 In this episode, we'll be talking about how service design has evolved in the last 17 years, we'll be talking about the relationship between service design and industrial design and finally about the potential and added value of service design. If you're interested in that, keep watching and here's the guest for this episode. Hi, this is Jereggen speaking on the service design show and I'm really happy to be part of it. Hi all, my name is Marc van Tijn and welcome to the service design show. If you want to create more impact and change the world for the better as a service designer then you've come to the right place because on this show you get the chance to learn from the success of some of the world's leading service designers. We talk about topics ranging from design thinking and customer experience to organizational change and creative leadership. If these are the topics you're interested in, be sure to know that we bring a brand new episode every two weeks on Thursday. So if you don't want to miss anything, don't forget to click that subscribe button. My guest in this episode is Sjil Röggen. Sjil is the executive board treasurer at the World Design Organization and he is the collective innovation catalyst at EDF where he leads collective innovation processes. For the next 30 minutes or so, Sjil will be talking about how service design has evolved, about the relationship between industrial design and service design and about the added value of service design. In case you prefer to listen to a podcast version of this episode, head over to servicedesignshow.com slash podcast where you'll find this episode and other previous ones. But don't forget here on YouTube you'll also get content that isn't available as a podcast. So that was it for the introduction and now let's jump right in into the interview with Sjil. Welcome to the show, Sjil. Welcome everyone. It's an honor to have you here and I'm here in a very dark Utrecht for the people who are listening to the podcast. Yeah, it's really, it's really dark. You're based in Paris, right? Or close to Paris? Yes, I am. Something like 80 kilometers close to Paris. Yeah, and in the Netherlands that's already totally different country if we travel 80 kilometers, but that's in France that's not that far. So Sjil, the question I ask all my guests on the previous, I think 40 episodes, 39, 40 episodes is, do you remember the very first time you heard something about service design? So when did you get in touch with service design? It was something like 18 or 19 years ago when I was on the one I graduated as not only an engineer but a design manager and I joined a company which was quite often an industrial company and I thought that we had to really work on service design dealing with new methodologies, new ways of working with different skills and it was year 2000. Did it exist in 2000? Were people really using the term service design? Definitely not and I think I was seeing like a weird guy. I hope that changed a little bit. Yes, it is definitely but so transparently when I joined a company called EDF Group, which is an energy supplier something like 18 years ago, when we really proposed to try to develop new methodologies about service design in this kind of really engineering driven company, it was quite of an amazing idea I mean for lots of people and we did, I mean we hired some people trying to understand in terms of research, in terms of methodologies, what would be interesting ways of working for in-house designers and service designers to work for an engineering driven company as service designers. It was quite amazing. Well you know this is the service design show and as always we have three topics and I think the very first topic already touches upon which are hinting up upon here and I'll come up with the question in this interview and the topic is the journey of service design and I'll ask you, Gilles, where did the journey of service design lead to for you in the last 17 years? Where has it led to? That's definitely a good question. Thank you Mark. First of all something like 18 years ago when we were talking about service design, it was in a company which was an industrial design company driven and we were just trying to develop new methodologies for in-house designers to make them propose added value by design and service design was part of the journey. But at the beginning to be really transparent we made a lot of mistakes. We failed a lot. We call that prototyping. Yeah you can, you're right. On the other hand what was interesting was the fact that you know in the past if you come back to the Bauhaus school and this kind of graduating processes for industrial designers and so on the question was about how can you help an industrial company or organizations to think differently about user experience and service design. It was brand new, I mean can you imagine it was one years ago. And we thought that we had to develop new methodologies in a sector which is quite difficult because dealing with energy issues this is something really complex. You have to work in a very complex ecosystem and now I think lots and more and more in service designers are working in very complex situations. So the main question is about how can you make your decision makers understand that if they work with service designers they will have more added value than without working with them. That's a golden question I think. A lot of people watching this episode would want to know how to do that. Have you found in this journey from the last 18 years were there any specific milestones or turning key moments that you think well that were the moments that the decision makers saw the light or that their perspective on the value of design changed and what made that change? I mean as designers we have to be really humble. So first of all we did our maximum during something like five to ten years but if we were quite I mean experts and able to make people understand which were our really everyday work as service designers it was quite difficult for people to understand exactly what we were delivering. So first of all I mean people and your decision makers really don't understand exactly what you really deliver. Because we are as service designers working in very complex multi-dimensional lots of decision makers involved ecosystems so it's quite difficult to make it clear for some key decision makers to pay for your work understand that you are key in the process. It was a 20 years ago. So we try to work and rebuild new processes for that but now I think because I'm an old guy I made a lot of mistakes but I learned a lot and in my opinion the main conclusion is that on the one hand service designers are really key for our features but there are two focus on explaining what they do, how they do it and at the added value they can add to any kind of organization should it be a non-profit or a private organization. So yeah I think this is the main thing I learned. This has been really a key topic on the last few episodes and that is that we talk so much about our methods, our tools, our processes and there is so little conversation about the impact we make and the value we add. We haven't really created a good vocabulary for ourselves to do that. I think the main question is about the difference between influence and power. It was your first... Yeah well, we'll get back to that topic. Don't spoil it. We try to answer to your questions. Everything in life deals with what you want to deliver what you feel comfortable with to work on and on the one hand we are graduated wherever we come from as designers and we think that we are able to change the world which is amazing. Just let me share a very specific and simple situation. I was part of it when I was young. It was something like 10 or 12 years ago. If you are in an elevator with some people and as a designer you meet for example or the financial director or the HR director, whatever. If you are a really convinced service designer or someone who really wants to change the world the only thing you want to share is about you guys. You often understand I'm the best ever to change the world which is not something that your contacts, the people you meet are really to understand because they are not coming from your culture they are not coming from your own methodologies and so on. If I could have a really simple recommendation about what you can really propose to someone you meet. Imagine you are going to a coffee shop or a bar or a meeting, some HR director, financial director, R&D director, whatever. The only question I ask you is about as a service designer what would you propose this guy or woman as an added value of yours if you only want one thing I want you to have another meeting with this guy or this woman later on. You find an HR director. You say, okay, I'm in the lift with this or her and say, okay, maybe so nice. I meet you, I'm glad I meet you in the elevator and yeah, what's your job? So I'm a financial director. Okay, great. As a service designer I could help you probably really reformulate your dashboards and really think about the experience that your teams could have with your dashboards which is simple. If you are a designer you would say, oh, I can change your word. Which is not a question. Well, and for this I think what you're saying for me the key there is that we really have to step into the shoes of our own clients. It's what we propose to our clients to the shoes of their customers. We have to do the same. We have to step into the shoes of our own clients and understand what their problems are and what their language is and what their culture is and that's the only way we'll be able to connect, right? I fully agree because we are as designers and service designers really keen on starting from observations reformulating the ecosystem of stakeholders in order to deliver much more added value as service designers at the end. But sometimes what we forget is that the first person we have to apply these kind of methodologies are our first clients. Really, really listen carefully to this because I think this is a really important piece of advice. So let's move on to the second topic because next to being a collective innovation catalyst you're also an executive port treasurer for the World Design Organization and the second topic is about the importance and this is the importance of service design for the World Design Organization, right? Yeah, I fully agree. First of all, to put the context in I'm quite impressed and honored to be part of this organization. So the World Design Organization is coming from the industrial world. It was really the exit, so industrial design organization really created in the mid, I would say last century. So just for you to know, this organization is dealing with people coming from different pillars. Educational companies, professionals that means agencies coming from not only industrial design but also service design, UX and so on design and so on. And the main story to be direct. Yeah, go ahead. We are facing as designers wherever we come from, I mean, service design, UX design. Whatever, industrial design. Something which is on the one hand really interesting which is this kind of design thinking moods and ability of sea level to understand that maybe by design we can reinvent ourselves, which is great. The main question for me is that they think they could do that without designers, which is something I cannot accept. Why? Because in my experience, on the one hand you have to have really interesting sea level people by the process and cultural process. Your changing process by design, but on the other hand you need designers from industrial fields, service design field, UX and so on design fields and so on to be able to really not only think at the big picture level but also in the details of what we can deliver. And service designers are people who are really able to reconfigure the ecosystem and the way a company an organization, a non profit organization can deliver some added value. And on the other hand to go into details in the really end products should it be user interface, website, blog, the actual touch point, designing the actual touch point, in whichever medium it is. When you told me about this topic I was really interested why is an organization that has a strong heritage in industrial design interested in service design and what is their perspective on service design? So how do people in the industrial design feel, look at this movement? So to be direct, I was elected as an industrial designer because I'm coming from the energy sector and I was in charge at the beginning of industrial design in the energy sector and now I'm a collective innovation catalyst for different profiles and skills to work with industrial designers, service designers, every kind of designers to innovate and create a near future, new activities and so on working with startups, working with lots of people. You have an awesome job. Yeah, I think so, that's why I'm here. Secondly, industrial design is coming from knowing a process of industrialization. It was coming from Raymond Levy or some people from Europe and the States but now you cannot work as an industrial design manager without working with service design, innovation design, product design and so on. So people and sea level have to understand that they need some chief design officers to be able to work not only on products, not only on services, not only on UX but having people able to understand which is the emotional, functional and client's journey of their products and proposals to really deliver it. It was called the global design. I'm referring to Dieter Rams. I mean, thinking lots of years ago about global design but now service design is key because it's the way for us to understand that more and more we have to build not only at the same time the brief but the end solution together and continuously because in the last years as an engineer I was graded to imagine a brief, then an experimentation, then some proposals and so on. Now you do that consequently and every time with agility. We don't design static end products. We design living systems and that's what makes it so complex, right? That's what makes it so difficult to design. I fully agree. And I think on the one hand we have this... If we think about our pros and cons as service designers, on the one hand we have an amazing potential to reconfigure ecosystems. But on the other hand, we are always confronted to really short-term decision makers trying to put you back to something like... I mean, three months, six months, solutions to be delivered as a service designer. So how would you deal with this kind of... I mean, oxymoron or controversial situation? This is difficult. And this is reality for... I'm lucky to be in the position to talk to a lot of people in the field and this is one of the key challenges we face. How do you deal with organizations that are organized or configured in a way in which short to medium-term results are the things that are valued instead of the long-term vision? I think that has to do with leadership but we should make a different episode on that. Let's move on to the third and final topic because this is the most cryptic one and it's called influence and power and I'll create the question and it's what is the difference between influence and power yield? And what does it have to do with service design? First of all, I would say that this is just a personal thinking. So please feel free to really not be happy with that or discuss that. We have been talked for years that designers and next steps deal with having service designers or designers part of the C-level, I mean chief design officers. Which is great, I mean. That's great that a lot or more and more companies, organizations are thinking about that. On the other hand, what does it really matter for you, as a service designer, having influence of the next steps or power? I really ask you to think about that. Why? Because in my company or in WDO the World Design Organization is about how do you create better conditions for you as a service designer or as a designer to really be heard, be influential, be able to change the way the organizations facing more and more environmental, sociological, technological issues be ready to listen to you to reconfigure their own business models the way they will reinvent themselves, deconstruct and reconstruct themselves in order to be part of the next years. And probably service designers are at the core center of this kind of thinking. And is it what you're saying that creating these conditions for yourself doesn't per se translate into traditional power and with power I mean a chief design officer? You can create influence through many different ways. Is that what you're saying? You're right. That's exactly what I am saying because how can I express that? On the one hand we have really specific expectations as designers or service designers and so on and whichever the consultancy agencies are proposing to a lot of organizations if they have no service designers no designers it could be only some one-step work and no proof of concept and no more added value for any kind of organization. Secondly I think that once more when you were born what was your key objective as an individual? Was it about learning things and trying to change the world? Was it about working and being able to have a great I mean retreatment at the end of your job life at the year of 60 or 70 years old? Was it about? As designers I think we want to change the world. The question is about how can we do that and if you have in mind that there is not only the chief designers positions objective and I remember what Anis Lanneros as chief design officer and I will once more stress what I support as a treasurer of world design organization dealing and working with different ecosystems such as cities, companies, educational systems obviously of course design communities and lots of stakeholders to make them work together by interdisciplinary skills and lots of people working together you have to be humble enough to understand as a service designer you can create better conditions for this kind of ecosystem to work together. A lot of material to think about and I would ask everyone to also leave their thoughts in the comments. Gilles we are heading towards the final part of this interview in this episode and I want to give you an opportunity to ask a question to the people who are listening and watching this episode what would you like to ask them? Maybe two questions if I may Sure The first one is about I'm a convinced guy about service design and what we can deliver as service designers but first of all even if it's a trend now but because I think that lots and more and more stakeholders are interested by service design and I know Birgit from Design Network I know a lot of people from WDU working on service design and so on One question What does service mean to you as a service designer? Really, really and because your definition will probably will not be exactly the same than every service designer which is quite interesting because it's a way to build something new for the future and on the other hand service is something changing every day for every kind of organization and second question is about when you will be 60 years old which will be your TPI your key performance indicator about what you have delivered as a service designer and being proud of it Please, if you identify some never ever forget it and work on it Big goals, setting big goals I think that that is important I think so Jill as always time has flown by I have more questions than answers based on what you said and I want to thank you because it gets me thinking Thanks again for making the time to share your thoughts, your ideas your questions with me and the rest of the people who are watching this episode Thank you for you and thank you for the opportunity and please, every service designer really be happy and aware of your potential Thanks Jill, thanks again and now let's wrap up this episode So what is your biggest insight into this episode with Jill? Share your thoughts and ideas down below in the comments and remember, more people like you are watching these episodes in your comment might just be the thing that helps someone to achieve his next meaningful breakthrough If you would like to learn more check out some of the past episodes or head over to learn.servesdesignshow.com where you will find courses by leading service design experts that dig deeper into the topics Thanks for watching and I'll see you in two weeks time with a brand new episode