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Well hello there,

It’s nice to be in your inbox friend - thanks for having me.

Confession time: this edition’s question is one that I grapple with all the time, and I’m still not sure I know the answer. As we head into another year of designing and living, with so much uncertainty and change, I find myself asking it over and over. What is the impact of this work? How should I think about the outcomes that service design can support?

The quest for this answer will be lifelong. But for now, here’s what I know so far.

Q: What are the outcomes of service design work?

On a bad day as a service designer, I feel like my job is sending email and creating powerpoints. Ugh.

On the other hand, I believe in the magic of this work, of using design approaches to come to grips with making services, processes and experiences better.

So what gives? How can we think more expansively and constructively about the outcomes of our work?

First let’s get our definition on: An outcome is a direct, intended, beneficial effect.

  • Direct - meaning we can see a clear connection between what we did and what resulted

  • Intended - it was an intentional impact

  • Beneficial - the result was ‘good’ or desirable in some way (not an unintended consequence)

The Outcomes of Service Design are Often Intangible

Service design lives at the services and systems layers of Dr. Stef Russo’s Stratification of Design Thinking.

Dr. Stef Russo's stratification of design thinking is a pyramid with four layers, from the bottom: artefact (product, interior, fashion, jewellery, graphic, web, new media), Object: Artefact and Experience (engineering, interaction design, human computer interaction, user experience, anthropological design, human centered design), Service: systems and behaviour (urban planning, architecture, service design, SME's, strategic design, culture), and System: Large scale systems (policy design, public service, environment, systems design, infrastructure). The level of complexity goes from low to high from the bottom to the peak of the pyramid.

At these levels, the complexity is high, and the tangibility is low. At the object and artefact layers, designers have tangible outputs of their work to point to. Service designers find it much harder to point at something tangible and visible.

The secret is that we often confuse outputs and outcomes in design work. Outcomes are the consequences of what we create, not necessarily the thing itself.

For industrial designers, this might be the power dynamic and experience created by the design of a dentist’s chair. For service designers, the outputs might be things like journey maps or prototypes, but outcomes are usually much subtler in nature.

A Gary Larson cartoon with a dentist holding a tennis ball and assistant hovering over a man in a dentist chair. the caption reads: "Now open even wider Mr. Stevens... Just out of curiosity, we're going to see if we can also cram in this tennis ball."

Let’s look at three ways we can think about the outcomes of service design:

  1. Service level outcomes

  2. Organizational outcomes

  3. Changes to how people think and what they feel

Service Level Outcomes

Service design finds ways to co-create value throughout the design process so that there is value both in the designing and in the delivery of services. These service level outcomes include:

  • new services

  • improved services

  • changes to touchpoints

  • changes to service interactions

  • new service artifacts

  • increased service efficiency

  • reduced waiting times

  • higher quality service

  • improved service relationships

Organizational Outcomes

”The material of service design is the Organization”
- Stephen Taylor, Harmonic Design

In order to be able to achieve service level outcomes, we have to achieve organizational outcomes. When we think about service design work, a lot of the time we are working with the 'meta’ as Dan Hill calls it.

Organizational outcomes of service design are things like:

  • capability or capacity building

  • creation of ‘value’

  • new perspectives

  • new conversations

  • convening (new) relationships

  • enabling a different problem solving process

  • adoption of a new set of words/language

  • change in behaviour

  • adoption of a new mindset

  • updated operating models

Outcomes as Changes to How People Feel and Think

Some of the most powerful outcomes that I’ve seen while practicing service design are shifts in how people feel (and think).

What if, working in these more complex, intangible types of design, with relational outcomes, we need different ways of knowing? What if we think about how people feel as an outcome of service design work?

”People will forget what you said,
people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget
how you made them feel.”

- Maya Angelou

What if we think of changes in perception and knowing as an outcome of service design work?

Gif of a bar chart showing survey results from the start and end of a project. There are statements like "I can empathize with what customers go through when researching and purchasing our product." The GIF shows an increase in understanding from the start to end of the project.

The outcomes of service design are often emergent, hard to control, and intangible.

That’s what makes them so slippery, and on the good days, so worthwhile.

Want more?

This newsletter is based on a talk called The Material of Outcomes. It’s my most raw and vulnerable explorations of service design practice to date. You can watch a recording or flip through the slides. (And if you’re really nerdy like me, there’s a references doc including the academic papers and other inspiration for the talk!)

Photo of Linn as a three year old with a very stubborn expression and the caption "I decide about the picture"

In the talk I also explore things like how to measure these intangible outcomes and there’s even a clip of me as a very precocious three year old!

Wishing you every good outcome,
Linn

P.S. Do you have an existential service design question? Do send it my way. :)

Copyright (C) 2021 Made Manifest Inc. All rights reserved.

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