 Hi, I'm Patty. Hi, I'm Kristen. And this is the Service Design Show. I'm Marc Fontaine, and this is the Service Design Show. With the Service Design Show, we help you to stay one step ahead by talking to the people that are actually shaping the service design field. My guests in this episode are Patty Hunt and Kristen Lo. They are the co-organizers of a service design conference in Hong Kong that will take place in September this year. They've done projects throughout whole Asia, including China, Vietnam and Indonesia. For the next 30 minutes or so, we'll be talking about topics like how is service design in Asia different from the rest of the world, about artificially intelligent services, and about the lack of urgency for companies to adopt service design practices. If you want to fast forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide in the description, or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. Welcome to the show, Patty and Kristen. Thank you. Thanks Marc. Awesome to have you here. This is a debut because we haven't had two guests on the show simultaneously yet. Well, we hope it works out. We'll see. Let's just start off by saying you just told me that you're organizing a conference in Hong Kong about service design. Tell us more. That's right. Yeah, we thought the time was right to actually have a conference dedicated to service design. I'm not sure if people will know too much about the region, but it's not as much of a well-known concept here in Hong Kong and in the region. So we kind of thought we might not want to be too early with this. So we sort of sat on it for a couple of years and then this year we felt the timing was right to actually say, you know, let's have the conference. So yeah, it's at the end of September. End of September. End of September and it's a two-day conference and we've got a couple of familiar faces who I'm sure that you've interviewed before, including Marc Stickton and Adam St. Lawrence and Lauren Curry. Yeah. And we're really excited to have them come over for it actually. It's a bit of a coup for us and lots of local practitioners and lots of really interesting case studies actually we've got. So if you want to get your finger on the pulse of what's happening in service design in this part of the world, then this will be the plex to come. Wow, cool. And where can people find more info about this conference? Thanks for the leading. They can find... We've got actually a Facebook page and also a website. So the website's just www.servicedesign.com.hk. All right. Yeah, and they'll be super early birds or early bird to get still on sale, I think, by the time we... Yeah, by the time this is out. All right. We'll put a link up there because it sounds really interesting. Will the videos or presentations be online after the conference or is that still unclear? Yeah, they will be. Yeah? Okay. I thought it was... I just made it clear. We'll see you after September. Okay. Patty and Kristen, you're not from Asia or at least not from Kong, I guess. So I'm really curious. What was your first encounter with service design in general? Yeah. You go first. Okay, well, yeah. Look, my first encounter with service design was actually through the Global Service Jam's courtesy of Adam and all of his work there with that as well. I actually even thought that Jam was involved the first time that I showed up to a service jam. I knew so little about service design. So from there, I've kind of, you know, that's what's gotten us to meet each other as well and that's what's gotten us started in our own businesses and got me into service design as well. So that was a super formative moment, definitely. And for me, it was around probably about 10 years ago when I was... when I first sort of started in this area which was in user experience design. There were two people at the company I was working for at the time and they were Sue Zingram and Megan Hayes and they mentioned to me service design and I thought, oh, that's interesting. So I kind of just attached myself to them pretty much for the entire time I was at this company and learned as much as I could about it because I was just quite fascinated about its relationship with UX. And now you're still here? And now I'm still here. Exploring new boundaries. Exactly, yeah. It's been an interesting journey. All right. You've seen a few episodes already and I hope a lot of people that are watching also have seen or listened to a few episodes but let's explain the format briefly for the people who haven't seen it yet. So what we'll do is I have three topics that you pointed me to. Printed here on a stack of papers and you also have a stack of papers, right? Okay, can you hold them up? And your stack is called the question starters. What we'll do is I'll pick one of my topics and you'll pick one of the question starters and you'll have to answer your own question. Okay, sounds good. Yeah, sounds good. So let's just dive right in. All right, let's just start off with this one right away and it's called service design in Asia. Can you pick a question starter that goes along with that one? We can. Let's do, I'm going to ask you this one. I'm going to go with how much. So Patty, how much service design is there in Asia? Okay, so I don't think there's as much service design in Asia as there is in the rest of the world as we were chatting about earlier. I think that it is when it starts, I think it's gathering momentum and I think it's getting a lot of momentum now and I think it's really about to get a lot of service design in Asia. And I think because of the sheer scale and of places like China, I think once it starts, you will see it absolutely leap probably a lot of the other hubs of where service design is more well known. Purely because it's a different context and it's a different situation here. So I think, well, I would say there's not so much right now. I think that there is about to be quite a lot in the next few years. What used to happen for the leapfrog? I think that just because I'm just talking about China in particular, there is such a different business dynamic there. It's fiercely competitive. It's interestingly innovative in a way that probably we wouldn't necessarily recognize as Western people as innovative, but it's innovative in its own way and it absolutely, that coupled with that highly competitive context and that willingness to try and experiment and get things out really fast, I think that will accelerate innovation to a point where it will actually like experiments will be done and forgotten about at a far greater rate than potentially we've seen before. So have you seen any big differences between the services you have practiced in the rest of the world compared to Asia? Yeah, do you modify? Yeah, I think the big thing for me here is that the difference that I see in the opportunities for service design locally versus outside of Asia is that when I look at Europe, the U.S. and Australia, I think that service design these are largely functional economies. The power is on, you drink the water out of the tap, you're not going to kill you. So everything you do in service design is usually about delight. It's a layer on top of something that works and about making it even better again. What we have here in Asia is we have economies that are in the midst of shifting from being mostly product-based to being mostly service-based and they're getting a lot wrong in that process. So you have this thing pop up that I call service seizure, which is where a service just doesn't work like at all. You pay TV contracts and things like that. You just literally don't even do some of these services. So I think that's the opportunity here is just literally doing functional, really operationally focused service design because these services have to work because here the bar is so, so low that if it takes me three weeks to change my address for the local bank then that bank isn't going to get disrupted by Bitcoin or anything else. They're just going to get disrupted by a bank that can do that in two weeks or one week and that's not particularly low barrier for someone to jump over. So I think competition will kind of play that out a little bit. What is holding back service design right now in Asia? Why is it still lagging behind? I think there's quite a few factors at play. I think one of the major factors is the education system here is quite different in that the focus is very much on factual learning and what do you sort of call that? Yeah, it's like retention of the data rather than thinking critically about some people. Yeah, it's not so much critical thinking but there are changes being made now. There's a lot of people working in this space to sort of bring that layer but because design service design as a discipline does require a challenging kind of mindset which it's all generally speaking but for instance Chinese kids going through the education system they're not really taught to challenge they're really just taught to it's a very hierarchical thing the teacher knows you just learn what you're supposed to know and repeat back so I think that needs to change quite a lot more before you get that sort of real design mindset going and I think what else is at play? That will take a generation so I can imagine that the first drive of service design will be coming from a company style instead of people that have graduated from a university I can imagine companies just want to accelerate this they're all starting to build their own internal teams around this and I think that talent absolutely is the throttle on pretty much everything that happens here not just talent in the service design space but just talent generally someone asked me the other day when will design thinking take off in this part of the world and I said well I'll settle for thinking taking off in this part of the world before we worry about design thinking because we literally do have that far to go in a lot of cases so it's going to be a real challenge but yeah I think the competitive dynamic here is just going to open it up so much more quickly. A lot of the talent in this part of the world what people tend to look for like the people who are working in our field is people who are brought up here and then may have gone and got say their education university degree somewhere else they might have gone to Canada US and then come back to Hong Kong and they've kind of then got that sort of different perspective and it's a more I don't know it's a more worldly view they've got that critical thinking layer they've kind of they're the ones that are sort of highly prized as practitioners here so I think that's only going to continue yeah I think there's another interesting phenomenon here that I've noticed about and this is to the point about how different it is here as well it's difficult to explain how different it is but also how different the differences are between all of the different cultures and countries here and I see it play out a lot in the language and the thinking that we use around organizations I think that we forget a lot of the time that an organization and a corporation as a structure it has a very particular cultural root that came from Europe and so I think in Europe and the US and Australia you kind of see a very neat match between the social values and the public spaces and the intellectual spaces that we have in an organization and so you tend to see that the narrative is a lot more about ideas and things are driven by this conversation around ideas and values whereas you come here I think that organizations typically the first interactions they've had with a lot of countries in this part of the world have been in that sort of colonial period and they were typically quite violent and quite negative and so you don't have a very neat overlap between the shared sort of cultural values that people have and the places they go to work at and the way that they're required to work in those places too. So I think if anything that slows it down slightly but it also makes a bigger case for designing organizations as a whole. What I was just thinking is we're talking about service design in Asia but it's the same like talking about service design in Europe for me service design in Scandinavia is already different than service design in the Netherlands so I can imagine that there are huge differences in Asia too right? That's absolutely right. For me I look at we've done a lot of stuff in the Philippines and I think the Philippines is you're going to see some of the best designers in the 21st century come out of the Philippines because I feel like they have such an incredibly just natural talent for empathy people that just seem to be unbelievably interested in what each other are doing very willing and able to put themselves in each other's shoes very high natural level of emotional intelligence and so the work that we've done when we do it in the Philippines we find it takes off so much quicker as opposed to something like mainland China which has its own pluses and minuses but they're very very different pluses and minuses absolutely. Yeah it's amazing just how much of a difference just a positive mindset can actually make to our kind of work as you probably know like we've seen different audiences or different people that we work with across the region and like we call out the Philippines because they you know it's just such a positive experience all the time and it's like they're really hungry for it and they really embracing of it and very positive they're just assuming that what it's going to do is good and whereas you don't have to spend as much time convincing people that this stuff works they will kind of give you that benefit and let it let it go more so whereas other countries you might have to spend a lot of time you know getting the facts convincing people you know just building the case to even try this in the first place and that's kind of a little bit it's quite difficult I find that personally quite difficult to do because you know I'd rather spend my time trying something and doing it rather than convincing or you know trying to get to that point where we're actually going to do something well it will be leading by example I guess if some countries can show that this works and what the impact is hopefully others will follow right it's definitely we have more to talk about so I guess if people want to know more about this topic just go to the conference absolutely and I just want to say about the conference we have actually spent a lot of time getting really good case studies from different places around the region so we've actually got stuff from Taiwan Korea, Singapore Hong Kong, locally Philippines so we are looking to give that variety and the diverse perspectives is something I think people would find really quite interesting to see how this stuff slays up in these different countries and I think that in itself is quite fascinating okay guys we're moving on to the second topic and it's one that hasn't been on any of the previous episodes I'm really curious what you make of this and it's about artificial intelligence services what is the question starter that goes along with this one okay well I'm going to take the asking of the question because this is Kristen's particular interest so I will ask the question I will ask when will artificially intelligent services become quite well known when will people know what they mean sure well I guess the short answer to that would be sooner than everyone thinks but I'll preface that by explaining what I mean by the term artificially intelligent services first one of the things I noticed that one of the things that got me into service design and also starting to stitch a really close relationship between service design and user experience design was I'd noticed that pretty much every touch point that we're working with when we do service design is either being touched by digital or just being consumed by it and I've seen this happen more and more and more and I think we're at the point now where you're seeing this trend from you know product based economies shifting to being service based economies and then once you're a service based economy you start being consumed by software as Mark Anderson puts it and that consumption of all of these different touch points by software that's kind of creating this structure I think which can now be consumed by artificial intelligence a little bit more and so what I've seen in my own practice here in this part of the world is that we're getting a lot more a lot more examples of this popping up now where we're seeing different different levels different sorts of artificial intelligent products start to interface with service experiences and the effect of it is that... Could you give me an example? Totally totally so you know in Manila I'm no stranger to the call centers there I get to visit them a lot and just as a sidebar if you've ever spoken to someone in a call center and they're from the Philippines I can tell you what it's like there they're you know extremely friendly people very smart at what they do typically when they're calling when you're speaking to you on the phone they're managing about 12 to 18 different interfaces on this on this tool that they're using well they talk to you while they sound interested and concerned about what you're talking about to them so they're good at their jobs but at the same time you know that's not always an ideal experience when you have to call up a call center and interact with the human being you know sometimes they're not helpful sometimes the systems don't support them what we're doing now actually is literally there's been examples of software intervening in this process now and starting we're having artificially intelligent agents start to represent themselves either through voice or text as intermediaries for a company and they're taking over some of that customer interaction and in doing so they're actually proving to be quite good at it as well so when you have an AI that sits behind a call center that might normally take 5000 calls a day or something like that it knows every one of those calls it was on every single one of those calls it's reflecting and learning about what went right what didn't go right and so it tends to get a lot better a lot quicker than any of the human counterparts that sit behind it and you know in the long term I think that's a that's a really dangerous thing because when you look at the long term because it could be quicker than we think right like you said yeah I think so I see this I see this stuff having a major economic impact within as little as 10 years absolutely we're already seeing it now in the Philippines and I think the Philippines is kind of a really good case study in what's going to happen to every single country in the world because this isn't just about smart people silly people it's not that it's literally every single task that we do as jobs is being beginning to be consumed by this stuff and the Philippines just happens to be in the unfortunate place of having most of its economy being driven by tasks that are previously automated whether it's work outside of the Philippines doing work that's going to be automated in another country or BPO workers inside of Manila who are doing a lot of work that that's going to get automated and removed as well they're going to get really just crucified economically because of this stuff and that that's the future that's pretty much coming for all of us and I think we need to design our way out of it sooner rather than later because it's coming definitely and this topic hasn't come up on the show and I guess that's for reason do you think HR is more open to this or is there more need for this or I think this is there's a couple of reasons I think one so open is a good word that you used there I find that the constraints the complexity and the appetite and the competition that you find here in this part of the world really drives some very nuanced and advanced usage of technology generally so your average consumer let's call them in China is probably one of the most advanced digital users in the world they pretty much interact with all sorts of different technology the firewall means that everyone has to have quite a high baseline level of knowing how technology works because we're all trying to get in and out of it all of the time so that does drive a lot of the interest in this sort of stuff but also things like messaging applications and people being able to do more and more with them so WeChat is a good example of this. WeChat as a tool is the swiss army knife of living in China even as a foreigner you can get by in China just with WeChat even if you can't speak a word of Chinese it will do everything for you so you're seeing all of these different touch points start to get aggregated into single sort of interactions that people can interface with and maybe right now it looks like a messaging app but it won't be like that necessarily in the future with all sorts of interactions so I think the other thing as well is we've got a really interesting scene here locally at least in Hong Kong for robotics artificial intelligence as well we have some of the the world's leading thinkers on it which is great and that kind of drives a lot of the progress here for that as well so where do you get your inspiration around this topic that's a very good question for me I get inspiration around this topic because like Kristen said there's some of the best brains in the world right here in Hong Kong and Hong Kong in many ways is like a small town even though it's a huge city it's these people are kind of accessible so you can meet them you can talk to them about what they're doing they're kind of like I just don't feel like I would have had access to these sorts of people if I was still in Australia for example it's just that there is sort of a lot of I guess access to the people to talk to directly about it and hear from them what they're trying to achieve there is more of a community on this topic I think there is I think there's definitely a lot of interest in it there's a lot of people who will go and meet and talk about it in person and I think there's a bit of a culture of like workshopping this sort of stuff here as well alright artificial intelligence services I hope we hear more of this because it's really interesting it hasn't popped up a lot in the service design community yet I think you will I'd expect it to we've got one more topic left and I guess this one will be yours to answer but Kristen you have to come up with a question that goes along with the lack of urgency okay so what I'm going to ask is this one how much lack of urgency is there around service design well okay so that that question that topic was specifically here in Hong Kong and the region because there is a more of a lack of urgency around service design and design thinking what we do I guess one of my frustrations has been that lack of urgency so for example large corporates we've had several engagements where or potential engagements where it's just hasn't been urgent or necessary to take action or they haven't felt the need that they need to take action on this stuff so when we're talking about artificially intelligent services that to me should be a sort of a case for taking some sort of action some sort of experimentation perhaps some sort of like let's see what this can do for our business what is the opportunity here but I don't see a lot of that happening and I think for me that's one of the major frustrations in the region I think people are maybe just a bit more risk averse here or maybe they don't think it's going to happen as fast as it's going to happen but whatever the reason is that's why in fact we have decided to give the conference that we're holding later in this year the theme of urgency could this have something to do with the perspective on customers in general compared to the rest of the world I think to the point earlier as well about organizations and the heritage of organizations as a concept and what that means differently here when you take a structure like that and you put it in what is normally quite a hierarchical culture you find that customers tend to fall pretty low on that pyramid it's hard everywhere to sell service to zone we all know that it's hard to do it everywhere definitely it feels harder here because even admitting that the customer exists seems like a heresy in a lot of situations it's like they are they just don't exist on anyone's radar and say why would we design for them, why would we even serve them why would we sell to them, why would we do anything for them because they don't exist and a good recent example actually of that was Hong Kong government recently had a problem with their bins so the current bins are sort of these round cylinder orange cylinders and they've got quite a large opening on either side for the rubbish and it was noticed that despite this fact there was still rubbish piling up on the outside of these bins there's a lot of just crap everywhere on the streets around these bins so the Hong Kong government has decided just without any research or without any analysis or any just insight I guess into the problem that they were trying to solve they've just redesigned the bins to have a smaller opening and the rationale for that is to get people to be more targeted in putting their rubbish in. Well ain't better when the hole is smaller alright okay and what happens and of course there's been a rather big backlash from that a lot of people from our community here in Hong Kong are saying well see look this is a prime example about why we should be paying attention to this stuff why we should be more human-centered why we should acknowledge that users and customers exist but not only that also get to the core of the problem I don't think the problem what we're trying to solve there is people's ability to get rubbish in I feel like there's another there's another whole layer of problem You need these kind of case studies not the ones that succeeded but the ones that failed right? Yeah well we do need in a way we need more of that but in another way the culture here is quite different in there there is a fear of taking these sorts of experiments and it's not we don't really have that culture of experimentation that we need so I think we've got ways to go before we can kind of crack the code on that one I think Well I mean you kind of see that as to the relationship between government and innovation there was a good example again recently here with Tesla so there's a lot of Teslas in Hong Kong the regulations typically pretty favourable for them but one of the departments in the Hong Kong government recently decided that Tesla had to remove the calendar app from the software had to, had to remove the calendar app otherwise you can't drive your Tesla here so what they gave was that they determined that there was no immediate reason that you need a calendar app in a car and so then of course it needs to be removed that what they've missed there I think is the probably fairly obvious point that going from A to B usually is very closely tied to where you're going and when you need to be there all of which is tied to a calendar but you kind of have to go through these sorts of discussion points and you will have very authentic Hong Kong experiences when you interact with the government and you sort of routinely ask to do the impossible for go the obvious for those sorts of things. That said we sound like we're bagging the government a bit here but that said we do actually have some we're speaking to some departments in the Hong Kong government and they are, they do actually they're talking a lot about service design to be honest they are there's a new department called the Innovation Technology Bureau and their remit is to just basically bust open some of these silos and start introducing service design and design thinking across the government and sort of stop some of these sort of waste of money kind of activities that are going on so there's progress but it's it's you know there's a lot of stop-start sort of stuff that goes on It's still in the early pioneering stage it's one I'm getting back from you just in comparison like we're both from Australia and I would say coming here was a little bit of a shock because we thought just where you come from you just think the rest of the world is exactly the same in it's maturity of a practice and we were quite shocked that even a user experience design was not so well known and to me that's been around forever so here it's still like user experience design what's that so you kind of and let alone something more abstract like service design you sort of have this way of talking about it you start with service design and then you gradually go down to I make websites I have a question related I guess to what you're saying and it's the question I'm asking everyone on this show and it is as people approach you with the question of you know I want to get into service design do you have a tip where should I start what is your most valuable tip for people that want to get into service design for me I think it's especially in parts of the world like this where it's really not like a mature sort of baseline for everyone to play to I think you have to get really comfortable making a market for yourself and by that I mean you have to you have to almost use language as a design tool so don't don't obsess over what is user experience what is service design what's the difference how do I know what the difference is don't worry about putting silos and boundaries around things there is endless opportunities to do service design where Hong Kong is a great example we don't make anything here we don't mind anything here literally every single dollar that circulates in the economy is coming from services so anything you're doing even remotely close to this space is going to involve some aspect of service design whether or not you can get someone to understand that service design is a thing and that it needs to be done is almost beside the point you can tailor the language that you're using talk in the language about what they value and then just do the design anyway and you can still create a really good opportunity for yourself yeah we have we had a social mixer we had service design drinks a couple of nights ago actually and we've been really growing the community we had about almost a hundred people turn up I think around about a hundred people and that compared to when we started that community four years ago is like that was just basically you and me service design drinks stink so your tip Betty would be to get involved in the community so I get asked that a lot that question a lot at these social mixes now and my tip is to take what you know so for example people know user experience design now and I say you know start there start just you know do a course do a you know there's lots plenty of courses around just you can teach yourself or do a formal course user experience design is a great place to start go into an internal team get a mentor just learn some of these basic human centered design practices methodologies processes mindset and then keep coming to these events because this community now is over 2000 strong it we're all talking about how to advance the practice how to get people to understand what we do we're always talking and evolving the language around it so it's a combination of things it's like you have to have a job so start somewhere like you start an established field and then slowly infiltrate guys this is your opportunity to ask the people who are watching listening to this episode the question what would you like to ask them when are you coming come on we want service designers here yeah we really want them so when are you coming and please make the answer soon yes I would absolutely second anyone coming through Hong Kong even just the one day two day stopover I would say give me and Kristen a call we're always happy to meet new service designers we always will we will try and probably convince you to stay here or move here because we want we want to just build them on the momentum that's happening we know the demand is going to be here soon and we already know there's a whole bunch of people from the rest of the world who are fascinated just as fascinated as we are with this region and yeah so it's definitely come visit us and that wasn't a question but why haven't you contacted you already curious what people will answer there was an awesome interview with two people that I haven't done before so I think it really worked out yeah a digital high-five for me too thank you for your time guys and giving us an insight into what's happening in Asia and I hope we'll be hearing a lot a lot more about that great, no worries at all Mark thanks Mark, thank you very much bye bye so what are your thoughts about the topics we've just discussed with Patty and Kristen do you think artificial intelligence services will take over let us know down below in the comments with the service design show where we help you to stay one step ahead by talking to the people that are shaping the service design field if you enjoyed this episode and like to see more interviews with service design pioneers subscribe to the channel and check out some of the past episodes for now thanks for watching and see you next time