Hi Folks,
I'm back on this thread which I had to drop out of a couple of weeks
ago. I am, as some of you know, always juggling between my
responsibilities to CRI and my responsibilities to a wider
intellectual community. Sometimes these things run together, sometimes—
as happened in the last couple of weeks—they do not. Also, I wanted to
reread some of the recent writing on service design with those
questions in mind. It all takes time.
To briefly backtrack. I asked three questions about the emerging
'designerly' interest in service design:
> 1. What evidence is being offered to business by Service Designers
> on the potential for Service Design to offer a return on investment
> (ROI)
> 2. How do Service Designers go about delimiting or changing the
> boundary of the Service they design
> 3. Are there limits to the complexity of a Service beyond which a
> designer cannot exercise control.
Having gone through some of the literature and taken account of some
of the comments made about my questions on the list, I've come to the
view that these questions remain largely unanswered from a design
research perspective. This is not to say that there is not a range of
opinion out there variously claiming that the questions have been
answered to the claim that these are the wrong questions to ask. My
own opinion is that these questions are legitimate and largely
neglected within the design research community. I also think that
these are critically important questions for design practice.
But to pick up on a couple of points made by GK:
> I always enjoy seeing my friend David Sless dropping into
> conversations on various lists wisely pointing out repeating
> starting point initiatives and provocatively tossing in the hand
> grenade of “where’s the ROI beef” however I think the bigger
> question for the service design folks is what happens when the
> challenge has nothing to do with service....for citizens, for
> organizations, for societies?
I would not disagree with GK, particularly when he claims that I am
wise! Nor would I disagree with him about the emphasis on citizens and
the wider society. But that is a question of boundary shifting and
simply begs the question I ask about boundary shifting. The point,
however, is not whether GK or I think the 'bigger' question is more
important, the question is for those designers who want to claim that
applying their know-how leads to 'improvements' in service delivery.
In this regard, ROI can be interpreted narrowly, in a financial sense,
or more broadly and more interestingly, in an aesthetic or social
sense. But there is here a legitimate research question. If part of
the professional offering by designers claims, as it frequently does
in the published literature, that design leads to 'improvements' ,
then it is legitimate to ask "improvement from what to what"?
This may be an awkward question, but it is perfectly legitimate, even
if there are better and more important questions to ask.
GK goes on to comment"
> By the way David: If your clients are asking that you define what
> you do in the context of how your services will pay for themselves
> you probably need to update your go-to-market strategy and likely
> even your services..:-) Those kinds of questions are signs that your
> industry in your market is being rapidly commoditized. Just another
> sign that it is not going to be possible not to change. Change is
> not a theoretical idea today, its a necessity. Welcome to
> globalization.
Lots of misunderstanding here.
First, it's not primarily a question our 'clients' ask. I put
'clients' in inverted commas because we (CRI) are a not-for profit-
membership body, and the organisations we work with are always Members
of our Institute. This inflects the normal client/designer
relationship into a different set of obligations, rights and
responsibilities. Primarily, we are the ones that ask this question,
and we do so as researchers interested in improving design practice.
That is our charter, our mission, if you will. It's written into our
constitution.
Second, we are continually updating
> our go-to-market strategy and our services..:-)
And we do so based on the evidence we collect from our research into
such things as measuring ROI and other parameters which enable us to
discover and then offer approaches to design that are better than
others within particular problem domains and at particular stages in
the design process.
Third, these questions are not a sign of something being commodotized,
rather they are a sign of constant change driven by evidence from
practice and research. Of course we are all in a state of continual
change. Welcome to the real world, global or otherwise! The issue
about change is what drives it: blind ignorance, faith or fashion; or
evidence that change is desirable, achievable and that those who make
the changes are accountable to the rest of us.
To return to the issue of Service Design. One of the most interesting
service changes taking place in our society over the last fifty years
is taking place in the military, where soldiers are being increasingly
trained for peace keeping rather than warfare. In our own Country,
Australia and a few others, this has been going on for some time.
There is a long way to go in this in many countries. It's not long
since when asked the question, the Pentagon's standard reply was: 'We
don't do Peace in the Pentagon'! Change happens everywhere.
But I would have though in this area of service design, as in any
other there are questions of ROI, problems of Boundary shifting, (both
literal and metaphorical), and contingency planning for things beyond
ones control. All, I would argue, legitimate questions for design
research.
The simple point of my questions was to find out if other design
researchers are asking these questions. Following this thread, I have
come to the view that many are not.
David
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blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog
web: http://www.communication.org.au
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