I hope you have enjoyed reading this book. I also hope you have tried to design your service, and even prototyped it and tested how other people have responded to it. If you are reading this paragraph, before reading other parts, as I sometimes do, please read some introductory parts first, then come back here.
Reading this book is a journey to unknown places; you may have heard something from your friends. You may have enjoyed some scenes that you have not seen before. You need some review to understand what you have seen. Let us look back at our steps.
We started by discussing the lifelong goal in “The Goal for Your Service” (Chapter 1). This is the background and the eternal goal of your service. Have you confirmed that the service you have designed here will help you to reach your lifelong goal?
The succeeding discussions on society (“Our Society in the Near Future” in Chapter 1), your business (“Your Business Prospects” in Chapter 1), and the focus of your service (“Focus on Your Services” in Chapter 1) are all preparatory works for setting the goal of your service, which again provide the motivation and are prerequisites for designing your service.
The reason I placed emphasis on these preparatory sections is that I believe they are indispensable for you to work out the design of your service. It is true that the essence of the design thinking approach and techniques are so valuable that you can enjoy the merits and advantages when you learn them without any motivational goals, just for learning. Yet, I sincerely hope that the knowledge you have got from this book can be deployed to bring forth some fruits that you can share with others, not remain just pure knowledge for its own sake, because the approaches advocated in design thinking is the knowledge with your hands to be used to bring forward something real in our daily life.
In Chapter 2, I explained what is design thinking. One of my messages here is that there are multiple definitions and viewpoints for design thinking, and it is okay and perhaps good for design thinkers who deploy and advocate design thinking. I hope you have developed your own idea about your design thinking.
In “Design Thinking Mindsets” (Chapter 2), I emphasized the importance of mindsets for design thinking. In general, the mindset is, as Carol Dweck explains in her book (Dweck 2006), a very powerful influence on people for learning and in motivating them to pursue further activities. Likewise, the design thinking mindset will open your eyes to everything around your service.
In other words, to learn the design thinking approach is to capture the design thinking mindset and use it to understand what is happening around the problem for which your service will deliver the solution. That is why the design thinking approach is so effective and also why experience in the design thinking work is much more important than the tools and methods to conduct the workshop. It is the mindset that is the core of the design thinking approach.
However, “Design Thinking Toolsets” (Chapter 2) introduce the tools
to conduct design thinking-based service development. The toolsets “IDEO’s design thinking for educators toolkit” and Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation will help you to try what you have learned when motivated by the mindset.
You should note that the mindset and the knowledge of design thinking alone cannot bring about the creation of your intended service. You need to act, or try to do it and see how people you intend to serve respond to your work. Tools will help you to convert your ideas into something tangible, and your work will give you insight into how your mindset is ready and responsive to what you are thinking of.
Also, the important part of these toolkits is to tell you what kind of team you need to build your service. Like human beings, services also evolve. Your service needs to grow with your team of people who are involved in or related to your service, that is, the stakeholders of your service. Again, the evolution will come from hands-on activities. You will have some ideas about evolution, but the real change and growth can be quite different from what you have thought, and that is the real fun with the experience of your service.
The importance of doing and experiencing is emphasized in “Try to Design Your Service” (Chapter 2) as well. The advantage of the class in school is that the workshop is conducted with participants. A book can address far more people with its contents; however, the author cannot know whether the reader would have tried out what he or she has learned from the book. And you know that the knowledge becomes real when you have experienced its usefulness (or in fact if it could not help you, you can check if you have the right knowledge or not).
“How to Deliver Your Service” (Chapter 2) discusses the delivery of the service that you have designed so well. Designing the service is one thing, delivery of the service is another. I have been engaged in the System Integration service business where people tend to focus so much on the design and development of the system, and unfortunately, do not pay enough attention to the delivery and operation of the system after its completion.
Any information system is neither useful nor worthwhile if it is not deployed for real operation, even if the design and development have been great and wonderful. Likewise, your service cannot be real unless it is delivered to your customers. The delivery is so important, but sometimes it is neglected because there are too many situations and things around the delivery.
In Chapter 3, “Societal Approach,” I have shifted your attention from the focus on your service operation to a wider context in the community where your service and your stakeholders are involved. This is important for the service business much more than the manufacturing business, because the people with whom we relate constitute the social entity. Even a physical product, such as a smart phone or a bolt, will be affected by a change in society, more so for our service product where the people’s response to our service is in the social context.
“Service in Societal Context” (Chapter 3) brought our attention to this context for our service, emphasizing the shift in the viewpoint. The following “Service Design for Society” (Chapter 3) discusses the social value of your service to the society. Here we understand the importance of communication about the value of our service.
In “Service Design and Delivery for Society Toolkits” (Chapter 3), we discuss the approach to adapt the existing and available toolkits to design our service, addressing social values. Since the social viewpoints are indispensable to our service, we can put more emphasis on our social value with our service, present them to the public, and get the feedback to enhance and advance our service so that we can promote its total value to society.
Chapter 4, entitled “Intermezzo,” summarizes the main theme of the book, and lets you look back on what you have learned so far, and gives some additional, refreshing ideas around our theme of “service design with design thinking approach.” I repeat here that this is a good point for you to work your service design with your hands.
I have picked motivation, global and local, and quick response as subjects for discussion so that you can check your knowledge and understanding about the service design and design thinking approach with some fresh aspects.
The Chapter 5 is the final part of the service design in this book which discusses prototyping and work-out of your service. As you have seen in the design thinking toolkits shown in “Design Thinking Toolsets” (Chapter 2), prototyping is one of the steps of design thinking approaches; however, it is often the case that when your prototype works well your service will start with a little modification of the prototype you have made.
“How to Prototype Your Service” (Chapter 5) repeats what is a prototype again, and discusses what to keep in mind while making the prototype. The first rule is to make it quick, and the second is the focus on the essence or core business part of your service. And the third is the future customer involvement. Adaptability comes in as the fourth and last principle.
Adaptable service is a must in this ever-changing world of ours; however, this does not mean you need not try to search for the best service ever in your area. It does not mean that a just-do-it type of prototyping is enough. No, you need to explore any better idea and better approach for your intended service.
Adaptability in prototyping means that the essential part of your service is to pursue the best of best services available to your target customers, and you are ready to shift to the unknown future customers about whom you have no idea at this moment.
One of the tough and interesting parts of services compared to physical products is this ever evolving customer interaction. In the case of physical objects, you can set up your qualification criteria in the domain of fixed numbers to be measured with physical devices. Services, on the other hand, are essentially human interactions and change according to the context in which they are served.
We discuss the evaluation of your service after the delivery in “How to Evaluate Your Service” (Chapter 5). I do not mean that we can skip the delivery step. Delivery is a must for your service, and you need to do it by yourself. However, I can tell you that you can make a much better delivery when you check what will be needed after the delivery. The evaluation system is one of the necessities after the service delivery, and your knowledge about it will make your delivery more valuable in the long run.
“Evaluation Systems—People and Sensors” (in Chapter 5 under “How to Evaluate Your Service”) discusses components of the evaluation system which is eventually an ecosystem of your service. Yes, you need to provide a better eco-system for your service, and the evaluation system is a very important part of it. “Evaluation Timings––Overhead and preparation for emergency” (in Chapter 5 under “How to Evaluate Your Service”) presents how to handle the timing and the cost of evaluation as well as how it becomes important in the worst case situation for your service.
As with the ecosystem, you need to understand that the tough time for your service is the most appropriate time for you to think of your service, hopefully from another viewpoint than you have thought at the time of designing it. You may be a genius or so lucky that you may experience no failure but only success. But such a case is rare, and normal people will experience lots of rough situations, sometimes too much. You need to set your mindset to accept these tough situations and turn them into great opportunities to provide much better services either with new values, new approaches, or new customers.
In “Revising the Evaluation Systems” (Chapter 5 under “How to Evaluate Your Service”), I really talk about the revision of your service, not to say the renovation of all the systems. When you can successfully continue your service, you get a sense of stability, a sense of control of your service ecosystem that it is very likely that your service can sustain as long as you are working as of today.
However, changes will occur in places where you cannot detect the change itself. Time is capable of destroying all things including the most powerful persons and their possessions. Your powerful service may have suffered this very slow but powerful damage by time. The only way to counter this problem is to revise your service all the time to accommodate any change even if it is very small and subtle.
Chapter 6 brings real-world cases to review what we have learned. These cases also tell the important fact that these practitioners are employing and deploying design thinking techniques in their pursuit but they have not learned these skills in any school. In other words, a part of the skills and techniques in design thinking are quite natural for these creative people. This is not to say that there is no value in learning in school. It says there are more things to learn other than what is taught in school.
These cases also tell you the tough part of the real business. For example, in the case of “Toys Yoshida,” their outcome is great but not so wonderful compared with some very successful stores in other areas such as some grocery stores in Hokkaido. In the case of Tsutomu, he complains that the current situation of Japanese children is still no good that he observes many kids do not have their own dreams at all.
The skills and techniques mentioned in this book are not absolute. We do have lots of limitations and restrictions that affect the outcome. And these cases and other experiences tell you that you should not give up. It sounds like a tautology when you say that you can succeed if you do not stop working for success, but real cases illustrate the value of this principle.
I have picked up cases in Japan because I have local knowledge about them and have contacts with these people. You should try to pick up your local cases, which I strongly recommend for your exercises.
Now, we have reviewed what we have talked and learned in this book.
So, only thing I can say to you is, “Good work! Good luck with your service!”
Thank you for reading this book and I hope to keep in touch with you in connection with this design thinking approach, but I also hope that we can have a chance to work together for any other things and businesses so that we can explore other new exciting things!1
Sayonara! And hope to see you again!
1If you have any question and comments about this book, you can send e-mail to [email protected]