The Materials of Service Design

The Materials of Service Design

My guests in this episode are Johan Blomkvist and Stefan Holmlid who, along with Simon Clatworthy, wrote the book The Materials of Service Design, which discusses materials (broadly framed) as a means to explore what service design is and could be.

You can listen to it below or on YouTube or subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts or listen on the player below.

Audio


Guests

The Materials of Service Design: https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/the-materials-of-service-design-9781802203295.html
Stefan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefan-holmlid-b402683/
Stefan on ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stefan-Holmlid
Johan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blomkvist/
Johan on ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johan-Blomkvist

Andy

Transcript

Note: This transcript is machine-generated and may contain some errors.

[00:00:00] Andy Polaine: Hello and welcome to Power of Ten, a show about design operating at many levels of zoom from thoughtful detail through to transformation in organization, society, and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I’m design leadership coach, service design, and innovation consultant. Educator and writer. My guests today are Johan Blomkvist, Assistant Professor in Design IDA in Linköping University in Sweden.

I’m pretty sure I pronounced that wrong. And Stefan Holmlid, Professor in Design IDA. Also at the same university in Sweden, and together with Simon Clatworthy, who’s not with us today. He’s the professor in design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway. They are the authors of the new book called The Materials of Service Design.

Johan and Stefan, welcome to the show.

[00:00:55] Johan Blomkvist: Thank you.

[00:00:56] Stefan Holmlid: Thank you.

[00:00:56] Andy Polaine: So the book is called The Materials of Service Design, and it is a sort of recognition, I guess, of in other, traditionally in design you have things like materials, libraries, and you have you know or pattern libraries. You have things that you, you can kind of recognize the different types of design.

Why did you feel the need to write the book?

[00:01:17] Johan Blomkvist: Mm,

I. We felt like it was time, maybe even a, a bit over time to write. Yeah. This kind of book, since the material that I. We, well me and Stefan think a lot about and work a little bit with and service design practitioners work with daily is not very well understood, I think or explored.

and we have been thinking about this and struggling with the issue of what. The service design material actually is for a long time and before this book, I think a lot of what we know about the material comes from other disciplines such as service marketing or service management, for instance.

And. I, it has been useful for us to think about how to understand the service from that perspective. What it means to co-create value, or what it means to work with resource integration and things like that, and what that means for design. But it’s time, I think, for the sign. To explore the material and think about what the material actually is and what it consists of.

And in the process of writing this book, I think we discovered that it’s much more complex, it’s much more rich in terms of different. Types of materials, different perspectives on the material than we anticipated. So, yeah. I think it was overdue for, for this book.

[00:03:08] Andy Polaine: Yeah. Yeah. You know, service design is one of those things that is.

One of the things I say traditionally, I, I we’ve out and written about it too, is, you know, we often talk about it being intangible, right? That the, the experience of a service or the, the value of a service is about the interaction between people. and so I. I’m interested in your, you know, in your use of the word materials, EE even, so, you know, when you were doing this, you have kind of, you started to make a kind of taxonomy.

You started to make a, some kind of categorization of different types of things and it sort of forms a section of the book. And maybe you could talk about that a little bit actually of, of what those sections are, but also was that immediately obvious? Of how to categorize this. ‘cause I have, I would imagine that was a thing.

You must have thought and discussed a lot.

[00:03:55] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah. I mean, let, let me first say something about material and the intangible, tangible thing, and I’ll mm-hmm. I’ll pass on to you on to talk about this, all the nerdiness of categorizing and thinking about how do they actually fit together all of these different ways of thinking about materials here.

So one thing that we were. That we wanted to do was both to talk about service as a material, but also about the materials that service designers use in their practice. and as you said, there’s a lot of thinking that, and that these, this service design thing is, it’s about intangibles, about the material.

And that’s of course not untrue. but everything also needs to be in the world. Which means that it also becomes material, even though maybe not in the sense that it becomes a physical thing that we can grasp with our fingers necessarily. I. Everything actually exists in the world, which makes it material in some sense.

So that was something that kind of also developed during our writing and talking about these materials of service design that, well, they, all of them are both intangible, untangible. It’s, it’s not that they are either or they’re both at the same time. And that’s also something that maybe is very prevalent in service design while it’s less prevalent, maybe in in other disciplines of design, but that also caused a lot of.

Discussions, let’s call it let’s call it that. Right. thinking in when we were writing, because we were also, we also agreed when we started to writing the book that we don’t have to agree about everything.

[00:05:55] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:05:55] Stefan Holmlid: We just have to agree that this is an important book to write and we may come with very different perspectives and ideas on what this can be, should be, have been.

and that’s what we wanna do. We want to make that book happen. And then we had all those materials and the categorizing work that needed to be done suddenly.

[00:06:17] Andy Polaine: So I put, I’ve put on screen here briefly ‘cause I highlighted the content before. So, Johan, you were gonna talk about how those discussions resolve into and when you say discussions, are we talking like there was like strong debate around this and, and arguments in a, in a good sense, robust editorial debate or, or was it that we’re just trying to get our heads around this.

[00:06:41] Johan Blomkvist: No, I mean for the categorization, I think we just agreed, like Stefan said, that we won’t be able to agree fully on any categorization and, um. so I, I’m not exactly, you know, that the strong words came in other situations but the categorization was interesting. So it’s the third part of the book book where we sort of take all the material contributions from other authors.

So there were a lot of people that contributed to the book and, um. They, their chapters should have formed this material library that we are starting, um with this book. And we felt like we can’t just, you know, include the material library and not say something about what the materials have in common or.

You know, ways in which you can structure them or analyze them. So we decided to do some attempts at categorizing the materials and, um. We, I think we quite quickly realized that we couldn’t agree and that meant that we, we tried, and I don’t know really why we decided to do that, but we actually included in the book our our failed attempts at categorizing the materials not failed necessarily because each categorization.

Says something about the materials. So we have a viewpoint from, um from the service marketing field, for instance. Yeah. So how could you categorize the materials from that point of view? how can you categorize the materials from a more design practice point of view? So that’s another like how the materials relate to each other.

As part of the sign, that’s another categorization that we Yeah. that we attempted to do. and the one we sort of end up with, which is not to say that, you know, everyone agrees that that’s the best one or anything like that. I think it’s, it, it’s main benefit is that it’s very, uh. Like small and easy to understand and grasp so that that sort of divides the material into traditional materials.

So some materials are more traditional in some sense. and of course there’s a lot of. debate about whether or not material can be considered traditional and what that means to be traditional. But we say that a traditional material is one that you can work on alone and you don’t need to include others in giving form and shaping this material.

Then we consider it more of a traditional material.

[00:09:30] Andy Polaine: Can you give me some examples of that?

[00:09:31] Johan Blomkvist: yes I can. so we have touchpoints, for instance in the way that we describe touchpoints in the book or the chapter on the Yeah, the material description of touchpoint, for instance.

[00:09:47] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah. So just to, um. To add something there is also that the, the thing with the, with the categorization we ended up with, which is these three end points on spectrum in some sense is that they also work generatively.

So the first categorization we did with that, or the one that, that related to service. The traditional service fields, we felt that the, the materials got locked in and it didn’t really give the possibility to think outside and beyond what is already there. So one thing that this final categorization we did.

made, what it made possible was to actually work generatively with figuring out what could be a new material that we should work with and how can we think about something that we’re working on as a material. Okay. And how can we develop a material into, so a traditional material like them touch points?

Yeah. if we want to make it more like a co-design material, what then do we need to do?

[00:10:59] Andy Polaine: Okay. So right now I would be, if I was listening to this. Audience, I would be thinking, well, that’s all very well, all sounding kind of abstract to me, so, so let’s get kind of nuts and bolts a around it. ‘cause because you use the word materials, right?

There’s the, there’s definitely an expectation I think, that you can then describe these things. They have certain qualities, you know, they have certain affordances and so forth. So let’s start with the, maybe the, the, the touchpoint ones. and for those of people they might, they assume there’s quite a lot of service design people listening, but describe to people who may not understand even that word what you consider a touch point.

As a, as actual materials. Yes.

[00:11:39] Johan Blomkvist: So the thing is, this chapter was written by one of the contributors of the book, so. I would prefer if the author of that chapter could also explain the material. so that’s another thing that we noticed during the, the writing this book that a lot of people that contributed to the book, they’re really passionate about their material and they want, they know a lot about the material.

They work with the material, they can explain the material, and they, they have a firm grasp of what they mean. By, you know, touchpoint for instance, or clay or behavior or any other material that you can find. There’s a lot of materials in the book and. So I don’t want to to sort of intrude on, on their area, their explanation of touchpoint.

so yeah, I, I would rather that we sort of collect these materials and make them available to people so that everyone can can see them and judge for themselves if they think it’s a material that they work with, then they understand why it’s a material, for instance. Yeah. And how it’s, um.

worked into a more finished form as part of Okay. The design process. So,

[00:13:00] Andy Polaine: Well, I, I, I’ll give my, my version then in that case. Yeah. So for me, I always talk about touchpoint as something that you can. See s sense, basically see, smell, touch and interact with, and or interact with, right? So, so it’s usually a thing that actually has some kind of tangibility in the world in that way.

You know, it, what, what might I hold in my hand? Who, what, what or who might I interact with? You know? So it could be another person. and often, you know, and traditionally in sort of service blueprints and stuff, you have this idea of the line of visibility. And I’ve always kind of hated that. ‘cause I thought, well, you know, if you ever sat next to someone in a restaurant smoking a cigar, you’ll know it’s not just visibility that, you know, makes a difference, right?

Or you’ve got the, the table and the other toilets and all those things. So, you know, there’s quite a lot of other stuff in there. But in general, the, it’s the, the moments of interaction. tho those would, or the, the things you’re interact with, interacting with or sensing at any, any one point that I would consider a material, the obvious materials of touch points, but there are some other things like policy and time.

I mean, policy is obviously a thing. It gets written down, but that’s, it’s the enactment of policy, which is a sort of systems effect thing. And systems are another thing that would seem to be you know, other important materials. Time in particular is one of those things that, you know, we often talk about services unfold over time.

They’re different in that way from physical products because they sort of don’t exist outside of unfolding over time, I would argue. how did you deal with, with time? There’s a, there’s a section on time, timing, and time in. Yes.

[00:14:39] Stefan Holmlid: And I mean in that sense time, of course there are a lot of different ways of thinking about time, right?

And, and people in service design probably has their own way of working with time. but one of the things that we can. We can see, and that is also in this description of time as a materialist, that there are two different ways of thinking to, you know, very general ways of thinking about time. And then, which means that we approach time in different ways.

It’s the chronological way of thinking about time that time passes. It’s something we can measure. things happen at a certain point in time, et cetera. Right?

[00:15:13] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:15:13] Stefan Holmlid: on that chronology. And then it’s the the other way of thinking about time is usually called kairos. Or a tic time as I’m writing in the in the book which much more has to do with the experience of time of, um you know, something happening at an appropriate time rather than at a specific not 1501, but rather at the time when it’s needed, right?

[00:15:43] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:15:44] Stefan Holmlid: and those two different ways of thinking about time we can see in the way that service designers work and, but maybe they’re not necessarily so good at understanding and dealing with those two different ways. So thinking about time. So if we’re taking on a chronological way of thinking about time.

we actually need to be really good at working with, for example, if we try to prototype waiting time, you usually don’t make a prototype where you wait a week, which would be, it would be in, in real life, right? Maybe waiting for Yeah, yeah. To get a response from a doctors or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So then working with time in that way, you have to, as a material, you have to actually think really, really hard.

What is then the experience of waiting for a week and how can I simulate that in a prototype? which then introduces the chaotic way of thinking about time immediately. So this mix and understanding this mix and how they co-exist and how we can work and shape these materials, I mean, that’s really, really important to, to see that.

[00:17:05] Andy Polaine: yeah, I once did a actually a talk that you probably saw about service design and talking about time. ‘cause it’s such a, the perception of time is such a kind of relative thing, right? And so, as is quite well known, when they started putting dot matrix displays on bus stops and in train stations, you know where it says, you know, the next train is in one minute.

There’s some research across London underground of like how long a London Underground Minute is, and it’s, it’s not actually a minute, but with it. But it’s this idea that if you know how long you have to wait, then waiting for that amount of time, even if it’s a bit longer, doesn’t, it’s kind of okay.

What’s really, really irritating is, is the not knowing is the kind of death row aspect of, of kind of waiting for a bus or a train and you not knowing, because what you’re really calculating is, should I just walk? Now, or walk to the next one or get a taxi or whatever versus you know, waiting for this extra minute or two minutes.

And there was also some research on how much people, what their sort of hourly rate what they considered their hourly rate would be for waiting. I I, I think when I read it, it was like $50 an hour or something. But there’s this thing where it’s to do with quality too. So if you go into McDonald’s and you have to wait for ages, well, the, the trade off that you’ve made, which is, you know.

Crappy food, but you want it quickly his fails, right? Because you’re getting crappy food and it takes ages to come. And whereas if you go into kind of like a Italian, especially like a slow food restaurant and you order a risotto and the risotto comes within sort of five minutes, well, you know, they’ve just microwaved, right?

So there’s all these kind of trailers or sometimes you want to wait longer. ‘cause that part of it is, is part of the joy of the experience is to wait. And I find kind of times that are really interesting. Thing to play with and to explore. Yeah. yeah, and it, it gets lost a lot in that sort of very process oriented way of thinking about services, I think.

[00:18:57] Stefan Holmlid: Definitely. And, and I mean time also when we, when we work with time as a material, it also gives us possibilities to work with pacing, with rhythm, other things that has to do with our experience of things that happens. In time, right? Yeah. The process view is all about things that are happening and not so much, and not actually anything about time, just sequence.

so when we introduce time, both aspects of time, then we get this possibility to think about rhythm and pacing and just a, a public transport example again. Then in Stockholm, they experimented with. You know, as always, in larger cities there is this there buses are not always on time, uh mm-hmm given the time schedule that they have.

So they try out a, um instead of them having, when it. When the clog is kind of easing up, instead of them having four buses at the same bus stop that were, you know, at actually at different points in time, they started having this, the correct pace of the buses. So they were not allowed to drive.

You know, and, and queue up. They were only allowed to keep the same distance in time between each other. Okay. So people knew that bus 40 will be here every 15 minutes?

[00:20:29] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:20:29] Stefan Holmlid: That has nothing to do with, with the schedule or anything. Right. But with pace and rhythm.

[00:20:33] Andy Polaine: Right. Okay. Nice. Nice. Okay, so they’re just all sort of going around the circuit and keeping and keeping the same distance from each other.

[00:20:39] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah.

[00:20:41] Andy Polaine: So time, you know, you can kind of. I see how time gets lost, particularly in a, I mean, I, I would argue that part of the, one of the things that say digital product design in particular has kind of brought to the world is and, and it is actually, it’s inherited it from the kind of startup sort of Silicon Valley thing, which is that, you know, everything has to be as, we have to move as an organization, as fast as possible.

You know, speed defacto equals good. and I think it then. It doesn’t really get kind of considered that much. And then there’s, there’s, you know, there’s expectations which I think are important part of time. Those examples I gave before about some McDonald’s versus kind of slow food restaurant.

One of those things of kind expectations versus I. You know, what’s the reality of it? so those are kind of abstract, but as you start to think about them, you can start to break them down and start to kind of think about how you might consider them. Was this the sort of idea or the intent of the book that you were, you know, as you start to pull these things apart and examine them perhaps more closely than they have been before, that you would then start to actually see things you hadn’t considered to be materials, to be things you can actually.

Play with, experiment, with design with

[00:21:53] Johan Blomkvist: Yeah, to some extent. I mean, it’s been a very involved process with all the materials. So we started actually with pitches material pitches, and we asked people to pitch, you know, the most important or one of the most important materials in a short format for first.

and we wrote a few ourselves as well. And then we had a symposium and that symposium included a lot of discussion about materiality and materials, and we give some feedback to all the material authors. And after that we started the process of reviewing the suggestions for materials.

So, and one of the things that we. Definitely wanted people to think about and make sure that they could describe about their material was, you know, what is the role of this material in design? How is it shaped into more finished form? What does that process look like? I. To, you know, give people a sense of what, what they consider the MA material to be and, and that process of, of using the material as part of design.

So, yeah, and I mean, like I said, we’ve discovered a lot of materials, but also aspects, elements of the materials that we hadn’t previously thought about. So from that point of view, it’s been a really interesting journey.

[00:23:21] Andy Polaine: Were there any surprises of things that people pitched and came up with, but things that you hadn’t yourself thought of as a material of service design?

[00:23:29] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah, I, I, I mean, one of the authors suggested conversations.

[00:23:33] Andy Polaine: Hmm.

[00:23:34] Stefan Holmlid: As material.

[00:23:35] Andy Polaine: Hmm. Yeah, I saw that.

[00:23:36] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah. I hadn’t been thinking about conversations as a material to form. but you know, when, when talking about it, it becomes really obvious that yeah, this is one of those super important materials in service designing that is.

And probably in many different, not necessarily only in service designing, but uh

[00:24:00] Andy Polaine: definitely in service designing in

[00:24:01] Stefan Holmlid: general.

[00:24:01] Andy Polaine: That was Jonathan. Is it Yan? It is probably Yan. Is it Ron? YY yeah. Yeah, yeah. and Johan, you, you did behaviors I. Yes. you talked about, tell, tell us about behaviors as a, as a material.

[00:24:14] Johan Blomkvist: well as you know, behaviors are difficult to design directly, so it’s interesting, I think, from this feedback point of view. so feedback is a theme of of ours in the book. I guess. we talk a lot about feedback and how feedback, what it looks like. Um. We know some from behavioral psychology about what it means to design for behaviors, what we can do to influence behaviors, the tools that we have available to us.

We have choice architecture as one of the things that we can play around with as designers and both use and misuse, right? Yeah. It’s a difficult material to pinpoint. And I think the format, like it, it’s almost worth writing a whole book. I think about that specifically. And of course there has been books written about behavioral design.

So it’s a big topic and I, I chose to write. About some aspects of behavior and I try to focus as much as possible on, you know, what has been done to influence behaviors or to, to get specific behaviors to appear or in, be able to influence in, in a in a, in a positive way, how people behave in different situations, I guess.

[00:25:46] Andy Polaine: Yeah. It, it’s kind of pretty contentious this though, as well as a, as an idea, right? Because of obviously, you know. Part of it is, first of all, there’s a, I think there’s a school of thought which says you, well, you can’t design behaviors, you know, people just, people do what they do. which is obviously not true because we, we know there’s all sorts of things that nudge our behavior either intentionally or unintentionally.

But then the, you know, the other aspect is who, you know, who’s to say. What the better behavior is. And I think this is a trap that certainly a lot of my students fall into. I think there, and it’s, it’s very kind of good-willed based. I want people to be, be engaging in the political process more. I people should be more sustainable in their behavior.

And there’s a lot of people should be X, Y, and Z, but there’s, there are, who is the kind of arbiter of that? Did you manage to kind of navigate that at all when you were looking into this?

[00:26:38] Johan Blomkvist: I think I stayed clear of it as much as I could actually, so I took the, the easy way out there. No. Yeah. But I think one of the things that is very important in, in, in relation to that is, is this idea of feedback actually that, you know.

Knowing the material and knowing how the material feeds back or how the material reacts to whatever you’re doing, and the time spans of that. I mean, that’s the whole thing that we could open up even more, I think in the book that like understanding your material, regardless if you’re a carpenter or if you’re, you know.

If you’re a someone who paints or, yeah, play the piano or whatever it is, like, there’s always an understanding of what you’re creating and how that feeds back and you’re, you’re training yourself in being able to predict, I. The change that you are inflicting or imposing or you know, that comes with whatever you’re doing.

[00:27:38] Andy Polaine: Yeah,

[00:27:38] Johan Blomkvist: and I think that’s like part of what we also try to do with the book and in relation to behaviors, but also in relation to a lot of other materials. I mean, some people say that you can’t design service and I, I guess some of us say that you can’t. Some, some of the author might say that. So this idea of feedback, like that’s, that’s one way to understand the materials and think about, you know, when does material feedback, like when do you get, talk back from the material and in terms of behavior, it could be months or years after you do something that you actually see a change in behavior or.

You know, if it’s about clicking the right thing on a website, if you want to force people to do something, for instance, you can see it immediately. Because you can just measure that, okay, these are, that many people actually now click this way. So, and yeah, figuring out how those things, like the things that you do, how that relates to how people behave and things like that, that’s really difficult.

And I don’t think you can read about that. It’s something you have to test and try and, and learn about. Uh. about this and I, I, I mean, when writing the book and thinking about feedback and thinking about service, it was really interesting to think about how the materials influence each other. Like how conversations and influence behavior or how behavior influences thinking.

Yeah, thinking is another material that we have in the book. but also understand these feedback loops and how they can sort of. interact with each other, but also to be, to be able to figure out like, what can you, can I do for this service? Like, how can I, how can I understand the current behavior in this service and what does that mean for the feedback that I’m going to get?

Like, is there a threat of layoffs in this service that I’m entering into and I’m trying to change? Um. Like how, how can I approach this material? And that you have to be, you have to develop sensibilities for, for different types of situations. And I mean, understanding humans and understanding how they might be how they might respond to your actions as a, as a designer.

I think that’s really, really interesting.

[00:29:49] Andy Polaine: And non-humans, right? I know there’s a section on data and there you get the sort of, ethics gets touched on. I can’t remember if there is a section on, on ai. Is there. As a, as a sort of, as a material?

[00:30:01] Stefan Holmlid: Not directly.

[00:30:02] Andy Polaine: Would, would you have, if you were to, you write it now?

‘cause when, when did it come out? It’s, it’s been out for how long now? Roughly? The book Since

[00:30:09] Stefan Holmlid: December last year. Since

[00:30:10] Andy Polaine: December. Right, right. And so obviously the, the writing time and, and it takes a while for, from the final manuscript. Mm. But

[00:30:17] Stefan Holmlid: AI has

[00:30:17] Andy Polaine: been

[00:30:18] Stefan Holmlid: around since 59, you know, so it

[00:30:19] Andy Polaine: has been, been around for a long time.

Was that a conscious decision not to include that or did no one pitch that idea? Or was it you know, no, it wasn’t pitched. I say it now because there’s obviously been a talking of conversations. There’s obviously been, I. Quite a few cases of, of particularly chatbots. Right. Just kind of, they just get kind of launched into a, a, a customer service offering.

Right. And, and cause, cause kind of havoc in some respects, or at least, you know, if not havoc, then things go wrong. But actually in some cases real, actual problems.

[00:30:48] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah. So, so I think, I mean, one, one way of thinking about it is with the one of those frameworks we, we have in the book with.

Traditionally designed materials, catalyst materials, and, and co-design material materials, right? So when we think about AI as being part of a finalist service, in what, in what ways can we form what it does in that service? And is it then a traditional design material or is it a co-design material? And how, if we view it as a co-design material in that situation because I mean, in my view the final design of a service is always done in the situation.

so we prepare stuff that will be used for that final touch of design in the end. Right?

[00:31:36] Andy Polaine: Yeah. So if

[00:31:37] Stefan Holmlid: you then view AI as part of that, as a co-design material, then what do we need to do? Or if you view it as a catalyst material as something that will in the organization help the people who tries to understand what they’re doing helps them drive change or, or become better in service delivery, not delivering lousy food you know, with a waiting time of an hour.

Um. So I think this, this little framework we have is, is really, really important when we think about what it means when we say that something could be a material of service design, because we have to make a bit of a, a, you know, a bit of analytic thinking on if I view this as a traditional design material.

Let’s say ai. Yeah, and it, it’s actually something that I believe I can form. And then my actions as a designer, as a, as a person who tries to form that will be of a certain kind. But if I view it as a co-design material, then my ways of working with it will be totally different.

[00:32:46] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:32:47] Stefan Holmlid: And that goes to all those materials, right?

So like behavior is it something we try to design directly and form very, very much

[00:32:54] Andy Polaine: and sort of shape inness of an authorial way? You mean exactly? Yeah.

[00:32:58] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah. Or is it the catalyst material behavior is something that we need to understand and we can view it as a, as a material that will help us do other things.

[00:33:07] Andy Polaine: Yeah. So, you know, it’s one thing to, to put a book like this together. you know, and you’ve got all this collections and there’s a lot of thought and thinking around service design and what do you hope people will. Will do with the, with what you’ve come up with here, how, and maybe apply it to their work.

[00:33:24] Johan Blomkvist: Yeah. This is this is a tricky one actually. I, you’d think that we had a better idea about how people will use it, but the, the we talked about this, I mean, before we started writing the book, I guess, or when we just got started with it, that we wanted to write. We’ve been thinking about this for a long time and we wanted to, to write a book about this because it’s really interesting to us.

And I think that we said, or one thing that we said at least that stuck with me was that, you know, we’re, we’re service design nerds. Let’s write a book for service design nerds who might also find this interesting. and I think that is what we did. but I. Of course you don’t have to know a lot about service design, I think to read the book and, you know, have it mean something for you.

I think definitely it can help you expand your idea about design, what design can be, and what you can work with and for in design. I think it can be really valuable for teachers of design since they might be able to think about using, for instance, the categorization that we have suggested what kinds of designing they need to teach and think about in their curricula and things like that when they develop.

Um. Things like that. Yeah. So yeah, I, I, yeah, I think there, there, there are many recipients potential recipients at least of, of the book or, yeah.

[00:35:15] Andy Polaine: Yeah. No, that’s definitely, I can imagine. I mean, it’s stimulated some, some thinking for me for teaching. Sure.

[00:35:21] Stefan Holmlid: I mean, it also gives an individual designer the possibility to think about what kind of designer am I, what kinds of.

What kinds of materials am I confident working with? How do I want to develop? maybe also seeing new ways of thinking about materials that you have been working with for a long time.

[00:35:43] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:35:44] Stefan Holmlid: and, and so it, it also, and also for companies, right? What kind of a company are we, are we a company that are working with co-design?

Mainly? Then how do we talk about these traditional design materials and how do we make sure that we. In cases when we need that have the capacity and competence to, to work with that.

[00:36:05] Andy Polaine: Yeah,

[00:36:06] Stefan Holmlid: I talked about that before, right? It’s generative in that sense. Yeah. It gives the possibility to think about where am I, where do I wanna go?

what kind of design practitioner am I, what kind of design practices do we, do we make possible?

[00:36:19] Andy Polaine: Yeah.

[00:36:19] Johan Blomkvist: When we talk about the book with. Practitioners or when I talk about the book with practitioners, a lot of times they, they have suggestions for materials that they’re like passionate about, that they want, oh, you should have this material in the book.

It’s so important. And they also recognize some materials, and some materials are like provocative to some of them. So I think, I think there’s emotional elements of why it might be, uh. Fun or interesting to read the book?

[00:36:47] Andy Polaine: I, I seem to remember, I can’t remember now ‘cause it was a while since I read it, but there was a, the aim to sort of create some kind of repository of these things.

Is that still a plan or not?

[00:36:58] Stefan Holmlid: Yes. So we, the symposia thing, it started out as a way of thinking about whether we could create a, a materials library for Yeah. with this materials or service design, kinda framing. so we’re we’re running that. it’s still in uh. You know, under construction, kind of, of Okay.

Label. but there is a, a website where we will be collecting suggestions for new materials and also then having a, a process where there will be a feedback loops for, for people that are suggesting materials to develop them and to publish them. And so they will be available for everyone in, in the end.

[00:37:45] Andy Polaine: Okay. Alright, I will I’ll get to that in a second of where people can find you online. but before that, ‘cause we’re coming out to time, as you know, the, the show is named after the Ray and Charles Eames film Powers of 10, and it’s about the relative size of things in the universe and different levels of Zoom.

And it’s always been the way I’ve found it easiest to explain thinking about services actually. So the one final question is what one small thing is either overlooked or could be redesigned that would have an outsized effect on the world?

[00:38:15] Johan Blomkvist: So my sort of focus and what’s it called when you can’t let go of one thing, you know like mono.

Passion. Passion, okay. Yeah. Passion. I, I was going to say mono. I’m a monomaniac when it comes to prototyping and, uh. Representing your thinking. So externalizing going from something that’s in your head to putting it out in the world somehow. And I think designers in general maybe are good at that, but I think in service design it’s been a little bit overlooked and I think we should teach and practice a lot more.

The process of materializing service, different ways of doing that, different ways of making it accessible to yourself and to others for co-design processes or for traditional design processes. Then if we want to make that distinction again and I think that would have a huge impact if we could develop the practice of externalizing service to make it easier to work with these materials.

Yeah. That’s such a great answer. I love it.

[00:39:28] Andy Polaine: Stefan.

[00:39:29] Stefan Holmlid: Yeah, that’s always hard to follow up a great answer. Right? But no pressure. I’ll try. yeah. You want will, you will just give me help tomorrow. Right. But no, but one, one thing I, I’ve been working with the meeting between design and the. And the public sector for a very, very, very long time now since 2003, somewhere.

And I think one thing that is often overlooked in, when, when working with that meeting with between design and public sector is how zooming out is done.

[00:40:09] Andy Polaine: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:10] Stefan Holmlid: So zooming out from the specific you know, meeting with a, with a doctors or whatever the zooming out is usually done through through the service.

And you think that it’s a service, but it’s actually not. Right. It’s actually the materialization of the societal contract. Mm-hmm. Or the right. You have, um. And that of course looks different in different you know, in different political systems, et cetera. But it’s still the fact that if it’s public sector, it’s not a service.

So I usually say that public precedes service in public service, right? Yeah. and that’s something. So swimming out to the service world is kind of, maybe not the thing we should do, but zooming out into the public world is probably the more. From my point of view, at least the one that is overlooked.

[00:41:08] Andy Polaine: Good. Thank you very much. Another great answer. So I made a little URL for the book on with my, because of the, the actual publishers one’s very long. so if you go to PLN me, that’s kind of pal me slash materials, dash of dash sd, you’ll find a link to the publisher’s website for the book. where can people find you both online?

I’ll put ’em in the show notes. So,

[00:41:33] Stefan Holmlid: I’m mainly, I’m, I’m so old, so I’m mainly on LinkedIn and of course on the university and on Scholar, right? That’s my slow social media kind of place.

[00:41:45] Andy Polaine: Okay.

[00:41:46] Stefan Holmlid: I can be found on, on that bird platform. I never do anything there anymore, but that’s another question.

[00:41:54] Andy Polaine: Yes. Are you on Mastodon?

[00:41:56] Stefan Holmlid: No.

[00:41:57] Andy Polaine: Oh, I thought you were okay.

[00:41:58] Stefan Holmlid: Get on there. Prob, I probably have an account, right? But I’m not on. Okay. Alright.

[00:42:04] Johan Blomkvist: how about you, Johan? Yeah, very similar for me. ResearchGate also, if you’re a researcher, that’s where you can find the things that I do. I think I update most manually update my publications and stuff like that on on ResearchGate.

But o otherwise it’s LinkedIn or scholar, I guess. Yeah, or the university website. Yeah.

[00:42:26] Andy Polaine: Okay. I’ll put all the links in the show notes. thank you so much for both being my guests on Power of Ten. Thank you.

[00:42:33] Stefan Holmlid: Thank you.

[00:42:34] Andy Polaine: You have been watching and listening to Power of Ten, you can find more about the show on pal.com where you can also check out my leadership coaching practice online courses, sign up for my irregular use newsletter Doctor’s Note, and more thoughts and stuff around service design to if you have any thoughts, then you can put them in the comments below on YouTube or get in touch.

You’ll find me as @apolaine on pkm.Social on Mastodon. You’ll find me on LinkedIn and obviously my website and all those links will be in the show notes. Two. Thanks for listening and and watching, and I’ll see you next time.

​