I wanted to mark this amazing milestone in this repository of what inspires, inflames and resonates with me design-wise with my favourite piece of service design that I’ve wanted to capture since I started at the beginning of 2010.

It’s a simple, dignified, and elegant solution from Dusseldorf, Germany. It’s from 2008 and it’s a fake bus stop outside of a hospital that ‘catches’ Alzheimer’s patients. I think it is a beautiful testament to design’s ability and innate intent to humanise outcomes, let people be people from understanding and the power of conscious design to facilitate creative solutions to human problems.

The best telling of the story can be heard through RadioLab’s: A Bus to Nowhere with Lulu Miller. It’s 14 minutes and well-worth the listen.
 
 

But here’s a quick overview (although if you’ve read this blog before you know I don’t do anything quickly).

People with dementia often get disoriented and panic “Where am I? I have to get home!” so they do what you or I would – they try and get home. In the Dusseldorf story there were examples of people getting 20 miles away, dressed only in what they were wearing when the panic set in. From personal experience I had a grandmother who used to wander, and an old family friend who would escape from her locked ward.

You can lock people away, you can drug them into submission – but these are human beings. I always found it offensive when people would talk about ‘how crafty’ they were to ‘get out’. But I also felt helpless. These escapes are stressful not only to the patient, and their family, but also to the staff.

One of the characteristics of the disease is that while short-term memory is shot, long-term memory remains – people remember where home is (or was). So there came a suggestion at the Benrath Senior Center, that if the patients want to get home, why not provide them with a bus stop to do just that. Only no bus would ever come.

Initially the response from the nursing staff was cynical, dismissive and derisive. Until one patient in a panic was calmed by the simple act of leading her to the bus stop and sitting with her.

As the patients wait at the bus stop, their mood shifts from sadness and panic. They soon forget their urgency and simply sit and enjoy the outdoors. Sometimes with a nurse and cup of tea at their side. It’s been nearly three and a half years since the bus stop began. It is well frequented. Sometimes nurses will even direct people there. Sometimes, they don’t see escape occur, they just see the person waiting at the bus stop.

The intuitive existence and placement of the bus stop treats the patients with respect. Sure, the bus stop is a lie, but what’s the alternative? If the patient doesn’t accept rational arguments or the truth why not allow the world of their mind to be true, and when their urgency passes coax them back. The bus stop takes the feelings of the patients seriously – knowing that these feelings are short-term and will pass. As Lulu Miller puts it “the forgetting is the problem and the solution.”

So why is it my favourite piece of service design? There were conscious choices made based on evidence, this wasn’t a process re-engineering. Dementia has contributing factors that, quite frankly were leveraged. The solution took into account the dignity of human experience –the patient, medical staff and patient’s families.

It needed to understand a host of touchpoints and experiential elements (what people do, what they think about, what they use) and craft the experience in a realm of two dimensions – the reality of a mind with dementia and the reality of the ‘real’ world.

Maybe what I like about it most is that it doesn’t treat people like their components of a system. The experience of ‘going home,’ the levels of human interaction required, the dignity of allowing people to make and act on their decisions, these are the intangible yet oh-so-human elements of service; people seeking goals over a range of interactions over time. Just happens that time is distorted and the goals are unachievable. But this service supports those goals and interactions as very real, and very meaningful. It makes a difference to people’s lives in a unobtrusive and simple way – and that is why it is my favourite example of service design.

Emma Jefferies is an “an award winning researcher, designer, educator, writer and more recently filmmaker” according to her blog. She is also a very active and inspiring twitterer – which is how I ‘know’ her (or of her in the tweequaintance-sense).

Her site is a great resource and repository of curated design and research sources. She recently put out a call for people to share their new and untold stories of aspirational design companies. I was somewhat surprised that no agency/designer immediately came to mind. I mean, I think about and do this stuff all the time, but I had to mull a little (and chastise myself a little for being too self-referential in my influences). When I looked at my search history, my favorited tweets, my oft-thumbed articles it wasn’t necessarily the new that made me come over all aspirated. It was the focused, the people-centric, design-disciplined, change in the public and third sector organisations that inspire my desire to make a difference.

I’m not entirely sure I met the brief of new and untold because I chose three that I’m sure others will point to. But as I said in my contribution “These won’t be earth shatteringly new, but from a public sector design perspective (my field of interest) there are three agencies I regularly think WWTP/P/FGD”

 
ThinkPublic

ThinkPublic is focused on tackling societal challenges. They work with public sector agencies, third-party providers (social agencies, ‘not-for-profit’ or third-sector groups), and they just have a beautiful and accessible presence – in their work, in how they do work, in how they show what they do, and in how they champion outcomes. Helping getting people’s voices, citizens voices, is no mean feat, and using service design processes in such an engaging way is inspirational.

• Follow: @thinkpublic

 
Pixar

Pixar’s story is not so untold I suppose, but these guys and the way people work with people is inspiring. I think great collaboration is at the heart of great design – not just collaboration with users, but collaboration with designers/peers. Empowering the designers (there does still need to be a ‘Director’), engendering a peer culture, a safe place to tell the truth; it’s a focus on the outcomes that means no one person can achieve complex change alone.

I regularly read How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity (HBR) when hierarchy gets me down.

• Follow: @DisneyPixar

 
FutureGov

FutureGov is a ‘change consultancy for government and social innovation’ – Amen, because as designers we are change agents. In fact, they specifically focus at the local government level because that is where real change can and does occur. They create the means (through design activity, through leveraging web technology e.g. cofluence) to engage people and facilitate change – which means they sometimes build the tools and the means (e.g. Patchwork, Casserole) for communities to own, engage, make, re-make and self-regulate the change. And they just do it; idea, invite, innovate, iterate, implement. How wonderful to describe a project as ‘imagination capturing’!

• Follow: @FutureGov @PatchworkHQ

 
 
These three all have a humble (in the ‘kind’ and ‘usually beautiful’ sense) collaborative style, a very definitive and direct outcome and a sense of humour. They all aim to transform lives in a practical way. And it doesn’t hurt that they all seem to be in love with their jobs and what they can achieve.

Let me be up-front and say my comparison point for conferences are the amazingly transcendent experiences I’ve had previously. Namely, Customer Experience and Innovation (I forget the actual title) in Sydney 2002 from which I still use my notes, and attendance at Webstock in 2009 and 2010 where every speaker and experience elevated inspiration in my discipline, and in the community of designers, developers, UXers, artists. So perhaps it’s fair to say my expectations were too high going in.

In reality, this post is more about my experience of attending this conference.

There were some good speakers and sessions. And there was a real effort made for the conference to be interconnected (no wifi or power-points, notwithstanding). Afterall, I do have a top 9 : ) But perhaps it was the combination of linked yet overwhelmingly conventional mix of IT, Gen Y, resource scarcity warnings, broad definitions of innovation and creativity not always fully expressed, disappointing superstars, flavoured with musical stylings of Potpourri, and tenuous bubbles reference, ultimately made stark by witnessing twitterfeeds in action from an obviously bored attendee tweeting the most exuberant verbatim insights. Superconnected indeed.

So fair warning, this post may not inspire or elucidate my thinking on the super connected world with a lens of creativity and innovation. Overall, I’d say the connection made between conference and topic was the warning/challenge to innovate creatively because we have the means (technology, emerging and emerged generation of new thinking brains) and it isn’t going anywhere, but let’s not lose our humanity in the bargain. The food was good, but : )

My top 9

Here are my Top 9 highlights in chronological order, and – as is this whole blog – seen through the lens of design, especially service design, and especially-specially design in the public sector context.

• ONE: The ANZSOG Dean, Professor Allan Fels saying that creativity and innovation in government has never been more needed. But that the challenge is government is inherently hierarchical, and reliant on both predictability and order. He proposed the power of storytelling was essential if we are to change that because:

“A story is the way for people to imagine themselves in a new world.”

• TWO: Simon McKeon, 2011 Aussie of the Year who said:

“Innovation starts with ‘why’, not ‘how’… [and means] collaborating with people [you’re] actually uncomfortable with”

Maybe it’s obvious about the ‘why’ not ‘how’ starting point, but later when I heard Edward de Bono lamented ‘crazytivity’ (see number 9) sometimes the ‘how’ takes over and the intent gets lost. The ‘why are we doing this’ part. Simon mentioning uncomfortable people is also extremely relevant. People, for the most part, just want to help solve the problem – from their perspective. The challenge of the designer is facilitating, mediating, and driving to an outcome (see number 7); an outcome that meets the ‘why’.

• THREE: Dan Dennet, philosopher offered maybe one of my biggest highlights, because – as all good philosophers do – he characterised a dilemma I’ve been experiencing but have been unable to name. That is the guilt-filled divide between what we ‘can do’ thanks to technology and connectedness and what we do ‘do’. A divide technology can’t fill.
  

  

  This feeling of guilt resonated on a personal level (I still haven’t bought a goat for a village – everyone else seems to have!), but as a designer it confirmed to me that valuable role we play in describing experience – that gap between ‘can do’ and ‘does’ – because we (are supposed to) understand and express the human aspects of services and strategy. For example, a customer can go online to complete an application for some service. All the Terms & Conditions can be there, all the instructions. And as service provider the organisation may expect that because it’s all there – the means are there to do everything right without generating the resource intense low-value phone call – the customer is ‘empowered to self-manage their experience’. But as Dan put it, “I can, but I don’t wanna, so I don’t” – which means the customer feel a little guilty all the time because they might not get it, and the organisation adds more information to help the customer self-manage better. But adding more information isn’t the point (see number 9).
  
  He wasn’t pessimistic about our lives tethered to electronic devices, but he did say we need to look at all the unintended consequences. Design anyone?

• FOUR: James Moody, futurist talked about the Sixth Wave of Innovation). The two key points for me were in reference to his five ‘rules of thumb’ required for capabilities for the future:

• ‘Sell the service, not the product’ (which he added ‘even think about selling the experience’) because today it’s about access not ownership. It’s a concept worth mulling because it’s nevermore true then today, but also because what does it mean for what we design. The notion of service is even more intangible when products aren’t necessarily touchable touchpoints.
• The second ‘thumb-rule’ I liked was ‘Digital and nature converge’ – now I can’t recall exactly what it meant (yes, I know I could look it up, but I don’t wanna – I’m ok with the guilt I’ll feel – see number 3), what I did get from his explanation was that the source of information isn’t as important as the ability to synthesise from the myriad of sources. It’s not about finding an answer, it’s about choosing the right one for the desired outcome (see number 6).

My absolute favourite thing James said, which totally aligns to my design philosophy was in answer to a question about applied technology. He said:

“The measure of maturity of technology is when it becomes invisible”

Services people don’t even notice because they neither upset, nor necessarily delight, they simply work and work beautifully for all concerned – especially in the public sector context – ah, to dream.

• FIVE: Stephen Heppell, an online education expert was a pretty engaging speaker, and his presentation as images and clips was a delightful illustrated conversation. I loved his use of language when he said:

• Everything he had done had been ‘spectacularly affordable’ – we can apparently have a noble outcome within an achievable budget! Even with technology.
• Sometime the most ‘gentle solution’ can be found – using the example of subtitling Bollywood songs so whenever songs came on tv the subtitles were there, and there was some phenomenal 40% or so increase in literary in the years since.
• Labels don’t make things happen (even if you believe in nominative determinism – see number 6) setting up the right conditions and adding people makes things happen.
  
  

• SIX: Victor Finkel, Gen Y rep, was an articulate speaker (as one would expect from a World Champ debater). He was there to talk to us about Gen Y. Personally speaking, I hate the whole Gen [letter] labels. Like having a room labelled ‘innovation room’ (see number 5). I’m not sure Victor was so into the labels either when he used the nominative determinism and Thomas Crapper as inventor of the toilet to reflect on it, (Potsie). He spoke about the three questions Gen Y is thinking:

• “Why am I doing this?”
• “Why do things have to be this way?”
• ”Why can’t I cite Wikipedia?” (Which is really about the ubiquity of information, and the need to challenge – not for ego’s sake, but to understand what’s really important; what really matters)

Cue drawdrop realisation: I am Gen Y, because as designer, service and or otherwise, I ask these things everyday! (See number 2 and 3)

• SEVEN: I’m kinda obsessive about collaboration. Mehrdad Baghai and James Quigley wrote As One: Individual Action. Collective Power and Mehrdad presented a superb breakdown of the different views and mental models of what it means to work together. I liked it so much I bought the book! (But it’s all available at the website AsOne). Highly recommended. Especially as a designer working with such a range of teams and people; it’s no good going in thinking ‘Architect and Builders’ when it’s really ‘Producer and Creative Team.’

• EIGHT: Not a speaker per se but a general theme (besides the general theme of planet’s resources becoming scarce) raised by Hugh Mackay, psychologist, social researcher, was how IT, which enables ‘connection’ is not the same as ‘personal connectedness’.
  
  I have people with whom the link is 140 characters or a ‘like’ every now and then. These are not relationships, these are data exchanges. The data may be emotive, but the level of connection is not personal. While not quite an honorary Gen Y (see number 6), my devices and the internet, are not part of my humanity, but they are part of how I live. The internet is the room I spend a significant chunk of my time – happily. But there are unintended consequences to be aware of (see number 3). There are still some uniquely human emotions and experiences that will always be human. I hope. (there’s one there – hope is human ; )

• NINE: Edward de Bono’s actual session at the end of the last day was phenomenally disappointing, and I feel very sorry for people that attended the conference looking forward to this session and who couldn’t attend the master class – for budget or timing reasons. Thank goodness a friend of mine went to the master class, where she shared these highlights:

• For him ‘Innovation’ is doing something new to an organisation, but not new to the world; ‘Creativity’ is doing something new.
• ‘Creativity’ is about logic, value, and benefit vs ‘Crazytivity’ which is about being different for the sake of it.
• Challenge is essential to the creative process – even when everyone’s firing along on the same track. Challenge helps unblock ideas, and helps you see what’s behind a concept. You should actively create ‘barriers’ to disrupt thinking – what he calls ‘provocative thinking.’
• The most resonant for me in my field was his view on change in organisations. He said organisations have things like legislation, policies, services, processes and think they can just add things to change what is there – add a new channel, a new policy. But you can’t just add something to change it – you have to re-look at the whole thing, re-design and change it. It’s like maths, if you have 200 and you add 20, you don’t have 200 + 20, you have 220 which is a completely new number.

Final reflection

I like the idea of conferences as inspirational. I’m selfish that way. I like ideas, I like new thinking or ways of seeing things. But I appreciate conferences are part idea sharing, part networking, part catering.

Then I attended this conference and TedX in Canberra recently, and read this blog post ‘A Tale of Two Conferences’ by Paul Wallbank, about a traditional conference vs an un-conference, and I’m rethinking things.

How do ideas get shared, people get inspired these days when I could probably have seen these speakers all on YouTube? Or simply bought de Bono’s books (as was his response to genuine questions at the final session). Maybe the notion of the conference being an idea-networking-fest isn’t enough. Maybe we need to make something and we need decision-makers there. Instead of spending time and money on getting millionaire big-name speakers, spend the time lobbying a politician or business person to commit to attending and accepting an outcome, crowdsourcing a solution that can go beyond the conference walls and timeframe.

I just want to know ‘why am I doing this’, ‘why does it have to be this way’ and I want to dull the guilt without resorting to crazytivity. I know it will be hard and we’d have to collaborate with people who may make us uncomfortable, but the stories we could create! We wouldn’t have to change the world; just make a difference.

Interestingly as I worked on the mapping, it emerged that this post and the experience of capturing the experience provided additional sub-parts that have occupied my thinking. Therefore Part B consists of two sub-parts:

1. The presentation of a map of current state experience, fully prefaced with a raft of disclaimers to qualify its existence
2. A postscript on the daily, sometimes hourly, round of inputs from other designers, design thinking, stimuli. Be it tweets, links, emails, thoughts, challenges, conversations. Sometimes they knock your thinking off its tracks in a good way, and sometimes they just get in the way.

SUB-PART 1: THE MAP BIT

Mapping the experience was (as it always is) challenging. Usually the research and mapping would be developed as part of a larger problem-solving/opportunity-leveraging activity. BAs, EAs, other change agents, would be performing corresponding requirement descriptors (process modeling, architecture maps, etc) and collaborative conversations would occur daily.

In that context here are some disclaimers to the map I’ve produced:

• I did this map on my own – normally a team of designers would have conducted the research – background, field, other. They would have got in a room and gone through a series of analysis and synthesis activities. Frameworks would emerge, further investigation may ensue. While I did a version of these activities this map represents my unmediated, unchallenged view. I never recommend taking a single source as a definitive view – no one person can cover all the bases. In my opinion, design is always better done as a good or ‘bad’ collaboration.
• There is only one source of data for this map – my experience of doing one thing (filing online). That fact alone means that the quality of the data should be questioned. I don’t even know if I’m an extreme or middle-ground user.
• This map was not done for an organisation with a problem to solve or service to change, accordingly there is no corresponding service blueprint that provides a view of how the service works from an inside-out view. For any real change to occur, a map alone is not useful as the information is not qualified by the reality check of why certain things are the way they are.

I’m not going to describe what’s in the map and what it might mean because my intention in the final part of this three-part post (which may not occur too rapidly given the effort the first two posts took) will be applying the map information and research knowledge to a change activity. (Check out my post on Customer Experience Maps as a technique if you want ‘how to’ detail or this excellent Journey Map resources on the Web (and if your confused about maps vs journeys here’s my take on that too)).

If you’re new to maps, what I will say is the data from the research has been extrapolated out into a framework of the experience phases. These phases feature the elements of the experience (what is thought about, what is used, what is done). It’s a map so it doesn’t show you where you’re going – it shows you the landscape you’re travelling on and through – highlights and low lights. You can choose to bypass or take these into account when you’re planning a trip (or to change the landscape). That’s the theory (and practice) and I’ll do this in my next post.

SUB-PART 2: THE SELF-REFLECTIVE BIT

In the time it has taken me to do the map I have been plagued by self-doubt – is this really saying anything? It started when I watched a TED video of Daniel Kahneman on The Riddle of Experience vs Memory last week. Does this mean even the process of interviewing is fraught with inaccuracy when the remembering-self can differ so greatly from the experiencing self?

Then this morning I looked at the most excellent Dan Saffer slide presso on The Complexity of Simplicity and I thought “Is this map providing a ‘Wow!’ or an ‘Of Course’?” (I aspire to the latter).

Even at work there are different conversations about visualising information and I’m reminded of the Louis CK, take on Twitter I watched the other day which resonated strongly with me because sometimes that’s how I feel and that maybe “everything that’s available to do isn’t a good idea.” I mean, I love the stimulus and the ideas and thinking flying around. But sometimes….sometimes, it’s enough already.

I’m a functional gal. I don’t want to change the world, I just want to make a difference (and thereby change bits of the world ; ). And I do question whether I’m just adding more ‘whatever’ to my discipline, or whether I am adding something of substance, or, if nothing else a useful point of view. I think it’s important to question yourself, your process, your faith in false gods/techniques. We do that as Designers all the time to services, experiences, strategies. We should do it to ourselves. Not for the answers, just for the questions. Not for more outputs, but for better outcomes.

And so like Marie Curie exposing herself to radioactive material (albeit unknowingly) I chose the service experience of filing my tax return – online and in a new country. And like Madame Curie and her most likely uncomfortable yet inevitable death I too suffered the toils of hope (“Look at ze pretty bleu-verte glow of zis radio-active isotopes in my poche”) and the bowels of failure (“Perhaps ze radium has something to do wis zees troubles, but it cannot be affirmed wis certainty”). This is my service experience story, to be told in three parts:

• Part A: The Experience – as an illustrated flow of what I went through (what I thought, did, used)
• Phase 1: The Attempt
• Phase 2: The Resolution
• Part B: The mapped experience – taking the experience and extrapolating meaning for change
  
• Part C: What could be done – focusing on one touchpoint (the atlas-like one) – I hereby reserve the right to bail on this one having looked at the source material again.
  

A few disclaimers:

• This capture was done over a period of 10 hours – there’s other analytical and representational things I could have done given more time
• This was just my experience – it doesn’t represent a body of research, or any background research. Just me, my experience, and my knowledge of services, (with a bit of tax service knowledge thrown in for good measure).
• It was done on my own – no benefit from other voices, experience, bouncing around of ideas
• I don’t purport to be a UXer, so any feedback on the online experience is only in relation to how that informs my service experience.

Here I go. Before I start I answer these questions:

How do I feel?

Nervous

What’s my expectation?

I’ll get in, do the first screen and then realise I don’t have some vital piece of information.

I’ll feel relief that I can’t finish it because then I can put it off. The two rules of procrastination: 1) Do it today. 2) Tomorrow will be today tomorrow.

My fear

I’ll owe money – it’s happened before. And it was big –  it came down to a stupid bit of ignorance on my part, some poor information design on their part and an assumption that every person that earns income is interested and able to understand as a matter of daily routine tax regulations.

Disclaimer: I used to work in a tax authority so I have other fears – like, doing something wrong, not knowing how to answer something and not getting any sense from the provided information, having to read legalese, asking the tax authority for help and getting an officious “it’s so easy” response, things taking days longer than expected.

My hope

That I’ll get through it quickly – thinking 20 mins. That I have everything I need: Unique identifier (TFN), pay slips, bank details, etc.

My fantasy

That I’ll get a refund.


THE EXPERIENCE – PHASE 1: The Attempt

Warning: Expletives are contained in the following illustrated stream of consciousness dialogue. I’ve also chosen to use not-the-most-professional looking mood indicator to accompany the screens. Made me smile.

I’m in.

Instant panic – lodge it by 31 Oct!!! (It’s 24 Oct when I do this and I thought I had until February)

I click on to e-tax essentials because I’m determined to do this online. I choose to go straight to the demo (Key note here: I’m assuming, unless there’s flashing lights saying PC-ONLY I can complete my task ‘online.’) It takes four clicks but I finally get there.

I’m pumped.

• Smart system because it picks up the financial data throughout the year.
• I can save progress without lodging anything. Seems good. I can do this.
• Pre-filling – nice. But she just said something about data pre-filled may not be available – what was that? Can’t rewind!? Have to replay the whole section.
• Lots of recommendations to print. Ah, I don’t have a printer. So really you’re assuming I’m in a home setting that’s very much like an office.
• Still – all seems like my panic over the deadline isn’t warranted.

Until:

‘Download’ – what?! Realisation it’s not an ‘online’ tool. I have to download software onto my machine. Still nothing about system requirements, assumption of hope exists. It’s still good. I progress to download.

Over six screens.

3 easy steps. Step 1. takes me to this part of the screen. My eyes are at the middle of the screen – I’m ready to download this mother.

Yup, I’m eligible, C’mon – let’s do this thing! OK, I’ll do one final check to see what downloading does seeing as it’s not online.

It’s bad.

Still, I delve into ‘information about other operating systems for e-tax users’ – only to realise it shouldn’t say ‘e-tax users’ BECAUSE YOU CAN’T BE IF YOU’RE NOT ON A PC SYSTEM!

[I shall now quote here directly from my notes]

FUUUUCCCKKKKKKK!!!!!!!! – I can’t do it from home!!!!!

Ok, ok. Don’t panic. Maybe I don’t actually have to do a tax return (I’ve moved swiftly from anger to bargaining…)

I step outside the system:

Nope. No hope. Took seven-screens to work it out – simple questions if a little too click-y.

So I have to do it manually. I go to the ‘Tax Pack’ – 130 page book I assume tells me how to do it. (…depression ensues, acceptance reluctantly murmurs…)

I scroll endlessly, hopelessly, there’s a chin shaped dent on my keyboard as my shoulders slump, my heart sinks and I realise I just can’t do this manually. I just have to find another way. What returns me to anger is this friendly green box that says ‘Helpful Hints.’ I know these types of boxes. I’ve suggested these types of boxes before. It may as well say ‘Helpful Hint, get a PC if you’re a Mac user’



I decide that I will download the software on my work PC. And now I quote again from my notes:

But even if it works, I now kind of hate you ATO.

Let’s examine where I am at the end of Phase 1. In the moments away from the service the experience still lives on, triggered by the unsatisfying interaction. As a Service Designer I can hear the voices of:

• BAs, Marketers “the process is right there – all the information is only clicks away, and everything the user needs to do is written somewhere on-screen”
• Managers “we must drive channel shifts to empower the customer to manage their own interactions”
• Me, as customer: “Fuuuuuck – what do I do – I don’t have time tomorrow, I needed to do it tonight…..shit, I can try download it on my work machine – I. CANNOT. DO. THIS. ON. PAPER! Oh, god, what if I have to do it on paper. I’ll have to get a tax pack. I am not flicking through the PDF to do this. And I’m another day closer to the deadline!”

Rationally, I’ve made my decision, but subconsciously, the ‘think’ part of my experience (experience = think, do, use) trundles along in my head as I calculate and re-calculate options, remedies, blame underpinned by regulatory fear. All of this informs my level of trust with the organisation. It informs my expectations and how I think the next steps will go.

THE EXPERIENCE – PHASE 2: The Resolution

So, it’s the next morning. I have every paper with a dollar $ign on it with me – bank, employer, super, et al. I find e-tax. I download it – mere minutes. I get started.

First screen. Too much to read – I’m a skimmer for these sorts of things, because you’ve already put me off with the 130 page Tax Pack and even if e-tax is ‘part of a public ruling’ I just want to get this done, and if I break a law filling in something wrong, so be it.

What follows is a series of screens that may be information or transaction (all look the same) asking me to read technical language and agree or not, complete or not, verify or not.

Another way to put the experience would be to insert a video depicting a overwhelmed character walking down a darkened street as images of neon signs fly by that all have something to do with the plot – ‘deductions’ ‘one-third of actual expense’ ‘offsets”threshold’ ‘foreign source income’.

If this activity was intended to capture my user experience I’d describe my painful ‘Print’ experience, my confusion at where I was on the screens, my lack of understanding as to how to save my progress and come back to later. But that’s not what this is.

I get to the end, after 60 mins of clicking, seeking additional information online from my bank, my super, my Operations Manager.

And pleasantly see I’m entitled to a refund.

Until I then get stuck in a loop and can’t get out.

I simply close it all down. Waiting for final confirmation from the organisation. Remembering when I last thought I had a refund I discovered a massive tax bill. I wait. With no excitement, anticipation or delight.

WHERE WE’RE AT

So is the above what the service experience is like? No. Phase 1 and 2 simply captured one user’s thoughts, actions, tools. To leave it where it is is like presenting the powerful customer quote to an executive: un-mediated revelation is not meaningful extrapolation.  Sure, as customer I want filing a tax return to be ‘easy’ but this is a service experience – so I need to map it out. A service designer’s job is not to simply describe what happened (above) it’s to extrapolate that out into what it means from a service perspective; in order to ultimately examine what changes or impacts may look like from the customer and service perspective.

Coming Soon: Promised an experience; given a map: Filing a Tax Return Experience Map (Part B)

I just watched this video by Henry Reich from MinutePhysics* and:

1. Discovered why I’ve struggled to write my all encompassing seminal infodesigngraphatainment post I’ve wanted to write ever since I started this blog
2. Feel like Neo saying “I know kung fu” only I’d say “I know quantum physics” (and then I’d quickly qualify before someone said “show me” by following up with, “by which I mean I just get it better than I ever have before…or maybe I’m a me that gets it, and the me that doesn’t get it in a multiverse and by reading this sentence You, as observer, are forcing nature to collapse to one option or the other [insert sound of one-hand clapping]…”
3. Realise what matters to me most about information being communicated visually and in a designed way is, harmonising clear purpose through a focus on content first and foremost, and representation last.

REVELATORY BIT FIRST

After I watched the video this was my thought process:

• Do I want to share this video as vehicle of information?
• You betcha!

• Why? Is it because it is cool/cute/attractive imagery a la:
• A visual full of seemingly meaningful data as per this Hunch ‘infographic’
• A simple representation that powerfully illustrates a point like Mark Goetz’s graphic?
• An art-imitating-life depiction like Simon’s Cat?

• Nope.

• Why not? Is it because of how you’re feeling in response to observing the video?
• I think it is! In fact, I think it’s because the content, the representation and the presentation helped me, relatively quickly, understand and learn something that’s making think about my relationship to the world!!

• Humph, sounds kind of lofty and esoteric… [and the conversation goes on..but back to the post!]

EXTRAPOLATION AND SLIGHTLY BORING BIT, BUT BIT I’LL PROBABLY COME BACK TO IF I EVER NEED TO SHARE A POINT OF VIEW ON ‘INFORMATION DESIGN’

This is what I got from the video:

1. It starts with the content: Explaining what the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment is about.
2. It simplifies complexity as a concept: pictures represent the cat, the bunker, the gunpowder, these are your visual cues. These players are introduced before the relative complexity of the quantum mechanics aspect is provided.
3. It deploys a number of design devices because its purpose is to transfer information (awareness of facts) in such a way that the user can turn it into knowledge (understanding/cognition of information):

• It built up learning through layering
• It chunked messages and was subtly repetitious
• It used both visual and verbal cues, that were clean and concise
• It used humour (which is a bonus, not a pre-requisite – but it does serve to humanise the information)

There is real skill and practice in preparing information so that I, as user, can assess meaning and direction from the information presented (visually and verbally in this case).

The reason this resonated with me because it held up a mirror to all the ‘cool’ ‘cute’ ‘attractive’ imagery parading as ‘information design’ that just feels like noise. Pretty, ‘would-love-that-as-a-poster’ decoration. But not actually adding much to the world. So much of information design or the abundance of what parades as it, is form over function – feeling exactly like this image by Alberto Antoniazzi:

While I can concede a video may be stretching the boundaries of the traditional ‘graphical’ information design – so what. The power of great information design is its ability and intent to convey complex information quickly and in the most accessible way (not the most aesthetically pleasing way). Because humans design information for other humans to use, a human response like delight in understanding, or desire to share with other humans is perfectly appropriate; good information design gives people the opportunity to understand and ultimately, maybe, help people choose to make a difference in the world. I think i can has cheezburger now.

*Thanks to Vicky Teinaki for tweeting the original link to the video, and Stephanie Pride for tweeting the Alberto Antoniazzi image.

A colleague in Washington DC, Leslie Tergas, attended the Transform 2011 Conference at Mayo. She presented us her highlights. The gist of Mayo, innovation and the conference:

1. Here’s a leading organisation – good at what they do – with design at the forefront of them being great
2. They take the notion of service (i.e. Health Care Delivery) seriously – and want to do it better
3. They want everyone to do better and have a thing called the Mayo Innovation Center, and run things like a Transform conference

I’m not even going to capture my highlights….nah, I am, but not as many as I’d like because that’s not really what this post is about. So these are two easiest to share highlights:

one

Great innovation definition from Andrew Zolli

INNOVATION: The creation of new forms of value in the anticipation of future demand that propels systemic change

I like this definition because it reminded me of when we had to define innovation at my old job, and failed. We said something like “Innovation is an activity that results in some kind of value-added change – experiential, operational, organisational, societal” or the equally lame “Innovation is the creation and implementation of new or improved ideas, concepts, processes, services that add value for the enterprise.” The definitions just didn’t capture innovation in a meaningful way, and this quote reminded of why. It’s the ‘value’ bit that makes it ‘innovation’ over change. Change can be for the worse, or just different. Innovation is about creating something better, not just different.

two

Think BIG – start small – move fast
Changing the system at an element level – not system level.
A simple win = achievable steps toward a meaningful goal.
This image (copied) that summed it up for me:

Why this resonated with me was because, particularly in the public sector space where you’re working with agencies looking to change/improve things for citizens, whole communities, all paid for by the nation’s coffers and taxes, change is often on a huge scale. Thinking is BIG, moving is fast. But the middle bit is often messy, competitive (organisationally) and, quite frankly, unachievable in its intended form. Being audacious in your vision is great, but as a designer, maybe turning the vision for that audacity into more realistic, more engaging smaller steps is a better way.

But why did the above remind me of my vocational devotional love of design?

Well, about 3 minutes into the presentation:

• My mind went all zen and ‘empty-bowl‘-like as I became solely interested in listening intently to every word and pouring over every image on screen
• In the gaps between intently listening my subconscious said – “This feeling is good; capture this feeling. This is what being a designer feels like. Remember? This is why you’re a service designer”
• My brain saw multiple applications to what I was hearing and what my synaptic pathways were connecting. I wanted to do, put into practice, inspire, and use aspects of EVERYTHING in my work IMMEDIATELY!
• I felt a focus on what really mattered (in amongst the sometimes daily round of mundane office life and politics) that was unashamedly about how I think, how my brain works, and what really matters to me.

Even the notes (below) I generated are a set I know I’ll keep for years and reference the little frameworks, info-design tidbits, quotes, and prompts. Probably not even for the content but for the reminder of things that made me re-think differently.

Maybe it was because Leslie was my original design mentor and I was happily hearkening back to my origins. Maybe it was the purist nature of conferences and speakers, passionate about their subjects, maybe it was because it was in the health space and I’m fortunate to have done some great work with great people in this space. Don’t know – don’t care. I just think sometimes, if you’re lucky enough to do what you love for a living you still need to be reminded why you love it.

*Steve Jobs also died yesterday. And as iWrite this on my MacBook, using downloaded photos taken with my iPhone and from notes captured on my iPad iCan’t say iAm an Apple-phile, but iCan say iM glad iWas alive when the likes of a Steve Jobs was. A man who also seemed to luck into his vocation. 

“The range of our collective vision is far greater
when individual insights become one” Andrew Carnegie.

Amen Andy.

As designers we espouse the value of collaboration. But what I’ve noticed in my years in the game is sometimes a designer speaking about collaboration is a little like the overweight dietician; oh sure, they say the right things, but they like their doughnuts on their own. This post is about collegial collaboration, that is collaboration with fellow designers. Working with clients and customers/users is largely the same, but you can be a little rougher, so to speak, with colleagues. And I guess I’d qualify that ‘co-design-collaboration’ has a few more etiquette rules around it which I’m not drawing out here.

A potted history of my relationship with “collaboration”

A few years ago a small group of us (three) organised a corporate leadership forum with the underlying theme of ‘Collaboration’. My role was to come up with the content and exercises for all the senior executives to present. Two key things came out of the experience:

• A deeper understanding of what collaboration actually means because I had to break it down for the executives
• A truly excellent and joyful collaborative collegial experience

Prior to forum I hadn’t thought much about collaboration. Yeah, yeah, people together, goals, outcomes, blahdey-blah. But this is where being a designer gives you the opportunity to dig into and behind the assumed. Some important definitions:

• Collaboration: multiple people working together in a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship to achieve a common goal
• Co-ordination: the bringing together of different and multiple working elements for consolidation towards a shared outcome

When we couldn’t get copyright to a collaboration model in time I had to produce one overnight as a Plan B. Broadly speaking there were five elements to the CLEAR model:

• Communication between partners (trust, respect, constructive conversation)
• Leadership of people and process (someone’s gotta be clear about the why, how and what)
• Engagement of a shared outcome (everyone has to be on board – willingly)
• Accessibility to participate and contribute (the process itself and how to contribute is explicit)
• Responsive to future collaborative activity (learnings are shared – bearing in mind this is a corporate model, so that really means shared across the organisation)

It was from this work that my consciousness of true collaboration emerged. Simply bringing people together doesn’t guarantee ‘collaboration,’ it’s more likely to be frustrating for all concerned. Collaboration is about people working together, and in our designerly world of multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary groups (nod to @vickytnz for highlighting the categories, see PS at bottom) People + Techniques ÷ Intent = Magic Happens doesn’t always work out.

Three examples of collaboration : the good, the bad*, and the ugly

Example 1: The Good

- Creative design making a tangible product

• The situation: With virtually no time together – except for a 30 min session, midnight emails, and passing in the hallway – the two of us involved had to agree a concept, content and activity ahead.
• The scene: During the 30 min session we shared a flood of ideas and expectations based on thinking we had been mulling on from initial conversations. Whiteboards, sketching and prototyping was involved.
• The collaboration part: As the ‘maker’ I knew the basic concept and constraints we’d have to work within but it was still messy and fuzzy. Through the conversation and sketching a clear and shared vision emerged, we had clear roles and clear responsibilities and no one voice was stronger than the other.
• Why it was beautiful: For my part, I had made things like this before but with Obi Wan CLEARnobe in my head saying “Use the collaboration force, Mel” I shut up and listened. I used my experience as a framework for the discussion not as the content. What we came up with together was far cooler than any one of us could have come up with on our own. And it was still make-able.

Example 2: The Bad (as in Michael Jackson ‘Bad’, so Great!)

- Conceptual visualisations of complex and complicated strategic outcomes

• The situation: Making sense of voluminous and complex information and nutting out next steps
• The scene: In a room, piles of paper, client urgency, clarity unclear, a whiteboard, four designers
• The collaboration part: A time was blocked out with no agenda set. We just started talking. We all brought something to the discussion – some different aspect of understanding. Someone was referencing the data, a couple riffed on experience with the organisation, someone directed someone to capture key points on post-its so we could move them around as our thinking moved around, people would get up and re-frame the capture. Someone reminded the group of pragmatic boundaries. There was conversation, there was dialogue, debate. What was said would be built on by another. Questions provided deeper insight and spread deeper understanding across the team.
• Why it was beautiful It was dynamic, hugely productive, relatively short time-wise, fun, funny, bonding – in a team, and knowledge understanding sense. It produced a better outcome than the four of us going away by ourselves and bringing our thinking together.

Example 3: The Ugly

- Working out an approach for upcoming prototyping activity

• The situation: Group of designers with mixed expertise in design method and varying levels of practical experience trying to scope and plan a series of prototyping activities
• The scene: A time was set but no agenda set. One person reading track-change notes off a computer that one other person was marking up on the only copy of the document. Same track-change person doing all the writing on the whiteboard and saying things like “Let me just write this up before we go any further” “What I want is…”, “When I did something similar I…”
• The collaboration part: n/a
• Why it was ugly: One person turned the collaborative session into a meeting where they were Chair. They also used their personal reference points as the predominant ones – so little experience in prototyping meant the person’s experience in facilitating a usability report deliverable framed the conversation. The experience at the table was also weak so the dominant personality could not be constructively challenged. The real trouble in this example was a collaborative intent was crushed by a more senior person’s insecurity with the design process itself.

So, to sum up, good collaboration to me is:

• A conversation: Just like design is the conversation, and the conversation is the work. It’s the glue that connects the making to how you get to the solution. Like any good conversation there needs to be a clear topic, some kind of outcome sought and equality of the participants. Good rapport and spirits help a hell of a lot too. And as with any conversation, the ability to shut-up and listen is very useful.
• Fast and deep: For generating ideas and insights there is no faster or deeper way than through collaborative conversation. To the point that, aside from all the obvious collaborative stuff like workshops, I am absolutely convinced two people sitting together writing up a workshop or research outcome is faster and creates better synthesis than one person doing it for the other to QA. ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED!
• Not personal: It’s about getting to a good place, not about feeling good: if you don’t have enough collegial rapport to say something is bullshit or wipe a whole whiteboard of thinking, then call out some ground rules first. If you do it right, with the right people you all end up feeling good at the end. Strike that, you end up feeling great and energised and spent!
• Not about quick consensus: Not being in total agreement is vital (except about the outcome). Like-mindedness is ideal but don’t trust too much agreement and consensus if it’s not tested. Expect and seek creative abrasion – this is where collaboration and emergence converge.
• Not for everyone: Some people just don’t know how to collaborate. If you can, avoid them. If you can’t, try and set some ground rules if you’re leading. If you’re not leading, let them get their inputs and directives out and work bloody hard to win them over progressively by balancing greater good compromise to their personal agenda. Poor collaborators (and here’s my amateur psychology input) fear a lack of control, so they exercise what they think is missing.

I love collaborating with good people. If you’re lucky enough to work regularly with good collaborators recognise it and cherish it because it can be rare. It’s the sweet spot of design to me. But its not the end spot, and I’m going to do the most egotistical thing (other than having a blog dedicated to my own thinking) and quote myself to end this post.

After the Bad* collaborative session, we were pretty fired up/exhausted from where we got to. We probably could have gone for a few more hours. But it wasn’t just about where we got to because we’ve got clients we’re collaborating with too. I said:

“We’ve got lightening in a bottle here, but we don’t need to start a fire yet”

There’s a point in collaborating where you have to pause. Where you leave it, sometimes in a unfinished-nearly-finished form. But you have to, so it can percolate, so emergence can emerge, so collaboration can continue.

Be a good collaborator. It’ll make the world a better place.

Postscript
-disciplinary Definitions (my take)

• Multi– varied but complementary expertise, skills and knowledge. Shared interaction for outcome
• Inter– specialist expertise from related fields experience. Collaborative interaction for outcome
• Trans– individual knowledge and expertise is valued and shared as boundaries are blurred for the outcome

1. ‘Time’ in the service design context – time taken, time spent, time saved (both from the design process and within the delivery of a service)
2. Design evaluation – what is it, how do you do it
3. What’s different about design in business that makes it of value (as design, not as a business method) – I guess this one is really “why is my vocation design-in-business, and not just ‘design’ or just ‘business’”

I appreciate these three things/notions/concepts/imps are inarticulate but I choose not to question or delve dedicatedly, until such time as the gods conspire to prod me by laying a morsel connected to one of the notions. One such morsel was laid before me on Friday, 22 July 2011. And the prod-ee was number three.

Sabine Junginger visited where I work. She’s a lecturer in Product Design and Design Management at Lancaster University. She’d worked with our principal, John Body at Carnegie Mellon a few years back on the re-design of the US Postal Service Domestic Mail Manual, along with Angela Meyers, who was also at this sharing session. But, enough of the introductions, what pricked my interest happened when Sabine mentioned ‘emergence.’

The context in which this came up was when she was talking about the principles she applies to her design research work. Nothing different from what most designers either explicitly or implicitly follow so I wont repeat them, but if you want to look further they’re informed by John Dewey and Richard McKern writings (can’t find any apparently appropriate reference for Mr McKern).

The principles, broadly speaking, cover (my descriptors):

• method (we do this)
• assumption (because we assume this)
• so what (in order to achieve this)

One of her principles in the ‘so what’ category was:

“allow focus on emergence to new possibilities”

Emergence(?!) What’s this – just a way of saying ‘emerging’? I’m intrigued. From the minor discussion that followed, and may I stress at this point that this was not a key topic of conversation, 60 seconds max but it did earn an asterisk in a circle on my notes, this is my interpretation and extrapolation, filtered through nerdy excitement and minor research.

‘Emergence’ is the process of coming into being or prominence. For design, emergence is the ‘connection of possibilities’ from ‘what didn’t exist previously’. Reads as poor English, reads better as a formula. It means emergence is the point where patterns and meaning come out of the multiple interactions of information, and from this new possibilities can suddenly appear. It’s like when you have a mass of information and you’re making sense of it, different voices in the room (or your head), different life experiences applying their thinking, and something new starts to emerge – a better way of understanding the information, a new angle, a better idea. That’s emergence. It’s not an ‘aha’ moment. It’s cooler, it’s the ‘hmm, hey…” moment. It’s the point of possibility.

Sounds like a bunch of esoteric arse? Well, no. I don’t think it is. To me it’s calling out that intangible value of design and the thing I love about it. This notion of emergence captures how the design process (super-broadly: research – analyse – synthesise – define) isn’t the steps alone. Design activity/thinking/whatever tangible-ises the bits in between. If, as we collaborate, iterate, discover, explore, we converse (and I use ‘converse’ in it’s broadest sense as a device for engaging at a human level), design makes value of the conversations, which lead to some form of capture. It encourages and facilitates those conversations. It brings the right people together to have those conversations – creating the circumstance for emergence. And then it has the means to visualize, capture and represent concepts. In this way it differs from analytical processes because the conversation is a crucial part of the work (as opposed to simply the means to an end). Design needs the divergence and synthesis, where analysis may seek to converge and refine as soon as possible because their parameters can be clearer (remembering design is concerned with experience and fuzzy human elements like that).

I’ve always been interested in ‘the process’ of design – I can even track it back to previous posts: Memory lane ramblings (ep #1) and the postscript musings (ep #4) and how designers think and what I call percolation. In a funny way, this post is the result of emergence for me – when my brain went “hmmm, hey…!” during Sabine’s talk. It’s not the end point, or the answer, it’s the revelation of deeper understanding.

So what does all this rambling mean? Well, in terms of the value of design in business, and as a change approach:

• Design captures the bits in between the traditional notion of work and does something with those bits (makes visible, facilitates conversation, explores, etc)
• As for the notion of emergence, it calls out that there is a point connection to what didn’t exist before occurs. The process of design seeks this out and makes value of it. As designers, maybe consciousness of this could mean greater possibilities emerge.

Well, that’s my take anyway. If I’m wrong (and do set me right if I have it all wrong) then I’m sure the Germans or Japanese have a word for what I’m on about. I still need to percolate on it, but I feel like a designer who’s approaching a breakthrough! And now, because there are an awful lot of words up there, here’s some pretty.

Emergence is not the unicorn framed by the rainbow.
It’s the thought running through the bunny’s mind before she
acknowledges that it is indeed a unicorn she sees before her.

Presented without comment. Except ‘cool’

Source: Flowing Data