 In this episode, we'll be talking about the difference between service improvement, service innovation and service design. We'll be talking about why you must be designing business models as a service designer and finally how you can become a better designer by learning from nature. And here's the guest for this episode. Hi, I'm Zebra Chebeco and welcome to the Service Design Show. If you're trying to design services that have a positive impact on people's lives and are good for business, then you've come to the right place. Hi, my name is Marc Fontaine and welcome to the Service Design Show. My guest in this episode is Debra Chebeco. Debra is a true service design pioneer who founded the service design studio called Think Public. In the next 30 minutes, Debra and I will be talking about three really interesting topics. What is the difference between service improvement, service innovation and service design? We'll be talking about why you must be designing business models as a service designer and finally how you can become a better designer by learning from nature. We post new videos on a weekly basis on this channel. So if you don't want to miss anything, I would love to have you to subscribe to this channel and click that bell icon so you'll be notified when new videos are out. And if you'd like to learn how to explain service design without confusing people, check out the free course that I have got for you. You can find it over here or in the link down below in the description of this video. So that was all for the introduction and now let's jump straight into the interview with Debra. Welcome to the show Debra. Hi Marc. It's awesome to have you on and I still remember when we met back in 2007 in our old 31 Ford Studio you took the whole Think Public team here and we went out bowling, right? That was our first encounter. Yeah, did we beat you? Chances are slim, I'd say. That was great. That feels like such a long time ago. Well, it is. I can remember coming over and seeing you guys and we all had lunch together which reminded me very much of Think Public and then you guys got the washing up bowl out and I was like that's exactly like us. We're still doing the lunches. So bowling isn't any more in the plans but the lunches still are. Let's jump straight into the show and I'm going to ask you the question that I've been asking for the past 50 episodes and that is do you remember the first time you got in touch with Server Design? I know. Well, I was thinking about this earlier. I think it was about 14 or 15 years ago and so I basically got into service design through volunteering at Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital and whilst I was there I saw so many opportunities for how design could improve communications and experience and I guess when we start to look at experience that's kind of at the foundations of service design and so that was kind of I guess my first step into going well, how do we design and improve these experiences? I didn't know what it was called at that point. And when did you learn about the term? I think the term came probably in 2004 when I was part of the Nesta Creative Pioneer Programme and spent quite a lot of time with the Live Work Gang and I think that helped to kind of I guess put meaning, put words to everything that was going on up here and it made a lot of sense. All right. You have a long history in service design so I'm really curious which topics you've picked to talk about. I've got three topics here. You've got some question starters and that's part of the show to actually co-create on the fly. Are you ready? I'm ready. Let's go. I'll pick the first topic and this is an interesting one because it's called improvement design or innovation. It's quite cryptic. Do you have a question starter that goes along with this one? Yeah, so my question starter is I guess how do you know what type of service design you're actually doing or should be doing depending on the context in which you're working in. So that's kind of my question. Are there different forms of service design? Well, I think there's different forms of being a service designer and I think that this is something within the discipline that I see that there's lots of different types of service designers that may be better on different types of projects. And so for example, I think publicly we did a lot of like service improvement work, which is actually, you know, obviously within the NHS when budgets are limited, you don't get to design a service from scratch very often and also you just don't have that kind of resource. So what you have to do is take the existing service and system and co-design and work with people to make improvements. So our role as designers is very different. We end up being more kind of facilitators and empowering people to be the designers to create the change themselves. So I'd say that's the kind of foundations of like service improvement. But it's still service design. So, and then I think when you then kind of move on to more like service innovation and more projects which actually will start from I guess the ground where they're like, we just don't know what it is we want to design. So there's much more place and opportunity and potentially quite often the budgets are slightly bigger and people also are trying to design for the future more. And that takes a very different type of design. Obviously, we still need to gain really good insights and understand the problems that we're trying to solve. But we're also trying to dream and create what a future could be. And so I guess it's a balance of when you're a designer and you're listening and you're learning and you're facilitating. But then you also flip into leadership mode where as a designer, you do bring some kind of special design magic, which is hard to explain. And that's where we can start to kind of create ideas that weren't possible before. So I kind of guess that's why I put that question there because I think sometimes if we're in a service improvement project, but we have a service innovation mindset, the solutions never going to work. So we have to kind of adapt to the context in which we're working in. And is there a really strict way of knowing which kind of mindset we have to adopt? I don't think it's necessarily strict. I think it's a lot to do with I guess really understanding the problem and the client and the system in which you're designing a solution for. And having kind of empathy for the situation and not trying to kind of enforce something if it's not the right context to be doing that. If you say everything is still service design, either if it's improvement or innovation, what is the thing that ties it all together? I think it's a lot to do with the tools and the methodology. And I think you can go through a service design and I always kind of frame it also like co-production methodology, whether you're doing a really short project or a really long project, or whether you're doing a service improvement project or an innovation project, you still need to have a really good foundation of insights. You still need to kind of work with people to create ideas. And I think it's just learning at what stage to, I guess, dial up and dial down design leadership within each of those projects. And so I would have to frame it. One of the big differences within these three things is your starting point. Your starting point differs, right? Your starting challenge probably differs. And maybe the outcome or the ambition or the goal is always the same. We want to create services that are better for people and business and the planet maybe, but the starting point might differ. Yeah, I think this the starting point or the question or the state of the question maybe that someone comes to you with. Because very often, I imagine for many people working in service design, people don't come with a brief. They come with a problem or they think it's the problem, but then when you start researching, you realize that's not the problem. And so I think it's also, I guess, knowing where that organization is in their kind of journey of understanding of design and innovation. So I always say, how brave do you want to be? And so if you think that a client's going to be brave, then you could probably do, but they also need to make change today. You could blend service improvement and service innovation. And I guess it's just about managing that relationship and trying to help people take a step forward to being bold. Because obviously what you don't want to do is end up just make like titling around the edges. Even though there is value because we can make a big difference, particularly in healthcare by making small changes, but actually sometimes we really need to have a radical change. Maybe one final thing regarding this topic. If you would have to give some sort of advice to service designers regarding this topic, what would your advice be, or based on the lessons you've gained in the last 10, 12, 13 years? I think a lot of it's about people skills. And I think that when it comes to having a design team that have really strong people skills, the ability to listen, understand, have empathy is key because I think then it removes the ego from the design process and I think that's probably one difference, particularly in the types of design projects that I've worked in the social sector. The ego has to kind of be left behind a bit because you're working with areas that you have like literally no knowledge about. So you need experts in the room and you need to be able to listen and be able to kind of connect the dots. And sometimes if designers don't listen then they'll miss out the magic. All right. Are you ready to move on to topic number two? Yeah, absolutely. I've got two left. Okay, let's go for this one. Drumroll. The topic number two is called designing business models. Do you have a question starting? Can you show it? Can you show the paper? There. Sorry. All right. So how can we and what do you make out of this? I could ask so many different how can we but the one that I guess to start off with is like how can we use our design skills to disrupt business models and system structures? And I think it's something that I'm really interested in I guess the role of how design is changing and more and more we see actually like design activism, design entrepreneurs. And I think that a lot of the social challenges that we see today actually probably need new business models or new system structures in order to be able to really tackle and change that problem. And so I'm always kind of really aware whenever designing a service you're actually quite often designing a business because it's not like designing I don't know like a poster. There you go. You put it on the wall. You're finished. It's actually you're designing a living system and quite often that has human interactions. It has technology. It'll have to have information put into them. And so all of these things need to be funded in some way. They need to fit within either an existing organization or they need to be made into a new organization. And so it's really important I think for service designers to think like to think like entrepreneurs and to think about all of the different inputs and outputs and how is this going to be financially sustainable beyond this project? Particularly I guess a lot of us working in consultancies where we're given a set amount of money to make something and then hand over but actually how can you hand it over in the best state in order to succeed once you've left? The business component, the business model component is sort of, it's vital. You can't ignore that within a good service design project. Exactly. And I think that quite often the radical forms and using business modeling as part of the creative process much earlier on I think is really important and not kind of like designing something that I don't know just is in a bubble and I mean it doesn't, it happens and I think it's just really important that particularly in design education that people come out with some kind of level of awareness of how to create a business model. And I guess there's lots of different canvases that we can use that help with that but I think it's an area that needs more thinking. This has been a topic quite often on the show recently because if we're not able to connect our solutions and to make them business wise sustainable then like you're saying we're designing stuff in a bubble, right? It doesn't make sense. And you said one of the things is that design schools need to play an active role in this. Is that where you see the big gap happening? Partly, I guess also that comes from experience but I think it's just being really aware of I guess not just the business model but also like the policy context it's just the whole system for what you're designing for because you could come up with a great idea but it's just never going to work because someone downstream is being impacted by it and so I feel like it's awareness from students all the way through to industry that let's not just create these lovely pilot projects actually let's think about who or what organisations might take these on to scale who's got an interest in solving this problem and I think the other bit linked to that is that quite often it's about creating new forms of partnership right from the outset and so we might have a certain challenge where actually as a design agency we know that we need to bring in a commercial partner or a third sector partner or a particular partner in order to have the backbone to that service so it has the potential to kind of live and it's just creating the right conditions and bringing people also in in the right mindset to work together in a collaborative way I'm sort of starting to think about where the boundaries of service design is still should we still consider the service design and I don't want to get into semantics or debates about what service design and service design isn't but is this still service design? I guess the question is I'm not quite sure actually I think with service design there's lots of blurry boundaries and so I guess what I'm not saying is I think that designers need to be able to write a fully fledged business plan but what I am saying is that they need to have an understanding of it and understand the context of it because otherwise their creativity is limited and so it's a bit like say for example with AI and the development of AI it's like well I don't know anything about AI but I also have a responsibility to learn the basics of what it means because that is going to be something that impacts a lot of the design solutions and so as service designers I think you have to be a bit of a bit of jack-of-all-trades sometimes just in a generalist level and then be able to bring in the experts when you need to go deeper Makes sense, makes complete sense What is when you think about this topic and try to fast forward it to three or five years how do you see this topic evolving? I guess partly I'm really interested in like value chains and how I guess depending on what the problem is how maybe you bring in existing businesses to create a new value chain so sometimes as designers, service designers we might find ourselves actually not even designing anything but saying well actually this already exists but what we're going to do is connect it with something else and help it scale and then actually you've created a whole new value chain that has a bigger impact so I think it feels like we're probably entering a phase where we don't really sometimes even need to design any more stuff We're orchestrating things much more, right? Yeah and there's so many great things out there but it's just about how you connect them to scale, I think that's the biggest challenge Alright time to move already to topic number three and this is a completely different topic so that's really fun we've moved from the business side to something that hasn't been on the show that often to be honest and that is learning from nature again the classic how can we So this is how can we go back to basics and explore our relationship to ourselves and to nature in order to inspire design solutions ideas that tackle social issues so Where is this question coming from? I'm a bit of a secret hippie not anymore now I've told you You're out in the open I think it comes from I guess within all of the work that I've ever taken part in I think one of the things that's always struck me is the power of connecting people and the power of when those people have a conversation with each other what's possible and I think quite often we forget about that and I see there's so much technology that's coming on the market which is all super exciting and we're going to have chatbots that will be able to give advice and stuff I'm a big fan of all of that stuff but I think we really need to make sure that we're grounded when designing with technology and I think it's about looking beyond that and reversing our thinking and looking back to actually how the planet works and how the earth kind of is actually giving messages and we can learn from that so what does it actually I guess I can pose some questions what does it actually mean to be human what role does human connection play in tackling social issues what's the role in looking at how trees for example are planted in the earth and they go through cycles of the season say for example when you look at winter that then moves into spring so that then moves into summer and autumn and actually if you look at a design process quite often we go through stages where things need to be seeded they need to be nurtured then they start to come to life and there's a natural kind of flow and I feel like that we need to get outside more connect with nature and also talk to each other more as human beings on a really deep level to be able to kind of think very differently about how we solve some of these problems and so some other kind of examples are like I mean I guess we're starting to learn a lot about how the gut the gut works and actually within our own gut there are ways that we can find things to treat different diseases or in Japan like how it's a massive movement around forest bathing and how forest bathing is really good for our mental health and our blood pressure and to reduce stress and so it's actually maybe some of our design solutions aren't going and having a mobile phone but they're taking your shoes off and going for a walk in the forest that's quite a cheap solution hmm so yeah I think it's also around I guess we talk a lot about like systems thinking but it kind of links into actually like systems feeling how do we what does it feel like what we've created and how are the humans the people actually going to interact and what changes in their life is it going to make because ultimately I'm a big believer in change only happens through people and so without empowering people nothing's going to happen so a lot of the process but I think I definitely get your message and I'm trying to relate this to myself and is it that where is that service designers or designers in general who have lost too much on tools and processes and technology and too little on themselves potentially yes I mean I think that the tools and processes are like a structure that's great and you could be trained to use all the tools and systems in the world but still not be very good because actually there is a bit of intuition that's needed and obviously data to back that up that's kind of like the data and that side of things sometimes comes in as a protection whereas actually if we are all more to trust our intuition I think that actually we'd a lot more cool stuff would kind of come through and we would trust it and I think that there was exactly the point I was trying to make that if we trust ourselves at least just as much as we trust the process then probably much better questions would come out right? Yeah exactly and actually I think there's a really simple exercise that you can do where you sit down and you talk to someone and you really listen to that person and not listen because quite often when we're having a conversation our mind is thinking about what we're going to say and how we're going to respond rather than actually listening deeply to understand and actually the change relationship of that dynamic of conversation is really powerful when the other person feels that they've been heard and it's so simple and I feel like particularly in health obviously which I work a lot in I feel like people don't feel like they're being listened to or heard and so things that can help with that could actually be really, really powerful That's an awesome tool already if we want to trust the tool deeply listening What has set you on this path? What has happened in your life that you thought okay I need to explore this more? I think it's always been part of always been part of my practice I think public we've had shamans in we've had lots of random things where we've kind of I guess connected with the kind of spiritual side and the nature and I also believe that even design is a creative process which is a magical process it feels like I've always been in that space and I feel actually more recently that the volume of actually talking about this stuff needs to be turned up and say for example mindfulness has become a really big movement now and so I think that really opens up the potential to talk about more kind of holistic ways in which we can solve problems and I mean personally I'm still kind of trying to figure it out myself but I feel like there's so much potential and power in that space Where do you get your inspiration from or if I frame this question in a different way where people are inspired by what you just already said where would you advise them to find more dive deeper into this what are good resources references I was reading I was reading John Facker his new book which I've completely forgotten I think it's like designing we'll put a link in the episode show notes and he's always been very interested in ecology and it's less so that I think I'm also interested in the shamanic processes of having a challenge, a problem and then going into a deep creative meditation ultimately to find a solution and so quite often if you think when we're looking for solutions we're ideating we bounce ideas around and it's very much from our head and so I guess what I'm saying is how do we actually stop and actually go inside ourselves either collectively or individually to be inspired with new solutions and so there's lots of interesting kind of ways in which you can do that and one of the things that also like sound meditation is a great way of doing that too and or just literally going for a walk without your phone in the woods somewhere connecting with nature and I think that a lot of us actually neglect that part of our lives because we're all so busy we feel busy, right? I know what I'm going to do this weekend put my phone away and taking time and taking it feels like taking a break but it's actually not taking a break that's a totally wrong mindset you're actually creating things by not doing anything or at least not doing anything in your head yeah and I guess we could all recognize that some of the best ideas come when you're in the shower and you're not even thinking about it and so it's like actually how can we access that quicker and make that part of our general process that's an awesome question how can we access the state of mind that you encounter in a shower quicker I love that Deborah we're heading towards the end of the show because I have a question for you and that is this is your opportunity to ask the people who are watching or listening this episode a question is there something you'd like to know from us? I think my question would be around how do we how do we actually spread like a service design, co-production way of thinking to engage more people in this process because I think that quite often when talking about it to people who haven't been involved in a project before it's really hard to explain because you don't have a physical thing to show this is what it is you say well once you've done it you'll know what it feels like and it's like okay great we need to get everyone to do this so they know what it feels like because generally in my experience once people have used this approach they want to use it again and it goes back to that kind of magic how can we get more people to kind of get the vibe how can we let them experience it without having experienced it that's a great question I'm really curious what people have to say about this leave a comment down below on this episode let's see what comes in Deborah I want to thank you for making time sharing some of your thoughts it inspired me a lot so thanks again for being here thanks for inviting me Mark so what is your favorite tool to actually learn from nature leave your tips down below in the comments and if you enjoyed this episode I'd really appreciate it if you click that thumbs up button and of course if you know someone who might benefit from the things we've just discussed please share this video with them if you want to learn how to explain service design without making a southline brain surgery check out the free course I've got for you over here or click the link down below in the description of this video thanks again for watching and I look forward to see you in the next video