 In this episode, we'll be talking about what you can do to accelerate the adoption of service design. We'll talk about why we need to start thinking about service design as a way to design new business models. And finally, we'll talk about how policies, government policies can help to grow the supply and demand side of service design. Here's the guests for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, my name is Christian Basen and this is the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you do more work that makes you proud by designing and delivering services that are good for people and business. My guest in this episode is an author of several books on design. He holds a PhD in design leadership and is currently the CEO of the Danish Design Council. His name is Christian Basen. The main theme for this episode is how do we create the conditions for service design to grow, both on the supply side and demand side. So in terms of education, but also educating our clients. So that's what we'll be talking about. If you're interested in topics like this and would like to see more, don't forget to subscribe to the channel because we bring new videos like this at least once a week. So that's all for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Christian. Welcome to the show Christian. Thank you for having me. Really interesting to have you on the show. Somebody with so much experience, so much expertise. For the people who don't know who you are, there might be a few out there. Could you give like a 30 second introduction? Yeah, so I'm the CEO of the Danish Design Center, which is a government funded body to advance the value of design in both for business and society. Before that I led MindLab, which was the Danish government's innovation team for about eight years. And before that I was a management consultant. I've done a PhD in service design and leadership and I'm also the author of a number of books on the topic. Super, a lot of knowledge here in this episode. So I'm excited to have this conversation. Christian, this is called the service design show. And you wrote a few books on service design, but do you actually remember the very first time you sort of got in touch with the term? Yeah, so when I started with my interest in government innovation and what drives that and the idea that maybe there's such a thing as starting with citizens rather than starting with the system or with the professionals when it comes to creating better services for people. And so that was sort of my first introduction and I came across a service design project. At least that was called that from around 2001, which was run up in the UK, part of our government funded program there. And it was a company that I didn't know at the time. It was called LiveWork that had carried out that project. That was the first case example, I think, that I came across of service design. And from then on, well, when first you start looking for it, then you see it everywhere, right? It's a rabbit hole, yeah, for sure. Yeah, cool. So because of your current role and all the background that you have, you shared a few really interesting topics. I shared some question starters with you. Are you ready to do some interview, Jess? Yeah, let's go. Let's go. Topic number one drum roll. There it is. The scaling of service design. Do we have a question starter and can you show it to us? Yeah, I think what we need to discuss is this one. It's basically how far can it go. Okay. How far in which sense? Right, so in the last decade and a half when I've been looking into design and service design, I've really seen a spreading and a scaling of the application of service design across industries, across sectors and domains. That's quite amazing. So as I mentioned, my own entry point came from the question about innovations in government and in public services. Currently the last five years I've worked much more across business and industry and I'm seeing how practice of service design become increasingly relevant in sectors where you may have not imagined it. I've seen it in people creating solutions for offshore drilling. I've seen it in pharmaceutical industry where you have innovations happening around R&D and of course the materials you put into drugs, but also service design as an approach to enhancing patient compliance and how do customers actually understand how to use the drugs that they buy. And of course I've seen a massive scaling of service design across the public sector at all kinds of levels from local governments to national governments. I've seen the blending of service design into issues around nudging and behavioral insights and so on. So I think the question becomes really how far could service design go? What's the potential of scaling service design into new industries and sectors? And I don't really see where it might end. I think it's a really pervasive question. I think one of the episodes we discussed the topic that every business is basically a service business nowadays. Yes, exactly. So if you're running a business, if you're running an organization and you want to design that you're basically always doing service design, right? Exactly and I think that's one of the great insights and actually you can say that physical products, if they're any good, they perform a service. So ultimately it's a question of value creation and the interaction between something we put into the world and then actors, people, organizations using it. And so service design becomes a really, really powerful perspective. And ultimately in my own work, also in my academic work, I've taken good advice from a lot of people and I actually generally talk about design and when I talk about design, I talk about how design has this bandwidth in terms of everything from graphics and products to services and systems. But in many ways I think the glue that binds it all together you could call it service design because it's all about what happens in the interactions and the flows and where people move in the world and interact with what we put in there. And so it's really a powerful perspective that's useful in all kinds of areas of designing. So if the question, if we sort of go beyond how far can we scale it and we come to the conclusion that it's almost endless, the next question maybe becomes how can we accelerate the scaling or what is currently maybe limiting us, what is your perspective on that? Well, a couple of things and I think that's in many ways my day job is that the big question, how might we scale and accelerate the scaling of this practice because we know how valuable it is and we know how it's a differentiator for business and other organizations. So how do we accelerate the pace? I think there's a lot of dimensions. You might even talk about an ecosystem, right? One obviously is terms of education. How do we educate future designers? And still, at least that's the case in Denmark, service design has only been marginal in the traditional design schools, the art-based design schools. Service design has maybe been more clear in the engineering schools and even in the business schools because it's somehow, it's better with the notions of value creation in business or value creations of technology. But no matter what you look at at the design art-based design schools or you look at the other schools, we do need to have deeper, more reflective practices, educate more students. We need to have more professors of service design. We need to have a stronger research environment. So that's one part of the ecosystem. Another part of the ecosystem obviously is the awareness in the business community and the awareness in the public sector of the power of service design. And here, I mean, we do surveys on this in Denmark and we know that about 40% of Danish companies have no idea what design might mean to them in any shape or form. And so there's a huge potential to bring awareness and understanding and then also a demand for design to business. And that's a major question. And part of that is also that when we say design, people do tend to think about products and physical things. Art effects, graphics and products. And so there's a job to be done in terms of expanding the notion of design into services. And as I said before, we also talk a lot about business models and systems. Of course, they can only be crafted and created through, I would say, service design or design research. So that's a big job. And then I would say, and we can maybe talk about that later, but there's a question of policy which means what are we doing from a government side to stimulate across all of society how service design could be accelerated and advanced. That could be around making it easier to invest. It could be around funding programs and grants and so on. And there's a part of that ecosystem too. We'll get into policies for sure. If I sort of summarize your answer to this, it's like we need to work to accelerate the scaling of service design. We need to work on both the supply side, like that's the education, but also on the demand side. It makes sense of course, but that's how clear it is. We need to have better service designers. We need to have people who are able to practice this. And we also need to have people who want this. And a part of the supply side, when we talk about the design community, it's not only the next generation of designers, obviously. It's also a question of the designers and the many designers already in the labor market practicing design. How do they maybe continue their professional development? How do they get access to some of the tools and approaches? Because in a way you could say that service design and by extension design thinking is in a way making more explicit, some of the more implicit methodologies and approaches that traditionally trained designers have always used. So for many designers who think of themselves as industrial designers, for example, service design actually is quite intuitive when they get to it, but it's maybe helpful to get some of the more formal methodologies and tools up front. And so there's maybe, I think there really is a professional development challenge or the design community to bring service design much more front and center as a more core practice in the field. I always like to sort of describe that as the traditional design practitioners sort of need to learn a new design material. Like they've been working with a certain design material that can be graphic design or wood, I don't care. And now you need to start designing with relationships, interactions, processes. And in that context, of course, we can't underestimate the role of digital and the role of new technologies in general. And so I think it's both a question of opening up also for new types of materials really to work with, but also as a whole shift in perspective. Again, maybe it's implicit in much industrial and graphic and visual communication, but the whole notion that we're really about designing it for interactions and we can then use a lot of different ways and tools and so on of doing so. You're hinted upon the second topic, so let's just move into that. And the second topic, it's called new business models and will make sense in a second. So we have a question starter. Yeah, let's do this one. What if? And the reason I say that is that, and I've been writing about this actually, one of my books, it's called Shape the Future, is really about this issue, right, that what would happen if we viewed the object of designing as new business models? So we sort of move the focus of attention from two-dimensional graphics and away from three-dimensional products and even four-dimensional, you could say, services, to what are the systems and the models that shape value creation? That's not independent, of course, of service design. It's actually closely interlinked. But you could say, put it this way, and I've seen this happen in so many different contexts and projects, right, that you start with end users, you start with service journey mapping, you start with insights, you start with crafting, how might you create more value for people? And then you go backwards from there and you open up your perspective and say, actually, this raises questions about the entire way in which we configure resources to be able to do this, and then you're suddenly in the domain of business models. And then you scare your clients. Yes, well, not only your clients, but you might also scare the designers, because designers maybe also lack a language and an educational background and maybe they don't feel comfortable in that space. But to me, this is the big game and one game is to try to design, discrete, minute, service flows and tweak and twist things here and there or even get serviceization into a product space. But the big game that is really, really interesting to CEOs and decision makers in business and on the other side also in government these days is in a time of technological change, disruption, more globalization, new types of consumer patterns and demands. It is really those questions. Well, new questions about sustainability as well. It really becomes how do we configure what we do so we create more value in the interactions with our end users. And that's a service design question. But that means that service designers have to scale up also in terms of thinking about the implications for business and business leaders have to understand that service design could actually be the trigger or the key to understanding how to change their business model. So I think there's a really, really powerful point here but connecting those dots has really not necessarily happened enough yet and that's maybe also when we say scaling, maybe it's really making service design into a true practice of business model innovation. I completely agree and I think this is related to the conversation where designers say we need to see it at the table because we want to increase our influence but that's not happening a lot. There are a few exceptions but it's still not happening a lot. Of course the both sides are sort of to blame here but what could we do because we only can influence ourselves as a service design community to, I don't know, increase our influence, be taken more seriously? Yeah, well there's a schism there, right? There's some paradoxes and dilemmas. I mean my own experience has been that quite few designers, I mean educated professionally trained designers have appetite for the types of conversations that take place in that space, the business model space, the strategy space. Many tend to prefer to stay in the crafting and in the shaping of beautiful both product services, graphics and so I think in some ways we need to build the next breed of designers that are more comfortable in this space. This could be both through education but also through professional development because it's hard enough to bring design in from the business perspective and convince CEOs and decision makers why design and designers are important but if the designers aren't really interested and have appetite for it or feel uncomfortable or would rather actually stay in their studios and do what they think they do best then this won't happen. So I think we're talking about a type of a new breed and honestly that might be the potentially positive fallout from the purchasing right now from the big management consultancies of design agencies, the McIntonsies, the Deloitte and so on and of how big corporations are also purchasing and integrating design teams within their structures, right? So this could be potentially positive fallout but again I think the jury is still out a little bit on whether this will happen, right? So I think we should really decide moving into that strategic level. Yeah, if we are sort of really critical we could ask the question like will the design slash service design community ever move into that space or should we expect the business community to actually start adopting service design because they are interested in business models they are interested in value creation are we up for it? Not on it, I really do. I just think that and from, I mean my own background, originally it's political science I did my PhD in design I understand both sides I understand sort of the rational and analytical logic from the business community and government but I also understand the passion and the drive and interest and the love for design when it comes to shaping and making beautiful aesthetic experiences for people and I think it's in that mix we need to bring things together I think it could come from both sides I'll just be a little bit wary that if design gets co-opted so much by strategists and business model gurus and business development teams in corporates and also in consultancies whether we are going to lose something really important I think we are going to lose the edge that design brings, we are going to lose the aesthetics we are going to lose the sensibilities we are going to lose the human empathy and the insights into all types of different aspects of the human condition that is not natural and is not part of the curriculum nor the language of business people and government people so I think it's risky and I would love it if we could find ways where we could bring in hybrids you could say people who have a balanced perspective people who are coming from the design field into organizations and corporates and find their space in a good way and that's maybe the role we play in the Danish Design Center also to talk with business leaders about how to create that space it's maybe just my tunnel vision but for me it comes down back again to a few things like we designers need to be interested in solving bigger problems working on bigger challenges just include new things like new business models and the other thing is again it's all about what do you consider to be your design material because a company, a business model there are just bits and pieces in there that you can learn the aspects of and start to craft it can be just as much a craft as it's working in graphic design absolutely and so I agree that designers need to have appetite to work on bigger problems and more complex problems more abstract problems sometimes as well but designers also need to be really interested in more impact because positioning yourself close to decision makers that's always been where designers have had most impact also in the industrial design where the industrial designer was invited into the C-suite and maybe not as a director but as a partner with the executives and the best, most design driven companies today in the world are also companies that have you know, top designers very, very close to decision making so it's a question that you can have impact and the potential for designers to make more of a difference in the world not least when it comes to those big topics of sustainability, durability and our planet's future and so on so I think that's the opportunity and we simply need to get more designs in there and then the other point you're mentioning about what is then the role in this sort of more complex organizational setting for service designers and here it's say that organizations are worlds on their own which need new interactions internally between employees and management, between different divisions between different skill sets and different silos of expertise and functions and so on so there's a massive potential for service design as really that organizational capability to craft and change how we work in order to make a difference to customers and users so and I don't think that many designers see themselves as being able to have that powerful role in many ways that might be the future of HR you know, that design is really needed there and designers need to maybe be in alliance with human resource departments as partners in sort of organizational change that has been also that is sort of definitely a pattern I see coming up based on the last 10, 20 episodes where we are getting into the position of shaping organizations or at least playing a part in there and the powerful part here is the way that service designers can be in the business of shaping organizations is not by doing it for the organizations, but it's by empowering people, empowering leaders providing them with tools, processes ways of working which really becomes a bottom up involving and engaging process of people in organizations designing their own work and that's really the power of service design where we're creating the conditions we're facilitating the change basically exactly, exactly let's move on to topic number three because it's sort of really into links considering facilitating change and the third topic is politics and policies are a way to facilitate change and do you have a question starter again? Yeah I think maybe this is going to be the one how can we and by saying how can we what I mean by that is a couple of things I mean one which is the role of the Danish design center is how can we at a national level from you could say from the political level decide if we want to advance the practice of service design in our nation or in our region or even in a level like the European Union for example or a level of the United Nations and the reason I'm saying that is that if we have now seen extremely convincing evidence that service design is key to creating more value for people and organizations and it's a differentiating factor for business but also at a national level why wouldn't you then invest even from players in stimulating in accelerating and scaling in the adoption of service design more broadly in society now that's of course investing in education and research but it could also be investing in programs, efforts that accelerate open up the eyes of business leaders and government leaders to what service design can do and so that is I think where the most some leading nations around the world have been investing and are still actually doing it increasingly so you know the UK, Singapore and certainly also Denmark has recognized that we need to invest in design and increasingly in service design and bringing that into a policy context so this is the question and I think many more countries around the world and even also international organizations how to they have to find out how can we how can we develop policies that accelerate use of service design policies and design always sort of feel like not things that go that blend really well but I'm interested what have you seen over the last years what are some ingredients in policies that make for effective policies to stimulate the adoption of design and what are maybe also some things that are don't make effective policies right so one part of it is is leadership right so it's simply articulating that this is really really important we missed the last 10 seconds we missed the last 10 seconds so the last part the most important part is leadership yeah political leadership which means that political leaders state and communicate to the public this is really really important so last week the Danish government launched a new policy on design and creative industries and four ministers went out and said this is really really important design is a differentiator for this country we need to invest we need to create new programs we need to stimulate the sector and so on so that's one example another example is the prime minister of Singapore who recently went out and said that Singapore as a nation cannot make the next evolutionary leap as a country without design thinking slash service design is the prime minister to say to the nation and you know people got to start asking themselves what is this design thing that he's talking about and is this important to us and maybe we should be curious about this so I think that's part of it the other part of it is the instruments of policymaking right so what are the instruments one can use from soft instruments like branding country or branding design communicating more but also to even regulations around intellectual property it could be investment programs right now in Denmark we are running a government funded program to bring service design to 100 SMEs smaller medium size enterprises and it's simply funded by the state we call the program sprint digital but it's basically we are organizing it where we match design bureaus, agencies together with SMEs to run very fast intensive design sprints to help them become more digital and more value creating so that's another example of sort of very hands on programs that can stimulate the adoption and also give many more case examples of how design can make a difference yeah so leadership makes a lot of sense and also building the proof because that's right that's the other thing that you are interested in and also I think that's one very fundamental thing and now again this is the political scientist in me speaking that businesses aren't really happy with risk businesses generally actually want to reduce risk and when designers come in and say hey let's explore the future let's find all new insights let's transform business models or redesign your services it actually can sound slightly risky and so we are finding that by bringing in a little bit of government funding to a de-risk by bringing in someone like us who can say listen we know a lot about this we know what you're doing we have other examples we can match you with other leaders in business that have tried it before don't worry by the way we also know who are among the best designers in design agency so we can help curate a good match that can sort of de-risk the experimentation and the exploration of what could service design do for me in my business so there's a role there to sort of de-risk at the same time as we actually invite in companies to take more of a chances or to experiment more and accelerate their business development so there's a role there to play if you would start if you would become the prime minister of Hungary okay let's say that Hungary and you could start all over and design put some policies into place to simulate the design community the adoption of design in Hungary what would be all the things with your experience from now you do right so apart from sort of changing quite a lot of other things in Hungarian politics which is solely needed I would start thinking about this ecosystem so an ecosystem consisting of investments in education building better design education with existing schools that are available building better design research business advocation programs like I just mentioned to stimulate the adoption of design in business I would definitely invest in some kind of capability like a design center or like a design promotion body you could say that really would exist to be sort of the executive there I begin to look into what are the what's the design DNA of our nation what's the DNA we're building on that characterizes how we in this country go about designing and how can we make that more explicit we did that in Denmark we sort of mapped the Danish design DNA which we of course know as something about some beautiful aesthetics Nordic style but has lots and lots of other social and collaborative and human centered layers and making that explicit for country I think is powerful as well to just be able to see the forest for the trees and have a common language around what's our unique approach to design those would be some other things I would do that I have conversations with business leaders about their approaches to design and also take my own take my own medicine as we say I would begin to adopt design into government and service design into how the public sector creates its services and how it interacts with citizens because that is the best way of learning actually to bring it up close and say if we're preaching design to business let's practice it ourselves and show how good service design can also transform government makes a lot of sense Christian sort of there's always a chance for the guests on the show to you've answered a lot of the questions we had but is there a question that you have for us as a design community the listeners and the viewers of the show anything that we can think about yeah I think there's one sort of overarching question we really haven't addressed so much but I'm really curious about and in my sort of day job I see so much focus on technology and digital including you know purely sort of digital service journeys and sort of that whole aspect and so I'm wondering where do you see the future of service design as a profession right so in that sort of digital context what does a service design in the future need to be skilled at or what are the challenges that service designers are facing what are the challenges service designers are facing I think that will be a long list in a digital context right in a digital context that's good all right Christian I'm going to put you on the spot because we didn't discuss this up front but I also did it with Lara and that worked out pretty well you've written a few books would you be interested in giving away a signed copy to one of the people who comments here absolutely I love to I brought a couple of them with me so there's actually even an opportunity to you know take different ones there's this one and there's this one this is the one in Danish so it has to be a there's this one which is design yeah I'm reading them out for the people for the podcast all right so we'll we'll do it backwards again so there's leading public sector innovation and there's the one this one in Danish yeah it's form fremtiden leading public design yeah and design design so so actually the offer is you can pick and choose which one and then I'll be happy to sign it awesome so basically the assignment is leave a comment and everybody who comments within a week after this video goes public makes a chance to win one win a signed autograph of one of your books yeah Christian thanks a lot for making the time and sharing what's on your mind in this episode well you're welcome and really a pleasure and it's fun to explore these topics with you so don't forget to leave a comment if you want to make a chance to win a signed copy of one Christian's books and if you want to level up your service design skills even further check out this video that is going to help you to do that and click that subscribe button over here to see more episodes thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing the next video