A while back, I interviewed Vincenzo Di Maria a service designer working across Europe and his company is Common Ground. His work focuses on socially responsive design and innovation ranging from products to services and experiences. His approach to design is holistic, playful and people-centered.
Related Podcast and Transcription: A Teacher of Service Design
Joe: Do you make people take other roles than what they are? You don’t leave the marketing person play the marketing role of service design; you move him out of there and make him do something a bit different, don’t you?
Vincenzo: Yes, definitely. That’s part of the challenge. Actually, it’s the most fun bit to watch because we’ve seen very square-minded people to deal with brainstorming and prototyping capacity, and we told them to look, use post-it-notes and this sort of visual canvas to prototype a business model, and they get frozen for the first few minutes.
That’s where, I think, some of the other events within the service design fields, I was mentioning before, global service jam, which is a place where you go for a weekend in a very intense dynamic. You may wear a funny hat and trying to prototype a customer experience within a retail environment by using a rubber chicken. That’s really, take off a bit of the rational, left-brained sort of attitude and get people to be creative and to start experimenting, creating, prototyping, and not being too afraid of that.
On the other hand, though, what I’ve been noticing is that it’s much easier to get the business and the creative guys, the banker, let’s say, into a sort of creative, fun mindset, and it gets them to come out with ideas because it’s quite liberating for them. It’s difficult doing the opposite, which is getting the creative people; the sort of…well, Edward Bono thinking about six theories. We’ll call that the people who are always in brainstorming mode or the very positive, constructive people, to start thinking business, to start thinking strategy.
That is much harder. So getting a designer or illustrator to start thinking look, you want to design services. It’s not just about drawing the storyboard. You also need to make a business argument for it. That’s why I say that there are three basic ingredients, in my opinion, to be a service designer. It’s the capacity of having creativity; I think, is the design base needs to be there. If something is not creative, innovative, or there is an aspect that is actually genius, you know. It’s something that you’ve been testing a lot.
If you haven’t got the creativity base, it’s very difficult to design anything. Then there is the strategy base, on the other hand, which is the capacity to make sense or making blueprints or communicating things that are intangible, being able to sell intangible outputs is very difficult. You’re trying to sell air. You’re selling experience. You need to visualize services. You need to make it tangible, to some extent.
Then there is the bit in between, which I call empathy, or is the capacity of understanding people, and as we are all user experiences ourselves, and potentially service users, so it’s good to understand the people motivation, because all service experiences are around users. When I service that is started being designed on the computer or in the digital environment before being taken to people, I think it’s going to fail very soon.
That is my approach. I think a common ground would look a lot like the people-centered design approach more than in other fields.
Related Podcast and Transcription: A Teacher of Service Design
Lean Service Design Trilogy: Bring this Workshop on-site!