The role of culture in the growth of service design
The role of culture in the growth of service design
An internal joke at that always makes us giggle at Dartington Service Design Lab comes from our very own CEO Tim Hobbs, and the way he often describes the Lab’s adaptive nature as being like a '30-year-old start-up’. Over time, I have realised this is actually the best way to define the open and adaptive environment that I have worked in for the past year as a Service Designer in the Lab.
Service Design is a discipline that's yet finding its feet within the charity sector and developing in itself as a whole.
The job of a Service Designer is to help organisations understand needs, solve problems and adapt to an ever-changing world. This is only possible in an environment that has its eyes open to learning and its heart ready to act on change-based initiatives.
As my time at the Lab comes to an end, I am reflecting on this and particularly on the role that culture plays in allowing the practice of Design to grow and mature.
What is Service Design?
Let me start by giving a simple definition of what Service Design means to me:
In its simplest form, Service Design is – unsurprisingly - the design of services! That is, services themselves, being the act of helping someone meet a need, and Design being the intentional choreography of the “touchpoints” of a service in a way that enables the user to meet their need in a fair and painless way.
As an example, imagine ordering a meal straight from your favourite restaurant to your doorstep. To do so you need a mobile application that lets you look at the menu to order your favourite dishes. You need a payment gateway that allows you to pay online while sitting at home. The restaurant needs a delivery driver who can pick your order and deliver it to your doorstep and a lot more factors weaved in that lead to the successful execution of the service.
In order to develop this seamless service, a Service Designer will need to take into account both the user and the backend process to enable smooth delivery of food to your doorstep. This includes the people, the resources, the channels and so on, which enable the food to be delivered in a way that is feasible, viable and desirable, for both you and the organisations involved. By its very nature, Service Design takes a complex multi-stakeholder approach.
In other words, Service Design is also about considering the needs of multiple stakeholders in order to deliver the services that meet people’s needs. As a matter of fact, you are surrounded by services everywhere you look, right from booking a holiday with an airline service, to using the gov.uk website to figure out how to file for your taxes. But this gets trickier in the charity sector, where beyond the operational functions, the needs in both the front and back end of the service are increasingly complicated.
Service Design at the Lab
In the charity sector, you are trying help those who are most in need (and often in vulnerable situations) facing a lot of things that might be felt and held deeply – systemic issues such as institutional racism, trauma and mental health needs for example. It’s not that these issues don’t exist in the commercial sector, they do, but in my experience, these issues factor more commonly in the charity sector and more deeply interact with the success rate for service users and staff when considered. Not recognising these systemic issues in-sight when designing a response can run the risk of a problem being only partially solved, unsustainable or worse, cause unintentional or further harm. That’s why we need a different approach, one that enables us to understand and consider the impact of such systemic problems in our design and delivery.
Coming from a foreign land and having a background in the private sector meant moving into the charity sector proved challenging for me. I found working on such issues very tough. It was uncomfortable, as my professional abilities had suddenly put me in a position of power; power to solve really messy problems, problems that were being faced by vulnerable children and young people caused by a range of systemic factors as mentioned above. I started questioning whether I was the right person to solve these issues, or if I was equipped with the right tools to get to the bottom of these problems. And this is where ‘culture’ kicked in.
The culture of the Lab
Here is what I saw and learnt about how cultural factors made a difference to how Design was being dispersed and the impact it had across the different projects in the organisation.
1. Valuing lived experiences
The Lab allowed me to work with a mix of people who were not only experts in their fields but were passionate about solving some of the complicated problems faced by children and young people. My manager Katie Potter, a Senior Service Designer at the Lab, taught me that as a Service Designer our main job is to be facilitators and bring the right voices into the room.
This is what I most enjoy about service design: ‘It's a team sport’. Service design is not about problem solving ourselves or being extractive. It's about identifying and bringing the right voices to the table (of people who are impacted by the problems), coupled with a range of expertise to solve those issues, in a way that enables co-design, testing and facilitating change.
2. Promoting reflection for growth:
Observing our Director of Learning and Impact Catherine-Rose Stocks-Rankin, who always encouraged reflective practice as a team and as individuals unlocked heightened awareness of my own practice. I started questioning my methods.
I started being conscious of designing every interaction in my service design process, carefully trying to be trauma-informed and inclusive in my approach at every step. More importantly I wanted to be non-transactional in my approach with participants who contributed to their projects. It was important to be accountable during our interactions with them and be aware that participants were bringing their whole selves to the table (especially in interviews). And the least of our responsibility is to set up reasonable expectations and give something meaningful back in return for their time and effort.
3. Identifying our personal biases, assumptions and thought patterns:
By becoming more aware of my thought patterns, I have started to identify my own biases and assumptions, which may have potential impact on the direction of focus of the projects. This practice is key to allowing us to separate ourselves from the work we are doing and start seeing different perspectives on the table. Not only does this strengthen team work, but it allows us to form a fuller understanding of the work at hand.
Conclusion
The culture described above has led the Lab to quickly innovate in the way it approaches Service Design. At present, the Lab is increasingly trying to take an integrated approach to its projects by combining the expertise of Service Design with systems thinking and evaluation. This is helping us break complexity down at a larger scale than before. Having worked in such a manner, I have learnt that Service Design is beyond just a set of tools and methodologies. It's about truly taking an integrated approach and creating the conditions, or culture, that allows for big picture understanding of issues, while also making meaningful changes at a granular level.
Culture is the hidden value that the Lab brings to the table, and one that allows the growth of ‘Service Design’ within the organisation.