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

CII-NID Design Summit, Bangalore 2007: Focus on the National Design Policy

The CII NID Design Summit 2007 was kicked off in great style by Uday Dandavate, Design with India, with the screening of two song sequences from Bollywood in the sixtees and from the current crop, the first showed Nutan doing a homely Garba dance and the other with Bipasha Basu in Omkara, a stark reminder that we have all come a long way since Independence. Yes, India is changing and we expect it to change even more rapidly in the days ahead since the world has just crossed the urban rural ratio going in favoutr of the urban settlements for the first time since the dawn of civilization.In the India Report of 1958 Charles Eames had warned us about the nature of this change. He says – ”… we recommend that without delay there be a sober investigation into those values and those qualities that Indians hold important to a good life, that there be a close scrutiny of those elements that go to make up a “Standard of Living”. ……”. He goes on to say in an insightful manner that …” …One suspects that much benefit would be gained from starting this search at the small village level.”
We are now in the fag end of the year 2007, almost 50 years after the tabling of the Eames India Report, and at the CII-NID Design Summit we had a report from the CII National Committees on Design that was set up to discuss the proposed implementation of the National Design Policy that was announced by the Central Government on the 8th February 2007 and this statement was part of the conference handout. I do wish that this statement or recommendation could have been made available much earlier and to a wider audience of designers and industry and that these recommendations were debated and discussed to the extant that they should be if they are to become inclusive as well as effective. Vikram Kirloskar, Chairman of the CII National Committee on Design spoke briefly about the five broad planks that were considered by the committee and these are listed below:
1. Competitiveness of Industry by Design
2. Design for Culture, Society and Environment
3. Design for Education
4. Branding /Promotion of Design through Media
5. Design Policy implementation including setting up of Design Parks. Venture fund for design

No mention of the village that Eames had warned us about, but we are already 50 years ahead, so things must have changed on the ground, the population is streaming into our urban centres – but the big question is – is this the good life that Indians are aspiring to live? Is this so? I personally do not think so nor is this an inevitable direction, since we can design our future if only we set out to examine the possibilities, by design. At the end of the session on the National Design Policy I was able to ask a question to the Secretary, DIPP Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion who are charged with the responsibility of implementing the policy. I quote, “How are you planning to bring the other Ministries of the Government on board the National Design Policy since all of them need Design and not just Industry, particularly in the areas on Rural Development and Education to name only a few?” – unquote. During this session the member secretary of the AIDI (Association of Indian Design Industry) too offered to partner with Government in furthering the objectives of the NDP and the Secretary immediately suggested that the AIDI get in touch with the Ministry after the conference to initiate necessary action and set up a platform for such cooperation, and I do hope that the AIDI will act on this invitation and make sure that the voice of the design industry is an integral part of the ongoing dialogue on the NDP.

The other interesting sessions that I attended included the dialogue between Kishore Biyani and Bruce Nussbaum that was facilitated by Uday Dandavate. Kishore Biyani, it is evident from his submissions, is very clued in on what design can do for the retail industry that he represents and he has a clear conception of how he proposes to use design to face the huge diversity of India and the Indian consumer. He is one CEO who understands design and I do wish we could see more of his ilk following suit. Ratan Tata, on the other hand is a designer and architect, who was not present at the conference but his impact was certainly felt since there were whispers in the corridors of the great under 100,000 Rupee car (sub-one-lakh car for the masses) being talked about in awe and great respect. I however am surprised and not moved by such a shallow understanding of the transportation aspiration of the Indian citizen while Bangalore and its infrastructure is being visibly choked to the hilt by private automobiles and two-wheelers and the city and in particular, the axis road to the conference venue, is not able to take it anymore with the traffic inching along at a snail’s pace. It is here that the design policy should look at the macro level of the system and see how public transportation can be designed offered at a high quality and such irresponsible adventures as the “sub-one-lakh car”, a great feat of engineering however, are not foisted on the unsuspecting Indian villager and urbanite alike. We need to raise a debate and some of these questions are political, and these are design questions at a systems level. The Politics of Design as the Ulm School Foundation is now discussing it should inform National Policy, but is the Planning Commission listening?

Dr Koshy, Director NID, said all the right things and Bruce Nussbaum was duly impressed as he has stated in his blog-post at the Innovation section of the BusinessWeek Online. Shailajeet “Banny” Bannerjee called for new kind of leadership education for India using design at its core and once again Bruce Nussbaum has a detailed post on his talk at the conference besides one on his own keynote at the CII-NID Summit. In the second session two speakers held my attention. These were Ignacio Germade from Motorola who talked about design Transformation through innovation. His purpose for using design were clear and insightful as a four stage agenda as follows:
1. Discovering Opportunities – Need great processes in design thinking.
2. Facilitating Collaboration – Being good at storytelling.
3. Prototyping Propositions _ Making ideas tangible and visible to all.
4. Inside out branding – Not as icing on the cake since people want the cake and not just the icing.

Very stimulating indeed. The other significant talk of the morning was by Kingshuk Das from IDEO, Paolo Alto who talked about design connecting to the traditional wisdom of India and thereby creating great value, refreshing ideas that are both realistic as well as exotic. GK van Patter was of course stimulating but you can get his talk and the details of his philosophy from his website at the NextD site here. The NextD journal and the methods that he proposed are all available for review at their website link. There were some very boring presentations or should I say sales pitches by companies, which should not have been allowed by the organizers, and we must see that this is not repeated next year even if the companies concerned make a contribution or sponsorship to the conference.

Besides these the presentation by Uday Salunke, Director of Welingkar Institute of Management was very encouraging since now management schools too are looking seriously at Design and they with IDIOM are designing the next generation school called WE-School which we had a glimpse in Sonia Manchanda’s presentation. Of the case studies one stood out for its brilliance and excellence of execution and this was Lemon Design’s presentation by Dipendra Baoni of a new honey packaging and branding strategy that had created quite a stir at the conference. There were several break-out sessions but I did not attend these but I am sure that some of the other participants will share their experiences in the days ahead. In the final analysis it was a good conference, quite unreachable due to the remote location and horrible traffic at Bangalore, but a great meeting place for designer friends but with a huge gap due to very low presence of Industry CEO’s, which should be our objective for the next time around if design is to find a place in the Indian landscape alongside management, finance, science and technology.

I moderated a very interesting session (for me) along with Maoli Marur, Editor of Kyoorius Design Magazine where we had five Indian students and one international student who was working in India to give their insights about the future of design. I will leave it to others to comment on this session and I am sure that this should be a regular feature at the future summits and we must thank Uday Dandavate for insisting on having this event and makiong sure that it was not forgotten in the husstle and bustle of talking to Industry and Government.

Design Concepts & Concerns Blog: An interactive platform for the DCC course at NID, India

Image: The Process of Design – The NID Way: As introduced in the Design Concepts & Concerns course

We have set up a new blog called "Design Concepts & Concerns" named after the course that I teach at NID, Ahmedabad over the past two decades now. This course was earlier called Design Methods and later Design Process but sometime in 1997-98 I changed the name to "Design Concepts & Concerns" (DCC as the students call it now) since I realised that designing is not just about techniques and about beating the competition with great market success, but that it is about human intentions that lead to thoughts and actions that create value – great value for all stakeholders – if the intentions are clear and these are followed by creative thoughts and committed actions. Setting goals has therefor become a part of this course and it is no longer about taking a client brief and getting on with the job, whatever the job may entail. There is an element of questioning and of taking positions and this makes the act and practice of design quite political and the design students would need to be equipped to assess the varied situations that they would face in the future, in most cases very difficult choices about an unknowable future, no matter how much experience the client or the designer may have had in the past.

As part of this course I have set up a multi author blog that includes several teachers who have been working with me as well as colleagues from near and far since they have volunteered to be accessible to students as well as contribute to the explorations taht would be part of each course as we move forward with it this semester at NID. Such an educational blog gives us the opportunity of maintaining a living document of the course as it unfolds each time and this is perhaps close to what Prof Bruce Archer had meant when he told us at NID that we would and should strive to maintain a contemporaneous documentation of design work if we are to build a body of knowledge about design which is otherwise very hard to come by. You may have noticed that designers are notorious for not publishing their insights and processes but most design journalism usually covers the outcomes of a design journey but rarely the process with all its warts and blemishes, which are many, and designers do not want to be seen as making mistakes since most administrators think that making mistakes is a sign of lack of expertise. However we now know that this is far from the truth, and IDEO, one the most successful design companies in recent times has as their slogan – “ to fail often to succeed sooner”, very insightful statement that is central to their design process.

This link to the "Design Concepts & Concerns" blog will take you there and show you the assignments and the details of the course as it unfolds this semester at NID. I am offering this course to many disciplines at NID this semester and the current course is at Gandhinagar campus for the Digital Design relaterd disciplines at the new campus that include New Media (NMD), Software and User Interface Design (SUID) and Information and Digital Design (IDD). This is a course of two weeks each and the next modules are offered at the Paldi campus (twice) and also at the Bangalore campus in October 2007 for the new discipline of Design for Retail Experience (DRE) that has started there from June this year.

This course has been documented, at least partly, at my website and two modules conducted in 2003 and 2004 can be seen at these links below. Each year we choose a theme for all the modules that are offered to the students and this year the theme is "The Design Opportunities for the Creative Economy in India" and in the course at Gandhinagar we are focussing on Digital Design Opportunities for design entrepreneurs in India across the 230 sectors of our economy.
Theme : Globalistaion and Impact on Indian economy – Link: Documentation of the course in 2004
Theme : Khadi as a way of life for India and the World – Link: Documentation of the course in 2003

I have published papers on this course as well as presented the work done by the students at a number of conferences. These papers and presentations can be downloaded from these links below:

Cactus Flowers Bloom in the Desert: National Design Summit 2001 Link: Paper 123 kb Link: Presentation part-1 (3.6 MB pdf) Link: Presentation part-2 (4.6 MB pdf)
The Avalanche Effect: on PhD-Design list in 2003 Link: Paper 55 kb pdf
Creating the Unknowable: EAD06 conference Bremen 2005 Link: Paper 50 kb pdf
EAD06 Bremen, Show. Link: Presentation 4.1 MB pdf

More about the ongoing course and its contemporaneous documentation at the link to the blog "Design Concepts & Concerns"

Mayo Clinic SPARC and IDEO Design Methods: Lessons for design of health care systems in India

Dr Alan K Duncan, Medical Director who heads the SPARC innovation Project at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota has this to say about the IDEO team and their design methods: “…..before I began our work with them I only knew of design as a craft of aesthetics. But I found in the designers three remarkable qualities – not too dissimilar to that of the skilled clinician – empathy, curiosity and positivity. I think this is why design can truly find a meaningful home in health care.” Mayo Clinic, one of the worlds largest health care systems looked to innovate ways to make their systems better but found that they were not equipped to do so easily. This innovation effort is supported by the VHA Health Foundation, USA and I do hope that a similar government supported effort can be launched in India as well to use design to address the health care needs here in India.

Together with IDEO and an in-house team of doctors and designers the SPARC methodology for health care design was developed and tested. The process that was time tested at IDEO over hundreds of highly successful industry projects (see the amazing IDSA-BusinessWeek design innovation awards statistics) was applied to health care sector by the SPARC team to achieve dramatic results in patient satisfaction and quality of service in a sector that was traditionally handled exclusively by medical staff and administrators. The IDEO way included the use of narratives in seeking opportunities for design action which were rapidly prototyped and evaluated through numerous iterations and the results achieved were then communicated with conviction to the entire medical system using design all the way. The approach included the use of processes and skills that could help design, develop and implement the learning directly into the health care system since the SPARC team was strongly coupled and embedded into the service network as an integral part of it and not operating from the outside.

The best traditions of user research have been borrowed by design (see the anthrodesign list on yahoogroups for discussions on this) from the fields of anthropology, psychology and sociology. Using these processes the SPARC team gets into a learning mode by using numerous tools of observation, narration and story telling that helps build a knowledge hierarchy that is both informative as well as sensitive to the deeper needs and feelings of the user groups. The learning curve involves an ask, observe and create cycle that allows one to access tacit knowledge which is not easily accessible to other methods of investigation. Comprehensive records are maintained through the process of interaction and observation with the intent of building models that can be shared and tested through a display of visual information, artifacts and notes. Dealing with health care is a sensitive matter that requires the team to be responsive to issues of access, privacy, care for the human subject as well as the management of the total experience to a high quality of satisfaction.

Collective idea generation using brainstorming is a norm and the IDEO rules for this are as follows:

Be Visual
Wild Ideas are Encouraged
Go for Quantity
Build on the Ideas of Others
Defer Judgment

Prototyping is the next big step. It is used to learn rapidly and to reduce risk of failure and this can be applied to the prototyping of services as well as products. By building these prototypes that team is able to literally see around the corner and experience the future, thus solving many latent needs which can only be recognized by the users once they are shown to them in the form of a prototype. The IDEO motto is… “ to fail often to succeed sooner.”

Form of the innovation and the mode of communication that is adopted is the key for the rapid diffusion of the break-through innovations that are achieved through these participatory and embedded processes in the health care innovation system. Using Everett Rogers’ innovation diffusion model the SPARC team looks at the spread of the innovation to explicate the relative advantage to ensure early adoption, compatibility to ensure fit, complexity to make sure that it makes sense, trialibility so that it can be tried and tested repeatedly and finally observability so the innovation can be seen to be believed in, all of which contribute to the smooth adoption of the innovation across a wide base of user groups.

Mayo Clinic discovered design in their search for an innovation tool and procedure that could be sustained within their own health care system and starting in 2002 in the planning stage the SPARC effort has reached maturity and full staff operation by 2005, leading to a dramatic transformation from within and the assimilation of the process of design as an integral part of the health care delivery system, which is the best way to use design in any case, from the inside. This is what I call putting design inside the health care system and in India we need to do this in as many as 230 sectors of our economy.

I would like to thank my friend Matthew Maleska for bringing this amazing story to my attention. Matt had traveled to India as a Fulbright scholar and studied at NID briefly after graduating from the RISD, Providence. Returning to the USA to join the SPARC team as an in-house design researcher along with a large team of doctors and medical staff at the Mayo Clinic he is finding a meaningful role for himself to use design skills within the health care system. Thank you. This kind of demonstration, if taken seriously by the Government of India and the medical establishment in India and it is adopted here in India as well it could show us the way for putting design inside all 230 other sectors that are in need of innovation today, in an effective manner.

The full presentation and discussions of results can be downloaded from these links below:
PDF file 3.5mb of the SPARC IDEO Method and at this link for more information about the various innovation projects from the VHA Health Foundation

Now "Experientia" has a story on SPARC: putting people first.