Service Design for India: Change in Design & Management Schools needed

Image: A page from the booklet "Design for Services" launched by SEE Design Network of Design Wales, Cardiff. Full pdf files can be downloaded from the links below.

Service Design for India: Change in Design & Management Schools needed

Service Design is an emerging discipline that lies between the various fields of Design and Management. It is the cusp of both these major disciplines, which in India have rarely met or exchanged expertise in an educational setting. Design schools do not teach management in depth nor do management schools teach about design, leave alone design management. We have thousands of management schools in India when the pressing need is for the creation of experts who can innovate great services across a huge number of sectors of our economy. In my view design is needed critically in as many as 230 sectors of our economy and I have written about these in the past.

Across the world many management schools have started embracing design and innovation as a core offering to their students and in this the charge is led by the Rotmans School of Management, Toronto and a less known school in Scandinavia called the KaosPilot, both of which have been covered in previous posts on this blog. In the 80’s the London School of Business had produced a book on Design Management and at both the Stanford University, USA and the University of Industrial Arts, Helsinki, there have been concerted efforts to bring together Design, Technology and Management through a planned series of projects that bring together faculty and students from all these disciplines in a transdisciplinary format. The Design Council, London had spearheaded an initiative called RED where a series of innovative design and management exchanges had led to the development of some very interesting new services, all designed by keeping users in mind. The Design Wales too has been working with SME’s and local businesses to assist them to refine their service offerings and their booklet on service design is a very refined offering that can be downloaded as a pdf file. (see link below)

Several unusual experiments have been taking place in this space and the work done at the Mayo Clinic, USA is one that stands out in using the IDEO methodology to improve the service offerings of the medical establishment and their hospital chain, which has been covered in an earlier post on this blog. This year the KaosPilot school from Sweden has deputed 35 of their students to spend their “Outpost” session of three months in the field at Mumbai, and they are in the city till the end of May 2008 to explore the creation of new and compelling services that can build local entrepreneurship in a number of areas of service offerings from transportation to health systems. The Welllingker School of Management in Mumbai has started a masters programme in Design Management and NID Ahmedabad has a programme on offer called Strategic Design Management, but these are very little for a huge country like India and many of the other management schools should consider offering such programmes if we are to make headway in improving our services with the use of design and innovation, all managed by expert hands that are trained to do the job. The National Design Policy must take this into account when we try and take design forward in India.

There are many online resources that provide insights into service design and its emerging boundaries and some of these are listed below for immediate access:

1. Design Council, UK: Service Design

2. Rotmans School of Management, Toronto: Integrative Thinking

3. KaosPilot, Denmark: Design of New Businesses

4. Service Design: Wikipedia: Definition and links

5. Service Design Research: Rich Collection of Papers

6. ServiceDesign.org: Resources hosted by live/work UK

7. Design Wales, Cardiff: SEE Design Journals

8. SEE Design, Design Wales, Cardiff: Service Design booklet Download pdf files links: Part 1: Part 2:

9. Design Management Institute

10. Domus Academy - Business Design Department

Rotmans School of Management, Toronto: Business School that is steeped in Design Understanding

Image: Six Recent covers of the Rotman Magazine
Rotmans School of Management, Toronto: Business School that is steeped in Design Understanding
Besides the KaosPilot, a small school located in Aarhus, Denmark that I wrote about on this very blog (see 22 July 2007 post) there is another cool school that has been seriously using design thinking and action as their primary tool for preparing management students to face the challenges of the emerging creative economy. This is the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management in The University of Toronto. Since 1998, when their Dean – Roger Martin – came to the school from industry with his insights that design was something that all successful business leaders used intuitively, he decided to articulate an innovative path forward in management education by applying this insight to the design of business programmes. They have come a long way since then and the efforts are bearing fruit if we look at the acknowledgement that is coming from the business press.

Businessweek and Fortune magazine have both already rated the school among the top ten schools which is a hard fought position of recognition for leadership in a highly competitive space of business education across the globe. In my view they are already ahead of the best since they have seen the value of design and innovation and have managed to integrate the lessons into the programmes offered to their students. The future is already here. I would like to see this interest in design and creativity enter into the fabric of management education in all our Indian schools and only then do I believe will we be able to achieve the universal mission of quality of life that the "Eames India Report" had called for way back in 1958 when the NID was being contemplated in India. (download Eames Report pdf 359kb)

BusinessWeek has once again recognized the contributions of the Rotman Dean, Roger Martin and he has been named a “B-School All Star” – According to BusinessWeek – “Martin's micro-innovation mantra has shot through business circles worldwide: To succeed, he says, corporate managers should become flexible problem-solvers, not sophisticated numbers-crunchers.“ – In 2005, his inventive teachings, which meld business and design thinking, earned him a spot on BusinessWeek's list of "innovation gurus."

Rotman School has adopted a policy of integrating design into management education and to quote an official communiqué of the school which says – “The University of Toronto's Joseph L. Rotman School of Management has set out to become one of the world's top tier business schools. Located in North America's 3rd largest financial centre, the Rotman School is taking an innovative approach to management education, built around Integrative Thinking™ and Business Design™”, which will amply illustrate my point.

The Rotman focus on innovation and creativity has been able to attract great faculty to their school and now Richard Florida, the guru of the Creative Economy fame, has joined forces with the school to build its forward movement, as reported by the school.

Image: More covers – a must see list
Will the numerous Indian schools of management take note of these moves taking place far away, half way across the globe, and will the Government of India listen to these examples and relent to include design at the core of its planning agenda? Only time will tell, since we can only hope and wait to see if these messages sink in and bear fruit eventually, which I do hope is sooner than later. The lessons from the Rotman School of Management are thankfully available for all to see through their remarkable programme of publication that has been sustained over the last ten years with three issues each year, each addressing a specific theme or industry sector and each exploring in depth how design thinking and innovation can make a significant impact across these sectors, very impressive indeed. All the issues of their magazine can be downloaded from their website at this link here. The image above would just give a glimpse of what to expect, go get it.

Great stuff. Very stimulating indeed.

230 Sectors of Economy for Design Action in India

We have been giving an assignment to our students in the "Design Concepts and Concerns" course since 1999 at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad that requires them to brainstorm and build a model of the Indian economy from the point of view of design opportunities that are embedded therein. The very fact that they address these broad perspectives in their foundation programme we feel that it would influence their career choices as the go forward in their education at NID and in their professional lives. These sectors are a mixed bag of industry types and service sectors where design is being used in India and these fall under several ministries of the Government of India.

Our list is actually longer than 230 in number but the figure is not an absolute one, give or take a few. However when we had built models of the sectors in the classroom, one of the groups had a logic for the number “230” by virtue of their categorisation effort and this figure has stuck in all my references ever since. These are shown in the diagrams shown here in low resolution in order to appreciate how we did this exercise and arrived at the list of categories for Design action in the Indian economy. I had included this description in an invited paper that was prepared for the Design Issues Journal (the special issue on India that has been released last year) but unfortunately my paper was turned down for lack of space. My paper was titled "Avalanche Effect.." (October 2002) and it was based on my course at NID and I had immediately released it on the PhD-Design list and one can search for "Avalanche Effect" there.
or download the paper from my website here.


The illustrations shown above include the Sectors of the Economy models by our students and I think the logic was as follows: two kinds of outputs - Products and Services: multiplied by five types - hardware, software, infrastructure, organisation and policy, procedures and business models – all applied across 23 broad sectors or ministries gives us 230 classes of sectors that could use design for development. (matrix of 5 broad fields x 2 types x 23 sectors = 230)

(5 fields: Nature, Society, Work, Life & Play)
(2 types: Products & Services)
(23 sectors or ministries – agriculture, health, industry, mining, ……)
see post below


This image is a map of the sectors using a city as a metaphor and the streets represent the ministries and sectors while the title is a call for a Ministry of Design, how insightful.

I do intent to take this further and make a full paper (when time permits) with a projection of the kinds of institutions that we will need to build in order to service this enormous task in India (and elsewhere) in the years ahead. I have already been involved in the design and establishment of three “schools of design" that address different sectors of the economy and this way we can find funding from different ministries and industry groups to make this happen as we go forward. The IICD, Jaipur is a school for the crafts sector in India, the BCDI, Agartala is a school for the bamboo sector in India and the Accessory Design Department at NIFT, New Delhi – for which I was an advisor – is a school for the jewelry, lifestyle & clothing accessory sector in India, we need many more such design initiatives. We still need to find the core of design capabilities that need to be at the centre of all these plans. We have reports on these initiatives that were prepared over the past ten years or more and these can directly download from my personal website link here.

We would explore this further as we go forward and in my view design still needs to be understood in the context of all this complexity in that days ahead. As you will see, this is not a fully developed theory as yet but it is something that we can work with towards a better understanding of design and to see its impact at the macro-economic level. I have placed a new model using my Hyderabad keynote to the HCI-USID 2007 conference last month on my post below and one can download this model of design opportunities and the brief list of design disciplines, design sensibilities and design knowledge which need to be part of any new school of design in the years ahead. I believe that besides designers we will need to open the field to managers and other specialists to use the discipline of design and this will be the general challenge in the days ahead. Bruce Nussbaum talks about the need to get CEO’s to adopt design thinking as a way of life in his recent blog post on BusinessWeek Online which is very heartening to hear from a management perspective. He is echoing the views of people like Roger Martin of Rotmans in Toronto and Uffe Ulbaek of the Kaos Pilot, Denmark as well as other thinkers such as G K Van Patter of NextD, New York who is advocating the shift to Design 2.0, a new collaborative space that addresses complex problems rather than specialization bound frames of thought and work.

I am currently interacting with a team of international experts on developing this list further and Dr. Ken Friedman, Denmark, Dr. Terence Love, Lancaster, UK, and Filippo A. Salustri, Toronto, Canada are cooperating online through the PhD-Design list as a team who are trying to take this forward as a well developed framework over the next few months of online collaboration. We will share the outcomes in public as soon as we are ready with our conceptual structure.

See also ...What is Design?