Chapter 4

Intermezzo—Looking Back at What You Have Learned

At the ship, only your skill at hand and knowledge at head are accountable.

––My grandfather-in-law’s words on his ship at Kobe port

In our course, this is the time when groups of students go out for their projects and then, after a while, come back to report on the kind of services they have designed. We then have a session for presentations and discussions.

For the reader of this book, I urge you to try to design and sketch your service for a while. It is very important that you use both your hands and head to work out your design for your service. Just listening to (or reading) the lecture is not good enough for an in-depth understanding. Once you start to use your hands and head, you will start asking ­questions—what, how, and why you need to do such a thing, in such a way.

Now, once you have tried using your hands and head (and maybe your feet as well), you can take a little rest and look back at what you have learned. It is also a good thing to have a little cake, perhaps with a sip of coffee or tea, to look back. You may find new things, which you may have missed so far.

From Motivation to Delivery

In Chapter 1, I have mostly talked about the background or motivation for your service. In the physical class, this is very important even though it is not an easy task at all. Yet, getting to know the background of your students will help you to set your strategy and tactics to conduct your class effectively. It is one of the keystones for the design of your service. It boils down to a popular phrase, know your customer, but the practice will tell you the work means much more than knowing. It is actually sharing and the making of the community with your customer.

Writing a book is a difficult task in this regard. However, some authors feel it is easier to write a book as there would be no necessity to know your audience. You can just write the text as you like since you cannot tell who the readers of your book are going to be.

Well, I hope I have written about what you may have hoped to read. However, even when you have met the student and you have thought you understand his or her desire, you cannot tell whether your talk has satisfied him or her or not.

Now, once you are motivated, you should set to work instantly. However, you may need some guidance on where to go and how to start, so I put design thinking as an approach for starting your motivated activity.

In a way, this specific approach to design thinking is my motivation to write a book, as I am not satisfied with the traditional approach to service design. It might be specific to the Japanese community, but people in service design have been too involved in service performance and fancy gadgets using information and communication technology.

The motivation and starting your service with available tools would be most important and exciting; the performance and fancy operations will come later, or at least you can find the way to manage them.

The design thinking approach is an open framework to make things or to rethink things. However, an attractive approach alone cannot ­produce anything. When I was involved in the study of design thinking, I have heard many criticisms that there is no assurance that design thinking can solve a problem or innovate anything.

Well, in many fields, there is no assurance you can succeed, yet what we know is that there are many people who succeeded by using the design thinking approach. Also, any approach always brings up arguments about what is the right approach, and what kind of approaches are the wrong ones. These arguments are not useful for practitioners who are searching for results.

People have been very fierce when arguing about which approach is right in terms of orthodoxy. However, as you know, these arguments may not be fruitful in terms of your customers’ interests or viewpoints. They do not care what kind of approach you took to design your service. They only care about the outcome or the actual service they get. Deng Xiaoping once said that it doesn’t matter whether it’s a white cat or a black cat; a cat that catches mice is a good cat, so it is with the approach. Whichever brings a better result is the better one.

So, you had better work on the delivery of your service rather than arguing which approach is better, authorized, or reasonable. Even if your approach is not the best, once you can deliver your service, you can revise it to make it better, and eventually you will come up with a service that is better than the best one at the first try.

Global Service Versus Local Service

One of the criteria for the design of your service is whether your service has a global reach or not. I am not saying that your service should be global, but you need to think whether your service has a global reach or not. Global service and local service have different traits. The number of service recipients are quite different from local to global. The global market can count on 7 billion people in total, and the number is still increasing and will be more than 10 billion by the end of this century, though the forecast is that the number of people will reach saturation in the next century and the world may experience the first decline after the industrial revolution.1 Compared to this, the local market is small. Even the largest local market, China, may touch the ceiling of 1.4 billion in this century, but they will also see the decline of their population in this century. However, the closeness with the customer will be much more in local service than in a single global service.

People nowadays try to combine global components and local components to make the best one; combining global low-cost supply and local specialized supply, for example, in a hotel will make your service special and within a reasonable price range. Sometimes this means a global reach with local supply, where the global delivery becomes the crucial element in your service. Franchising your service may be another approach to deliver globally with local supply which may combine the global process with a local solution for local customers.

As an approach, you can pick up a global target with huge volume, but your current operation may be catering to local customers with limited volume. It is the design principle that keeps the global standard but fabricates with local management to deliver the service.

We tend to think that the global and the local are trade-offs, but in the real situation, we need to combine global and local at the same time in the same delivery. It is not like the saying think global, act local, but a more concrete delivery with a combination of global operations and local products.

Think Carefully Versus Act Instantly

It is interesting that people can be divided into two groups when asked to come up with some design. One group takes considerable time for the design, while the other group jumps into prototyping their ideas. Usually people try to divide themselves into these two categories: think deliberately or act without thinking.

Some people urge you to take time to think: Consider every possible opportunity and every risk accompanying the activity of your service. They believe good planning is the best way to produce best results.

Other people recommend you to start your service quickly: You can learn many things from your service, and revise your service accordingly thus leading you to success. They believe that the time is most precious resource and a quick response is the best way to achieve the best service.

The best thing would be reasonably quick action with reasonable consideration, because you do not like to lose the opportunity but you would also like to avoid any risks with foreseeable problems.

One approach for this would be thinking along doing or quick response with good thinking. However, it is tough to find the best combination of action and planning. Even for the common practice of prototyping which is one of the basic tools for design thinking, we often ask how many prototypes are enough for starting the service. One? Two or three? Dozens?. There would be no definite answer to this question. It depends on the situation. It also depends on the purpose of the prototyping—just testing the response or understanding the perception of the customers.

You may have learned lots of other things. Please just look back at some of them, which will give you some idea about what you are planning to do with your service, and also about the design thinking approach. Now, let us come back to the mainstream of the service design and finish with our collaboration.