MBA Design leadership elective 2010 - Exploratory prototyping

In this fifth iteration of my MBA elective in Design Leadership at Saïd Business School (SBS), this year I again set up a project giving students an opportunity to experience aspects of the design process first-hand. This project was initiated with Alison Prendiville, course director of the MDes Innovation and Creativity at London College of Communication (LCC), University of the Arts and involved the 48 MBA students taking my class to work over a day and a half with 10 students from LCC with the aim of exploring prototyping and its role as a visual aid with the aim to interpreting and developing ideas.

This post covers in detail what the two groups of students were asked to do, and includes video highlights showing what the students developed together during two workshops in Oxford in April 2010 and discussion of what they learned about prototyping and design-led innovation. It will be of interest to other educators bringing design approaches to management education, to those setting up other kinds of collaboration based around design practices, and to future Oxford MBA students thinking of taking the class next year.

Exploratory prototyping

One of the things designers emphasize in their working practices is creating visualisations of their ideas, even at very early stages. Whether called a sketch or a prototype or a model, these artefacts play important roles in multi-disciplinary and cross-functional collaborations. Depending on the stage a project is at and who is involved, the terminology used and purpose of a visualization may vary. The aim of this workshop was for the MBAs to develop an understanding of the value - and implications - of different kinds of visualization. For the MDes students, the aim was to go beyond thinking of their device as a product and pay more attention to the service system and business model around it.

This first video shows LCC tutor Cordula Friedlander and I introducing the workshop.

MBA-designer collaboration: Introduction (1 of 4) from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

Workshop 1

Project brief: Post-operative remote monitoring sensory device base station/charger

The starting point was a project that the MDes students had already been working on for some weeks, exploring possible designs for a remote monitoring sensory device for post-operative patients.

Context: As the population is getting progressively older, the need for higher quality and better efficiency in healthcare, both at home and in hospital, is becoming more evident. Healthcare providers are coming under increasing pressure to improve the quality of preventative and post-operative care delivered to patients. It is in the interests both of care providers as well as patients, for the patient to leave hospital to continue recovery at home at the earliest opportunity. However, carer and patient need to be reassured of seamless communication and reliable emergency procedures. The latest sensor technologies and wireless communication could enable the care provider to monitor the remote post-operative patient’s recovery process. Logging and analysing this information will give the patient reassurance, or provide early warning feedback to carers.

Where they got to: Working with medical technology researchers from Cranfield University, LCC students developed and tested suitable shapes and ways of engaging with the device based on the researchers’ idea of having the device in the patient’s ear for the duration of 2 minutes. The purpose was to use prototyping methods to develop a sensory device that allows easy and reassuring usage by the post-operative patient at home and to provide a starting point to develop and explore the service system that would support it. Students were expected to test their prototypes amongst themselves but also with other user groups such as elderly people or children. The prototypes were developed by the LCC students, as a first step to engage and demonstrate, to the medical engineers at Cranfield, explorative ideas on how elderly people may use the technology and how feedback from this group needs to be considered early on in the device’s development.

The result of this work was presented as a starting point for the collaboration with the MBA students, which shifted from a focus on the device and interactions with it, to the larger service system and business model.

The second video shows two of the MDes students from LCC, Anna Kassen and Nicola Sherry, presenting to the MBAs what they do in their programme, the user-centred explorations they had done to date, and the prototypes they had come up with.

MBA-designer collaboration: Briefing (2 of 4) from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

The third video shows the groups of MBAs+MDes students presenting their concepts for the device base station. They came up with these based on working together for only a few hours, in ten teams, in which two or three MBAs worked with one MDes student and their existing prototype for the device. Using simple materials such as salvaged card, plastic and paper, the students were briefed to come up with a 3d prototype of the charging/base station for the sensor device.

Brief: The base station for storing and charging the sensory device needs to be compact, discreet and user-friendly. The unit communicates, reassures and alerts the patient and also transmits pulse and temperature readings to the receiving hospital /doctor. The unit will accompany the patient during his or her recovery period at home. Where in the home is the best place for its location? The patient’s reassurance and ease of use will play a vital part in the success of the device.

The patient will need to know:
- is the unit sufficiently charged?
- is the sensory device positioned correctly when in use/ when charging
- start, finish and 2 minute indication?
- what time of day to take the readings, and how the patient is alerted.
- are the readings normal/reassuring or is some action required?
- what to do in case of readings that are not in the normal range.

Other practical issues to consider are
- product packaging (eg consider re-use)
- hygiene
- cable storage
- user manual, instructions.

The task is not only to prototype a unit that could fulfil all the practical functions listed above but more so to explore the opportunities for a new product identity (eg name, colour, materials etc).

Together, the ten short presentations in response to this brief illustrate the different ways prototyping helps with the process of exploring the design space at an early stage of technology innovation. For some teams, the exploration of the base station raised important questions about the nature of the service it will be part of. For other teams, prototyping the base station/charging unit forced them to make assumptions about how people feel when they have just had an operation and how they might engage with the device. For some teams, it helped to focus on a very specific user (eg a parent of a child who has had an operation).

MBA-designer collaboration: Presentations (3 of 4) from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

This final video captures the discussion we had at the end of the workshop, with reflective contributions both from MBA students (shaped by their diverse backgrounds in marketing, engineering and other fields) and the MDes students (not all of whom are designers by training). The discussion ranges from the detail of some of the ideas the teams came up with, as well as the value of early prototyping in a complex project such as this. It illustrates how even a with limited timescale (here, one day) bringing together people who had not worked together before, using visual methods to explore the possibilities for a new device, raises valuable questions about the device and the wider service system it is part of.

MBA-designer collaboration: Discussion (4 of 4) from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

Two weeks after this first workshop, we had second session at SBS.

Workshop 2

The aim of this workshop was for students to develop a deeper understanding of the device/system by creating personas, using role play, and by creating visualisations of the service journey and business model.

Part 1: Creating personas for the post-operative remote monitoring sensory device


Once team members had familiarised themselves with the 10 prototypes of the device and base station, we asked them to develop an assigned persona, someone from the possible future service ecology around the sensor. We gave them a template to help flesh out some fictional details to make that person come alive in the context of the device/service, for example picking a photograph so you know what they look like, think about where they spend their time and what other technologies and devices they use and are familiar with.

The actors we picked were: a patient, a family member, a surgeon/specialist, a general practitioner/family doctor, a nurse, a receptionist, a friend or online contact, support worker for the device/service, a health visitor and a pet. We asked teams to pick a country they were familiar with to explore how the device/system might work in quite different kinds of healthcare system and culture.

Once the teams had created their persona, we then asked students from each team to test their personas using role play to reveal some of their assumptions by acting out what might happen when a team's persona interacted with other actors in the device/system around questions like these:
- The readings on the device seem high. What next?
- The readings are ok according to the device but the patient does not feel well.
- The patient is not able to use the device.
- The patient does not know if the device is working.

This exercise asked students to combine knowledge from their various specialisms, with their imaginations, and make a number of assumptions about the future device/service system. Working in this way helped make more tangible aspects of the device and its service system and ecology, raising important questions about the business model and possible benefits.

Part 2: Service and business modelling

The final part of the 1.5 day collaboration involved the students again working in mixed teams of MBAs and MDes students, developing visualizations of service and business models for the device/system based on work done in the previous workshops including the physical prototypes and personas.

This led to a discussion about the nature of this specific project which is technology-led, where the focus has been on developing a suitable technology, with some work on researching end user experiences by the MDes students which informed their prototyping but without any knowledge about what business models, if any, have informed the proposed device as it is currently conceived of.

Service modelling
We gave teams a template of the service blueprint (or service journey) (developed from Shostack 1982; Bitner et al 2008; Kimbell 2010). This template helped make explicit the activities involved in instantiating a service, who is doing them and what kinds of resources are involved, from databases to packaging to support staff, arranged over time, in different locations, and where value was being co-created.

Business modelling
Having imagined in some detail actors in the service ecology by creating a blueprint showing how they interconnect, the next task was to use this enriched understanding of the service to sketch potential business models. We used Osterwalder’s (2009) business model canvass leaving it up to the teams to decide what kinds of organizations should be actors in the business model.

Discussion

After one and a half days of working together, the MBA students and MDes students came up with a number of valuable ideas that could help shape the design of the post-operative sensor - and perhaps more importantly - its service and business models. Their brief, but intense explorations of the nature of the sensor and what it might mean to imagined patients and other key actors, using 3d prototyping, personas, role play, service journeys and business model visualizations, brought home to them the complexity of design and innovation.

What started off as being conceived of as a question of how to fit a small device in or near a patient's ear comfortably became a question of where the value was being created, for whom, and how. The approach we took of seeing the sensor primarly as a service shifted the students' attention away from questions of physical form, functionality, meaning or usability, to the form, functionality, meaning and usability of the service system. Exploratory prototyping can help bring these questions quickly and vividly to the attention of managers, designers and engineers before committing to design decisions that are inappropriate and wasteful of resources.


Further reading


Buxton, Bill (2008) Sketching User Experiences
Osterwalder, Alex and Pigneur, Yves (2009) Business Model Generation
Verganti, Roberto (2009) Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating what Things Mean


Credits

Organized by Lucy Kimbell (SBS) and Alison Prendiville (LCC)
Faciliators: Lucy Kimbell (SBS), Alison Prendiville and Cordula Friedlander (LCC), Moura Quayle (Sauder School of Business, UBC)
Filming/editing: Dariusz Dziala

Glen Cove Conference on Strategic Design and Public Policy

Glen Cove, NY, June 9-11, 2010
Download conference report here

View conference presentations here

Ever keen to expand the boundaries of their practices, design professionals have been moving in the direction of public policy for some years. Moving beyond (but drawing on) concerns with products and brands, and interactions and experiences, some designers have found themselves over the past decade working on the design of systems and services including several in the public sector, situating their role as designers of social action rather than designers of things. Meanwhile some policymakers have created opportunities for designers to apply their approaches to social and economic problems.

In Australia, consultancy Second Road has worked for a decade with the Australian tax office on the design of the tax system, rather than just the tax forms. In 2004, the UK Design Council set up a research unit called RED, to tackle social and economic issues through design-led innovation. Its director, Hilary Cottam, and her colleagues later set up a new consultancy, Participle, which currently works with organizations such as Southwark Council in London. In 2005 UK design consultancy ThinkPublic worked with the National Health Service Institute for Innovation and Improvement to help improve the design of a cancer service, written up in an excellent book (2007) by Paul Bate and Glenn Robert. In 2007 the Danish government re-organized innovation unit Mindlab as a cross-ministerial organization to use design approaches to involve citizens and policymakers in innovation. That same year the Design Council and a regional development agency in the North East of England launched Design of the Times (DOTT), a one-year project bringing design-based approaches to projects that aim to increase sustainability in the region (now running in its second iteration in Cornwall). Last year design consultancy IDEO created a Human-Centred Toolkit for NGOs supported by the Gates Foundation. Researchers from Intel’s People and Practices Research Group recently published a social viability measurement tool for technology projects. End-of-year shows in design school present project after project in which studio-based learning practices are applied to deep-rooted social, political and economic issues.

Designers’ ambitions, and desires to contribute to making significant change in the world, are evident. In such projects, their work often includes research about and sometimes with the communities or stakeholders within which new social action is desired. Research methods range from ethnographically-inspired techniques that try to identify and interpret what matters to communities to participatory methods involving them directly in co-design rather than designing for them. But what designers, or multi-disciplinary teams using “design” approaches, can also bring to such projects is a set of assumptions about knowledge, that can have important consequences for how they, and the communities they claim to serve, understand the work they are doing and what happens within it. Social scientists (who have a lot to say about these assumptions and the nature of research) have come together with designers to discuss such matters for several years at conferences such as the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conferences (EPIC), the Participatory Design Conferences, and the anthrodesign discussion list as well as many other fora. But it is rare to bring these two professions/disciplines together with policymakers, who have different kinds of investments in the design of social action.

The Glen Cove Conference on Strategic Design and Public Policy held in Glen Cove, NY, on 9-11 June, was an event which did so. Initiated by Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnick of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), and co-organized by myself (based at Said Business School) and Gerry Philipsen (Center for Local Strategies Research, University of Washington), this event was conceived of as a small workshop which would bring together – for the first time, as far as we were aware - three groups: policymakers concerned with security in intrastate contexts and post-conflict situations, whose work is typically structured by intergovernmental and national policy goals; social science researchers, in particular ethnographers of communication who pay special attention to the construction of local knowledge, for example, how “security” is understood in communities in which the UN has a mandate to do increase it and having decided to help disarm ex-combatants; and designers and managers involved in designing services shaped by policy concerns about politics, exclusion and access. The workshop was a direct result of Miller and Rudnick’s work since 2005 and increasing concern with how generating local knowledge could shape local action in the UN context. By developing the Security Needs Assessment Protocol (SNAP), Miller and Rudnick have been exploring design as a way to link local knowledge and local action (see the SNAP section of the UNIDIR website which includes the conclusions from an earlier workshop on design and public policy they organized in the Hague in 2009).

The aim of the Glen Cove workshop was to see whether the developments outlined briefly above, in which designers skilled in going through a process of creative enquiry in new contexts, combined with rigorous cultural research, attentive to the necessity and difficulties of generating local knowledge, might be relevant to contexts of international security. A second aim was for participants from these three different professional contexts to reflect on what such an agenda might mean for their disciplines and professions (although not ignoring important differences among them). My introduction above illustrates my own interests in how design professions are changing and what kinds of knowledge and assumptions designers have, or might need to question, in order to design social action and in whose service they are operating.

Since we will be publishing a report about the workshop and its conclusions, I will not go into detail here such as listing all the participants’ names (but see below for a list or organizations) nor what we did and what we concluded. Instead I mention some of the sessions I found most illuminating.

Day 1:
The first sessions set the scene through discussion of current challenges in policy, humanitarian and development activities and the growing awareness for the need for local knowledge for effective local action in an effort not to have strategic goals undermined by poor programme design. These included presentations about the importance of local knowledge from Randolph Kent (Humanitarian Futures Project, King’s College, London, and former UN member of staff in Rwanda and Kosovo); the irrelevance and inadequacy of many guidelines for operational staff by Tore Rose (SecDev, and former UN Resident Coordinator in several countries); and Roz Lasker (Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia) on bottom-up community engagement in public health and tracking who has influence in decision-making.

Day 2:
The second day introduced the two other main threads – design and cultural research. There were presentations from Dick Buchanan (Weatherhead School of Management) presenting design as based on rhetoric and dialectic as useful for professionals of different kinds to practice well; and from my colleague Steve New (Said Business School) about process thinking within the field of operations management in which action on the ground is understood as being complicated and interventions often make things worse. I presented a highly partial overview of key intellectual developments in fields in which participants are concerned with designing services and combining anthropological and design research which helped illuminate the timeliness of this event and its relevance to policy.

The afternoon saw presentations about cultural research from Gerry Philipsen (Center for Local Strategies Research, University of Washington) about the ethnography of communication which among other things studies the deep cultural knowledge about ways of communicating as strategic action that can be found in particular communities; and from Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnick (UNIDIR) describing their efforts within the UN context to generate stories that are of places rather than about them for the benefit of designing more effective, sustainable, and legitimate community security projects and bridging some of the gaps between cultural research, programme design and public policy.

Day 3:
In the morning, five mixed teams (with at least one design-based professional, one cultural researcher and one policy professional) worked together to try to design a process that would generate local knowledge to shape local action in the form of a programme in the UN context. The matter of concern for this exercise was reintegration of ex-combatants in west Africa. As one designer put it: “Designers are quite happy to work on anything.” But this exercise asked teams – few of whom had much knowledge about the particular topic or indeed other team members’ specialist domains – to think about how their different perspectives, knowledge and assumptions might be combined or questioned so that more effective programmes might be designed. For design, this lead to questions such as: Can one really "co-create" with war criminals? Can one really use "empathy" as a formal approach in a post-conflict context with global as well as personal ramifications?

The final plenary session lead to heated discussion – which was for me an indicator of the success of the workshop. I take the view that multidisciplinary workshops or teams, if they work well, will lead to some moments of productive synthesis but also raise equally productive challenges to individuals’ worldviews and disciplinary assumptions. This led to a lively set of activities to identify common agenda items across the disciplinary traditions, driven by policy concerns which several of us are now trying to synthesize. I am confident that new collaborations in action, research and teaching will come from the event.

The organizers and participants are now in dialogue about how to capture and report the workshop, in the short term, and how in the medium term we can find ways to take forward the idea that (1) cultural research has something important to offer the creation of local knowledge in international policy contexts, and that (2) design practices have something to contribute to interpreting and enacting that knowledge in the design of social actions. Hoping to learn from similar discussions in other areas of policy and public service, and contribute to discussions within my own profession, I look forward to helping take this work forward.

Participants came from these organizations:
Bell & Payne Consulting
Carnegie Corporation
Center for Knowledge Societies
Engine Group
George Washington University
King’s College, University of London
Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
Mindlab
New School for Social Research
Permanent Mission of Sweden to the United Nations
SecDev
ThinkPublic
United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research
UN Department for Peacekeeping Operations
University of Ghana
University of Haifa
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
University of Oxford
Weatherhead School of Management


Links
UNIDIR/SNAP
Aditya Sood’s summary of the workshop on his blog
Write up by Ivo Gormley, Think Public, published in Design Week
Anthodesign discussion listserv
DOTT Cornwall
EPIC 2010
IXDA Interaction Design Conference 2011
Participatory Design Conference 2010
ServDes 2010

Embedding service design

Last week's seminar on Embedding Design at the Royal Society of Arts, London, offered a snapshot of current issues in service design and management and raised some questions about what kinds of thing need to be known to bring this approach into large organizations. Organized by Emily Campbell, director of design at the RSA, and the National Policing Improvement Agency as part of their own enquiry into the strategic use of design, the workshop brought together designers, policymakers, anthropologists and managers from organisations seeking improvement and innovation.

Speakers were:

- Lynne Maher, NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, who set up the project in which designers ThinkPublic brought an (experience-based) design-led approach to the design of cancer services in the NHS, written up in Bate and Robert's excellent book "Bringing user experience to healthcare improvement" (2007). Lynne described how this work has moved forward through the creation of the "Productive Ward" presented to managers as more efficient, and to nurses as giving them more time to spend with patients, and how she and her team have to translate the language of designers to the languages of the different constituencies they work with.

- Tony Coultas of Skills Development Scotland, a national agency that is now putting customer experience at the centre of their service designing activities, including an in-house team of designers. Tony described how he saw design as an important link between policy and delivery, building a space to create better services and be a catalyst for change by focussing on the customer experience.

- Ben Reason of leading (and indeed the first?) service innovation and design consultancy live|work, described three different ways his firm has worked with clients Streetcar, Haringey Council's housing services, and Skills Development Scotland. Demonstrating a rare modesty among design professionals, he said "Design isn't good at everything" adding that his firm have found they have had to get more and more collaborative. Ben suggested that design is characterised by change, outside-in perspectives, provocation and a horizontal view, where as business is more concerned with consistency, an inside-out perspective, reassurance and being vertical.

- anthropologist Simon Roberts of Intel, sharing his experience of the issues raised by trying to embed anthropology within large organizations. His experience is that the "value" of anthropology is not easy to identify, often connected to a shift in thinking rather than to specific benefits to particular technologies or bits of IP. Given the complexity of modern organizations, he suggested that part of the value was that anthropology "gives the organization an opposable thumb" - invoking a phrase that Roger Martin has also used in his writing.

I gave an overview of design and service theory, lite, summarised in a 2x2 matrix (download PDF here) which captures two tensions in the literature: the "how" of design ranging from an idea of design as determinate and procedural (eg Simon 1969) in which the desired state of affairs is known at the outset, to an idea of design as exploration (eg Cross 2006; Schon 1983; Rittel and Webber 1973); and the "what" is being designed ranging from a conceptualisation that sees products and services as quite different kinds of thing, to a more generalisable idea of service (in the singular) following Vargo and Lusch's (2004) description of a shift to a service-dominant logic in which everything is service. For me, the kinds of practices that emerge from the art-school tradition of exploratory design, which reframe encounters with things and people and structures as opportunities for service, is the space that I understand as designing for service.

The ensuing discussion raised familiar questions. What is design? What is service design? Is it really different from other kinds of design? How can organizations bring in some of its concepts, tools and practices? How can this kind of design be managed and what resources are required? Does it "work" - in terms of helping cut costs or save money (compared to say Lean Manufacturing), or make improvements or innovate? How are Lynne's team trying to scale these practices in the NHS? What works and what doesn't? What might all this mean for the National Policing Improvement Agency, who are at an earlier stage in the process? Is now the perfect opportunity for designing for service to move forward, as the UK faces budget cuts affecting nearly all public services?

As I have found in my research, it is hard to separate these questions out because of the nature of service-based organizations and because (good) designers are attentive to, and able to work with, questions of value rather than just making pretty things and from the end user's point of view the pretty (or ugly, or unusable..) things constitute the service. However any discussion that fails to make the links between emerging practices such as "service design" in the art-school tradition and existing knowledge about services in (often dull) management literatures and the social sciences, will hamper efforts to build the knowledge base organizations need to move forward.

What happens when you turn a business school into a studio for a day

Seminar Room A during the break when the MBAs and the MDes students from the London College of Communications were having lunch

MBA Design Leadership elective 2010

This is the fifth and most likely final year of my MBA elective in Design Leadership at Said Business School, University of Oxford. My five-year post ends in September and the school is not renewing the fellowship. However tomorrow I look forward to teaching the course, this year with 50 MBA students (out of 225 or so students).

Over the five years the basic principles have remained consistent, drawing on my own art and design education and ongoing research including:
- a commitment to experiential learning
- hands-on playful exploration of studio-based approaches to concept generation and exploration
- opportunities to collaborate with designers
- reading from a range of fields including design theory, sociology and organisation studies
- insights from leading practitioners including Bill Moggridge (IDEO), Joe Ferry (Virgin Atlantic), Chris Downs (livework), Indy Johar (zerozero) and Andrew McGrath (Orange).

When I designed this course, I had a very open brief to create a new elective that would give students an opportunity to learn about design and design management. The school chose the name 'Design Leadership' because that term was being promoted at the time among some practitioners within design management, but it has since been eclipsed by the term 'Design Thinking', another problematic term (see my paper Design Practices in Design Thinking offering a critique). Back then there were hardly any MBA courses with such electives, let alone design-based teaching in the core of business education. Now there are several, although rarely devised and taught by someone from an art and design background, but these developments are still quite minor within the current way of doing things within management schools.

For those interested in such approaches, key business schools to look at are Rotman, Weatherhead, Stanford's d-school and Imperial College, London. In addition a number of design and engineering schools have created new post-graduate programmes based on similar ideas. It has been a great pleasure to get to know some of the faculty who have developed these courses and have a dialogue with them - an effort that is being enabled in particular by Dick Boland and Fred Collopy at Weatherhead whose 2002 workshop 'Managing as Designing' and this year's 'Convergence' event have been particularly inspiring as spaces for critical reflection.

In a context in which the MBA is being challenged (see the current discussion on the HBR blog and ongoing commentary by Bruce Nussbaum and colleagues at Business Week, not to mention a number of excellent books), these efforts are important efforts to reconceive of management education. I have learned a great deal from the students who have taken my elective and from some of my colleagues, as well as many others such as Armand Hatchuel at Ecole des Mines. However since I will be leaving Said in a few months - and I'm disappointed to be doing so - I may not be engaged in these questions in such a hands-on way in the immediate future. For now, back to the prep for tomorrow's prototyping workshop.

The limits of design (thinking)

Last week I attended a think tank entitled Design in Our Times organised by Andrea Siodmok and her team at DOTT Cornwall, a year-long project that brings a design approach to (re)designing Cornwall's future to be more sustainable and more inclusive, and University College Falmouth. Two days on a lovely clifftop with some leading UK and international designers, researchers and educators was a chance to assess what is happening in design and its ambitions for world-changing. With keynotes from architect Nabeel Hamdi (Housing without Houses), design researcher Ezio Manzini, Mat Hunter (now at the Design Council, UK) and workshops on day two by people such as ThinkPublic, UsCreates, Asier Perez (I love agitación para la innovación), and Andy Polaine, this was a whistlestop tour through emerging design practice with a focus on co-design and participation and the application of design thinking to complex social and economic issues such as long-term unemployment and transport in the UK's poorest county. (See DOTT Cornwall's event website here). This DOTT project follows a similar project directed by John Thackara in the north east of England in 2007.

These were some of the key things I heard (partly cribbed from an excellent summary by Jeremy Myerson of the RCA of an academic conversation I was involved in):

1. Design practice is changing and it needs to change.
2. Some designers are shifting from designing for to designing with, raising questions of authorship, which some others are not so comfortable with.
3. Design education should teach both design knowledge (or craft skills) and design thinking, the latter which is not the preserve only of designers. But no one was defining what design thinking was. One speaker, Mat Hunter, warned that talk about design thinking as a process that anyone can try tended to miss out the messy, difficult bits which are part of design and which are important.
4. Public service managers and policymakers are ready to hear what design can offer them (but they are desperate in the face of budget cuts and a lack of trust in the political class).

Now that I dabble in the social sciences and in management, it was strange to be back in a room that was mostly design people talking to other design people about design - and by design people I mean art-school design rather than engineering. I found myself skeptical about a number of things that I heard. I noted:

1. A lack of interest in reading or referring to literatures outside of design that are extremely relevant to the DOTT agenda, for example within innovation studies, the social sciences and management and organisation studies.
2. Not much interest among design practitioners in understanding theories of design that are enacted in their work, while some of them struggle with saying what they do and why it matters.
3. A reluctance to question the values embedded in current design practices - as if being nice people creating collaborative processes to enable co-design gets designers (and policymakers and managers) out of asking themselves challenging questions about power.
4. An avoidance of recent and less recent design history, as if the turn to co-design and the application of design to social problems means we can forget how implicated design practices are in the styling and branding of ecologically destructive mass consumption, as Tony Fry and others argue.
5. Not much effort being invested in critically assessing whether, in fact, we can just apply design practices/thinking/methods to social and economic issues. Are the tacit knowledge and methods developed for developing consumer insights really directly applicable to such contexts without much new thought?
6. An unwillingness to acknowledge the bits that designers do well and the bits they don't. One conversation thread was about how designers are good at scaling. They are not. Management is all about scaling, by replicating products and services globally through standardisation. From Adam Smith to FW Taylor to Henry Ford, increasing operational effectiveness and efficiency is a core activity in management but I can't think of a designer or design writer who has much to say on this.

The Design Council's DOTT programme, and the specific year of projects in Cornwall, is important. There has been a huge effort to mobilise local and regional organisations to engage with the possibility of design and designers helping shape Cornwall's future. It's just that the current framing of the project needs further scrutiny, so that those of us interested in it can make better sense of it, but - more importantly - so that non-designers can understand, question and assess it. John Thackara made the point that design is not known for being self-reflective and critical. We all know that design on its own is not going to save the world - so why do designers in a room on their own still seem to think it can?

Image: Village life by Steven Coombe on Flickr for DOTTshot.

Ron Arad's restlessness

Ron Arad, furniture and product designer, architect and design educator, has a major retrospective show now on at London's Barbican Art Gallery (18 Feb - 16 May 2010). Originally from Israel, Arad come to London to study architecture at the Architecture Association, then set up his own practice with Caroline Thorman in the early 1980s and has practiced in London ever since. His work across a range of media and manufacturing contexts demonstrates a consistent curiosity about forms, materials and possibilities - hence the exhibition title 'Restless'. He is also well-known for his playfulness and verbal wit evidenced in chairs that look like they might tip over, and the careful naming of many of the pieces. His architectural work includes private houses and the new Design Museum in Holon, Israel.

Visiting the exhibition raised questions for me about the seductions of this kind of design practice. More concerned with designing for sustainability and for service, I do not follow closely what goes in in furniture design and the world of "design art" and its limited editions. Usually resistant to what seems to be a kind of reckless environmental carelessness in these fields, I have to admit to a partiality to Arad's work. I have one his V&A sofas in blue felt (manufactured by Moroso) and some chairs. I know Arad to be a committed educator from his time as professor of design products at the Royal College of Art (where I used to teach).

But visiting the show I found myself captivated by the way it communicated Arad's ongoing enquiries into what to make and how to make it. On one of the many screens there was a quote saying that many of the manufactured pieces came from studio works, and not vice versa, illustrating nicely the notion that design is not (only) problem-solving but rather an ongoing set of enquiries. In a gallery that usually shows contemporary art, and sometimes architecture, it was a rare example of a design exhibition and a reminder of the value of these kinds of solo shows which give an opportunity to see how ideas have developed over decades. I wonder which service designer, if any, the Barbican might be showing in 20 years' time.

Investigatio: Workshop at Design London/RCA/Imperial College

Yesterday I joined around 30 people discussing multi/inter/transdisciplinarity at the Investigatio event in London organised by Anne-Laure Fayard (visiting academic at Design London, from NYU-Poly) and Bruce Tether (Design London). In addition to the workshop, Anne-Laure curated an exhibition exploring "what is research" with work by researchers working in the arts, design, social sciences and management, including Yasmine Abbas, James Auger, Anne-Laure Fayard, Ileana Stigliani, Patrick Stacey, Nina Wakeford, Aileen Wilson, and my own rat project (see image). See Anne-Laure's blog post here.

Since Design London are creating a podcast of the event (available here), I will not say too much here other than to give tweet-sized summaries of the contributions by
- Peter Childs, Professor of Engineering Design, and Marco Aurisicchio, Imperial College, proposing the jet engine as a model of creativity, and design linking creativity and innovation and the importance of language in interdisciplinary encounters
- Tony Dunne, Professor and Head of Department, Design Interactions, Royal College of Art, proposing designers can contribute a great deal if they shift from application to implication
- Bruce Tether, Professor of Design and Innovation, Design London, Imperial College, discussing institutional limits to multidisciplinary research because of the pressure to publish in A-list journals
- Lucy Kimbell (ie me), Clark Fellow in Design Leadership, Said Business School, Oxford (see below); and
- Simon Blyth, IDEO and Julien McHardy, Lancaster University, on user-less design rooted in practices

Here's more or less what I presented.

Aesthetic play and interdisciplinary ambiguity


Many of you will be familiar with debates over the past 10-15 years about the nature of research in art and design, in particular that of practice-based research. I will not rehearse these debates here today, but make three brief observations which will serve to inform what follows.

The first is to note criticism by Michael Biggs and others of the way that art and design research in the UK academy has adopted the natural sciences as the paradigm to which it should aspire and against which its contributions should be assessed (Biggs 2004; Biggs and Buchler 2007; Rust 2007). For Biggs, this undermines the contributions that art and design research can make, because its outputs offer a plurality of interpretations and are open to, although not reliant on, non-linguistic experience.

The second is the important question of aesthetic autonomy, which so far has not been discussed extensively in design research (Ross 2008; Ranciere 2004). Ranciere makes a distinction between three regimes – the first, the ethical regime of images which reflect the collective ethos, rooted in Platonism; the second, the representative regime of art, in which art’s function is mimesis and the Aristotelian idea of consciously shaping matter; and the third, the aesthetic regime of art influenced by Kant and Shiller. This latter regime offers freedom from prescribed criteria, disrupts hierarchies – and – relevant to today, gives art the function of reorganising the accepted perceptions of reality.

The third observation is that the natural sciences – if we can even call them such – are themselves objects of scrutiny and contestation. Research in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), for example, has shown how science and other kinds of knowledge production are very social matters (eg Foucault 1972; Latour and Woolgar 1979; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Scientific research is not neutral and the ways that scientific knowledge is produced, legitimised and disseminated are subject to questions of power, value, and difference.

To put this another way
- firstly, the nature and value of practice-based art and design research is still unclear, and
- secondly, the aesthetic regime of art of the past 200 years or so is concerned with reorganising perceptions of reality, and
- even what we might think of as well-established fields saturated with disciplinary rigour as in Kuhnian (1970) normal science, are more messy and ambiguous than many scientists and policy-makers might like to think.

Where does this leave attempts to bring disciplines together to do research? I will argue that it is exactly this ambiguity and disciplinary incoherence that offers opportunities to generate new knowledge, as researchers attempt and fail to combine worldviews and approaches from different disciplines.

There is one further piece of research on which I wish to draw, an empirical study of interdisciplinarity in projects crossing design and IT, social science and design, and art and science (Barry et al 2008). Their starting point was claims about interdisciplinarity rooted in the idea that science is becoming more accountable to society and research is, or should be, more directly relevant to users and stakeholders (Gibbons et al 1994; Nowotny et al 2001).

Research undertaken in Mode 2 knowledge advanced in Gibbons et al (1994) has five criteria:
- knowledge is produced in the context of application
- transdisciplinary research cannot be reduced to disciplines
- it is heterogeneious and there are lots of diverse organisations involved
- it’s more socially accountable and reflexive
- there are diverse quality controls.

When Barry et al set out to examine in more detail so-called interdisciplinary projects, they found the abstract notion of interdisciplinarity promoted by funders and others turned out to be more complicated in practice: two or more disciplines added together do not simply make a nice coherent new field.

Barry et al describe three modes of interdisciplinarity that they identified across the examples they studied in their fieldwork. One, the subordination-service mode, involves one discipline being in service to another, for example artists whose projects were funded to help increase the public understanding of science. The second, the intregrative-synthesis mode, involves disciplines integrating. The third, the agonistic-antagonistic mode, is forged as researchers question disciplinary commitments to ideas of what constitutes reality and knowledge. Barry et al found that some of the interdisciplinary collaborations they studied sprang from a “self-conscious dialogue with, criticism of, or opposition to the limits of established disciplines, or the status of academic research in general and attempts to reconceive or change the object of knowledge” (Barry et al 2008: 29). They found three logics under which claims about interdisciplinarity were advanced (accountability, innovation, ontology) and different kinds of institutional commitment.

My argument today is that this agonistic-antagonistic mode provides a helpful way to think about the positive effects of the disciplinary incoherence and ambiguity I mentioned earlier. If - still early in its trajectory within the academy - art and design research is unclear about the nature of its knowledge and contribution, then it is not necessarily a problem in interdisciplinary research as long as the institutions supporting it are willing and able to recognise the agonistic-antagonistic mode alongside the other modes. In other words, art and design research does not have to be internally coherent, normal science before it engages in interdisciplinary collaboration. It has the potential to mobilise the aesthetic regime of described by Ranciere to reorganise the accepted perceptions of reality within different research fields.

Image: Drawing created by rat, human and software in collaboration through the "Is your rat an artist?" drawing device, part of the Rat Fair organised by Lucy Kimbell at Camden Arts Centre, London, 2005

Visit to Object Research Lab, Amsterdam

This week I'm going to Amsterdam, the guest of Dutch artist Yvonne Droge Wendel and the Object Research Lab. Having met some years ago via a mutual friend, Anna Best, we met again at the CRESC social science conference in Manchester, at which the Object Research Lab ran a session offering encounters with objects including some blobs. I was one of three people Yvonne asked to take home one of these blobs to educate it. My pathetic efforts to carry out this commission are documented in my Educating the Blob blog.

If anyone is in doubt that this is a serious activity, please refer to the Lab's reading list here or read the work of object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman, who was a keynote in Manchester. The basic idea of the Lab's work, as I understand it, is to draw attention to objects and objectness, something that artists and designers already do, of course, but which social scientists tend to ignore, even the ones who make claims about methodologies that "follow the object". I like the extremes Yvonne takes this in her earlier work, for example, getting married to a piece of furniture and creating large objects like a big black blob and placing them in public situations. Her work has included collaborating with Anna Best and others to define and publish an Architecture of Interaction, an important attempt to articulate the underlying design elements in interactions.

This week, the other people Yvonne has invited include my Oxford colleague Noortje Marres and designer Jurgen Bey and digital artist/researcher Sher Doruff. I'm not sure what we'll be doing, other than trying to keep warm, but I hope to post something here.

Multidisciplinary Research: Challenging and Rewarding or Too Damn Difficult?

Wednesday 13 January 2010
3:30 – 7:00
Organized by Design London
Location - Stevens Building, Royal College of Art, London


There is a lot of encouragement for multi-disciplinary research, from policy makers and research funders, and it is generally seen as a ‘good thing’. Yet the reality is that this is often very difficult to execute. For instance, the definition and the evaluation of the outputs (e.g. prototypes, patents or papers) vary across the disciplines, and the results of multi-disciplinary work might well be regarded as below the standard that each individual disciplines seeks to impose on its own work. Consequently, those engaging in multidisciplinary work lose rather than gain credibility in their own ‘home discipline’. To look at these issues, we are holding a workshop that seeks to examine the barriers, challenges and rewards to multi-disciplinary work. The workshop will be followed by a drinks reception and an exhibition presenting research works from engineering, design and social sciences.

Speakers

Simon Blyth, IDEO and Julien McHardy, Lancaster University
Peter Childs, Professor of Engineering Design, Imperial College
Bill Gaver, Professor of Design, Goldsmiths College
Lucy Kimbell, Clark Fellow in Design Leadership, Said Business School, Oxford
Bruce Tether, Professor of Design and Innovation, Design London, Imperial College
Anthony Dunne, Professor and Head of Department, Design Interactions, Royal College of Art

Discussant

Jeremy Aynsley, Professor of History of Design, Royal College of Art

Organizers

Anne-Laure Fayard, Visiting Scholar, Design London, Imperial College and Assistant Professor of Management, Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Bruce Tether, Professor of Design and Innovation, Design London, Imperial College.

Exhibition

Exhibition will include research projects by James Auger (Royal College of Art), Lucy Kimbell (Said Business School), Anne-Laure Fayard (Design London / NYU-Poly), Patrick Stacey (Design London), Ileana Stigliani (Design London), works from the Interaction Design Studio at Goldsmiths and projectsfrom the Mechanical Engineering Department at Imperial College.


Participation

Places are limited, and will be issued on a first come first served basis. If you want to attend please complete your details here http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/X72BKNQ to reserve a place.

A year in designing for service: 2009

A Google search for “service design” is one way of indexing what is a growing field of practice and scholarly enquiry. On the basis of a search today (December 16, 2009), the term is resonant enough to have a long-ish entry in wikipedia (although it “provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject”). What comes next are links to two consultancies: Engine (based in London) and live|work (ditto). Practice leads theory, then. But although they are leading the field, they are extremely small – 20 people at the former, 13 people at the latter, according to their websites today.

This was a year in which service design began to move away from being the province of designers educated and practicing in the art school tradition to an activity in which designers have something important to contribute, but which is not necessarily owned by Design.

Conferences brought together practitioners leading and developing the field with researchers from universities involved in studying and teaching service design, management and marketing. These included the Service Design Network Conference in Madeira and the first Nordic Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation in Oslo. The line-up of speakers suggested a shift from the emphasis on designerly service design seen at earlier conferences such as the Emergence conferences hosted by Carnegie Mellon University (2006; 2007) and at Northumbria (2006), drawing in those interested in service design from outside design fields. However these conferences were still dominated by those of us from design school backgrounds (as far as I can tell from attending one, and reading the public material of the other). In contrast, the Frontiers of Service Conference in Hawaii included “service design” on its list of topics but the only person I know who went was a researcher rooted in academic HCI.

At the beginning of the year, anecdotal accounts of consultancies laying off staff suggested a despondency matching the world we found ourselves in characterised by financial and ecological crisis. But by the end of the year, I was hearing reports of new clients, new projects or at least things ticking over. New consultancies formed too – like Snook, whose public stance is evidence of a refreshing modesty and optimism among the design community.

New books explicitly mentioning service design and introducing it to a wider field included Tom Lockwood’s edited book republishing articles from the Design Management Journal by livework, IDEO and others. Satu Miettinen and Mikko Koivisto brought together many others to suggest how organizations can go about Designing Services with Innovative Methods. The #service design twitter community of designers involved in service design became a busy and valuable resource.

Roberta Tassi published her research undertaken for her graduation thesis as a fairly comprehensive list of service design tools. Daniela Sangiorgi from Lancaster and others founded a web resource called Service Design Research, a very readable way of getting a handle on different research perspectives. This aims to build an understanding and foster a dialogue on where ideas and concepts of Service Design have come from, how these evolved over the last two decades as well as report and review current research and service design practices.

The year ahead will no doubt create opportunities to build on these developments as what is still a diverse field continues to create ways of legitimising and authorising practice (eg professional qualifications), defining the boundaries of the field and drawing in other kinds of service practitioners and researchers. I hope that people involved in the field will continue to ask important questions, which should include

- Politics. How are service designers going to position themselves in relation to questions of power? As with Participatory Design, one way of understanding the introduction of new technologies sees them as increasing managerial control over service employees and indeed customers. When are designers going to become more reflective and critical of the politics involved in designing for service?
- Scope. Do service designers really want to focus mostly on the design of services (public or private) or scale up to policy issues? From the international arena - the United Nations, World Bank and so on – to national and regional services, a whole collection of serious problems face policy-makers, elected representatives and citizens. Whether called service or transformation design, or something else, in what ways can practitioners seize opportunities to move beyond the legacy of industrial design and articulate a vision of designing for service that moves beyond designing services (industrial outputs defined as what products are not, cf Vargo and Lusch 2004) to designing for service?
- Knowledge. What kinds of knowledge do service designers and managers need in order to design better services for and with others? What are the strengths and limits of the design-school approach to designing for service? What published and developing knowledge bases should those involved in designing services draw on? When will service designers start paying serious attention to established fields with literatures on which they can draw including Participatory Design, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, anthrodesign, services marketing, service operations, science and technology studies and feminism?

In next year’s Google search I hope to see some surprises. A service design consultancy with 100 people! The UN taking forward the work of the UNIDR (Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnick who spoke in London and Oxford in November) introducing service design and planning for field engagements in 50 countries! Oxford, Harvard, the Royal College of Art and MIT introducing new multidisciplinary service design and innovation masters courses! The new UK Conversative-Lib Dem government creating a Design Unit in the Cabinet Office to provide hands-on consultancy for government departments aiming to increase efficiency and innovate based on designing for service rooted in end user experiences and practices! Ten new books! Large consultancies such as Accenture and McKinsey training consultants in designerly methods and approaches! Oliver King or Joe Heapy or Lavrans Lovlie or Chris Downs or Ben Reason as keynote speaker at Frontiers of Service! Check back in a year and we’ll see.

Call for papers: Art of Management conference, Turkey, 2010

Track at Art of Management Conference, Turkey, 2010: ARTFUL ORGANIZATION DESIGN






Daved Barry & Stefan Meisiek, School of Economics and Management (FEUNL), Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Lucy Kimbell, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford


This track focuses on ‘artful’ organization design, reflecting recent revisionist trends in organizational practices and the organization studies literature. In particular, there has been a significant rise in approaches that reflect more of an arts-based sensibility rather than the scientific/engineering mindset that has characterized organization design efforts since the late 1800’s. Representative works of this revisionist perspective include Boland and Collopy’s “Managing as Designing,” Mintzberg and Liedka’s “Strategy as Design,” Martin’s “Design Thinking,” and IDEO’s articles/videos on service and culture design, all of which focus on design-as-process. These approaches to organization design seek a meeting between art and science, and craft and technology in design practice. Importantly, they stress going beyond a sole focus on instrumentalism in design—great designs should not only deliver utilitarian outcomes but should also create delightful and meaningful ones. Thus, an organizational appraisal system designed from this new approach should not only result in useful appraisals, but should also be a pleasure to use and enrich the work life with a sense of possibility.

In this track, we push the arts-based approaches to the forefront. To do so, we will depart from the regular presentational track format and host a design studio where we work on live organizational issues.

Specifically, we will provide designers, artists, and organization scholars interested in our track with basic information about Garajistanbul (www.garajistanbul.org), an Istanbul-based performing arts organization. This organization and its presented issues will be our ‘design site’; the design brief appears below. Designers, artists, and organization scholars selected from those who apply to our track will be invited to develop either 1) an artful design exercise to take place during the conference; or 2) a design sketch or proposal engaging with organization’s issues, and to submit this to us. In place of the usual paper submission, this will be used to select participants to take part in the track. The form of the submission will be open and might include whatever activities submitters are familiar with or would like to experiment with (e.g., visual methods, role play, modeling methods, narrative techniques, philosophical inquiry, etc.).

At the Art of Management conference, then, our track participants will briefly introduce their artful design exercises or solutions, and then we will continue to work on, discuss, and explore possibilities in the design studio. We imagine a multistage process in which participants create designs for Garajistanbul, discuss them in plenary, receive feedback, and go into another design phase. There might be 3 or 4 phases in all, in which we aim to understand the participants’ design assumptions and methods in a hands-on way and to amplify these methods via feedback. Stakeholders from Garajistanbul will be invited to take part—either as ongoing commentators, or as a ‘review panel’ on the last day.

The resulting designs will be documented and may provide the basis for a special issue in Aesthesis, or a ‘thin book’ on artistic approaches to organizational design. Apart from a desire to discover and share new design approaches, a key aim of the track is to begin to build a network in which people interested in artful approaches to organizational design can meet one another, both at this Art of Man conference and also in the following years.


Design Brief:

The design site for our track at the Art of Management conference is Garajistanbul (www.garajistanbul.org). In their own words, Garajistanbul “is an international, non-profit, contemporary performing arts organization that owns a venue in Istanbul, Beyoglu; makes productions and publishes a magazine called "gist". Garajistanbulpro and 10+ are the two production units. Garajistanbul tours regularly abroad, especially Europe.”

Your task as a potential conference participant is to design either an exercise or sketch initial design proposition that could help Garajistanbul redesign its services and activities, organization design, corporate identity and culture, and/or strategy. If you develop a design exercise, it should be doable within the conference period. Members of Garajistanbul will share further materials online (organizational charts, rules and routines for organizing, photos of the site and people, etc) prior to the conference in September, which will allow you to prepare your sketch or exercise. They will also join us at the conference site, and, if time permits, we will visit the premises and see what they are doing.

Abstracts for papers should be approximately 500 words, but we will accept any form of media submission you feel appropriate. Your abstract should be sent to the stream conveners (dbarry AT fe.unl.pt; smeisiek AT fe.unl.pt; lucy.kimbell AT sbs.ox.ac.uk) and copied to Jane Malabar at artofman@essex.ac.uk by 1st February 2010.

We look forward to your imaginings.
Daved, Stefan, and Lucy

What if…? …..Report on Service Design Network conference 2009

Report on Service Design Network conference 2009


The conference archive including presentations is here.

My (short) conference paper is here, and a recent longer essay: Kimbell, L (2009) 'The Turn to Service Design' in Julier, G and Moor, L, 'Design and Creativity: Policy, Management and Practice', Berg.

This is a partial and highly particular account of the Service Design Network conference, Madeira, which I attended a few weeks ago. It’s partial since I do not aim to give a full account of what the conference was trying to achieve (as I understood it), nor everything that went on, which others have been doing much better than I could. And it’s particular, because I attended and spoke at it in my current manifestation as a researcher and educator situated in a management school and involved in teaching on the MBA. My remarks below should be read as critical reflection that I hope will be of use to others, some of which I have already discussed with the organisers. I raise what I believe are important questions for an emerging community seeking not just to survive but also grow, as it thinks about how to create new institutions and ways of validating its knowledge.

While I have a background in interaction design practice and live art, now supplemented by a vast amount of reading in management fields, anthropology and design theory, I am concerned at present with the body of knowledge on which a service design profession or even discipline might rest. What do organisations, groups and societies need to know in order to design for service? How can they go about designing for service? Who should be involved in designing and why and what ethical concerns exist about co-design, participation and accountability in designing for service? What kinds of knowledge are relevant and what assumptions and world views are they based on? What happens to “service design” when “non-designers” (such as marketing consultancies and management consultancies) take on some of these practices, do them systematically and routinely and at scale, win the clients and do the projects? What are the strengths and weaknesses of a designerly approach to designing for service? The SDN conference was not a good place to go to get answers to these questions. This is not to say the event was not of value – I enjoyed hearing from Joe Heapy (Engine), Lavrans Lovlie (live|work), Ben Reason (live|work), Bas Raijmakers (STBY), Bruce Tether (Imperial College) and many others (although I didn't need to travel 1000km by air to meet them).

I will comment in detail on one talk, not in any way as a personal attack but rather as the most clear example illustrating my concerns, which apply to the event as a whole. In their presentation, Craig LaRosa and Jon Campbell from Continuum talked about employee motivation in service design. To me, a European, they came across as arrogant, an interesting counterpoint to the more modest presentations by UK/Nordic consultancies the day before. It was a very polished, enjoyable presentation – full marks for use of rhetorical devices – but I was left disappointed by the sense I got from the speakers that no one other than a Designer could produce useful knowledge in relation to the design of service. Perhaps that is the case - but I doubt it.

There were two examples from their talk where there is extant literature the speakers seemed unaware of. First, the idea that employees in service organisations play an important role in constituting a service – interesting, yes, but that’s what Bitner et al were looking at in their paper on critical incidents in the service encounter in 1990 and Solomon et al in 1985. That’s well over 20 years ago. Second, the speakers shared insights about the gap between expectations raised by service organisations in their advertising (such as United Airlines) and the actual service delivered. A great insight – and one that is captured in the 5 gaps model of service quality created by Parasuraman et al in 1985, again over 20 years ago. But there was no sense from these speakers that they felt they had any responsibility as designers to keep track of relevant literature or – even better – work out what new research was needed as part of efforts to design better services. If this view is true, and is one that is shared by other individual designers and consultancies, then the knowledge upon which a professional field of service design could rest is unlikely to develop significantly.

Some may argue that it’s not a designer’s job to go and read academic literature. However I believe that these days most designers, consultants and design educators would see research as part of design. For the practitioners spanning anthropology and design (eg the anthrodesign mailing list), research – which includes reviewing what is already published – is a very important part of their work. I am not going to suggest how individual designers or consultancies should go about their work, but I am interested in what an emerging field of professional practice thinks it is doing, how it understand its knowledge, practices and institutions in relation to those of adjacent fields and the rewards it gives to its leading figures. Earlier I asked questions about what was involved in designing for service. But in terms of a developing profession, there are also questions of what constitutes good service design practice and who is defining what ‘good’ means within the context of professional standards. One particular challenge faced by those involved in designing for service is how to understand the social - not something taught in many design schools, still hampered by a legacy of craft and objects.

On the plane home I sat with several other participants who also had to leave slightly early. I asked one of them – a leading figure – if he had learned anything from the conference. He said he had not. It seems to me that if a network such as this, however young and under-resourced, is not stretching its core community, then it may not survive.

This journey allowed us to digest and share our different experiences of the conference. I began to think about my impressions as a shortlist of if onlys which I have now translated to a list of what ifs, which serve as my benchmark for future service design conferences.

- What if the conference brought together those interested in designing for service, broadly conceived, rather than mostly service designers educated and practising professionally within Design?
- What if that definition included those from services marketing, management, innovation, information systems and adjacent fields?
- What if the people present, speakers and participants, did not assume that the social worlds which they are involved in designing for, and which their designs create, were not just givens but were things to be researched and interpreted?
- What if there was no underlying but unpsoken assumption that “design” is owned collectively by researchers, practitioners and educators rooted in design schools?
- What if the keynote speakers came from outside the core field, to help articulate the boundaries between it and other fields?
- What if members of this community actively took responsibility to extend their knowledge by reading literature from diverse fields? (see Jeff Howard’s blog as a generous example of someone digesting existing literature for others)
- What if members of this community began to think seriously about the underlying assumptions about knowledge and what constitutes “the social”?
- What if practitioners who are close to action began to identify and share where they see gaps for further research, whether through practice or academia?

Image: £20 note showing moral philosopherAdam Smith, a foundational figure in economics whose work underpins the idea of exchange value, now being challenged by scholars such as Vargo and Lusch (2004; 2008) who suggest we attend to value-in-use in order to understand the transition from a goods-dominant logic to the emerging service-dominant logic

Report: Oxford seminar on Managing as Designing: What next?

Notes from a workshop held on Friday 30 October at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Attended by about 40 people.


Introduction

It’s 40 years since Herbert Simon published The Sciences of the Artificial in which he wrote the now much-quoted phrase “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (1996:111). While Rittel and Webber (1973) and many others have questioned the rather top-down, technocratic view of design that Simon seemed to be arguing for, he did make a distinction between the purposes of the social sciences and of design that many scholars and practitioners are still finding useful today.

But now, 40 years later, things are quite different. There has been around four decades of research within design and engineering schools mostly into established fields such as industrial design, architecture and engineering design, generating descriptions of design activity. Alongside this, there has been research in management fields including New Product Development and innovation studies and more recently organization design. Science and technology studies have contributed a perspective on how innovations emerge that challenges the individualist accounts of some management scholars.

Simon’s insight was not really seriously taken up until Boland and Collopy’s workshop in 2002 and subsequent book titled Managing as Designing (2004), which brought several of these approaches together staging a wider conversation about the role of aesthetics and the arts more generally in organisational life. Boland and Collopy brought to management attention the idea not just that some abstract notion of design was important, but rather that design in the arts-based tradition offered something important to management practitioners and scholars – what they call a “design attitude”.

The value of designers’ practices educated in this tradition is what some people call “design thinking”. This autumn, three books are being published that have design thinking in the title, by Roger Martin, dead of the Rotman School of Business; Tom Lockwood, president of the Design Management Institute; and Tim Brown, who leads the design innovation consultancy IDEO. Alex Ostwerwalder has just published a book on the design of business models. Other new books based on academic research include Roberto Verganti’s book on design-driven innovation, and a forthcoming book by Armand Hatchuel and Benoit Weil. If you read Business Week you will have noted its latest ranking of top design schools which includes many business schools which are now teaching design in the MBA– though so far, very few teach design in the arts-tradition in the core curriculum.

To discuss these developments, we invited leading scholars within management, organization and design to share their thoughts on what is going on at the moment and what happens next.

Please note that what follows are slightly edited notes taken by hand while I was chairing the workshop. Any mistakes are mine. If you quote from this blog, please add this disclaimer.


Presentations

Richard J Boland, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University
What am I for?
- Valuing the existential moment
- Appreciating action (Dewey) as the basis of enquiry, all knowing and creation of knowledge comes from acting in the world.
What am I against?
- Assuming a ‘presented’ world.
- Thinking that an acceptable conclusion is that everything is socially constructed – that is the starting point.
Research
- Design and use of representations, how people make meaning, use metaphors, perspective making and taking, distributed cognition, representing temporality.
- Visual representation did a better job of representing financial data than numbers in predicting bankruptcy (Zhao et al)
- 10 years with Gehry, design attitude, digitisation
- Systems of gestures, discourse practices and representational forms that will enhance team learning in healthcare
- Theorygarden.com – causal reasoning for children

Blanche Segrestin, Ecole des Mines
- Why do we need a new theory of design?
- Context: a shift in innovation, not just improving products and services but rather the changing identities of objects. Organisations don’t know what competences they need.
- Existing theories of design are problem solving (Simon) and systematic design (Pahl and Beitz). Existing theories of creativity focus on cognition (Torrance, Guilford). But we need to understand how to combine planning and evaluation with imagination and deviance. This is what C-K theory (Hatchuel and Weil) provides, which helps companies structure exploratory processes which generate new concepts and new knowledge.
- A brief may be clear but it is asking for something that is unknown. We need to produce knowledge for design, which involves working on unknown and partly undecidable objects.

Ken Starkey and Sue Tempest, Nottingham University Business School
- Business schools champion expertise masquerading as science, which leads to functional incompetence. In the search for technical competence (which has proved to be illusory) business schools have lost their capacity for reflexivity.
- MBA courses focus on personal advantage at the expense of public purpose, with a narrow curriculum focussed on analytics.
- The market logic has subverted the logic of professionalism (Khurana)
- “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what stories do I find myself a part?’” (McIntyre)
- Foucault offers an emphasis on power and knowledge, ethics and technologies of the self
- How do we develop a narrative imagination using the arts and humanities to think about new design spaces?
(See their forthcoming paper, “The Winter of Our Discontent: The Design Challenge for Business Schools” in Academy of Management Journal of Learning and Education 8(4))

Bruce Tether, Imperial College/Design London
- MBA students want to know what’s the takeway? What can they use on Monday morning? Design is difficult because it’s harder for them to reflect that they may have changed their way of thinking.
- How does design in a business school environment achieve legitimacy?
- Is design a fad? Can we really deliver?

Rafael Ramirez, Institute for Science, Innovation and Society/Saïd Business School
- How do changes in context change what to design and what is good design?
- How do turbulent environments change the context for business design? How do you plan when you can’t predict?
- How to create enclaves of productive possibilities, using scenarios to design value constellations to push back the turbulence?

Respondent

Jennifer Whyte, University of Reading/ Design Innovation Research Centre
- Talking about both managing and designing involves talking about a large space
- Questions of micro and macro – how do you design a financial system
- A danger of romanticising design


Discussion

Boland: Design truly is a practice. At Weatherhead we try to implement a more studio-based approach to MBA education. They work on a project as a design project, developing an ability to engage in a practice in a particular way and giving them an orientation that they are involved in shaping the world that other people are going to live in.

Starkey: How do we design an education system to equip people to handle things like the financial crisis?

Segrestin: How do we teach something that will be obsolete in a few years? More important is how to apprehend change.

Boland: We need to challenge business schools. They are historians of the recent past and gear students up to reproduce it. One possibility is challenging the business schools, waking them up. Another is to take design and business schools and morph into another kind of school so that organisational leaders become more broad-based.

Ramirez: The MBA is a locked-in standard. Exec ed and doctoral students are the research lab for management education.

Boland: The thing that intrigues me about design is its relentless commitment to inquiry.

Boland: I’m always surprised at the opposition set up between management and design. The world of the manager is addressing the unknown and designing collective action.

Segrestin: The models of the firm we have are 19th century models based on commercial activity. We lack a model of collective design activities that are not just commercial activities. We need to go back to look at the designing firm.

Whyte: Inquiry is central to design and to reflective management practice. …When you are creating businesses, you are creating social and material domains. But we should be wary of transplanting ideas from one to another simplistically.

Starkey: In Europe, for business schools, the student isn’t the customer, the customer is society.

Thanks to the Design Council who supported the refreshments during the event.