 In this episode, you're going to learn about the big power you have as a service designer and the important responsibility that comes along with that. You'll also learn about how you can become a better designer by building bridges and finally what it means to shape service design, to shape the future of service design in an intentional way. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. I'm Yoko. This is the Service Design Show episode number 98. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design organizations that put people at the heart of their business. The guest in this episode is the general co-chair of the Service Desk 2020 conference. She is the co-founder of the Service Design Melbourne Meetup. Her name is Yoko Akama. The reason I'm so excited to have Yoko on the show is that she challenges some of the dominant forces within service design and strongly argues for a more diverse and inclusive practice. So at the end of this episode, you'll probably have learned about some of your own biases and how those impact the work you do as a designer. Before we dive into the chat with Yoko, don't forget that we post at least one new video a week here on this channel to help to level up your service design skills. So if you haven't done so already, click that subscribe button and the bell icon to be notified when new videos come out. So that's all for the intro and now let's quickly jump into the chat with Yoko Akama. Welcome to the show, Yoko. Hi, Mark. Thanks for having me on your show. Well, happy to have you on all. You're literally at the other side of the world because you're in Melbourne right now, right? Yes. Yeah. And Melbourne's at the bottom of Australia. Yeah. And I think if you would just dig a hole straight through the earth, I would end up somewhere in Australia. Quite possibly. Yeah, quite possibly. Yoko, for the people who don't know who you are, could you give a brief introduction? Okay. Hello. My name is Yoko Akama. I'm a design researcher from the School of Design at Aramite University in Melbourne, Australia. Cool. And in the introduction, I already said something about the service desk conference. What's the current state of that? Yeah. So because of the global pandemic, we had to postpone the conference from being scheduled. It was scheduled for July 6th to 9th, but we're looking at a future date at the current time. And it would be the first additional service that's going outside of Europe, right? Yeah. It's the first time Asia-Pacific is hosting it. So we're very excited. Let's hope it happens. Yeah, me too. Yeah. A lot of thoughts going into it already. I can imagine. Yeah. Yoko, it was quite interesting when I approached you or got connected to you for the show. You had some reservations. You said, I'm not sure if I'm actually the right person to talk about service design. I have a different perspective on it. And then I said to you different perspectives on more than welcome. And we'll talk about that later. But I'm, first of all, interested in, do you remember the first moment that you sort of got in touch with the term of service design? When did you start learning, thinking, and speaking about service design? I think it was when I was doing my PhD. So that was so, you can see my gray hair was so long ago. And it might have been when I bumped into Lucy Kimball at a conference in Europe. And we met because she came to our presentation, something on human-centered design. I can't remember what it was about. And she said, I should meet with Ben Reason at Live Work and interview him for my PhD. And so I think that was 2005, no, 2006. I can't remember something like that. The early days of service design. At least the modern early days of service design. Cool. Yeah, definitely. Like I just said, you have a different perspective on service design, which is really good. And I would love to dig into that with you through our interview jazz format. So are you ready to do it? Yes. All right. We're going to talk about a topic. We're going to start with a topic that's been discussed often in the past few episodes, which is really good. And I'm really curious to hear your thoughts about ethics. Do you have a question starter? And can you show it up? Why? Why ethics? Maybe you can sort of frame this a little bit for us. That's a really big question. But what is ethics in relationship to design slash service design for you? Okay. So I think ethics comes up for me. As you said, for many of your guests who you had on your show. And I would imagine I would like to think for everybody who is designing, because I'm really worried about how design tends to, well, it's really good at telling itself to affirm its own values to businesses and society. You know, so who says no to good design. But I think design expresses certain social priorities and it carries cultural values. And often these values are invisible, but they become inscribed or hard-baked into the design process as an outcome. So I worry about what when design is assumed automatically as being good or it's useful. And whether it's a method or a process or system or product, what it's actually doing. And that's why the question of ethics is always about the why for me. Yeah, yeah. So we had the conversations usually are around that designers are quite positive people. They tend to look at the positive aspects of the design process. And now that the questions and that the topic of ethics is being raised, it's sort of like invites designers to take a step back and also think about maybe the not the downsides, but the side effects of their work. Is that also like the way you're thinking about ethics? Yeah, definitely. I think my worry is partly because service design has become so powerful through its effectiveness. And it's coincided with that shifts in economies from manufacturing to services and the rise of this, the cheaper and the faster accessible digital technologies. So service design has become so much more powerful because it can kind of then span geographies and social cultural boundaries, its accessibility. And so it penetrates into our lives much more deeply. And we might I don't think we quite know the impacts of how far and how deep those values penetrate until many years down the track. And that's what I think we, for me at least, we need to sort of build a culture that allows us to question a lot more of these things before and during our designing. My question would be like that. I think I hope a lot of people listening and watching would agree with that. There's a but they run into practicalities. Like if you're running, if you're doing commercial projects, there's usually it feels like there's little time to deliberate around these topics. Like what have you found? Is that the biggest barrier or is it just lack of knowledge? And how do we cope with that? Yeah, I understand. And I think what seems to be happening, and what you say Mark about the pragmatics being a big barrier, I guess. I think maybe the form of the dominant designing that we have inherited still carries that legacy from the time where quicker was better when and I think when you were mass producing objects, perhaps certain things could have been done that way, in a sort of very sort of cookie cutter way. But I think given that service line now reaches into people's behaviours, how people imagine, experience things, that then requires all of us to slow down to do due diligence in not just the research, but to actually also talk with enough people who may potentially be implicated in the delivery and impact of certain circumstances. And those things take time and those things are additional skills and capacities that the traditional disciplines of design didn't really have before. So we're now starting to see that and the methods and the processes that are coming in to support that. And I think FX is a string that ties it all together actually. So it's always in accompaniment of the actions that we were doing. But in order for us to sort of think about the actions who we speak with, whose values are privileged over others, how we negotiate them, they are very complex. So they're not quite like choosing between materials, the traditional design needs to be, these things are quite invisible and very nebulous. So I think that that demands a different kind of sensitivities for designers moving forward into this space. What I feel that is emerging is that working with ethics and in embedding the ethical discussion in your design process is a fundamental responsibility of a designer. And we're sort of starting to address that now that it's just like if you don't consider your values, your morals, like how you make choices, you're basically not doing good design, which is I think a very positive way forward. And the other thing is that I think a lot of designers struggle around ethics because it's not part of the education. Like we talk a lot about the design process, the methods, but not a lot of designers I think maybe including myself probably have taken the effort to make their values and norms explicit and use that in their design process. So if you don't know what your values are, like how you make choices, it's really hard to do something around ethics. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And I think what also adds a further complication is that if you belong to either the dominant culture or you're designing for a specific group of people. And as I said, service design tends to perhaps go beyond those initially intended users, as we know, because services and digital technology evolve through its use. And so values tend to be highlighted when it encounters difference. So you know certain things matter to you when there is a difference in those values. So it's actually quite difficult to notice what your values are if you're within a dominant culture where everybody sort of shares those things and only start to recognize what those values you hold and even what values matter to you until those things are not sort of quite in a sort of antagonistic way, but in composition of many others. And I think this shift into a diversity or understanding different value systems and being able to accommodate that I think is another challenge that again being brought on by globalization but also how yeah and how and this goes back to the question of ethics that I think personally design the dominant form of design tends to privilege certain kinds of values actually. So things that are bigger, things that are more convenient, you know, cheaper. I would be curious and I'm inviting the people from the community to comment on this. Maybe there are some smart design methods and tools that help us to make our values explicit. Like you said, probably we don't fully see them when we're in the dominant culture. Maybe somebody, probably somebody already has a method in place which helps us to make it more explicit. And if there is, please leave a comment. For now, I'd like to sort of wrap up the conversation about ethics and move into the second topic. Are you okay with that? Yeah, of course. Okay. Because this will be an interesting one as well. It's the topic of bridges. And I see you searching for a good question starter. So let's give it a go. Oh, so Mark, is this like a wild card? Yes, it is. Three dots. It's absolutely a wild card. Okay. So my wild card was a question to you. And you sort of mentioned how you had 98 people on your show. Yes. You probably interviewed more than that, but the ones that's been published would have been 98. I like to know how many people of diverse cultures and backgrounds were on your show. That's interesting. It doesn't happen to me that often that the guests actually start asking me questions, but I'll do my best to to play along. So I think we have to sort of think about what is the, you said, non-dominant culture, right? So people from non-Europe, non-US and preferably non-male, right? That would be like the dominant design culture. I think if I would have to give a number, it may, it's probably between 25 and 35. So let's say a third of the guests were probably maybe a bit more, but 30%, 30 to 40%. And how many of them were from regions outside of Europe and US? Yeah. So that would be for me like the 32 to 40%. Oh, okay. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious about, so the question, well, the question, the thing was around bridges. Yes. One of the things that I'm quite passionate about is how design can, when we talked about this in ethics around accommodating or embracing diversity. And it comes from the premise that I have, but also, I guess, discussions in particular, actually, not in service design, though, but in other fields, where design and many other fields are recognised as being dominated by a certain particular worldview, usually they're called Western, you know, sort of, even though Western culture in itself is very diverse. But I think it's a convenient shorthand that speaks to how certain norms are put into the centre of a particular field. And design is definitely one of them. So I didn't say myself in my introduction, but I am Japanese. And I have, I'm a product of a family who migrated quite frequently, actually, every five years, owing to my father's work situation. And so the reason why I speak the way I do and I now live in Australia is partly because of this quite a mixed bag of experiences while growing up, even though, for me, I very strongly still identify as being Japanese and I think I still associate with a certain social, cultural and spiritual dimensions of Japanese people. Anyway, so what that has provided me with is a teaching that I didn't actually receive in my Western education around the kinds of designing that Japanese cultures have been doing for a lot longer than the short history of the industrial period that are shaped by certain kinds of materialities, well views, beliefs, histories, to become and to be made relevant to that local context and situations. So I am always embodying this identity as I speak to people like yourselves. And my role in my life has been a lot around building those bridges between, it could even be simply around communication. So it's not by accident that you and I had to learn English and its proficiency. It's also not by accident that we had to learn certain other cultural norms in order for us to conduct professional things in international or whatever contexts. And so I am really starting to wonder and I guess advocate and this also ties to the service 2020 which we were hoping to host and we were still hoping to host is how much is still invisible or lacking recognition of design and also service and practices that are not from a particular place. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's that is a topic that's definitely on my mind when inviting guests and creating a show to be a mirror of the global community which the service design community is. It's when I started doing the show, a whole world opened up for me and I really realized that the community is much bigger, much more diverse and colorful than you might see when you look at books that you can buy on Amazon around this topic. So it's definitely something on my mind. And I don't know who mentioned it, but what I like a phrase that I like is that there are different flavors of service design. Like there's a Brazilian flavor and there's probably a Chinese flavor of service design and putting that forward and sharing that story is I think really enriching. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And I might even go so far as saying how there is a lot more. I personally am learning from being exposed to and learning from not just practitioners, but academics, philosophers around what these diverse practices or approaches can teach us. So when I, I guess I'm sort of pushing back a little bit on the flavor notion of it being, you know, like a rainbow color thing. For example, the current condition of the unsustainable consumption that we're in is design cannot deny its role in that. And I also have learned that there are economies that had flourished by actually not taking the land or the resources as a human ownership. And so there's quite different worldviews in which humans see their relationship to each other and to its environment. And again, because design expresses and prioritizes certain values, certain values from a certain place that sees nature as their resource accelerates that it makes it more powerful. And that's what we see through industrialization. Whereas there's other forms of designing that had always has also flourished and created very sustainable economies of trade without that being a result. And Australia is a great example of that. It's 65,000 years of a sustainable and flourishing civilization of indigenous nations. So this is where I feel that there is a lot that regions that where I'm in and living in can even, I would dare to say, lead the way that design can go and enable us all to learn and re-inscribe the way, I guess the dominant design has been talked to us through textbooks. Sure. And what we can then start to shift not just mindsets but our entire relationships to one another and the whole ecology and in looking to shape futures. Shaping futures. And I like your pledge for building bridges and adopting and learning about different world views, which is, I think, really enriching for the design practice. But you said something about shaping our future. So and that's a really good leadway, lead in to the final and third topic, which is called shaping our practice. Do you have a question starter around that one? Yeah, I think you might be one. So I guess it'll be in sort of in this time and for viewers who might be watching this, I don't know, a year later or something, I just want to say how we're actually in a very unprecedented time where the whole world is in the midst of this coronavirus pandemic. And this is, I've never experienced this in my lifetime. And the cultural memory of people having lived through this have mostly gone. So it's teaching. So we can't not think about this basically, that's what I'm trying to say, in terms of futures, right? And I'm trying to think about not not seeing this as, you know, like a really bad thing, even though it's terrible in terms of the number of cases and deaths. But I think it's also a teaching moment or something for us to learn from, in a sense of how it sort of touches on the two things we talked about around ethics and about worldviews is how it's I think we've arrived at this moment because the dominant industries have disrupted ecosystems through mining and clearing urbanizations, the population growth, unsustainable economic development. And it's brought the humans in contact with these species where these viruses had come from. And and there's reports about how, you know, because of the travel bans and people not driving to work anymore, that there's the quality of the air is improving in major cities like the UK and China. And maybe it's not peer reviewed yet, but perhaps this might be a way to think about how we might reduce carbon emissions in the future. And even though I don't think it's totally sustainable for us to all stop traveling. I think it's a question for Service Design to think about because Service Design champions, supposedly, holistic and systemic changes. So what are we learning from this accidental and fearful public experiment? So we can put the insights we learn from this experience back into how we redesign organizations like systems of governance, systems of commerce, flows of information. So we are able to work with key decision makers in each of these fields that we collaborate with so that we don't just go back to business as usual. That's what I like to think about as a what if. And there's no answer, obviously, maybe by the time we revisit this six years, six months or a year down the track, there might be a possibility. But that's something that I think we could we could collectively think about. So are you hoping or expecting that this will be like an incremental change? Or do you hope that it will be a more fundamental change to our practice? I'm going to be erring towards a fundamental change, partly because the disruption has been so significant. And a lot of the norms and the business as usual have been questioned. I can't I can't really imagine people slotting back to how things used to be because how things used to be is not the way we want things to be anymore. We don't want the pressures on the health care system that collapses in this way. And vulnerable people not being able to be supported. You know, these are these are questions that are universal now because of our single common united problem. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm curious, like when we were preparing this interview, you mentioned something about rising above like the individual and thinking about the practice as a whole as a community. I'm trying to imagine what that might be. And of course, that's like the what if question. But where do you hope this what is the compass for our field? What is the direction? That's the million dollar question. I know. But yeah, you're God's feeling. It's like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what yeah, what if so what if let's see, I'm I'm part because of my experience and part because I'm Japanese. I'm, you know, I'm biased towards the power of the collective in a sense that I think collectives can make quite wise decisions. And I don't really know whether service line as a community globally talk about this in a kind of a UN style. I don't even know UN as an organization, the system is also very fraught as well. But it could be ways in which people like ourselves step out of our normal jobs and the boundaries in which we are operating within to think about a collaboration across scale in this sense. I don't know whether that's possible. I also think we could try and prototype a lot of ideas that we generate in our own communities and local organizations and start to share them. But again, you know, there are conferences and having been sort of busy organizing one conferences themselves are quite political as well. So I don't know what platform would be most suitable for for this sort of sharing. Maybe you might need to be something that's online access to all. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe I don't know, like I said, one would be it kind of goes back to the sort of questions we had at the beginning about how do we know what we're doing is the way we should be going is in ethics. And the frame of references we have, again, is sort of bound up by the immediacy of the needs and the requirements of our jobs or and I wonder what it is that we can do to help one another loosen some of those boundaries to have almost like a friend who can advocate with you on certain things for change for really important changes to be made. I don't know how we can lend our support and expertise and influences that way. I don't know. This is me just thinking on this. Yeah. And there are a lot of people listening and watching right now. So I hope some of them are inspired to join you in this thinking, because I think these are interesting and really important topics as well. What do you think, Mark? Well, I feel like I'm in a privileged situation to talk to people like you who are thinking about these things and sort of pick your brain. And then what happens for me is that I start to recognize patterns. I start to recognize patterns among people from various backgrounds, various expertise, various parts of the world. And when those people individually start talking about a specific thing like ethics, then that's a really clear indicator for me that our field is heading into that direction. So I, yeah, like I said, ethics is, for instance, one of the things that has been coming up lately quite often and the importance of maybe having a manifesto or something like taking your responsibility as a designer, bringing that into our field is definitely something that's on the agenda. But there are more. And I hope that people listening, again, will sort of be able to extrapolate their own patterns from these conversations, because I'm watching and listening to this from my own lens and my own background, but I'm sure that if you would listen to 10 conversations, you would see other things. So that's a long answer to your question. Yeah, yeah. And I think I'd like to see whether, because I think you have a lot of influence, Mark, partly through the popularity of the show you mentioned, like 2000 people might be watching it or something. So I like to try and see whether we can calibrate the balance between the 30% becoming maybe 50% or 60% and how partly because it's so easy to fall back to listening to the same people again. And the people I'm inspired by don't often get that opportunity, partly by the positioning that they're in and partly all sorts of reasons. And I would really love to see whether that's possible so that your platform then becomes a place where we would all then be able to learn and have a mutual dialogue around shared concerns. And I would like to extend your call as a call to the community because I'm partially dependent on the people who sort of are brought to my attention. And the more people from diverse backgrounds are brought to my attention that will be reflected in the show. So people, please help me out to make this show even more diverse. So let's see what happens. Well, I've got 30 people I can recommend. Let's go. We're almost approaching episode 100. So after that, we're going to continue for the next 100 as well. Joko, we're entering the final stage of this chat, but I, and I'm really curious, do you have a, you already posed a few questions, but do you have a question for us, the people listening and watching to the show that we can think upon next to the questions that you already asked us? No, but I'd like to sort of, I guess, call attention to the conference we're organizing. Well, the date still hasn't been set, served as 2020. And the, and the theme that we've selected is tensions, paradoxes and plurality. And the reason why those themes were nominated was partly in recognition for the times that we're living and the, and also the acknowledgement and perhaps some of the worry about services are not stepping into these spaces enough to not neatly bound things too much and to sort of expose the, yeah, the tensions, paradox and plurality of in accompaniment that comes with the work we do. If you're watching, we are still trying to aim for a hybrid conference. So if the travel ban continues, we'd really like people, if you're watching this wherever you are to participate via online, we haven't quite worked out the details yet. But the peer reviewed papers are fantastic. And we also had prepared, I mean, in fact, Mark, the people I was thinking of for you to speak to are already on our panel conference. Yeah, so that could be another great way to sort of give another introduction to what their appetite, you know, of what might follow through a conference. And they're really inspiring speakers and practitioners. So I'd love to invite you to participate as and when you can in a dialogue that we're hoping to have. I'll make sure, yeah, I'll make sure to put all the relevant links either on the screen somewhere or down below in the video show notes or the episode show notes. So yeah, if people want to continue this conversation with you specifically, what's the best way to get in touch? I guess email. I'll make sure it's somewhere in there. Yeah. Yeah. We also have a like a Slack service design network thing. Specifically for Melbourne or the general services network Slack? Oh, so the one that we run is a service, a school service on Melbourne, but we've got like 3000 members, which I'm sure is not more. And there's different channels in there that talks about ethics and public sector stuff and whatnot. The link to the Slack channel will be on the screen here as well. So if people are invited. So yeah, somewhere over there. I think we have to wrap this up. Yoko, thanks for sharing really valuable and important topics that I hope that we can keep addressing here on the show. So thank you for making the time. And good luck with the conferences here. Great. Thank you. So if you'd like to be part of SerfDesk 2020, make sure you check out the links that are down below in the video show notes, the episode show notes. If you enjoyed this episode with Yoko and found the topics that we've discussed interesting and important, make sure to grab the link and share it with just one other person today who might enjoy it as well. That way you'll help to grow the service design show community. And that helps me to invite more interesting and inspiring guests like Yoko for you here on the show. If you want to continue, we can do that. Check out this video because that's the next video that will help to level up your service design skills. So click over here and I'll see you over there.