Service design & Choreography.

This third edition collaboration workshop took place from October 2019 to January 2020 and is an iniciative Birgit Mager (SDN President) started with KISD – Köln International School of Design, Chiba University Japan, and Toshiba’s Design Centre.

Twelve international students during six weeks, two intense workshops in Japan and Cologne focused on the topic Service Design and Choreography. The results? Three valuable projects to enrich the actual Customer Value Design transformation within Toshiba’s design department with new ideas and solutions based on current problems. Inspired by performing arts and choreography, students changed their perspective on how services could be seen and how work + co-creation could live as one at Toshiba corporation.

First steps

In our kick-off session we did some body exploration by being choreographed and choreographing others. This made us learn about the importance of changing perspectives and how performance is involved with different stages, so as service design does! Then, Toshiba gave a brief overview situation and we identified four possible main problems:

Hierarchy: Hierarchy is deeply rooted in the japanese culture. Therefore it is uncommon to take initiative and risk losing your face.

Silos: There is a lack of communication between departments building silos.

Design ladder: Design is only known as graphic design and advertising. It comes in at the end of a project. New roles of design are not understood.

Confusion: In theory people have understood the concept of customer value design, but they are not living it.

Problem statements

Diverge process gave us qualitative insights and information, that helped us to start the converge and define steps. We settled 3 main problem statements that involved the current situation:

Poor quality of communication between departments.
Missing awareness of design capacity.
Disconnect between design education and implementation of the design process.

So we splited up in 3 teams and focused on tackle each problem.

Kitsune design process

Missing awareness of design capacity

Etsu Ma, Shoko Tanaka, Tim Schnettker, and I were team kitsune members. Together, we focused to ease the second problem statement: The missing awareness of the Service Design Capacity in the Business, Management and Design departments.

Our starting point was to reframe the problem statement including a clear understanding of the stakeholders. We worked together with Yuri Narita and Margaux Tamai from Toshiba to have a complete understanding about the departments, tasks, roles and processes within the company.

Awareness Stages

With the information provided we wondered: How might we support the ongoing Service Designer awareness in their implementation of Service Design practice on a daily basis at Toshiba? By making aware in three different types of awareness:

Awareness as information
Facing the understanding of the Customer Value Design Process and how it is linked to Service Design.

Awareness as experience
Showing the need and the advantage of the CVD process.

Awareness of implementation
Supporting and giving a Guideline on how to actually implement the CVD process. How to put it into practice?

Key insights

At this point, we got into some conclusions: There is a confusion about design capabilities due to different naming of design roles. The language used for transferring the methods of Service Design within the company is Customer Value Design. Designers are not used to their full capacity, often it’s task driven. And last, it is difficult to spread the CVD, because each team doesn’t know the process of the other team. So, the key insights that defined our action plan were:

Strengthen Knowledge and Understanding
More Confidence and Motivation
Master CVD Process Spread Motivation More Credibility

User Persona & Value Proposition.

In the process we conclude who our target user is and what is the main value proposition we want to transmit. Stakeholder need to be aware, but the main person that can mentor others the service design duty is no one else but the Designers. For this we need to: Strengthen Knowledge and Understanding of Customer Value Design among Designers.

Concept definition

With the goal value in mind, we started a second phase of ideas generation, where we explored channels, timelines and storyboards.

In order to deepen the understanding of general CVD and align the skills of different designers, we decided to create the solution of a platform that can easily create a community to learn freely among designers and exchange project processes and skills.

Customer Value Design Training

A training platform where designers can learn about Customer Value Design through various channels, share their knowledge, and experience the process in four features:

Connect
Chat, Meet-Ups, Discussions

This community section allows the conversation through designers and masters in CVD, where they can share their knowledge and experience. Also, community can ask questions and get direct advices through friendly talks.

Share
Blog, Process tree, Case Study Library.

Exchange new knowledge, experience, and information about CVD. In particular, it is possible to see the project process and idea proposals from past successful cases, and reviewing them will play a major role in really understanding CVD.

Learn
Tool Library, Academy, Podcast.

Through podcasts and libraries, users can learn about CVD introductions, practice with tools on their own and with other designers to improve their skills and deepen their understanding.

Explore
Implementation, Possibilities, Approaches.

As in a real project, user will discover the possibilities and new CVD discoveries by itself, using and trying the tools, information and support from the community in the channel as a guide of different possibilities.

Conclusions

It is important for designers who have knowledge in CVD to increase their confidence and motivation in order to practice and spread CVD to non-designers. Strengthening knowledge and understanding leads to motivation, practice and spread.

Toshiba Knowledge Base choreographs change towards Customer Value Design by…

Creating a Community
コミュニティの作成
Exchanging Experience
経験の交換
Collecting Learning
学びを集める

← Previous