 I'm Alex Nisbet and this is the Service Design Show. In the Service Design Show we talk to people that are shaping the service design field about the current state of the industry, exciting new developments and challenges up ahead. Today my guest is Alex Nisbet. Some people may know Alex as he is the head of design at LiveWork and something that you might not know is that he almost became a potter but chose graphic design instead. So it's luckily that we have him in the service design field today. Welcome to the show Alex. Hi there. You're right now in the UK, right in London. Absolutely, London Town. London Town and I see the small LiveWork logo there. Yeah, awesome. Alex, you've been in the industry for 11 years. You just told me and I'm really curious what is actually your very first memory of service design? Mark, that's a great question. I think it actually goes back a little bit further than 11 years. So a friend and I, we were talking about cycling and we were talking about sharing bikes and things like that. We were both graphic designers so we were kind of creating people and we were just trying to figure out how on earth could you possibly design something around sharing bicycles? And this is a long time, this is before Velib in Paris and all that kind of stuff. And we just thought wouldn't it be great if you could but we just had no idea how you could do it. So I think that was probably without me realising it, my first thoughts about service design. Can you recall when you actually stumbled upon the term? Yeah, so I was working in interactive, I guess you could call it interactive marketing and we were already thinking about the user quite a lot and how to create messages for them and help them do what they wanted to do. And somebody got in touch with me and said hey, there's a position that a company called IDO and it's about service design. I think you'd be really interested in that. So that's where it all started. Alex, let's explain to the people that are listening or watching this episode how the format works, right? I've got a stack of papers with some topics and you've also got a stack of papers, right? Yeah, there we go. And your papers contain question starters. So I'll be holding up a topic and you'll be holding up a question starter and we'll co-create the question that we're going to discuss from there on. Cool. Sounds good, right? Let's just jump in and let me pick a topic that's... Well, I'm not sure quite what it is so I'm really curious what you'll make of this. It's called customer performance. Okay. Well, here we go. Do we get that? Yeah, absolutely. How can we... How can we design for customer performance? So first off, I think it's probably worth just thinking about what we mean by or what I mean by customer performance. So four years ago I worked at the London Olympics and one of the big challenges that we had was that the most spectators were only ever going to visit the Olympics one time. Okay? So they had no kind of previous experience and they probably weren't going to visit again. The Olympics and the way that we designed it had to be quite complex. You had to arrive very early. You had airport-style security. You had venues to navigate that you'd never ever been to before. And when you sat down, it was all going to be the most brilliant, you know, the greatest show on earth. So we realized that we really needed to help spectators to, if you like, get to the right place at the right time and in the right state of mind. And of course, if they did that, they were more likely to spend a little bit of money on the catering or the merchandise. But possibly more importantly, they provide that sort of perfect backdrop, if you like, for the broadcasters and the athletes. Now, in order to do that, it means that the organization had to be high performing, if you like. So not just the usual things like great signage and great information, but also thinking especially about ensuring that spectators knew that they had to arrive super early, that the games makers were on hand to help guide them to the right place, and that queues were minimized. And even if you did have a queue, it was actually a fairly okay experience. Now, this idea of customer performance or spectator performance that can also be applied to think about the airport. So oftentimes you're in a hurry, you don't know which way to go, the gate may be changed, but you really need to get to that gate on time. And if you can do that, then you're more likely to buy a coffee or maybe some last minute duty-free. But especially, you're going to be a happy passenger, if you like, a high-performance passenger. And that's what the airlines like. They like us when we're flying to be happy, to be punctual. But that means that the airport has got to help us get to the right place at the right time. And it works for hospitals. It works if you're visiting a city for the first time as a tourist. It works. So this idea of high performance for a customer. But the challenge there and how can we design for high performance is really to ensure that the organizations and businesses understand the role that they play in the service that they provide and in the customer or the spectator experience as well. So it's a very critical thing. It's a big challenge. But if you do it right, then you get satisfied customers. You get customers that are going to come back, customers that are going to advocate your service. I think this is really recognizable for everyone who's been a customer or a spectator or a patient or a client in a situation which is pretty complex and you're there for the first time. So we all know this. I've never heard of the term customer performance in this kind of sense. So it's really intriguing. What is your takeaway from the Olympics? What were the main ingredients that actually created for high performance customers? So I think there were two things. There was the fact that this was going to be a once in a lifetime opportunity for London but also for the city, for the spectators, if you like. And in that respect, at the same time, we knew that we wouldn't get it right first time. So it's going to be hugely impactful, hugely important, but we knew that the first day, the second day, the third day, it wouldn't be perfect. So I think it's acknowledging that you're not going to get it right first time. But secondly, I think my main takeaway probably from the Olympics was that this sense of continually improving the experience and for us at the Olympics, that was on a daily basis. Not just leaving it until next week or next month but actually refining the experience on a daily basis. And I think that's something that every service provider can take a little away from. So could you say that you actually designed more of a mechanism or a process to continuously improve the service instead of the service itself? Yeah, so that's something that I was very involved with at games time. So we were interviewing spectators as they were leaving Stadia. We were monitoring social media to hear what they were talking about, where their pain points were. We were observing their kind of behaviors at the venues. And overnight we would create, if you like, a set of scores for each venue on the how they were performing on, I don't know, speed of cues or how efficient security was or how spectators felt about the quality and the value for money of food and drink or things like that or the quality of the sports presentation. So all these things we were measuring on a daily basis. Real-time monitoring of service quality, service experience. And then feeding that back to the venue teams and the sport teams so they understood where they had to improve. And what was the biggest challenge in that if you look back on this experience? If you could pick one. Am I allowed to say lack of money? It's an interesting case where the, so London was the first host city, if you like, to really explicitly design with spectators in mind. Clearly there have been spectators a long time before that but we were the first city to actually have a spectator experience team. And that, but that meant that they didn't quite understand how to use us. We really had to build a very, very strong business case and fight for the funding to do what we were doing. Because back in 2012, you know, we were only just really coming out of quite a bad sort of financial crisis really here in London. So it was very much an austerity game. So as sort of creative thinkers, if you like, we had to be quite resourceful in how we used the funding that we needed. But once we did put mitigations in place, the organisers immediately saw the value that we were bringing. So once you make things tangible, often that's when organisations, that's their aha moment, I guess if you like. And have you seen any other field or sector taking learnings from what you've learned at the Olympics? Yes, so interestingly some of the airports, the train providers are beginning to think in that way. But they also, I'd say the city of London has taken a leaf out of the Olympic book and certainly the work that we've been doing with Transport for London in focusing on the visitor experience. So that, if you like, the experience of the Olympics began to cascade down to lots of other organisations at home or far away. I really like the topic because of course everybody's heard of staff performance, stuff like that, but customer performance, like I said, is quite new for me. Any tips or resources where people can learn more about this topic? Yeah, well, that's a good question actually, Monk, very good question. I think there are some people are beginning to write about it and I think partly out of my Olympic experience. So the new book by Live Work. We'll put a link up there. So we talk about that a little bit and I'm constantly talking about it. But it would be interesting to see of course at the Olympics in Rio later on this summer how that experience is. So I think the real proof there is how the spectator experience is there. Interesting. Alex, let's move on to a second topic because time is flying by. This is a topic that has been on the show a few times already in its capacity building. So there we go. Who are building capacity? Question mark, right? So I think over the sort of 10 or so years I've been in service design and I still feel myself as a relative newbie, if you like. Those kind of organisations that have been continually focused on building their capacity to design services have been those in the public sector. So if you know the story about teaching a man to fish and the public sector, especially here in the UK, have always been very focused on developing the skills internally to be able to design, deliver and operate services. So although they've been buying service design from design consultants, they've been equally focused on figuring out how to do it themselves. And this over the last few years we've seen an increase in commercial organisations wanting to do exactly that same thing. So maybe there might be a time when service design consultancies and maybe that time is now that if you look at the volume of services being designed globally, there is a time maybe it's now where service design consultancies are doing that much but then organisations are designing and delivering that much. And something about service designers, we're incredibly open. We want to share everything and we want everybody to succeed at this because as somebody once said to me, there can never be too many service designers. That's a nice statement, absolutely. I need to plug my computer into some power. Let's do it, yeah. Two seconds. So a lot of the work that we do here at LiveWork is not just about delivering content, if you like, actually supporting our clients in improving and innovating their services. But I'd say an equal amount of it is explicitly about helping them to build their internal capacities, their abilities, their skills to be able to, shall we say, not necessarily become a service designer. I don't think that that's necessarily the thing but certainly to understand what good looks like so that they can manage service design projects, if you like, but also how they in their own way can improve and innovate services using many of the kind of tools and techniques, the methods, the processes, if you like, that we are all familiar with. I've been saying this also and I see this development really strongly in our field. Maybe it's like you said, not becoming a service designer themselves but at least becoming better service design clients and being able to better articulate the challenges that they are having. Yeah, we're seeing a rise of the manager, if you like, the people that are actually employing us or buying our services. These design managers are experienced at design themselves and so they are very able and competent at helping us to co-create the brief, helping us to set up the project, helping us to work with their internal teams. I understand our language. There have been times, of course, where we've been working ahead of marketing. They kind of get it but they don't quite understand exactly all the detail, if you like, so having an advocate inside an organization like that is incredibly powerful. So my question also, Alex, would be what does this mean for service design agencies and the people that we employ are used to designing service and not per se being the people who actually train our clients? That's a good question, Mark. I think actually, you know what, a lot of service designers, by definition, if you like, we're very empathic, we're very curious, we're very open, we're very positive. I think those are all great attributes of somebody that would share, maybe teach, share their skills. So actually, I find that a lot of service designers are naturally very good at helping our clients to kind of do better, if you like. And in many respects, it's a very similar kind of skill set to design research and it's a very similar kind of skill set to workshop facilitation in many ways. I think we're on the whole, we're all very comfortable working with people and understanding their real needs and supporting them and in many ways that's what building capability is, a key part of building capabilities. So if you fast forward five years and think about capacity building, what do you think has changed in the next five years? Well, over the previous five years, we've seen a huge growth in the demand for capacity building inside our client organizations, right across every sector. The next five years, that's only going to increase still further. I think we're going to see more trained service designers working inside organizations permanently. So being members of staff, if you like, I'm sure there will be a time when we see designers at the very highest level of organizations, maybe on the board as well. So I can see those all being very positive things. I think we're also going to see a huge increase in the numbers of people that if they had to select a number of skills that they had, they would probably say that designing services or improving services was one of those. So I think there would be more people talking about it, more people doing it. And that's only going to be a good thing. Yeah, absolutely. So the field is definitely moving in a new phase. We're entering a new era. That's absolutely my gut feeling. I think you're absolutely right. And I think thinking about the UK and the government digital service, GDS, so we're putting service design on the agenda of central government. That's been, I think, a major turning point for us here in the UK, because for many organizations they could say, well, if it's good enough for central government, then it's going to be good enough for us. So I think that has been one of those turning points, especially here in the UK. Alex, we need to move on to the third topic. And you already touched upon it a few times. So we had a sneak preview. The third topic is about public services. Well, I picked this one up. So what if public services just kept on improving? And what if public services actually became better than commercially provided services? Now, wouldn't that be an interesting thing? I mean, I was thinking about this a little earlier today. I was thinking that the world doesn't actually need more chairs. It doesn't actually need more smartphones. What the world needs and what people, our citizens of the world, we need to feel safe. We need to feel valued. We need to feel healthy. And many of those provisions come from what we see as the public sector. Us as citizens have the right to feel protected by our country, to feel healthy by our health services, to feel valued and to have employment and all those kinds of things. And I think that the public sector has obviously has a huge role to play in all of that. And I think, yes, I touched on this before, the public sector is increasingly looking to design approaches and especially service design approaches to help them address the huge challenges that they face in doing all those things, in keeping us healthy, in keeping us kind of warm and keeping us clean and all of that kind of stuff, supplying those utilities, it's under increasing pressure to do that with certainly the huge cuts in funding that we've been seeing, with the aging population that we have, with the increasing movement of citizens across borders as well, which is adding huge complexity for those at local government level or under national government level. So I think that those in the public sector here in the UK and in many, many countries around the world are using service design approaches as part of their toolkit, admittedly, of course they're using lots of other techniques, approaches, but they're using service design approaches very successfully in order to deliver better services for less cash effectively. They're getting very clever doing that. And of course they're doing that by designing their services around real users, real needs. So it's kind of a basic for us, if you like, which is being adopted and adapted by probably, for citizens, the most significant provider of services that they're ever going to interact with. So what do you think is... What is on your mind if you think about public services compared to maybe the commercial services and I really like the statement that what if public services actually became better than commercial services? What are the questions that pop into your mind if you think about this topic? Well, I think that one positive is that I've always seen a lot of young designers, those that are graduating, if you like, with more of a passion for doing good, designing better, if you like, not designing more chairs, but actually trying to tackle some of the tough challenges around health, aging population. Well, I feel very confident, if you like, that there is a steady stream of very talented and creative designers who want to tackle those challenges. I'm also very happy to see that there's a steady stream of discourse, of conversation between the public and the private sector, sharing, if you like, and trying to understand how they can partner, how they can work better, how they can collaborate and learn from each other as well. This is what we're seeing, and there are some organizations in the UK, so I'm thinking about the UK Policy Lab, where they're reaching out to big business in the UK to get them to help address some of those challenges that young families have, for instance, when one of the partners is going back to work. So really trying to address some of the social questions that are around. I think it's a very exciting place to be. At LiveWork, we're very lucky because we work in both sectors, in both public and private. So that satisfies, I think, a lot of the designers because they feel very driven to address social design issues. But it also means that our clients benefit from the experience that we have working across the both, and if you like, sort of, cross-fertilizing those experiences. Right. I think we could do a whole episode on related to public services. Like you said, service design has a strong history in the public sector, so we should value that, cherish that, and embrace it and develop it even further. Alex, maybe you get this question a lot by young designers at LiveWork or outside. People that want to get into service design, people that are maybe just graduated, coming from a different sector, what would be your tip for them? Okay. My tip would be to... I've got lots of tips, lots and lots of tips. Like, never give up. Think positively. Try as hard as you can to get an internship somewhere. I mean, those are some kind of practical things. I think there are a lot of very talented young designers that are going, you know what? I'm just going to go out there and do something myself. I'm going to collaborate with some like-minded young people. We're going to go and find an opportunity. We're going to build a pop-up studio somewhere on a high street in a store that's not used, and we're going to figure it out for ourselves. So I think one of the great things, possibly about design these days, if I can say that, is with the technology that's available to us, you don't need huge facilities. You don't even need huge funding, arguably. You can make a difference, I wouldn't say very easily, but you can make a difference on your own. And I think that's arguably... It's like musicians these days, they don't need record companies. So service design challenges don't necessarily need service design consultancies with a different mindset, thinking about the user, thinking positively, trying to understand the challenges in a kind of holistic kind of way. These are all things that we can do straight out of college as a young designer. We can do that. I'll summarize this as go out and make a difference. There we go. Perfect. Alex, this is your opportunity to actually ask a question to the people that are watching this video or listening to this episode. What would you like to ask them? So I'd be really interested in understanding... So here's the question, right? I think service design has always talked about an approach, a process if you like, and we're always talking about being user centered. We're inspired by our users. We validate our ideas with our users. Is there ever going to be a time, do you think, when we're actually going to know enough about some kind of situations? I mean, let's take an example, taking a train journey. Is there ever going to be a time when you know what we don't need to do user research? We don't need to speak to users because we have enough experience, enough intuition to do it ourselves. So that's my question. Will we ever know enough? Well, yeah, to do it ourselves. I don't think we'll ever know enough, but yeah. Here is what people will say about this. Alex, I know it's been earlier for you in the studio so thank you for being here, thank you for taking the time and giving us a bit of an insight on the topics that you are currently thinking of and working on. Mark, it's been a pleasure. What are your thoughts about the topics we've just discussed with Alex? And if you have any suggestions that you would like to see next on the show, be sure to let us know down below in the comments. If you enjoyed this interview and would like to see more service design pioneers, be sure to subscribe to our channel and check out some of the past episodes. With the service design show, we help you to stay one step ahead in service design. For now, thanks for watching.