As service design continues to develop as a discipline, people within the field are starting to work towards achieving higher-level, larger-scale integration with both public and private sector companies. This was the focus for a recent ‘public-private partnership’ in the Netherlands that saw STBY working with several service providers, government funded organisations and other service design agencies to develop a series of case studies showcasing what service design can achieve. This long-term project will take 3 years to complete, and is ultimately intended to help improve the visibility and applicability of service design in relation to the Dutch economy.

The project will involve several different case studies demonstrating the value of the approach – whilst also offering an opportunity to explore the processes it involves. In addition to this development and dissemination of in-depth knowledge about the field, the project also aims to strengthen the service design community in The Netherlands – the core group of organisations who originally founded the Service Design Network Nederland are all involved, with each agency working in the open-minded spirit of collaboration that is a key principle of the field.

Showcasing the Field by Studying Stations

The main focus for the case studies is Utrecht’s central train station. Currently undergoing a fundamental redevelopment, this represents an excellent opportunity for innovating the service experience of train passengers. In the true spirit of service design however, the case studies are not just looking at the use of the station, but at the complete customer journey: from preparing and anticipating a trip, to the moment people arrive at their destination.

In the past few months STBY has been working on the first case study together with Prorail, Edenspiekermann, Hogeschool Utrecht and TU Delft. We conducted in-depth ethnographic research on how the use of platforms at the station can be understood in the context of complete journeys; What kind of information and expectations do people have before arriving at the station? What kind of support is beneficial to them when on the platform? What works well for them, and what does not? What needs and preferences seem to be unfulfilled? What additional services could be offered to delight these intrepid travellers?

These questions were all addressed in an extensive ethnographic exploration incorporating observations, in-depth interviews, customer journey mapping, visualising insight clusters, and identifying opportunity areas in co-creation workshops – all classic techniques from the service design toolbox. The project is still ongoing, and will probably require a further series of internal workshops and presentations within the wider organisation of the main service provider, Prorail. We’ll try to update this article from time to time with the results that emerge from these, and will also detail the further case-studies that are still to come.

Spreading the Word

One of the final aims of the project is to generate materials that will be valuable for a wider group of stakeholders than just the participating organisations themselves. Various seminars and conferences will be organised therefore, and several articles published as well. This is one of the roles for the participating Technical University Delft and Hogeschool Utrecht who are actually studying how we, the service design agencies, approach the case studies and work with the stakeholders. So we, as observers, have researchers observing us… a bit surreal, but also fun and in a good collaborative spirit!

The parties involved in the project are: Prorail, Movares, Bureau H2O, STBY, EdenSpiekermann, DesignThinkers, 31Volts, Scope Design Strategy, Hogeschool Utrecht, Technische Universiteit Delft and Taskforce Innovation Regio Utrecht.

The project ‘Service Design – Are you Being Served?’ is co-funded through the Pieken in de Delta-program by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, the city of Utrecht and the province of Utrecht.

If you’d like to know more about STBY’s involvement, then just drop Geke a line at geke@stby.eu, or follow us on Twitter at @stby.

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As much of the research was taking place in Germany, we worked with our local partners in the Reach Network, Minds & Makers. Together we developed a methodology for the fieldwork, targeted around the kind of insights we needed. We involved a range of participants that covered a variety of social and geographical backgrounds, each of whom had different preferences and routines centred around mobility  and re-fueling. A series of probes, semi-structured interviews, and location visits gave us the data we needed for an internal analysis workshop at our Amsterdam office.

The end result was a series of clustered insights that could be used to inform and inspire the client’s design teams. To make these insights as accessible as possible to these teams, we visualised them on a large-scale poster, in addition to presenting them in a more traditional report format. Presenting results in this way is something we’ve had a lot of success with in the past; after all, even the most resonant of insights will achieve little if the right people never get to see them.

In a full-day internal workshop with people from many different departments in the client organisation we presented the insight from the research, and participated in discussions around a series of new service concepts they are currently working on. The posters with observations, quotes and insights were there to refer to and to ensure that the consumer perspective did not get lost during the sometimes passionate strategic discussions.

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Our client is in the process of developing a new innovative service proposition in this area. They wanted to obtain feedback from consumers on their early concepts, as well as get a fresh outside perspective that could help them to further develop the concepts and progress them towards implementation.

To expose the concept to many different people in a short period of time, we invited four groups of six reasonably healthy people to our studio to take part in a series of half-day Service Experience Labs. We prepared a set of engaging materials to introduce the concept to the participants, and to engage them in an interactive exploration and discussion.

In contrast to traditional focus groups, the participants in these Service Experience Labs do not just sit around a table and respond to general questions. Through a series of individual and group assignments they were prompted to reflect in detail and in a highly personal way on the consequences that the use of the concept would have on their daily lives. They also compiled a rich personal profile of their current (healthy) lifestyle, indicated the aspects they would like to change, and reflected on the potential use for them of getting support in achieving this.

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Through a series of in-depth interviews with a mix of journalists, analysts, and NGOs in the US, UK and Netherlands we documented a large collection of recent and actual Customer Journeys. The recurring patterns in these stories, identified in the analysis, have been translated into a set of personas, each consisting of a rich profile description and a few typical aggregated customer journeys.

The conversations with the external stakeholders were complemented with interviews with key internal experts within Ahold. As professionals in Corporate Communication, Investor Relations and Corporate Social Responsibility they represent important ‘touch points’ for external stakeholders, either through face to face contact or phone and email. Their interaction can be one of the key aspects in the overall customer journey, just as the online platform can be. These individual touch points can all be ‘moments of truth’ that make or break the service experience.

The development of an online communication strategy cannot be done in isolation from these ‘offline’ touch points. They all need to fit together into a smooth and integrated service delivery. So one of the main research purposes was to develop a holistic vision on how the corporate website connects to the wider context of Ahold’s corporate communication.

By empathising with key external stakeholders, Ahold can look at their corporate service offering from an ‘outside-in’ perspective, validate their current communication strategy and innovate their future strategy. The insights from the stakeholders research provide a useful sounding board for this.

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Do different people in different companies have the same conversations? Is the language people use influenced by context, culture, technology – or even all three? That’s what STBY have recently been trying to determine in a major project conducted for Nokia. Working with our Chinese and Spanish partners from the Reach Network, we designed a study that analysed how the cultures people live in can influence the type of language they use.

Working on such a broad topic was a challenge in itself – as indeed was conducting a simultaneous study in 3 separate timezones – but one of the benefits of the Reach Network is how quickly these projects can be up-and- running; both planning and preparations benefit greatly from the network company approach.

The first step in this case was to create a matrix of existing knowledge, developing a framework of relevant issues from a wide range of literature (in 3 different languages no less). This was then further focused on the topic at hand via a series of in-depth expert interviews. We spoke to a range of leading academics, journalists, and designers in order to build our own analytical framework that was capable of refining a hugely complex issue into a series of hypotheses. These initially helped shaped an interview script, before they were subsequently used as a ‘lens’ to provide differing perspectives on the research data gathered.

Once developed, we then applied this framework to a series of in-depth ethnographic immersions. Going out into the field in London, Barcelona, and Shanghai, we conducted a series of intensive interviews with a wide range of different people. This generated an incredibly rich amount of data, which our framework helped shape into a workable format; namely, a series of wall-sized ‘conversation maps’ that were used for a collaborative workshop in London. These maps allowed all the partners to work with Nokia on the data that had been gathered, displaying a series of conversations organised around the insights that emerged when the framework was applied.

This complex, multi-phase project proved how design research techniques can be applied to all kinds of issues, from concrete to abstract, helping in this instance to maintain a grip on the broad topic of communication. It also proved how the network-company approach adopted by Reach can allow such projects to maintain a global focus, incorporating cross-cultural differences (and universal similarities) into the earliest possible stages of a design process.

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STBY recently returned to Heartlands, reprising our role as inclusive design consultants at this large-scale regeneration project in Cornwall. This time we were asked to help design a collaborative workshop to help provoke new thinking on what the future should hold for the project. Organised along the themes of Art, Culture and Society, the event brought together academics, designers, and local stakeholders to look how arts and culture can help include local communities in the design process – and even help strengthen these communities in doing so.

Several conclusions were drawn from this, including the positive role Performance, Storytelling, and Film can all play in facilitating more effective engagement. These were then applied to the next question to be addressed: what can Heartlands learn from prior experience when planning for the future?

Here, the focus was placed upon whether arts and culture could – or even should – continue to make active and forceful contributions to Heartland’s future development. Discussions evolved from the starting point of whether culture is becoming more inherently democratic, moving on to first establish exactly how arts and culture could contribute to the management and programming of Heartlands, before subsequently attempting to frame exactly what such contributions would entail.

These focused, in-depth discussions were designed to provide the Heartlands leadership team with workable opportunities to develop a more democratic approach to their engagement with the public. By generating focused opportunities in an inherently democratic way, it was moreover demonstrated that inclusive design techniques can both facilitate and ideate community involvement.

A more in-depth account of the Creative Conversations event can be found in the final report documenting its findings, a PDF copy of which can be downloaded here. 

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STBY have recently completed a project with the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. We were asked to put a human face to four different types of patients with diabetes, all of whom cope with their disease in very different ways.  The company wanted to present their teams with materials that would guide and inspire development of future products and services, by synthesising and enriching user-research material from several previous studies into one cohesive whole.

In order to achieve this, it was essential that we collaborated very closely with the client team. This began with a collaborative workshop which was designed around the notion of consolidation; Novo Nordisk already had a great deal of research data, but the insights they’d generated were spread over a number of different projects and reports. Working with them to collate and synthesise this material allowed us to identify and elaborate on those insights that could be made more accessible to their designers and engineers.

We did this by developing a series of scripts for twelve design documentary films. Again working closely with the client team, we created a series of videos that vividly illustrated the behavioural insights upon which they were founded. A team made up of STBY and Novo Nordisk researchers travelled to the US to film these videos, which focused on the everyday lives of four people who were all coping with their diabetes in very different ways.

Working with Novo Nordisk’s existing research data had allowed us to prepare scripts for the films that effectively focused upon the insights that typified each persona. This meant that we were able to seamlessly integrate the films with the data generated from the company’s previous studies. Our focus wasn’t on providing vast amounts of new data, but on finding creative ways to make the existing material they had more accessible and ‘alive’ to the engineers and designers who would be using it. The videos were a key part of this, providing an empathic link to the patients at the heart of each persona.

The end-result consisted of a DVD with the films as well as a poster that summarises the results. As these materials are already being picked up and used within Novo Nordisk, they proved to us once again the value of using video to bring real people right into the heart of design processes.

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How can people in the U.S. live a sustainable lifestyle? That’s the question STBY recently tried to answer during a project with the Reach Network commissioned by Panasonic. Any company developing products for the ‘Eco Aware’ has to first gain an understanding of the lifestyles such consumers need. The plurality of approaches and attitudes that invariably exist towards sustainable living complicates the matter of how people react to green products. Exploring these differences allows companies to develop products that more effectively support people’s efforts to live their lives in an environmentally conscious way.

With this in mind, Panasonic asked STBY to design an ethnographic research project that would deliver inspiring insights into sustainable living in the U.S. The approach we took was to create a series of design documentaries, thus providing an empathic link to those people trying to live in a sustainable manner. By visiting a number of such people in their home, we were able to create videos that communicated a range of intimate insights into their lives and opinions, telling their stories in a way that could both inform and inspire.

To add structure to these stories, we worked with Panasonic to develop a number of cultural probes that could be used during our home visits. These prompted the participants into asking questions about what aspects of their lifestyle could be better supported by new products and services, thus throwing more light onto the areas of their lives where innovation was most needed.

A series of workshops held with Panasonic and the Stanford University Design Research Lab meanwhile allowed us to help the company integrate these insights into their concepting processes. One of the main goals for the project was to create research materials with long-term applications – to ensure that the insights we captured could be used and re-used, time and again. This understanding of consumers’ practices and motivations could in addition be applied to the work of a wide range of internal departments at Panasonic, from design teams to business model developers.

Working with our Reach partner, Portigal Consulting, allowed us to conduct this project in San Francisco at relatively short notice, and with no logistic difficulties. This project once again demonstrated the strengths of both the design documentary format, and the Reach network itself; combining the two allows us to quickly and effectively communicate empathic insights from almost anywhere in the world.

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To provide for informative as well as inspiring research outputs, we worked with a probe package (sent out to the participants in advance of the interviews) and with a large scale insight map annotating the stages of the decision making process from the perspectives of the various target audiences involved.

A broad range of useful insights have been derived from this first exploratory study – later in the development process more in-depth studies focusing on specific aspects may follow. The collaboration between the various parties involved has also been quite special. In the true spirit of iterative co-creation we regularly got together in workshops, where we exchanged our concurrent insights, ideas and early concepts. Apart from THNK and STBY, Lava is working on the brand identity and visual style, with LBi Lost Boys developing the next release of the online platform. All very experienced and knowledgable experts in their fields, and all a real pleasure to work with.

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“This is Service Design Thinking”, a book STBY recently collaborated on with Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider, has now been released. The book is intended to be the first comprehensive overview of the service design field. Designed to be a useful resource for teachers, students, and anyone else who wants to try applying service design principles to their own work, it explains in detail how the field has developed – and how it’s still growing.

STBY made two substantial contributions to the book. For the first, we were asked to edit the section detailing the kind of methodological tools service designers use. When putting this together, we tried to keep the emphasis on these tools being something practical that people can use themselves. Our idea was that we were presenting a ‘toolbox’ that people could turn to when looking for inspiration for their own projects.

We also contributed a chapter on design ethnography, which is one of the key foundations of our own work. In the chapter we were able to expand a little more on some of the thinking behind this approach, and how it enables us to translate experiences from everyday life into inspiring and engaging research materials.

Overall, we’re extremely pleased with how the book turned out. It’s available now, and by visiting the publisher’s website (http://order.thisisservicedesignthinking.com) and entering the code ’11TDS36′, you can obtain a 20% discount on the cover price. And if you do order a copy, don’t forget to drop us a line and let us know what you think!

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