The Servant Designer's Process
ServiceSpace
--Vishesh Gupta
5 minute read
Sep 20, 2014

 

One of the newest, hottest things at Stanford these days is the d.school, who are injecting their process of "doing things the design way" into every aspect of Stanford's curriculum, from engineering to business to even social science. The promise of the d.school certainly is great, but the focus of their 5-step process tends to be a "something" at the end of the road - a product, a service, something new that will change the world, with the emphasis being on *new*. There's also this inherent sense of superiority associated with the design thinking way - that somehow you are privy to the end all be all of doing things and that your position at the d.school entitles you to some higher status above all other people you could ever mean to help. Basically, lots of ego.

This mentality seems to work for pure design theory and commercial applications the d.school is involved in, but the d.school's greatest fame comes ironically from the "service" work they do, from the Design For Extreme Affordability class, among others.

I've taken a couple d.school and d.school-like classes but have been constantly eaten by the ego driven nature of the work. Over the past three weeks at a leadership program I was part of, we once again used the d.school process to solve a problem for a client (it was an actual real world problem involving the SF waterfront, which was very cool). Again I found myself really liking the process, but not liking the mentality I was asked to enter, which got me thinking - we have servant leaders, why not servant designers?

And what does the servant designer's process look like?

Before I go into what I came up with, I will briefly talk about the d.school process. There's a full 5-page document on it online too.

The 5 steps are:


EMPATHIZE - this step is all about understanding your "user" - the person that will use the ultimate "thing" you design. You conduct interviews, go to events in the community, and try to unlock the real motivations and reasons behind people's choices and actions.

DEFINE - here you take all the things you've learned from your interviews and condense them into something called a POV statement, which has the skeleton:

[USER] needs [archetypal THING/EXPERIENCE] because [AMAZING INSIGHT]

IDEATE - now, it's time to take your POV and generate ideas that will solve the thing you're doing. There are two main processes the d.school teaches you aside from just generally having good ideas - one is brainstorming in a group, and the other is mind-mapping, which mimics the way your mind thinks so that you can document your thinking process and then synthesize that into an answer. You end up with lots of crazy things this way and then you spend time picking out ideas like "low hanging fruit", "most realistic", "crazy cool, but no", and "the best bet".

PROTOTYPE - Once you've identified some ideas you want to run with, you do the actual building part by making a crude prototype to show off to your user that gets the main ideas across so they can comment on it.

TEST - finally, you go see your user, and show them the protype, gather their feedback, then start bouncing around - maybe you redefine the need or you redesign the prototype etc.

It's not actually a linear process, even though most classes I've taken teach it that way - you could start by prototyping then go back to the define phase, etc.


So what does it look like to have a servant designer? I think that while the mentality of bouncing around 5 main processes doesn't change, what those are does, into:

COMPASSION, SEARCH & AMPLIFICATION, CO-CREATION, INTENTIONAL LOVING ACTION, REFLECTION

COMPASSION - it's actually very funny that all the 4 speakers we had at the program talked about compassion and specifically brought up how it was different from empathy. I think compassion has to form the core of every action done by someone wanting to help someone else, or it'll become about you rather than about them (which is exactly the problem with the d.school).

SEARCH & AMPLIFICATION - This is an idea from Nipun-bhai about what his role is; instead of plan and execute, he searches for opportunities and seeks to 'amplify' them and connect the various ripples together to reinforce them. There is no DEFINE, because there is no point of view. You simply accept what is happening and encourage it to blossom.

CO-CREATION - the main problem I always saw with the ideation step is that it seemed silly that I was the person who was coming up with the ideas when I could just as easily ask the person going through the issue themselves for their perspectives. There is the conundrum that people don't always know what they want, but that's where co-creation becomes the gold standard, rather than being in front of a whiteboard by yourself without the input of the 'users'.

INTENTIONAL LOVING ACTION - this name is really long, but basically using the co-creation process you perform a act of loving kindness :) The key here is that it's intentional - based in your values and morality, so that it's not an emotional (or logical) decision based on trained brain-patterns rather than your core beliefs.

REFLECTION - finally, you reflect! How did it go? Did you have the desired outcome? Basically this is the step that causes inner transformation and helps you be a better servant of external transformation.



I've been doing something like this in my quest to bring the laddership principles to Stanford, and so far I've found that the mentality has been tending towards egoless action and that makes me feel much better.


Of course, this is what I came up with one day while scribbling on a napkin, so I'm looking for ideas from the community - what is your servant designers process? 

I'm thinking we can get much more radical than just changing 5 words around :)  

 

Posted by Vishesh Gupta on Sep 20, 2014


4 Past Reflections