 In this episode you'll learn how to keep service design simple and why being kind is a very smart and effective design strategy and finally why you should avoid doing research at the start of your project at all costs. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hey, I'm Lincoln and this is the service design show. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you to design organizations that put people at the heart of their business. The guest in this episode is Lincoln Nager. Lincoln used to be a service designer for the city of Austin in Texas USA and he's the co-founder of a service design meetup in Austin where they organized a service design hustle for homelessness. Let's be honest, most people just practice the design process as it's described in the books. They follow the steps from research to insights to ideation to prototyping and maybe scaling up. But the question is, is that really the best process and the right steps for your project? The reason why I'm so excited to have Lincoln on the show today is that he has a very hands-on and very fast approach and practice of service design. So it's a bit different than it's described in the books. And I think that at the end of this episode, you'll not only have learned a few new tools and methods that could be really useful in your next project, but also start to question and think critically about the steps you're taking in your projects, in your design process. Are those really the best steps? Do you really need to take these steps? Or is there a smarter approach? So that's what you're going to get if you stick around till the end of this episode. If this is your first time here on this channel, I'd love to welcome you and let you know that we bring a new video on how to level up your service design skills at least once a week. So if you're interested in that, make sure you click that subscribe button and the bell icon so you'll be notified when new episodes are out. That's all for the intro and now let's quickly jump into the chat with Lincoln. Welcome to the show, Lincoln. Hey, Mark, how's it going? Awesome. I already gave a short introduction before we dive into the chat right now, but for the people who don't know you, could you give a short intro? Who is Lincoln? Sure, who am I? Wow, that's so existential. Okay, yeah, I'm a service designer. I live in Austin, Texas, and I've most recently been working with the city of Austin around homelessness and understanding how services are coordinated around that experience. In the US, we have a big homelessness issue here. Affordability and housing are huge at the top of our list of problems across cities. And so that's been the work I've been doing most recently. That involved a lot of people working with people experiencing homelessness and understanding where they're coming from and finding ways to get their voice put into the policy discussion and put into how services are actually operating and how they're structured in order to support the homelessness experience more effectively. I've also been working with an organization called Civic IO who does an annual summit during South by Southwest and that's where we bring US mayors from across the country together to introduce them to innovation practices and innovation practitioners so that they can interact with new ideas a little bit more fluidly than when they're usually working as mayors in their cities. So it's kind of like a vacation for mayors to come do fun stuff during South by Southwest. So that's one of the things I've been doing. And are you also running a meetup in Austin? Yes, yeah, we've been on a bit of a hiatus since I've been traveling. I was just in Europe for a few months and we've been on hiatus. We're picking it back up this month and we do a meetup every month for the past almost like I think it's been four years. We do a meetup and we're really focused on transferring skills so making sure that people get to interact with the tool. We often practice the tool, figure it out, we talk about it beforehand and then the people I founded the meetup with, the co-founders and I, we come up with a really interactive workshop to be able to figure that out, to be able to play with the tool and think about it and have that experiential understanding so that people feel more comfortable taking it into their daily life. And that's been so much fun. I know I've been doing them in the Netherlands for quite a long time and it's fun to actually get people engaged in the design process. For sure. Do you, Lincoln, remember the very first time you learned about service design? Oh yeah, I was, I really like this story. I was at school for industrial design, for product design at SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia and I love SCAD, great school. We've had many people from SCAD here. Yeah, it's a good program. I think it's one of the first in the US too for service design and it's been, I was there right when it was starting. Good timing because I was there to study industrial design. I had, you know, in high school had decided, oh, industrial design, product design. I love things. I love how that all comes together. I love creating useful products and I was about two quarters of the halfway through my industrial design degree and I took this foundational service design class called contextual research and it blew my mind and I could see so easily that this was what I was interested in. The research part was really what fueled me and what excited me and finding things out of research, finding opportunities out of research and realizing that there are so many ways that you can help people that have nothing to do with making something. It has nothing to do with creating a product to put on the earth to help people. It's about making systems better. It's about making the service more exciting. It's about branding. It's about marketing. It's about this confidence of all these different things coming together and that was the first time I saw that and I think the next day I decided to double major in industrial design and service design because I was so far through the industrial design degree and that's like where my heart is. It's like this aesthetic thing that I absolutely love and I learned so much process from industrial design too as well. That's really where process is. It's so important to iterate, to prototype. That's like built. It's foundational to industrial design and so bringing that into service design, it's really helped me see design from a theoretical and philosophical perspective and having both of those angles pointed at what I'm working on and I love it and so that's where service design, that's where it came from and I majored in it and it's just been so exciting working in that field and watching it grow. I think when I started majoring in it there was not another program in the US for sure and this was before UX design was a thing and people, the industry was talking about service design. You could see it in the blogs. Oh, this thing called service design. It's coming from Europe. Service design, service design. It's so fancy and then probably like a year into my program the user experience designer came out and it kind of swallowed what service design was and now it's rising to the, now it's coming up again and we can see the difference between UX design and service design because many people have gotten to the point of understanding those differences and there's so many more people who have a basis and design to be able to to tell the difference. So it's great. It's been great. I'm sure they will be happy to hear this. Let's get that you're still so excited about the course back then. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it was great. It was phenomenal. Robert Val was my professor. He's at Fjord now. He was so incredible. Yep. Great. Maybe we need to get him on the show. Yeah. Lincoln. So I really, we did a chat to sort of prepare for this episode and I really like your, let's say, different take on service design, your different approach to a little bit. It's a different kind of practice and I think we're going to dig into that in the topics. So let's do some interview Jazz. Are you ready? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely ready. All right. Okay. So the first topic is keep it simple. Do you have a question starter and can you show it up? Yeah, I got that. What if? What if? Yeah. Okay. Let's see. What if designers, what if service designers kept design simple instead of complicated? I think that we have a tendency to over complicate things. I mean, put simply. We really have a tendency to sit and hear all the parts of the thing we're working on. This is how they all fit together. We're very precise with our speech, which I think is great, but I think we have the tendency to over complicate things and make it hard for everyone to understand. One of my biggest beliefs about design is that it must be accessible. It's a tool for inclusion. It's a tool for working toward an end goal with many people. And in that, we need to make it simple because everyone needs to be able to understand it. Everyone needs to be able to follow it and see how it's working. So the second we add too many elements in it, the second we add too many layers or too much theory to the design process, it inherently becomes inaccessible and is hard for people to work with. It's hard for them to grasp. It's hard for them to really to follow the process and feel included. And in that, if it gets too complicated, we end up alienating the people that we're trying to pull into the process. So what would be like a stereotypical example of the design process being overly complicated? Where do you feel it's too complicated? I feel like I've been working to dismantle the design process and put it back together. And one of these things, which I think we'll probably get into later is a lot of the design research deliverables and the process around design research, I think can be really heavily simplified and focused on doing and creating something rather than investigating and interrogating a concept. Because when we interrogate something, interrogation, that word, the word that I'm using, you seize up, right? You get kind of frozen. You might feel like in the city, we use the word audit a lot, like you're feeling like you're audited. Everyone's looking through all your files and making sure that everything is going okay. A lot of people in an ecosystem will kind of seize up and freeze when they start feeling like they're being watched. Whereas if you start feeling like you're playing with someone, if you're using play to kind of engage someone, those people end up being more accepting to the idea. They get a little bit more excited. They feel more included in like, and as if you're using their knowledge and their expertise to move something forward. So that's kind of one of the examples I would use. What is your take on where this complexity is coming from? What is making design more complex? I think it's just the human condition to try to make sense of things. One thing I've noticed about designers across the globe is that they're exceptionally nice people. They're engaged. They're interested. They're wondering what's going on. They're often up to speed on political happenings. They're very curious about the world and they're very nice. Nice and curious. Nice and curious. Those would be two words I would use. And in that, I think, oh, I've lost my train of thought at this point. Let's see. Nice and curious. Yeah. And where is this complexity coming from? Yeah. Okay. Right. So I think that in that, designers are often trying to make sense of things for everybody, right? They're trying to make sense of a system so that they can explain it to everyone across that system. And I think there's this niceness to design where people are trying to make sense of everything. And the designers, speaking things that are trying to make sense, they're using language, they're finding the right words to describe something. And so I think that designers kind of, that can get very complex at times when we're trying to put so much language into one little thing. A couple design deliverables. Once you introduce a blueprint, you want to talk about complexity, let's talk about blueprints. Boom. Whoa. They're so helpful. They're so great. They're so useful and helpful. But how do we make it so that blueprints are a little bit more accessible, a little bit easier to follow? The information and the ideas leading up to the blueprint, how do we work on those and make it easy so that when the blueprint does come, it's easier to work with? Yeah. And the thought that comes to my mind is one of the things designers should be really good at is hiding complexity, like sort of coming through complexity, getting to the essence and sort of presenting that to the people who aren't experts. And I think we're doing that really well with the solutions that we're creating, but maybe we should also sort of redesign the design process. Right? Yeah, I think so. I think the way I look at it is there are a few assumptions we can make about our approach to design that can really cut a lot of the work, a lot of the really, really hard work ruling tedious work out of design. One of those things being co-creation. So co-creation is so important to my design process. I don't like to design unless I have the users with me working on the product. That's not something that I'm very, very focused on. And so co-creation is a big thing. If we are leaning on co-creation as a foundational principle of our design process, then we can really lean on the expertise and the understanding of our users in that system. That means that the designer does not have to take the time to understand those so fluidly, so fluently. That's something that we have time, we're trusting the people that we're working with to bring in their expertise and their knowledge. And we as a designer is kind of keep an eye on things to measure any dissonance, to measure anything that's going wrong and try to resolve things that we see are going wrong. And I think that's one of the designer's role is to shepherd that process, to help people through the co-creation process feel comfortable enough to interact and provide their expertise because we could not do our jobs without it. So I think replacing research with co-creation activities is an incredibly useful way to avoid this complexity within design. That's already a really good tip. And I would urge and invite people to actually prototype this to test this and see what kind of results you get. I'd love to hear about that, yeah. So do I. But Lincoln, we have to move on to the second topic and it links to the previous one because you said designers are curious and nice. Well, this one is about being kind and do you have a question starter that goes along with this one? Yeah, I have this. How can we? How can we? Yeah, okay. I like, okay, so how can we spread kindness and excitement about design throughout an ecosystem? I think that's really important. One of the things I've talked about where this be kind came from is how impactful it is on your work and on the success of your work when you're just nice to the people that you're working with when you're kind to them. And one of the examples I use here is something I call service design gift. And that's where when you're a service designer and you're walking into any situation, I'm sure you can see a million things that can go that can happen to make things a little bit more a little easier for the person who's working a little bit more effective, a little bit more exciting. So do some of those things, right? We are our brainwork so quickly. Let's do something. You see how a spreadsheet might work to fix something. Maybe you give them a Google form instead of a clunky email spreadsheet. Great. Do it for them. Maybe they don't use it, but you made that gift for them. And as you create more gifts for this office, I'll use an example with a permitting project I worked on. We worked on a project with the city to help make residential permitting, which when you want to make an improvement on your house, you need to get it permitted, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We helped make that service a little bit more understandable and consumable. And a lot of that was my job. A lot of my job on that project was sitting in the office with everyone and working with them to help them understand. And sometimes a prototype is a gift. I know that there was one prototype we worked with, prototype we worked with, that just mapped out the time that people take to do their job. And people hadn't been able to see that in so long. They hadn't been able to see that, and they were able to see, oh, I'm spending a week over here doing this, but I could spend that week down here. Or if I do this over, just being able to visualize the process in itself as a gift, and we were able to make these things for them or even business cards with their website on it, because they're like, what are they saying over and over again while they're working? Let's give them a pamphlet that takes us 10 minutes to make it. Let's give it to them and they can use it for as much as they want. I think that's a really good criterion for when you're engaging the design process. Every deliverable you create, if it's received as a gift, then I think you're doing an awesome job as a service design. Maybe that should be the benchmark. Every deliverable should be received as a gift, should be perceived as a gift. I love that. I made this. Here's this present for you. Yeah. Well, here's your customer journey map. Well, that would be interesting when people can start to see that as a gift. I think you also said something about that it's not a trick, being kind, but it helps the design process later on. For sure. Yes, absolutely. If we use this project that I was working on before, the permitting project, there was another service design project around this service that had come in about a year or two before I had come in. Everyone in the office had a bitter taste in their mouth about it. They weren't really excited about what we were working on. They didn't really pick up on the excitement that we were having about the project because of this experience that they had. But because I had built relationships with everyone in the office and knew them by name and had spent time sitting in the office with them, prototyping in in situ, on site with them, they were much more willing to hear about what the solution was. They were much more willing to engage. It was almost as if they felt they were doing me a favor by working with the product. Even though the product was for them, I don't want to use the word obligated, but they felt they had a relationship with me in that it would help me if they used this product. That ended up helping the product live on. The training session that we did with them to help them use the product really went well because they were all sitting there trying to help me because we had built those relationships. So the better your relationships that you begin at that, that you start at the beginning of a project, the more the more success your project will experience toward the end, for sure. Yeah. And that's that's, I wouldn't say it's a challenging thing, but you have to experience the fact that investing in relationships, investing in building trust, investing in social capital that it eventually pays off, but you have to be in the position to have the time to actually build it and maybe not every service designer, especially external service designers, maybe aren't necessarily in that position where they have these opportunities. Sure. And I think that goes to something we spoke about last week where what is the role of the designer? What is the purpose of the designer's job in a system? And I think part of that is bringing energy and excitement to a project. And I think because I think about the successful projects I've been on, I have a pretty loud personality. I'm pretty eccentric and flamboyant and it's really helpful to bring people into the projects that I'm working on and get them excited about what we're working on. And remember the tricks and the tools that we're working with because they've had they've had this energetic experience around it. And so I think that's part of the designer's role is being a character in the design process and helping people helping people have a face to attach the work to. And I think that that's really that to me is a really important role for my work as a designer, for sure. And we're talking about being kind and the people listening to the podcast don't see it, but the people on the video might have noticed the sign next to you which says, Hi mom, hard, hard, hard. Yeah, that's maybe a service design, service design gift. I did that. I actually that's been up there for about two weeks since the first time we scheduled already nice. Well, it's ready. That's that's a good example. That's maybe a small small service design gift. I want to move into topic number three, because I suspect that this is a topic where we'll spend most of our time. So are you ready? Yes. Okay, I am. And you hinted upon this one already. Also, and this one is learning by doing them by doing and I have when will when will. All right. So let's see. When will we double the efficacy of the design process? When will we when will we make the design process efficient, more efficient, more exciting, more impactful? I asked this question because I feel as though on the projects I've been on, we spend a lot of time wondering, right? A lot of people will use investigating or discovery, right? The discovery phase of the design process. And I think what happens is that becomes a bit gratuitous, it becomes a bit selfish for the designer to take their time to understand what's going on in the system, right? Because obviously, a designer has to orient themselves if we're working in a in a new environment, we have to orient ourselves to be able to see what's going on to be able to understand what's around us and use our intuition. But I think as we said earlier, if we can lean on the people already in that ecosystem, we don't necessarily need to be so well oriented. If we're oriented along the design process or along our design discipline, no longer do we have to be so so steeped in the problem so that other the people who are who are steeped in the problem can can use their expertise to come in and inform you and let you know. I think so one of the things that I talk about here is how long it takes, how long design research can take. Sometimes it can take months, it can I think I've been on projects where we did research for six months and then we started talking about doing and the whole time we were working with people who had been working in this problem space for their careers and it ended up becoming a bit condescending. We were being a bit condescending in this idea of like, let's wait, let's hold off, let's figure out what we're working on. Maybe that's what we need, maybe that's what we need, but let's wait, let's wait, let's wait. And we ended up damaging a lot of our relationships throughout the project for that because people were ready to do something. They had been living in the office, they had been living with this problem every day. They hear about this new design thing coming at them. They're ready to do something and we wasted that momentum by pausing and saying, stop, we have to stop. So what's the alternative? We have to research. I think the alternative is to learn by doing. So let's say, for instance, we have, I don't want to use it for instance here, let's say we have a project we're working on and there's 20 people in this ecosystem. These 20 people have ideas already, right? They have something that they think needs to be done. So let's make some gifts for them. Let's see what's working very, very lightly. This is just a light thing. Let's go into the office for the week, see what they're doing for a week. Okay, let's, we made them a Google form here. We helped them with their website design over here. We figured out their, their marketing, a little bit of their marketing and their, and their brochures over here. Now, now what are some bigger ideas they have? You know, we've built some relationships with them, we've helped them, what are some bigger ideas that they have about how they can fix their workflow and their, and their work? And then start with one of those. But then at that point is when we start learning. So this isn't necessarily the idea, right? This isn't the idea that we're working on. We're working on something to help us learn while also improving and helping the people around us. Because if we take too much time to observe, we end up becoming apart. We end up becoming different. Here's the problem and here we are around the problem. But to be an effective service designer, I think it's really important to wrap yourself into the problem and, and really work toward it. And this is coming from my experience in public service, which is definitely different than private. But I think that I've learned a lot about how to, how to work in both of those spheres this way. And I think it's really important to start with a prototype. I mean, prototyping is, is the best way to learn by doing. And the starting point for that can be from the very people that you're working with. And I think it's really important to respect their expertise. It's really important to be humble and express your humility as a designer. I don't know what we're doing. No, I'm not a social worker. I don't know how homelessness works. I don't know what it's like to be homeless. I don't know what it's like to help people who are homeless. It's not for me to make that decision, but you know, and you can do it. So let's, what ideas do you have? You have so much context and understanding and, and experience to bring into this that I don't have. What do you have? And I think that goes back to the designer's role. The designer's role is to pull that out. The designer's role is to say, okay, you have this experience, bring it here. How do, how do we use that experience? I've designed this, this workshop for you to inject your experience into an idea and make sure that we have it. And I think that that's kind of, that's where my head is on that. Yeah, so I think a lot of people want to do research because we've had experiences with clients who think they know who their customers are, but eventually it turns out it's on a quite superficial level. They don't really get to the root of the problem. It's, there are short term solutions and we want to address bigger challenges. So I think for me, at least that that's one of the reasons why you're, why I wanted to go out and do research and yeah, expand the scope. How, how does that relate to learning by doing for you? So I think that this is a little bit of an exercise for the designer and a little bit of a discussion of design research versus the mindset of a design researcher. So I think as we enter into projects, it's important for everyone on the team to have the mindset of a design researcher, right? We want to bring empathy. We want to bring understanding into a situation. We want to make sure that we're oriented correctly around the problem. And that to me is the mindset of a design researcher. But as we talk about design research in itself and the acts of design research, I think it's an exercise for the service designer to break apart the design process and put it back together. Let's look at a persona for example. So as the example you used with, with private clients thinking they know their, their customers, but they don't. Excuse me. Those, if we look at the persona, which is often the way we communicate those types of things, how can we create the pieces of a persona, the elements of a persona, while also doing generative research? So let's say you, you interview 10 people. Now, now we have a persona based off of those 10 people. But let's say instead of interviewing them, you did a more generative research exercise with them. So maybe that's prototyping with them. Let's say like, okay, we're going to bring in, we're going to make something with you. The designer's job now is to translate that experience into a persona. So we're always making assumptions in design research, right? And I think this is another place where we discussed the role of the designer. I think the designer has a little bit of a privilege here to, to make, to make assumptions, make safe assumptions, make comfortable assumptions. So basically what we're doing instead of making assumptions out of interviews, we're making assumptions out of experiences that we have with the customer. And I think we'll still find the same types of information, we'll still find that we're onto the wrong customer, but we'll find it in a much richer, future oriented way. Is how, is how I kind of look at that. Yeah. And maybe in a way that's more engaging to the people who eventually will need to deliver the service or deliver the solution. Absolutely. Something also, if we think about this to design, like I talked about design being accessible earlier and how I think that that's very important. Design can become pretty inaccessible once we start looking at the clinical kind of research, that this is how it works. But people interact every day, right? We as people know how to interact, we learn things from our interactions. If you keep the design work around that, the design research work as simple as interacting and working together. And don't think too far beyond that. It becomes pretty accessible to people working work that you're working with. If you have a frontline staff, staffer that you're working with, explaining this is the question. These are the questions we have to ask. And this is what we have to make sure we get out of it. And all this stuff can bring a lot of anxiety to the situation. Whereas if you say, hey, we're going to put you in a room with someone and you're going to work on something and we're going to just all work together and talk about it. They're doing that all the time, every day. That's another thing that I think is very foundational to to my design approach, is that everyone's doing all of this designing stuff every day. The only difference is that we're finding tools and ways to do it as a group and to do it together. But we're all prototyping, we're all iterating, we're all, we're all researching, we're all doing these things, we're all trying to understand, we're all building empathy every day, we have to, we're humans. Yeah. And this is a point I've been trying to get across for a really long time. And that is like in service design, implementation is, is, is something that goes on every day and the way you describe your perspective on the design process, you're, you're implementing every day. There is no implementation stage. Implementation is the doing part. Sure. Yeah, I would totally agree with that. I think services are living, breathing things, although they're, they're intangible, they're alive, they have to be. So if we, if we don't feed it every day, if we don't water it every day, it doesn't live. So I definitely, I like the way you put that, I haven't thought of it that way. I think implementation is definitely a constant thing. It's, it's maintenance. It's continuous implementation. Yeah, absolutely. And you need to get, you need to get the right people in the room to be able to see what tools of service design are useful for their workflow. Managers might use blueprints, whereas frontline staff might use personas more, right? So these, these things, it's, you got to, you got to put the right tool in the right hands and build the right relationships too, as you're working forward. Is there a question that you'd like to ask the viewers and listeners of the show that we can think about, help you with? Absolutely. So something I've been, I've been working on is how do we design proactively? How do we, how do we look at industries and look at design proactively? And I'll use an example to explain this question. As, as, you know, as we talk about the autonomous vehicle and self-driving cars coming out, we, we, in the US, we talk a lot about our truck drivers. What the hell are all our truck drivers going to do when we no longer need the driver of the truck? And I'm interested, what services could exist to help? Maybe it's about helping truck drivers find new work for themselves that they're interested in. And we find that, Oh, this, these are the qualities of the truck driver and these types of people are interested in these types of opportunities and creating training programs for them. But, or maybe it's about, you know, re-skilling them in other ways. And I'm just really interested in what people have in mind about designing proactively for these social problems that are, that we can seek. It's coming. It's coming. It's coming. Oh, what are we going to do? So we can, we can see it coming. How can we design preemptively, proactively to avoid that issue and, and, and manipulate industries to want to help in that problem too at the same time? Yeah. So spawning, it's fixing challenges before they become or fixing problems before they become problems. Absolutely. You know, be smart about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, leave your comments down below. And if people have good examples, we would love to know. Absolutely. Lincoln, if people want to get in touch with you to continue this conversation, what's the best way? The best way to interact with me is through email or LinkedIn. I do not have a website or a social media presence. I've been off social media for about five years now. Um, but, uh, wait, that's a lie. I have a Twitter. So I have a Twitter too. Um, so Lincoln dot niger at gmail.com, um, at Pragmasmic on Twitter, P R A G M A S M I C. I'll link to it. Or you, or you can, great, or you can find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the most efficient way to get ahold of me. But I'd love to chat. I'd love to talk. I'm really interested in, in what the world's doing around service design. Um, all that stuff. I know people from Austin are watching and listening. So, uh, let's, uh, let's see if a few at least reach out. Lincoln, uh, thanks for sharing your story and, uh, your perspective on the design process. I really appreciate how you're trying to make it more effective and more accessible. I think that's a really, uh, um, important, uh, quest. Great. Thank you so much for having me on the show, Mark. I really appreciate it. I love what you're doing for service design with the show. Everyone talks about the show. I push this show as often as possible. I think it's, I think it's a great resource that you're creating and I really, really appreciate it. Absolutely 100%. Well, thanks for your contribution, man. So what's your biggest takeaway from this episode? Leave your comments down below and we'd love to know. If you enjoyed this episode with Lincoln, consider sharing with one other person today who might find it helpful as well. That while you'll help to grow the service design show community and help me to invite more inspiring guests like Lincoln for your hair on the show. If you want to continue and get more inspiration, check out this next video because we're going to continue over there. So click over here and I'll see you over there.