The man at the center.
Monika Wietrzynska
On service design with Paulina Ignatowska-Zarebba.
- You are involved in service design, and you are a social psychologist by training. Could you tell us how you got started in design?
- The decision to become a service designer arose firstly from my interests, and secondly from the need to constantly change and learn new things. I am a social psychologist by training, but I am also a cultural scientist. I have always asked myself questions in the context of psychology about human fabrication and its motivations, and on the other hand I was interested in the effects of this action. In addition, I worked as a TV journalist for quite a long time: doing research, preparing programs. People have always intrigued me in terms of the choices they make, why they do what they do. On top of that, I always liked to be where something new was happening, where something was developing. That's how I got into the world of technology and start-ups. At first I was volunteering, co-creating projects, gathering experience. I noticed that the technology world lacked humanists. It was dominated by binary, technological thinking and lacked diversity. It was the time of hackathons, and only individuals in Poland knew what design thinking methodology was. Back then, it was more popular to look for answers and solutions through hard skills, rather than analyzing user needs.
All the time I was looking for a way to combine my humanistic knowledge with the world of technology, which I was increasingly interested in. That's how I ended up in a postgraduate program in Service Design. I finally felt that I had found the answer and that it was design thinking and related methods that focus on the human being and put him at the center.
- Do you feel you have an advantage in the world of service design because you are a psychologist?
- I think it's more a kind of attitude. In the process of creating services, I really like the empathy and research phase, especially reading and analyzing research. I regret that I didn't develop more research competencies during my studies - as a result, I feel that doing research itself is not my strongest point and that I could have better developed the psychological competencies I have. On the other hand, I think that taking an interest in human beings and listening to their needs in the context of responding to challenges as well as team building is what I developed during my psychology studies. When working with companies and teams, I always pay attention to the importance of the person we are designing for and the team that creates the solution - the psychological dynamics of that team have a huge impact on what quality of solution will be delivered.
- Aside from the human being at the center of the design process, what else is important in service design?
- I personally need a great sense of what I am designing. In my opinion, an important part of design is the ability to step into someone else's shoes. Curiosity and empathy are then awakened, and through this we find out if and where we should actually improve or enhance something. It's important for me to feel that I'm solving some person's problem, because it's for them that we're going to improve and facilitate something, change their environment. Then it is much easier for me in the whole process to find motivation for myself and for the whole team. That's why health projects are closest to me.
- What are the most common mistakes made when designing services? Is it skipping a step or focusing too long on one?
- First of all, moving too slowly to the next stages. This is something I think we all face. It is very difficult to move on to the next steps, while I see value in trying to give the process a time frame. It's better to knock yourself out quickly and go back and start again than to stretch the work indefinitely. The second mistake is the lack of iteration. It's very important that you can go back to previous stages at any time. I feel that in the business space where we train people, we don't allow them enough room for mistakes and errors, and there's not enough space for these returns. Meanwhile, it's important to be open to mistakes, thanks to which we learn the most and can draw conclusions, improve something.
Working mainly on the Polish market, I see that we have a lot of success stories, especially when people describe their projects, and not enough case studies, that is, such project meat about what actually happened while reaching the goal. It's painting the grass green.
It's only now that business is shifting more strongly to goal-oriented methodologies, which have long been implemented in startups. These methodologies are more focused on retrospectives, on learning and getting better and better, e.g. in them we have time to reflect on shortcomings, on what we should improve. Retro meetings are not to judge someone for results, but to evaluate how we are doing, what allows us to achieve better results, and what hinders us. I believe that because of the current dominant education system, we are unable to estimate the time it takes us to learn or work. We are supposed to learn something in 45 minutes, which is the length of a standard lesson. There is no room in the system school to ask how long it actually takes me to learn something. Why does something go and faster and something slower? What can I do to learn more efficiently? All this adds up to the fact that we then create unrealistic schedules and optimize them for work time and not the result. Agile approaches come to the rescue here, among other things, and a retrospective that allows you to answer the question what did you get done in that time and what didn't and why?
- Do you have a service in mind that has recently made a great impression on you and that you would wholeheartedly recommend to.
- I have such a beloved service and it has impressed me in several areas. Totally changed my experience in the area of patient service. We had a big problem with getting our son's blood drawn at a blood collection center. He was very stressed about hospitals and clinics, so we ordered the upacjenta.co.uk service and it was a completely different experience. It is a unique experience with a service that focuses on the safety of the child. I myself also had my blood drawn at the time. I was very surprised because, being pregnant at the time, I noticed how my body relaxed, how it reacted completely differently on a physical and sensory level. In addition, I was delighted with the nurse, her competence, the way she approached and explained to the baby what was happening - I had the feeling that she was actually there for us, for my baby. And in addition, the children get a sticker at the end, but not the typical "brave patient" one. On these stickers were the nurses' pets. And with each animal there was some interesting story that the nurses told. I had the feeling that the client was really taken care of at every step of his path through this service.
Paulina Ignatowska - service designer and facilitator of future scenario design.
At Concordia Design, she supports future design with analysis of trends and signals of change. She teaches an agile design approach. She works on the basis of Human Centered Design (Service Design, Design Thinking and Creativity+Thinking). While working at Huge Thing Accelerator, she supported Polish and foreign technology startups to enter the Polish market. She believes that design can change our lives for the better, so she shares her knowledge by serving as Director of Hospital Relations at the K.I.D.S. Foundation - Innovators of Children's Hospitals.
