Concepts to Prototypes

Recently, after finishing a major piece of work, we took some time out for a creative design exercise. Similar to our previous #100 Shots experiment, we again challenged ourselves to think from a different discipline point of view, and a different topic all together from what we usually spend our days thinking about. We knew we wanted to do physical prototyping, we wanted it to be quick and we wanted it to feel like purposeful play (so not just “fun”).

CAPITheticAL Exhibition and our notes

We were prompted by the CAPITheticAL exhibition currently on at the Gallery of Australian Design. The exhibition shows the entries to the competition to design a hypothetical Australian capital city.

Our challenge: Design a civic square in a capital city in three hours!

We chose not to do any pre-research on urban design and town planning – except for the exhibition and our own experience and exposure to cities around the world.
 
 
Our approach
1.    Taking a small burst of inspiration/research move quickly from
2.    Concept and sketching, to
3.    Three dimensional prototype.

Bonus incidental activities also occurred such as sharing travel stories of favourite cities, scalpeling fingers, discussions about the amount of static electricity generated when cutting into Styrofoam.

The result
The People Mega-vista                                                                                             The Nation’s House

What did we learn

• We are not urban designers.

 
Physical prototyping

• Having a concept is critical – regardless of the type of design. It meant that the design could change during implementation (i.e. as we prototyped) but the intent remained true.
• Making is dictated by the level of skill with material or knowledge – which means unfamiliarity with materials or the subject can end up dictating a design because you do what you can with what you know.
• Scale is hard – when you’re drawing a building in relation to a lake, and then you try and do that in three-dimensions, it’s a particular skill.

 
Design is design is design (but it’s still a skill)

• Thinking in physical dimensions is challenging. While we think it is learnable with study, practice and a design mindset, it is not instinctive (like we’d expect of visualising being a design skill across the board).
• No research means you spend time changing as you build/prototype because you have no rationale to back you up or give you direction.
• Where you position your concept informs the build – too much detail too soon may mean you may miss the big picture (because you’re focused on details like getting the little tram right) or miss the concept intent (because you forget that the environment needs to cater for people living nearby).

So what did we learn from all that

Amongst the obvious (such as concept is king in design, prototyping is a way to learn how to make the design better because you understand and can solve implementation challenges quickly) the overwhelming feeling we had was that experimenting with technique is fun for learning, but when something is on the line – like a real outcome or generating a real solution is sought – experienced professionals leading the application of tools and techniques means you will get a better result.

We reckon this is pretty relevant when we go into organisations who question the value of design and have tried to do it themselves without experience or aptitude towards design as a discipline. It makes demonstrating practical design over theory or espousing “design thinking” without contextualising it to actual human and business outcomes even more important.

The call for public consultation

Big data presents an opportunity that service designers such as ourselves welcome. It offers a compelling opportunity as an emerging, but to us, one of many potential quantitative inputs to the policy development and service delivery puzzle.

To be able to have detailed information about the operation of large systems is the kind of base research that underpins much of our work.

We feel though that the desire for big data to answer questions around policy and service delivery should be put in its true place as input, and not as a driver. Public sector policy and service design is much more complex than that.

Data doesn’t make decision-making easier – the challenge of all those involved in improving services to citizens is turning data into usable information and that information into meaningful knowledge for outcomes. Even after you’ve done all of that, you need to design services for people, not numbers.

We look forward to the next developments from AGIMO in this space.

Check out our submission: Big Data Issues Paper DMA Feedback_13-04-05

So we’re pretty excited about the public announcement of the global expansion of one of their key innovation products, Patchwork, to be piloted in Victoria, and our role as FutureGov’s design partners on the project.

Working with the Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV) and a consortium of local councils, we will be supporting FutureGov and Patchwork as they seek to transform the way governments interact with vulnerable families in maternal and child health (M&CH), and youth services through this pilot. One of key areas of our focus in the collaboration will be mapping out where technology and service change could help a rethink in how M&CH practitioners are supported to do their job.

We have had a long personal and professional interest in the vulnerable families and children space – including working with the ACT Public and Child Advocate as far back as 2008. At a time when Governments can think the solution to better client care is to implement large enterprise systems, we can’t wait to see how the pilot of this eloquent technical solution, founded in a service approach, will fundamentally and quickly help practitioners in the space and in the end, support vulnerable families and children themselves.

So thanks for having us on board Dom, Kirsty and the Patchwork team – we can’t wait!

You can keep up to date with the pilot progress at the Patchwork blog.

After donating a relatively modest amount to The Yellow Van at Christmas we were surprised and delighted to be asked by Director Dave Burnet to come out and see their operations in action. And what an operation. The Yellow Van is a local charity that “rescues excess food” to deliver free of charge to refuges, shelters, and charities that support men, women and children.

“Welcome to Second-hand Heaven” as Dave called it when we first entered the quite lovely surroundings out in Tuggeranong. Their patch is a mixture of donated furniture, DIY by volunteers, and strategic buys like the Shipping Container which provides them much needed storage for things like containers that makes food collection and distribution possible. The Yellow Van currently receives no government funding, and relies on community support. And large doses of enthusiasm and spirit from the volunteers and workers.

Above is a map of their drop-off and pick-up spots and Peter proudly showing us their schedule which means there is no double-handling and minimal storage of items which keeps their costs low. The stats are pretty impressive, the three yellow vans they currently run and their two-person teams visit around 90 food donors throughout the week – these include supermarkets, caterers, event centres, and local cafes and restaurants. They drop off their rescued food which can also include treats and other staples like toiletries, to around 70 recipients.

This part of the operation was particularly interesting to us as we saw the systems in place to manage the logistics of the business itself – with all the appropriate considerations to business efficiency and sustainability. But what was also impressive was the role and trust in the staff/volunteers in the vans and how their knowledge and skills about routes, food, need was integral to the success and effectiveness of the service.

Dave Burnet, Director and ‘driving’ force behind The Yellow Van ;)

After our visit we could see why a small donation like ours really means something – especially when you discover as little as a $10 donation enables them to rescue for 10 meals. We feel privileged that they took the time to share their operations and spirit with us.

• Make a donation to The Yellow Van
• You also can vote in SunSuper Dreams for Yellow Van to recieve a $5000 grant (that’s 5,000 more meals!)

Organised Crime and Drugs in Sport (15 February 2013)

We say the furore has been fascinating because in the days following the release of information about Essendon Football Club and then the ACC report, it strikes us that commentators in mainstream media, social media and everyday conversation are at risk of retreating to entrenched code-defensive views.

There have been two sorts of cheating identified this week – the administering, or consumption, of performance enhancing drugs (PEDS) either at an individual or systemic level; and the corruption of a sport through match fixing.

In both cases, drivers such as gambling, organised crime, government funding and pure desire to win have been mixed together and discussed interchangeably – for us they are distinct though related elements of a complex problem.

The question of match fixing and formal corruption of a sport is in some ways easier to tackle because of the clear criminal nature and the entrance of gambling and organised crime, the more complex issue for sports is the use of PEDs and as-yet-unrecognised substances and approaches.

The much-promoted concept that athletes are somehow heroes or inherently models of morality as well as physical role models conveniently overlooks that these people are, well, people.

From our work across a range of compliance regimes we know that demographics, gender and occupation – though important factors – are not determinants alone of who will consider or may actually behave dishonestly in order to gain an advantage. What is more important is the psycho-social position of the individual and what we call ‘typologies’ that people can be categorised into based on understanding their experience (i.e. what they think, do and use).

In reality there are a number of stages a person may move through, such as:

• Fully compliant and willing
• Fully compliant but unwilling
• Partially compliant and game playing
• Partially compliant and planning aggressively
• Non-compliant and naive
• Non-compliant and game playing
• Non-compliant and criminal

The critical question we consider is, what are the behaviours, networks and patterns that lead people to move through these levels. For example, a strain on cashflow in a small business might see a stand-up guy start moving into non-compliant territory in order to pay the bills. Similarly, in the sports arena, the pressure on a fringe player to secure a contract, coupled with the motivation by the team structure to excel could see a young talent moving towards illegal and non-compliant behaviour.

In both cases, being educated on what is right and wrong in the regulatory system is not enough to deal with the complexity of the mental processes, belief structures, relationships and environments that people operate within.

Many regulators have worked on the premise for at least the last decade that a ‘zero tolerance’ ‘right or wrong’ approach to compliance defies the true nature of how people think and act. On the face of it, this is no different to the position of athletes. It’s exactly why the user typology and mapping work we do as designers in complex systems is complementary to and used extensively in mature compliance approaches.

This week has been a wake up call for industry sectors who fall outside of the ‘traditional’ regulatory environments. The actions and language of the ACC and ASADA have been straight out of the enforcement of compliance system textbook – find, prosecute, ban. It will be interesting to see if behind this (necessary rhetoric) there is an intelligent and thoughtful compliance strategy that actually reflects the humans in this regulatory system called sport.

A User Typology describes the expectations, behaviours and motivations of types of people who will be using a service:

• Who they are (in relation to the service)
• How they operate (within the system)
• What they expect
• What frustrates them

As an evidence-based tangible output of our service design process, user typologies:

• Are relevant beyond the touchpoint
• Document and define the user experience across the whole service
• Stay with the organisation as reusable knowledge

They’re critical to the work we do.

10 minutes of sketching service concepts, participants critiquing, then creating their own.

Unfortunately, we can’t share what the topic was about (public sector budget sensitive), but we can share that it was a rare case (when we talk to other designers in the service space) of service design not concerned with improving an existing service, but designing a new service. Blank page territory and a fantastic opportunity with a keen public sector client.

We can also share that the timeframe for the entire project was extremely tight – five weeks from kick-off to full service design specification. We’ve done tight before but this was extreme. It meant there was some documentation compromise in terms of depth, but in terms of breadth it was still collaborative intent > research > analyse/synthesise <> prototype/iterate > define. It also meant working closely with the team and their trust in us was critical to get to the right outcome all round – a service design that represented the users, and a service design they could use.

The opportunity for the nitty-gritty of service prototyping occurred about Day 12 – Day 15. We had done the background research, and field research with actual and potential users in one-on-one interviews and exercises. Up to Day 11 we formulated with the client representatives (our team) emerging insights – both from the internal and external view, emerging design principles and a value proposition for our component of the service within a broader service program context. And we had design features we knew would and wouldn’t work for users based on considering existing ‘like’ services.

Working up the service prototypes

On Day 13 we worked up the service prototypes for the workshop to be held on Day 15. They had to be paper-based and mobile because the workshop was going to be interstate, and in a room we where we knew we couldn’t stick stuff on walls. Sidenote: why do so many event facilities not allow you to use the walls!?

We started with all the information in our heads, a wall full of the refined insights, what we knew were key design features, the design principles and value proposition. We talked a bit about what we knew, and what knew we wanted to explore. And what we knew was likely to be the shape of the service.

And then we gave ourselves 10 minutes to sketch out how the service might work.

A bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of interpretation, a bit of personal perspective, some sacrificial red herrings, but mostly a lot of evidence. We named our concepts, and then we told them as a story – drawing out how the concept illustrated the pertinent points we wanted to learn more from. They worked! We then spent the next three hours working them into presentable component versions that we could put in front of people in a workshop. These components would also give the participants the means to work up their own versions during the workshop.

Workshopping the service prototypes

The workshop itself was half a day. Deliberately short for the participants who were a 2:1 mix of real users and business team representatives. The tight time also meant we could focus the thinking and activity; this was to be divergent and blue sky, but blue sky with feet firmly on the ground. After some scene-setting and informal validation of our findings so far using brainstorming and discussion we introduced the service prototypes. Telling them as a story the same way we’d done in the office. The energy of the participants was palpable as you could see they were naturally were inclined to particular prototypes they wanted to explore. To do this we asked them to capture on the prototypes themselves:

• What worked
• What didn’t work
• What would they change or add

This quickly helped us test the basic precepts of the design principles and validate or discard key design elements.

After this first round we gave the participants the pens, paper and scissors and tape and asked them to design the service themselves. As designers it was a delight to see. Having had their appetite whetted with the ‘review’ and the means made accessible with the basic service component representations the participants weren’t intimidated. They were inspired!

Using the components from the original prototypes they built on them, coming up with their own user whose journey they plotted – exploring who might be involved, what tools they’d use, even giving themselves boundaries of service because it was a government service. To bring their prototypes together we asked them to:

• Name their service – which helps drill down into what it is at essence
• Describe it’s key features or benefits in their own language
• Describe what they thought might be some of the challenges – especially fruitful for their take on government service boundaries.

At the end, the participants had not only given us feedback, but had also seen and felt like they had been an active part of designing a service they would one day use themselves (hopefully soon).

The value of service prototyping

Prototyping workshops can be exhausting, thrilling, difficult (add in any number of adjectives) and this project was tight (have we made this point enough ;). But that meant it was critical to not compromise on what can sometimes look to the client like ‘play’. The value of the service prototyping enabled us as the designers, with the business team, to rapidly, roughly, and cheaply; propose, make, explore, discard, enhance, learn, and extract solution options in a few hours better than any individual crafting could have achieved.

Because the team representing the business and technology sides of the service were in the room and working with the users they were part of the conversation and saw how users interacted and talked and felt about the potential service experience. This gave them a better perspective of what was to be built. Not just what policy initiative or CabSub (that’s a cabinet submission for those of you outside of the public sector) needed to be met.

At a practical level, the service prototyping gave us and the client clues and direction to the ultimate service design in a very short amount of time.

At a client and service capability level, the service prototyping activities gave the client an exposure to the type of design thinking and practice that will help them approach their work differently because now they are thinking about humans using their service, not as use cases interacting with a system. This is perhaps best captured by a comment from the IT Project Manager in our project closure meeting:

“I came into this being very sceptical about service design, now I get the value of it.” We’ll take that!

Our goal is simply to be part of a creative process, think differently for a bit and have fun. It’s usually spontaneous and as far as possible, original. Our latest effort was a little exercise we called #100shots.

How it worked (made up the day before)

• We split up for one hour
• Take 50 photos on the phone anywhere in Canberra
• Come back together in the office – print all photos and stick them all up on a wall randomly

• (Admire how great our job is that we can do this)
• Reflect on what we’ve taken and look for themes and patterns – visual or content or whatever

• Whittle the photos down into themes
• Done.

Remnants

People

Lines

What happened that was great?

• Great creative tension thanks to a blank canvas
• It felt like we were in a reality tv show (think Amazing Race NOT The Shire)
• Switched off for 2.5 hours with nothing to do but this exercise (no social media, no filters, just take and talk)
• The themes we developed when talking about the photos were meaningful even though our perspective when taking them was quite different
• We didn’t set out to create something – in fact we didn’t know what would actually happen.
• We did create something pretty cool.

What happened that was interesting?

• It’s hard to take 50 photos without imposing a narrative on yourself
• Reflecting on how personal it is to have to spontaneously ‘create’, reveal and share (a lesson we can take into our work where we so often call on participants to prototype or create on OUR terms)
• Getting beeped because one of us was in a rush to get to the next photo op
• Falling over in a storm water drain and ripping your pants in front of a child
• Getting yelled at by a garbo for taking snaps of dumpsters
• Being asked to help someone get their car out of tight spot (and in the process getting to drive a hotted up Skyline with Usher blaring!)
• Judging just how to take a close up of the person serving you at a café without them knowing (and being successful)

What’s next?

Who knows – we’ll let you know when we make it up.

Postscript

Since we did this we discovered this Ray Bradbury quote. We won’t be renaming the exercise #100itemsofozone though ; )

“Ideas come from the Earth. They come from every human experience that you’ve either witnessed or have heard about, translated into your brain in your own sense of dialogue, in your own language form. Ideas are born from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized. Ideas are probably in the air, like little tiny items of ozone.”

One of the key ‘outputs’ was to map the complex relationships supporting a key service of our client. The map is designed to be a way-finding, decision-making, impact-assessing representation of how stuff is supposed to work and the routes goals and outcomes travel.

Sometimes it’s interesting to look back and track the progress of a map and we thought we’d share what we’d done and why so here’s the journey of iterations of the map we’ve been working on.

First iteration, with the client design team to try and make some sense of the anecdotes:

Next iteration, taken from the insights, inputs and literature that is known:

Then, the iteration developed with the users and stakeholders:

Until you can pull all the pertinent elements together on whiteboard:

And then finally, pulling it all together:

And the client sees it in this form and says: “Yes, I love it” – hopefully (and in this case they did!).

The process affirmed our approach, which includes:

1. Keeping it messy.  Don’t get the diagram looking too good, too early – it means if it’s wrong, or there’s a better way to present it people have already imprinted a particular look and it’s very hard to shift them.
2. Support scribbling. We deliberately leave the work rough and scribbled on when we engage users and stakeholders. That way they feel they can scribble on it too. Just like a good prototype – it invites improvement.
3. Visualise don’t process map. It never ceases to amaze us how powerful putting something in a visual form is. Yes, yes “picture’s worth a thousand…” and all that, but when you go to a client site and they’ve had literally years worth of documents and powerpoints full of text and process maps but still don’t get their world and you have a conversation with them, using a pen, and clumsily sketching connections just watch them (some of them) take the pen and go for it!
4. Prototype the map, don’t craft it. Producing something that is knowingly wrong (what we like to call a ‘sacrificial prototype’ (nod to IDEO for that term)) can be just as powerful as getting it right.
5. Be realistic about feedback. Don’t be overawed by the apparent awesomeness of a great looking diagram – sometimes a positive response can just mean the viewer may not have actually taken it in, but it definitely looks like ‘something’ to them. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But like the juicy salif, if it looks great but doesn’t perform the function it says it does, well then it’s just a good looking piece of design. And design must lead to function because, in this case, function is implementation.

(See, the title isn’t just a play on the literary zeitgeist : )

PLATINUM GREY

As revelation often does, its inception began when we weren’t thinking about anything in particular except workshopping with clients to get to the heart of the problem we’re trying to solve. Drawing out from them in conversation, in diagrams, in hand movements, what they know they know, but also what they don’t know they know. We talked about what people firmly believe, the models that have such resonance, that even if they’re wrong they just won’t budge. We covered the practitioners comfortable dealing in ambiguity and those firmly ensconced in rules, process and XXBOKs. We talked about the influence of the theoreticians who prefer conceptual discussion and strategic musings, and the realists who favoured discipline, certainty and pragmatism. But these divides were only useful for drawing out difference.

In practice, we all knew we just couldn’t accept this black and white view. And then Justin drew up the following:

If he was better at writing sideways you’d see the middle connector word says ‘anecdote’. It’s anecdote, and myth, and conversation, and misinterpretation, and informality, and dialogue that connects (and separates) the abstract from the concrete; the divergent and the convergent. The black and the white. It represents the grey.

Whether it’s about services, about strategy, about (little-p) policy, about direction, it’s that middle bit (in whatever informal way) that helps you get into understanding the hearts and minds required for change to stick and, effectively for design and innovation to occur.

For us it means that without critical thinking, without the challenging questions that designers are so good at posing, these anecdotes can become powerful, and even true, if not for the balance they can also create. It was also a turning point in our workshop because we knew we now had a language for the design team to reflect in the messy middle, and be okay with the grey.

CADET GREY

Not long after this Justin was asked to MC and Moderate AIESEC’s Leadership and Convergence Conference at ANU. AIESEC is a fascinating university student association – placing students in work experience situations all over the world through reciprocal placements with sister clubs. The Leadership Conference was a way of generating some excitement within the membership group and the student body more widely. It was an “…attempt to make sense of the complexity in the modern world by exploring the connections between economic, social, scientific, environmental and moral dimensions of issues affecting Australia.”

The speakers were as diverse as you could imagine. Everything from Global Peace Index and foreign aid, mixed up with Neuro-linguistic Programming and surveys on CEO behaviour. The conference finished with a panel featuring six members with a potential for wide divergence. Amazingly, despite vastly different experiences and subject expertise the panel members dove into the grey; exploring the similarities, themes and patterns that were relevant not only to them but to their audience of aspiring leaders. What black and white there may have been on paper disappeared in genuine critical ‘thinking out loud’.

BATTLESHIP GREY

Now we’re pretty keen social media users – we love twitter. We watch and occasionally engage, but as avid tweeters we’ve viewed with interest some of the black and white ‘discussions’ on service design, and on the state of government (and indeed design in government) in Australia.

More and more we struggle with black and white being the dominant (expected) behaviour on Twitter. It manifests in people feeling comfortable making sweeping statements on behalf of a discipline; in ‘conversations’ that are little more than artificial debates designed to present a personal ‘brand’; and hasty judgements about anyone who dares question or explore the concepts being discussed rather than simply agreeing or disagreeing.

It’s certainly a big ask to make a case for or against important ideas in only 140 characters or even in a series of tweets. Crazy idea but perhaps twitter isn’t the place for case-making at all! That said, while important ideas are being thrown out there – especially about a practice and profession we care about – we feel ok about occasionally grey-ing up the black and white rhetoric.

DARK MEDIUM GREY

Speaking of important ideas, we were recently introduced to the notion of ‘design for services’ when we spoke on a DESIS panel, by Cameron Tonkinwise down in Melbourne.

The diagram we used when we were talking with Yoko. Our scribbles, our take, Mel’s hand.

The concept came up again later in a conversation with Yoko Akama from RMIT and DESIS.

While we’re still mulling what our view is on the concept (immersed in the grey) of ‘design for services’ v ‘service design’. Our anecdotal response is that both approaches may in fact have the same risk. The theory of design for services that we’ve dipped into takes the refreshing view that design can be for a noble outcome of ‘enabling’ the service, not ‘engineering’ it. The service design theory we know well dictates that process and discipline are important and a vital differentiator between service design and simply ‘design thinking’.

In design for services, from what we understand, there runs a real risk that the designer is seen as an experimenter – a dabbler who possesses some gift for insight that isn’t necessarily connected to rigor or may in fact be disconnected from the people who are utilising the outcome for the design, or that the services that are designed require a level of capability that just doesn’t exist yet. In the social outcome business all of the above would very quickly see practitioners not invited back.

We’re still mulling in a state of grey, and our thoughts are definitely not trying to fan some faux ‘practitioner v academic’ debate. We do not favor one view over the other but continue to critically think about both. It occurs to us that those who may evolve both of these fields – who choose to talk not do, who pose and don’t get their hands dirty, and those who will always think their black or white should be everyone’s run the biggest risk of us seeing more articles entitled “X Design is Dead – Long Live Y Design!”.

Indeed, in the evolution of the service design discourse we are seeing a drive towards commoditisation and methodology. The risk we see is that the process becomes the obsession – that designers try and package themselves as the guardians of some ‘magic’ methodology that has everyone’s answers – and that more effort is put into trademarking terms like ‘Intent’ than being true to it.

COOL GREY

Finally, a quick reflection on the DESIS panel itself. If ever there was a positive, shining example of the niftiness of grey this was it. We were chuffed to be asked to mix it with a range of academics – Yoko Akama, Cameron Tonkinwise (Parsons New School for Design and Carnegie Mellon University), practitioners (us) and social innovators - Kate Archdeacon (VEIL) and David Hood (Doing Something Good) and the content and vibe was more than worth the trip to Melbourne. We hope to keep up contact with the panel members and audience and making many similar trips into the future.

So it’s been a big couple of months. In amongst all of this navel gazing we’ve continued on our ‘sticky step’ way with some great clients. We’ve been lucky enough to create some seriously good service design outcomes that had the added bonus of starting to change the culture at one client in a way that we are particularly proud of. And we get some pretty fantastic opportunities with some pretty fantastic people. Our job is to ensure that in these interactions we stay ‘nifty’ and keep the ole grey matter in working order.