 Hello, I'm Lauren Curry and this is the Service Design Show. In the Service Design Show, we talk to people that are shaping the service design field, about the current state of the industry, exciting new developments and challenges up ahead. In this episode, I'm talking to Lauren Curry. Lauren is the co-founder of Snook, the very first service design agency in Scotland and she has been named on the list of 30 most influential women under 30 in Elle Magazine. Welcome to the show, Lauren. Hello, thank you. It's good to be here. Great to have you, Lauren. It's been quite a while since we actually spoke and met. And it was in Amsterdam. Yeah. I'm very jealous of all the cyclists going past. I love Amsterdam. So, where are you now? Are you still in Scotland? I'm in London right now. I moved to London in January. So, yeah, South-East London. Exciting. Lauren, do you recall your very first memory of service design? Yes. So, I first discovered service design when I was at art school. I was studying product design degree. And the man that had designed my program and was the director of my course brought all the students together when I was in first year to tell us that he was leaving and he was starting a new job. And his new job was to run the live work office in Newcastle. So, then I asked lots of questions about who live, work, where and what service design was. And from that moment on, I was extremely excited and drawn to this process. And I then had a lecture from Professor Mike Press that was all about design against crime. And he was talking about designers working with the home office to create interventions and design products and services to prevent crime. And that, again, just let a huge passion in me for how we can use this process to do good. And I was probably 18, 19 years old then. Wow. And service design hasn't let go since then? Yeah, we've been friends, space friends ever since. Lauren, as we believe in co-creation in service design, we're also going to apply it to the show today. Let's explain how it works, right? I have a few cards here with a topic written on them. And you also have a few, in this case, posters, right? Can you show me one? Sure thing. What if? So you have a few question starters written on your posters. I have a topic. I'll show up the topic and you'll show up a question starter. And then it's your task to answer the question that you all created. OK. Right. So let's just jump right into the topics, Lauren. And I'll pick one. And I think this one is close to your heart, at least. Let's start with the topic of design education. Can you pick a question starter that goes along with that? What do you make out of that? What if? I'm not sure. So I can't. What if design education transforms the how designers work and the role of designers in society or transformed the skillset of a designer? Or? Well, I would say you pick one because you have to answer it. So I think my things I'm thinking about around design education right now are designers clearly at a stage where it has the most influence it's ever had in history before. It's finally been taken serious by the business world, by the tech world, by governments all over the world. And my big question is, what does that mean for design education? All right. How might we design designers who are fit for purpose but also who are going to challenge the status quo and who are going to push boundaries and shape new roles and spaces and contexts for designers to really thrive and have impact? So I'm really curious around how traditional universities are tackling that and also alternative schools like Hyper Island and Chaos Pilots General Assembly. I spent the last year at Hyper Island designing their first ever master's program in service design. And one of the things that I really took away from that was the increasing demand for meaningful work and the number of students, both young, mature, older students have a wide range of backgrounds are really looking for social, they have a very strong social conscience. Yeah. And I think that design education has to, yeah, it's the biggest challenge we face as designers. It's a design problem because there is a lot of unemployed graduates out there. There's also a lot of designers who are making useless stuff that nobody needs. And I'm really excited about how we can tackle that. So what do you think is the biggest transformation that needs to happen within design education? I think industry and education need to work together as one. I think right now there's a bit of us-in-them culture where one blames the other. I get really frustrated when industry blame education. And what do you mean with the industry? The agencies, the- Agencies, practitioners, businesses. And by education, I mean universities and schools and colleges. And they have to work together as one, which for us and for us who are practitioners, that is about giving up time to be a mentor. It's about sharing our process and our learnings online. It's about making ourselves findable to the people who are out there who are inspired by us and want to know what our journey's been and how we got there. So having designed a course around design education at Hyper Island, what were the reactions of students? So the student, there's been a huge increase in student numbers. Lots of students really wanted to come and study the program. And a lot of the feedback we got was around the fact that the model is very based on experiential learning. So all of the projects are real. There is a live client brief. And it's designed in a way that they get as much exposure to industry practitioners as possible. Our reflection of mine is that there's definitely attention with that and gaining an academic qualification where you have to tick boxes. And so how do you create a learning environment where prototyping and learning by doing and making mistakes is really celebrated, but yet you want to achieve an A. And both those things attract different types of people. Yeah, that's really, I think it's a big challenge for education. And I'm really curious if traditional education will find an answer to that. And I think again, it's about all of us working together, which I think is very easy to say, but very difficult in practice because universities are having to rethink their business model, they're having to rethink their funding streams. And this is causing conflict and tension and competition and things that make collaboration very difficult. And I'm not quite sure what the answer to that is right now, but I think we need to find on. Exciting times for people who are in the educational field and trying to cope with this. Yeah, and I say that often to the students that I work with. It feels like the most exciting time to study design and to be a design student because the perception of design is changing really rapidly. Yeah, they have the opportunity to shape design education as they go along, I would say. So, okay, Lauren, are you ready to move on to a second topic? Sure, yeah. Okay, let's touch upon this one and this is around product consumption and maybe the promise of service design leading to less product consumption. Do we have a question starter that goes along with this one? How much? So what would be your question? So I think I would ask the question like how much is services design really changed at scale? How society consumes stuff? And what is your answer to that? So I think it's when we come back right to the basics of what service design is and what its purpose is and why it kind of naturally came to be out of other disciplines that it kind of evolved from. One of those core things was about to reduce consumption and to move us away from a product-orientated society to a service-orientated society. You know, things like zip car and car sharing schemes and tool swap workshops, Airbnbs, Uber, the things that reduce the products that we buy and we consume and change our behaviour around our relationship with physical goods. And I think the reality is that that's not happened that much and I think that's something that we should, our community should be questioning and critiquing and figuring out is that something that we still aspire to? Is that something that we want to work on? Is it something we are working on? And what does good look like? What will the next five years be? Because I really want the brilliant people I know who work in this space. These are the types of people who I want to be designing the next Facebook and designing the infrastructure that's going to really fundamentally make a difference to things like climate change. And I'm sure that I know that that is happening in small pockets. But I would love to have a conversation about how we do that at a much wider scale. So would it have to do with the fact that service design as a field and as practice is still very much evolving and people are trying to find, figure out their spot within the field? I mean yes, but also no, because I think that will be an excuse forever. And I think that's something that all disciplines face at some point or other, and it's not really the right question to ask or the right thing to focus on. I think what we should be focusing on is the how, but how do we do this? My question would be what would be needed to actually accelerate this process towards less product consumption and more service designers actually designing for less product consumption? What would be needed to accelerate it? So I think one immediate thought is service designers working more closely with engineers and industrial designers and people who make very tangible physical things. And again, I think that does happen. And how we make that happen more, again, design educations one by engaging with engineering programs, computer science programs and really building up those relationships so that when that becomes a part of the design education journey and something that students get exposed to very early on to understand what the role of a physical product in the world is today and how that's changing. Because I think obviously digital is in a massive context that has to be explored and taken into account as well. So I think closer collaborations and one way we're going to start to be taken seriously by those guys is by getting much better at proving our value and measuring our impact and having strong quantitative data around where our process adds value. We'll get to that topic in a minute, Lauren. I think it's also interesting if we have really strong, more really strong case studies from the maker industry. What happens if you collaborate with a service designer? Because I think you look at business models, the opportunity is there. The opportunity is huge for the maker industry to actually invest in services. Yeah, for sure. And there's lots of, you know, in London, there's a make-a-versity in Scotland. We've got MacLab and these guys are, you know, they are all designers. They embrace the principles associated with this process of, you know, being very, having a strong bias towards action and, you know, really thinking through the context of the things that are made in the customer experience that people have when they engage with their service. So I think it's ripe for, you know, more relationships and new ideas. Well, maybe the design community needs to collaborate more itself before we can actually bring this to the public, you know, reaching out to the maker industry, more collaboration. Like you said, with the engineers. And things like, you know, the Internet of Things community. Yeah. I know people who definitely are, you know, a bridge between that community and ours. And I think even the fact that we have siloed communities is, you know, that's natural and always going to exist. But I try really hard to join dots across all those communities as much as I can. Building bridges across design communities is, I think, a skill we also need very much at this phase. Lauren, you already touched upon this topic and let's just dig in a bit more and touch upon the third topic about proof and I guess this is the proof of the value of service design delivery. So do we have a question started that goes along with that one? I wonder if you haven't used yet. How can we? How can we? Yeah. How can we what? I think how can we get better at articulating our value? How can we do more things that become mainstream and have, you know, have a very measurable impact? And how can we get better at convincing other disciplines why this process is important and what value adds? And that's, you know, everything from proving that it creates very solid business opportunities in a commercial sense, proving that it can help create social change and the number of people it reaches and in what way those people are touched and how their lives change. What kind of proof are you thinking of in this case? What kind of proof would we need? So I think, again, it comes back to the collaboration like working closely with people who are experts and measuring impact and evaluation. That's, I think, a responsibility of our academic community as well is to really raise the bar on that because I, you know, go to lots of coffees, conversations, conferences, there's lots of great people doing this work but there it still feels fluffy in lots of places and I think that's not because we're not trying but I think we can't settle, you know, it's looking at things like, you know, Spotify and just the actual scale of that product. You know, I would love to see things like that coming out of this process in our community. So not stopping at the moment we've designed something but actually articulating what the impact, what the actual impact is of what we've designed and delivered. Yeah, and also being open to the actual, the process that we use as well. So how can we work with, you know, psychologists and behavioural economic experts to understand what a prototyping process is and how that's different from a process where there's no prototyping and what difference does that make and how does that make people feel and what difference does it make, you know, three, five, ten years down the line? I think we don't want to get into a world where designers fill in Excel sheets and make graphs and charts. So what do you think is needed or where can we get inspiration to articulate our impact without getting into those, well, very statistical and analytical things? Well, I think that's our design challenge is we need to, I mean I don't know what the answer is but I also think that, you know, numerical data is what it is and shouldn't be avoided and it reminds me of how, you know, I meet a lot of students who talk about not wanting to write and hate, you know, they hate writing, they're terrible at writing, it's to be avoided at all costs and I think we are guilty of doing that with numbers and data sometimes too and I think to be taken seriously in the world we need to embrace both because there's no getting away from them. Again, coming back to the first topic I think design education should and must play a big role in there. And I think it's not about becoming experts in all these things but it's about working closely with people knowing where to get that and really learning from other fields learning how other disciplines do this stuff. Cool, Lauren, there is also a question that you probably as a teacher got asked a lot by people who want to get into service design aspiring service designer what would be your golden tip for them? What is the tip you give people that come to you and say I want to get into service design? To design a service, just go out there and do it and that can be everything from spending the afternoon in your local coffee shop and then redesigning that service to working with a local business to working with an imaginary service you just have to do it, use the tools practice the methodology, try stuff out and show your work, show your process invite others into that and just yeah don't wait for opportunities to come to you because you have to go out there and find them and I think this is a very experiential process that you learn it by doing it. And if you would have to pick a service to redesign first as a starting service designer where are the clues? What kind of service would you redesign? I would tell them to redesign the service that makes them most angry so the service that has caused pain to somebody that they love has made them lose lots of money has made them lose time something that really gets them like this is not good enough it needs to be fixed I would start there. Redesign a service that makes you angry? Yeah. Alright, awesome. Lauren this is also your opportunity to ask a question to the people who are actually viewing this episode is there a question you would have put in? Yeah, I would ask them how can we so at the next services I and meet up conference if we all have to bring somebody from a very different field so I bring a journalist, you bring a scientist and Mark Stickdorn brings a musician how can we do that how can we talk to people who are different from us more and talk less to each other? So who would you bring to a next service design meet up? Who should we bring? Who isn't in the community already that we should invite? Awesome, Lauren Thank you very much for your time and you're having given us the opportunity to tap into the things you are thinking about You're very welcome Lots of luck in London I hope you do great things there and keep pushing the service design field and challenging design education Thank you very much, I'll try my best What are your thoughts about the topics we've just discussed with Lauren? Also if you have any suggestions on who we should invite next to the show be sure to let us know down below in the comments With the service design show we help you to stay one step ahead by talking to the people who are actually shaping the service design field If you enjoyed this episode and like to see more interviews with service design pioneers subscribe to our channel and be sure to check out some of the past episodes For now, thanks for watching