Just finished watching Richard Buchanan’s keynote at the Service Design Conference 2011 (via @pennyhagen).

There were lots of points that were interesting to me, but a couple stood out. One was the purpose of an organisation not being profit, but instead the delivery of goods and services. The second was three key areas that he highlights where service design is of particular interest: health care, community design and public services design. The third was the need to extend service design into the culture of an organisation.

Overall a thought provoking talk very much aligned with my perspective of service design and Zumio’s approach/purpose.

Zumio co-conspirators Penny Hagan and Natalie Rowland have just published an excellent introduction to co-design methods over at Johnny Holland: Enabling Codesign.

While I could quote some excellent points from across the whole piece, I’ll start with this introduction:

Involvement of ‘users’ early in the research and ideation phases of the design process is often equated to “asking users what they want”. (A certain quote oft attributed to Ford comes to mind). Codesign however, goes well beyond this. The premise is that ‘users’ become partners. Rather than being viewed as a source of information to be input into the design process, those impacted by the design are invited to work actively with designers to shape the definition and direction of the project. Participation can include sharing personal experiences and perspectives, contributing to the generation of new design concepts, the evolution of those concepts, analysis, interpretation, decision making, evaluation and more.

When taking a codesign approach it is our role as designers to facilitate that participation. At the beginning of the design process we work with users to understand the design project in relation to their everyday lives including their habits, rituals, dreams, attitudes and experiences. These then become resources for inspiring design concepts and direction. In order for people to actively and effectively participate in the design process they must be able to imagine, access, and express their experiences and expectations. Simply asking people questions is not enough to facilitate this process. This is because people are not explicit sources of information. As humans we are limited in what we can express by our existing frames of reference, we can only talk in the language that we know.

This (perhaps unsurprisingly) reflects Zumio’s approach, and our process is strongly geared towards enabling this type of participation. Penny’s and Natalie’s article does a great job at providing some insight into the thinking behind some of the methods we employ to achieve this goal. Congrats (and thanks) to Penny and Natalie for producing yet another great resource for the UX/service design community…

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had the pleasure of presenting at UX Australia last week. As is tradition, my presentation is now up on Slideshare:

The presentation centres around our experience on the FlavourCrusader project — specifically considerations of behaviour change models and the workshop process we undertook earlier in the year at Social Innovation Sydney.

The presentation makes mention of Les Robinson’s “5 doors” model — just a quick mention that Les runs workshops on this model and facilitation techniques, including some later this month.

My understanding is that the talks were recorded, so once the audio is ready I’ll do my best to sync it all up… But in the meantime you can get the gist from the the presentation + speaker notes (PDF 18.3 MB), which contains further pointers to some of the references I mentioned in my talk.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the research process — both behind the scenes and as participants — but special mention to Sharon Lee and Penny Hagen for their input into both the workshopping process and presentation, and to BJ Fogg for kindly granting me permission to use his model in the slide deck.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the UX Australia 2011 conference as both a presenter and participant.

I have to say, the quality of the presentations was impressive — one of the best conferences I’ve been to in recent years based on the amount that I took away from the sessions there. While the calibre overall was high, standout sessions for me were:

• Kim Goodwin’s Experience Leadership opening keynote definitely set the scene for a lot of the talks I saw, many of which contained elements of organisational change. It was great to see some of the key theories of organisational change mentioned, as well as picking up a few new (for me) pointers as well.
• Helen Palmer’s Managing Change as a Designed Experience talk was entertaining and energising — no small feat given it was at the end of the day. A novel and interactive presentation approach was a fantastic way to dive into a successful organisational change project.
• Martin Tomisch’s
  case study on the Neighbourhood Scoreboards research project was awesome — great concept, well executed, interesting learnings.
• Jon Kolko’s presentation on Personality, Discursion and Disruption was a great way to end the conference from my perspective — touching on the deeper purpose and meaning of design, a topic that regular readers will know is close to my heart.
• While the subject matter wasn’t directly relevant to my work environments, I was fascinated by Michelle and Vicki’s talk on UX Design in a Surgical Environment. (The random images of cute animals — oh look, puppies! — in between surgical images was a nice touch).
• The “Switching on my ears” case study, presented by Matt Morphett, Shane Morris and Rami Banna also provided an excellent insight into some of the challenges of designing for devices.

And while I missed them, the buzz was that Bob Burns’ ‘A Market of the Senses’ and Ben Kraal’s case study on designing airport security were also ones to catch.

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be attending the Communities and Technology conference happening in Brisbane next week. In addition to attending the Friday and Saturday presentations, I’ll be participating in the Food(ing): Between Human-Computer and Human-Food-Experience workshop on Wednesday.

I’m particularly looking forward to the workshop as an opportunity to learn from others working in this area, and to share my experience from both my masters studies work and the learnings from the FlavourCrusader initiative. In related news, my participation in the workshop stems from a proposed book chapter that my friend and colleague Penny Hagen and I proposed to the Urban Informatics folks at QUT, that hopefully will be going ahead soon, but I’ll have more on that in the coming months.

Yesterday I had the good fortune to attend the first (and hopefully not the last!) Service Design conference in Sydney. It was great to have the opportunity to connect with so many familiar faces and like-minded folks to explore the emerging field of service design.

I’m not wired to live-blog these kind of things, but I noticed Mal Booth was doing a fantastic job if you’re after a blow-by-blow description (or just check out the #sd2011 hash tag).

The day was great overall (all but one presentation was excellent from my perspective), and over the fold I want to outline three of my highlights from the day.

Highlights

Tim Fife, In the service of…

This high-level review + a brief case study really resonated with me. Tim outlined a perspective on Buchanan’s “4 orders of design”, ranging from visual communications (2D design), object design (3D design, industrial design etc.), interaction design, and organisation design.

I am particularly interested in the shift towards 4th order design (organisational design) and the challenges of bottom-up vs. top-down approaches, and how service designers might play a role at this level of an organisation.

He also emphasised the importance of balancing organisational intent (which we refer to as purpose in our framework) with human-centred design, but also the importance of supporting systems and operational considerations.

All of this was very familiar from our own practice, but it was great to see it pulled together into such a well presented communication.

Melis Senova, Service design for corporates vs NGOs – is there a difference?

Melis presented some, by her own admission “generalised”, learnings from working with NGOs and comparing these to corporate projects.

I get the sense that a lot of the work/case studies that Melis was drawing upon were donor focused (e.g. working with fundraising teams on donation forms etc.), though I may be wrong there. One piece that I think was missing from the presentation (and I recognise that presentations like this can’t cover everything!) was the role of service design in engaging constituents and stakeholders in the delivery of the “service” — from an NGO perspective, the societal change that is intended.

There are a couple of aspects to this: the use of social networks to achieve/promote change (e.g. the 350.org model), the use of tools to sway decision makers (something Melis touched upon in response to my question/suggestion during the talk), but also the achieving of behavioural change within the stakeholder base (which may not necessarily mean “supporters” per se — for example, campaigns for sustainability or public health that aim to change or challenge people’s behaviours — Hello Sunday Morning being one example that comes to mind.

While in a general sense I think Melis’ points were valid, I do question how much NGOs maintain a sense of empathy with their supporters (especially where NGOs are positioned as “experts” within their area of interest/activity), and also while I agree NGOs typically have a much tighter connection to overall purpose, my experience suggests that often the purpose/objectives can sometimes be a bit broad and require clarification to be really powerful and actionable in a service design context.

I make these observations not as a criticism of Melis’ talk — I actually found it very thought provoking as it challenged me to examine my own experience in non-profit contexts, which is exactly what I was looking for from the day.

Siobhan Toohill and Adrian Wiggins, Creating better places to be

I was really looking forward to this preso and it didn’t disappoint. It was awesome to see Ezio Manzini’s work mentioned, along with Collaborative Consumption and a raft of other thinkers (many of whom I’d not heard of — plenty to follow up!)

It really resonated to see the ideas of creating the pre-conditions for communities and value to form presented in a context such as the conference. I also had so many questions — about shared value (especially in a retail context, an important part of Stockland’s business), but also in terms of the role of Stockland in community support after a development has been sold etc. But unfortunately was not able to connect with Siobhan or Adrian after the conference — something I’ll have to follow-up on.

Final thoughts

There seemed to be a couple of themes across the day, but the one that really caught my attention was the connection between service design and “change management”. This is something I’ve identified in our practice — whether it be looking at social media, sustainability, agile management, or design thinking/service design, that a lot of the work is in supporting and enabling change within the organisations we serve to support the implementation of solutions, as much as determining the shape of those solutions.

Having recognised this, I’ve undertaken an elective as part of my Masters study in leading and managing change, and it has been very helpful in understanding different schools of thoughts, frameworks and approaches to change management. I’m positive that this is going to help inform our future work in a service design context.

All in all it was a terrific day, and I’m really looking forward to future events. If yesterday was anything to go by they will be well worth the investment to attend…

In agile management and lean startup circles I’ve seen mention of the concept of a Minimum Viable Product. A very rough summary of idea is: to create only the necessary features to get a product (or service) into the hands of actual customers to get feedback and start to evolve, refine and further develop based on actual usage, rather than hypotheses of what people might use.

The aim is to both reduce waste (by not investing effort where it’s not needed/warranted) and to help increase innovation potential by observing how people actually use the product, perhaps uncovering unexpected uses or directions that aren’t immediately obvious to the design team.

To be sure, this remains a pertinent goal, but in chatting with the crews at Interaction Consortium and infoding this past week, we’ve lamented the fact that creation a “minimum” and just “viable” product is just a little uninspiring — not necessarily something that gets the creative juices flowing.

In these conversations I suggested instead that perhaps we should aim for a “Minimum Inspiring Product” (MIP). “Inspiring” in two senses — firstly, it’s about building something that will not just meet minimum requirements, but what is likely to get people excited about the product — that unique twist that makes something remark-able (in the parlance of Seth Godin).

But inspiring also in the sense that it inspires use and action, and new ideas. Something that people will want to engage with. If the product is just the bare minimum, it’s less likely to inspire the level of engagement required to actually achieve the benefits of the incremental development approach (as outlined earlier).

This, perhaps, is what Buster Benson was suggesting when he said “People who talk about minimum viable products tend to focus more on the minimum and less on the viable.” (thanks to @infoding for the reference.)

I hate to drop in an Apple reference here, but I think that’s perhaps a fair description of what they have done with the iPod, iPhone and iPad lines. Each was lambasted for what it left out (suggesting a minimal approach), but they also managed to provide inspiration that ultimately drove commercial success. These weren’t a minimum viable product, as there was clearly much more delivered than a bare minimum, and each emphasised that inspirational aspect. They inspired action, play, exploration — and, I think one could argue, lust ;) — that has in part led to the success of the apps ecosystem.

Internally, of course, it’s still important to build iteratively, and in this sense the minimum is sometimes necessary — especially to make sure we respect the YAGNI principle. But in terms of releasing a product or service into the wild, perhaps the MIP is a better target.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a workshop organised by the wonderful Dr Zoë Sofoulis and Justine Humphry of University of Western Sydney. Zoë and Justine have been working as part of the National Water Commission Fellowship for 2010-11 on the Cross-connections: Linking Urban Water Managers with Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Researchers (PDF 311 KB) project.

As the title of the programme suggests, the focus of the workshop was on how to connect social researchers with the water industry. It was a very interesting discussion, looking at the challenge from a variety of perspectives. For me it was an invaluable insight into the challenges of bringing the social sciences into a field that is largely driven by a more quantitative and engineering focused approach.

As part of the days proceedings, Zoë invited me to present a short segment on the use of design research methods for communicating and engaging with ethnographic and qualitative research. My presentation looked at mobile diaries (for which I recommend Penny Hagen and Natalie Rowland’s excellent Johnny Holland article as a backgrounder), personas, infographics and visualisations, customer journey mapping, storyboards. I also used Smart Design’s wonderful work for the FastCompany Biomimicry Challenge (embedded below) as an example of envisioning using video/animation, of particular relevance given the focus on urban water.

IBM Biomimicry Challenge from Smart Design on Vimeo.

Part of what Zoë and Justine have been working on is a Directory of Social and Cultural Research on Urban Water. Their work to date has focused on researching and collating the data for the directory, but they will soon be turning their attention to publishing it. It was during discussion on how this might be advanced that I was reminded again how valuable social technologies like wikis and rapid development frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django can be in providing low-cost publishing methods for this kind of work.

Thanks to Zoë and Justine for the invite — I’m looking forward to continuing the dialogue into the future.

In the time I’ve been actively engaged in business sustainability, I’ve noticed that report after study after survey that shows that a majority of customers have environmental and social considerations at the forefront of their mind when making purchases. For example, this 2008 McKinsey report (free registration required to read article) highlights that “87% of consumers worry about the environmental and social impact of the products they buy”. In the Australian context, research carried out by NetBalance for the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC) reports “80% consider sustainability issues when putting products in their shopping trolleys”.

Yet this latent desire to make ethical choices in purchasing is also shown to be missing in action, outside of a significant minority. The same McKinsey report suggests 33% make such purchase decisions (which is similar to other reports I’ve read) and the AFGC finds that only 13% of Australians buy environmentally-sustainable food and groceries from the supermarket (as an aside: this figure seems low — I’ve seen other statistics that show organic produce as being much more prevalent than this, and that these purchases would be considered “environmentally-sustainable” — something to look into further).  Trendwatching place these figures at 40% and 4% respectively (based on Journal of Marketing data).

In considering this gap, we find many stated reasons as to why intention isn’t translating into action. Most commonly cited is price — reports I’ve read (coupled with my own experience) suggest that customers aren’t willing to spend more than a 5-10% premium for “green” products, if they are willing to spend more at all. And of course products with a price premium were much more likely to feel the pinch of changing economic circumstances.

But there is more to it than that — performance is another, where “green” products are seen as inferior to mainstream products. As Joel Makower asks, why does “green” not equal “better”?  Convenience is another factor, with limited availability of green options through mainstream channels (e.g. mainstream retailers, such as Coles or Woolworths here in Australia). Each of these is noted in both the McKinsey and AFGC summaries — and each is weighted against the environmental or social benefits of the product when making a decision. The AFGC report notes that only a small number will compromise on cost or convenience for environmental factors.

So what to do? We could try to change people’s priorities, to get them to change the weighting the put on each of these factors. I suspect this won’t get very far though… As I noted in my Web Directions South presentation, a lot of successful social innovations aim to actually flip the equation — to make the more sustainable option also cheaper, or more convenient, or have better performance, rather than forcing this kind of trade-off.  Companies leading in the Collaborative Consumption space often fit this category.  Trendwatching call such products Eco-superior or Eco-easy.

Bridging the gap

But why aren’t more companies doing this? Why aren’t there more products like this in the market? I think part of the challenge is that when companies are considering sustainability factors in their products, they focus on specific attributes of products, rather than thinking more holistically. What this means is that their consideration only extends as far as lessening the impact of certain ingredients — e.g. substituting an eco-friendly alternative as a key material or ingredient in a product.

Often this results in a more expensive product that doesn’t perform as well as the mainstream alternative. But more importantly, I think it misses the bigger opportunities of taking a sustainable approach to business – the kind of opportunities outlined by leading thinkers like Makower, Gil Friend, Paul Hawken and William McDonough.

These opportunities require a more holistic approach that considers the broader context in which a product or service exists. In Natural Capitalism, Hawken, Lovins & Lovins call this “whole of systems thinking”.

For those familiar with design thinking or service design approaches, this will be a familiar theme — core to these practices is assembling multi-disciplinary teams that take a broader contextual view (informed by design research) to uncover opportunities for rethinking the role of organisations and the products and services they provide that can create whole new classes of products (or, perhaps more accurately, product service systems).

The iPod/iTunes ecosystem is an oft-cited example of the possibilities of rethinking the system, rather than innovating purely on product attributes (while this isn’t explicitly for sustainability benefits, it does demonstrate the concept in practice).

In Blue Ocean Strategy, authors Kim and Mauborgne suggest a similar approach in their guide to formulating a successful product/business strategy. They reference this as an opportunity for innovation — without considering sustainability as a factor. However, it seems clear to me that the same principles are at work in books like Cradle to Cradle and Natural Capitalism, and are also cited in papers on design thinking in business (as I covered in more detail in my paper on Design Thinking and Sustainability).

This, I believe, is where design thinking and service design can play an enormously positive role in progressing sustainability. As it inherently takes an innovation frame, it is appealing to business. However, the opportunities for including the building of social capital and environmental benefits in the broader contextual frame of reference are huge — creating significant wins for business and society simultaneously.

Today was the first day of the Participatory Design Conference being held at UTS.  Just a reminder about the Industry Day that’s happening on Thursday, for which Zumio is a sponsor.  (I’ve been unable to attend the entire conference due to work commitments — if you attended, please drop us a comment with your thoughts!)

The programme for the day is looking great — I’m very excited to see Mariesa from Inspire is presenting the opening keynote.  In talks and conversations I’ve often singled out Inspire as a great example of involving young people in their processes across the organisation, so I’m really looking forward to hearing more about their work in the participatory design space.  And of course I always love to hear from the folks at Digital Eskimo and CollabForge, who I know are doing great work.

But I’m also very excited to hear from some new (for me) voices in this area — and there’s plenty of very interesting folks in the panel and research sessions in the afternoon.  In any case, I hope to see you there…