 In this episode we'll talk about the need for service design in China and how it differs from the rest of the world. We'll talk about what kind of feedback mechanisms you can put into place that will help you to design better services and finally why and how you can open up the service design process so that people will see the value and start to appreciate it more. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Slavo 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 the co-founder of the Skoda Auto Digileb in Prague and more recently in China. Nowadays he's helping big corporations to innovate from his own service design studio called Kube and he's also one of the co-founders of the service design network chapter in Czechoslovakia. His name is Slavo Tuleja. The main theme of this episode is based on Slavo's recent experience in China and that is what is the role of service design in China and what can we as the rest of the world learn from that and take away from that. So if you like these kind of interviews, these kind of episodes, make sure you subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already because we bring new videos that help to level up your service design skills at least once a week. So without any further ado, let's jump straight into the interview with Slavo. Welcome to the show Slavo. Hi Mark, it's good to see you. Good to see you again. We've met I think a year ago and brought you Slavo so it's good to see you. Yeah, was it there here? Maybe a bit longer? Yeah, I think it was actually even a bit longer. You were in our first service design, I would say it was service design drinks, we call it back then of the Czechoslovak service design community. So it was great that you visited us and you trusted us at the beginning. It was my pleasure and now it's nice to have you back on here on my side of the show. Slavo, for the people who don't know who you are, could you give like a 30 second introduction? Absolutely. So my name is Slavo Tuleja. Today I would say that I am an innovation designer or a service designer. Most recently, I came back from China where I was building a Scott Alto digital lab, which is an innovation lab of the Volkswagen group. And before that, I worked in a very similar field in Czech Republic. So focusing on building new mobility services, analyzing what are the trends, what people want, what do they not want, and what are the services that might be missing in their mobility life. All right. And now, nowadays, you're an independent service design studio and consultant, right? Absolutely. Yes. I am now back on the entrepreneurial track. It was the track I was on before, before I joined the corporates and the corporate innovation world. And now I had the urge to come back and continue the entrepreneurial direction. You are one of the founders of the Czechoslovakian service design chapter. Do you actually remember the very first time you got in touch with the term service design? I think that actually took me some time, because when I started corporate innovation, back then it was still all about, or at least in our part of the world, it was still all about design thinking, and not even design thinking was so wildly used. So it actually took me quite a long time before I went through UX, UI, and then all of a sudden we arrived at this thing called service design. And then it was like, click. And then it all connects together. And you're like, ah, but this is actually the thing that covers the whole of it. And then UX, UI, it's part of it, or a subset. And then you entered the rabbit hole and there's now turning back. There was no turning back. So Slavo, you just said that you just returned from China, doing an in-house innovation lab project there. That will be the main focus of our talk today. You gave me some really interesting topics to share some of your experiences from being there. Are you ready to kick it off? Are you ready to do some interview, Jess? Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. The topic number one is called perception. And do you have one of the famous service design? So question starters, of course you have. I'm taking the why. So why is the perception of service design totally different in different markets? This is something very interesting for me because when we were starting the service design chapter here in Slovakia and Czech Republic, we also had absolutely no perception of service design. Nobody really knew what it is. And this partly ties to what I have seen in China, that the perception of the need for service design is, at the moment, I would say it's absolutely lacking. So we see something. How did you notice that? How did you notice that? Yeah. Yeah. I think one thing that is giving you the hints is somehow the quality of the services that you experience yourself, that you ask other people about how they experience it, and then the feedback that they give you or the lack of feedback that they give you. And looking at building new services in China, service design is interesting. And I think we will dig super deep into this at a later point. But you somehow get the sense that the focus on the service and the excellence of executing the service, somehow not so there. So if you had to make it black and white, how would you compare the perception of service design in China from your perspective? And let's say Europe. What are the big differences in there? When you look at service design in Europe, or especially in Western Europe, you have a sense that the company or the organization that is providing you with the service or with the value is actually thinking about how to deliver that value in a better way. So you actually have a positive experience of consuming it or experiencing it or going through it. Whereas, I would say in some parts of Asia or especially in China, you don't really have that sense. Because on one hand, you have quite a lot of users coming through. And perhaps that there is still this drive to experience many services, therefore quality is not the number one thing that they would be looking at. So and then if you are empathic enough, then you actually feel that and you start noticing it and then you start digging deeper into it. And then you're like, ah, but maybe service design is not such a hot topic here. What's interesting is that I know that recently there was a service design network conference in I think Beijing or Shanghai. It was in Shanghai. Yes. Yes. It was at the end at the end of March. And I think this could actually be a game changer for the future. Because the way that some developments and some topics are taking up in China, actually this by having the conference there, this might actually spark the interest of many companies. Because if it's presented as a thing which is super hot in Western Europe or in the US, then there might be an organization actually taking that up and trying to spread it as fast as possible. And this is one of the characteristics that you can only see, I would say in China that once there is something that they would accept by seeing it somewhere, then it can spread actually much faster than the natural growth that we experience here or the rather slow growth that we experience. Hmm. So the conference is an interesting thing to help to speed it up. What are some other things that could potentially speed up the adoption or the perception of service design over there? How was it in your corporate environment? Did people find service design interesting there? That was super interesting because I brought it along with me because we have already adopted this methodology back in Czech Republic. So for me it was definitely a way to build the methodology of the lab around service design because that was our task to look at new possibilities of where we could take mobility, what could be the services that we could build. So for us this was a base, but generally yes. If we spoke to people about it, the awareness was not so high. So what was good is that we managed to organize together with Startup Grind Beijing, which is a very active chapter of Startup Grind. We managed to do like a joint service design event where we introduced it a little bit more, spoke about the concepts, looked at some case studies. What I saw personally was that actually service design was much more appealing to operators or the ones who are actually building the service because they are looking for that operational efficiency, let's say. Well get back to that topic, but what interests me what you're saying is basically building the community and of course that's what happened and that is what is happening through the conference. But I'm also thinking like there are probably people watching this episode and they're also in countries where they feel like they are the only one practicing service design. I've literally heard people say that. And from what I'm getting from your message, like the secret to getting adoption and to increasing value perception is basically uniting and creating a community, right? Does that make any sense? Do you recognize that? I think you must build a community because you need to have people who are listening to you are listening to you and who are willing to spread the message further. Because if you come there as someone who knows something or you're the only person knowing about service design, I think it's your duty to show a case study, explain how it could work and explain to people what could be the benefit for them. Because saying I'm doing service design, nobody knows. And this I'm seeing even here and we have done quite a lot of community events and so on. People still don't know what service design is. I think every methodology needs to grow over time. I think in our region, let's say Central Eastern Europe, I would say that design thinking is on the top of the hype right now. Service design still has a long way to go. So I think people need to have these patience and to continue to spread the message if they are the only one. Then it will be two, three. You need to evangelize. It's all about evangelizing and you need to be up for it and you need to have a, I don't know what's the English word, but like a long stamina. It's not a quick money scheme. So perception of service design in China is definitely different from your perspective than it is here in Western Europe. But let's move in. You already hinted upon the second topic. So let's move in into that because it relates to what creates this perception. Let me find the second topic. Let's do this one. The second topic is called feedback mechanisms. That's interesting. Yes. I would go with how much or actually how many. How many feedback mechanisms are enough? What do you mean with feedback mechanisms? If you're a service designer and you're building something new or you're approaching a project where you believe there is some service design work to be done, you need to have a feedback mechanism to actually find out whether the things or the steps which you have taken have had any effect, positive, negative, neutral, any effect. You want to get something back from what you have delivered. And hinting towards this, I think we are in Europe, we're quite used to using feedback mechanisms and people are actually quite open to give feedback if you ask them nicely. This was not so much the experience I had in China. Give us an example. I think examples is the best. So when we were building one of our mobility services and let's say you draw up a service design blueprint and you're going to present how the service is going to work out, what do we see as a vision and how to operate it? Most of the people say, yeah, it looks fine. Nobody will examine the services and blueprint in such a detail that they will tell you this could be a potential conflict space. This could be something which the users might really like. This could be an operational problem and so on. So I would say that generally the need to give feedback is much lower as compared to Europe. I think here in Central Europe as well, people have the tendency to maybe give too much feedback. Maybe not all of it is constructive, but the other extreme perhaps a little bit. So what is the implication that feedback mechanisms work less efficiently from your experience? What is the effect of that? Well, the effect of that is that it makes your job much harder and you don't know whether you have done a good job or a bad job. I think service design is all about iteration, trying it all over again and getting some feedback. Whereas if you're not getting feedback, then that makes your life a little bit harder and you have to maybe try out some new feedback mechanisms. That's what I was pointing to with my questions. How many feedback mechanisms are enough or in order to get something back to improve on your actual design? And is the problem with that the feedback, so let's make this really concrete. Is the problem that asking a question is not the right form to get feedback? Should I do a survey or observe people? Is the problem with the actual way to ask for feedback or is it like the new problem in the other way around, if you get what I mean? Yes, I think you have more options of asking for feedback. I think the ultimate way of feedback which is, let's say, purchase decision, that's good feedback, but it's not giving you much detail. It's a very, let's say, quantitative kind of feedback. This is fine and this works in China. Whereas when you go more into the qualitative way of receiving feedback, asking someone for an opinion, that is the other extreme and that is much more difficult. Then you can actually look for maybe to strike some kind of a balance and to ask for people whether they agree with something about your product or they disagree. So what I'm trying to say is that in the service design process in China or in similar cultures, you are always fighting what direction you take your feedback, because selling something and getting a lot of sales data is good, but you don't know much about what were the thoughts. So this is the challenge, the tricky part. And yeah, I can totally imagine because we are all about getting the qualitative data and understanding why people do stuff and why they don't do stuff and what you also hinted upon, you want to know if it's like the notion of customer experience, like you want to design for good customer experience, and then you have to know if people actually have a good experience. And that is not something that we figure out through sales data. That is something that we need to figure out in a different way. So I can imagine that if you're designing for customer experience, like a restaurant experience, I don't know, you need to have the qualitative feedback, right? That's basically what you're saying. That's exactly what I'm saying. And I think it's probably not on us to judge whether this is a cultural thing or educational thing or something. I haven't been in China for long enough to say that I would be an expert on this. But these are the hints that you are getting that people are naturally not so motivated to give feedback and not to give criticism. I mean, you're probably not going to get much constructive criticism, but it would be nice to at least get some criticism to start you off in your solution finding. Have you, by getting this inside, because like all these lessons from different environments, different cultures, different contexts are always enriching to your own practice as a service designer, have you learned something from this that you thought, well, maybe I can use that over here in Slovakia. I think what is important and what I've brought is when you think of feedback, you should also think in terms of motivation for feedback. And what was important in China was to reward people for giving you feedback. And I think this is what we're not doing so often in Europe because people are naturally more open to give you feedback. But perhaps if we experimented with actually rewarding them, this could be turned into something much more deeper. So not getting a two line response to an experience, but actually having a 15-minute call or talking to someone, actually so connecting with someone. Exactly. So yeah, and when we're talking about rewarding, maybe a lot of people immediately think in monetary rewards are paying, but if feedback becomes like a dialogue, if it becomes co-creation, then that is also a way to reward somebody, actually, right? That's my experience at least. Absolutely. I think in the last five minutes, we discussed it all the way from getting feedback by someone buying something from you, which is amazing at the beginning, but not knowing much, all the way to coming to actually having a co-creation session with someone, which is giving you so much value. And if you can achieve this with a couple of people, it's amazing. But that's also the reward for the other person that he gets to interact on this deep level with somebody else, I think. Absolutely. And also coming to the mass low hierarchy of needs, I think this is also a little bit of a self-actualization of these people that you are actually taking their knowledge and putting it to use and they're able to express themselves in order to apply something on the service which they have experienced. Yeah. So maybe, I don't know, maybe this is a good to restate for the service design community, but maybe also we already know that if we want something from our users, we also should be thinking about what are we giving back? It should be a two-way street. Absolutely. Because we should also give some value back to these people. Exactly. And that's some kind of a reward or self-actualization or just letting them spread their ideas. It's amazing. But let's always think in this value. If I'm getting value, then I can expect something back. Exactly. All right. So we have one topic left and that is also interesting because it links to the first one, as in there is the value perception of the need of service design. This third topic is called on the inside. And I think I know where you're heading with this one. So bring it on. I think I just lost it right now. So when will we let people experience service design on the inside? And on the inside is on the inside of an organization, right? On the inside of the organization, but also on the inside of how it actually works. And I think this is something that you are doing very well by doing the service design show. And what we are trying to do here in our community is to show people how actually these services are being created and designed. So I would say, yes, one thing is to bring it and to show it on the inside of organization. But second is actually to show the insides of how is it actually being made. Because I think some very nice case studies can be shown this way and showing people that services don't just come as someone has a great idea and that's it. You have a great service that it's actually a very long iterative process with a lot of experiments and a lot of failures. And only then you can have a lot of feedback if we can get it. And only then you can have a service which is good. I had a conversation today with Mauricio Manias, who was also a guest on the show. And this topic has been raised a few times on the show. Also it's sort of showing the craftsmanship of service design, right? Yes. How do we actually craft a good service experience? How does it happen, right? And showing, yeah. So why is this topic on your mind these days? Because this is a way that you can actually can get more people in your community. And by getting more people in your community you are then spreading the message. So coming back to the question of service design and the methodology of service design being a marathon that it's going to take you a long time to spread it around, showing people good examples of how it was done is amazing. And you don't even have to call it service design. This you can only mention at the end. You can say, hey, look how we created this amazing airport experience. You show it to people, you let them experience it. And then when they say, oh, this was lovely, you tell them, and this was service design. So I think what our community maybe was not so good at was that we were all only spreading the word service design, hoping that people would understand we should be spreading the good messages of service design and the good experiences of that. Have you found any, so I'm really curious like, have you from your experience at the DigiLab in Prague and also in China, have you put more effort into opening up the process that you applied rather than just showing the end results? Have you put more effort into that? I would love to do that. But as you might know, some of the corporates, you know, you're not allowed to share what you're working on if it's not ready yet. Yeah, but it's not for the public. But I can imagine that internally, like, not just showing that we have like a new service blueprint, but how did we get to that service blueprint? Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think this is super important. This is what I tried to do by doing bi-weekly workshops for my colleagues, where I showed them some of the examples on how to do it. And, you know, you are an ambassador of something that is super unknown. And the only thing that you can do in order to spread this message is to show how you have achieved some things with it. Because, you know, this should be a tool which helps you to get somewhere. If it wasn't helping you to get somewhere, then you shouldn't be using it. It's a really, sorry to interrupt you, but in my mind, it's really interesting that I'm seeing like an a pattern emerge in all the discussions from the last almost 80 episodes. Like on the one hand, we as a community are saying we should put much more effort or emphasis on showing the impact of our work. So what is it that we've actually changed or created? How has the life of people changed? But on the other hand, we were also saying, well, yeah, but we still need to show the process, how we got to that, so that people understand the value and appreciate the value and sort of want to do this more often. That's, I don't know, that's something that I find super interesting. But these are super interesting thoughts, I would say, because I was thinking about something similar. Like what is the problem or what are the challenges of our community when we're spreading this message? And I think partly we have tried too hard to catch people's attention by showing the methodology. So showing the process? By showing the process, yes, but theoretically, right? I think where we should focus more is maybe not talk so much about it, but actually do it and then show what we have done, even if it comes up, it's not a good experience as a failure, but it was still something that you executed. And I think our community talks a lot about methodologies and how important is it to be customer centric, but I think we should be also pretty good at doing it and executing it and then showing what we have done. Yeah, so, yeah, I totally agree. And that is sort of like also being the mantra at our studio, like, have evidence of the fact that you're doing stuff and then talk about it. Like, use a research or field research, do it, like, and then show the evidence that you actually stalked tourists through the city center, just show the evidence because that's the thing that will convince people, right? Yes, absolutely. We were recently here with the team, we were recently doing a research on a clinic here in the city where we come from. And we were in discussions with the local government here and at the beginning, when I showed them the process of how we are actually going to do it, they were like, sure, just do it, guys, we want to see the results. But then when a couple of weeks later, after all the hard work and talking to people, talking to patients and doctors and so on, we came back, showed them the result and then they were like, hey, but how did you get to this? It's interesting. And then it was time to shine and to show the process and how it works and what is the methodology. So I think it's also quite a lot about how we actually approach storytelling or explaining service design. One last thing that we're going to say about this, but I've seen that in proposals that I've been doing lately. I sort of show the service design process, but I don't show the double diamond. I just show photos of the actual things that we're going to do or have done in the past. And that's just immediately like, people get that, people feel that. And that's, I think, what you're also hinting upon, show less double diamonds, show more actual dirty hands. Absolutely. Show the value. Show what you're going to do. Yeah. So like every other guest, you're going to get the opportunity to ask us a question. Is there anything on your mind that you'd like to share with us and have us think about? And I see that you're cheating on a piece of paper, but that's okay. So what is it? What is on your mind these days? I was doing a bit of preparation. Yes. So the question I had to the community was, how do you guys see the response of different industries to service design? Because when we are talking to some industries, let's say manufacturing ones, there is absolutely no response and they are only looking for some value. Whereas on the other hand, if it's more like banking on insurance, they're like, sure, let's experiment with something. So I'll be very curious whether this is something that is only happening to us, whether it's also happening to you, and whether there is some kind of a pattern or whether this is absolutely random across the countries. Interesting. So if I would have to put it in my own words, what are the industries that are sort of most receptable for service design? And what are the ones that are least receptable at this moment? And then do we see some kind of patterns? Interesting. Please do leave a comment people. Slavo, thanks so much, man. It was interesting to hear your experience. We will definitely be continuing to follow your journey and Czechoslovakian service design chapter with your studio. I'll make sure to put all the links in the show notes of this episode for people who are interested to learn more. So thanks again. Thank you very much, Mark. It's great the work that you're doing and bye to the whole community. So if you enjoyed this talk with Slavo, make sure you check out this video because that's the next one that will help to level up your service design skills even further. And if you know somebody who might enjoy the things we've just discussed in this episode, make sure to share this episode. And finally, if you haven't done so already, click that subscribe button so you'll be notified when new episodes come up.