 In this episode, we'll be talking about how do you scale the practice of design on a global level? How much impact can designers make on important social questions? And finally, what does it mean to design for emerging technologies like AI, VR and IoT? And here's the guest for this episode. I'm Doug and this is the Service Design Show. If you're trying to design services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business, then you've come to the right place. Hi, my name is Marc Fontijn and welcome to the Service Design Show. On this show, you get the chance to learn why some services fail and others succeed. For that, we go beyond the usual tools and methods and talk about topics like design thinking, customer experience, organizational change and creative leadership. So if you're ready to take your service design skills to the next level and you haven't done it already, I'd love to have you to subscribe to this channel. My guest in this episode is Doug Powell. Doug is a distinguished designer at IBM Design and he's tasked with scaling design at IBM. For the next 30 minutes or so, Doug and I will be talking about how do you scale the practice of design on a global level? And we'll be talking about how much influence and impact can designers have on our big and important social challenges. Finally, we'll talk about what's needed to design for emerging technologies like AI, VR and IoT. So that was it for the introduction and now let's jump straight into the interview with Doug. Welcome to the show, Doug. Hi Marc, it's great to be here. Awesome that you made time all the way from Austin, Texas, USA in the IBM Design Studio, right? That's right. That's right. Here we are in Austin, Texas. We've got about 350 designers based here in Austin. It's the home base of the design program for IBM globally. This is called the service design show. So I'm going to ask you the question that I ask everyone and that is, do you recall your first memory of service design? When did you encounter the term? You know, I think I actually encountered the term service design probably 10 or 12 years ago in a conversation with Michael Beirut, who's a very renowned designer here in the US. You might have heard of him, graphic designer. And he's a big thinker about design and always kind of curious about new design trends. But he's also very true to his own roots as a graphic designer. And so he kind of has a curmudgeonly quality to him sometimes. And he gets very impatient with new design practices that he hears about. And so Michael and I were at, you know, he's a very generous guy and he and I were having a drink together. And he said, have you heard of this thing called service design? What on earth could service design? I have no idea what service design is. And he went on this sort of short rant about service design. And it was very memorable to me. And of course, you know, I went off and read everything I could about service design to make sure I knew what... Did he have a point? Did he have a... was there some truth in his rant? Oh, there always is with Michael. There's both, you know, you kind of have to, you know, look past the bravado and there's always some truth there. I think what Michael really responds to is that there is a core of being craftsman and crafts people that is what is at his core as a designer. And I think it's part of all of our... who we all are as designers in different ways. And I think he laments that some of the new practices of design, user experience design and service design and design thinking and, you know, call it what you will, sort of the expansion of the practice really feels to him and to many of his generation that we're getting away from the core craft orientation and the core craft principles that really drew many of us to being designers to begin with. Interesting discussion. Next time we meet over a bear, we'll continue this one. Doug, you've sent me three topics we can talk about now. I've got them printed here on my piece of paper. You've got the digital version of the question starters. Let's go create the topics. Are you ready? I'm ready. Let's go. Awesome. This one I think is super dear to your heart. Being at IBM, scaling the practice of design, I'd say at an unprecedented scale. Can you make a question around this? Well, I think it's a how can we... and I hope you can see that. Sort of. How can we question here? I'll hold it very close there. Yeah, that works. I would say how can we scale the practice of design at a global level within companies and organizations that are global? Arguably, that really has not happened until very recently and IBM is in the midst of attempting to answer that question and to do just that. It's a question for me that's a fascinating one. And it's one of the things that drew me to coming to IBM initially was the challenge of taking this practice that we've all... that historically has happened in a very small setting. You know, even when it's been in big companies, the practice of design has been sort of centralized and localized in a department or a certain part company. Or it's been in an agency or an academic setting or whatever. And here we're talking about a company of 380,000 people in 170 countries, a company that's been around for over 100 years. And we needed to think about it in a completely different way. And we needed to understand the systems of the company in order to build our program. In some cases on top of those systems, in some cases making new systems. So it's a very complex question and one that has kept me very busy for the last five years here. When I was thinking about this topic, a question that came to my mind is the global aspect. How does that change the challenge of scaling design and does it change the challenge of scaling design? Absolutely. It changes it in so many ways. Partly because our teams, the teams that our designers are working on are not all sitting together in the same space. They're almost always distributed teams. And by team, I mean a cross-disciplinary team. So that will include designers, product managers, engineers, business leaders, marketers, and so on. That team is, in most cases, going to have centers and pods in many different parts of the world. And so that alone, that notion of how do we do, how do we apply a design-driven approach to our work when we have that situation of a distributed team? So that forces some really fundamental rethinking of how the team operates and communicates with each other and how we collaborate as a cross-disciplinary team. So what are your insights related to that? Is that something that we can solve, we can work around, or is it something that is so embedded in the design process that it's almost impossible to solve? No, I think it's not only something that we can solve. I think we have to solve it. Think of IBM and the scale that we're operating at as kind of a predictor or an early indicator of where design programs of the future are going. I really think that 10 years from now, I expect that IBM will no longer be the largest design organization in the world we are now, but I think that other companies will emulate what we've built here. And so the practices that we're, and the approaches that we're devising to meet this challenge are really going to be picked up by other organizations as they try to do the same. I think it's a matter of, as far as insights and what we're learning, it's a combination of tooling and behavior. Think of the tooling being like what you and I are using right now, video platform to communicate with each other. So that's part of it. And we've got a whole platform of tools that include video conferencing and virtual sticky note like forms and so on. That's important, but you also need to sort of train your team to behave a different way and to learn to communicate differently. And by that I mean, for instance, we have teams that are in very different time zones. So a team might have one design team in Austin, Texas and a dev team in Tel Aviv, for instance. That's challenging because their work day only overlaps by about two hours a day. So they need to figure out, they need to alter their cadence and the way that they work in order to take most advantage of those two hours a day that they're both working. So that's very challenging. So when I was thinking about this topic also, the question that came to my mind was scaling the practice of design. What is it exactly that we want to scale? Well, we want to scale output eventually. I mean, we want to scale the productivity of designers and the teams that they're working on. We want to take, we want to replicate a high-functioning team. We want to figure out what's working with that team and we want to do that 20 or 100 or 500 times over. That's what scaling means. It's really all about output and getting our teams functioning as smoothly and as efficiently as we can. Topic number two, let's go. And this one seems a little bit different. So really curious what you'll make out of this one. It's called social impact and change. Do you have a question starter related to this one? Well, let's see here. I'm going to say it's how much impact can designers have on the biggest and most complex problems of the world. That's a big question. I mean, a big question, not just for me, but for all of us. I think designers naturally have an inclination to do good for the world that they live with him and to try to make positive change. So we find ourselves drawn to situations where we can have that kind of impact. But we tend not to be all that good at it, frankly. I think our ideas are often novel and interesting and creative, but I don't think that they actually solve the social problem that they're trying to solve. And so I think that there's a huge opportunity for designers to make an impact in the world and positive impact in the world. But I don't think that we really deliver on that. What are we lacking? Are we missing skills? Are we missing tools? Yeah, we're missing skills and tools and connections. We're missing the relationships with the people who really do know how to make change. We're not very well connected in that world. There are people who are actually quite good at it, and they need our help, too, because they're running out of ideas and we have ideas. So we need to find those people. So it's skills, it's tools, and it's a network. And I also think it's humility. I think we go into these situations where there's a problem to be solved, and we think that we've got to be the ones to solve it and that we need to invent something new in order to solve it. And that's classic. That's classic behavior for a designer. I mean, we've got great ideas and we've got the means to sort of make these ideas happen. But we often, too often times, don't listen well enough. We don't pay attention to, we don't really study the problem, and we lose patience. The real social impact happens over years and even decades. And designers tend to, they get their idea knocked out and then they're on to the next thing. And that's not going to lead to really meaningful social impact change, in my opinion. Should we be judging ourselves and the whole design community on the thing you said in the previous topic, Outcome? Are we actually delivering up on our promise? Yeah, absolutely. Hell yeah. I mean, we shouldn't be judging on, did this creative idea win a design award? Am I able to show this website or video or app or poster in a design conference? But really, how many lives did this change? And how can we quantify the impact that we've had? Absolutely measurement of the outcome is super important. So this could be interpreted like a quite pessimistic view on design. Do we have a spark of hope that we can change this? Where do we have to look for answers? Who can help us? Yeah, I'm totally hopeful. I just think that we're at a point where we need to get really serious about this. And I think there are some leaders who are doing just that. But I think it's alliances with government agencies and NGOs and other established organizations who are really doing this kind of work. Look at like UNICEF has a great design and innovation team within their organization. That's exciting to me where there's a new practice, a new practice of design and innovation that's emerging within an established organization whose mission is positive social impact. That's a great combination. That's a really potent recipe right there. Too often design is still just an experiment, right? Yeah, too often. What is the biggest question you have yourself related to this topic? When you think about when you go to bed at night and you think about this social impact topic, what is the question that comes to your mind? Well, I think there's a question around, quite honestly, around funding. How do we get to the money? When I mentioned a moment ago that social impact takes time, well, if you're a designer and you want to make an impact on a social issue and you determine that that's going to take 10 years to do that, you can't just donate your time for 10 years. You'll go bankrupt. That's unsustainable. So where is the money? Well, there is money in this space and we need to find ways to find that money and get that money redirected toward designers rather than toward the more traditional organizations that are in this space. I think we have the title for our episode. How do we get the money? That would be a good one. Give me the money. Topic number three, Doug, because this one, I'm just starting to notice that you have three really distinct topics, so that's really cool. Topic number three is called Designing for Emerging Technologies. Right, right. Okay, so what is our question here? Let's see. I would say, I don't want to use the same questions over twice here, so I'm going to make this a why do we need to be designing differently for emerging technologies? This is a question that we are faced with here at IBM, a technology company. What are emerging technologies? Well, yeah, so let's, I mean, three that come to mind for me are AI or artificial or augmented intelligence, virtual reality, IoT, Internet of Things. These are all technologies that are not only emerging, but in some cases they have emerged. Yeah, they're there. And they're being used, and yet designers really haven't had impact yet in my opinion on those technologies. And, you know, we are going to have to find new ways to interact for people to interact with these technologies. When you think about AI, for instance, I mean there's a whole way of interacting with machine learning and with artificial intelligence that we haven't invented yet. We literally haven't figured out how does the human have an interaction with this technology. And that's a fascinating question and for really curious and technical designers, that's something that, you know, and we've got many of those here at IBM, that's something that is a really great challenge. So when you think about, I mean, like how do we have a conversation with a machine? You know, our current way is through a Google search, say. So we're typing in, we're typing in, you know, a bunch of keywords. But moving forward, you know, it's going to be voice and it's going to be, you know, other, you know, motion. And so the notion of a, you know, of sound design being something that, you know, is going to emerge as, you know, as a whole new practice area. It's already a practice area, but I mean, you know, 10 years from now, I can imagine that the academic design programs are going to be filled with sound designers because there's going to be a whole need for that type of way, the way that we relate to our technology is going to be through our voice. You know, that's just one example. You know, virtual reality provides a whole other way. How do we interact with a virtual space when we're in it? You know, are we pushing virtual buttons or are we, you know, signaling some in some other way that something needs to happen with the space we're in? You know, these are just really cool and interesting areas that I think designers are going to have some great impact on in the next decade or so. When I read this topic, I was thinking, you know, these technologies, in essence, I just knew design materials that we have to learn the properties of, right? Yes, yes. Yes, they are. And I think that's important, yeah, for us to not be intimidated by the technology, but to break it down, as you say, into its core elements and to, you know, just understand it at its essence that can really allow us then to say, okay, this is a design problem. You know, this is something that, you know, that even, you know, a great graphic designer, craft-driven graphic designer like Michael Beirut, who I mentioned earlier in the discussion, is going to still have fascination with and still be able to engage with in a really strong way. You just said something like, we shouldn't be afraid of the technology. Are we afraid? If so, why is that? Sometimes, I think, you know, I think that's perhaps one of the ironies of designers, is that we tend to, in some ways, sort of embrace change and really be pushing the edges, but in many other ways, you know, when something new comes along, you know, again, back to my story about Michael, you know, he had heard about service design. He didn't understand it, and so he assumed that it must be, you know, that it must be threatening in some way. And I think we need to get beyond that. I think we need to be really sort of embracing these new challenges and really be curious about them as opposed to be, you know, threatened by them. I guess curiosity and playing around with these technologies is the only thing that will accelerate our path towards understanding them, right? Yeah, I think those are essential qualities for a designer. I think humility, I think curiosity, I think empathy. Those are, you know, those are the three, for me, three essential qualities of a designer. You know, the craft and the aesthetic and everything else needs to be there, of course, but humility, curiosity and empathy will get you a long way. That's also what we want to remember, yeah. And if you don't have them, then you're going to really struggle. Yeah, the question is if you can be a designer then. I know you haven't prepared for this question, but this is the last question I'm going to ask you in this episode. And that is, do you have a question for us, for the viewers, for the listeners of this episode? What would you like to know from us? What would I like to know from the listeners of this? Well, I guess, what is the thing that holds you back? What is the thing that you feel is really preventing you from doing your very best work as a designer? I think we all, that's another very designerly trait to have, to kind of not complain, but kind of complain about, you know, if I only had this thing, then boy, I'd be able to do, you know, amazing work. You know, what is that for you? It's a superpower question, you know. If you could have a new superpower tomorrow, what would it be, right? Right, I mean, for instance, we had always said for many years if we only had a seat at the table, you know, if we were only in the business discussions that preceded, you know, the design problem, then boy, we could do whatever, you know, we could have so much impact. And that's basically what we have here at IBM now. We have a seat at the table, and we are impacting the direction of the business in, you know, in a very direct way. And so, but yet there are still, you know, you ask any designer in this organization and they're still going to say, well, yeah, but, you know, I still have these blockers and these challenges and these, you know, things that I can't get rid of. And if only I could, I think, you know, that's awesome. Let's invite people to comment starting with, if only I could, that would be a really good answer starter in the comments. Thanks so much for making time, sharing what's happening at IBM, showing what's happening in your head. Yeah, it was a pleasure and an honor to have you here on the show. Thanks again. Yeah, thank you, Mark. It was a good conversation. I enjoyed it. So what would enable you to make more impact tomorrow? Let us know down below in the comments. And if you enjoyed this video, please leave a thumbs up. I'd really appreciate it. If you know someone who might benefit from the things we've just discussed in this episode, please share this video with them. And if you'd like to learn more, check out some of the past episodes or head over to learn.servicesignshow.com where you'll find courses by leading service design experts that dig deeper into the topics we talk about on the show. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you in the next video.