 In this episode you're going to learn about the most effective application of design to address the global pandemic. We're going to talk about the success and sometimes the lack of it of design in the social sector and finally we're going to talk about the rise and fall of design thinking. Here's the guests for this episode. Let the show begin. I'm Linda Pulik and this is the service design show episode 102. Hi I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about empowering you with the most effective skills and strategies that help you to build services that win the hearts of people and business. The guest in this episode has a deep passion for doing work that makes a positive impact on social sector. She's a teacher and she's the founder of Studio Stella. Her name is Linda Pulik. The reason I'm so excited to share this chat with Linda with you is because we talk about design for a greater good. How can we use our skills as a community to help to create a better society? We're going to talk about some of the lessons Linda learned from the past, what works, what doesn't and what can we take from that into the future. Linda definitely gave me a lot of food for thought about where design is today and where it could be tomorrow. So enjoy this episode with Linda Pulik. Let the show begin. Welcome to the show Linda. Hi Mark. Good to have you on. Really excited about what we're going to talk about today and I appreciate that you're up early for this episode. For the people who don't know who you are, could you give a very interesting but brief introduction? I will try. I am a designer. I've been doing it for quite a while. The focus of my practice is really on providing services to people for free who deserve world-class service for free by virtue of the fact that they are citizens or residents or constituents of a non-profit. That's not really an accident. I started my professional life as a public servant. I was a public high school teacher and so that has remained very important to me. Of course, I've worked in industry. The latest, the last employer that I had, I'm now working on my own but the last employer that I had full-time was Fjord. Of course, there we worked across industries. I'm also a teacher. A few years ago I decided to stop teaching design to design students and I now teach design to public policy students. We met through Robert, who was on the show a few episodes ago. Service design, the term service design. Do you recall the first time you bumped into it? Yes, I do. It was probably, it was more than 10 years ago and a friend of my, a good friend of mine, Dennis Vile, who is now the Dean at the Institute of Design, but used to be the VP of design at McDonald's. Dennis used to talk about service design a lot, of course, at the time he was a leader in the service industry. I came to understand that service design was really an extension of human-centered design, just a very holistic view of how the design process could help business and other types of organizations. It was shortly after that that I went and worked in India, which is in my opinion the homeland of service design. I feel that in India service design was really invented in India before it had a name in the West because the approach that Indian businesses and organizations have to service and really looking at, you know, that the whole of what a service really means is done very, very well in that country. It comes naturally to entrepreneurs. It's an insight that I don't recall having heard on the show, so that's interesting. Linda, we've got some big topics on the line here for today. Are you ready to start and do some interview jazz? Yes, I am. Very well. First topic, in times like these and for the people who are watching or listening to this later, we're in June 2020 and our big topic is the pandemic. Do you have a question starter around this one? Yes, I do. My question is what if people who could make an impact in this epidemic listen to real experts? I feel that there's a lot behind that question. Yes, there is. Where is it coming from? Well, I know that, you know, that for a lot of us, this pandemic is what everybody here in the US is calling unprecedented. So it certainly is a situation that's unprecedented for many of us in the West. And I actually have been interviewing some friends and experts in other parts of the world for a project that I'm working on to design something to help people in crisis situations. And what I was expecting was that people in other parts of the world would say this pandemic is actually not unprecedented. We're used to going through things like this. But what I've been surprised to find is that a lot of people, particularly young people in other parts of the world, are feeling very different at this time in history than they have before. However, in a time when everybody feels uncertain, and some of us want to contribute to making things better, people tend to jump in and do what they think is the right thing to do to help. And in a situation like this, it is my opinion that we are best led, we will be best led out of this pandemic by medical and scientific researchers, and medical and scientific experts. And a few weeks ago, I heard this Italian doctor speaking on the BBC about his experience in Northern Italy. He was somebody who had worked for Metsens en Frontier, and he contended that the right organizations to lead the world out of this pandemic were perhaps not even governments, but humanitarian organizations who could draw on their expertise in handling crisis situations that also included the social and humanitarian outcomes. Which I think brings us back to the role of service design in the pandemic. And how does it tie into service design? Well, service design, again, as I referenced earlier, my own understanding of service design and the way I utilize it in my design practice is that it's a very holistic human centered way of approaching the creative process. And so I think that Robert talked earlier about designers and service designers being expert facilitators. And I really think that at a time like this, that's where our expertise is most applicable. So our expertise is most applicable in supporting experts, health and science experts in deciding what the way out of this situation is. And not being the people who stand in front saying we know what the right way out is. We really need to take a backseat here and provide a supportive role rather than the front stage. Yeah, so how can we guide, facilitate, enable, empower the people who have a different kind of knowledge about this kind of situations and again empower them to come up with the best solutions? Right. So we are experts of a creative process that really works. And in other disciplines like science and medicine the expansive and the expansive thinking and comfort with ambiguity that we really know how to manage is not always part of, I know for sure it's not always part of the scientific method. So my first degree was in molecular biology and I always, when people say that they think that that was a big jump, I really argue with them because most of the best scientists were or are creative people. You have to be people who think well outside the box, whatever the box. I think of that physicist I think in Australia who was trying to come up with a therapy for coronavirus who ended up going to the emergency room with magnets up his nose, which was kind of a hilarious situation and luckily it had a positive outcome. But you know the idea that that person seemed to have gotten so excited about a creative or novel idea. We as designers can offer our expertise to be the stewards of that process in addressing something like COVID-19. And I've got two questions around this. One is what can we do more than we're already doing? Like where is the part where we sort of, what's the English phrase? Not picking up the ball or letting the ball lose? Something like that. And I already forgot my second question. So where can we step up our game? Like what can we do more? Well that's, I mean that's been something that I, you know, sitting locked up like everybody else have thought about. I mean we can do the same things that everybody else is doing like I'm making masks. We can donate blood and you can listen to public officials and stay inside and not endanger other people. But in addition to that I think that we have an opportunity to join forces with humanitarian organizations. So for example I've been a Red Cross volunteer and I, the project that I'm working on I plan to give to one of the humanitarian organizations that I've, you know, that I have friends working at or that I've been affiliated with in some way. And have them be the client and decide whether or not that is useful to them. And in the process of creating that I'm also speaking to people who work for organizations like that. Because it's a challenge to, you can't really approach somebody working for one of these organizations now because they're swamped. They don't have the time to initiate a new design project with you. And so one thing, if you are not already involved in working with an organization that is directly addressing the pandemic I think is to do a service design project on your own and give it as a gift to one of these organizations. So I'm not sure whether you've heard of the WHO call for creatives, but that's also an opportunity for designers and other creatives to contribute to this effort by supporting a humanitarian organization. The call for creatives by the double WHO, right? Yes. Okay. Cool. Well, not cool the pandemic, but let's see if we can step up our game. Linda, let's move on to topic number two, which is closely related to, I guess to your heart, because it's about the social sector. Do you have a question starter? Yes. I saw a sneak preview. All right. So my question is how far should designers insert themselves into the social sector? So this is something that I've been thinking about for quite a while. Seven years ago, my friend, Siobhan Gregory and I presented, we did a talk at the design research conference at the Institute of Design about this, and not everyone was happy with what we had to say. Siobhan is a, she's a designer, but also an anthropologist. And one of the things that we were advocating was that designers spend more time with the people that they are designing for and design with them rather than swoop in and tell them what to do and then leave. And so we, in addition to proposing that people slow down, what we were suggesting was that designers are not the leading experts. So we need to, what we need to do as I referenced earlier in speaking about the pandemic is to understand what our expertise really is and to provide that expertise to people who are already doing that work well in their communities. Where do you feel that we are sometimes stepping over the boundary of what our expertise is? Well, I think part of the problem, one of the causes of overstepping is that our discipline, design as a discipline, as a profession comes from industry. It's a commercial practice and design consulting is very effective and our process is very repeatable. It's very successful in a business context. And so part of what's problematic is when you, when you try to design in an environment where time moves at a different speed, in some ways, time moves a lot faster in the public sector. So I mean, now as a great example, here in this country, policy and the political environment changes in seconds because of a tweet. And so, you know, I remember once working on a tax project and, and, you know, tax law here in the United States as well changes more than once a day, at least it did when I was working on the project. And so, so in that way, you know, it's very challenging to be a designer for an organization who has to contend with, with changes in, in funding and policy that move at that speed. But then in other ways, things move very slowly. So we're not per se stepping over our expertise, but we have to adapt our expectations or be more flexible, be more in the moment, rather than quite, are we too rigid? Maybe that's the question. I, yes, perhaps, yes. I've never thought of it that way. But, you know, because we've achieved such success in the commercial sector, and people are very impressed by what we deliver, you know, we can very quickly, you know, mock up or visualize a new reality or a new future. We, we tend to think that that success can be transplanted into an environment which moves both both fast and slow, at the same time, and then also where resources are scarce. So the, the seedlings that designers provide for, you know, the organization to plant and, and, you know, grow a new future or, you know, develop new, new products and services. Unfortunately, they may not have the resources they need to take what we give them to, to develop, you know, what they've created. And that has happened to me, by the way, I'm not suggesting that I've always been successful in all of my, my forays into, you know, the social sector. Yeah, so the, the, like, if you could give one or two pieces of advice for designers who want to do good in the social sector, and based on your learnings, maybe based on the mistakes that you've made in the past, like what, what would you say, what kind of advice would you give? Well, I would say, first of all, slow down. Don't expect success to come overnight and, and be prepared to stay for the long haul. You know, so when I think of, of some of the most successful partnerships that I've had in, in, in the social sector, one was with a doctor in Uganda. And that, that partnership was nine years long. The, the, the project that we got the most press for and that, that I guess in some ways was the most successful. We, we weren't able to realize its scale. But our, our working relationship was actually very successful. You know, I, I currently have been working with a local social services organization as a designer for about five years and my, my collaboration with them continues. I don't expect, you know, I don't expect a big flashy success and for the world to change even in a year. And if the world does change, it's because the people that I'm working with make it change because they've been on the ground doing the work for 20 years. Good tips. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Setting, being a bit more humble, being in there for the long run, not going for fame and fortune. Yeah. I recognize a lot of things. Let's, let's move on into, yeah. By the way, I, I don't want to suggest that, that good intentions and the desire to help is, is a bad thing. I don't, I don't think that at all. You know, I think it's really, for me, it's been really heartening as an educator and, and you know, even, even in the jobs that I've had to realize how many new designers, you know, want to orient their, their career and their practice in this direction. And so I'm not suggesting that, you know, everybody in the design world is just rushing in and wants to get it done in five minutes. And that's that. I just think that people will be more fulfilled in this space if they, you know, if they realize that they need to be in it for the long haul. And it's good that somebody tells them. All right, Linda, let's move on to the third and final topic of today, which surprisingly hasn't been on the show in the past few episodes, months maybe. That's a topic of design thinking. And I'm sure you have an interesting perspective on this. So do you have a question starter? Yes, my question starter is how much design thinking is too much? Again, a loaded question. Right. How much, how much is too much? Well, my answer 10 years ago would have been there's never enough design thinking, no amount of design thinking is too much. Now I think that once you enter the design phase, too much design thinking, capital D, capital T, design thinking is too much. Because unfortunately, I think that the the campaign that started was started in part by designers. It succeeded. You know, it was extremely successful. And, you know, three years ago, working inside an organization that very successfully rolled out design thinking and, and, you know, educated thousands of people in how to think creatively, you know, and use design methods in their, in their work, you know, super, super exciting to be inside that. But I do think that, unfortunately, one of the problems with, with design thinking is that it has become a discipline unto itself. And it's, it's, and it's enabled people who have very little training in, in implementing design methods to think that they, they can dispense of designers in the thinking part of the process. So designers, at least in some of my experience have been dragged back 10, 15 years to the time when we were the people that, that make stuff look pretty, pretty because other people design think for us, we're no longer required to design things. It's a, it's a painful observation. Yes. Is there hope? Is there a hope somewhere? Oh, definitely. You know, I think, I think what's been good about it. I was talking about this, you know, with a friend of mine, whose opinion is that this, this is actually good for, for designers, because we have to, you know, we really have to rediscover now what, what, what sets us apart. And just to go back to the beginning of our, our conversation, we really have to reinvent our expertise, because, you know, the thinking methods that we have encouraged everybody outside of our profession to use are, are well understood and well accepted and they're being, they're being applied. But, but, you know, we need to, we need to explore the margins of our profession a little bit and reinvent ourselves. Yeah, and maybe get better at articulating what it is that we're actually, how, how we are differentiating. Like it's when it's not about running a workshop, it's about running engaging workshop. I don't know, it's at least taking some effort to articulate and verbalize the thing that, that makes certain designers different from people who don't have a formal slash informal design, training, background, experience, career. Right. A bit of feedback that I got recently was, was from a client of mine. You know, they, they've hired me to be, to be, to provide them with design expertise. They're not a design firm. And, you know, when we were going through our initial pitch to explain the process, we, we deliberately cut the number of slides down explaining the design process. We cut, cut it down to one. And afterwards the feedback that we got was, you know, thank you for not going on and on about that because we already know about that. I mean, that's why, that's why we've, we've asked you to work with us. But what we're expecting is for you to provide us with something that we don't know and that we don't know how to do on our own. Yeah, that's a really important challenge maybe for the coming years, like showing where the expertise and knowledge gap is. Like, okay, it's awesome that you have learned about maybe creative thinking, creative problem solving through a design driven approach. But where's the gap between what you know now and what people who are more skilled and experienced do? At least, like, like you also said, the positive thing about this is that the, the awareness around design that it exists and that it can create value has grown tremendously over the last decade. Absolutely. And it's incumbent on us just like it is in every other profession or discipline, you know, scientists don't sit around bemoaning the fact that the, that the methods and tools and processes that they used 10 or 15 years ago are no longer relevant, you know, they, they, it's their job to go out and, and, you know, reinvent their field, which, which I think, you know, that's what we, that's what we sell first. And so that's, that's what design thinking has challenged us with. We've democratized our field to a small extent, but now we need to sort of take it to the next level, which, which is good. Maybe it's a challenge for, for the community. Maybe we've gotten too complacent. Is there maybe something that you'd like to ask us, the viewers and listeners of the show? Yes, I'd like to ask the, the viewers and listeners, what the most unexpected application of their design expertise has been over the last year? Leave your comments down below. I'm really curious, as always, to hear what people have to say about this. Linda, when people want to continue this conversation with you, what's the best place to reach you? For now, they can, they can reach me on LinkedIn. I'm at Linda.pulic. It should pop up on the screen somewhere. I always forget if it's left to right, but it should be here. And for the people who are listening to the audio version, it's in the show notes. Did we forget anything, Linda? I don't think so. Good. Then I really want to thank you for spending the time with me on this, on this day, sharing what's on your mind and addressing some of the bigger issues for, for the design field. Thank you as well. And stay safe. Stay healthy. So coming back to Linda's question, what is your most unexpected application of your design expertise? Leave a comment down below and let's continue the conversation over there. If you found this episode interesting and helpful, consider sharing it with at least one other person today. That way you'll help to grow the service design show community. And that helps me to invite more inspiring guests like Linda here on the show for you. If you want to continue learning about effective skills and strategies that help you to build services that win the hearts of people in business, check out this video because we're going to continue over there. See you.