 In this episode, we'll be talking about is service design and actual design practice. We'll be talking about how do we design services for real people rather than customer journey maps and personas. And we'll talk about how do we push back against the fetishization of tools and methods by embracing deep learning. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hello everyone. My name is Lara Benning. This is the service design show and live from New York. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to our new episode of 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 a true service design evangelist. She's an author. She's a service design researcher and an educator at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. Her name is Lara Benning. The main theme of this episode will be how do we design for real people, real solutions that make their lives better. Lara has a really interesting perspective on this which she shares with us today. If this is your first time here on this channel, I'd love to have you to subscribe as we keep bringing new videos that help to level up your service design skills at least once a week. And don't forget to click that bell icon so you'll be notified when new videos are out. And if you also like podcasts, now you can listen to the service design show on Spotify and you can find the link to that down below in the show notes. So that's all for the introduction. And now let's quickly jump into the interview with Lara. Welcome to the show, Lara. Thank you, Marc. It's nice to be here. Nice to have someone like you on the show. Really cool. I think we have a lot to talk about. So let's not waste any more time. But first of all, for the people who don't know who you are, could you give a really short introduction and also tell us a little bit about the book that just came out? Sure. My name is Lara Penning. I'm an associate professor of transdisciplinary design. I'm director of a graduate program and MFA program, also called Transdisciplinary Design. We use service design in many ways in our program. I'm a researcher. I'm a scholar. I'm a practitioner also. I am a co-founder of a research and design lab called Desis Lab at Parsons. And Desis stands for design and social innovation for sustainability. What else? I just wrote a book about service design. Tell us about it. So it's a textbook. Here it is. It's a textbook. Designing the invisible. That's right. An introduction to service design. The idea of this book was to provide a resource for learners. So for folks who are going through school, either undergraduate or graduate master level or beyond, or if you're just coming from another discipline or background and you want to study service design, this is a tool. The book is really a tool for you and it tries to cover the basics as well as practice and has some templates and exercises. Lera, I know I didn't ask you this one, putting you on the spot, but how about we give away a signed copy of your book to one of the people watching or listening to the show if they leave a comment? Is that possible? We can do that. Yes. Wow. Cool. So the way this works is leave a comment within the next week after the episode and then I'll let Lera know who won and you'll get a signed copy. Yes. Awesome. Lera, the question that I also asked to everyone coming on as a guest on the show is, do you remember the first time you got in touch with service design? Where did you learn about the field? Right. So I first learned about service design when I was doing my PhD in Milan, Italy, and I joined a group of researchers doing work and pretty much defining service design at that point or helping to define service design at that point. There were a number of colleagues. It was very tentative. I think my first connection with service design was through the concept of product service system, which basically tried to service design products and create a new way for us to get stuff done without having to buy more stuff. So it was essentially a strategy towards sustainability, environmental sustainability, trying to reduce material impact of stuff. So instead of buying the washing machine, can you pay for use and share with other people in your meeting? There was a classic case study of the Landro Mat, for example. So that's how I got to know it. Service for me was one entry point strategy towards sustainability, towards sustainable futures. Now, services are much more sustainable than products. We don't talk about that, but that's a really interesting concept. What was this? How far do we go back in time? Yeah. So this goes back in early 2000s. My PhD was from 2003 into 2006. I remain in part of that group of researchers for longer. And in a way, Desus Network still connects me with my colleagues from Ilan and those who also pass through, but others who haven't passed through them. But we all somehow connected through that network of people. So it's been quite a while. It's been a good 15 years. I've been here Parsons at the New School. This is my 11th year. So it's been a while. And in a way, I decided to write the book because there were no books. And I would compile texts from papers, academic papers. I would also go into websites from LiveWork, Engine, and then download every method and everything they had available, case studies from their projects, and use those to teach. And so this book came out of that process of compiling pedagogical materials out of what was out there, both from theories and more academic work, but also from the practice and practitioners. So that was my trajectory. You needed the book for yourself. Very much so. Very much so, yes. Cool. I'll make sure to link to the book also in the show notes. So if people want to know more about that, just check the link down below. Lera, I'm ready to dive into the topics that you've shared with me. I'm ready for some interview, Jess. Yes? OK. OK. Drumroll, please, because there we go. This topic is called, the first topic is called service design as design. Do you have a question starter? We do. How much design is there in service design? I would say a lot. What would you say? I'm trying to say a lot, too. So that's the case I'm trying to make. It's one of the cases that I'm trying to make in my book. And with my students, too, and with my, you know, the people I work with, my project partners, to try to make a case for service design as a original, integrative, but also legitimate design practice in its own right. And it's it's very ambitious because it's transdisciplinary. You know, it's it's not your usual kind of design and it does combine design thinking and design making. So I think that that is the space I'm like I like to explore. Can I interrupt you for a second? Because you said like it's not like traditional design and what is traditional design for you? Well, this year marks 100 years of the Bauhaus and the Bauhaus was all about the building environment and how designers and artists would and architects would help define the way people live. And the building environment and communication was part of that as well. Pretty much as being the manifestation, tangible manifestations of visions of the different preferred futures. So I am from Brazil originally. So a city, a whole city, the country capital was built out of the idea of a designer and an urbanist, of course, reflecting the political identities of the time and culture identities. But it was essentially a design, a design act that materialize a whole city. So if you use that as an example, you can bring this towards the space of services that surrounded and find our lives. So we have to have visions. And that's why I think service design is designed because the primary role of design, my view, is to create and envision new preferred futures. That's what design has been trying to do in different ways and has been doing. Only we don't have a one particular medium to do so. Exactly, yeah. Different ways. But there's also something interesting and we can touch upon that later if you like. But the issue of the design thinking and the design making and the tension I think there is in service design and perhaps the reason why many people think it's not really designed. We'll get to that, I think, in the final topic. So how are you, how do we get there? How do we get service design to be seen and valued as a legitimate design discipline? What do we need to do? I think we need to recognize the service design. It's not only about improving management, but it's about changing culture and mindsets. And this is essentially a design thing to do, to change culture. So my students, when they graduate, they go on to work in very high state positions, sometimes within hospitals, within corporations, within international development agencies, within public agencies. And they will, through their work, change and affect the life of millions of people. So I think it's important that we recognize that it is about creating the experiences to which these people will go about experiencing their services. But it's also about changing the general perceptions and general culture for that people, but also within the organizations that are those providing the services. And that's why I think we need to embrace the idea of service designers, service designers as those who are able to provide vision and the roadmap towards those visions. So what do you think we're missing at this moment to... What are we missing? Why aren't we there yet? Yeah, I think the reason why we aren't there yet is in a way the result of our own success, because service design has been successfully adopted and widespread now within many kinds of industries and sectors, which is a great thing. However, there is the risk of commoditization of the methods and tools of service. And because they're so nice, and for those who don't work coming from a creative background, it's fascinating and it's enticing and it's engaging. It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. You get to play with dolls and Lego and the neck thing. So it's fun and engaging, but it's not all there is. There needs to be the recognition that you can't simply pack and reproduce a number of tools and methods, and then you get to the result you want. Design as many people who are coming from architecture or product design, you would know that it requires a constant engagement when you find men. And sometimes you get to a point you have to start from scratch all over again. So it's more about sustaining a certain process and feeding this process towards a certain goal, but it will require long and deep engagements within organizations that sometimes it's hard to sustain for all kinds of reasons. And it's nobody's fault. I don't want to point fingers. I think it's part of the natural pains of growing, I suppose. But I think it's what my big point here is that we are maturing as a field and we need to be more critical about the work that we do, that it's not just for producing methods. We need to be less naive about the politics of what we do when we engage in the different organizations. What do you mean by that? In which way, politics? Well, I think what I mean by the politics of services, I mean things related to the internal politics of organizations for sure, but also the politics of the service being designed or redesigned or studied and what are the different social, political, environmental implications of that? I think a big topic for me right now of interest is related to labor and work. When we design services, we're designing work and how people work. And in an era where platform, digital platforms are really taking over different sectors of our economy, we are always risking forgetting about things that happened before. The case in point, we could use Uber, for example, to talk about how sure there was an industry in place that perhaps was on the best, but all of a sudden it was taken over by another one and whose model simply ignores labor rights that were acquired with a lot of pain through a long process before that. So how much do we want that for society? And now with artificial intelligence really coming fast towards it, I think service designers will have a big role to play in designing work and designing people sometimes out of work. If you talk about some more radical experiments that people are considering, such as a universal income, but I think service designers are very good to, they should be very good at touching upon those very critical issues that we have that are not resolved in a way that we're not just oiling the machine, but we're really being visionaries about the future we want. So I think it's a time for us to become critical practitioners and not just reproducing things because we have a lot of clients that are asking that from us, but I think we need to be selective and it's our role also to educate our partners, our clients in this process. That's a really, really important call to action already in this episode. You already hinted upon this, so let's just move into the second topic. And you said something about designing people out of work. I think we'll touch upon that in this one. And it's actually called here on my paper, designing people, but I'm sure you'll be able to create an interesting, formulate an interesting question out of this that starts with. Okay, who are people behind the services we use? So for me, designing services is designing people in great part and consequently is designing for labor, design for care, designing social justice. I've been very much interested in frontline staff, especially those at the forefront of social services in critical services. I've been learning a lot recently in the some projects I've been engaged with and I have engaged recently with public libraries in Brooklyn. It's an ongoing project we have in my research lab and one thing that I've been learning is how much emotional labor and how much of one person own lived experience goes into providing a services and engaging with a person that in many cases go above and beyond their job descriptions. And this is something we have observed firsthand. We're the project I've been working on relates to services related to post-incarceration. So how libraries, one of the service areas that they are starting to offer is related to connect people that are coming out of prisons to the service they need. This is a huge issue here in the United States and Brooklyn in some neighborhoods that you'll find that has been a very important component of social life. So we have observed in some particular branches how people are compassionate, people are helpful, people will help patrons of the library even outside the physical space of the library they go out and reach out and help people getting help. And then the question becomes which is wonderful to see to begin with, right? But it's the question then for service designers is how do you scale that? How do you train people? How do you sustain that kind of a very personal relationships that are part of the service engagements and their service connections? And I'm giving this one example but I think this is present in every kind of care related world. This is for sure the case of nurses in hospitals and doctors and in general related to people in some kind of need or immigration services, right? So I think that that's where my heart is. This is where I think there is a human interest that I think it's important but I think it's interesting for our field to understand you can't design the conditions but you can most of all provide ways to sustain things already happening and instead of managers designing oh I think people should do that. What if we learn from the things that already work and try to amplify those? So I think that is a philosophy that I'm learning and I think it is about designing people it's designing their future what they do can we sustain them and help them be the best they can be in those positions and also give them agency to be who they are in the situations rather than just reciting out from a playbook which is what happens in a lot of times, no criticism but you can compare the two and I think there's a lot that can be learned from that. So I'm trying to figure out what does this mean for me as a SERVS designer? How does this actually influence my design process? Yeah, I think it has to do with deep learning. It has to do with it's not just that's the reason I was criticizing the idea of just packing up tools and methods and then try to quickly go about them. I think you need to spend time with your project clients and partners and really immerse yourself there and be able to carry out some kind of active listening rather than just interviewing people to quickly try to come up with a solution. I would even argue, so I think deep learning, deep listening, active listening and being humble about you're there to learn and really differ any kind of judgment and try to understand things from people's point of view and I mean both the user and the staff member and also, you know, and that is time. So you need to budget time. You need to, in the end we have to write contracts, right? We need to do people and all that. So it needs to be translated in that kind of language. So I think it's budgeting time and allowing for that kind of longer engagement because there is no bullet, silver bullet that will get to a final conclusion. I personally don't like personas. I think some methods have reached the limits of what they can offer. I think they can be helpful but I'm interested in the people. So I think I'm recently a more interested in collecting stories rather than building personas, real stories from real people rather than trying to put people in categories. I think that is an easy mistake and it's easy for you to use your own personal bias, whether you are the privileged person in the room or not but for sure, most cases designers when you go to certain situations, you are the privileged person. So you have more power and agents over your life in some cases and you need to be able to understand and listen and learn from the others. So budgeting time, calculating and being able to tell that to your client. Exactly, you're finding ways on how to explain the value of that, right? Yeah, it's true. It's not easy but hey, we've came a long way to our headies. So I think it's our job. I wanna use the rest of our time that we have to touch upon the third topic because I think it's sort of the central theme already in this episode. So let's just move into that. Is that okay? Sure, absolutely. I've narrowed it down to these two words, more mindset. Okay. Okay. How can we define advanced mindsets for service designers that allow them to go deep into the realities they're designing for and the people in the lives of people they're designing with and for? So I will go and try to define a number of mindsets that I think are important. I write about them in the book is my last chapter and one is precisely the one I was telling you just now. So learn how to be an active listener and learner. So it's a learner mindset and being there and listening. I have observed in some case studies of colleagues who are really good at that. I work with some colleagues in my lab who also try to use this idea of being present and you budget time and you knew it was gonna be several days there with a camera and you have to have the whole ethical aspect of doing research in that way. And also, you know, people use the word empathy a lot. I think there's a lot of interest in that and knowing how to refrain from your own judgment and put yourself in the shoes of the person. You know, how far can you go with that and not assuming anything, right? And then I think another one, so that's number one. Number two is learn how to lead and manage processes and conversations with people, right? How can we stage not only workshops, sometimes it's meetings, productive meetings, working sessions where people come together and be the steward of those processes that can take time and will probably be revisited over and over. So it's more of a soft skill in the end, not so much design early if you ask me, but it can be design early. Sometimes we have to design the tools for that. Designers are very good at designing games, cards, and whatever are the artifacts that can sustain those things. But it's really keeping things in time and revisiting. And some conversations can be really hard and painful. So how can we do that in the right way? I think the other point, the third point, the third mindset is goes back to service designers design, that of our job is learning about things, but also spotting opportunities for change, for the better, right? That's what designers have been doing all along. We can make things better. That's what it is. So we have to be able to have those visions, to be imaginative and create situations that aren't here yet. There are, somehow it's creating the future all the time and capturing those ideas and visualizing them. That's another point. Making it tangible, making the future tangible, yeah. Exactly, exactly. So if you're a service designer, so don't come from a visual design background, you should partner with one because that's part of our job too, to create visuals and to put this in front of people. Some people prefer writing, find, some people do videos, whatever you do, I'm here in a design school, so that's part of my day-to-day life, but I realize in some other situations, it is in the case, but you should hire someone, you should be working with people who can actually do that and have that skill. And then, and related to that is materializing, but also testing and simulating. You have, it's the famous prototype. You have to enact, right? You have to really enter the performatic aspects of services, services they unfold. They don't just, you just don't put it there. And there's nothing like, you know, enacting something to feel how you just know and you just know it's wrong or it's right and you can take leads from that. I've been reading a lot of drama literature for actors lately and you know, and we perform every day, we're performing now, we're performing all the time. Everything is a performance, but I think that I like to use the idea of services as a performance when I'm designing service prototypes because service prototype is not just an object. You have to put something out there and people need to do something with that. So I think the idea of a performative kind of approach to prototypes, things become true, right? When you enact them, when you perform them. And I think lastly, my first fifth point is related to knowing that our work is gonna be on the process also and ultimately you're working towards first learning how organizations work but defining your work in relation to that. So your job is about changing them and changing your organization. And that's hard to do and you have to be humble. You cannot come from parachuting and not knowing how that is gonna be like. I know that I work in a very complex organization where universities tend to be that but I guess that's the case elsewhere as well. And you have to build your way towards and so there's a lot that goes into beauty relationships with people inside organizations and clients not only the top level management but you have to develop relationships with everybody in different areas and understand where people are coming from. I'm saying this because I, most of my work is public interest design so whether it's not for profits and government and some of these organizations for, they're of their very nature, they tend to be very, sometimes not interesting changing things because they're always either in a shoestring or they are subjected to all kinds of scrutiny from the public, rightly so you, if you're a public institution. And so they're a bit risk adverse in terms of trying new things or we do things in this way, this is bureaucracy, bureaucracy is out there because you need them, you need two things to be controlled so that corruption doesn't happen, right? So there's a reason behind that but on the other hand, it creates a really, you know, tighten a kind of organizations and flows that are not necessarily the best, the best, the most open kind of organization for change and people need to want them. So it is a process that you need to steward rather than impose. That's a lot to process and I can definitely recommend people getting the book but just one question related to this is, you know, you work with students every day and you probably explain these four mindsets and they sort of feel that this shouldn't be, service design shouldn't be productized and oversimplified into tools and methods. How do you get them to actually do this? So how do you challenge them to adopt these mindsets? Well, with our students, we do that by proposing nice projects hands-on related to, you know, somehow part of the real world. So we work with partner organizations, we'll have us coming over and, you know, giving us access to people and to them and these are studios that we design, you know, and sort of curate for students but they also do theses on their own so they have to do them by themselves, those kind of thing. And you know that part of their time in doing something like that is to just build relationships. So that is a long year, more than a year long process actually. So that's how we do in this education environment. In an education environment is different from, you know, this is real life by the way too, people say it's not real life, it is real life. So I'm just saying that too, you dissipate that notion but we have the opportunity here to create some sort of protected environment where the stakes are high but they're different from when you were a designer out in the world and you have to pay yourself and pay people. Yeah, there are other constraints. Yeah, there are other constraints. So it is a sort of protected environment. So we simulate, we do it, we curate and we do that in a way that makes sense for a partner organization who have access to a lot of intelligent people doing interesting work and questioning things and coming up with interesting ideas. But it is different from, you know, hiring a professional designer. That will happen later when they graduate, hopefully. Hopefully, I'm sure of it. Lara, you've given us so much food for thought. That's the right expression but I'm sure there's also something on your mind that you would like to share with us. A question that you would like to ask us to serve design show community. Is there anything on your mind? Yeah, I think things I wanted to bring to our community is related to things that I've touched upon. It's this design. Are we, what is your politics as a service design? Can you talk about it? Can you think about it for yourself? What is the role of aesthetics in your work? You know, aesthetics is not just the color of something. It's much more than that. That will determine how you would, you know, behave in a certain space. And I think this aesthetic question, we haven't had that conversation enough or if at all in our community. And somehow I see the aesthetics question, the political question as being related. Interesting. I think that is the new book I want to write. And these are elements that I want to uncover. I think sometimes at touch points, you know, it's just one inch door towards a much bigger discussion. Working in public interest design, somehow you have to confront yourself with that and the cultural implications of things. So these are aspects of services that I don't think have been enough discussed. So I think it's something our community need to do more about. And I think it's our job in academia also to be pushing forward the discussions that people working with clients, they don't have the opportunity to do that. Well, this is the opportunity for the community to contribute to your new book by leaving. But even comments on the podcast or the video. And let's not forget, we'll be giving away a signed copy of your book. So make sure to leave a comment in general. Lara, it was really a pleasure to listen to you. So much inspiration. Thanks so much for making time in this busy period of the year again. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much, Marc. So what is your take on service design and aesthetics and service design and politics? Leave a comment down below and just of all, leave a comment because then you'll make a chance to get that signed copy of Lara's latest book. If you enjoyed this episode and know somebody who might be interested in what we've just discussed, don't forget to share this episode with them. You'll help to grow the service design community and you'll probably put a smile on somebody's face. If this is your first time here, I'd love to have you to subscribe to the channel so that we can keep bringing you more videos like this. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.