 In this episode, we'll be talking about when will we start designing for a healthier society, the importance of making sure your design fits a specific context, and finally, how can we mindfully use language as a design material. Here's the guest for this episode, let the show begin! Hi, I'm Jorge and this is the Service Design Show. Hi Mark and welcome to a new episode of the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business. My guest in this episode is an information architect, a consultant, a writer and a teacher and most of all a big Disney nerd. His name is Jorge Arango. In the next 30 minutes we'll be talking about when will we start designing for a healthier society, we'll be talking about the importance of making sure your design fits a specific context, and finally, how can we mindfully use language as a design material. We post new videos every week, so if you want to level up your service design skills, make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you'll be notified when new videos come out. So that's all for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Jorge. Welcome to the show Jorge. Thank you Mark, I'm happy to be here. Awesome to have you on the show, you were referred by Steve so I'm having, my hopes are high for this talk. Steve is a good friend and I saw his episode and I know he's very intrigued and interested in seeing how this goes. For the people who haven't seen that, who is Steve, Steve Portagall, Steve is a writer, he talked a little bit about his book that was released last year, you're also a writer and you have a new book coming out too, right? Could you really briefly tell us what is it about? It's actually come out already, it came out in June, it's called Living in Information and I've got one right here next to me and I think the subtitle kind of gives it away, the subtitle is Responsible Design for Digital Places. And the idea of the book is that we who design digital things, websites, apps, software, have mostly framed the work we do in terms of products or services like we have in this show. So we think of ourselves as designing products, services, interactions, experiences, right? And those things are all true of the work we do, but there's another thing that we're doing when we design these things, which is we're creating contexts which influence how people think and therefore how people behave and how people act. And the book draws from architecture, from the field of architecture, which is what my background is in, to try to create digital places that better serve our needs. You said it's related to the digital RAM, do you think it would be an interesting book for service designers as well that are not strongly tied to digital? Yeah, I think so. As I told you when we were doing the preamble to the show, I'm very curious to know how you see service design because I only have a passing familiarity with what people mean when they say service design and I have my own understanding of what it is. And I have not been very active in the service design community and I know that there is a strong practitioner community developing there. So I'm very curious to refine my own understanding of what service design is in the course of this interview. But to answer your question, yes, I think it is a good book in that sense because... So digital is the framing that I chose to use for this because so much of what we're doing today and so much of what we're reading in the news is happening in information environments like Facebook, right? And we hear about, for example, the spread of fake news. That's something that's been in the non-fake news a lot, right? And we've seen the effect of moving our civic discourse to these digital places, right? But ultimately, what it boils down to is that we must be mindful of language and the distinctions that we are imposing upon the world. And those distinctions transcend digital, I mean... Let's not get too much into that because that's one of the topics we'll talk about. So if people want to get the book, one last time, what's the best place to buy it? Amazon or where is it available? So again, I don't know if you can see this on the screen, but the name of the book is Living in Information, Responsible Design for Digital Places. It is published by Two Wave Books, which is a Rosenfeld media imprint, and the best place to buy it is from Rosenfeld Media. I'll include the link in the show notes. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's available in Amazon and all these other online bookstores, but I like to support my publisher. Awesome, we had a lot of publishers from Rosenfeld. So, Jorge, a question that I must ask because it's a tradition on the show, and that is, you're not a service design practitioner per se, but do you remember or do you recall the first time you heard the term? Yeah, the first time I heard the term was in the context of the work that the folks at Adaptive Path were doing. And I remember that they had a conference around the subject, which by the way, I think they are wrapping up, if I'm not mistaken, I've seen a post that they're discontinuing that. But that was the context that I first heard about this, and I associated in my mind with things like Journey Maps, which again, the first time I saw that artifact was coming out from the folks at Adaptive Path. And I remember thinking at the time that the innovation in this framing had to do with taking a more holistic understanding of the experience of the person as they interact with the organization throughout multiple touch points. So, you know, you're calling out the digital in the title of the book is apropos here. The idea was, well, this thing that you are designing, you may be focused on an app or a website, but that's not the only point of interaction that this person is going to have with your offering. And you need to take a more comprehensive look at what's going on. That's the understanding I had. Yeah, and it was informed by the work that the folks at Adaptive Path were doing. Yeah, they did some groundbreaking work. Go ahead. No, I was going to say, like I mentioned earlier, I hadn't participated much in the community. I mean, the thinking around it has been influential to me. That said, I've long been very influenced by systems thinking. And a lot of it I feel is kind of a return to a way of thinking that has been lost as people focus in ever more specialized areas of design, which I found to be a welcome and refreshing development, you know, having an area of the discipline that focused on the big picture and coherence across the experience was refreshing. And something that I thought filled in an important gap. I'm going to send flocks of service designers your way to make sure they read your book and start the conversation to draw you in more into this field. Jorge, you sent me three, not even topics, you named them provocations, which I really like. So let's get into them. And you said this format feels like jazz. So in full jazz style, we're going to improvise on the spot. I'm going to surprise you with which one will be first. Are you ready? Okay. So let's see three topics here. Yes, let's start with the most, it seems the most distant one from service design. But who knows? It's the topic of healthier societies. Do we have a question starter that goes along with this one? Yeah, let me look for it. It's jazz for you. You don't look for it. You do whatever comes up. Okay. So what's the question? How will you, how will you define the question? So I picked, I picked this starting, this starting framing because of the word when, time, right? When will we, so here's the thing. Let's dive into it like this. I am living in Northern California and this is a very interesting and particular part of the world where a lot of developments are happening that are changing the way that we live in fundamental ways, in non-trivial ways, right? The, a lot of folks in your audience will have read an essay by Mark Andreessen where he talked about software eating the world. And we are in the process of moving a lot of our social interactions, fundamental social interactions to basically software mediated environments. Things like Facebook, for example, or Twitter, right? And these, these interactions that we are moving to these places, things like civic discourse and shopping and learning. And conversations like the one that you and I are having now are things that we have done in physical space for a long time. You know, 100 years ago this conversation that you and I are having would have been impossible. And over the long period of time that our species created architecture, which is the context where a lot of these interactions have happened in the past, we evolved best practices for places to support these interactions. Now, we're in the process of moving a lot of these things to software-based environments and we don't have best practices for it yet. And we are seeing the effects of having kind of barged into moving these things, these, these critical social interactions, moving them to these environments. And my sense, the reason I picked when as the framing is my sense is that those of us who are involved with designing especially software-based experiences have taken too narrow a focus on what we're doing. And when I talk about narrow, I'm talking about narrow time-wise. We tend to design things to meet the needs of this quarter or perhaps the next couple of years. But we're not thinking about what we're doing in the context of, you know, a 10-year frame of thinking or a 50-year frame of thinking or a 100-year frame of thinking. And this is something that if you're, if you're making a building or if you're making a place, you know, an urban environment, you're not thinking about meeting the needs of the next quarter. You're thinking about the impact that that's going to have in the environment over the long term because you don't make these things with the understanding that they're going to go away soon. So one of the reasons I wrote the book and one of the things that I'm constantly talking about with designers is how might we think about what we're doing in a longer-term perspective, in a perspective of, with a perspective towards putting things into society that allow for society to function in a healthy way in the long-term. I don't think we're doing that now, Mark. I think that we are putting things out there that are, that have very short-term goals and are actually harming society. In which way? So that was because to understand health, I think to move towards this direction that you're talking about, I would be really interested to understand your notion of healthy societies versus unhealthy societies, right? Yeah. I mean, I have my own personal takes on this. My North, my North Star, so to speak for this, is a book called Finite and Infinite Games by James Kars. And are you familiar with this book, Mark? No, not. So it's one that if the viewers of the show or the listeners of the podcast are in any way intrigued by these ideas, they would be well-served by checking out. So in this book, James Kars makes the distinction between two types of games, and he says we're always playing a game. And he makes the distinction between two types of games, finite games and infinite games. And he says that finite games are games that we play with the objective of winning. And infinite games are games that we play with the objective of keeping the game going. And that's how I framed this issue. I think that a healthy society is one that works towards ways of keeping the society going and not necessarily having one group win over the other, but having better ways of collaborating towards shared goals. My ideal would be a society in which we can talk with each other, converse, and through conversing, identify shared goals and collaborate towards those goals, work towards them. That requires that we find ways of seeing eye-to-eye, finding common ground, understanding each other, basically. And there's an interesting tension in the digital space, and a parenthesis here. I'm always looking for tensions. I think that tensions are very interesting, things that are kind of pulling in opposite directions. And one of the interesting tensions about digital is that in the digital revolution and in the internet in particular, we have perhaps the greatest communication medium the world has ever seen. In my mind, it leaves the printing press kind of in the dust. It's the most powerful one at least. For sure. The ability to do what we're doing now and to reach the number of people that we are going to reach with this conversation is something that is, I think, unprecedented. It's incredibly powerful. That's kind of pulling in one direction. We have this incredible technology that allows us to communicate better than ever before. And unfortunately, we have, I think, been very, I'll say, meek in exploring ways for monetizing what we do in this medium. And the business model that we've reverted to, which is advertising, is one that, in my mind, is at odds with the project of getting people to see eye to eye and finding ways of understanding each other. I think this is a contentious thing that I'm saying here, perhaps. But the premise of advertising is that I am going to try to persuade you of something. And in order for me to do that, I need to know who you are. Traditionally, we call this demographic distinctions. I need to understand that Mark is, I don't know how old you are, but you're of a certain age group. You live in a particular location. You are interested in particular things. And you break down your profile into an ever smaller niche. And that is valuable for certain things. But it's less valuable for others. This idea that we are going to somehow divide people up into ever narrower demographic segments so that we can target content at them individually, in my mind is at odds with the project of coming to agreement. I think we could fill the whole show talking about healthier societies. And we won't do that because we have more interesting topics. But I want to ask one last question. And hopefully you'll have a short answer for this. If people are inspired by this topic and want to contribute to designing these healthier societies, which question? What is the essential question that they should be asking themselves? The essential question is asking whether you as a designer are working on the right question. I'm not going to speak to service designers because, again, I am not as familiar with the area of practice. But I can tell you that from the perspective of someone who works in the design of software, my sense is that we have not really been very good. We designers have not been very good at questioning the underlying assumptions that drive the things that we're asked to design. I think that we have much to contribute here. We have developed all sorts of techniques to establish empathy, for example, with the people that we are designing for. And it behooves us to take those approaches kind of a couple of levels deeper and ask harder questions. Why are we doing this? Is this healthy? Is this useful? Is this going to drive towards greater communion between people? Or is it going to drive them apart? A thing that comes to my mind, but we will dive into that is critical thinking. That's basically what I'm hearing you say. We need more critical thinking regarding these subjects. Well, yes, critical thinking and also the willingness to take on hard questions. One of the issues that comes up often when talking about this is freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is not a binary thing. It's a pretty complex issue that if you're going to discuss, you need to really examine and ask difficult questions. And I think that designers need to start doing more of that. We need to start questioning the things that we're doing, but the effects and the motivations, what's driving us to do these things. I'm going to sort of wrap up topic number one. Let's move on. I'm sure it blends into each other. Topic number two is service design show jazz. It's the topic of the role of context. Then again, do you have a question starter that goes along with this one? Yeah. How can we? So what question can you make up? What's the question? So how can we make sense of and articulate the context that we are creating in the world when we design a service or when we design software? Well, we design anything, right? No. I'm very specifically talking about context. And I'll tell you why. Because when you design anything, when you design this thing that I'm holding, this is an iPad, right? And I'm holding this thing in my hand. And this is an object that you can hold, you can examine. It has a particular form. It has, it's a tangible thing, right? And there is the industrial design that resulted in this object. There is the design of the software that allows me to flash the questions promptly, right? And those are all kind of tangible things that we can see and we can sketch, right? Context is trickier. Context is less tangible. It's more abstract. It's more prone to interpretation. And we are increasingly creating contexts in the things that we design, right? If I'm working on the design of, let's say, a financial services application, let's call it a bank, right? Like the website for a bank. That's at least going to have two different environments that users operate in. Most banks have a public side of the website or app and a kind of private side which you access by logging in, right? Those are two very different contexts that you're operating in when you are interacting with a bank. And when I'm working on the design of something like this, I can convey the user interface, you know? And I can convey things like the navigation structures that will be created. The thing that is trickier to convey is how users will understand that they are switching from one environment to another or from one part of the environment to another. And I find that that's it's an important abstraction that we have that is challenging to convey, especially to stakeholders, right? Like the folks who are paying us to design these things, yet it's critical that we get it right. Because you don't want to be trying to transfer money and entering stuff into fields thinking that you're in the private side of the bank when you're actually in the public side of the bank, right? I mean, this is an exaggeration for that. So to make it concrete, you know, in the example with a bank, how do you convey that it's a safe context, the notion of safety, right? That's something we should be designing. It's that feeling. Is that what you're talking about? Is that an example? Partly, I would say that the word perhaps is not safety, it's trust, trustworthiness, right? Like safety is what makes you trust that your transactions will be, you know, that you won't make a mistake, a costly mistake, right? What I'm talking about is having users understand that they are operating between the confines of a particular environment and that there are certain things they can and cannot do there. And they get a sense of what that environment is and isn't. We operate differently when we are in a church than when we are in a sports stadium, right? Like we, when we inhabit those places, we know that there are certain expectations as to how we're supposed to behave in each one of them. And for a long time in the design of, especially in the design of software, we've paid attention to things like navigation bars to allow people to get from one part of the environment to another. And that's certainly an important role they play. But they also played the role of telling us where we are. And I don't mean where we are, like what page I'm in, in a website. I mean, what kind of place is this? Is it a bank? Is it the private part of the bank or is it the public part of the bank, right? That's what I mean by this. It's like an understanding of where we are and what we can do there. And to our discussion earlier, you know, we have only been doing this really for the last, I would say 40 years or so. This is fairly new for us. We've been using banks, buildings that serve as banks for a long time, and we have practices around that. We're still figuring it out when it comes to these more ephemeral software-based experiences. So what is the consequence that we're not consciously designing for certain contexts? Well, the consequence, I think, is that in many cases we're getting it wrong. And getting it wrong in a big way. And I want to go back to this idea of civic discussion. So if you and I want to have a conversation around who we're going to elect, let's say, you know, if we live in a democracy, we want to discuss our candidates, right? It would behoove us to have that conversation in a place that is well suited for us to A, be informed, B, keep our temper, C, behave in a civil way towards each other. And that, in my mind, is at odds with the idea of engagement. Like if you design a place to serve as a container for your conversations, that place should go away once the conversation is over. It shouldn't try to keep you there. But if the way that the place is making money is by keeping you there, you have a fundamental contradiction. The place is designed for something and it's being used for something else. And the net result is you're going to get in trouble. Because you're going to think you're having a conversation that is neutral somehow, but you're not. You're somehow having a conversation that is being influenced by the place it's in. What I refer to my former question, so again, what is the question that we as a design community should be asking ourselves more often regarding designing for a specific context? Yeah, so I can tell this is a question for myself. I don't want to pretend to be posing it to the rest of the world, but I'm always struggling with how can I illustrate this? How can I make it obvious to people? Just the very questions that you're asking are useful in helping me articulate it, but talking about it is no good. We have to find ways of putting this into artifacts that we can critique and that we can have design discussions about. And that's why I go back to architecture, because architecture has been designing places for a long time with designing context, but we can't just take it verbatim. We have to translate these ideas towards this new domain that we're working within. Super interesting. Super interesting. It really appeals to the craft of design with the new design materials that we have in our hands. We still need to learn the properties and how to use them. Topic number three, Jorge, because we need to move on and I think this one sort of we spoke about it earlier and it's the effect of language. Do we have a question starter again? So we talked about the effect of context or a lack of context and now we're moving into the effect of language. The wild card. Yes, there we go. What question could you make up? Is this language, right? We're seeing three dots. It's three dots, right? There are the word service design show in the upper left corner. But yeah, this ties, I'm glad that this is the sequence that the questions came out in, because I think this is a perfect segue from the previous question, which I'll start by saying this. We need ways of describing what we do and how it's different from other things and you touched on this earlier, right? Like this idea that we want to somehow be inclusive within your talking specifically about the practice, you know, service design and you want a label that is both inclusive but that also kind of ropes off a little part of the world and says this is a discipline that is focused on this, right? And that is what I refer to as setting up a distinction, right? You are saying to the world, we have a discipline here, a design discipline, so it's not medicine, it's not law, it's a design discipline. So that's one distinction and you're making another distinction. You're saying this discipline is focused on service, services as the kind of object of interest, the artifact that we're somehow manipulating, right? And in so doing, you're setting it off against other design disciplines. It's not industrial design, it's not graphic design, it's not interaction design somehow, that's an interesting distinction by the way. And you're creating distinctions and the way that we do this is through language, all right? And when we are designing any kind of context, any kind of environment, what we're doing is we're setting it off against other parts of the world. And we're saying this little part of the world is reserved for doing this thing. When we are doing that, using buildings, we do it with walls, we do it with different types of materials, floor treatments. When we do that in software, and I would imagine this is also in service design, you know, beyond software, we do it through language, we are setting up labels that say this part of the experience is dedicated to this thing, this other part is dedicated to this other thing. Let's return to our banking example. You know that you are crossing from the public part of the environment to the private part because you are given a label that says login somehow, right? Or sign in, or my account, which is worth pointing out that in the financial services context, account is an ambiguous word, because the account can refer to your account as a user, but it can also refer to your bank account. So language is incredibly important when we're setting up distinctions and when we're creating contexts. And I increasingly think that language is the primary material that I work with. Okay. That's a provocation. It's not like you had a follow-up question. Well, so if that's true, if language is an important design material, I would almost say, so what? Because I'm sure you have some tensions or concerns about this. Yeah. It's great that you asked that because one of the challenges with this conversation is that it can get very abstract very quickly and you can end up losing sight of what it is that you're trying to get at, right? So we said earlier that healthy societies are those that are somehow sustainable over time. And that requires that we get a degree of understanding with each other, that we collaborate and work towards shared goals, with one of the goals being keeping our society going. And the way we do this is through language. And for us to use language, we need to be clear that we understand what words mean. And I went through great pains at first to say, well, I'm not very familiar with service design because that's a label. And it's a label that has meaning in my mind. It's a container for meaning for me. And one of the things I wanted to get out of this conversation is whether you and I share that meaning of the word service in this context, right? We are in the process of, like I said, moving a lot of our interactions to software based experiences and we move around them using labels. And that means that we need to make choices about language. I can give you an example of a choice of label that I think in retrospect might have been a mistake and that may end up being a costly mistake. When you go onto a social medium like Facebook, for example, what is the name of the first screen that you see when you log into? It's the friend feed, right? Or the news feed. There you go. The name is news feed, right? And news is a word that used to have a particular meaning that I think was well understood. And it's a word whose meaning has been shifting over the past 10 years, I would say, perhaps a little longer. But when I think of news in the context of something like Facebook, so news for me used to be I am going to find out what is happening, the latest, right? Journalism, yeah. Right. And you pick up the newspaper, right? And the whole point of the newspaper was I want to know what's happened most recently. Like a month old newspaper is only interesting for historical reasons, perhaps. It's only really useful if it's telling you what is happening now, ostensibly so that you can make better decisions, right? So in my mind for a long time, the meaning of news has been, I'm going to get the latest. And in environments such as Facebook, which I'm going to use as an example just because of how prevalent it is and how many people use it, the news feed started out like that. It started out being a chronological news feed, but it no longer is that. Now it's an algorithmically driven thing. There is software that determines what you will see, the order you will see it in, the stuff that you will see and from whom. And my sense is that our understanding of what news are is shifting as a result of interacting with these things. And very specifically, using the word news to describe them, it's not just that the thing exists, is that we chose this word news for it, perhaps for historical reasons. But I think that we need to question that. We need to question the language we're using because it influences how we think without doubt. We're using the example of news. I use a similar example. That's a classic one, maybe a little bit different context. And that is when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he introduced it as a phone. He used the notion of a phone and then explained how it's completely different. So it's like piggy-begging on a mental model that we already have. And that can work out well, but it can also do some harm. I can give you another example from Steve Jobs, which I think Steve Jobs was a master of this. He was a great presenter and a master of language. And one of the products that Apple developed under his watch that always sticks with me is the iPod Shuffle. Do you remember that? A small level thing, yeah. It was a small little thing. And the thing that intrigued me about that one is that was the first iPod that didn't have a screen. And the screen, up to then the screen had been an integral part of the iPod experience because that's how you chose what you were going to play, what song you were going to play. And that device didn't have a screen and that could be perceived as its biggest liability. It was cheaper. It was more portable. It had a bunch of different benefits to it, but by far its biggest liability when compared to the previous iPods is that you couldn't see what you were selecting. And rather than somehow try to paper over that liability, they reframed it and made it like the chief selling asset of the product to the point where they called it that. They said, well, you don't have to worry about selecting a song because this one is all about randomizing your playlist and surprising you. And they made it into like a delightful thing. And I think that that was very clever. And the choice of the word shuffle for that thing was very, I thought it was very clever because shuffle refers to both like randomizing your playlist, but a shuffle is also like a particular like jaunty way of walking. Right. So it's spoke to this liability of the product and reframed it as an asset, which I think was brilliant, right? I've got one more question for you before we start to wrap up the show. And that is we talked about a lot of things, super interesting. I think a lot of people have a lot of questions after the show. And that's exactly what we want. More questions than answers. But it's your turn to ask us a question. What would you like to know from us, the viewers, the listeners of the service design show? I would very much, first of all, I am very encouraged by the fact that service design is an area of practice. And that there are people focused on this. I would like to encourage service designers to dig into systems thinking as a discipline that has been around for a while. My sense is that as an area of focus service design is perhaps the closest to system thinking, because you are taking such a such a wide lens into the user's interaction with the thing that you're designing. So I think exploring systems thinking is something that is long overdue for designers. And my sense is that service designers are potentially in the forefront of that. And what would be your question? What would you like to know from us? I'm going to put you on the spot. How might you, as service designers, help business stakeholders, the people who are commissioning you to do the work, avoid unintended consequences, create an experience that is not just coherent and holistic and supportive of the goals of the organization, but also the goals of the context that the organization exists within. Society more broadly, thinking of not just the business stakeholders, but also our social stakeholders beyond our customers, just people in general. How might you as a discipline help your patrons basically get a better sense of how the thing that you are designing serves broader needs? I've mentally wrote down to do a special episode on unintended consequences of the designs we bring out, because that's a super interesting topic. I really want to thank you. We made this into a marathon session in a service design show term. So thanks so much for inspiring us, for making us think, question, and I hope a lot of people comment on this episode. So thank you again, Jorge. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. So how would you help stakeholders to see the unintended consequences? Make sure you leave a comment down below and join the conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please give it a thumbs up. I'd really appreciate that. And if you know someone who might benefit from what we've just discussed, make sure to share this video with them. Thanks so much for watching. I really appreciate your time and look forward to seeing you in the next episode.