A Japanese merchant joined our troop to escape from U.S. military attack. He brought a huge bag of Japanese military money. In the jungle, these paper money had no value at all. The knowledge of which plant is eatable has by far much value.
––My father’s words on the retreat to mountains in
the Philippines during the last war
We humans are social animals. An independent person, without any social environment, can exist only in the theoretical, unrealistic context. The Japanese merchant thought money was the most valuable and useful thing for his family; this had been true in his former life. We ourselves may behave like the merchant and believe that the most valuable thing that we have been used to will be valuable for our customers even in the future. But alas, the situation may change dramatically, and nobody can tell when a catastrophe will occur.
I have learned this lesson at the time of the East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. Because of the loss of electricity, our city, though far from Fukushima, suffered a lot without ordinary food, several goods, gas, and other things.
This means that your service must be designed in the societal context. Let us see what you need to make your service highly valuable to society.
Service in the Societal Context
Your service is a social action in the sense that you are interacting with your customers and your supporters for the service. Your customer is not alone, he or she is connected with other people in many ways. Eventually, you are serving a group of people, or societies of people, not just one person whom you serve directly.
To design your service in the societal context means that you design your service as a part of your society, which means that you deliver some meaning and value to your group of people by your service.
This is a shift of your viewpoint from just business with your customer toward the bigger picture which includes you, your customer, your customer’s customer, and so on to all the stakeholders of your service.
It is also a challenge to you to explain the value you are providing to society. Are you bringing better quality to your community? Are you promoting safety to your society? Do you give joyful experience to the group of people who are engaging your service? Or, do you think of your service just for money?
Service Design for Society
When you say “Our service brings social value,” you could mean many things. One simple situation is that the service directly targets society. A more complicated situation is the case when your service has a social impact that is not obvious to other people. In the preceding sections, we have learned the design thinking approach and how to design our service. Now, we would like to think about the way to design your service to provide social value.
A critical element is the presentation of the social value that may not be obvious for other people. This is a variation of an advertisement in the sense that your intention is to make your service popular and attractive for the potential customer. This may also serve as communication to your people and other stakeholders of your service. So, there are lots of reasons why you should spend your time and money on this.
One of the very effective methods of advertisement is through the messages of other people in the society; some of them might be those who benefitted from your service, some of them might be just curious to know how your service affects society, and yet others might have a critical view of your service, that the service is not enough or is missing some points. Anyway, it is very important that somebody other than your inner circle talks about your service.
Service Design and Delivery for Society Toolkits
There are lots of service design toolkits available on the web. I have checked one of them, http://www.servicedesigntools.org/, which had a good variety of tools listed with explanatory materials. There are also textbooks such as This is Service Design Thinking: Basics, Tools, Cases (Stickdorn and Schneider 2012), which has numerous methods and tools listed. Parker and Heapy’s book The Journey to the Interface: How Public Service Design Can Connect Users to Reform (2006) is also a good introduction of service design in public context.
All these tools and toolkits are used for Service Design for Society when you add the society’s perspective. For example, Service Design Tools.org lists the following tools for the design phase: (a) story telling, (b) rough prototyping, (c) role play, (d) motivation matrix, (e) mind map, (f) LEGO serious play, (g) issue cards, (h) group sketching, (i) design games, (j) character profiles, and (k) affinity diagrams. All these tools are used in many ways, and there is nothing exclusively for society.
If we pick story telling as an example, it is a very general tool and can be used even in places other than service design. It can be used for psychological counseling, in nursing places, even for composition or a journalism course. Here, what we need to do is to add the perspective of society. You need to tell the story where your service will interact with the society. You must make up an anecdote to show how the individual in society can enjoy your service, or how much your service will help give society a good and healthy status.
In a recent case of ours, we collaborated with a music device maker for a kids’ workshop on electronics circuits. In the device maker’s context, it served as a product promotional event. However, with them, we developed a scenario where the kids and the parents together explore electronic circuits designs and experiments. The event took place at Kawasaki city, Japan, where many industries including electronics, chemical, and mechanical factories are found, and the electronic circuits design is one of the features that Kawasaki city boasts of.
The facility is a shared office and people have been working with the city’s administrators to promote new business ventures exploring this opportunity. Thus, our program is positioned as one of the events to promote the technical knowledge needed for future industrial plans for the city planners.
We have almost completed the design of your service. Let us take a break and look back at what we have learned with some refreshing topics around service and design.