A service design reflection on the future

Part 2 - Compassion and Inclusion

In light of our current public health situation, we tend to think that crises are the only times that are ruled by unfamiliarity and uncertainty. Because of this, organisations, communities and individuals act with short-term, temporary moves. But in fact we are presented with the opportunity to change things for better over a longer horizon. What impact can or must design have on businesses, on communities, on people? When the current corona pandemic is over, our behaviour may shift into a new paradigm that may have a lasting impact on how we consume, behave and interact. As designers and innovators, how can we have a positive role in that? How can technology support us? Letting organisations make adjustments to their ongoing business practices and encouraging people make (more) compassionate choices?

In this article you’ll find a summary of the 2nd Service Design Days *) live streaming panel discussion with panelists - Rosana Ardila, Shaun Frankson, Kieron Leppard, Cat Drew and Jim Kalbach - and participants, moderated by our hosts, Niklas Mortensen. Find the first article here.

On the last day of 2019 Sitra, the Finnish innovation fund, published 5 trends they expected to have the biggest impact on our future including the tensions between the various megatrends of our time. Not knowing that within a few months a world-wide crisis would unfold, they gave a system overview on strongly related social changes which we currently encounter and consider as urgent.  

The overview of tensions shows us where it might be possible to have an impact and positively influence the future. In other words: to be able to “design the new normal” as Kieron mentions in his panel statement. With the corona pandemic, we are in a unique situation, namely that the whole world is facing the same problem affecting every part of society, from politics and government to the environment and economics. Design for positive change has never been more crucial in its capacity to impact how the world can or must look like and move forward. 

Kieron Leppard:

“Now is the time for designers to step up, be recognised for the talents they possess and have a greater impact than ever before.”

Cat sees a twofold responsibility where “design is now needed more than ever to help us not just respond within the emergency within the crisis time, but also to use positive behaviours that we are seeing right now to shape the future.” Kieron adds: “Talking about behaviours, I have seen the best and the worst of society. From hoarding toilet paper and food, and finding lots of that food, untouched, a week later in people’s bins on the street. To the appreciation (the 8 o’clock cheer for carers that started a while ago in Southern Europe), great pivots like from Deliveroo and UK’s body coach Joe Wicks.”

The panelists and participants have many of those positive examples. Cat: “The responses are amazing. Some examples I have seen are with a big D, where designers were involved, but actually in many cases it’s people taken a design mindset and being incredibly creative resourceful within constraints. Design is happening without designers.” Jim agrees: “I think that there's a heightened sense of awareness of the impact that our individual behaviours have. If we all stay home and wash our hands we can already have a huge impact and make a difference.”

What are the drivers for people, companies and organisations to come up with those solutions? Is it fear? Shared responsibility? Altruism? Compassion? In times of emergency, providing empathy, kindness and compassion to others are important factors in surviving the initial stages of disaster, protecting the vulnerable, and quickly recovering in the aftermath of the crisis. But as Kieron points out, a crisis can also bring out the worst in us showing our inability to deal with the disruptions to our daily routines, making money at the cost of others, thinking and acting based on “my people first”, victim blaming or promoting xenophobic beliefs. It is easy to think about our own local environment, family, neighbourhood or city. But what about people who are not “our people”, out of our sight, or on the other end of the world? 

Shaun’s experience working with susceptible communities in third world countries is analogous to the present need: “With Plastic Bank I had the gift to build a platform for compassion and inclusion in developing countries for the most vulnerable people to get access to everything they need through recycling. What I learned is that when it is not just your service but when it becomes a community initiative, when it can bring something for everyone, you are able to offer a solution that actually becomes loved and endeared by the whole community. This is a starting point for offering more, related services or scaling that service to a larger population, including more people.”

Shaun Frankson:

“When this light became a community service, this place became the safest night spot in the village.” 

Jim thinks that the Plastic Bank is an example of how companies should do business: “How great it would be that not only the public sector but also the private sector now creates business models that have a virtuous cycle of benefit rather than depleting our societal resources.” He points out a movement around shared value that started almost 10 years ago: “It was a new way to look at businesses to create value. The idea is to create a business and a business model that actually has a positive effect back on society. I am not talking about philanthropy or corporate social responsibility but pursuing profit in a beneficial way. In other words: Being a compassionate business is actually a competitive advantage. It’s about building an ecosystem, being transparent and offering choice.”

Jim Kalbach:

“Our skills have never been more critical in creating value.”

What does that mean for designers and innovators? Traditional design roles might emphasise too much on partial analyses. We need co-creative mindsets, holistic views, systemic approaches, and speculative futures/design thinking. One of the roles design can play is to challenge, in a way that understands where individuals and organisations start from and what they value, and work out an argument based on that. Two values related with inclusion are dignity and pride. 

Shaun: “It's an amazing gift of designing for pride. Even though we are a blockchain solution, no one in our ecosystem is excited just because of the technology behind it alone. We needed to learn the service needs to genuinely have something in it for everyone in a self sustaining way. Especially in time of crisis we really need to have compassion and inclusion. It is not just giving someone a tool or offer a service; it is someone recognising inclusion, feeling inclusion. This is where technology can be the script to save the world.”

Rosana seconds Shaun: “We are all connected. Challenges and opportunities are shared globally. So we need to work together. I expect that we will shift from individual desires to collective needs and systems where both individuals and the collective thrive. We are in this late capitalism state where there is an emphasis on individualistic values. But designing to fulfill related, unfulfilled needs doesn’t help to build systems that help and work for everyone.”

Rosana Ardila:

"Compassion allows us to care for people, while looking rationally at the facts and not putting the individual over the many.”

But if we shift from empathy to compassion, and combine stories with data, how do we put things in place to ensure that the most vulnerable ones stay at the heart of what we design? How can we create inclusive solutions with the use of technology? Rosana answers: “Technology is facilitating a lot of the human interactions. And I do think that designers and technologists have the superpower to facilitate positive changes. But for that we need ethical technology to facilitate the redesign of collective systems. We need technologists and designers to invent the technology that will help us all flourish.”

There are different kinds and levels of inclusiveness. Think, for instance, how to make space for pedestrians and cyclists by adapting the building environment and repurposing streets as in Berlin and Vienna. This is because there are more cyclists than cars on the roads these days which also comes with new street signs, similar to the catfish street signs in Japan. Cat: “Those community-led responses are absolutely at the heart of what we’ve seen in the UK neighbourhoods supporting each other in times of crisis.” Rosana: “Designing for and with everyone makes the entire system better. We need to ask ourselves and others the right questions.”

Cat Drew:

“I have three design questions on the level of businesses, places and communities.”

So skills like challenging and questioning are important, but so are our values. Being compassionate isn’t easy, but we need to avoid self-focus and shift our attention and concern to the needs of others. In other words, let’s “overwhelm this coronavirus crisis with creativity and compassion” and focus on a future horizon - when we don’t have a ‘common enemy’ anymore - with products and services that include as many people as possible.

Also thanks to: Daniel Carey, Magdalena Jakubowska, Wouter Walgraeve, Jyothi Shankar, Marina Blázquez, Ewa Dominiak, Christina Sadek, Joyce Yee, Svitlana Tanasiychuk, Maria Augusta Ferreira Zavanella, Bettina Koebler, Vincenzo Di Maria and many others who joined and participated in this discussion.

The slide decks of the panelists can be found and downloaded on the Service Design Days Community, including the video recording of the whole session.

All links referred to in the article, plus some additional reads can be found here:

• The Shared Value Initiative is a global platform for leaders seeking to solve societal challenges through business solutions and to help companies fulfill a purpose beyond profits alone: https://www.sharedvalue.org/ 
• Sitra’s trends of the 2020s: https://www.sitra.fi/en/news/here-they-are-the-most-important-trends-of-the-2020s/
• Two examples of pivots and altruism: Deliveroo: https://deliveroo.co.uk/menu/london/the-city/nhs-donation-london, and UK’s body coach Joe Wicks: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/28/joe-wicks-body-coach-tv-pe-youtube-nhs-covid-19-lockdown
• Kat Holmes (Mismatch) describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iccWRhKZa8 
• A crisis on this scale can reorder society in dramatic ways, for better or worse. Here are 34 predictions for what’s to come: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/19/coronavirus-effect-economy-life-society-analysis-covid-135579 
• Two examples of volunteer networks: https://covidmutualaid.org/ and https://www.zebrasunite.com/ 
• In the UK, there is emerging B-corp movement, balancing purpose & profit, and the government launched ‘mission driven businesses’ a couple of years ago: https://bcorporation.uk/
• The Design Council was created at the end of World War II. What will arise after the current crisis? https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/who-we-are/our-history 
• Article on compassion written by Mark Brennan, professor and UNESCO Chair in Community, Leadership, and Youth Development at Penn State University, and others: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/03/24/coronavirus-pandemic-demands-kindness-compassion-empathy-column/2898413001/ 
• Sherry Turkle in a comment on how Covid-19 has affected life suggests that we should use our time with our digital devices to rethink the kinds of community we want to create: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/19/coronavirus-effect-economy-life-society-analysis-covid-135579 
• In this article author Alan Moore writes about the need for a non-linear value based approach: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/six-steps-transform-way-do-business 
• Read Cat’s article for more examples of how businesses, places and services are being reconfigured around a new collective purpose and the crisis provides the material for designing the future: https://medium.com/design-council/the-crisis-as-a-material-to-design-the-future-2af1b159ea46

*) The highlight of Service Design Days is organising the annual conference and providing a meeting point for creative minds to get inspired by, exchange with, and learn from each other. And although we will get the opportunity to do so in September, we wanted to start the conversation now. In one and a half weeks, we went from having the idea to organise a virtual gathering for and with our participants on the original conference day to two prototypes/test runs live streaming panel sessions. Thanks to our speakers and host, who loved the idea, made space in their calendars, and prepared their ‘statement decks’, we were able to organise two sessions: one in the morning and another in the afternoon where Jim Kalbach and Shaun Frankson (located in Jersey City and Vancouver) able to have to join the panel, as well as participants from a.o. Brazil, the US and Canada. In total, almost 200 participants registered for the live sessions or to watch the recordings afterwards. We would like to thank them all for watching and participating!