Tag Archives: service design

February 19, 2014 | 0 Comments

Transforming complex systems: a case study in service design


JakeJake Garber is a senior service designer for Innovation Unit. He uses a service design approach to help partner organisations address challenges in a radically different way. Jake specialises in using ethnographic research to unlock hidden insights and prototyping to develop very different ways of working. Before joining Innovation Unit he worked at the social innovation agency Participle, amongst other things, helping to design and launch Backr, a new social enterprise that helps people to invest in their own employability. Previously he researched and co-wrote Dying for Change with Charles Leadbeater at Demos and ran community development art projects with Gypsy Roma children in East London at The Children’s Society.

Editor’s note: This month, Jake Garber‘s account delves into his ethnographic research into the challenges of designing services for families facing difficulties such as suicide, incest, and long-term unemployment. Beyond the challenges inherent in working with such vulnerable populations, the service for which they conducted design research ultimately needed to coordinate the activity of over 20 different government agencies – each with their own priorities, budget conflicts, and factional interests.

This case study used ethnographic research and service design to put vulnerable families at the heart of a new system of support. In this post he outlines one family’s turbulent pursuit of stability, while reminding us of the critical importance of two valuable commodities: time and empathy.

The Trouble Families research is a project of Innovation Unit, a not-for-profit social enterprise that uses the power of innovation to solve social challenges.  Jake spoke about this research at the most recent EPIC 2013 Pecha Kucha in London.

For more posts from this EPIC edition curated by editor Tricia Wang (who gave the opening keynoted talk at EPIC this year), follow this link.

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Riding around with no place to go. © Innovation Unit 2012

Let’s imagine we’re designing a new service for families. To be confident our service is going to work for these families, it’s going to be pretty important to understand what they value, what their priorities are, how they see the world and how they respond to it. Ethnographic research can make important and decisive contributions to this task.

Now imagine we’re designing a new service for very vulnerable, complicated and often misunderstood families. Not only that, but we want to deliver our service through a complex and overlapping system of more than 20 separate agencies. This time ethnographic research is not only vital for understanding what can make a difference; it is also indispensible if we’re going to maintain focus on families and avoid getting completely lost in organisational bureaucracy.

In my work at Innovation Unit we support public services to radically improve what they do. In the service design team here, we rely heavily on an ethnographic style of research to ground and inspire the work we do.  I want to share a story of one of our recent projects to illustrate how we use ethnographic style work to create human centered system transformation.Read More… Transforming complex systems: a case study in service design

February 17, 2014 | Comments Off on Ethnographers creating a better bus riding experience for a diverse set of passengers

Ethnographers creating a better bus riding experience for a diverse set of passengers


Screen Shot 2014-01-21 at 1.47.36 PM Lionel Ochs (@lionelochs) is Principal at Méthos, a Paris based research agency with a focus on strategy and product/service design for companies.

Editor’s Note: Along with many other ethnographic researchers, I’m always interested in hearing about field sites that are “out of the ordinary.” In the case of Lionel Ochs’s (@lionelochs) latest project at Méthos, his field site happened to be in motion, in the form of months of long-haul bus riding across Europe.

Méthos undertook Europe-wide ethnographic and design research to define the service guidelines for a high-quality holistic travel experience, which SNCF (French Rail) has implemented in the/its successful iDBUS (service). Lionel and his fellow researchers in collaboration with the innovation consultancy idsl set out to define what a better bus riding experience would consist of. As more and more riders are drawn to long distance buses globally, the shortcomings of present service offerings have never been more visible than today, and Méthos’ project has come at a time when it’s impact could be massive and far-reaching. Enjoy Lionel’s insightful observations, fascinating field note excerpts, and colorful “field experiences” (when was the last time your bus trip’s soundtrack was a chorus of inebriated Englishmen?)

For more posts from this EPIC edition curated by  editor Tricia Wang (who gave the opening keynoted talk at EPIC this year), follow this link.

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Cars, trains and planes promise mobility, freedom and discovery, but traveling on them is becoming increasingly expensive. The decision to deregulate European long-distance travel prompted SNCF (French Rail) to aim for the lead in this market by providing high-quality European Coach travel services at affordable prices.

Méthos undertook Europe-wide ethnographic and design research to define the service guidelines for a high-quality holistic travel experience, which SNCF has implemented in the/its successful iDBUS (service). A collaboration with the innovation consultancy idsl presented as an artifact at the last Epic Conference in London.

ON THE ROAD

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Europeans look down their noses at long-distance bus travel. It is inexpensive and second-rate, and therefore tacitly intended for penniless students, immigrant workers and young professionals hoping to make it big in our European capitals. In many ways, therefore, long-distance bus travel is a parallel means of transport, frequented by populations that we do not see on trains or planes—even if higher fuel and train ticket prices are ushering in growing ranks from among other social classes, which the economic downturn is slowly reaching.Read More… Ethnographers creating a better bus riding experience for a diverse set of passengers

March 2, 2012 | 0 Comments

Core 77 Spotlights Service Design Ethnographer, Panthea Lee


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Image courtesy of Panthea Lee

Ethnography Matters hopes to interview Panthea Lee of reBoot with our own list of questions, but in the meantime, Dave Seliger of Core 77 tracked Panthea down A Better World By Design conference. For those of you who are not familiar with Panthea’s work, Tricia Wang wrote about Panthea’s Design Research essay a few months ago on Ethnography Matters.

We liked Panthea’s explanation of NGO’s perception of their own value in a community:

With a lot of these NGO’s, people assume they’re doing a lot of good work and then they design a program poorly or design a bad service and they put it out there and beneficiaries have to use it because they don’t have any other options. There’s no accountability.

Panthea then cuts through the hype of designing for “social change”:

Design for social change is a very “sexy” topic and you see a lot of design firms now going to the public sector and to NGO’s saying, ‘We’re designers, we’re here to help you!’ And they’re like, ‘What are you talking about? You don’t speak our language, you don’t know development theory, you don’t know our approach.’ It helps to know why things are the way they are today because so much of the time you see people jumping in and saying, ‘We’re going to design for change and things are going to be better.’

But what’s the context around why we have these problems to begin with? What has already been tried? I think design firms—well-intended, very talented—don’t always understand that and so I think governments look at them a little weirdly. With most of the people from Reboot, we come from those kinds of organizations and we know what we don’t know. I think that is an advantage for us.

Read the rest of the interview with Panthea on Core 77, A Better World By Design Spotlight on Panthea Lee of Reboot.  And if you didn’t get to go the conference, Dave Seliver provides a roundup of each day of the conference a the end of the post!