Beyond the (individual) user: Service design, societal impact and the long-term view

Service designers need to raise their gaze from the individual user and take responsibility for not just broader societal impacts but how these develop over the longer term.

That at least was a message that featured in both the keynote talks at Camp Digital 2024, and as this is a topic that really interests me, and I decided to write a semi-review, semi-reflection based piece on them both!

Keynote 1: Lou Downe — ‘Bad Services: Why Services Fail and What We Can Do To Make Them Work’

The first keynote was given by a longstanding hero of mine.

[Side note: when you meet your heroes, don’t immediately blurt out ‘You’re my hero!’. Its not very cool and no-one knows what to say in response.]

You see, back in 2018 I got my hands on a copy of ‘Good Services’. And well, this wasn’t just a book I read: I poured over its 222 pages, lavishly highlighting, post-it noting and scrawling my own thoughts in an attempt to absorb its wisdoms. Containing 15 succinct principles for what makes ‘Good Services’, backed by an array of real world examples, and all wrapped up in a bold, bright package, the book seemed the very embodiment of a youthful, energetic and ambitious discipline, and indeed one that Lou had done so much to develop through their founding of Service Design as a role in UK government back in 2014.

Good Services. Definitely a good book.

Fast-forward 7 years from my book acquisition, and there I’m sat at Camp Digital, eagerly awaiting Lou’s keynote on ‘Bad Services’ — a kind of flipped-perspective companion to the book, focusing this time on the common ways that services can (still) get things very wrong.

‘Ease of use’

Lou began the talk by reminding us that the major goal of service design to this point has been for ’seamless ease of use’, for convenience for end-users. Most often, when services don’t tick these boxes, (and are therefore ‘bad’) that usually means for us as individuals that they:

…cost us time

…cost us money

However, it can be far worse than that. In some sectors, such as emergency healthcare, when services don’t work properly, they can:

…put us at risk

…or even ruin our lives

Well, so far, so routine. Good or bad, our understanding of the outcomes of services (nearly always) focus on users as individuals.

Lou Downe talked about ‘Bad Services’

But we then go somewhere a bit different.

Broader societal consequences

You see, Lou then pointed to some high-profile examples of the unintended, societal consequences of our drive for convenience. for the individual. Looking at London as an example, Lou highlights that ride-hailing and parcel delivery services have meant more vehicles and congestion at certain times, and the rise of a certain ‘vacation rental’ company that has led in some places to spiralling rent prices for those living there permanently.

Throwing down the gauntlet, Lou then implores us to raise our collective gaze, to take the responsibility that is surely ours, and ask ‘what is the impact of our work on the world more broadly?’. And not simply to understand the societal impacts in the now but also how these might develop over the long term

Wow. Yes. I agree!

Lou highlighted that the almost religious focus on the end-user has served to obscure the broader impacts of the services we design. And somehow that has seemed okay up to this point?

Yet having tantalised us by dangling this provocation, Lou swiftly returns to re-focus on their bread and butter: the ongoing battle to get the basics of services right for users and the organisations that provide them. And there the talk ends. Hopefully they’ll be some more on the topic in the upcoming ‘Bad Services’ book!

Take away questions

I come away with lots of questions in my mind, along the following lines:

• Clearly there is plenty of work still to do to get the ‘basics’ of service design right in many contexts, but can we afford to wait for perfect levels of seamless ‘convenience’ for end users before we start addressing the wider societal impacts? (Or environmental impacts — there’s a climate crisis?)
• How would we start to practically go beyond the normal bounds of the user-centred paradigm to include consideration of the (likely?) societal impacts of what we design in processes and decision making?
• How do we understand how these impacts evolve over time? How can we take meaningful medium and longer term views?

Keynote 2: Julian Thompson — ‘What If Every Digital Team Had an Afrofuturist?’

The second keynote asked us to reflect on the growing importance of the socio-digital realm, where our societies and digital technology increasingly intertwine. Like Lou’s talk, we were asked to consider the responsibilities that we have as designers to understand the broader social implications of digital products and services, but also, the question who it is amongst us that actually gets to ask the big questions about what shape our futures take.

The speaker was Julian Thompson, founder of Rooted by Design, a strategic design and research studio, which is described as ‘wholly in service to Black Futures — supporting the transition from challenges of the present, to the possibilities of the future’.

The problem (for this community)

The problem currently faced, as Julian described it, is twofold. We live in a society in which Afro-Caribbean communities have been traditionally pushed to the fringes and left exposed to a fast-changing world by entrenched inequalities. At the same time, we have a design discipline that largely reflects the imbalances and the peripheralisation of communities seen in society at large, and this means racial discrimination can be carried through into the digital realm.

Julian Thompson talked about the challenges faced by Afro-Caribbean communities in the UK, including the way they are left vulnerable to crises due to their historic marginalisation.

Genuine co-design, sharing power, diverse design teams?

In order to place outcomes for the Black community at the very heart of design processes, Julian suggests that we need to ground approaches in lived experience, to involve those who have traditionally been on the margins in meaningful ways. In practical terms this is about power, and that means that those who have taken power up to this point need to give it up, and real agency being transferred to the Afro-Caribbean community.

This can mean the inclusion of end-users and communities being designed with and for, but as the title of the talk suggests, we could perhaps (and might need to) go further than that. How powerful could it be if we had these communities represented as members on our design teams? Or indeed perhaps the whole team should have those experiences and backgrounds, as with Julian’s agency Rooted. What thriving might result for Afro-Caribbean communities if that was the case? What might that mean for the shaping of services like those focusing on recovery from debt, or those to empower better environmental and health outcomes in areas such as South London?

Julian talked about the fact that if the Afro-Caribbean community are not ‘active’ in forming and designing their own futures, then they will continue to be marginalised.

Futurism and the long-term lens

And then there is also the ‘futurist’ aspect to what Julian discusses, the challenge of escaping the ‘tyranny of the present’ and designing for longer term thriving. In order to do that he suggests we need to take the time to really understand what a community values, and therefore what we need to protect and promote in terms of traditions, culture and resources, before we then determine how we can design for its sustainability. In this way, we need design to really understand the need for plurality rather than (inadvertently) imposing assumptions of universalism.

The dangers of ‘digital colonisation’

And that need may become even more pressing if we look beyond our own shores where there may be some degree of what Julian calls ‘Digital colonisation’ in action — when standards, guides and patterns for the application of technology set by a particular demographic or culture (Western culture) are applied to another without questioning or understanding the needs of that culture. Julian points to this happening to Africa and Caribbean, which leads in some cases, to poor outcomes for the people living there.

A conclusion — and takeaways

As both these talks highlight, if we are concerned with the broader societal impacts of what we design, the elephant in the room is the long-established and cherished paradigm of user-centricity itself. Asking us to focus as it does (almost exclusively) on end-users, providing organisations and the application of technology, it leaves little room for understanding the bigger picture and including any insights in design processes.

Some kind of re-orientation of the design discipline is clearly required if we are to meet our responsibilities, and I would say these can and should include the economic and environmental implications of what we design, alongside the societal. And then we need to combine that with finding ways to understand how these may develop over time if we are truly to find a way to imagine sustainable futures. What sort of world do we want to live in and where can service design, or design more generally influence this, and whose voices should be included?

As ever the ‘How?’ question remains a much bigger challenge than the ‘Why?’, but that just means we have lots of work to do!