Here is the text of my responses to questions for the industry panel at PDC Sydney 2010.
December 2, 2010
1. When did you begin to see connections between service design and participatory design? And what connections to you see?
I'm a newcomer to the formal concept and history of PD, but I suspect not the practice. At this stage I’m wondering if Participatory Design is a thing requiring a big noun, so much as filling a need to index a set of principles and various methods that inspire maximal inclusion of customers in design.
PD seems to be a response in some ways to the common exclusion of people from design decisions that impact their lives.
If one is designing anything for anybody else it is a basic courtesy to get to know them and their situation on some level.
It is also polite to have at least some design skill.
The only way that one can acquire detailed knowledge about the lives of others is by spending time with them, being invited into their lives, and then having ears to listen and eyes to see the implications or opportunities arising.
The degree to which one involves customers in design beyond research per se is, I would imagine, very much specific to circumstances. This is true for a service or product, as they are both on the same continuum of consumption anyway.
2. How have you integrated service design and participatory design in your practice or research?
The last several years of my work have been focused on the design of online communication services for the NSW Department of Education and Training.
We’ve been designing and delivering web publishing and communication services more than discrete tools and websites or web applications.
My work over the last 12 years has more and more involved gaining detailed knowledge of customers at relevant behavioural and situational levels.
The overarching frame I’ve had is UCD. I‘ve packed this frame with personal meaning over the years, as others have done, and supplemented it with ideas from other bodies of work such as for example, Activity Theory along the way.
Customers or end-users are the people I have been working for. The “user” is an esoteric concept and my desire to get to know who they are has always been tempered by less esoteric, practical constraints.
When it comes to working with “the business” or significant stakeholders, there has always been a participatory element to this involving at times extravagant amounts of education and negotiation.
But I ask myself, what is participation on design and what is negotiation? Where are the boundaries between the design effort and the economic and temporal realities of a project?
I believe clearly defined roles in projects involving design are important, along with hierarchies for decision making – such is our cultural custom. But I’m also fond of a rhizomatic notion of design in this context – where the end product – be it a service or otherwise – is actually the fruit of the entire ever emergent ‘organism’ of a project over time. UCD + Agile development helps with this enormously.
3. Are there different challenges and opportunities faced when adopting a participatory approach to service design as compared to product design?
Products and services are in my view on the same continuum and from a certain perspective the distinction is much more in the mind of the business than that of the consumer.
As a consumer I am getting the verb or service dimension of anything designed for me. As the business I might think I am selling the verb – service - or a collection of nouns - products.
Either way, one cannot design something new for customers other than by, in some way, getting into their skin and seeing the world from their perspective.
I believe this is true even when a sole designer takes herself as the template for humanity and produces for what she sees there.
We are ultimately always dealing with what Bakhtin termed the “super-addressee” in the dialogue of design even when making things (products or services) for and with the person sitting right next to us.
4. Who should participate in service design? (e.g. provider organization, recipient organization, Human Resource department, IT department, facilities management, skills competencies)?
The people who should be involved in service design are the owners and sponsors of a project,; design, technical, delivery and support specialists, end-users, key stakeholders (eg., representative organisations of end users) and other specialists in terms of skill or interest as may be required. But above all the imagination of the overarching designer of the service.
Without a central, or overarching design intelligence that knows when to be singular, and when to be inclusive, most if not all the projects I’ve ever heard of, and certainly the ones I’ve been involved in, are or have been doomed.
Design leadership structures are important as they will dictate the methods and timing of research, co-design activities, and various other inputs.
5. What are the challenges of aligning and involving all these potential “stakeholders”?
The overarching challenge for the lead or chief designer is to a) see something worthwhile and b) to do all they can to head for it and bring other people with them.
I do not believe the initial core of a service or product of any complexity can be collectively improvised from scratch. Such things need a foundation image and a first infrastructure to be able to organically evolve.
So the overarching challenge is to see the landscape and for all to see enough of this picture to understand the necessity for certain movements.
Some need to see the very big picture, others need to see the very next steps in excruciating detail.
I’m not arguing for paternalistic design – but simply identifying that some will buy in very deeply and lift tremendous weights to progress the journey, others will never buy in and keep chucking rocks at you or lie in wait for a foot out of place.
That is to say that design of services or products of any serious complexity often involves equally complex cultural, economic and social factors – and that design of any complexity usually requires rather large acts of individual will to proceed.
6. What are some of the integration challenges in designing and delivering service (e.g. healthcare services may require doctors, hospitals, nurses, patients, families, etc. to work together for effect delivery of service).
I speak here from the narrow perspective of online service design and my experience thereof. Every significant piece of work I have commissioned and lead over the last 10 years has taken UCD as a framework and has been underpinned by a consideration voiced by Karen Holtzblatt – basically that design must embody the contexts and work that people seek or wish to do, and extend them as appropriate to organizational needs.
We’ve designed and delivered an extremely successful service, the School Website Service – adopted freely by approximately 1300 schools in NSW – that has been carefully designed to fit into existing communication economies, work processes and cultural perspectives found in NSW public schools.
The service meets their needs, provides quality controls and central feeds of aggregated information for parents, and meets the organisation’s needs in all of the above. There are approximately 70,000 page views per day of the content produced by these schools.
“Integration” of the service into work practice and localised context has been written into its very design. Every element respects the realities people are working with. For example, we very deliberately sought to provide a service that people could walk up to and start using, without any prior technical knowledge, and whose functions they could accommodate in the swing of any busy day at school.
We’ve achieved that without the need for face to face training to use the system, and we get less than 2 help desk calls a day – for mostly minor issues - from a content provider base of over 8,500 users.
Over 1000 schools serving hundreds of thousands of people are now able to use powerful online communication services where they couldn’t before.
I attribute this success to the end-to-end user-centred approach we have taken to producing the service.
7. Is the line between design and use different when designing services as compared to products? What about relation between production and consumption of the product or service?
“The line” between design and use is very clear and distinct for most services and products. Designers by definition need to deliver integrated vision to an extent not possible for the average user or consumer or stakeholder to grasp.
Consumption of complex services extremely rarely extends to the full array of functions and routines available. But it is the designer’s business to be fully across this.
Personally I feel this holds true for products as well. The lead pencil is a complex bit of technology for such an unassuming object. As with all products such items are always located in context of a broader service ecology, be it but manufacturing, marketing or distribution let alone something more elaborate. Then there is the use of the actual product. The use of any product is a service scenario (from the consumer’s perspective) by definition.
So “the line” between design and use in the context of Participatory Design probably lies just there – in the degree to which non-specialist others contribute to the design and possibly even the execution or manufacture of products or services.
Another way of putting it is that design is available to anyone given they have suitable knowledge or expertise in a given area and a propensity for such activity, and that the political and economic structures are in place for their participation.
8. Does the role of the “user” need to be conceptualized differently in service design (e.g. ongoing participant in service delivery)?
There is a clear difference in being a user-consumer versus taking on a role such as being actually part of the service that is offered.
By way of an example to illustrate this point, a model which we are hoping to implement to assist authoritative curation of information and content services in the Department is to broker contracts with subject matter experts throughout the organisation.
These individuals will eventually fill a multiple of co-service provision roles, including co-curating sets of information, assisting with inquiries relating to their domain of expertise, publishing their own primary or auxiliary information, and helping to ensure content is authoritative and up to date.
These individuals will have much to add by way of design of the communications they will be jointly responsible for. Be it in terms of the content or information itself, or the information architecture, information design, and even interaction design relating to their communications in certain instances.
9. How have participatory design principles been integrated into your design practice?
M working history in the field of service and online design has been informed by prior careers in journalism (or pseudo journalism) and the arts.
UCD has provided me a frame where I could take rich tools aimed at fostering intuitive, creative and empathetic connections with human behaviours, psychologies, motivations and contexts – into the practice of designing products and services for others.
From this perspective, “participatory design” is for me certainly not a discipline but rather an index – amongst other similar indices – to methods that can supplement one’s design eyes and ears to take in the fullest consideration for the people one is designing for.
And to my mind, that is the practice in question – design, and designing for.
The degrees to which and stages at which one may design “with” others is variable.
At some point we need to delegate roles to each other in society.
In end-to-end service design, as I have mentioned, the designer is tasked with providing a fully integrated vision.
Others who may participate in that activity are hopefully genuinely important, but in relative terms and of necessity casual or ad hoc contributors to the main design task.
10. Are these (the following) PD principles also useful as design characteristics/goals for the services designed?
· Mutual Respect for Different Knowledge
· Opportunities to Learn about Others Domain of Knowledge
· Joint Negotiation of Project Goals
· Others
There is a big difference between a characteristic of design practice and a design goal.
The employment of human-centred principles as guiding values in design practice makes sense, depending on the service and the project constraints at hand.
I am an acute idealist and pain-in-the-arse evangelist when it comes to UCD. In my mind, UCD broadly embodies humanitarian values.
When it comes to joint negotiation of project goals, my main experience on this front is with sponsoring individuals and influentially significant stakeholders at the early stages of a project.
Such goals may, and often are to some extent, modified by what is learnt from the target customer base. But such modifications must still be negotiated and agreed with the powers that be.
I mostly ensure that I come to such negotiations equipped with enough of an insight into the needs and situations customers to ensure some authority on my part.
The voice of the customers in question can be leveraged to create a level playing field in terms of defining the strategic direction, goals and agreed approach to a project.
This is critical in my view. End-to-end design of online services is still poorly understood in terms of cascading impacts flowing from decisions such as concerning technology procurement through to offline customer support, and most things in between.
Users get a solid seat at the table of real-politik service design and delivery when end-to-end UCD is a core consideration.
Which takes me back to the role of the overarching lead designer.
This person must ride shotgun on a range of considerations to deliver a fully integrated vision that attends to the needs of users and sponsoring organisations alike.
User participation in design is but one of many considerations that must be dealt with along the way.
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