in service design, but also about the future of service design. Here's the guest for this episode, let the show begin. Hi, I'm Nick and this is a service design show. Hi, I'm Mark 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 has a background in advertising and graphic design. He worked as a service designer at Chase Delta Airlines and Samsung and he's also an author and we'll talk about that in this episode. His name is Nick Parek. In this episode, we'll take a critical view on service design and question some of the fundamentals to make sure that we don't get complacent with the situation we're in right now and help ourselves to get to the next level. So be prepared to ask some deep questions. If this is your first time here on this channel, welcome and I'd love to have you to subscribe so we can keep bringing you more episodes like this. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button and click that bell icon so you'll be notified when new episodes come out. That's all for the introduction. Let's jump straight into the chat with Nick. Welcome to the show, Nick. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Really cool to have you on the show. You're one of the guests that I haven't actually physically met face to face, so it's really nice to connect. For the people who don't know who you are, could you like give us a 30-second background introduction of who Nick is? Sure. I'm a service designer by profession. My last workplace was with Samsung where I worked as a design strategy lead, where helping some of their partner companies think more human-centric design with their products and services. Prior to that, I worked at Chase where I was part of a team where we were thinking of a branch of the future, a few branches that would design the branches for 2023, but again, putting the user at the center of the story and trying to figure out what services they would want to see in their neighborhood branches. In their production, I said something about you writing a book. What's that all about? So a year back, I was in advertising prior to this and I have written several blogs on medium and I've also written for other advertising stories and stuff, so I decided to jump into a book. It was very exciting. I was told by a few people, why don't you put all your thoughts into one book? It's always hard to see what the book will be about, so it took me a year to figure out and finally, I think I'm just in the last stage of production. The book is actually called The Future of Extraordinary Design. And I'm very excited. This is just a home printer version of it, but looking to launch sometime in November, I'm so excited to kind of share my, the book is about design strategy, design thinking, and also questioning some of the norms we follow. Yeah, and that's what we'll also be doing in this episode. And we'll we have a small surprise for the people who stick to the end of the show. Nick, you said you came from advertising. I know you studied graphic design. How the hell did you end up in service design? What is your first memory of service design? My first memory of service design, I wanted to study something further. I was deciding between MBA service design and few other things, UX design. I always liked the strategy part, but when I read more about service design that it's how changing the way designers think. I came from a very old school design background, which is graphic design, colors and logos and other things. Craftsmanship. So I loved, I thought that design is no longer about shapes and colors, but it's beyond it. It touches our lives in so many invisible ways that we don't see it today. So that's that's how I got into service design. I always tell people that advertising is a way to sell customers something and service design is a way to retain those customers. Yes, yes. We had a discussion some time ago about the difference between branding and service design. So like branding or marketing is your promise and service design is what actually allows you to deliver on that promise. That's Nick. We've got so many cool things to talk about. I've sent you some legendary service design show question starters. I've got your topics over here. Are you ready to start? Definitely. Okay, drum roll. Topic number one is going to be standardization standardization standardization. Do you have a question starter and can you share with us? Sure. So do you want me to put this? Yes, show it. Show it us. So how far? How far what? So how far can we take standardization? Especially in service design, right? Especially in service design. So basically, although I would, I use a lot of big company names, I would use a lot of big company names, but these reference pointers actually relevant to even the small startups. There, I think there is a, I'll start with what the origins of standardization is. How did standardization come into place? Back in the day, American companies wanted to scale up and not just American companies, but in general, we what we see around the world is more of American companies. They wanted to scale up. They had their processes, their systems, their design and everything in place. And the idea was to go to every part of the world and try to set a business there to try to replicate the business model. And what happened over a period of time in the last five years, we've seen that we've seen that the what we've seen is that the world trends have changed. We've seen a shift in social values, political values, and people are no longer looking for big giant corporations to help them decide. But in fact, they're looking for something more local, something more handmade, something more unique, something more artisan, something that's produced in small batches and their cultural relevance to it. And unfortunately, McDonald's, Uber's and other ones cannot give us those. They are completely opposite of being local, handmade, unique, not in small batches and they don't have a cultural relevance. And in some ways, I think the world started feeling like it's an American product with American brand superimposed on another culture. So I think problem with standardization is we need to think different brands need to think different. In my book, I talk about how Uber brand when it goes to India, Uber is a really nice, a really sexy app and look and feel I really enjoyed. But that's really not relevant in a country like India. Because in India, black has a connotation to not such a color that people wear during celebration, and same with white, and it's more of a colorful country. It's more of a country where people and design is supposed to be relative dynamic and contextual. So if that's the case, then why can't brands start adopting? We've seen the problem with McDonald's that they are facing. McDonald's, a lot of people actually think that standardization is connected to quality, standardization is not connected to quality, but quality assurance. So McDonald's today has a problem because they stand out from the neighborhood, they don't blend in with the neighborhood. And when I talk about an overall, I think when I hear that design is so centralized for big brands, and it just makes me question that why if we are trying to decentralize the business models, if we are trying to decentralize computing, then why can't we think of decentralizing design itself? Why can't we get a few designers in different parts of the world who are actually designing the service and making it more local relevant? I have a really interesting example here. There is a restaurant in New York called Enoteca Maria. What they do is they actually don't have a head chef. They rotate the head chef every week. They get what they call it as a non-e, where a grandma from that neighborhood comes and decides the menu for a week. She plays the role of a head chef and she decides everything. So the grandma can be from Mexico, can be from India, can be from Sweden, and the whole culture of the restaurant changes. And this is very interesting because this is what non-standardization needs to look like. We don't need to have the same colors look and feel throughout the world replicated, but we need to think how we can be part of that culture rather than superimposing our culture onto others. So many questions that come to my mind. Let's start with the first one. Isn't the obvious reasons that organizations and companies don't do this is because it costs them more, it's less efficient. Standardization is more efficient. And if the answer is yes, how do we as designers break through that? So it is actually on a short run, yes, it can be a little more expensive, it can be less efficient, but on a longer run it can be more. We've seen the problems today that McDonald's, Starbucks have to think their stores and their shops purely because they will have to take a U-turn now to what their business model is. And I think in a short run, yes, you may not be able to scale up as fast as you can, but I think that's the problem. The world doesn't want fast scaling anymore. They want a very careful source scaling. Shareholders want fast scaling. We as consumers probably don't. And I think the world is shifting fast enough. I think shareholders have realized that fast scaling can come with a price. So for us as service designers on a daily practice, how do we take this kind of thinking and actually apply this in what we do? I definitely would say that what, so these are the three things I would definitely say. Standardization is sometimes used as a necessary evil on a road to mass expansion. But we need to recognize all the time that sometimes it creates more of a hindrance than a help. So plan ahead, imagine a time you will only try to win a brand, but also delivering a diverse and an adaptable service. So it's not just about trying to put your brand across the world, but it's also about the services and all the interaction and all the customer experience with it. Standardization like technology should be very invisible. And I think unfortunately the problem is it's very, very visible. So when I say that Uber can actually think how they can maneuver, how they can change their service across the world, what I mean is that Uber's power is in the cloud and it's in the cash pile. And they can go to India and create a similar Uber brand where it relates more to people. They can go to Europe and do so rather than getting a backlash around the world, which I'm not saying is a part of the design, but it's also part of the fact that it's super imposing a business model that has worked in one country onto another one. And I can imagine that just being aware and making your service, making sure that you include elements of the local and local can be like super small, can be on a street level, that you include cultural aspects into your design. That's being aware of what the cultural norms and aspects are. And taking those into account is already a step in the right direction, I guess, right? Definitely. Definitely. I think standardization, we as service designers as design strategists, we need to just rethink what standardization means to us and where we need to apply it. I'm not saying we can't apply it anywhere. Definitely can be applied in processes and systems. But it does not need to be applied in branding. And it can start to be applied with customer services. Interesting. Okay, good topic. Let's move on to topic number two. And this one has been on the show, I think two or three times. Maybe I think the last guest was NF Jane to talk about this. So let's see what your perspective is. The second topic is beyond human-centered design. So I would say why human-centered design? Why human-centered design? I think human-centered design was born with the whole idea of interface design, where we had to take into account people's point of view to see what actually how they use interfaces and how they connect with it. Somehow these three words have become champions into everything we do in design. And I don't have a problem with that because at the core of it, we use the service. But I think somewhere down the line, we've forgotten, we are part of the system and not the entire ecosystem. Back in the day, we often spoke about that how we are at the center of the universe and the sun revolves around us and vice versa. So I think somewhere down the line, we have to ask ourselves that when creating a new product and services, what else is being effective? Trying to put the good into it by giving it a spin of human-centered design and not thinking about the entire ecosystem. Yeah. So the first thing you mentioned is that it started with interfaces and I guess it started with the moment we had to interact with machines, right? Yeah. And not just computers, but I guess anything from steam engine to a jet. And the other thing you mentioned was beyond human-centered design. I think Mauricio Manez said in his episode, like if we continue doing human-centered design, we'll destroy the planet. And he has a point there, right? Definitely. I think definitely Mauricio has a point purely because I think most of the problems we see today in the world, whether it be at political, social, environmental, because we've put ourselves always at the center of the story, we only think about ourselves. Yeah. There's a bit too much ego in design. So have you seen examples of where human-centered design was part of a human or of a design ecosystem? So are there any references to any good examples? Yeah. Definitely. I would say to start with one of the things, I'll give two examples, one that is definitely working and one that may not work enough, that we may need to rethink in the longer term. So the one that's working for me is at the top of my mind is definitely something like beyond meat burgers. I think when we think about health aspect, we understand that McDonald's and others have been good on some areas where they've been able to provide food to people who definitely needed the most to a certain group of people. But the other part is definitely talking about that they've also been in some ways been responsible for the health crisis that we have today. And going back to it, I think when I think about Beyond Burgers and a lot of people talk about it as innovation. What is it? Because I think a lot of people don't know what Beyond Burgers is. So Beyond Burger is basically this engineered burger that looks exactly and tastes like meat, smells like meat. And it looks like meat, but it's actually not meat. It is actually using DNA and other very natural ingredients to give you that taste of it. Now it's in some ways, it is definitely has a social value to it because we're not going ahead and killing animals for it. We're not mass producing it. We're not killing animals for it. We are mass producing it, but in a good way. And the other part is that it's healthier for people. So I think when I think about this, so many companies, when they tell that they're using more organic chicken, but I was like, we only again thinking about ourselves. What about the fact that if you kill someone in a human way, it is still killing. So Beyond Meat to Me is a good example that how we can just not think about ourselves, but the entire ecosystem, like think of designing in totality. Yeah, and make sure that everything benefits. Yeah, otherwise it's a zero sum game. Only one wins and the rest is losing, right? And so what was the other example that you had in mind? So other example that I have put down in one of my blogs is drones. I think a lot of people get excited because when we see drone delivery, we often talk about it in good sense, whether it's the media or whether we have to try and upsell the idea to someone, but we think about it as emergency services. Now, having worked on it for a little while, I don't know how many actually people have thought about the fact that there could be noise pollution. What about the birds? What about the bees? What about people who live in that neighborhood? And because it will come so easy to us, will the number of deliveries increase? Like, does my neighbor want to see 25 times drone coming into my house and hear it all? I think these are the aspects we have to think and learn from it. It's not just about what good it will do to us, but it's also what bad it will do to the environment. What about if there are no bees tomorrow? That means we will have a problem with the entire ecosystem of the nature. So I'm trying to think of what, why haven't we thought about this more in the past? And how can we increase this more? Because there is a clear, for instance, in service design, when you're working for a commercial company, there is a clear incentive on what you want to design. You're not designing for the bees, you're not designing for the other neighbor, you're designing something for the customer. So how do we bridge that? How do we make design more inclusive? Somebody needs to take an interest in that. So if the user has a place at the center of the design, so does every other living thing. So I think we are designing for the user, but we don't want to fall into the same problem that we have today, the problem with the environment. We design it for the user, but in five to 10 years, we realize that we've actually destroyed the entire ecosystem of the neighborhood. Now, one of the scenarios that actually talk in my book is that tomorrow what will happen is just because I want my delivery to come faster, maybe they'll get rid of some trees which are blocking it to come faster and this just goes on. At the cost of convenience, we are going to sacrifice a lot more. So I don't believe, I think firstly, we should not say that customer is everyone. Everyone is going to be affected with that ecosystem. Everyone is going to be affected with that technology. And one of the things that I have noticed working in the world of technology that as soon as something new with technology comes, we kind of only put forward all the good things that it may do. And we kind of forget that it has its problems. We've seen it today. People are more addicted to their screens, people. And we've seen that today that Apple and Facebook and all are trying to reduce your time on the screens. So is it that I'm thinking about these trade-offs that we as designers constantly have to make? Like if we design it in this way, some people will benefit, other parts of the system will be in disadvantage. I think if we give clients the option, they will choose always for the option that's most financially interesting. So I think we as designers sort of shouldn't even present the options where there are disadvantages. We should always only present solutions that you know, let's not put clients in the position where they can choose for solutions that are less inclusive. And I do believe it's changing purely because if we look at people are buying more local, which is actually more expensive than buying something that's mass produced, people are buying more, as I said, buying more local, buying things more unique. They don't want anything that's mass produced. They don't want a candle, which is in every part of the world. They want some unique smell to it. So I think people are willing to spend. And if we constantly tell them that this is what benefits it's going to give you, people are buying things which are more organic, more socially, things which are even produced in other parts of the world. People don't want to be buying products which are related to child labor and other things. And I think this is about informing the customers and telling them what are the benefits of it. Yeah. So in the end, I was of course referring to clients, but in the end, the consumers are the ones who decide on what we deliver. But maybe as designers, we should take a more active stance in what we actually present to consumers. Definitely. I totally agree. Anything else you want to say about this one beyond human-centered design? I think I just have one thing that I think everyone should start practicing that in some ways. I think whether as designers we're designing the next product or services, I think it's good to go back to the book and look at a holistic approach. We already learned that and we already apply that in service design, looking at every perspective. In some ways, we are the champions to the customers and the customer should not be someone who looks exactly like us. The customer is everyone around us. So start understanding design in totality. I think it will be great as designers that we can put forward a different perspective than the world has used to seeing overall. Let's make design even more inclusive. I like that. Nick, final topic. When I show it, it will probably be more in contrast with the other ones. So interesting. Third topic is called lawmakers. We had legal design on the show. We haven't talked about lawmaking so much. So the topic here is when will designers be lawmakers? Oh man, I'm not sure if that's the world I want to live in. No, you don't want to. I think it'll be exciting. I think I have one small thing that I would say that we as designers have always been told to stay in our lane, stay out of politics, stay out of societal or society decisions. But when you look at all the ways that we as designers influence the society, that just sounds ridiculous. We have to be involved. And when I say designers as lawmakers, what is the next thing for service designers and design strategists to take to the next level? It's about lawmaking. Why would you say that? How did you end up with law? So what is law? What is writing a law? When senators and lawmakers, when they write a law, what is one of the things they do? And it's something very similar to what we do today, is basically when you're writing an income tax law, for example, you're thinking about everything that's going to go, all the loopholes that's going to go into it, all the goods and the bads, like what will happen when this will happen? And it's just about understanding the entire goods and the bads of it. And I think it's also seeing things from a consumer point. Is this law going to be good for people who make X amount of money or is this law going to be good for people who make under 50,000 over a million? And I think as we as designers have an empathy, there seems to be an empathy deficiency when it comes to the lawmakers today. And as designers, we are much more better equipped to understand and write the laws. I'll give a very basic example here. We've heard for years now the problems that Facebook has with the data collection and with everything, we've known. And the thing is, the business model is about collecting data. And in some ways, I think we all are contributing to it. We're giving them the data and they have to use the data to in order to that is the business model. But I never understood one thing is one of the problems is that nobody seems to be knowing what the privacy policy in terms of users. And why a design team has never been set up to rethink how to present the privacy policy? How to present the terms of use? Why can't a privacy policy be written or and presented by a service designer as if it's a product and a service by itself? When I open the privacy policy, it actually talks to me in my language. It tells me things like an infographic that, hey, Nick, we're collecting this. Are you comfortable? No, okay, done. So why can't we think of an onboarding for a privacy policy? And I think nobody to me is better equipped in the industry today than designers taking this challenge. It doesn't have to be writing the income tax law that will take time. I do understand. But it's about getting involved in local politics. It's about getting involved in companies, I don't know, privacy policy. It's about getting involved about something that's going to affect people. It's about community building. It's about social awareness. Can we get involved in some way because we have the ability and going back to be on human centered design, we will understand lawmaking from every corner. We can look at it truly from that 360 degree perspective. If you look at the design field, why do you think we haven't engaged in this law policy field yet? Because I think in some ways we are getting involved. But at this point, as I said, as designers, I think service design is such a new concept, at least in the United States. In Europe, it's over 30 years old. But today for the first time, designers are sitting on the board. Today for the first time, designers are trying to understand design that's beyond colors and shapes. We are trying to understand it as a service. We are trying to understand it as a human psychology. We are trying to understand it through feelings. And I think once we pass that area, and today I think another thing that I would request all the designers, including myself, that let's not look at just products and services. We can get involved in a government channel. We can get involved in also writing. There's a great example, which was about how a little firm helped countries like Germany and all have 100% of what is it called? I'm so sorry, organ donation. And I think it's about getting involved with other things. It's not just about looking at products and services. It's about looking at everything. And this will really help us understand the world. And maybe we had to develop our own practice first to a level that we're confident enough and skilled enough to have these conversations. Lawmaking has been there for a few centuries. So they had some practice. And now, yeah, we needed to do a little practice before we got into these discussions. Maybe yes. Maybe we just need to look at it in a completely fresh perspective. Maybe we need to say that to me, lawmaking can be treated exactly how we treat today products and services. Because when we start working on a new service, we go out and ask the customer what they're looking for. We go out and do quantitative, qualitative research. We understand the market landscape. We understand what other countries are doing. And I think today there's this example I'm using in my book that how one of the senators is actually questioning Facebook on what their business model is. And he doesn't seem to know what the business model is. And he's like, how can you sell ads using people's information? And later on, they found out he was talking, one of the things he was talking of during the hearing was about piracy and people downloading pirated movies. And what they found out is that he himself had three pirated movies on his laptop when they checked because he did not know they're pirated. We in some ways don't want people like this to write the laws for us. Exactly. Yeah. And especially just a few days back, I heard that Amazon is about to write a law for facial recognition and presented to the lawmakers because the lawmakers just don't know how to go about it. So Amazon has taken it upon themselves. And I was like, great, but I would like a team of designers to do so. Whether I agree or disagree, whether a corporate corporate enterprise should be writing a law. But that's a different story. But they have the expertise. Yeah. They have the expertise. And I think with the world of technology moving so exponentially, most of the lawmakers don't know what the business model of these tech companies work to write the laws for it. Nick, at the end of each episode, when we're almost there, we still have one little surprise left. But every guest gets the opportunity to ask us the service design community a question. Is there something on your mind that you'd like to share with us that you'd like to ask us? Sure. I think I would love to know from the service design community, how do you think designers as lawmakers in what areas can we make an immediate effect? Is it something that you see as local politics? Is it something, as I said, in the world of helping your company rewrite the privacy in terms of use or something else? I would love to know from you what you think about it. And I can, for the people who are sort of interested in this topic, check out the episode with Angelica Fletcher, who talks about legal design that's really related to this topic. Okay, Nick, the book. I think we're going to do a giveaway, right? Yes, we're going to do a giveaway to the best answer. To the best answer. But what's the question? So the question is, where do you think designers can make a difference in lawmaking? On what part of lawmaking can we make a difference? And how can we make a difference? Okay, so the answer, and we have two weeks after publishing this episode, check out all the details down below in the video. And if you're listening to the podcast edition, go to the video and check it out. Two weeks and an answer. And yeah, you might win a sign. It's a signed copy, right, Nick? We're going to do a signed copy. Yeah, signed copy of Nick's book. Right. Thanks for sharing and provoking the conversations on the show. That's what we do here. So thank you so much for having me. It's great to discuss some of these topics. Service designers as lawmakers, what do you think? Leave a comment down below and let's continue the conversation over there. If you enjoyed what we've just discussed here, grab the link and share it with one other person today who might be interested in this as well. That's how you'll help to grow the service design show family. And that's how you'll help to get more guests like Nick on the show. So thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.