E-Book, Englisch, 266 Seiten
Grinyer Redesigning Thinking
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-11-139916-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
How Service Design is Solving Our 21st Century Challenges
E-Book, Englisch, 266 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-11-139916-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The world doesn’t work. But there is a way to make it work – it’s called design.
In , Clive Grinyer discusses service design – the holistic process of managing all the points in a customer’s journey with the provider, from the initial introduction down to the last customer interaction, with the purpose of designing each interaction and experience in a way that is user-friendly and relevant to the customer. He argues that design is a way to think more humanely, to create better business and navigate through complex systems to achieve successful outcomes. Sharing inspirational stories and examples of the power of design from around the world, he explores how service design methods combine data and research to understand how context and creativity can be used as a problem-solving tool to engineer, reframe, and deliver effective solutions and help organizations succeed.
Whether you are a leader in business or in government, a practicing designer looking to use your skills to enhance your impact, or a student keen to use your creativity to improve the prospects of the planet and society, this book will challenge you to change how you think. It will help you make informed decisions and craft products and services designed to create solutions for the people who use them.
Zielgruppe
Scholars and students of Service Design.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
Weitere Infos & Material
Introduction
I live in a house that is about 100 years old in a suburb of London. The house was designed by an unknown architect who was working for a developer keen to capture the financial opportunities from the growing the need for housing in the 1920s.
My house is like many others in suburban London. At an exhibition of Britain at War in the Imperial War Museum in London, I came across an exact facsimile of my house. It was a replica of every house that was built at this time with a hall and staircase, living room in the front, kitchen in the back with bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs.
The house is built of brick and is attached on one side to another home that is the mirror image of the one I live in. It does not have a garage but does have a front garden, which at some point became covered over to become a drive, as car ownership became more popular in the suburbs after the Second World War. It clearly once had a gate, but this would have been melted down during the Second World War to be used in creating ammunition.
The road I live on is wide and lined with magnificent male plane trees. I mention their gender as it was decided to plant male trees to reduce the quantity of seeds that would need to be cleared up each spring. The unintended consequence of that decision is that I and many other London residents suffer chronic hay fever caused by the male pollen that swirls around the air for much of the year.
The road has many speed bumps to limit the speed cars can travel, the type you can get your wheels either side of, so many are able to ignore the 20 mph speed limit. Today, the pavements are littered with Christmas trees sprawling like New Year’s Eve drunks, trying to keep hold of various brown, black and blue bins full of festive rubbish, waiting for the local authority to take them away.
On the corner of the next street from mine are three charge points, available for people with electric cars to charge them if they need. They are not used much as many people charge their cars on their own driveways, but they send out a message that change is coming, something fundamental is happening.
The pavement outside my house was renewed about a decade ago but now looks messy and crumpled as various utilities have dug it up to lay down cables for accessing broadband internet, had water meters fitted or have been cracked and damaged by heavy vehicles delivering and taking away skips and materials from the many building extensions that have gone on in this road in recent years.
The cable into my house that delivers broadband internet meets various generations of other wires with forgotten purposes for telephones, alarms and power supplies to sockets used or unused. I have forgotten or never knew the purpose of many of them but am too scared to pull any out in case one of them is important. Once inside they find their way to a Wi-Fi box that in turn feeds numerous Wi-Fi points currently connected to ever increasing devices – interactive digital objects from televisions to sound systems to iPads and mobiles and lighting. In my front room I have eight remote controls that I juggle with to turn on TVs and various set top products, set volume levels, change channels or turn the fire on. I am the only person in the household who holds the secret knowledge for changing channels access the various platforms offered by the competing providers of entertainment, sport, news and information we consume.
Around the house heating systems click on and off, thermostats are set, ovens and microwaves go ping, for different reasons, one temperature, the other time, and twice a year, and sometimes more if there is a power cut, I have to reset their clocks, each one in an entirely different way, and during the seasons between changing them, I always forget how to do this. I then go and sit in my car for a long time whilst I find out how to change the clock on the dashboard, before driving to my parents to go through the same process for them.
When not mastering technology, I pay bills and people and buy things, usually through my mobile phone and try and sustain life as best I can. I buy tickets, and lose my password and try and register, to be told that my name has already been used. Yes, by me! Websites and mobile apps tell me to find things in settings that are now called something different and look for buttons that are not there. I’m asked to tick tiny buttons I always miss, that turn out to be the legal terms and conditions of the transaction.
In this description of what surrounds me, there lies a complex entanglement of physical material, infrastructure, utilities, systems, technology, historical and social change, economics, government policy and design decisions. Much of this world allows me to operate as a human, to have a roof over my head, to sleep securely and earn a living. Most of these interactions are not ones I have chosen by design; I may have little, or sometimes am offered too much choice, but I have never been asked for my opinion on most of these decisions. But, in the most part, they have been made in a way I can understand, though I have little or no agency over them.
This book is about how some of those decisions are made and how we design and shape the world around use. Where we live, our surroundings, the objects around us, the technology we use, the rules we abide by or break: All are the way they are because of decisions people make, perhaps with purpose and intent, or invisibly, even accidentally. Because it’s about decisions, it’s therefore about people: how they view other people and decide what’s important and their assumptions and how we consider the future outcomes and impact of our decisions, or don’t.
As a child I loved to spend time with my grandmother who owned a dress shop in the local village. She had a regal style and would emerge every day around ten o’clock to greet her adoring customers who would file into the shop to view, consider, try on and eventually buy new outfits. The shop was surprisingly high quality for its location in a small village and had copies of fashion magazines that would lie casually in the window below the same garment styled on an unnaturally but fashionably twisted and pouting mannequin.
My grandmother understood well the theatre of the shopping experience, brilliantly combining chat, local gossip and friendship with creating new identities for her customers who would leave happy and excited at the combination of personal reinvention and with reassured confidence in their new image. She, with some help from my mother, understood the economics and business model of the shop, balancing the local taste and demand with the reality of affordability and their own profitability. That understanding would put good food on their table and allow my grandfather to buy a new car every two years.
Once every three months or so my grandmother and mother would travel to London. London was a magical concept to my sisters and me. Two hours seemed a long way away and it was a place of intrigue, bustle and museums. It was a big occasion when they went to London, and they would leave with intent and much make-up and return in a flurry of bags of garments and magazines. They would talk excitedly of the fashion shows they had been to and displays at the dealers of next season’s fashions, and they would speak with excitement as they confidently proclaimed that the following summer would be white and that the following spring would be blue. They knew this as fact and would be happy to share this knowledge with their customers who would lust after and crave their blue and white garments, confident that their good taste would be noticed and commented on by all.
To my young self, this seemed a magical knowledge to bring back. A message from the oracle at Delphi, the whisper of a high priestess in the confidential conversation with a god who could predict the future. To prove it, the sumptuous photos in the magazines Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Draper’s Record would proudly confirm the prediction to the delight and excitement of the prospective customers peering through the shop window.
Where did this knowledge come from? What wizard, magician, or prophet? My mother said they came from Paris, or “the designers” but this didn’t mean much to me. Slowly it dawned on me that these decisions were made by people. Individuals who had the incredible job of deciding what people would want to wear. Somehow, they would decide, divine and design these objects of both desire and commerce – and then get people to change their minds and buy something different next summer. Amazing!
This was a big revelation for me. I began to look at the world differently after this epiphany. Why was a thing like that and not another way? Why was something made of a particular material, made in two halves and fastened together in that way? Why was something ugly and something else beautiful? This childish curiosity, it turns out, is an early sign of the kind of behaviour very common in people who go on to be creative and work in the world of design themselves.
This epiphany, and a curiosity into how the world was made, led me at the age of 16 to study a new course: design and technology. This seemed a magical topic combining analytics and decisions with the practical skills of working with materials to make things. I had found my vocation, as many others have since. Design as part of an education is an incredibly valuable and...
