 In this episode, we'll be talking about the changing relationship people have with products and services. We'll talk about how product design and service design relate to each other. And we'll also talk about what you must know as a service designer moving forward. And here is the guest of this episode. Hi, I'm Mark and this is the Service Design Show. Hi guys, my name is Mark Fontijn and welcome to a new episode of the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to create more human-centered services. And we know that this is important but also can be a bit of a struggle sometimes. So on the show we talk about topics ranging from design thinking and customer experience to organizational change and creative leadership. If these are the things you're interested in, know that we bring a fresh new episode every two weeks. If you don't want to miss anything, click that subscribe button. And if you want to show your support, click that like button or leave a short comment. It lets me know that the things we do here are appreciated by people like you. My guest in this episode is Mark Wilson. Mark is a chief creative and co-founder of Argo Design and he worked for Frog Design for over 20 years helping them to grow to the company it is today. In the next 20 minutes or so we'll be talking about topics like the changing relationship people have with products and services. We'll talk about how service design relates to product design these days and we'll also talk about what you need to know as a service designer moving forward. 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. And in case you'd like to listen to a podcast version of this episode head over to servicedesignshow.com slash podcast where you'll find this episode and all the previous ones. For now, let's jump right in. Welcome to the show, Mark. Hey, good morning. Yeah, it's afternoon here in the Netherlands but it's morning in Austin, right? Yeah, good morning, good day, good night, wherever you might be. Mark, you have an awesome background. It's the Argo studio you're in right now, right? That's right. Yeah, you can see the studio behind me. Yeah, people listening to the podcast should really check out the video too. So Mark, really curious and I asked this to all the guests who appear on the show do you remember the first time that you actually got in touch with service design with the term? Oh yeah, for me pretty late in my career, frankly, because as a product designer we tended to frame everything in terms of the overall experience design problem. And I started my career back in the early 90s and really engaged product design, I'd say formally outside of more of just being a designer who will do anything to get work. I'd say around 1994 I started working with frog design and we through those early years were really just trying to figure out all of the tenets of a broader landscape of experience design. In other words, it wasn't merely going to be industrial design and branding but the overall definition of a product experience that someone would have. And of course as that grew up and as more of that problem became software we would encounter the notion of services and eventually we encountered a few folks who called themselves service designers. You're what? What do you do? And I remember my initial questions like, so what do you make if you're a service designer? It's a really fascinating thing to hear about and more than anything I think it was a real sign that some of the greater push points are factors to design. We're moving from the definition of an artifact to the definition of sort of process of engagement to the experience touch point. None of these things were going to be completely concrete anymore. And of course we've seen what technology's done to the overall world of product design and so service design has become a really critical component and it's also I think from my perspective deeply integrated to the notion of experience design. I still have a hard time thinking of it too discreetly. I guess that will be a central topic in what we're going to talk about. So let's just jump right into the topics you handed me and let's see what this show this episode has. And the first topic is called Relationships with Products and Services. What's the question? All right. Relationships with products and services for 20. I think the question is really what is changing about our relationships with products and services given particularly what's going on with technology. How technology is developed to change those relationships that we have. And I think in general I'd sum it up first in the most simplest terms as we have long had relationships with the products around us as a very static theme. These products we would engage more or less as tools. Something was designed to do what it did and it consistently did that. And to a lesser degree but still critically services were the same thing. You had a relationship with your bank and it was a very fixed relationship and the process for engaging them despite all the human niceties was a fairly limited concept. It knew about you what you let them know about you and so forth. But technology of course has changed that equation. First of all we could easily say that processes around services and products lived in different worlds. Maybe services would engage a product but you really didn't engage services and products in a single design problem. Technology really started forcing the two to work together. We've long since started talking about that in terms of overall consumer experiences or experience design of course. Today when I think about a product, a modern product, a technologically driven product, applications in particular I think of them really as services with affordances. We look at a lot of applications through the flow that they are experienced in and the net effect is not a concrete thing or a tool but a dynamic involved service. In that sense the world's sort of completely changed from that old view of you buy a thing and it does what it does to these products and quote slash services that are integrated and dynamic. They learn about us and they continually evolve to become something more and more valuable to us. I was thinking about this topic before the show and the question that really came to my mind is the relationship with products and services is changing but how do we use design to actually create more meaningful relationships because I think that's one of the biggest challenges at this moment. We're meaningful relationships. We're struggling right now to make sense of this shift. It's pretty easy to design a toaster when the meaning of a toaster is pretty well defined. It's pretty easy to design the ideal way to serve someone ice cream in an ice cream store so a nice sort of simple example of service or take like renting a car that's a great example of a service design. What does it take to go rent someone's car? But if you look at technology and what it's done it has and so what does it take to do a good job? You really have to understand the not only the technical framework and therefore what's possible in rethinking that. You can continue to do it the way it's always done like continue to rent cars the way they've always been rented but look at what zip car is. Look at what Audi's silver car service is or some of the other services that allow you to actually rent someone's personal automobile off the street. Those are completely leveraged off of a new technical framework the fact that a person can use their car dynamically and that there's enough data that's real-time and available to the application that allows us to understand is that car available. Something normally kind of built into the service framework has now become a technical framework. So to me what does it take to understand and design now is the affordances that we would normally think is static really dynamic components things we would normally train human beings in a service designed to solve for that would be normally back office operations maybe in something like a classical like Hertz rent a car are now technological affordances that not only move the human aside which is kind of a scary proposition in some respects but they dynamically become part of that service. They also open the door to things you thought you couldn't do like rent a personal car rent someone's personally owned car. So the idea of the business itself becomes a design component. We normally you know I grew up in the early 90s there was a sense of a real dynamism and design around emerging businesses that were taking advantage of new kinds of devices but the whole idea of the whole business itself could be in question has really been a crazy phenomenon in the last ten years so to me a design problem today often entails how do you even want to conduct the business dot com introduced the idea of conducting a business for free with a customer and earning the business value in other ways so that's even part of the question how do you redeem value? What do you think because a lot of has changed within design the recent years what do you think is the or maybe there are more aspects of design that we are not utilizing enough or should utilize even more when actually building meaningful services and products on the technologies that exist today so what are the aspects of design that we should really cherish? Let's look at that like a spectrum there's two ends of the spectrum to me that really intrigued me or I think are sort of really critical one end of the spectrum is a still very humanistic passion we have for touch points for things so even when we talk about this very somewhat abstract notion of a service in the end the measurable parts of it are these touch points these moments where you're engaging in artifact and the qualities of the experience can be endowed through that artifact it can be expressed or sort of punctuated through a great thing right a nice moment a nice experience driven by that and so I think particularly today really thoughtful software design still and industrial design still is a critical leverage point no matter how abstract some of these services be data centric they become and Apple of course has taught us all over the last several years especially this sort of the steep jobs renaissance years you might call helped reinforce the idea that despite some of the abstractions we experience in this new data centric universe of products and services that touch points really beautiful things still matter elegant touch points elegant words right and the second thing and in that sense ownership and perception of those objects matter the second thing is it's more of an emerging factor but it's deadly serious right this moment which is the growing intelligence of these participating affordances what I mean by that untangle that complex statement is we have long thought of the objects around us and the processes around us is largely fixed but we're now getting the point where the processes itself can not only have you know let's say we could design a car rental process that would thoughtfully adjust to different factors but we designed those factors and we designed how it would adjust we're now getting the point where intelligence systems can auto adjust can auto invent the process itself the very it can fine tune the criteria for the adjustment of these things we're I'll give you a concrete example because all this gets kind of loosey-coosey as we talk about it we're working on a financial advisor engine with an AI company a great customer of ours cognitive scale now this financial advisor is at the core of basic service that helps a customer an investor work with an advisor right that service the advisors largely the interface for the service the advisor is giving advice on investments is heavily powered behind the scenes by an assistant intelligent assistant to that advisor that is rapid fire giving advice and so the second for example the second the customer asks a question the assistant fires off a handful of very strongly quantified ideas for the advisor to decide themselves they're not out of the equation how to react to they can ignore it or they could act on that advice and what it ends up doing is not only deeply empowering the advisor with information at their fingertips which is kind of a cliche but it is in a lot of ways almost beginning to overstep the advisor's own intelligence capacity to conceptualize and deliver support to that customer because this advisor's assistant is learning from everything the advisor does and it learns at what you call a much more perfect rate it's much much faster it can calculate and look sift through for example the entire history of a stock and we've got an example that we played out where a customer asks about a particular FBI raid with a customer you know something that you would think would be immediate like oh my god maybe we should sell that stock but the system was able to sift through and go well that actually happened ten years ago something might be generally forgotten and the stock did dip as it usually would in a situation like that but then it quickly rose because this investigation was one of many investigations that happened for a particular reason and therefore the advisor has a really kind of a non-intuitive point of intelligence something they could not have conceived of themselves that just completely changes the framework of this engagement so if we step back away from this we realize like designing for those kinds of interactions is fundamentally transformed by the fact that there's something in some way smarter than us in the process or more nimble than us and it's not like another person but it's more like a two year old that can memorize the entire telephone and spit it out anytime we need it and it learns from us and like I said it fundamentally changes the equation of what we're designing really like designing how do you best surface this little guy in our normal process? We're designing the context in which maybe things like these intelligence services can perform optimally maybe we're designing for AI Yes, you become kind of a backseat driver even though we still think of ourselves in the front seat and actually one of the most exciting design exercises right now is coming up with those interfaces and so I'll give you this example again we still have the sort of conceptually the dynamic and exchange going on between a human and a human the customer and the advisor and the assistant, the AI assistant is a third member of the conversation rapid fire offering ideas but it's still on the part of the advisor to ignore that so it's like the much smarter citizen sitting next to the doctor or the financial advisor or the concierge still having to communicate through the human being as the sort of final arbiter value in truth and that's an interesting dynamic that we haven't really played out to take the superior actor and put that in the front We're not ready for that yet I guess We're not Let's move on because we have more things to talk about and the second topic I guess it all blends into each other but it will give you the opportunity to maybe look at it from a second different perspective let's play the second round of Jeopardy and this question is about product design What is happening in the greater world of product design? I think we've touched on this a little bit but I think it's important that anyone who calls himself a service designer has a passion around service design or those who consider themselves a product designer realize that it is irrevocably compressed now to more of an industry that has to look across those what once were more discreet services capabilities and at the same time I think there's a kind of a verticalization that happens there is an emerging new concept of let's say like an industrial designer or software designer who is intentionally artifact centric who is intentionally saying I'm going to need to work with somebody who is experience focused I'm just going to work on the things but let's set that person aside that every industry verticalizes Those are like craftsmen who know how to work and it's great but it used to be the sum total of what it meant to be an industrial designer and now we have what remains of the generalist designer experience designer or product designer has to think in terms of the overall experience which is the transcends the artifacts and services to become something more holistic that is in a nutshell what is happening in the greater world of product design it means our vocabulary has greatly expanded it means the interplay of artifacts and the processes of engagement the services that are the cumulative effective of a customer engagement are part of the problem that is the sort of envelope that we solve for you can't do any one or any other right yeah sorry I think it doesn't even stop there and I think this is the part where we haven't yet even found to become sufficiently talented and that is in the depth of understanding of data and the capabilities of intelligent systems within this scenario as a designer I think we still feel our contribution as a dominant contribution to how to define the behavior of things and how to define the process and also a transaction of a service it is a human defined thing and in almost all of the experiences when I encounter designers they still think of it as once it's designed it is a done thing but data and intelligence artificial intelligence or computing intelligence of any form even the simpler forms invoke a certain dynamism to those designs that we have to ironically design for you have to create a set of abstractions to how something might come out for example you know I go back to my financial advisor the outcome of that encounter really depends on what not just how our interface that we design that goes between the advisor and the customer but how the artificial intelligence system contributes and it contributes in lots of different ways it contributes in ideas it contributes in observation and ongoing learnings like this work last time he doesn't like to calculate his transactions this way he likes to calculate them that way he prefers to trade in this manner his threshold of success is this referring to the customer it also actually provides the transaction assistance so it presents mechanically all the necessary forms and tables for engaging those problems so to me it's not just the integration problem but the learning to design with dynamism inherent in the process these external influences I guess that's really powerful and I understand what you mean that designers are used to actually seeing some form of maybe not even tangible but their result of the work being in an artifact or process but if these aren't the things not only the things we should be designing what's next or what's left you know if we can't design these fixed things dynamic systems how do we call them it's not that scary because for example I've been making journey maps for 20 years some form of what we now call an experience journey map the sort of ideal flow a customer should go through if everything works out and we would occasionally create these sort of branches and the branches would be well here's this option for the journey or here's what happens if they refuse to do this but those are more exceptions programmers have long understood how to create highly articulate logical diagrams for how an application might flow which has hundreds of forks they're far more directional forkings than flow they've also long understood how to define statefulness how to define branching in a very artful way that is software you know the nature of creating software and so as we design experiences I think we're going to migrate to more looking like a programmer not a programmer in code but a programmer in experience elements experience touchpoints in that it'll have far more forks far more logical potential states and driven by the sort of logic it fascinates me I have a bachelor's degree in software engineering so I sort of try to understand where I get it and it's like we need to make smaller chunks and make the ends and the beginnings of these chunks super flexible and highly I don't know communicative and in the world of software that's apis but you can define boundaries within software we've long done it take like a super nerdy example I want to render a button the earliest buttons I would render 1993 I'm doing an interface for compact computer but we would render buttons that would be rendered in photoshop and the label itself what the button said would be rendered in the context of that button so everything aspect of the button would be this fixed piece of art so the designer you might say had complete control over that experience element now move up to today the modern button a simple simple object is a definition of something where statefulness the width of the button even the potential size and the label are downwards into the software so it's hold dependent on context where it needs to render the style of the button might be dependent on what the state of the software is at the time all these things are dynamically assignable now in that simple object so we think about our flow designing flow today we're still kind of moving past that point flow is a very concrete thing to needing to learn how to design flow we're still with human boundaries like when I design the new button I can still say it's always going to be blue at the core and maybe it turns orange in this state so I have still human controls around it I can still artfully choose things like fonts and border even in that abstraction that it now exists in it's not lost to a humanistic cause there's a lot more factors that will weigh into it but we as designers still are responsible to build boundaries around ideas of acceptable interactions or desirable interactions there's just many more possible variables injected into that process and those variables aren't necessarily human driven variables they're externalities, largely software externalities that we now weigh in our thinking we're sharing the design responsibility you might say with system let's move on to the third or final topic let's move on to the third or final topic it's a really good topic because it's just a topic of moving forward what's your question that goes along with this one all right so with all of this you might say blowing up around us about the change going on right now how do we move forward to me it is the embrace of this dynamism the acceptance that dynamism isn't just in a few corners I pointed out an AI cognitive assistant for a financial advisor but understanding that's affecting how one orders a hamburger at McDonald's in fact I was in I think it was in Munich that I went to a McDonald's where I was using software that was driving it was a kiosk that I needed to make my order by the way it was a giant pain in the ass I didn't say it was initially a service design fail but I can't imagine the food ordering process being able to net out what people are ordering that day, what people order in that location I typically order into a much greater experience so it's not merely a passive recipient behind the counter saying what can I get you and me having to browse the totality of the menu into a future where it's a much more dynamic experience so me moving forward is people in our industry believing and understanding how encompassing this change is there is not a safe place for you as a practitioner and to embrace these new skills is absolutely necessary well talking about skills Mark what advice would you give people that want to need to know what new skills, what study would you do today first of all what new skills the answer is all of them I mean the capacity of human mind to learn things is limitless you just have to choose to now with that said the focal areas I would say really start to understand some at least the surface level art of data and data analytics and design with data and then learn to understand what's actually happening with AI, what is AI really about what are the modalities of AI for example there are systems that respond to queries and they are able to provide a better answer simply because they bring more factors to the table they can do things like quantify different answers against a whole set of variables that you don't normally apply to a question things about me, things about the moment, things about the state of the information available so that in a lot of ways you can just think that's super search there's also learning systems, systems that are observing and in the background deciding when to provide insights as delivered, insight is a concept an object if you learn about what an insight is is a almost semi-formal object it's not quite formalized yet but it is becoming so in the industry, the delivery of an insight is a mechanism and it's a mechanism you can employ if you're trying to design a medical system a financial advice system or food ordering at a place like McDonald's so these concepts these objects and the technical systems below them are asking you to become a programmer but as a designer understanding these technical notions becomes deeply empowering it's like knowing the characteristics of data and AI as the new design material yeah, look ten years ago I used to nag my studio full of designers to understand the GDIs of the major operating systems to understand what a standard approach for a dialogue box was for macOS versus Windows the fact that OK and cancel are on opposite sides on those two platforms and things have normalized by the way and now we have iOS which has a whole other set of standards and Android which has another set of standards and designers now get that they have to understand materials, draft angle different manufacturing processes things like that that affect their choices to me if you're going to be a competent service designer you have to understand these technical aspects and they will in five years feel a lot more ordinary so this is just a beach head calling like that's why we're doing this show that glimps into the future Mark, so sort of wrapping up and I know you didn't prepare for this question but I'm sure you have one and this is your opportunity to ask the people who are listening or viewing this episode a question what would you like to ask us yeah I'd like to understand what most service designers are spending their time doing and given that you know it's really a two-parter how many of you feel truly integrated with the greater sphere product design versus successfully operating as independent service designers I'd love to understand that you know for me my perspective of service design comes from the world of product designers so I would like to know how many of you have heard of the Hamer's sea nails and I think my perspective is well informed but still I'd love to understand how other people see the world awesome post your comments in the comments Mark it's time to sort of wrap this episode up so thank you for your time thanks, yeah it's fine we've just discussed in this episode let us know share your thoughts and ideas in the comments and remember more people like you are watching these episodes in your comment might just be the thing they need for the next meaningful breakthrough if you want to learn more check out some of the past episodes or head over to learn.servicedesignshow.com where you'll find courses by leading service design experts that dig deeper into the topics we discussed here on the show I'll see you in two weeks time with a fresh new episode thanks for watching and see you then