 In this episode we'll be talking about why you can't design services without deeply understanding the context. We'll talk about what you can learn from service design in Colombia and finally, if the changing role of academia is conflicting with professionals. Here's the guest for this episode, let the show begin. Hi, I'm Diego Mattho and this is the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business. My guest in this episode is a strategic design professor at the Los Andes University in Bogota. He is the organizer of the service design drinks in Madrid and Bogota. His name is Diego Mattho. In the next 30 minutes or so, Diego and I will be talking about why you can't design great services without deeply understanding the context. We'll talk about what you can learn from service design in Colombia and finally, if the changing role of academia is conflicting with professionals. We share new videos on this channel every week. So if you don't want to miss anything and if you want to level up your service design skills, make sure to subscribe and click that bell icon to be notified when new videos are out. And if you want to learn how to explain service design in plain English without confusing people, check out the free course that I've got for you at servicedesignshow.com. So that's all for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Diego. Welcome to the show, Diego. Hi Marc, thanks for the invitation. We could continue in Dutch as you've lived here for quite some time, right? Yeah, more or less. Yeah, I lived there for three years so I can speak a bit of Dutch. Maybe that will put off the other viewers. So let's continue in English. Diego, let me start with the question I ask everybody and that is, what is your first memory of service design? Well, my first memory of service design I think was back in 2011 when I was living in London. I was working there as a product designer more into technical parts and then I had a chance to go to a conference in the real colour of art and then I heard the words and the discipline service design so I got interested there. Okay, 2011, that was quite early. Do you remember the conference? Well, it was kind of an informal talk, it was not a big conference actually. Maybe a drink, because you like the drink, right? Diego, you sent me some really interesting topics. I've sent you, of course, I've sent you a few question starters. We're going to co-create the show, we're going to do interview jazz. Are you ready, man? Great, yeah, I'm ready. Okay, here's topic number one and it's your opportunity to pick a question starter. This topic is called the importance of context. Do you have a question starter that goes along with this one and can you show it up? Yeah, sure, I have it here. So, mine is why, right? Yeah, explain. And yeah, definitely, yeah. So, why is an important context? And I actually experience it more than ever here in Colombia. And the context is especially important to design, for service design, to take into account all these cultural factors there. For example, here in Colombia we see inequality, we see a high hierarchy in society, we see also distrust in some part of the society. So, we need to take this into account to design. And this is not the same as in Europe, this is not the same as in Asia. So, all these cultural factors are essential for a designer, a service designer, to provide solutions that fit the society in general, I guess. Yeah, now we've had this topic on the show a few times already with, I think, Luis Alt from Brazil who also said, talked about service design with a Brazilian flavor. I've had guests from Asia and service design, although the process might be similar in different parts of the world, right, the eventual service is, the same service can be quite different, I guess. Is that also what you're saying? Yeah, I think, well, in my opinion, you cannot design a product, it's a global product. You need to design within the regions that you are trying to deliver value, right? So, if you want to deliver value, you have to deliver value locally. And even if you are a global brand, let's say Uber, probably Uber is not delivering the same value in Colombia than in the Netherlands. Yeah, yeah. So, what does this mean for us as service designers? Well, I think definitely the first stage of the process is to understand these behaviors, right? And this could also relate to behavioral economics, not only to traditional qualitative research, but we need to understand deeper these behaviors and then design upon that. I will say, to give you an example here, when you grab a taxi or a cab, people tend to be not as confident as in all the parts of the world, so they have these small behaviors of take a picture of the plate of the car, or so those kind of nuances that designers need to understand to deliver value are key to provide great solutions. So, here's an interesting question. I see this also happening in our studio, but for us it's really hard to hire non-native internships, for instance, but I'm thinking maybe, could you be in an advantage when you're not from the local culture because you sort of see those differences and when you are in the local culture, you're blinded by them? What is your take on that? Well, yeah, that's definitely a difficult thing to define, because firstly, for non-native people in any country that you're visiting, you realize of small cultural actions that are different to your local country, right? But then, in my opinion, to understand not only the action, but the behavior and the mindset behind that, you really need to live in the context. So, that is interesting, because in order to see those cultural things, you sort of have to have the beginner's mind, the classic notion, and maybe it's the fact that we as designers, when we come into a different context or work in a different service, let's say healthcare, we don't have a specific healthcare background, we are sort of always the outsider and learning from that specific context. Could it be like that, something like that? Yeah, I think, well, sometimes even in design practice, we find fresh minds to create, to understand in a different way, because we are biased by our own context. So, that's definitely a disadvantage to be so biased that you cannot see different dimensions within the context itself and to create solutions later on. But also, that's why it's important to bring on board new stakeholders and also to let them share their experience in a new different context, a totally different context for them. So, it could be eye-opening, I would say. Why did you specifically raise this topic? Because you've lived in several places across the world. Why do you specifically address this topic of context? Yeah, because I also realised about these behaviours that are so intrinsically understood here in Colombia, that for me, and I don't think I'm Spanish and I don't think Spanish people is that far from Colombian people, we're really close, but these social nuances are super different, but it's extremely different. And then I realised, alright, to design for a context like Colombia, I really need to understand how people behave and how people think in this specific area, right, in this specific part of the world. And why is, and I try to understand, where are these nuances and these behaviours coming from? It's really interesting, maybe sort of, not a prerequisite, but what would be really good for designers is to live abroad for a while. Because then, when you live abroad for a while, you will see the nuances in the other culture and probably that will open your eyes to the nuances in your own culture, I guess, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let's move on to topic number two, because we're going to continue on the Latin America, Colombia theme with this topic. And this topic is called Maturity of Service Design in Colombia. It doesn't say that on the paper, but I'll make. Do you have a question starter again and can you show it up for us? Yeah, I think, I chose this one, who are... Who are, all right? Yeah, and in general, I mean, we need to understand also that the discipline of service design here in Colombia is newer than in Europe or USA, right? There they have more, the heritage of service design, it's longer. But still, I think it's important to understand the role of the different players of this ecosystem. So the maturity depends on who is in this ecosystem. And here in Colombia, we mainly have the private sector as one of the catalyzers to develop the practice of service design. And with the private sector, I mean, insurance companies, I mean, banks. I mean, yeah, mainly the financial sector is very hard to apply service design in-house. So that's the current situation at the moment, but also there are some agencies probably not as in the Netherlands, in the Nordic countries that this is quite common, but a lot of agencies already are applying the service design methodologies to provide value to these different private sector or private industries. So two questions. I'll ask the first one first. How have you seen service design changing or evolving in the last few years in Colombia? What are some of the interesting things? Yeah, I think, well, I've been here for one year and a half more or less, a bit less. And lately I've talked to too many people involved in the service design ecosystem here in Colombia. As I said, it's developing. Something that I've seen, for example, in Europe before the service design was mainly applied by agencies, and the agencies started to create this necessity for corporates to recruit people, the experts in service design. Here, I think this period was smaller, was shorter, and from the starting of the agencies to the in-house teams in corporate, it was almost simultaneous. And this happened just in this moment. It is happening. So I think that that's different. Maybe in Europe where you say it took some time to change this mindset, but here we jump from one to another directly. You're leapfrogging a part of the evolution that we had to go through here, right? Yeah, definitely. I don't know how, but if you had to express how mature is service design, what would you say? Yeah, I would say here we are rookies, but we are pushing hard to stay at the front of service design. Probably no inexperience, but delivering new ways of doing things in service design that could complement the practices or the actions that are being done in Europe and in the US. So I think it's complementary because we, as the context, bias us, so we need to find a new different perspective. In the same way that I'm talking about Latin America, you are talking about Europe, I guess, but I would be interested if, I don't know if you have an answer to that, do you see any differences between the service design practice in, let's say, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Argentina? I'm sure there is, but how clearly is that difference? I have experience here in Colombia and also I've talked to people from Peru, from Chile, and Argentina also, they are doing really good things on service design. I would say that the Latin American environment has some similarities, but in service design, as I mentioned in the beginning, context is, I can't say this, but it's a must to understand, so definitely Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Colombia are pretty different. So I'm not sure if I can answer completely this question. I wouldn't be able to really clearly articulate the difference between the Netherlands and Germany and England, for instance. Yeah, exactly. I think that's pretty much it. So the different nations force you, they have similarities, but also quite big differences. And you mentioned one thing about that the push is coming strongly from the commercial sector, the private sector. Any ideas why that is happening, why the public sector is not picking up as fast, while in other countries the public sector is the driving force behind service design maybe? Yeah, I think in general here in Colombia the investment in innovation is less than 1% of the GDP. So that's a big statement already, you know. So the government is starting with the initiative to help companies to innovate, but service design is not just known in the public sector as a discipline to create an impact. Or a visible impact, even more, to be more specific. So it's our responsibility to educate the public sector through our practices to give us the opportunity to develop projects for them. I think it's starting, some agencies already are working with small projects in the public sector, but this must grow exponentially in the following years, I would say. Interesting. Now that we're talking about different sectors, the public sector, private sector, education, we haven't talked a lot about education, so let's take up that discussion in the final topic. And that is the role of academia. I would say, what is your question? What if, right? What would the question be? Yeah, I think, my question would be, what if we change the role of academia in the current world? Or our context here in Colombia? And that's actually what we're trying to do from Los Andes University, where I'm working at the moment. We're tired of these theoretical approaches and that's what service design offers us, right? A practical approach that delivers value for us, even internally, but also externally for companies. And the role is not to create knowledge only because we also focus on research, on design research, service design research, trying to create new knowledge, but also we bring it to the practical side of the service design. And we try to collaborate as much as we can with companies, with this private sector, as I mentioned before. And our role is not only to collaborate with companies, to try to solve their problems, but also to educate them in design and service design methods and bring this to a wider scope. So that's the answer to my own question, I would say. So if academia is starting to adopt the role of evangelizing, educating clients by doing actual projects, how does that still relate to the work, for instance, agencies do? How does that fit together? Yeah, our vision is a peaceful ecosystem within the service design. Peaceful, I think it's the word for Colombia in this moment. And we see collaboration between academia, universities, agencies, consultancies, then the potential clients that could be industries, we would like to call them clients, we like to call them partners, right? And then also could be that the government will join us in these kind of initiatives. So it's a partnership between different stakeholders that could bring some value to the ecosystem. So I get it, that it's a partnership, but in that partnership, what is the balance between academia in that sense and us as the practitioners community? Because if we're both working on a challenge, right? If academia steps away from the more theoretical approach. Yeah, I get your question and I think it's quite sharp. And I would say that this, we can find the balance here. And mainly is that we as academia, we have the time to reformulate our practices, right? And agencies have the experience of the pure practice. So they have the experience of years practicing, delivering value for companies. And probably they are specialized in doing service design research or ID18 or even implementing. For me it's one of the biggest challenge in our profession. So we could collaborate if agencies can specialize with an activity within the service design. And we can use some of the reformulation of the methods of the different activities that we have the time to explore. Because at the end, agencies are exploding, exploding, exploding and doing great job. But it's difficult to find the time to explore when you're in an agency. I'm telling this from my previous experiences. So I think we can find out there the balance and even join the forces to have even more or better results for the clients, partners as we want to call them. It's interesting to see or to think of the role of academia as sort of the reflective, the observing, the asking critical questions. Maybe from that perspective and I could see us joining forces with academia, universities where students would observe what we're doing and then maybe not criticize that but build upon that or ask questions or reflect upon that. That's basically I think what you're saying, right? And also we have to be clear about our role, right? So in a professional role, I'm leading a group of students and all together we're working for companies. But this is complementary to an agency because in an agency we are talking about experts, not about students, right? So that's at a different level. But still I think that the collaboration can happen perfectly. I would be interested that I'm asking the viewers or the listeners of this episode if you know of any good examples where really good examples, innovative partnerships between academia and the agencies or the consultancies have taken place in this where they have adopted this new role. So I'd love to hear about them. So leave a comment here on YouTube or on SoundCloud wherever you're watching or listening. So Diego, also a question for you. You've given us some perspectives on service design. But is there something that you would like to ask us? Is there anything you would like to know from us that we can help you think about? Yeah, I think, well I'm pretty interested also about the startup world. So I'm a professor, but I'm an entrepreneur and also I sometimes consult for corporate. So all these worlds I think are intertwined and it's really interesting for me to discover new things. So I would say that for me the question would be what are the differences to apply service design for corporates and for startups? Is there a difference? Is there not? I'm not sure, but probably someone has the answer to it. So is there a difference in applying service design or design thinking? Let's keep it at service design for corporates versus startups. I have some ideas about it, but I'm really curious what the people will have to say. So Diego, cool. Thanks for that question and thanks for inspiring us and thanks for giving us a little bit of insight in what is happening in Colombia and what you are doing as a professor. If people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way? LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook? Yeah, LinkedIn is perfect for Diego Matzo, but also I have a medium account that I normally write often there. So you can find me there and Twitter. Also through LinkedIn it's the easiest way to find me. I will add all the links in the show notes. I hope a lot of people reach out. So Diego, thanks again for sharing your insights. So what do you think? Is there a difference between how service design is applied to startups versus bear corporations? Join the conversation and leave a comment down below. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to grab the link and share with someone who might benefit from what we've just discussed. And don't forget that if you want to learn how to explain service design in plain English, you can also check out the free course that I've got for you over here. Thanks again for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.