 In this episode, you're going to learn how to get service design into an organization that doesn't even know that they need it. It's mind blowing. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is Matthew Moreno and this is the service design show Episode 149. Hi, my name is Mark Fontijn and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are those hidden things that make the difference between success and failure, all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and our planet. Our guest in this episode is Matthew Moreno, the founder of the Paris-based service design studio called User IO. Now, although it's getting better, still a lot of organizations can't articulate that they need service design in order to solve some of their problems. Now, this is a challenge when you're a service design professional and want to help them. This begs the question, how do you bring service design into an organization that isn't asking for it? Well, in this episode, Matthew shares what he calls the Trojan horse approach. You'll learn about a few tested and tried ways to get your foot in the door and how you can make sure that once you're in, you're not getting stuck doing the wrong projects. If you stick around till the end of this episode, I promise you you'll walk away with some very practical ideas that help you to open doors and get the ball rolling. If you enjoy conversations like this and want to grow as a service design professional, make sure you click that subscribe button and that bell icon because we bring a new video like this every week or so. I hope you're ready because now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Matthew Moreno. Welcome to the show, Matthew. Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me. Cool. Awesome to have you on. One of the reasons we got in touch is that I haven't had that many service design professionals or friends on the show, so that's already a super exciting thing. Maybe we'll dive into some of the specific things about the service design community and friends, but you'll also do some other interesting stuff and that will be sort of the gist of the story today. For the people who haven't Googled your name yet and are curious what you do, could you give a brief introduction? Yeah, sure. So I'm Matthew. I'm Franco-American and I'm the co-founder of a company called User Studio. So we're a service design and innovation agency based in Paris, Paris, France. And we've been around since about 2009 working for a variety of projects, both in the mobility space, energy space, actually all different types of spaces where service design is relevant. That's the gist of it, I guess. Yeah, all places where service design is relevant. I remember that from our, from my past in the studio, the industries were all over the place and that made it sometimes hard for people to sort of put you in a box, but that's okay. That's just the nature of service design. Matthew, I've got a rapid fire question around for you. Five questions, you're asked to answer them as quickly as possible, just the first thing that comes to your mind and that way we'll get to know you a little bit better. Are you ready? I am. All right. The first question is, what was your first job? Oh, I actually sold roller blades at a very large sports store in France called Decathlon. I liked the roller blade and I sold roller blades. Cool. We have that store as well here in the Netherlands. Now the next question is, if you could be an animal, which one would you like to be? Tough question. I'd probably see a dolphin. Smart social beings sounds like it's a just nice animal to be. Fair enough. If you could recommend one book, which book would you recommend? That's a really tough one, but I can tell you when I read fairly recently, which won't come to a surprise to the design community, which was Good Services, I looked down. I thought that was really interesting to have a focus on the actual outcomes and characteristics of services and less about the approaches and methods. Yeah. Yeah, definitely a book that's high on my list as well. Next question is, you're currently based in Paris, but if you could work from anywhere in the world, where would you pick? I've always had a great appreciation for like the Pacific coast in the US. So somewhere along the Pacific coast, that'd be amazing. Yeah. Okay. Still possible. Final question is, what was your first encounter with service design? Oh, wow. I guess this probably dates back to somewhere like around 2004, 2005-ish. I think I'd had not exactly how, but I'd heard about this company called Livework, which a lot of people in the service design community know about. And I stumbled upon your website. I can't remember how, and I thought it was really interesting. And we were actually discussing an internship, which kind of fell through, because it was supposed to be for one of their French clients, and that did not work out for them. And so I guess we kept in touch. I thought it was super interesting, and that was my introduction to service design. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. So that gives us a little bit more insight into who you are. And now we can transition into the topic of today. And I really love reading through your notes and sort of getting the theme of today's conversation down. And I think you wrote something down like, let's talk about service design for organizations that don't know they need it, right? Yeah. I guess this is probably a, I mean, at least in France, I think it's a fairly common challenge because, well, service design is fairly, I guess, unknown to many organizations. And even when it is fairly known, I think a lot of people see it as a somewhat abstract design discipline. And so there's always that question about how you actually, how are you going to actually infiltrate that organization? I'm kind of using that word on purpose. I'm exaggerating a little bit, obviously. Because they don't necessarily express their needs in terms of service design explicitly. Some do, more and more do, but still a lot of organizations do not. And so how do you actually create awareness? How do you make sure that you find those right people, projects, ways in? And I think that's one of the huge challenges that we've had to work with, that we enjoy working with, and that maybe some other service design designers actually share. Yeah. Yeah. I remember the joke we used to make in our studio that we are a service design studio, but nobody calls us to do service design work. Yeah. That's kind of a classic, I think. So yeah, this is going to be interesting. Like how do you bring in service design without people actually asking for service design? And how do you even start that conversation? How do you infiltrate? So I'm really looking forward to your examples. In sort of the notes that you had sketched up, you also mentioned that service design isn't really compatible with most organizations out there at these days. What do you mean with that? Yeah. So I guess we could kind of compare to what we might see, for example, in the digital product design space. So maybe the way I would approach it would be to say that service design does not necessarily fit very naturally in organizations because, well, service design doesn't necessarily have a clear stakeholder that you're going to actually respond to, that you're actually going to talk to. Maybe like we had to contrast this with like digital product designers, you might have like a head of product or someone like that, or have a full product team with product owners, and so that's something that you can naturally talk to that you can actually, and then kind of know what to expect and you know what to expect from them. And I think within service design, that's less clear. There's rarely a head of service or at least it's not expressed in that way. And so you have to find all these different ways in, open doors to kind of get your projects done. And I guess the other challenge is that services are by definition, they have to, or at least when you design the customer experience or the user experience, you have to think of things in a very cross silo way. And so that is not necessarily super well adapted to the way most organizations are set up. Yeah. The lack of clear ownership and the lack of clear responsibility inside an organization that makes it great. There is no clear buyer. Exactly. Yeah. And there is no real clear owner of a service design challenge. It's so fragmented that everybody owns a piece of the service design challenge. Yeah, for sure. Like we often like to say that, you know, we need to find projects that are like Trojan horse projects, you know, projects that will be a way in, they might not necessarily be explicitly like labeled service design, some might be, and more and more are, and that's obviously great. But if they're not, you kind of have to find alternative ways in. Yeah. So, and I guess that's where I would love to learn from your examples. Like finding these way ins, it can be interesting to hear your experience with, what are some good entry points? So if you're not coming into the door with sort of the sticker of service design, what are ways that you can actually start a conversation within our organization? Yes. So I guess we have, you know, several stories that could kind of tune into this and probably most of them were, you know, happened in our earlier days. So I guess anywhere between 2009 and 2015 ish, somewhere like that. Whereas now we're lucky enough to be in a space where service sign is slightly more prevalent, although these challenges are still very relevant and, you know, still, still exist today. But maybe just to like, you know, zoom in on one, for example, very initially, I guess this was around like 2009, 10, we had met up with an organization which still exists today, which is a super great organization called the 27th region, which is so it's kind of like the lab for France's region. So, you know, like Google might have the Google labs, France has their own lab to kind of explore the future of local public policy. And for a bunch of reasons, they, you know, they've historically worked with a lot of service designers. And they had got some funding, some public funding that allowed them to create this kind of really funny format, which in the end became like service design residency. So I kind of like, you know, compare that to like an artist residency. And this was a super interesting space because it kind of gives them like this mandate to kind of experiment what the future of, for example, a high school might be like, you know, this is stuff that was taken care of by local regions. And so what the future of like a high school experience might be like. And what happened was that, you know, maybe two, three service designers or two service designers, maybe a sociologist would kind of come in, they'd actually spend maybe a couple of weeks, for example, if we continue in the high school example within that high school, and they'd have free range to kind of, you know, invent whatever seemed relevant for the various stakeholders within this high school. And that was a super interesting way to work because, you know, you didn't necessarily have a very clear brief. So it allowed you to work in a very, let's say, holistic view with a very, you know, open type mind. And you could actually kind of come and experiment the way we thought service design, at least at the time, should be, should be worked on in a very open-ended free way. So that was like a spurs, I guess, like just like a super format to experiment things. So the service design residency, that's an interesting model. There you have sort of public funding and people are interested to experiment to try new stuff out. And I guess that's always a good starting point for service design, if people are open to explore and just give it a try. I'm curious in that specific example, what was, not per se, what was the outcome, but how do you make sure that something sticks? Because it can be an interesting and fun project and everybody enjoys the experience. And, you know, service design is very attractive and appealing from the outside. But then after three or six months, the project is done and sort of there isn't any sustainable change or was there or how did you experience that? Yeah, I think it was a bit of both. So I guess with hindsight, these projects were kind of more designed to create awareness than to actually stick and be implemented per se, because at that time, like, you know, service design awareness or just, you know, more user-centered ways of designing public policies were, they were very nascent at the time. And so just creating those projects that would allow people to understand and what, you know, approaches, methods, tools could be used. That was already a win within itself. A lot of what was done was, you know, actually documenting these projects, you know, both through like, for example, we document both like video text and so on. And that was very efficient. Then there was some of these smaller parts of the projects that eventually started to stick just because the fact that they were, you know, done locally, co-created with local stakeholders, once we left, the people just kind of latched onto them and actually pursued them. But once again, this was not initially made for it to stick in the long run. And like, I guess the funding model is also key here. Have you seen similar examples of service design residency in a non-public space? Not to my knowledge, but what I have seen is like private and public partnerships to actually, well, actually do research projects. We've had an example, and this was fairly recent actually, super interesting with the Paris Metro, where there was a, so it was a partly EU funded project, partly funded by the Paris Metro itself, to kind of explore how, let's say, you'd actually connect like an urban hub, such as Paris, with an airport in, at least in, I think this is the case in most cities in Europe, but it definitely was the case in Paris. There was no direct Metro, and so there was like a whole experiment and a whole project kind of explore what the passenger experience might actually be like. And in this case, it was more like the partnership between private and public that actually allowed this research space to open up and to be explored. So going back to the question like what is a good starting point, maybe it's someone looking for a different approach, and maybe they aren't per se looking for service design as an approach, but service design is a different approach than they are used to, right? Is that the case? Yeah, I mean, if we go back to like those design residencies and I think the supplies to, you know, other spaces as well, I think a lot of what people would actually latch on to was the more bottom-up approach, you know, as opposed to public policies, at least in France, but this might be the case in other places are often very top-down in the way they're designed. And I think what people really tuned into here was the fact that, you know, as more bottom-up, you'd actually work in a more co-creative way with the different stakeholders, and that was their way in. That's what they could actually understand. That was concrete, because I guess that, you know, for the a lot of what the rest of design does is really abstract, you know, it's really fuzzy, especially in those initial stages of like discovery, ideation, and so on and so on. Yeah, so thanks for highlighting that, because this can be sort of like the superpower that me might easily overlook, but the co-creation part of doing stuff together, the facilitating the creation process, that is like a unique characteristic of design. And when people want to move away from the hierarchical decision-making structures and into a more collaborative, co-creative way of working, then this is already a very good way in, I guess. Yeah, it's actually, I always find it a funny topic co-creation, because obviously, you know, it's very relevant for service design, a lot of service design is practice it and so on, but I found that there comes a point when, you know, that's all people remember from service design, that's all they associate it with. And, you know, if we push that to like the extremes, you know, people just kind of associate that to like, you know, post-it workshops and so on and so on, which will also give us a very, you know, limited view in terms of what the potential of service design can actually do. We'd actually, like if you maybe to give you another story, another anecdote, kind of let's say during those same years, similar years, like 2009, 2010, 11, so on. One of the things that we had noticed was specifically that is that, you know, those initial stages, creative stages, discovering creative stages were very fuzzy to most people. And so we thought maybe we can kind of like embody this within an actual tool. And in this case, we had created like a digital platform that allowed people to map out the insights that were being collected, especially for like public projects. So for example, we'd have a map, like a Google map style map. And we'd be able to map out the insights, so actually, you know, physically on the map. And then as we move to more of the co-creator stages, we'd actually have this little, well, on our tool, we had like a toolbox, like a Cran box that actually allowed you to kind of build a little postcard with your idea. So if you said, you know, within this given spot of my neighborhood, I want to have this park that'll have trees, that'll have like, you know, so on and so on. You could actually make that up in a very simple way, because you were just like clicking on icons and they would kind of pop up. And that was like a super interesting way to approach it, because it actually made, you know, the initial fuzzy stages of design super concrete, because it transformed them into a tool. So it was a slightly standardized tool, but it kind of, you know, embodied them as a tool. And people thought that was super interesting, because it made the design process much more concrete for them. So what was the, what do you experience that people experience as the fuzzy part? Well, I think it's both the, for example, the insights sometimes can be slightly unclear for them, because, you know, they thought they'll think, well, you know, as designers, you might be less rigorous than, you know, sociologists or ethnographers and so on. But I think the real fuzzy part is more the creative part when you actually come up with ideas, new ideas, new concepts. And, you know, they know that there's going to be some type of creativity, but they don't really know what they're going to get, you know. And so if we could actually present a tool that would actually show them, you know, this is what the results might actually look like, it was super reassuring for them. And I want to hear more about this. So if this was reassuring, what was the part that made them, that gave them the confidence that this was something that would bring them the outcomes that they were looking for? Well, I think it was the fact that, you know, what they were buying, at least what they, one of the things they were buying, was the actual tool itself and kind of the framework in which we were going to implement that tool, because it was like a hybrid of the toolbox we were bringing. But also, let's say the workshops, like the insights, sorry, the user research that we were going to be doing, but also the workshops that we would be running, the co-creative workshops, that, you know, the fact that there was that actual tool that kind of, that we could show them and we had previous examples with that tool, it was super concrete as opposed to, you know, what, what we often do as designers, which is 100%, you know, custom led methods and approaches to whatever topic we'll be, we'll be working on. But there was, there was an interesting kind of, you know, effect to that, which kind of moves back to the co-creation topic, which that, I guess this was so reassuring that it also created such a big spotlight on the co-creation that that's all they kind of remembered. And so in the end, you know, the huge risk was that they would just be calling us to run these workshops. And that would be kind of the main focus of the project, which we thought was obviously not enough to actually we'll actually do service design, you know. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess that's, that's one way it's the appeal of sort of selling standardized processes. I'm thinking of design sprints or three-day training. Like it's easy to sell. It's easy to buy. It's very tangible. You know what you're going to get, but you miss like 95% of the value. Exactly. I mean, this is, I mean, I think you've summed it up perfectly. It's the whole, you know, debate around should we standardize or not our tools and methods. Like we strongly believe that, you know, service design is not a method in the sense that it's not like, you know, something that you can replicate in a standardized way. But on the other hand, we also understand completely that, you know, selling something that's fairly abstract and that's super, you know, custom made in many cases is extremely abstract and unclear for a lot of clients. Yeah. Clients aren't well there. And I love to have this conversation and it's a balance because when we apply and put on our empathy hat, then we sort of have to understand that clients are used to buying things in a different way and sort of how can we cater for that and help them to ease that, to close that gap or to make that leap of faith smaller for them to buy into this. I want to cycle back to one of the things you mentioned. And that is they latched on to co-creation or maybe in a different thing that will latch on to the design sprint. How do you make sure that that's not the only thing people will sort of know you for and that they will be open for getting the rest? Yeah, that's a tough question. I guess what generally happens, so this will be an indirect way to answer your question. But what we often find is that, you know, when we start a project, a lot of people kind of, you know, be fairly worried. I don't know, the word might be slightly too strong, but, you know, they'll be slightly worried until we actually start producing deliverables and deliverables with which might be some, you know, initial sketches that will express like a user journey or some type of concept or something a little more concrete. And so, you know, there's always those initial stages where, you know, we might do some user research if that's relevant within the project or there might be a few workshops with that. You know, that'll be somewhat concrete to them. At least the co-creation part will be, you know, fairly, they know that that's relevant. But I think what really makes a lot of sense is once we actually start showing those initial sketches and then they're like, okay, I actually, you know, I realize where this could actually go in terms of our project. And this is to an extent where, I mean, we've kind of realized that this was so strong that I think at one point, I can't remember exactly when, but we kind of said that, you know, in the future, we can't really show any user research without showing any initial sketches, because we're also just being too disconnected. And so even though like some projects, you know, I guess a lot of people experience this, sometimes people don't buy the whole service design approach, they buy pieces. So even for people who will clients will buy, for example, a user research project, or at least a strongly focused user research project, we always try to associate some type of ideation just so that they realize, you know, that these things are not disconnected. And I think those are one of the ways in which that they really go beyond the cliches, which are maybe user research or co-creation. That's interesting, because this is a topic that has been addressed on the show in the recent episode weeks, months. And that is when you do something as a service exam professional, it seems to be very smart and very strategic to always show like the bigger picture to put everything into context. And like today we're doing this, but this is part of like this roadmap. And this roadmap can be next month, next year, like next three years to always be highlighting that story. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think it's always super important. And I guess that's what we try to always do as service designers is kind of always, you know, go back and forth between like the helicopter view and then this presumed view. And yeah, as you were saying, always put things into perspective. And that gives, I guess, clients and all people who are non designers, just like say a general outlook on where the project can go. And I think what's really important is that we also are very aware of building this story, like having, asking these questions and not just rushing into a project and just doing that, just facilitating the user research, you're just doing that idea generation workshop that you always try to understand from the client's perspective, like, okay, how does this fit in? How is it helping the organization? How is it helping you achieve your goals? And then like, what's the next step? Yeah, like, I don't know, you know, maybe it's something that you've experienced in the past or we often like to think in terms of, you know, who's our accomplice within the client organization. And that person is often, you know, not necessarily equipped designer, but not necessarily. But it's often someone who's, let's say, more familiar with the design process than other people who are part of the project. And they often help us to build exactly what you're saying, you know, kind of like the design of the design, so to speak. Yeah, I think it's two episodes ago that we talked about the service design whisperer. Ah, yeah, yeah, very similar. Which was a great analogy. So, okay, co-creation could be a way in bottom up approach, getting in with a tool or method or framework could be a good starting point. Any other examples that you think might be useful to share? Yeah, there's one that we found to be very, very efficient, which I guess I could compare it to like building a concept car. So, I'll explain. Every so often, we'll design what we call concept projects, which, you know, I think designers are fairly familiar with what this is. All types of designers might have done this. So, it's a project that is not done for a client. It's kind of, it's, you know, you take a topic and then you actually make a project out of it, a design proposal. And then we, you know, show it, communicate it, kind of broadcast it to the world, so to speak. And we see, you know, people actually find that interesting. And that's kind of a way to, we use it as a conversation started with them. So, I'll give you an example of one that was fairly actually, I think, pretty successful for us. We had decided to design a, to redesign a phone bill. So, you know, your typical phone bill, you know, I mean, everyone knows what it looks like, but there are many ways in which it could look like in the future. And in this case, I won't go into the details, but we wanted to redesign it in a fairly more infographic way to give people more transparency in terms of what they're actually spending and, you know, what their consumption actually is. So, we had, you know, redesigned this phone bill, made it look pretty nice. And there was a whole concept that revolved around it. And we had made this one minute video that kind of presented the whole concept and obviously the phone bill itself, kind of like the videos you'd have, you know, on the front page of, that a startup might have on their front page presenting their proposal. And we kind of actually put it, put this into the world through newsletters and sent it out to a bunch of people. And it actually created this huge buzz. It was picked up by magazines, mostly Anglo-Saxon magazines, which was kind of funny, like fast co-design, for example. And they were often tech or design related magazines, but it also just created like a huge buzz within our network, our local network here in France. And we know that it was sent around to, you know, a bunch of telcos, utilities, anyone who had bills, you know, anyone for like an energy provider to a telco. And this was kind of used, I think, I mean, this is my interpretation, but I kind of have, you know, good evidence to suggest that this is what happened is that people would actually use this as like a demonstration tool within your organization to say, oh, you know, this is what we could actually do in some near future. What do you think? And then in the end, you know, they'd come knocking on our door and they'd say, oh, we have a project that might be fairly similar to this one. Maybe we can do something together about it. Yeah. So what's interesting about this concept project example, a few things, like you might argue that what is a service design studio doing redesigning a phone bill? Because isn't that part of a graphic designer or a copywriter? You might end up confusing people. How did you make sure that? What happened? Like, which story got out into the world? Yeah, that's a good question. You're right. I mean, they could have just seen us as like graphic designers. Maybe I should mention why we actually decided to zoom in on a phone bill. So phone bills, I mean, are a very symbolic touch point in the sense that you're the main interface. I'm using the word interface in a very large sense between, I guess, service organization or especially utility or telco and the customer. And often what happens is that's kind of like the only interaction you might actually have with that telco, which is not necessarily the nicest one because they're asking you for money. So there might be a different way to actually go about that relationship. So we thought that it was, you know, symbolically, it was kind of the touch point that could also embody, represent the rest of the philosophy that that telco or service provider might actually offer their clients. And so that I guess that was one of the main reasons. And then what we did is we thought that, you know, kind of like in a movie, you might have a main character and the movie might focus on that main character, but the movie might be about more than that character. Well, we kind of needed a main character to kind of think about what the future of this telecommunications service could look like. And that main character was the phone bill. So we thought that was like a very strong narrative way to actually, you know, portray that. But obviously in our concept, we were actually showing more than the phone bill, we were showing all these other different touch points, just that we needed that main one. So people wouldn't think, oh, you know, this is super complicated, where should we actually start? Yeah, you take something that is so common that everybody can relate to where everybody has some probably strong emotion towards. And I'm almost like you made a movie, but what I will see is almost a manual or a reading guide or reading instructions to what are you seeing here? You're not seeing a phone bill, you're seeing a representation of a human-centered way of working. Exactly. Yeah, right? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like it's, you know, the tail end of the service that it gives you, let's say, a first idea of what the rest of the service could be like. It was designed in the same way as that phone bill was designed. And the other question I have around this, which might also pop up to somebody who's listening right now, this seems like a pretty significant investment on your end. How did you justify that? Yeah, it was. Obviously, this was done on our own time. I guess it was just an investment that we thought was relevant enough to make sense. And the advantage of choosing something like a phone bill is that you know, anyone who might be working for a bank or an energy company or any type of utility or large service organization will have that type of touch point. And so it's not like it's super niche, even though we had done it for a telco. You know, it was a fictionist kind of telco that kind of didn't actually exist, but it was something that many different service providers we thought could relate to. And so it made sense to make that investment because, you know, it would actually be able to talk to a lot of different people. Yeah. And I guess it's a way to market your services by showing what they can do rather than talking about them like demonstrating. Yeah, yeah. I guess it often comes back to this debate that we have in service design communities, which are, do we want to talk about the tools and methods? Possibly. I mean, that's always very relevant, but maybe not exclusively. We also kind of want to talk about what the actual results and outcomes might look like. And I think for a lot of of our clients and a lot of people who could be interested in service design, that is something that's a little less abstract to them. Yeah. And I still like, the biggest challenge I see here is like, how do you make sure that people don't get hung up on the actual artifact and sort of understand because like, if you can redesign a phone bill and make it more use, like make it represent the user-centered philosophy of an organization and do it without, without a budget, without having access to customers, like you skipped a lot of, you took a lot of shortcuts, which is great for the demonstration. But it might also raise some, like, how hard can it be or suspicion? Yeah. Yeah, I see what you mean. Well, I guess, you know, maybe one of the more challenging parts is actually, you know, getting your foot in the door. And once that happens, and you actually start the conversation, then obviously it might be more traditional ways of creating awareness might need to come in and actually do the job. But yeah, that is maybe one of the pitfalls that people will be like, oh, this sounds super simple. You know, you could do this for cheap or for a super short time. And yeah, it's often more complex than it seems. Well, yeah. But that's, that's, that's, that's like a second problem to solve. That's, let's first get a seat at the table. Exactly. And I guess, what I'm getting out of this is you have to pick something that where you can sort of provoke and sort of where the pain is pretty obvious, like where you can find a very strong lack of human centeredness. Like if you can sort of push on that touch point in this case, then you can make a pretty decent story. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that that was probably the success of it is that, you know, really, a lot of people could relate to it. Yeah. Did you did this inspire you to do any other follow ups? Or was this like, okay, this work, but we're going to try other methods in the future? We did do follow ups, maybe with topics that were a little more niche. And so they didn't necessarily have, let's say, the same success or the same widespread following. Although within their niche fields, I think they were, they were effective. So this was something that we would do, you know, every so often. Obviously, it can only be once every, you know, year max, if not every two years, because as you were suggesting, you know, involves involves a lot of investment. But yeah, we do feel that this is something that's pretty efficient. And that I think a lot of service designers could put into practice. Yeah, that's interesting. And there are so many, like if you just look around you, I think in one of the, if not the first service design show episode, I think it was, no, I'm not going to quote this person, but because I don't recall exactly, but the sort of gist was redesigned something that makes you angry. Like, take that as a starting point. And yeah, it's not so hard. Like there are so many shitty services out there that you should be able to pick something. Yeah, for sure. For sure. But I guess once again, the challenge is always, you know, how do you find something that's not so niche that, you know, only two or three people will pick up on it? Because around for investment, you know, it's very, I mean, you know, it's highly specialized. And yeah, I definitely like that way of looking at it. Okay, so this was another approach to getting in the Trojan horse. Anything else that you feel we should mention? Yeah, there's, as I was, I think I suggested this previously, we work often for the Paris Metro. And this has been has been like an ongoing, absolutely amazing relationship that we've had for like as many years now. And one of the things that we've observed, you know, over the space of maybe five, six, seven years, I can't remember the exact amount, is that, you know, it's interesting to approach things on all fronts. So let me make that a little more explicit. For example, sometimes we'll get like, you know, projects that will be explicitly expressed as service design projects, like, you know, those very holistic looking at the entire passenger journey type projects. One example is that is that recent project I was mentioning. And either we're interesting in the sense that they create like a very good framework for having that let's say holistic view of what the, you know, the entire ecosystem should look like. And they're also like great demonstration tools of how we can actually approach things, especially in the ways that we work, but also in terms of, you know, where the Paris Metro could be going in the future. But this is also combined with projects that are more let's say smaller scopes, maybe more traditional, not in the negative sense, but more traditional design projects that might actually have us design maybe one touch point so that it can be like signage projects or user interface projects or those types of projects, which is something that we we work on a fairly regular basis. And what often happens is that, you know, we might work, let's say on an app on this piece of signage and so on, or like wayfinding tools. And although these projects might be individual projects, once you work on one, then a second one, then a third one, and so on, then you start, you know, connecting the dots between all of them, although they were not necessarily, you know, meant to be connected in that way. And so it helps us connect the dots and make sure that, you know, when you're designing, let's say this element of signage, you're actually thinking about how it actually connects or relates to the other pieces of signage that are in the metro stop that are in, you know, the larger ecosystem of the Paris Metro. And so it's a very, it's a much more indirect way of working on service design. But I think that it's a very, you know, efficient and just a very, just a great way of working because in Yannick is very concrete results. And it allows you, once you start having two, three, four projects to have that holistic view. Again, what I found interesting about this is that sort of service design is intertwined with the approach of like solving any challenge. And that is, that is like almost the ultimate form of democratization of service design. Like you're doing it now as a service design studio, but ideally, like the people who would be working on signage or the app would also have this approach. And then it's sort of, it's in the veins, it's in the fabric of the organization. Yeah, I think that's exactly what's happening within the metro is that, you know, more and more people are looking at from that perspective. And therefore, you know, even though they might work on in this specific touch point, they'll always have that greater frame of mind when they actually work on things. Yeah, like the conclusion is, we don't need service design professionals to do service design. I think that they have a specific role and they won't go away. But in a lot of cases, let other people do it. Yeah, I mean, as your, I mean, your services are just so huge, so gigantic that no one service designer could actually, you know, or even one team of service designer could actually have that full spec work on the full spectrum. So I think you're right, you know, it just makes sense to kind of, let's say, send that philosophy out in the world, even though maybe certain projects will require, I still strongly believe in that will require, you know, very precise service design work, you know. Yeah, like the trained professional, the trained service design professional won't go away anytime soon. But like, there are different levels of maturity. Yeah. One thing I was curious about in this example is, I was, I was thinking like, okay, so you're a service design studio, like how the, how do you get invited to do a signage project? Because you're like, you're not the expert with regards to signage or with regards to digital interfaces, like, how do you get in from that angle? Yeah, we've always had like, I guess, I guess two different, not too different, but two complementary positioning. So one is, you know, clear cut service design. And the other one is more in the UX UI digital product design space. So that definitely makes us very legitimate to actually enter those projects. And once again, we think that this is often like, you know, very Trojan horse way of entering those projects, because, you know, they could have theoretically called a very traditional UX UI studio to actually do the work. But they start realizing that it's interesting to have someone who knows how to look at things, you know, on both levels, the very zoomed in, you know, working on one touch point point a little bit at the same time, having that helicopter view of how the global ecosystem needs to work. So I guess it's by, you know, having those two, the team with the two skill sets that actually makes us, you know, that allows us to actually enter those different projects. Yeah, it's, you know, you'll have an expertise, which organizations know how to procure. They know how to buy it, when to buy it, who needs it. And then that opens up doors. Yeah, for sure. For sure. And I definitely think that, you know, in our early years, that was very helpful. But what's extremely, I'd say, you know, satisfying now is that we see more and more projects that are specifically labeled, you know, service design. So the maturity is growing. And that's extremely, you know, satisfying to see. From these examples that you gave, and I'm sure you have many more of doing the service design Trojan projects and bringing service design into organizations who don't know that they actually need it. What would be some of the most important lessons you learned along the way? Yeah, this is, I was kind of reflecting on this when you initially asked me the question. And I think one of the conclusions I came to, which is still a long, we still have a long, you know, long road to actually keep walking down, which is learning how to speak our client's language. So this is not nothing that's particularly surprising. But I just think it's really hard to do as designers, you know, learning how to think like our clients think learning their language. And, you know, the more you get to know about like a specific sector, for example, we're getting to know what a lot more about the mobility sector, that's one of them, but like, for example, also the health care sector, the more you're actually able to understand the thing through their lens, you know, their point of view. And that I think is probably the single one, you know, most useful, I guess, learning that I've had in these past years, not that it was particularly complicated to actually realize that it's just very complicated to implement. What would you say makes it so complicated? Well, you know, it's a I guess it's a question of time and education. A lot of us were trained as, you know, formal designers, we went to like industrial design school or interaction design school. And so I guess we were kind of like trained, if not even like, you know, formatted, so to speak, in a certain way. And, and I'm often very surprised, you know, about how all those is not new for me, but I just always find it amazing that, you know, people don't think about projects in a very user centered way. And so that that's one of the things that's, you know, hard to go about. And then the other thing is that it just involves a lot of time to learn all the jargon to learn to understand the very complex stakes. Yeah, it takes time. And this is this is a key message, which I absolutely believe in. And I don't think you can be a effective service design professional when you don't learn how to learn the language of your client. And for this, for the single reason that we have to operate at a higher level of abstraction, abstraction, abstraction inside the organization, like when you're sort of dealing just with a touchpoint level with all due respect, like if you're making signage or making the app or doing the copywriting, like you don't have to get involved in the politics and the processes and the strategy of the organization per se. Like if you're just great graphic designer, you can stick it out pretty long. But as a service designer, you want to influence decision making, you want to influence roadmaps and you just won't be taken seriously if you don't speak the language of the business. Yeah, that that's very true. And I think, you know, as you as we deep dive within certain sectors, then that's, you know, that's what ends up happening and you actually start learning it and you actually become more legitimate. You know, having said that, there's always something that we've never wanted to stray away from because we find that it's often very convincing is that, you know, we don't want to forget the way in which we actually know how to design touchpoints, because although this might be more of a traditional way of looking at service design, we often feel that, you know, in the end, it's just super convincing. You know, once you show someone the actual touchpoint, which, you know, in a lot of like mobility, healthcare, and so on spaces, they're actually very complex within themselves. And once you actually spend time around those and design them and show your clients, they'd be actual end result, I think that's also one of the ways in which you become very convincing, although you're right, you cannot just do that. That's not not sufficient. So speaking or learning the language of your client is one of the things, the lessons you learned along the way, were there any other things that you think you would be important to share? There's one which I would say we're, you know, still not very good at to be quite honest. And the more I talk to designers, the more I feel like no one is very comfortable with it. Which, you know, how do you actually evaluate your projects? How do you, so is it through KPIs? Is it through qualitative evaluation? But do you have a formal way of actually evaluating your projects? And are you able to embed that evaluation, you know, from the from the go of the project, from the start of the project? And I think that's something that we're currently learning how to do very, you know, very early stages. And I'm always surprised when I talk to, you know, people who deal specifically with evaluation, not necessarily evaluation of design projects, but let's say evaluation of public policy projects or strategy projects. And once you start diving with them, they realize that, you know, no one has found the right method to or the right way to go about evaluating a design project. So I feel like everyone's still kind of, you know, experimenting in that space that if we had maybe experimented earlier, I think we would have learned a lot, a lot more since. Yeah. It's, it's, it's an interesting topic. And I think there is already quite some good knowledge and theories around this, but it just doesn't, my hunch is that certain design professionals and maybe designers in general aren't that interested in evaluating. Yeah, it's possible. Yeah. Like we, we try to do the work then, spend our time counting numbers and that what, and I don't think that's a good approach, by the way, but yeah, it's possible. But maybe the thing that I've seen more recently, especially in the public sector space is that there are, for example, agencies or professionals that have that expertise. So maybe not necessarily to evaluate design projects, but to evaluate, you know, projects within themselves. And maybe it's more about, you know, finding ways to collaborate with those professionals. And that way they can actually do the work in a very professional way and leave the designers to the design work. So maybe one of the rats that we might be exploring, or that, you know, service designers could explore if they're not already doing this is finding ways to kind of, you know, embed them within the projects fairly early on. This is going to be a call to action. So if somebody is listening to this and has some ideas, who might be an interesting person to get on the show, who's probably a not designer, but is sort of experienced with evaluating design projects, leave a comment. You can do that on the video or even the Spotify episode if you're listening to this right now. So yeah, I'd love to have that conversation. So Matthew is sort of heading towards the end of our conversation. How would you summarize the last 45 minutes? Well, I guess maybe the main point maybe we're trying to make here was that, you know, you have to kind of be creative in terms of the ways that you're going to actually get service design into organizations because there's no, you know, clear road, clear path to actually embedding service design. So maybe one of the toughest challenges is actually, you know, designing your path into the service design world, you know. Yeah. It's like when you're picky and when you're very dogmatic about how it has to be done, then you'll have a pretty hard time getting a lot of work. And I think like there is you can make an argument for not watering down the approach, like that's I guess the risk. But on the other hand, like if you don't get to do the work, then nothing will happen. Nothing will happen exactly. Nothing will happen. So finding that right balance, like making sure that it's not watered down, but you still get clients comfortable enough to make that leap of faith in order to engage with you. That's, I guess, yeah, it comes with experience. For sure. Yeah. Are there any interesting links that we can add to the show notes? I guess the phone bill example should be out there somewhere. Yeah. I guess we could add the phone bill example. We could add that toolbox example that I mentioned previously. Maybe those are the two main ones I'd say. Yeah, sure. And if people want to reach out to you to continue this conversation, what's the best way? Sure. So my email is, I guess through email, probably. So my email is marino. So my family name M-A-R-I-N-O at user.io. And you can find all our info or all our work at user.io. Perfect. Watch out because you'll be getting a lot of emails. Awesome. I really enjoyed this conversation, the Trojan horse approach to service design. I think a lot of people will benefit from it. And it's really recognizable. And I think it's good to share some of these best practices. So thanks for coming on, Matthew. Thanks for sharing the French perspective on service design partially here. And I hope we'll get many more people from friends to follow you on the show. Thanks for your invitation, Marc. It's great talking to you. Do you have an example of how to bring service design into an organization that doesn't even know it needs it? Leave a comment down below. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot for watching. And I look forward to see you in the next video.