Because we live life in the present tense we are always living in the belief that we are right. Therefore being wrong feels like being right. Realising your wrong feels different.

But what can you do with this new found perspective? I thought this was a good analogy to go along with Paul Saffo’s Mantra “Strong Opinions Weakly Heard”.

Paul explains it well here: “my mantra for this process is “strong opinions, weakly held.” Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the “strong opinion” part. Then –and this is the “weakly held” part– prove yourself wrong. Engage in creative doubt. Look for information that doesn’t fit, or indicators that pointing in an entirely different direction. Eventually your intuition will kick in and a new hypothesis will emerge out of the rubble, ready to be ruthlessly torn apart once again. You will be surprised by how quickly the sequence of faulty forecasts will deliver you to a useful result.” http://www.saffo.com/journal/entry.php?id=898 

I don’t like the use of the words right and wrong when talking about design, its too black and white. But criticism of decisions and designs can bring up our defences of not wanting to be “wrong”, so next time your being challenged keep your strong opinions weakly held remembering you could be the coyote.

He also gave the group a bit of tough love, by saying; “The role of the designer is to be the facilitator not the center”, and the crowd responded with applause.

Some other points include:
- Advocating design playing a key role in implementing strategy in organisations.
- Teaching managers design skills so they can synthesize
- Useful, Usable and Desirable fits in the core of management itself…
If you dont have a quality of character…. a sensitivity and care for your customer, then you have a crippled business model
- The arousal and fulfilment of expectation
- Profitability is important in a company, but not the purpose of a company, the purpose is to provide goods and services

This was the best speaker of the two days, hope you all enjoy.

Service Design Network, Learn Basics Page:

SDN national conference Paris 2011_Birgit Mager from sdnetwork on Vimeo.

Within Service Design, Service Interfaces are designed for intangible products that are, from the customer’s point of view, useful, profitable and desirable, while they are effective, efficient and different for the provider. Service Designers visualize, formulate and choreograph solutions that are not yet available. They watch and interpret needs and behaviours and transform them into potential future services. In the process, exploring, generating and evaluating approaches are used similarly and a redesign of existing services is just as much a challenge as the development of new innovative services.

http://service-design-network.org/learnbasics

The definition in the video is ok. re: “Application of design concepts and design methods to services in order to create solutions that are useful, usable, desirable, efficient, effective and different” at 10:59.

I like this statement in explaining what service design does 19:09: “Service Design went into the user perspective, created the system a concept, Visualised it”…

Also the 10 basics are worth listening:

1. Look at your service as a product
2. Focus on the customer benefit
3. Dive into the customers world
4. See the big picture
5. Design the customer experience
6. Design a visible service evidence (e.g. the toilet paper fold in a hotel)
7. Go for standing ovations with your service (it takes happy staff to have happy customers)
8.  Define flexible standard
9. Create a living product (learning processes, designed into the service)
10. Be enthusiastic (look at the culture)

The book is well structured, getting to the point with explanations, visual references, and references to previous studies, tests performed for the book and clearly stated when drawing on personal experience and preferences.  This is great as i tend to get frustrated with authors which rant their personal preferences but don’t cough up any concrete evidence that their opinion is remotely valid when tested against real people.

I’ve since gone back and touched up a few forms but really happy that most of the design decisions that i’d worked on were inline with the recommendations on those specific situations.

This book doesn’t tell you all forms should be designed “X” way. Its funny that the author answers this question with “it depends”.  Which when i first read the line, i thought; ‘you bastard, i’ve just bought this book and your not going to have an opinion at all’. But reading further on your provided with a number of example situations and research to backup which solution tested provided certain results. e.g. allowing you to assess if accuracy or speed (or a healthy balance of both) is more appropriate for your frame of reference.

Go check out the table of contents, read the first chapter if you want, but if you have to design a form, build a form, or in any way influence the creation of a form i highly recommend this book. It might just save me some time and pain filling out another crappy web form in the future, or even better save some lives in a hospital CRM system.

Lean Thinking
Too many fascinating things to list, but an underlying principal of “doing more and more with less and less” for the benefit of man is fantastic, and it’s always great to change your frame of reference to zoom out a little more, for me I was relating the concepts to Lean Thinking as a vehicle of improving the quality of life for humanity, it’s the rudder at the back of the boat which can shift our overall direction.

Design Responsibility
At 1:09: 45 to 1:10 50, I really enjoyed his rant he gave to a class of architecture students, about the responsibility we have as designers. Specifically their concern with how pretty it looks, and asking them to stop concerning themselves with this and instead work on the function and in an economical way that its realizable, how pretty it looks will come out if you have solved the problem properly, like a rose is beautiful, or sunset, something we all know as experience designers. Put in the reference of “responsibility”, it makes me think of the alternative which means concerning yourself with aesthetics first is negligent.

Iterative and zooming out
My favorite part was at the end when he was talking about the dome being used for covering cities with a dome and its economic benefits, then transitioning to his next iteration of making cities obsolete by producing little black box’s that you could create your own ecosystem, offering quality of life that can be packed and carried away anywhere you want to go along with your paper dome that lasts years for shelter. The solutions come back to his big picture view of our earth as a spaceship, he is a futurist (or nutter) but we have this technology now, you can get free eBooks on creating your own bio sphere, they’re not yet compactable into a suitcase, but it is possible to be completely self sufficient.

It’s my random reference of inspiration this month but hope this prompts some new ideas by zooming out a little and changing your frame of reference, what’s the equivalent of spaceship earth in your company, group, industry, zooming out might help you find next year’s solution. By thinking lean and zooming out, is the problem you are trying to solve/improve really needing a long term plan to make obsolete?

To help me grasp the overall concepts and get an understanding of how other service designers approach their jobs, this book was great. It is beautifully designed, and presented, I was also pleased that the author approach writing the book as a service design project, and not an author/designer locked in a studio.

I had naturally been doing co-creative, user centered and visual approach to Customer Experience Management, so I was pleased to see some of this in the principals of service design thinking. Examining the title you should notice it says “This is service design thinking” and not “this is service design” which realizes that many professions are already doing service design thinking in their specific roles.

Fields of Service Design:

• Product Design
• Graphic Design
• Interaction Design
• Social Design
• Strategic Management
• Operations Management
• Design Ethnography

Defining service design, and service design thinking was also described in the book and it was interesting that there are allot of attempts, and not yet an agreed definition as service design is very young as a term.

A definition I liked from the book was:
“Service design is all about making the service you deliver useful, usable, efficient, effective and desirable. “ (UK Design Council, 2010)

Also the 5 principals of Service Design Thinking:

1. User Centered
2. Co-creative
3. Sequencing
4. Evidencing
5. Holistic

Overall I would recommend this book for anybody wanting to understand and get started with service design.

To get others opinions I attended a book club in Melbourne which recently reviewed the book, one specific points was a few people felt co creation did not fit as a tool, and why it was also duplicated as a principal. It possibly should be left as a principal and removed as a tool.

Additionally the tools were extensive but didn’t go into specific details e.g. a process of how to use them, overall though we agreed this would have been difficult to achieve without the book being twice as long and it at least gave you direction to seek more information.

I asked the group: “on a scale of 0-10 how likely are you to recommend This is service design thinking to friends and colleagues”

The responses were:

2 x Promoters (9,10)
2 x Passive (7,8)
3 x Detractors (0-6)
Note: nobody marked less than 5. 

I also asked do you think its worth reading unanimously it was yes.

I like it when i see simple customer service rules applied to software.

thanks tumbler, its nice to be told “i’m great”.

This is a simple story that reveals some truths on how we react to change. As the story unfolds you can relate and see in others how they are playing out the story in their own reactions to change.

This great thing about the story is that you could attempt to explain all the lessons literally but this tiny book would end up as a novel. Great work guys in succinctly getting the point across in so few words.

My take from the story is at the end of the story the character hem isn’t revealed as making it through the maze to the next cheese station (experiencing change), and rightly so sometimes people just don’t want to change, and no matter what you do you just can’t change their mind. Sometimes you need to let go of those wo don’t want to change.

Barbara Glanz is a friend of mine who is a speaker and author. A few years ago, she spoke at a convention for a large grocery chain with over 3,000 people attending. Her talk was on creating memories for the customers so they would want to come back. At the end of her speech, she gave out her email address and phone number, and said, “If you have any great service stories, I’d like to hear them.”

Well, about a month later, Barbara gets a call from a young man who introduces himself as Johnny. He said,

“Barbara, I heard what you had to say about service, and I like it! I’m just a bagger in the store and I have Down syndrome, but I wanted to think of a way I could make a difference. I decided that I like sayings, so each day I’m going to pick out one that I like, and my dad and I will print it out on the computer. I’ll cut out the quote in strips and sign my name on the back of each one. The next day when customers come through, I’ll just drop a strip right in their bags and say, ‘I hope you enjoy my quote of the day.’ What do you think, Barbara?”

Barbara said, “Johnny, I think that’s a wonderful idea!”

A few weeks later, Barbara gets another call…this time from the store manager. He says,

“Barbara, you won’t believe what’s happened at our store. I went out into the store and noticed that one line was three times longer than the others. I went to the back of the line and suggested that customers move to another checkout, and they wouldn’t budge—they wanted to see Johnny’s quote of the day! In fact, one lady said, ‘I used to come here once a week, but now I come 2-3 times just to see the smile on Johnny’s face when he drops in his favorite quote.’

So the next day, I round up my team and tell them what Johnny has done to give our customers more than they expected. That afternoon, I see the lady in the floral department cutting off her broken flowers and pinning them on the elderly women in our store. Our guy in the meat department loves Snoopy, so he was putting his favorite Snoopy stickers on the packages, and talking to his customers.

In fact, everybody in our store is finding creative ways to put their mark on service. We’re having the time of our lives, and it seems like everyone in town is talking about us! And you know what, Barbara? It happened for one reason…Johnny decided to do something!”

When it comes to service, we all have our unique gifts to give; however we’ll never make the emotional connection with the customer unless it begins in our heart.