Service Design + Design Futures — the New way forward
The Process of imagining the future in itself sounds very exhilarating, Yes I felt the same, when I was told that we have a unit called Design Futures. What is the first thing that comes to your mind, when you hear Design Futures? When I asked my classmates and myself this question, it was interesting to see how we had words come across like; innovation, change, fiction, technology, abstract, vision, forecast, speculative & fear of the unknown. That got me to this:
“Change is the only constant thing”
How easy it is to put into practice especially as a designer.
The Problem?
One of the issues currently is when UK declared a climate emergence in May 2019.
What is climate emergency?
A climate emergency is an issue of global warming alarm declared by the governments and scientist. Evidence shows that human activity and our use of fuels like petrol, diesel, gas, and coal is highly likely to be the main cause of global warming. — BBC news- 3rd May 2019
MPs are calling on the government to make changes that include setting a new target of reaching net zero emissions before 2050. Local councils around the UK have also said there is a climate emergency and want to be carbon-neutral by 2030. We the MA service design students got an opportunity to collaborate with Southwark council on a project discussing and bringing about a change in ways on how the borough will achieve a sustainable zero carbon emissions by 2030.
I will be talking about 2 focus areas ;
1. Designing for the future and collaborating with southwark council to achieve a net zero carbon emission free borough by 2030.
2. Focusing on the gravity from the grass root problem of the current situation to make a change/ difference to the future. Understanding why are people ignoring the emergency? why are people’s behavior’s not changing?
Why are we doing this?
Why is the importance of design futures given a lot of weightage?
Design futures gives you the vision to forecast and strategically be prepared for the future. It also guides you through its back casting planning method defining a desirable future and then works backwards to identify policies and programs that will connect that specified future to the present. The methodologies used for my project are:
1. Research through design
2. Speculative design
Reflecting back, when I joined the service design course and the methodology learnt, we worked on bringing about a change in the present situation. However design futures focusses on a change in the future world with research through design methodology and speculative design. The question I had — Why can’t it be integrated? Why can’t they work hand-in-hand?
Speculative design starts with ‘what if’ and relies on a designers imagination to create a preferable future,Speculative design tries to imagine what it would be like to design without the current limitations of technology, culture, and politics in mind. Speculative design methodology uses a ‘research through design’ practice..
“[Speculative design book] thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely. Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality.”
In the article ahead you will see how Research through Design, Speculative Design and Service Design have helped me evolve as a designer by integrating them to form new way of working.
A shift of thinking and viewing things from a different lens which can open up a lot of possibilities for the future. My learnings and reflections have helped me gain some insights, that will remain with me forever and would love you to learn-absorb-reflect along with me.
Let’s dive into the future together.
1.The Scanning lens:
Sustainable future is the way forward. As we focus on transport, it is highly essential to look at alternative ways. As travel is the most important means to everyone in the world, sustainable travel can help improve the lives of children and young people in Southwark.We needed to make the borough a better place.
As my team came from different backgrounds and work experience, we quickly put together experiences of how things worked back at our own respective countries. Focusing on futuristic design took us back to our childhood cartoon show called “The Jetsons”.
This show was ahead of it’s time. The futuristic family cartoon The Jetsons premiered in 1962. It was set 100 years in the future in the year 2062. We’re over half way there now, but surprisingly, many of the technologies they predicted in the cartoon are already a reality, while others are maturing quickly.
Getting back to the brief. The first thing that comes to our minds when we think of future of transport is flying vehicles, isn’t it? As crazy as it sounds it is true as 80% of the people I spoke to had similar responses. The first step before we deep dived we researched on the plan and vision of southwark council and kept ourselves updated by following up on the daily news and shared it with each other. We focused on what is trending, new innovation and the current landscape across different countries around the world like China, US, India, Europe, Middle, etc. The one thing that amazed me while we were sharing our research was:
Elon Musk Quote — “If you can dare to dream it, you can definitely make it happen”
I questioned myself; How do I make my dream a reality ? How? This quote inspired and motivated us. At that point in time, we were introduced to the concept of Horizon Scanning. To be honest I hadn’t heard of it before. I was a little perplexed and thought to myself isn’t this the kind of research that we do in most of our projects? Partially yes, but, what was quite interesting is that Horizon scanning is a technique which is used to explore potential future developments and better anticipate risks.
Using the horizon scanning map we deep dived into each area both locally and internationally. We acknowledged the landscape of different countries and mapped out on the basis of economic, political, environmental, social, and behavioural aspects. This helped us connect the dots and understand the driving factors while looking at a picture holistically. It was as a good starting point to identify early signs of risk and opportunities.
Key takeaway:
1.Horizon Scanning technique — Helped me not only understand cultures and behaviours from one angle but to zoom out and see the wider picture.
2. The impact of change is often highly unpredictable, and the design of effective horizon scanning interventions is grounded in principles and foundations that assert the importance of mapping the landscape, monitoring change, using future techniques and validating findings.
3. Present and future conditions are changing quickly due to interconnected activities and events, and decision-making has become more complex as a result. Horizon scanning is a good technique if you are looking at complex, challenging assumptions and reviewing multiple ways that events could unfurl, in order to try to increase resilience and predictability
4. It helped to recognise potential opportunities, which otherwise would have been difficult.
5. This also helped me identify gaps in the knowledge shared with my team and suggest areas of new research required to understand driving forces better.
2. The Process — as the driver
The planet is being destroyed by humans and much of the world is in denial about it. Indeed there is misinformation leading us to believe that we can continue to live our lives as interrupted and that illusion is harmful as it prevents as from taking action. ( Donna. Walden -Ted X)
As service designers we need to understand the present and future to design something meaningful for the user, even if it be a small change. There is a lot to understand in the behaviours and the drivers to people’s action. There is no right or wrong way of approaching a problem. It depends what is best for the project.
Interestingly, we were introduced to “Speculative Design “ and “Research through Design”.
As designers we are told to understand the problem and the solution will automatically follow, but, is this process set in stone? We were introduced to looking at the problem from a different lens called Speculative Design with the practice of Research through Design.
How do you use it in real life problems? When I started working with my team on design futures, it was exciting as well thought provoking. What does the future actually look like? Have we ever taken time to think on that? We always end up following a set pattern to solve a problem, but since we got introduced to this term, I was confused should I think of an idea that is realistic or futuristic.
I was then inspired by the Nesta report on Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow :
Reading it kept me motivated to dream about future possibilities:
3 ways which show that thinking about the future in a structured way is not just useful, but essential:
1. New forms of data–driven forecasting tell us valuable things about the near future. There is scope for experimenting with these techniques to find out what works.
2. Thinking about plausible future scenarios can help guard against fragility. Governments and businesses need foresight capabilities in order to address systemic challenges.
3. Innovation begins with a story about the future. Imagining and sharing desires and fears about the futures is a way for all of us to shape it.
We incorporated these 3 ways to help our project see better light. We looked at mapping all different ideas on the speculative design cone. We realized that the sweet spot lies when your idea can fall under the plausibility zone.
Why did we do this?
To understand and plan for our communal future, we pushed ourselves to imagine the possible. To think outside of our daily lives, and envision the world as it could be, should be, might be, what we hope it will be and what we hope it won’t be.
To understand it from the user perspective we thought why not analyse our journey and the way we travel. What factors influence our decision. We considered different factors based on situations and applied the Speculative design “what if” questions about the future.
Ted talk “Re-imagine the future” by Angela Oguntala inspired me when she talks about how visions can inspire us and be a limitation to our imagination. She says that:
“Imagination is the spark that can lead to change”
It is not about the things we see, it is also about seeing possibilities we haven’t seen before, being curious about the alternatives as nothing is written in stone. Take a chance and be surprised. She mentions on strongly asking people “What if” from a new perspective.
In the picture above, we followed the exercise, didn’t cloud our minds with any barriers and came up with a number of ‘what if’ questions
What if we could actually make all of this happen so we kept building on these what if’s. We thought of making our what if’s a reality.
Speculating through design by presenting abstract issues as fictional products enables us to explore ethical and social issues within the context of everyday life ( Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby- page 62 Speculative everything)
Key Takeaways:
1. A great way to get people to think differently about the future, making them less defensive about current practices and lowering resistance to the process of identifying completely new ideas.
2. It acts as a good way to start conversations and trigger ideas not thought of.
3. It is positive and idealistic because we believe that change is possible, that things can be better; it is just that the way of getting there is different.
When we were told to exhibit something in our first 2 weeks I panicked. How do I share something so early into the project? This led me to understand the Show don’t tell concept deeper, which our professors told us day 1. Today I would definitely vouch and convince people to work through a show don’t tell way of working.
Show don’t tell
We looked at experimenting and using incentives rather than penalties to aid in increase active transport and reduce their carbon footprint.
We made prototypes and wanted it to be perfect, until we were told that if you get everything perfect in the start, there is definitely something wrong. We began our first phase by sketching our thoughts down. Prototypes and other types of expressions like sketches, diagrams and scenarios, are the core means by which the designer builds the connection between fields of knowledge and progresses toward a product. ( Design Research through practice, pg 69)
Sketching is not my forte, but this exercise really helped me think visually. I got out of my fear of not being able to draw too well because nothing has to be perfect before showing it. It built up my creative confidence.
We realised the most powerful way to express our ideas was to sketch it first. It helped us think on how would it actually work if put into practice. We built sample sketches for the future scenarios and discussed each others idea. This helped us identify and narrow down our thought process to How might we encourage people in the neighbourhood to feel empowered to walk.
Design through Actions
As designers, we have different responsibilities than engineers and policy planners. Through identifying patterns of action, the designer could guide users forward naturally without a need to stop and think. (Koskinen, I., 2012.)
Following week when we had an in-person class, we were told to do something different, fun and quick. We were introduced to a concept called Ban- Amplify- Create and we were given one hour to think of different ideas. We were the most creative under a time limit. We prototyped 4 different objects and a video. It was more about the quantity than the quality is what I realised at that stage. We presented our idea to the class and it was a fail idea as nobody would use our product in a practical world, since it was not feasible. We were told you have to fail in order to succeed and keep building multiple prototypes always, test it and re-iterate it.
We were a little dejected but pulled up our socks as we were told never be married to your ideas. Through brainstorming we came up with a zillion ideas. It was now time to consolidate things and narrow down on a selected few ideas, but, how do we do it? We had to respect everyone’s ideas and it was difficult to discard it. The unconscious mind always lures you to the one that you have written.
Why did we do this?
The Ban, Amplify and Create methodology helped us segregate our ideas. It assist you to create a prototype with a rational behind it. This made things easier for the benefit of the project. Design is about change and making the world a better place. Our area of focus was Transport and Travel which was everyone’s daily use, we had to really get our heads on it.
The above is a collage of all our prototypes together. It is an experience when you go and test it with actual local people and get true feedback. We got our hands dirty, we used all the stationary and cardboard boxes. We got to know each other better, our bonding grew stronger each passing week and we trusted each other and the process.
Key Takeaways:
1) Failure is an essential part of success, it gives us an opportunity to learn.
2) Show, don’t tell has become an integral part of my learning
3) The improved collaboration of the team and the opportunity to fix problems at an early stage creates a greater chance of success for future design and should be seen as an investment for companies
Service Design meets future design
As a service designer we typically end up looking at the current situation holistically and deep dive into areas where there is a need by talking to the users and stakeholders to bring about an impact and change in the now. Whereas design futures looks at a strategic foresight and a unthought of solutions that could be possible in the future. While we were introduced to Design Futures- yes I did feel a disconnect in the beginning as it was a different approach, never taken before. It made me realize that as a designer do we actually look far ahead in time in our daily work? Are we looking into various possible future? Or do we just pick the nearest future scenario and turn them into an experience as we see it.
I understood the importance of bridging the gap of service design and design future. They are not 2 separate work ways but need to make them work together.
Businesses are looking for more practical ways to understand what future means to them and how they can turn opportunities into tangible outcomes. We worked with the same principles to achieve our project deliverables.
We mapped out a working concept map answering all the aspects that business would like to know. We put on our business and service designer hats to make sure we are able to bring across value into the system which they could start implementing immediately to see a difference, few years down the line.
Key Takeaways:
1) The 2 major questions a) how do we do it? b) why do we do it? Gave us a lot of answers.
2) How policies are made considering the future where as service is in the NOW.
3) It helped us create conversations through provocations.
Let’s conclude:
Looking back at the design process and what could we have done better.
I think I have to say that when introduced to the concept initial I really didn’t know what was I supposed to do, but now I can say it with confidence that I have learnt the importance of Research through Design and how it has helped me evolve as a designer.
It helped me understand that you should just prototype or sketch your thoughts and show it to people without apprehension, you have to fail in order to succeed.
We could have spent some more time testing our outcome with local businesses to see and co-design with them to take it forward.
Finally as a service designer it has made me realise that there are a number of different methodologies for a service designer but it is essential to look at the system holistically at the present as well build future vision to bring about a change.
Climate change is speeding up quickly and if we as individuals can make our contribution in whatever way possible, I think I will feel accomplished as every drop makes an ocean.
References:
1) What is Climate Emergency? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-47570654
2) Elon Musk spoke about the future and quoted “If you can dare to dream it, you can definitely make it happen”
3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFCzLOts85Y — How to change behavior to ensure a sustainable future — Donna Walden]
4) Ted talk Re-imagine the future by Angela Oguntala — https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_oguntala_re_imagine_the_future
5) As designers, we have different responsibilities than engineers and policy planners. Through identifying patterns of action, the designer could guide users forward naturally without a need to stop and think. (Koskinen, I., 2012.)
6) Prototypes and other types of expressions such as sketches, diagrams and scenarios, are the core means by which the designer builds the connection between fields of knowledge and progresses toward a product. ( Design Research through practice, pg 69)
