The world is a garage
designing services is a dirty messy job
- Hi, I’m Marc Fonteijn, co-founder of 31Volts
- 31Volts is design agency that helps organizations create valuable and meaningful services
- Today I’m going to share with you the things I’ve learned that are important in designing meaningful and valuable services and the reason
why I think our world is a garage.
- This presentation contains primarily practical examples, I’ll leave the complex theories to others
- Before I get down to the messy details, I first of all I want to put things into context really quickly
- Organizations have focussed their resources primarily on 2 things in the last decades ...

1: On technological innovations

2: On making things efficient, standardizing stuff, improving processes, getting the maximum efficiency

We live in a world where the
growth in connections between
people has accelerated and
changed the challenges
organizations face.
- Let me rephrase this: organizations face different challenges
- As we all know -now more then ever- the only constant in todays world is change
- I think everyone in this audience today sees these challenges but just to make sure we’re on the same line let me give 3 quick examples

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an oift
dc fp
on ow
tro er
l
- Organizations have to make the transition from monologue (advertising) to dialogue (true marketing)
- The question for them is: are you going to (can?) ignore this or are you going to jump in?

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an
gin
g va
lu
es
- Organizations have to deal with new values to differentiate themselves like ... authenticity
- But what does it mean to be authentic for a commercial company anyway?!
- And how do you prevent that people will see you as a fake because you’re pushing authenticity so much

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& st,
ow pr
ne iva
rs cy
hip
- And the last example are challenges concerning trust, privacy, ownership
- Do you trust the one who stores your data
- Do you know where you’re data is?
- By the way who “owns” YOUR data anyway?

people challenges
- Although we see these challenges -because we are the one creating them- we have to realize that organizations have a hard time catching up!
- The important thing is that these are NOT management or technology challenges, these are all people challenges
- These are different challenges and the approaches organization have been applying for years just to solve them
- So how do you deal with these challenges?
- Well this is exactly what we’ve been working on for the last years at 31Volts
- I’d like to share how we approach these challenges and what we’ve learned in doing so

the world is a garage
- While writing my submission for this conference and summing up the lessons learned over the past year the light struck me and I had an insight
that is now the title of this presentation!
- Why a garage? It should all become clear in the next few slides, so here we go...

1. doing research is messy
2. be pragmatic with tools
3. balance between co-creation and experts
4. design frameworks and embrace hacks
- I found that there are 4 remarkable resemblances between a garage and the way we work
- There are probably a lot more but these are the 4 most important for me
- I’ll go over them one by one and give an example of the garage and one of our projects

1. doing research is messy
- We usually don’t have a well defined research question
- So a checklist or survey won’t work in this case as you don’t know what to ask
- The first thing we need to do is to find the question before we can start looking for the answer
- Another thing is that you’re not in a lab where you control everything except 1 thing (quantitive research)
- You need to look at the whole system at once and do an estimated guess (based on experience) where the problem might be and digg deeper
- Being (too) analytical while doing design research can put you in a deadlock.
- Most importantly, there is no easy way out, you need to invest time and effort in research!

1. doing research is messy

2. be pragmatic with tools
- Although the process is we apply is very well known (design), we’re now applying it in a field thats new to designers
- We often encounter challenges for which there are no dedicated tools
- This requires that you are pragmatic with tools
- We have to borrow tools from other disciplines ranging form industrial design to theater and tweak them
- You need to invent, create and test these tools in real-life situations
- A broad knowledge of other fields and an open mindset to be creative and translate these tools to your challenge

2. be pragmatic with tools

3. balance between co-creation and experts
- Involving the user from the very start is absolutely nessescery but they can’t do it alone
- We found that you need to balance between a team of experts and co-creation
- You need (multidisciplinary) team of experts (electrics, engine, painter, bodywork, etc) to get the best results, this is the same while designing
services
- The designer is expert of the process but he needs to involve other experts to create the best solutions

3. balance between co-creation and experts

4. design frameworks and embrace hacks
- It’s clear if mechanics has fixed your car but the thing is do you trust that your car is safe again?
- A big challenge while designing services is that they operate in a constantly changing environment
- You can’t create static 1 off solutions, you need to design flexible frameworks that adapt easily to a changing environment
- People like to hack stuff; software, hardware but also services!
- Don’t assume things will work in a specific way just because it was designed that way
- Organizations often ignore hacks of try to prevent them
- Instead they should embrace these hacks and try to embed them in the service
- If someone hacked your service they had a good reason for it, try to learn from this

4. design frameworks and embrace hacks
- The santa clause won’t give you a cleaner toilet but it may give you a different (better?) experience

time for a recap
- So, why again am I telling all this?
- Of course we don’t work in a garage and we’re not true mechanics
- Every organization that deals/works with people either though its a hospital, public school or telecom provider needs to rethink how it’s going
to approach the challenges that are coming at them today
- I’ve shared our approach that we’ve been applying with a lot of success over the last years...

to
da
ys
ta
ke
aw
ay
- Finally if there’s one thing I hope you remember after this presentation its that:
- We’ve learned in our projects that in order to create value for people, todays challenges require that organizations get a little messy

Thank you
marc@31v.nl
@marcfonteijn
+ 31 648 37 29 04
- Please feel free to contact me
- I’d love to hear from you what you think about this perspective

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ot
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slide # - source re
dit
s
1 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kvh/3176077462/
3 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/theblueboy/2115715749/
6 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/arapehl/413122038/
9 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandytri/3020638454/
11 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigfez/3127793543/
13 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/robotapocalypse/245505533/
15 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidbygott/2418357719/
17 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/icathing/26603225/
20 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/vwescape/3491301376/
21 - http://www.flickr.com/photos/vannispen/3586592218/
- All the credits to the great photographers on flickr.com!