Constant, yet ever changed

Contemplate upon a river, says the old zen master – always the same, yet never the same.  Just keep that image in mind, think about studying a river, really understanding a river, as we talk about service design.

A service is a product

A service is still, in some important ways, a product.  And all products are—also in some important ways–  tools.  A service – like a phone or potato peeler or a Prada bag – is something that people use to accomplish something.  Whether those things accomplished are what was initially envisioned is not in any way a given.

Services are plastic

But on the other hand, one of the distinctive aspects of services is that they are ‘plastic’, that, at least the best of them, have a much better, more adaptive feedback cycle than do hard products, or ‘softer’ products like financial instruments.  Every instance of their delivery is slightly different.  Because they are always being delivered in ever so slightly different situations and because their delivery is interactive, they are neither delivered or experienced identically.

Because of this plasticity, services and their sequelae are in some senses continually redesigned, altered as they are delivered no matter what their designers do.  Any service is always ‘evolutionary.’

And the evolution is two-way:  A product does not simply meet needs, it shapes behavior, changes experience, changes understanding.  People live differently because of what a service enables them to do.  Online banking doesn’t simply allow one to pay bills, it changes the amount of time a person has.  Obviously, it changes where and changes when people do their banking. But rituals change.  It changes how people think about trust and privacy changes, and the concept of “where” money actually is has evolved dramatically.  Money – a social abstraction for some time now –has lost one more concrete connection to the community.  Clear enough now perhaps, but that whole constellation of events wasn’t part of the ‘brief’ of the designers of ATM’s or the early online banking services.

Things to think with

Rather famously, at least among social scientists, Mary Douglas defined dirt as “matter out of place.”  A couple of weeks ago, I was weeding my front garden along with my neighbor (our gardens sort of flow into one another).  We were talking about how difficult it is to know what actually is a weed, and I told her about Douglas’ definition and my belief that a weed is a plant out of place.  Immediately, she said, “And it works for gossip too.”

That’s the power of getting a good model out of research.  One of my advisors in graduate school used to say that a good theory gives you something to think about, but a great theory gives you something to think with.

Making (not simply “discovering’) those things should be what research does for design, the design process.   They continue to have application, to get at the basics even when the original thing being studied has changed – something that just does not happen with a list of ‘findings’ or ‘insights’

Good research helps you to understand not just the specified functional bits, but the way in which any product might affect the dynamics of the life and context into which it fits.  A picture of not just how things work, but how they can be changed, and what that whole experience might change into.

Where research works

Most of us who work at the research & design intersection have argued for years that the right place to do research is at the beginning of a design process.  Me too.  But I think that we’ve been only partially right.

Research for service design is a different beast. Even if it is user centered, or iterative, or participatory, it is by definition dealing with something that is changing, has changed, will change because of what you’ve designed.  So in other words,

It is always the ‘beginning’

If services are being perpetually designed, research needs to be perpetual as well.   Fortunately, there is a model for that.

Fat ties, bell bottoms, sideburns

In the early to mid twentieth century, longitudinal research on social, developmental, and psychological issues was big.  A major tool, generating some of the most important theories of the day.  The Kinsey Report.  Growing up in River City.  Aging in America.  The 30 year Harvard study that resulted in George Vaillant’s classic, “Adaptation to life”.   The BBC’s 7 up, 21 up, 28 up.series.

These studies each followed the same groups of people for years, focusing on continuity as well as change in the areas they were following.  These were theoretically huge efforts.

And big, expensive, and expertise-intensive projects.

Gradually, largely because of how big and expensive and intensive they were, longitudinal research fell out of favor and cross-sectional, ‘representatively sampled’ research became the deeply ingrained norm in all sorts of research.  The idea of watching the same people over time, instead of bunch of different people at the same time, is rarely considered when anyone talks about research design.  But, grasshopper,  think again about that river.

New means new

New technologies and their broad adoption are changing this.  New technologies means new research tools, and new life for some old ones.

Communispace is indicative of this direction.  Communispace projects are each an engaged community, and not a slice in time.  There is a relationship that is maintained over for at least one year, and some of the communities have been going on since the company was founded in 1999.

Flickr, MySpace and the like show that different kinds of data – not just online surveys and focus groups – is also doable at scale – we recently did close to 500 ‘visual stories’ in 3 days – impossible without the new tools.  Still, cross-sectional.

This one:  Noah takes a picture of himself

If you combine the two — add to a constant community a suite of research tools that allow you to build a rich, multi-dimensional picture of the evolution of a community over time, then the effects of unforeseen forces, of major changes in contexts, of introductions and adoptions over time, of life events and cohort change.

Now, grasshopper, we are seeing the whole river.

A Very Good Model

Fortunately, I don’t think that this is just the dream of a frustrated longitudinal researcher.  Blog guru Christian Sarkar, in collaboration with John Rheinfrank and John Hegel, developed a model that I think brings all this together with a convincing argument for the ‘good business’.

The most important bit, form my purposes, is the right hand side.  Start with the communities, and have the services emerge from them, drive the business opportunities.  The focus is on this side, on the arrows going right to left, not the business and product driven cycle you could read from left to right.

Research for service design can look at the process this way, and more importantly, can swap longitudinal for the easier ‘continuous’ (but, a built in assumption) cross sectional model.

Harder, but more interesting, and more valuable.