The Material of Outcomes by Linn Vizard

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On a bad day in service design consulting, I lament that my job is just email and powerpoint.
As a trained industrial designer, I sometimes long for more tangible results.

It sometimes feels like I never MAKE anything, that the work has no meaning or impact.

We’re in a moment in the service design community where this crisis of confidence is apparent in our conversations.

We can see it in the themes of recent publications and conferences.

This is an existential crisis - does my work even make a difference?

I have a hypothesis that design’s roots in craft, industrialised production, leads to a mindset of a false sense of a control.
We know the power of making ‘things’, something from nothing.

This power is magical to people - even at the simple level of sketching.

Here’s me at three years old, drunk on this power…

Drunk on the power of making things, we want to shape the world.
Now, we don’t just want to shape things like chairs and posters and websites.

We want to consider the thing in it’s next context, and to shape human relations, through services, policy, organizations, relationships.

As the level of complexity increases, the level of ‘thing-ness’ goes down.

It’s hard when we no longer have a ‘thing’ to point to.

Things win awards.

We attach inherent value to –thing-ness.

There is no inherent value in product, there is value in use and exchange.

It’s not about the chair, it’s about what the chair enables.

Even as an industrial design student, I quickly realised it wasn’t about the thing, really.
If someone told me I was going to design chairs for my degree project, I would have laughed. But I did.

The tangible things are only the means to an end.

These chairs were about trying to get people thinking about socialised expectations of gendered behaviour.
(It was still satisfying to make the thing - but the outcome I wanted was not having made a thing)
I wanted people to change their mindsets, or at least ask new questions.

So what is the end?
In design, it seems we talk a lot about objectives, deliverables and process. And of course IMPACT, which can be seen as a sub-in for outcomes. I don’t think I’ve ever talked explicitly about outcomes.
We need a vocabulary and set of tools and methods for having these conversations.

Direct
Intended
Beneficial

(walk through diagram)

Design outcomes: the consequences of the use in the world of actualised design (products, systems, services, processes organisations) created using the instructions of design output.

Typical design outcomes that are the consequences of actualised designs used in the world are:

Social outcomes and impacts
Environmental outcomes
Economic outcomes

Historically, a sign of the quality of a design process is that the actualised products that result from the design output are as identical as possible.

We often conflate these.

A lot of design practice and research has developed around outputs. We also continue to structure agreements and projects around deliverables and outputs, rather than outcomes.

Stakeholder care about outcomes, but often have to interpret the value of a design through the lens of design output.

We are often most engaged in recent times about talking about how we get from our outputs to actualised design.

The implementation gap.

We need to go one step further and focus on outcomes.

Of course, the truth is that outcomes are not linear, they are dynamic, and being produced at all stages of design process.
This is where we can consider value in process in tandem with value in product.

In a goods dominant logic view…

When we take a service dominant logic view…

Through this lens, an outcome of service design is the co-created value throughout the process.

At the service level, these outcomes might be some or any of the following:

Organizational outcomes of service design are things like:

A lot of these outcomes are not ‘tangible’ or visible.

When we think about service design work, a lot of the time we are working with the ‘meta’, as Dan Hill calls it.
The organization is the material of service design.

In order to achieve outcomes, we need to be really good at working with this material.

As service designers…

We often think about organizations in a mechanistic way, where we expect that we achieve outcomes by implementing a plan.

We also want a close 1:1 match between our plan and the actualised design.

The latest in organizational theory suggests we need to start thinking about organizations as conversations.

When we do this, achieving outcomes becomes about changing the conversations that are happening.

Through this lens, outcomes are changes to the conversations throughout the SD process.

But this leads me to a tautology – we are producing outcomes simply by being there and changing the conversation.

So how do we even know if we are going in the right direction? If our work is moving towards desired outcomes?

I think a lot of the conversations about KPIs, ROI and measurement of design are trying to answer this.

This is Design’s I told you so moment.

Here’s the secret: KPIs, metrics etc are actually just PROXIES for value, PROXIES for outcomes. They help us to identify change from one state to another.

Goodharts law essentially says when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
We like this because we like certainty, quantifiable things.

Ok, but how do we know service design is working?

Consider the question: how do you know you’re in love?
What if, working in these more complex, intangible types of design where we want relational outcomes, we need different ways of knowing?

What if we think about how people feel as an outcome of design work?

Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Through this lens, outcomes of service design are about how and what people think and feel.

I’m going to share some examples of how we can start to consider this in our process.

For example: considering where in the body work is most felt.

Ways of showing outcomes of purely research work.

Complex systems and service work is never done.
You are seeking system, service health rather than mission accomplished. There is no final outcome.
Your outcomes are about how far down the road you kicked the ball this time.
All outputs and outcomes become inputs to the next evolution.

What if we think about the outcomes of service design work as horizon 2 bridging narratives?

These outcomes not fit a 1:1 problem:solution match.

Design as problem solving, as framed by Herb Simon, Christopher Alexander, John Christopher Jones in the 60s
Tends to fit well with the ‘thing-ness’ levels of design.
We had a problem, so we made a thing, problem solved.

This mindset is no longer suited for the world we find ourselves in, and for the levels of design higher up on the pyramid.

The certainties about design we create for others are false. Outcomes are not certain, and there is a lot more unintended consequence from our work.

Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker talks about how…

What if we spend more time doing divergent thinking and ideation on the possible outcome space itself?
Through speculative futures, thinking of the extreme utopic and dystopic outcomes our work might lead to…

What if, in becoming NATO - we actually got better at being humble and thoughtful about our role in creating them?

For this closing quote, I’ll ask you to close your eyes.

“When you are unattached, you have inner freedom. You have no investment in a particular outcome, and so you do what is necessary in the moment. You explore every option and are receptive to all new information. You do all that you know to do, and then trust, because you have no attachment to either the result or how the result is produced,”

- Charlene Belitz and Meg Lundstrom in The Power of Flow: Practical Ways to Transform Your Life with Meaningful Coincidence.

The Material of Outcomes by Linn Vizard

Service Design Network Canada