 I'm Cameron Tonkenweis and this is the Service Design Show and this is episode number 198. Today we welcome Cameron Tonkenweis on the show. As a highly respected educator Cameron has been shaping the service design field for over the last 20 years. And today he says it's time to stop. It's time to stop eroding expert services for the sake of lowering costs and increasing revenue. Why? Because the desire to replace human knowledge and expertise with yet another chatbot is just unsustainable. It's doing more harm than good for customers and businesses in the long run. So what's the alternative? Well Cameron makes a case that we need to start rebuilding supportive services and the economies around them. Don't worry, we'll get into details of what expert and supportive services mean later in the conversation. For now you just need to know that supportive services recognize and value the wisdom that's embedded in lived experiences. There's just one small problem. Our clients aren't asking us to rebuild supportive services as we just said. Clients mainly ask us to do the exact opposite. All the human elements are being removed from our services and they are being increasingly automated and digitized. Of course with the hopes to increase efficiency and gain short term benefits. So how do we break this cycle? We need to show that there is an alternative future and that it's a better one for all of us. What that alternative future is and how do we communicate it in a compelling way? That's what we're about to find out because in the upcoming chat Cameron goes in depth into what exactly expert services are being eroded and what the painful consequences are of this development. How we can bring back the appreciation for lived experiences into service delivery and show that it pays off and which tools we have at our disposal to give our clients the confidence to move into this direction. During the conversation Cameron shared a great story about how a bank suddenly realized that it's not just in the business of storing our money but also needs to be in the business of helping people relocate as you'll hear this surprising insight at the bank was triggered by an unfortunate disaster. The big question is whether we can also unlock these insights proactively. It is very practical yet thought provoking story and I think that you'll enjoy it. So let's turn the volume up a bit give our full attention to Cameron talking wise and I'll catch you at the end for the closing reflections. My name is Mark Fontaine and you are listening to the services I show. Welcome to the show Cameron. Hi Mark. Nice to have you on. You've been on my list for quite a while. That's exciting thanks I'm honored to be chatting to you today. It's a great podcast I think very necessary. I think our community needs more chat, more critique, more conversation, more maturing. That's what we're trying to contribute here and that's what we're going to try to do here as well today in our conversation. Cameron for the people who don't know who you are and your career has been ever evolving. Could you give us an insight into where you are today? What are you doing? I'm currently speaking to you from Sydney Australia which is Gadigal land, the land of the Gadigal language group, the indigenous population who never ceded this land always will always be always is always will be Aboriginal land. I am currently the professor of design studies at the University of Technology Sydney. I've had the great privilege of being in North America teaching at two institutions sort of five years ago for 10 years. I was at Parsons in New York City and I was at Carnegie Mellon University before that but I've always been an academic. I worked for a sort of independent think tank called Eco Design Foundation in the 1990s but ever since then I've been in formally university employment but a lot of the work that I do is service design research and we don't do that academically we do that in an applied manner so I do somewhat practice as a service designer when we're doing research projects. Carnegie Mellon, Parsons, classic schools for service design for sure. Cameron you have a long history with service design and the other question that we always ask here is do you know the first time you sort of learned about service design do you have a memory I have a distinct memory of coming across Birgit Marga's kind of little pamphlet book on service design that she had produced while teaching at Clone International School of Design. I was looking for service design. I was doing a lot of work in sustainable design and the work at that time this was early 2000s really 2000, 2001, 2003. A lot of the work at that time was trying to think about how do you dematerialize society how do you reduce materials intensity how do you make sure our lifestyles are less heavy with less churn and so a lot of people were talking about how you do serviceization how you shift to service economies and as someone speaking from design I was interested in design based change towards those service economies in the name of sustainability but service design wasn't really a thing at that time and then I or not a thing I was aware of and then I remember coming across Birgit's booklet and thinking ah it is a thing it's it's a thing that people are starting to to think and talk about. I went to a John Thacker conference in 2003 a Doors of Perception event in Delhi in India and I met the two people who were setting up live work in the United Kingdom and they said oh yeah you know service design they'd come out of the interaction institute in Navraya and they were now founding a service design firm so they and engine were beginning to create UK based service design so then I thought oh this really is a thing now and that's two decades ago can you imagine yeah that's why this beard is gray now thanks thanks for sharing it's always nice to get a little bit of origin story Cameron to get to know you as a person next to the professional a little bit better we've got five questions for you to reply to as quickly and briefly as possible are you ready yep all right finish this sentence the thing that always makes me smile is oddly stand-up comedy I I am a bit of an addict for a good stand-up comic uh Stuart Lee in particular with these kind of anti-capitalist rants a lot of them get cancelled I think quite deservedly so it's always a bit of a worry but I find in a weird way it's it's sort of anthropology it's its observation and I do think that you can learn a lot about the nature of social relations between people so it's not only just like actually making me laugh but I actually find it always quite intriguing and and and worth considering as a kind of research source I think Edward de Bono mentioned that humor is one of the most important or an important ingredient in creativity absolutely absolutely yeah yeah there has to be and that enjoyment is not just visceral it it's the enjoyment of discovering new things it's the enjoyment of suddenly seeing a connection that was playful and sometimes that connection makes you laugh and then sometimes that connection is a piece of insight which is the moment at which you go aha so yeah but I do find myself oddly distracted by stand-up comedy I have to say all right uh question number two let's see if we can pick up the pace the most important quality in a friend is reliability just always being there I think it's it's very important that no matter their circumstances or your circumstances they they are present and they show up and they they give time so and I think we look for that reliability in things and not only in people and it's not always there all right the book that has impacted my life is Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry is an English literary professor I call her a kind of philosopher of literature the final chapter in the book is about a kind of philosophy of why we make things artifact creation and the way it's about seeing pain in other people but wanting that pain to be gone and the frustration of not being able to do anything to make it sort of drives us into creating artifacts that can help and it's just a really beautiful book it's a life-changing book fascinating um well added to the show notes for sure um question number four is what is your hidden talent my hidden talent is pissing people off um I I I don't think I'm doing it but I am definitely doing it so I have a capacity to unintentionally alienate people and it's very problematic because it really gets in the way of the sorts of things that I'm trying to convince them to do so it's not really a skill if you've been pissed off by our conversation today you'll you'll get a time I'm sorry to everyone I'm pissed off I'm very sorry I promise you it's not intentional all right and the fifth and final question Cameron is the world our world needs more service designers is a really cliched answer but I think people who understand social relations and understand ways of creating social relations between people which is how I define service design I think we need that right now there are a lot of people who've given up on sociality on institutions on organizations we we need people who understand how to create new types of social relations right creating new types of social relationships Cameron when I was reading through the notes you shared with me um prior to our chat now the thing that came up for me was that we need to think and act in service design beyond just services can you explain that a little bit more I think if you just said to somebody what is the service section of the economy what are service jobs they have a very particular understanding of what that is and I think a lot of service designers their bread and butter is designing that type of service um as I said just then I think services can better be understood as ways in which strangers collaborate ways in which people who don't know each other are helped to help each other um and it's not just the provision of service to a customer but it's the customer participating in the creation of of value between two people and I think service designers have a lot to bring to how our societies do that stranger collaboration whether it's a cooperative uh whether it's a formal organization or an informal organization whether it's government um whether it's ways in which uh people can be welcoming of immigrants and difference ways in which people can begin to change their lifestyles ways in which people can actually begin to modify their the values that they they think they live by um and I think that is actually what service designers can service design can sculpt can help create and uh how would you describe the current notion or perspective on service design apparently we're not there yet where you imagine a hope wish we would be so where are we today I think we are too much of a service industry I think we wait for clients to come with problems that we solve I think we are not entrepreneurial enough I think we are competitive agencies who are trying to win work uh and then do one-off projects hopefully get the client back again but um I just cannot see enough collaboration I cannot see enough alliances I cannot see enough people creating opportunities for change and creating opportunities for service designing and not only for themselves but for others so I think we need to start to become much more of a collective force for moving societies toward more equitable and sustainable futures uh and much less people just waiting for the perfect client to walk through the door who is um who is we and when you say we need to be a more collective force who do you foresee being there uh so I'm referring to the community of practice that are designers um which would stretch from strategic designers uh through to product designers and include service designers I think part of my concern is that a lot of service design has been yoked into and under digital design uh and it's become a kind of subset of that um and so yeah that we is an appeal to people to be more assertive about what different service design can make and to begin to ally with other people who are committed to that project of creating new social relations fostering new opportunities for people to begin to collaborate as strangers so I'm appealing to a we that I think could exist uh doesn't quite exist at the moment it's often more in activist and not-for-profit space uh than it is in agency-based service design how would you imagine this to look like like in the ideal scenario if you could sort of shape and craft our world our community what will we have that we don't have right now I think it would be something this is a terrible analogy but it's sort of a go-to I think it would be something like um doctors without borders or engineers without borders uh and I don't mean it in the sense that the projects exist in the global south and these are opportunities for the global north to to suddenly do a small bit of ethical give back I mean it merely in the sense that it's an alliance of people who use service design skills and expertise and insights to find opportunities for change and to begin to lead that change um who are not as I said waiting for clients to create the opportunities for them to do the work but are actually going and initiating projects so um I am I would want an alliance of service designers who are committed to bringing about uh these kinds of changes uh in their own societies across different societies uh not necessarily you know in in um less privileged circumstances but actually sort of deprivileging their own societies and committing to that so it's halfway between a community of practice and a political organization um and it's definitely something that would have a you know a strong ethical mission yeah you mentioned the word activist I think that resonates with me and uh when you use words like alliance that really strongly resonates with me um yeah and taking a short sidestep uh from this one of the things you um shared with me is that you feel that the service design community is vastly undereducated I see you smiling and I it's a provocative uh statement so I would love to go into that can you share your thoughts so there's there's a kind of just a very straight pragmatic reading of it which is that a large percentage of people who call themselves service designers or have service designers their job title do not have a design education um and have possibly only done a short course in a type of what I would call UX version of service design and you mean with formal education like the classical yeah yeah yeah if you survey the population you'd find that um I think possibly even a majority have not actually done a let's say a degree in service design if they have done a degree in service design it's almost entirely postgraduate degrees uh and then so you're now a smaller population if you kind of took this and said okay well this many have only done short courses and this many have actually had uh formal training um of those half of them have probably pivoted from some other degree marketing or business or um coming from anthropology uh the number of people who are doing postgraduate service design but have done undergraduate design and are now service designers is a really small minority of uh service designers out there now that's not a good measure I don't think um it's the only one so that's why I said that's the first pragmatic measure is just to say I think service designs are undereducated formally in that way but I think that's not necessarily the case I think people who are self-taught people have done a short course people who are well experienced I mean not that they are undereducated not because they're lacking formal qualifications but because I don't see a community of practice engaged in ongoing professional development in a really rich and critical way I do not see service design being a community of practice that celebrates critique that celebrates analysis of failure that is wanting to learn and wanting to share there are bits and pieces people tell stories on podcasts there's a conference served as and then the the ISDN conferences and there are bits and pieces obviously there is some but I think given what I think is the importance of service design I just don't believe there's enough that there needs to be a lot more both formal and informal maturing of the practice have you do you have any guesses or assumptions why that could be because like we said at the start it's not like it's a new community it's a new field but then again we're into this over two decades so apparently something's going on yeah no no so this obviously is the case that there is there's long a lot of demand and it arose you know as a profession because it was needed but the economy a kind of you know to use academic jargon the neoliberal economy of the last 40 years has only needed a very particular type of service and so people have been designing services that delight customers and are more efficient for the provider on the edges they're more inclusive they are not what Shoshana Zuboff called the support economy they are not rich services in the main they are not rich services delivered by people to people that enable people to to develop whole new practices shift the nature of their businesses reorient their lifestyles I think we could be seeing a lot more of that type of service design and that requires I think a lot more sophistication as a service designer what kind of sophistication I think you need to understand a lot about the nature of social interactions beyond just things like cognitive biases and behavioral nudges you need to understand different ways in which people have collaborated over history different cultures of collaboration you need to understand a lot about cultural difference different rituals different roles people play I think you know if you kind of just ran through the history of 20th century anthropology and sociology you'd find 20 or 30 concepts that I would hope every service designer knows and yet I'm constantly frustrated that they don't so even ones that are directly relevant emotional labor ideas of the presentation of the self from kind of Irving Goffman ideas of different types of everyday communism from Dave Graber I just think there there is so many different models of social interactions that are beyond cognitive science that service designers need to be familiar with and drawing on for inspiration whenever they come across a project is it because these models or frameworks I'm curious why they haven't been popularized yet as like if they would be useful and helpful in the day-to-day practice of service design if they would lead to better I don't know commercial results people would have adopted them by now I'm going to assume they would and so I think that's exactly the issue that they they don't look profitable according to a current mode of doing business which is about increasing price and lowering cost and generally trying to move things into cheaper and cheaper labor and the cheapest labor source is outsourcing to the customer themselves so you get the customer to do half the service and you call it freedom of choice you know you get to choose and you put all the liability for the choice onto them and they have to pay the privilege of doing it so you know at one point it was called time theft that kind of unsourcing to your to your customers and definitely people have embraced the version of choice they get but I think that's starting to be exhausted I think that value proposition is exhausting and I think the kind of push around chatbots and artificial intelligence right now is is the last effort to come up with the high price low cost version of service that is not actually paying skilled people to support customers so yes we are moving into eroding services in that sense and that is mainly driven like you said by our profit or revenue a profit perspective commercial perspective that's as long as there are businesses that's probably going to be the case um so do we have the ability and if so how do we change that bottom up because we are not yet in the positions where we lead the organizations we're not yet calling the shots on the level necessary to change this what's your take on this so I think two things that the first is I am confident in the analysis that that this is not a sustainable business strategy that if you just look at eroding trust and customer satisfaction people are not feeling like they are getting what they deserve from this setup and that frustration you can see bubbling everywhere from conspiracy theorists to doubting experts to hating banks and governments and airlines and everybody I just feel at the moment it's a really tricky situation in which if you actually realistically accepted how many people don't like the services they have to pay for because they have no choice we should actually be very close to revolution but but when we're not so I'm very confident that the current business model in which the support economy that I'm talking about is not viable and that's why service designers haven't had to educate themselves to into a mature practice to lead that change I'm pretty sure those conditions are changing now that I think they're coming to the end so I think it's important that service designers begin to as they say in North America where they play ice hockey possibly in Scandinavia as well you know you've got to play to where the puck will be you don't play to where the puck is now I suppose it's a football analogy as well you need to move to the open space and it's a risk and it's a risk in which people need to have alliances in which they support each other in trying to make those transitions and really pushing clients so if clients are not yet prepared to realize that customers are dissatisfied with the chatbot version of their service we need we the smart set of service designers need to begin to refuse to do that work and we need to critique that work publicly and we need to take some risks we need to take some risks I think you should be asking service design academics to lead that because we are somewhat protected from the market and and we're in a position to be critical but I think things are changing and people need to be pushed it's not changing fast enough and service designers can see it whenever they have to compromise on a service design because it doesn't fit an existing business model which is unsustainable so I'm feeling like there are options they're not easy options they're political options they're risks I think a lot of us are in a very privileged position to be able to take risks whenever I say this lots of people say well you know junior designers can't possibly say no because they'll lose their job and it's kind of like I'm not talking junior designers I'm talking to design leads I'm talking to principles of companies service design agencies I'm talking to the thought leaders in this space and I'm talking to the educators who can provide some backup as well I think it was Wayne Gretzky by the way who came up with a hockey puck story if we dive into that a little bit more I have the privilege to host a community an alliance of service design professionals who do work in-house inside organizations they have the opportunity to shape the future of their organizations if we would have a chat with you and sit down and think about okay so where is the fuck heading to and if I say to my boss you know what I don't think we should do this work they will ask me for an alternative so let's talk a little bit about what does the alternative look like from my perspective the alternative looks like a lot more people-based mid-level experts doing what is called in social work case work but they have people who they are responsible for helping make decisions so the example that I use is just recent experience I've had doing some work with banks around scamming so presuming your country as well and around the world levels of scamming are just going through the roof they are being aided and abetted by artificial intelligence on both the analysis and delivery side and it's very clear that banks for example who are already not well trusted are falling behind in this so people are experiencing a situation in which the model of it's all up to you you do your research you make a choice somebody comes to you with an investment opportunity that sounds too good nevertheless this is a rare opportunity you should take it and then you take it lose your money people are desperately looking for in financial services trusted support you can get that trusted support if you're a high wealth you can get a personal banker you can get financial advisors this is a really expensive service everybody else gets nothing and just gets put into this risky situation it's not dissimilar in health it's not dissimilar in education where are you going to study service design we give you here's the website it's all promotional material you work it out there it's very difficult to get as a junior a coach who can help you find the right course for you to do so we don't have good models of all these different versions of expert service that are somebody well trained who has the time to talk to you and do case by case it's a really expensive business model so obviously people aren't going to be able to afford to pay for it up front so it'll have to have some kind of equity purchase or paying up over time or hopefully not the model of I'm being paid by somebody else to give you this advice and therefore I'm going to sell you what they're selling that's how we got into this in the first place so we need some other model of what this mid-range expert service is and we have examples of it you know with things like social work financial counseling as opposed to financial advice sometimes you know in America when you go to university you're immediately assigned an advisor and those advisors give you personal advice about which subjects to take during your college degree and that happens that's a whole profession in America there is a profession of student advisors they don't occur in my country I'm not sure if they don't occur in yours but again it's a particular type of service provision and it's a very old knowledge based version of the care economy so that's what I'm sort of talking about very abstractly I think I can find particular examples in energy services in bank services that's what I think we need to be heading towards interesting I can imagine that as we're listening to this and we're in the peak of the AI hype cycle one might stand up and say you know what all this knowledge all this expertise is or very soon will be baked into things like AI so we don't like we should eliminate the human from the equation because of the biases because of the like limited amount of knowledge a single person can contain I'm sure you have some thoughts on this as well I have no faith in artificial intelligence whatsoever but I think just in terms of the the the service proposition artificial intelligence is a patent-based system with a generative capacity so that means that it is always going to be synthesizing existing patterns and therefore proposing them to you and your situation we are nowhere near actual comprehension of individual contexts even today if you were to ask a question of some generative next word predicting service you have to be a very skilled prompter to try and architect it and in fact you have to be so skilled in asking the question you probably know what a good answer is it's very difficult to be someone who generally doesn't know the answer and ask a question and then get the correct answer so it's just a long way from being able to actually understand personal circumstances individual cases or actually using biases productively so you know doctors will have a very particular bias towards certain types of therapy and you understand that as you get to know your doctor and you know that sometimes they will say well look the general feeling is that this drug does this but I've known you for a while now and I've seen your way your body's reacted to other things and I think we should stay away from that one I think we should go with this one I think we can use this combination that is not something we are going to get from artificial intelligence despite fantasies about general artificial intelligence anytime soon and I think never is actually the answer I'm trying to imagine like we live in a service economy service dominant logic says that everything is a service even in your bicycle is a service the the examples that you are describing I'm curious to which extent they are sort of the edge cases versus the commonality like do how how prevalent are these expert case lab services am I yeah it's a great question it's a great question and I have an odd answer which is a lot of work that I've been doing in a university context which is therefore looking for progressive social change based projects has identified that often somebody who might have very particular technical skills ends up finding themselves in a quite complex social situation so if you are the cable guy who comes into a house to connect somebody's internet up you're one of the few people who crosses the threshold into a private dwelling and we know that those people will often see evidence of domestic violence or partner abuse or neglect or something else so all of a sudden you have this desire I have this desire to make sure that everybody who crosses the threshold who's invited into a house to do a technical service also has a social work degree or understand something about service design and social relations and understand how to do referral at that point it's not that they need to know at all it's just that they need to know enough to recognize and it's the same as I was saying with the bank a bank just looks after your money and tries to get you to borrow money and tries to get you to spend money as long as you can make enough money but banks these days say they're also in the business of financial well-being and if they're in the business of financial well-being suddenly they need to be offering you tailored life advice if they say you need to be saving a lot of money for your family and you happen to come from a sexual orientation in which that's not in the future I'm not sure the artificial intelligence is going to pick that up or how it's going to pick that up without some political worrying situation whereas you know the capacity for somebody to know you and have that kind of expertise it's a low level social expertise and it's piggybacking on other types of service provision so it's true that even a bicycle is a service in a kind of service dominant logic way but it's also true that your bicycle service maintainer can also see that you're in some financial trouble or see that you are wondering which service design subject to take at university and know that they can begin to refer in that way so it's that type of expertise that I'm talking about yeah and uh correctly if I'm wrong but I think what what's at the heart of this is that organizations are sort of re-evaluating the place that they are taking up in our society so where they used to could be pretty isolated and pretty independent now and like I said financial well-being like that's a completely different objective for a bank versus keeping your money safe and when you shift your objectives and your goals and your mission as an organization it could be to save the planet I don't know what Patagonia's exact mission is but you know they're they're selling clothes but they're trying to achieve something else when that happens you have to adapt and then you probably also have to think differently about what you're offering something like that I give you a quick example I just told you I'm in Sydney there's a lot of wild weather this summer there's a lot of flooding going on so lots of people are now finding their insurance premiums going up it's proving to be unaffordable they're suddenly uninsured I was talking to banks and banks realized that they're not actually collecting the data to work out who has insurance on their houses they check when you finance and they don't check in the subsequent years so all of a sudden they were like oh my goodness these people they might get flooded and then they can't repair their house because there's no insurance and then we own they owe us money for something that no longer exists we need to call them up and have a conversation with them about insurance or moving like suddenly that they live in an area that's been rezoned a flood zone and we need to tell them they need to move and the bank was sitting there saying we don't know how to have that conversation how how do we possibly call up somebody and say now there's a strange conversation for your bank to be having but no one else is having it with you the local government's not having it with you the federal government's not having it with you the insurers aren't having it with you because they're just running away so where the last one left standing we need to tell you you need to move out of your house like we need to help you to move now so all of a sudden you're a bank offering a mortgage and you're now in the relocation services business because of climate change and it was amazing to see them realise that whatever value proposition they're working to at the moment that is literally going out the window and it's not a matter of corporate social responsibility it's not about looking good looking green it's not about any of that it's literally like we do actually value our customers because they have an asset and and now we have to tell them to manage their asset how do you have that conversation they said I said well you need service designers they didn't have any local service designers they only had digital designers no one knew how to have this conversation I love this example and we could sort of copy paste it on so many industries you mentioned now we need service designers can you help us make that translation so how do you go from as a bank we need to help our customers move because they are an asset or they own an asset to hey the realisation we need service design to actually get this done I mean in that particular case that lesson came from their just most committed branch managers and stories of how they handled the flood so in that case I was sitting in a room in head office as they were listening to somebody in a regional branch talking about lifting computers up onto desks so that the flood didn't destroy the IT and wrapping up safety deposit boxes so that somebody's heirloomed items from their their family history weren't going to go moldy and when they saw that somebody was proactively doing the service there was nothing in their job description there was no it never said in their job description oh and by the way when a flood comes move the computers and bag the the safety deposit boxes and it was at that point that they thought oh actually we could help these people we could design a guide we could have tools we could have training sessions we could have internal learning on how to begin to do this and that's what we think of as service design we train our frontline service workers to be aware of financial abuse when somebody comes with somebody else and they have a disability and the carrier is there and the carrier takes the money so they do this training and it's called service and all of a sudden they were that was the moment in which they were like right okay so we actually need to design people training resources touch points we need to think about how to actually help people do this so it's suddenly because they saw their own service workers doing it they saw it as service and they saw it as the service that can be designed and I'm going to assume that relationship or the role of frontline workers will also be completely different so they're already working in a service industry but I don't I'm not sure if they all have a service mindset no in that case though you what what caused the difference was the people in the head office seeing frontline service workers offering so much more service than was being asked of them by their official job description and it kind of shamed them it shamed them to think we we deliberately didn't tell you to do this because we'd have to pay you so much more if you did do all this but they were doing it anyway because they love their local community and it's an emergency and everybody pulls together but it made a huge difference for them to see absolutely that frontline service workers do so much value creation that is just not evident to the people who are supposedly designing value propositions of the bank in this new form of relationship between service designers or service design professionals and people delivering the actual service how do we if like when we don't have a crisis or we it's not being asked for what are ways we who are listening to this conversation could accelerate the adoption of this way of being working thinking so I mean the one thing is just to make sure you're doing frontline observations not of customers but of service workers that you shadow service workers and you see all that service that they are already doing in an undesigned way and the design job is just simply to make it easier for them and then to make the other half of the design job is communicating it back to head office so that it gets valued I think the other is is to do rich scenario living lab type work it's it's we have a tradition of speculative critical design I'm very critical of it because it tends to be a kind of play thing it tends to be an aesthetic object tends to be a bunch of bad jokes by very privileged people about apocalyptic futures it's now necessary that we do very rich simulation of emergencies in the same way that every airline does with every airline steward who is hired you know being woken up at all hours to go and go through the emergency routines on a plane until it's automatic that's what you need to be doing with a bank about a flood that's what you need to be doing with a real estate agent about a fire that's what you need to be doing with a installer of internet about physical abuse in partners you need to be running those scenarios and and really helping people understand how they're going to respond in that situation so it's like an applied theater job at an enormous scale to anticipate the kind of conditions we're going to be living in in the coming coming decades interesting and fascinating I can totally see the importance of this and I'm seeing hopeful examples of organizations moving this way already and like you said it takes courage to adopt this way of being working earning your money accepting that you on the short term might earn less in the long term you'll still be alive as an organization I think that's what at stake I mean sorry mark another just to interrupt I mean another way to think about this this is research and this is particularly university partnered research so every service design agency should be having a really significant chunk of their people and time working with universities on coming scenarios not just again waiting for clients but investing in professional development in maturing their practice by working with the people who have the capacity to think about these things to think about where the puck will be even if it's calamitous and to create rich situations in which people can learn from it so I do wish that many more service design firms of every size had formal partnerships and that you know the way to resource it is government funding for research with partner with service so there is a there is a possibility there it's more possible in the EU than it is where I am I'm not sure how possible it is in the US though a lot of universities have large endowments so you would have thought it was possible but I just think there should be a lot richer partnership between service design and service design research it really makes me think if I go back to my personal situation right now and the community of service design professionals that I have the privilege to be part of like this is starting to create critical mass I'm starting to feel that you don't need a thousand people to start a movement like 50 100 people can already make a huge impact and lead by example yeah so I haven't considered partnering with universities or education but that might be a great avenue to explore and I feel that the people members of this community of the circle are eager for this knowledge they like they joined this community this alliance to their practice to push the entire field forward yeah excellent and look if your first part of call is listening to this podcast and and not being pissed off as I said at the beginning but actually thinking okay maybe I am really happy to chat to anybody about this it's not a consultancy I don't charge any money I get paid by my university to profess that's the job of a professor so I'm I'm here to talk to people about these possibilities because it's where I think our society is both going and needs to go so if anybody wants to start to flesh out what this might look like I'm happy to help them flesh it out I don't necessarily have to be the researcher on it you can find local partners but I'm really happy to chat to people about this thank you for inspiring me this already gets my mind buzzing on this morning where we are and recording this if you could leave us with one practical takeaway what do you hope people if there's one thing listening to this conversation what do you hope we take away from it it's a strange thing I want people to recognize just some of the the own frustrations they have I think if you're a professional service designer you tend to think I know how to do things I know how to work out banks I know how to work out insurance I know how to work out renewable energy and even then even if if you're that type of person you will still have these moments at which you think oh this is this is a bit beyond me this is a bit risky you've made mistakes in in some of the decisions you've made I want you to remember those moments and not just think that's embarrassing I won't tell anyone but actually admit that it would be great if there was a service that could help you even you you in your professional privilege so just remember those moments you'll see them in customers you'll see them in companies you'll see them in communities but remember them in yourself and think we could have a support economy we could have a situation in which businesses exist governments exist agencies exist to to help people make decisions and to make the right decision for them and not to have to outsource that to their own limited knowledge or some bad chatbot so I want people to just remember that frustration which I'm hoping I certainly have and I think everybody else has so just remember that next time you're designing and don't just design a service that's cheap and delightful design one that's actually moving towards support you mentioned that you're open to connecting so when listeners want to reach out or learn more about your work what are some good ways to do that I am only on the platform I don't enjoy LinkedIn I have deserted where I used to piss a lot of people off on Twitter because it's now run by somebody who really pisses me off so I'm only on LinkedIn just hit me up there I'm on there too much still and and I'll always follow up so yeah just just go there we'll make sure to add those links there you have some great articles published or I think it's medium right where you publish your articles half on medium half on LinkedIn I'm trying to find I'm wondering if I should stick it on something else I don't know Cameron Tonkenweiss.com might still be available Cameron thanks for coming on sharing and pushing the boundaries and the pushing the bar setting the bar higher for the work that we do saying no more often and offering a more interesting and helpful alternative to the work that we do so I've really enjoyed it so thanks thanks again for coming on it's a real privilege Mark thank you so much I'm excited to have been number 198 it was a real bit of an aspiration to kind of get here and so thank you so much thanks thanks again okay Cameron knows how to shake things up and do it from a place of gratitude and optimism what I'll remember from our conversation is that we should not wait for permission to build better services don't expect anyone to ask you to do so you have the power and the responsibility to push your organization forward so meter source that shines a light on a brighter future if you've enjoyed today's conversation you can do me a big favor click the like button on this video if you haven't done so already not for the youtube algorithm but for me to let me know whether or not we're on the right track by discussing topics like this finally before we part ways please take a moment to reflect and celebrate that by joining us today you've directed your attention towards learning and growing as a professional so from everyone who you are going to impact through your work thank you for taking the time and making the commitment my name is Mark Fontijn and I look forward to having you with us again for a new conversation on the service design show take care and see you soon