 Hi, I'm Amy Yip. Welcome to the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Mark van Tijn. With the Service Design Show, we help you to stay one step ahead by talking to the people that are shaping the service design field. We talk about the current state of the industry, exciting new developments, and the challenges up ahead. My guest in this episode is Amy Yip. Amy is currently a design director at Tencent, and previously she worked at Microsoft and was the first interaction designer in Asia that Yahoo hired. For the next 30 minutes or so, we'll be talking about topics like reforming design education about how Chinese clients interact with design, and finally, how do you incorporate service design within large organizations. If you want to fast forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description, or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. So, let's jump right in. Welcome to the show, Amy. Hi, Mark. Thank you for inviting me. Awesome to have you here, and I'm very happy to, again, have someone from Asia sharing stories about design. Amy, let's jump right in, and the first question I have is, what was your first encounter with service design? Oh, wow. It was when I was a student as at Carnegie Mellon University in the States. What did you hear about it? How did you meet? How did you and service design meet? So, I was a master student at interaction design program. So, at that time, so we started to notice that people started calling, like, there's, say, it's a subdomain called service design. So, and we started having a lot of conversations on, like, what service design is, you know, what interaction design is, you know, and start from there. I think, like, I guess, like, till today, you know, in the industry, a lot of people are still confused with, like, you know, with all these terms, interaction design, UI design, it was experience design, you know, service design, right? Absolutely, and I guess definitions are, will forever be a hard topic to correct, but, yeah. Well, this was back in how many years ago? Wow, that was 2001 to 2003 when I was in Carnegie Mellon. So, that's quite a while already. Yeah. So, Amy, I've invited you to share a few topics that interest you at the moment, and for people who haven't seen any of the previous episodes, let's give an example of how our co-creation format works, right? I have some cards over here with some topics, and you also have a stack of cards, right? Yeah, thank you. Yes, there they are. So, I'll pick one of your topics, and you'll pick one of my question starters, and we'll co-create a question that is up to you to answer. Yeah? All right, okay. Let me pick the first one. Yeah, I'm going for this one, because we've talked about education before, and I'm really interested what you make out of this. It's called reforming design education. We have a question starter that goes along with that one. Okay, so maybe why? Can you see it here? Yeah, I see it clearly. So, I guess the question is, why do we need to reform design education? Do we need to reform design education? I think I would hope to see that definitely there's reform in design education in Asia, particularly in China. I think I have been working in China in the past five, six years, so I have worked with many designers. I am also one of the board members for Tencent Design. So, within our company, a lot of times for senior designers, when they need to get a promotion, they'll come and give a presentation, and so senior designers will come in the judging panel to give feedback and comments to make sure that that designer get promoted in that in one particular department is also meeting the standard for the company standard. So, I myself also used to manage a huge design teams. So, every year I used to go to fresh grad hiring trips, so in China when we go, so we will go to different locations and talk to students that potentially will be interested to be interns, as well as a fresh grad hire for our company. So, I do get a lot of chance to talk to young designers. And I think it is one of the challenges I see is in the past, or even now, I think the design education is still changing in China. A few years ago when I first came to China, most of the interaction designer or use experts or use experts designer that I hired, many of them come for industrial design. And they may have taken one or two classes like about user interface design, digital product design, and then they want to come and work for us. And so, we all know the industrial design process is very similar to service design, interaction design process, right? So, but it also means that they is, at least from my previous experience, that if we can start the education a lot earlier, it's going to have more impact on the design, on the designer, himself or herself, right? So, most of the times I see a lot of designers start picking up design theories, start practicing design theories, not until they start working in the industries. And a few years ago, I was also invited to go be gas speakers in one of the well-known universities in China. I'm not going to mention the name, but when I go and talk to the professors, some of the professors told me that they realized that there's a huge need in the market, but that, but themselves don't really know how to teach. So, because they are, they are also new to the industry. So, they are inviting a lot of people from the industry to come and give short-term courses, right? So, I see that the professors need the needs, but they also have limited information to help them to reform the classes. So, I do see that there's a huge need, you know, to do the reform. And is that the reform in thinking and products, to thinking in services and experiences, is that the reform that you are talking about? I think, yes, first of all, I think in China, or based on my experience, many of the, so in the traditional schooling systems, right? So, they give a topic, they give some assignments and ask students to finish certain tasks, right? But in design, we all know that people who are in the design industry that we need designers to be innovative and somewhat rebellious a little bit sometimes, right? In order to do new things, to shake the ground a little bit to do disruptives, right? So, it's the school, it's the school environment, prepare that, right? Are the designers prepared to be challenged when they're working in the industry? Let me share one example. When I was a design grad student at Carnegie Mellon, I remember the first day when I was at school, the professor has prepped me, prepped the class that in the next two years, we are going to do a lot of design critiques, right? So, your design will be challenged by your classmates. So, especially for those grad students, their undergrad didn't come from design background who are not family with that. Please be patient with the process. When it first started, you may not feel comfortable, but while you go through the process, you will learn that all the feedback from others will help you to polish the design of your project, right? So, when I first started, so my undergrad was not in design, my undergrad was in information systems, right? So, but I get interested in user interface design and this is how I get into interaction design, right? So, I was one of those who get through those process. It's the first time when people criticize my design, I feel like, ah, I have the pride, right? But then I have also gone through the process when I started hearing feedback, right? From different angles. And they're like, oh, okay, right, there might be some holes in my design that will help me, right? I really cherish the design process. I really cherish how the team works together, right? So, putting it in a Chinese culture. So, I think being respectful is important in Chinese culture. Working in hierarchy, you know, in organization, the hierarchy in the organization is also important. So, how can designers bring up important questions respectfully and not to break some boundaries, that not to challenge certain boundaries authority, that I think the young designers need some support or some communication skills or negotiation skills to help them to achieve that as well, right? This is especially a challenge within the Chinese culture? Yes, that's correct. That's one part of it. And also, one of my personal hypothesis is, I think many of the design process is, and the design theory are developed in the West, right? And we all know that design theories and process, design is deeply rooted with philosophy, with the culture, right, with human beings, right? So, all these design theories, principles, can easily be understood by the Chinese culture. Excellent question, excellent question. So, these are some of my questions, say, so let me give you another example. So, a lot of times in design process, we say the first step is we define problems, right? So, there are a few times that I have encountered that when I go to my team and I talk to the team members and say, hey, you know, let's define some problems or the internal clients that I work with. When I ask about, hey, let's talk about problems, you say, no, no, no, no, there's no problem. But when I start using another word, you know, like, oh, what are the user requirements? And then they will start talking, right? So, this is something that I noticed that if I were directly translating the words in the Western world in English to Chinese, just the perception of how they understand certain wording, there is already a gap and it's going to slow down people. Sorry. Yeah, well, that's purely also the reason why I want to learn on the show what's happening in Asia because I think it works two ways, right? I think design can learn so much from the Asian culture and bring these topics into the Western mindset of design. And it's, we have so much to learn. That's my feeling at least. Yeah, yeah, I think it is also a very interesting topic to discuss in the design industry, right? Because I think a lot, so especially my years, you know, working in a Chinese design community, many of my, many of the designers who reported to me after they left my team, you know, and then they will come back to me and say, hey, Amy, you know, when you ask us to do certain things back then, I really feel uncomfortable and I didn't understand back then, but now I understand and they come back and they would thank me and say, oh, thank you for sharing that time. And we will also joke about that, oh, maybe Amy, your Chinese is not good enough back then and so that's I couldn't understand, right? So, I think many of the design theories and principles, it does take time for them to understand. And also, when I first started, it is true that I realized that the language that I use is also difficult for them to understand. But to me or for the Western world, it seems like, oh, it's so obvious. So, while I'm working in China, like in the past few years, I constantly learning, trying to see how I can explain it in their language to help them to better understand what we are trying to achieve here. Really interesting and I hope we'll see some more results from from Asia and I guess the language barrier between English and Chinese. It's one of the issues, one of the reasons that there isn't so much collaboration between those two fields. So, Amy, we have a second topic that strongly relates to the first one and it's not a focus on so much on education and on students, but it's more of a focus on Chinese clients. Okay. And I guess that shouldn't be a too hard of a bridge. Okay, so, so I will pick, who are these Chinese clients? So, probably it's not the perfect wording, but basically what I'm trying to address is, so in order to, I think surface design or interaction design as a whole is a new concept for many industries. For us, the industry has been developed for a few decades, right? But for many of the folks who are not in the industry, it is new to them. So how do we tell them our values, what are KPI, the ROI, right? And I think in different cultures, in different industry, they have their own set of values, they have their own set of KPIs. So I think it's also important to understand, how do they measure success, right? So that is one of the reasons why I wanna talk about, who are our Chinese clients and how do we work with them? What have you found so far? So have you found any differences between Chinese clients and clients that you've worked with in the West? And if so, what are these differences? I think traditionally, I think the design profession is not well-established in Asia yet. I think maybe for you from the European countries, like basically even for someone who is not in the design industry, they pretty much understand what design is and what the values of design will be, right? And they respect and appreciate design. But I think in China, I think the interaction design, service design didn't come out till the last decade, right? So a lot of people still don't quite understand it. And traditionally, the word design is easily being associated with art productions, just output. Yeah, and I guess that isn't that much different in Europe or in the US, I guess. Yeah, so it's just putting a beautiful face on top of an existing thing, right? So, and sometimes they would just, we designers just joke about in the industry, we're perceived as the factory labor that produce like art assets, right? Like in Mandarin, we call it mei gong, right? But which is not the case, like, so we were able to, so constantly, we were trying to educate the product managers that we work with, you know, and we joke about it and ask them to respect design and not treat it as, you know, one of those art assets output labor. I think the, I think with how the industry grows, you know, in its past 10 years, people start to understand, but still there is still needs to have a lot of communications and a lot of educations. So have you seen any specific things that do resonate with Chinese clients when you talk about design? When do they get excited? When do they get interested? I think it's, or at least in my personal experience, maybe a decade ago, you know, when we talk about design consulting in China or in consulting in Asia, the question is, would the Chinese willing to hire consultants, right? Because consulting industry is something new to them. Why would I want to pay someone to give me recommendations? You know, I can think, I can come up with ideas. I'm the expert. Why do I want to pay someone? You know, I am in the industry, I know better, right? Why do I want to pay someone that I don't know to give me recommendations, to give me some reports or suggestions, right? It doesn't make sense, right? But I think over the years now, you know, I started to see, you know, some design firms, including Western design firms, especially some local design firms, start to have gained some good reputations, you know, from in the industries, right? And, you know, some banks in China, you know, some, you know, cell phone companies, you know, like different industries with all hard design consulting firms to help them to think about, you know, how the design can better be done, right? So, I think, yes, I think for now, I think traditionally, you know, that is probably similar to the States as well, you know, like traditionally, when I talk about, especially in the digital sector, right? They tend to make things, right? They want to engineer to have certain outputs, right? Do I have this app? Do I have this website? Do I have this like internet of things, you know, that tangible product, right? So, I think in the past, or at least now, if we just say, hey, I'm going to sell the strategy, you know, it's become something vague for the Chinese clients. So, usually it will be, you know, selling the strategy together with the tangible output delivery as a package, right? I think this tends to be a little bit more easier for the clients to accept, right? So, I think the sum of the Chinese design consulting firm that I know of, they, you know, like a lot of times when they go and sell their clients, like they are still using the language as like the website, you know, the certain services, right? But moving forward, but I see that when they deliver, it's not really just the website, it's the whole service design strategy, right? So, a lot of times, I think it takes time for them to better understand that, hey, when we talk about design, this is the deliverables, you know, the strategy is included. But even though when they first came, they can tell, oh, I want to, I need to redo my website, right? But I think it will take time to educate, you know, the clients, you know, and the industry as well. So, they're still talking about the deliverables, but they're also selling the road to get there. That's maybe the difference, right? Yes, right? I mean, because if we, I think, so me and some other designer, we always talk about if we go and tell someone, our friends that, you know, what we do as a designer, as a user experience designer, as a service designer, I don't think we can use one simple sentence to explain that, right? I mean, if we have legal designers, if I just say, hey, I'm a service designer, then you know, I don't need to say anything else, but for most of the folks, the clients or most of the folks here in Asia, we do need to have like a long page to describe to them what we do. And then they still don't understand it, yeah. True, that's true. Well, Amy, sort of, I'm now realizing that the third topic is we have really nice balance. We talked about education, we talked about clients, and if I look at the third topic, it's called service design within our corporation. We have a question starter that goes along with that. Then we'll have corporate students, clients, and businesses, so that's really nice. Okay, so maybe, how can we, how can we practice service design within a corporation? So I think, I think a lot of times, maybe some of the design consulting designers would think that within the corporation, it's difficult or almost impossible to practice service design. And in reality, I'm not gonna lie, it's difficult. Because when you work within the corporations, so there are always different departments, and all the roles and functions are well-set, right? So not unless the corporation, the organization's structure is set for that design team to do the service design strategy and then have it spread out. Otherwise, it's really difficult to practice that. So it's difficult because there is no space or you don't get the opportunity to take a more holistic view on the service or? I think it's the perception of what the role of design is in Asia or is in China, right? Like what we discussed earlier, a lot of times they tend to have, like they want to know, there's a strong tie between design and deliverables. Design and then SS, right? Design and the image, right? Design and the websites, right? So when we talk about design, service strategy, service design strategy, and then it costs link to all the different departments and have it all work together, right? It's become a lot more difficult because in one big organizations, you have different departments and different departments, they have their own manager and own bosses and other managers talking to each other, right? Versus if you were hiring an outside company, outside design consulting firm, when they present a strategy, naturally all the managers will come and listen to this design firm and present, even though it's still difficult to implement, but at least they're all sitting in the same room, they're all focusing because they're paying this company, so they want to hear what they're saying, right? So how do you manage, right? You're within a very large organization, how do you cope with this? So a lot of times I think is, so when I was in school, when I was still in design school at Carnegie Mellon, I think the teacher has prepared us well. I think when I was there, they constantly tell us that we're, when we graduate and leave to school, we're going to be the pioneer in the industry. So I was like, at that time, I have no idea what it means. So I have started working in the industry, I started to realize that, hey, like what is the role of interaction designers, service designers, it was not, the definition is not clearly defined, the role is not clearly defined. So I think I am so from, because of the industry, because of the training that I get, I'm so used to help defining my own role, building relationship with cross teams and help defining the process and re-establishing new process, as long as we have the same goal, I believe we can do that, right? So in the past, in the past, when I was working in Yahoo or Microsoft or even here now in China, then I would tend to bring up, like first I'll bring up the goal, I first bring up the problem that we're trying to solve, right? As long as the problem is being recognized, I can work my magic and try to talk to different teams and say, hey, in order to solve this, maybe this is something that we can do, but we would hope that maybe you can collaborate, right? And it's not, and making sure that the results or the honor will go to everyone in a team, not rather just design team. I think that's also important to work in teams. You have to think a lot. You're like sort of the glue between all the different departments, right? Yeah, so I can tell you an example. So when I was working in Yahoo for Hong Kong in 2003, from 2003 and 2006, because I was the first head count in Asia for interaction designer. So before me, they have never worked with an interaction designer before. So of course, the producers, back then, they didn't know how to work with me, right? So suddenly, like this designer come and say, hey, you can do this, there's a guideline, you can't do that, right? They will interview you. So I did take the time to do with the help of my boss back then. So we set up different sharing sessions. And I would explain what are the user experience design theories, the design methodologies, and this is how we do things, and this is how we do usability. And this is like how we measure of success, right? Yeah. And then because it was only one of them, as an interaction design resource, right? I can handle all the requests. So I'm not saying that you have to go through me, but instead I will share my design philosophy with them so that they can practice themselves, right? So in the beginning, let's say for example, when I first started, they would say, hey, me, I only have two days. I want you to work on that. But of course, I can deliver a good design. For example, for a simple task, I may need four days. So the first time I worked with that producer, I made just OT on my own without letting them know. And so that I can come up with something that with decent quality, at least I think it's decent quality, to go back and tell them, hey, this is what I'm proposing to do. And then they will look at it and say, hey, it looks good. We should try that. And then after it's been implemented and after we're happy with the results, and then I'll go back and tell them, hey, you know what, actually, I took my own personal time to work on that project. Next time, if you want something that nice, maybe you can give me a little bit more time, you know. And piece by piece, we build relationships like that and reform the process. What you're basically saying is that, and this has been a topic on the show also a few times, service designers or designers in general need to be very open and clear and transparent about the process they use instead of just showing up with the results, right? They need to educate their environment to see the value in the process. Yes, and also I think different industry, different company has their own culture and has their own process, right? So I see many of the designers, yes, we do have certain design process, but does that mean that we need to make sure and force them, certain companies, certain teams to follow our design process or as we could be flexible to modify our design process to make sure that the key milestones are met, the key KPIs that we needed for the design is met, right? But we can also be flexible to blend in and create, co-create new development process together with the team to make sure that what we're delivering are also meeting the KPIs, you know, yeah. All right, Amy, we're heading towards the end of this episode but I still have two questions left for you and the first question is what would be your tip for somebody who wants to become a better service designer? What would be your single most valuable tip? I think so we have to, I think we have to understand the products, we have to understand the surface. I think it's really hard to say how, but I think we need, first of all, especially in Asia, we need to establish our credibility. We need to establish our professions. So I think it's also important to brush up our communication skills to make sure that the deliverables that we have align with the values of the customers. I think definitely this is important and with all the things that we have discussed earlier in the show is I think there's a lot of communication, educations need to be done. So how can we polish the message that we want to deliver and to make our clients or the particular, in my case, the Chinese clients that they feel comfortable with what I'm delivering. That requires a lot of communication skills, project management skills as well as negotiation and persuasion skills. Maybe the new design skills instead of next to the craftsmanship that we still need to have, we need to become more or at least better within these skills that you just mentioned. Yes, that's correct, I agree. Final question, Amy, and I'm sure we discussed a lot of topics and you gave a lot of insights, but what is your, what is the question that keeps you awake at this moment? What is your biggest question? I think it's about how can I help young designers to rebel a little bit more? As what we discussed earlier, I think I see a lot of times, the Chinese culture is very respectful. Respect is important in the Chinese culture, right? So as I see a lot of times, like some designers who come from really good design schools and because they are fresh grad, so they have no working experience. So after they come into corporate culture, they tend to be complying in a PB to be very respectful for the current process. But unfortunately, many times, most of the times the current process within the corporation is not perfect for doing good service design, right? So how can we encourage, provide support to these young designers so that they feel a bit more confident and comfortable to share their thoughts and make the change and this is what I think of all the time and relate to the earliest discussions in this show. I think it has to start from design education or from earlier education reform in order to achieve that. Start at the beginning. Learn young students to push boundaries. That's a big question. How do you do that? I think maybe people can share some thoughts on that and I hope a lot of people from Asia are watching, so who knows, maybe we can learn something from that. Amy, thank you so much for making the time. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. It was an honor for me. Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me as the audience on me. Thank you so much. Thanks again. What are your thoughts about the topics we've just discussed with Amy? What is the highlight of this episode for you? Let us know down below in the comments. If you enjoyed this episode and like to see more interviews with service design pioneers, be sure to check out some of the previous episodes and subscribe to the channel. We have a fresh new episode for you every two weeks. For now, thanks for watching and see you in the next episode.