Service Designer: An Anchor for Innovation, or Merely Its Catalyst?

Do we need to redefine this role to improve the standing of service design within client organizations?

There is a hypothesis, one I have heard often among Iranian designers, which holds that the Iranian market neither understands design nor desires it. According to this hypothesis, the major merchants of the market—whose long-established firms command high turnover—occupy the central role in shaping other actors’ roles in the market. By other actors in the field, I mean stakeholders like entrepreneurs, industrial engineers, designers, and so on. The hypothesis holds that as long as the traditional form of commerce continues to function well within the market network, these major merchants feel no need for the presence of such other stakeholders. As an old Iranian proverb puts it, “One does not bandage a head that does not ache.” When the same old model of trade—import and export—continues to yield the merchant substantial profit, and no major competitor exists in the market, why should the merchant trouble himself with innovative industrial production, the improvement of service experience, and so forth? This hypothesis largely reflects designers’ own perspective, shaped by the responses they have received from their clients. But what would we see if we looked at designers through the eyes of their clients themselves? Do the major merchants and capital-holders of the Iranian market truly have no inclination toward design? Is the problem really the market’s failure to understand design? This essay surveys a number of scenes drawn from clients’ efforts to define the place of design within their organizations, and considers some of the obstacles and complexities that stand in the way of accomplishing this successfully.

In the office of the senior manager of the complex, Vala, along with his representative in the mall, Hooman, and one of the complex’s female managers, Anahita, are present. The head of the design team, Fahimi, is also in the room, together with Melika, Sima, and myself. Vala is present at this review meeting because the subject under discussion is the design of Floor X of the mall—regarded as the anchor of the entire complex and of particular importance to the senior manager. Hooman has opened the meeting and given Vala a brief introduction to the history of the design team’s presence within the complex. He has noted that the design team “has done a great deal of research and has fully completed the discovery phase. Now we want to move forward with them on how to implement the ideas, what the priorities are, and which of them we can execute together with them.” From a conversation I had with Fahimi at the start of this fieldwork, I know that the design team has been working with the complex for close to two years. Initially, the arrangement was that the collaboration would take the form of separate, defined projects, each carried forward by representatives of the design team and the client. However, when the design team began conducting design research for one of these projects, the client was so pleased with the team’s findings that—given the diversity of services offered by the mall—it began, for a time, continually assigning the team new subjects to research. This led the form of collaboration between the team and the client to shift toward hourly consulting. Each piece of research required a different amount of time and a different level of skill, and for this reason the team and the client arrived at a particular hourly-consulting agreement for the project. Now, after two years during which the bulk of the team’s activity has consisted of research—research that has, in some cases, yielded new concepts for service delivery and ideas for prototyping new services—the client is considering how to implement the many scattered ideas that have accumulated over this period.

After Hooman’s introduction, Fahimi begins enumerating the work the team has carried out across the complex as a whole. Fahimi, who joined the complex through an introduction from another of the complex’s consultants—one who is no longer working with them today—reviews the history of his team’s entry into the complex and its collaboration with the consultants and managers who were present over these two years but are no longer there, before turning his focus to the subject of Floor X. He speaks of the various pieces of research the design team has carried out, both at the request of the complex’s managers and on its own initiative. He touches on the new concepts they have arrived at over the course of the design process, then moves on to the ideas that appear feasible for implementation on this floor, gradually working his way into the details of some of them.

When Fahimi begins presenting the ideas, Hooman rises from his seat and moves to the whiteboard positioned behind Fahimi. After writing the name of the meeting and its date, he begins jotting down scattered words on the board. Sima’s attention is drawn to Hooman, and she watches what he is writing. Vala, too, glances alternately at Fahimi and at what Hooman is writing on the board. Hooman writes the words one by one, each after a brief pause of thought. At times he writes a word, looks at it for a moment, then writes the next; at other times, after a pause and a brief glance, he erases a word and writes another in its place, or adds a connecting line between words. Fahimi, whose back is to Hooman, cannot see him, and keeps his gaze on Vala and Anahita. My own attention is divided between listening to Fahimi and watching the words Hooman is writing, and apart from a few instances, I am unable to find much connection between what Fahimi is saying and what Hooman is writing. It seems to me that Hooman is simply emptying his own mind onto the board, unconcerned with what Fahimi is actually saying.

Vala occasionally nods in agreement with Fahimi, and at other times turns to Anahita to check with her about what Fahimi is saying. After listening to Fahimi for a while, Vala interrupts him and attempts to redirect the conversation:

• Vala: Let’s not get into the details this way—let’s turn to the general picture.
• Fahimi: Well, what I’ve been saying *is* the general picture; there’s even more detail than this.
• Something like [the] subject … is a part. Let’s turn to the whole.
• But these are the challenges, and each one has its own details.

Fahimi then begins once again to explain, in greater detail, the various spaces on Floor X and the ideas associated with them. Now, after this interruption in Fahimi’s remarks, Anahita too becomes increasingly focused on the board Hooman is writing on. Hooman sometimes paces and thinks, and sometimes writes a word himself. The board is now nearly full. Anahita joins the discussion regarding one of the ideas Fahimi is explaining, saying that specialists had been invited in for this matter and that they had recently visited the space and presented their own designs for it. Fahimi is somewhat taken aback upon hearing this, and about the design the specialists had proposed; he discusses with Anahita the issue of customer safety, which had not been accounted for in the specialists’ design. Vala joins the discussion between the two of them and says that, in fact, this design had been provided by the complex’s own managers, and that they consider it feasible for implementation. Fahimi falls silent, lost in thought, and Hooman takes the opportunity to explain the now-full board.

From his explanation, it becomes clear that a large percentage of these words that Fahimi calls “concepts” and Hooman calls  “modules” are results gained from over two years of collaboration with the design team. Hooman’s use of the word “module” strikes me as noteworthy. I sense that what Fahimi regards as an untested design requiring further ideation, prototyping, and only then implementation has, in Hooman’s mind, become one of the complex’s established capabilities, simply awaiting its place on the implementation list. Hooman says to Fahimi, “Some of what you’ve been discussing [in this very meeting] would have gone into this model [the words on the board], but until we have this [pointing to the word ‘Master Plan,’ which he has written on the board in English] in place, decisions might not be valid, and might not harmonize with the overall plan.” Now Vala too proposes another service to be added to the board. Hooman adds it to the words without any discussion and then continues: “It needs to be determined what the procedure is for each of these items. Then priorities will be defined, and after that, the people involved will be assigned—and it seems that many of these will start simultaneously.” Now it is Vala’s turn to continue Hooman’s remarks, addressing Fahimi:

• Vala: How long have we been working together? Two years? Over these two years, have the managers decreased or increased?
• [Everyone in the meeting laughs.]
• Fahimi: Decreased.
• Vala: They’ve decreased, but apparently only decreased—in reality, we’ve arrived at a certain organization, and now we have a structure, but where is Soraya? Where is Mahmoud? Where is Mojtaba?
• [Fahimi listens in silence and does not answer.]
• If we wanted to bring in a manager to manage Floor X, it would be very difficult, and it wouldn’t work. This job needs a team—one that is both a good observer and capable of good design with our help, and also capable of implementation. [He then puts the next question to Fahimi.] I know you’re in a good position in the first two parts, but have you also been involved in implementation?
• No.
• How ready could you be? [He does not wait for Fahimi’s answer and continues.] Say, for instance, that I can’t be involved in implementation at all. We break those parts down in such a way that even people with fewer resources can implement them. But if you can, and you’re mentally prepared, get involved in implementation as well.
• [Fahimi, who has by this point leaned forward somewhat, his brow furrowed, says] I don’t know exactly what we’re talking about.
• There are many projects. We look at the whole and reach an understanding of what the priorities are for the next three months—and we know each other well, and ninety-five percent of our views are close, since we’ve worked together for two years. All these ideas have been thought through, but how many of them have been completed? How many implemented? But we can introduce people who can work alongside you and get things implemented.
• For many of these, if they’re to become projects that get implemented, project management isn’t our competency…
• [Vala nods, meaning “I understand,” and says] It’s not in our best interest.
• Of course, It’s not in our best interest …
• But have these people work alongside you, and pave the way for implementation. If you can do that, we’ll move forward with smaller teams, because a single manager trying to carry this forward would take a long time just to arrive and get established. It would take at least six months just to understand where they’d landed and what’s what—but we can see the independence and interdependence of these items. No one person can do it all.
• Right now, the number of managers we’d need to coordinate with is small, and coordination can happen quickly with everyone, and what you’re proposing can be done.

Now Fahimi himself proposes adding another word to the board. Hooman, too, adds several more words in the midst of the exchange between Vala and Fahimi. A little later, even Anahita reviews the remaining ideas they have developed over this period for the complex as a whole—not merely for Floor X—and asks that the connection between these ideas and the concepts for Floor X be assessed.

Vala now speaks of the complex’s “other consultants” as well, who over these two years of collaboration have likewise offered various pieces of advice. It may well be that some of the words on the board have emerged from the suggestions of these non-design consultants—consultants whose engagement with the complex Vala is unhappy to see diminished, and whom he has asked to return and offer their counsel once more. Vala says, “Making optimal use of the consultants is also something we need to address—having them get involved again.” Hooman, affirming this, adds that their intention is to keep the consultants on as observers alongside the complex, and that they do not want their presence to end along with the conclusion of a given project. These consultants—each, according to Hooman and Vala’s remarks and examples about the manner of their involvement, a specialist in a particular domain—when they join the complex, complete what they themselves call the “discovery phase” quickly, within a week or two, and then place a “practical” proposal on the client’s table—one whose implementation details, in my view, are not entirely reliable. Perhaps it is for this reason that Vala proposes to Hooman:

• It would be good if, when Consultant [Name]’s proposals are presented, he [Fahimi] is there too, since part of it concerns Floor X.
• Fahimi: Yes.
• Hooman: Meaning, it might be good if you also add someone permanent to your own team for Floor X, someone who can be present and work on it.
• Vala: Forty-eight hours ago, we had an urgent discussion about the fact that we’re not working well with Y [a well-known delivery contractor]. And we tried to resolve it quickly.
• Hooman [gesturing to the glass room next door]: Their representative is in the next room right now, signing the contract.
• Vala: If there are certain resources available, let’s use them, and then handle the implementation ourselves. Like with Y. [Then, turning to Fahimi, he asks] You’re not planning to take the design all the way to one hundred percent and only then tell us what to do, are you?
• No.
• Then we need to see which ones we implement in September and which in October. [Then, smiling, he adds] Let’s go from small to large—it’s more exciting that way. Let the smaller jobs get results and get done first; it’s better for our morale, and it gives us the motivation to do the rest.

More examples follow of the complex’s speed in addressing an issue, of ideas being drafted in the shortest possible time by the complex’s own members, and of the rapid start of implementation—something Vala refers to as “getting the hang of it”—followed by hope for its improvement over time through consultation with advisors and other staff. Even though Anahita strongly disagrees with one of the already-implemented ideas, believing the problem has not been properly defined, Vala supports this procedure nonetheless. In the end, Vala sums up his remarks as follows: “The organization’s approach is: if I don’t have the design part in-house, I hand it to a set of consultants, and then I start finding people who can implement what has been designed, and then I find others who can operate it. What I’m saying is that you’re currently in the position of the project’s executor. Even if you’re not really the one implementing it, that’s the name for it—that’s the name for what we’re talking about. You’re managing. The management of the process is with you, and then we hand the implementation over to the executors. You have a technical-implementation arm on our side, and we also have a workforce that you need to draw on and make use of. The simple way I’ve learned to do this myself is: first, we define the projects—so out of these twenty-one, say, we greenlight five in August and move forward. Then the path becomes clear, and we find the teams—who does what. Now, if you develop this, we’ll be waiting for your proposal at the next meeting.”

Fahimi asks Vala for a bit of time—both to find more implementation-oriented members for his team and to work out a breakdown structure diagram for implementing each of the concepts—so that, with a schedule and prioritization of tasks in hand, they can continue the discussion at a meeting a week or two later. But Vala is more impatient than that; with the meeting nearing its end—he himself notes that he must leave within five minutes—he pushes the meeting’s participants to settle the priorities within those five minutes and then close the meeting. Hooman hands Vala a marker so he can mark the priorities, and Vala, in a quick back-and-forth with Hooman—Anahita occasionally joining in as well—rapidly circles the words that seem important to them.

The way this prioritization discussion unfolds is of interest to me, because the words chosen—the “modules,” as they call them—are ones that some consultant or member of the complex happens to already be involved in advancing right now: “This one—since we’ve already told the person handling it to go ahead, it’s already been greenlit.” “This one—my team is already moving forward with implementation, but you could give us input on the experience side.” “This one is Consultant Ms. [Name]’s responsibility. Combining you with her, we can create a difference for people sooner.” “The matter of human resources, recruitment, and training is important too. We have Ms. [Name] for that.” And so on. It seems that the thrust of Vala’s remarks is something like: “We have a set of issues on the table alongside a set of idle capacities, and we want to make the best possible use of them. Some of the design team’s ideas, developed gradually over the past two years, are now well suited to these issues on the table but lack a scenario for implementation. On the other hand, there are people within the complex who need the design team’s counsel to advance their own ideas, which is why different names keep coming up: Ms. So-and-so, Mr. So-and-so, Ms. Such-and-such…” It seems Vala wants to keep combining the design team with these specialists in particular domains—people who offer more implementation-oriented advice—to help bring the ideas to fruition sooner, so he can see the output of the ideas produced through service design while simultaneously treating the complex’s current pains. At the same time, the design team could play a central role in integrating and clarifying the connections among all these projects—and it is my impression that this is precisely why Hooman placed such emphasis on creating a master plan.

When the meeting ends and the design team gathers together outside the client’s office, the team members are pleased with the outcome of the meeting. I feel less pleasure than concern; the existence of so many different teams, each a stakeholder in some portion of the work, nearly all of them wanting to work simultaneously on the implementation of various tasks, worries me as to how the design team will manage to coordinate with all these stakeholders. I share this concern with the team lead, but he does not think it will pose a problem, since these teams consist of people who have worked with Vala for a long time, and the design team needs only to coordinate with the executive manager of Floor X regarding these matters.

The question of the design team’s facilitative role in implementing the ideas comes up again a few days later within the team, raised once more by Fahimi. In a fresh conversation with Fahimi, Hooman said that the complex has increased its number of mid-level managers and now requires project management—and, in the course of this conversation, he also voices another need he hopes the design team can help address. Hooman has asked Fahimi to recommend a cashier for one of the stores on another floor of the mall, and when Fahimi asked him the reason for this request, Hooman said that it matters to him to find the right people for the job, and that it seems to him that Fahimi, unlike himself, has easy access to such people. Fahimi, reasoning that recommending implementation-level personnel to the complex might allow the team to remain involved longer through the testing and rollout of ideas and to go deeper into the projects, ultimately agrees to think it over. He hopes that this person’s presence might, in addition, help the design team advance the rest of the path toward the full implementation of the service.

I have experienced an argument similar to his own before, in my own position as the manager of a service design team. This is especially true at this stage of the design process, once the ideas have been defined and someone is needed who, with an awareness of what has been done as well as an awareness of the design approach to problem-solving, can carry the rest of the work forward through to implementation. As an advisory agency, our proposal at this stage—and at times even the client’s own wish—was to hand responsibility for the work to a single member of the organization, who would maintain close and continuous contact with the design team, so that an internal design team could gradually take shape within the organization with our facilitation. We wanted to serve as a bridge between the idea-testing stages and the formation of an internal team that would permanently take charge of testing and implementing ideas. This proposal seemed particularly fitting for organizations resembling Fahimi’s current client—organizations whose managers are older and more traditional, who were unfamiliar with design prior to working with a design agency, and who have no team of their own dedicated to this work. But a client unfamiliar with design is likewise unfamiliar with the people who work in this field, and unfamiliar too with how to evaluate candidates for such positions—even those within the organization whom managers put forward as candidates to take on this responsibility are unfamiliar with this approach, and tend to avoid taking on responsibility in this area as much as they can. By “unfamiliar” I do not necessarily mean unfamiliarity with the terminology and general concepts of design in business; even in cases where this general familiarity exists, the client’s team has no real conception of how the work is actually carried out or how design is managed. This is precisely why, once this proposal is raised, the client’s next request usually follows close behind: help finding people to hire who can bring the ideas to implementation.

In my experience, in many cases where the matter concerns launching a new business, the person requested from the team is a product manager; and in cases resembling the present project, where the matter concerns launching several new branches of service, this person or persons are members of the design team themselves, asked to be present within the organization—at least temporarily, until the project is implemented—on a permanent basis, overseeing the implementation process. This is exactly why Vala, too, called for the design team’s involvement in implementation, and why, over the following months, the push to secure a fixed presence for certain design team members across the complex’s various projects continued unabated. From my earlier conversations with Fahimi, I know that he too has repeatedly encountered such requests—particularly since, owing to the economic conditions in Iran, the clients of service design agencies are largely established, traditionally capitalized organizations less familiar with the new vocabulary of the business world, and especially of design; as a result, this situation arises frequently for design agencies.

Even in my own experience, given the small size of our team, I recall instances in which the client intended to hire my partner and me—the team’s leads and more experienced members—as designers working full-time in service to the organization, so that we would form a team for implementation. A client unfamiliar with design, who through our involvement becomes acquainted with this approach via the small number of service designers active in the Iranian market, and who after a while comes to trust our knowledge and ability, prefers to retain precisely these people it has come to recognize as experts within the organization, so that they can carry the work through to implementation. In other words, finding, hiring, and coming to trust someone who understands this approach and can execute it is, for the client, a considerable source of difficulty. Of course, under current conditions in the Iranian market, finding qualified people in any specialized field is far from easy—let alone in service design, a relatively new job title. A wave of emigration of specialists out of Iran in recent years has caused a significant decline in the number of capable professionals in every field, and the preference for working with a specialist whose trustworthiness has already been proven has grown almost obsessively strong. Hooman’s reasoning for asking Fahimi about hiring a cashier likewise traces back to this broader pattern: asking a trusted person to introduce another trusted person.

What I understand from observing how the position of service designers gets defined within an organization is this: once a client encounters this relatively new problem-solving approach in Iran, implementing the outputs that result from it requires more help than simply going through the design process itself. The client has given the team sufficient time (in this case, two years) to understand what help a designer can offer the organization. In doing so, the client also comes to understand what advantage the designer brings: an understanding of the organization’s needs, an integrated view of these needs and their connection to the rest of the organization, and an awareness of customer preferences in implementing design ideas. But at the same time, the client does not know how much it can continue to trust the designer to the same degree as before in this next stage, as Vala put it: “They need to be good observers, and also do good design with our help, and also handle implementation. I know you’re strong in the first two parts, but have you also been involved in implementation?”

The client hopes that, with the designer present as an anchor for innovation rather than merely its catalyst (through the provision of research findings and concepts), the designer’s output can be brought to fruition within the organization. The client therefore asks the designer to take on a role beyond that of designer per se, and to become involved in implementing the ideas—even in managing the organization’s implementation projects: “Even if you’re not really the one implementing it, that’s the name for it—that’s the name for what we’re talking about. You’re managing. The management of the process is with you, and then we hand the implementation over to the executors.” / “The complex has increased its number of mid-level managers and now requires project management.” But not all clients voice this need in the same fixed form. The shape this request takes varies from client to client depending on the type of project and the type of organization: sometimes it takes the form of trying to hire the design lead of the agency (as in my own experience at our small agency), sometimes the form of close collaboration between the designer and other departments, and sometimes the form of introducing trusted individuals for collaboration (as in Fahimi’s experience on this project). In any case, however, this is a serious need.

What the client fails to grasp is not design itself, but rather how to fill the vacancy of someone capable of implementing the design’s output. For the client in the present project, who operates in a turbulent, rapidly changing environment, this pain is felt all the more acutely, and there is correspondingly greater urgency in responding to it. The client attempts, through examples of rapid responsiveness to challenges—”Their representative is in the next room right now, signing the contract”—to underscore this need for faster implementation, and perhaps also to gesture toward the client’s own preferred method for implementing ideas. Before the designer’s arrival at the organization, its managers, drawing on trial and error and accumulated experience, produced solutions on the spot and gradually began implementing them—and in some cases, still do. Since the designer’s arrival, they know that a solution grounded in design will likely produce a better experience for the customer, particularly since some of the concepts the design team arrived at and presented over these two years have now become visible to the complex’s managers. But the client still intends to implement ideas in the same manner as before—through what Vala calls “getting the hang of it,” proceeding with the advice of the complex’s various consultants. In other words, the governing spirit behind implementing solutions remains this same “getting the hang of it,” and the design team has simply been added onto this existing style of implementation, so that it too can put its own outputs into practice within it. Moreover, given the standing the design team has earned, and having mastered the ins and outs of the various issues on Floor X and across the complex as a whole over two years, it can play a central role in implementing the outputs, so that the implementation of solutions is integrated. But this brings no change to the prior style of implementation; the same old urgency for implementation still governs this environment, and it is the designer who must adapt to this pace in order to participate in implementing the ideas. The designer must be able to shape the “master plan,” to prioritize whatever has “already been greenlit right now,” and, in coordination and consultation with “people we can introduce to work alongside you,” take on the management of the project.

Although greater involvement in the implementation stage is, for the designer too, desirable for bringing design ideas to fruition, whether this is feasible given the conditions under which small service design agencies operate is questionable. At times, this need—and the expectation placed on the designer to meet it—has led me to doubt the usefulness of agencies whose work is purely design. Much of our time in design teams, particularly in a market like Iran’s that is unfamiliar with this problem-solving approach, is spent conducting the design research phase, working through to implementable ideas. As in this very project, where the client’s appetite in the first two years of collaboration for more and more design research findings led to the definition of ever more design research projects, the bulk of the team’s time—and, gradually, the bulk of the team’s expertise—becomes concentrated in these design phases. As a result, by the time it comes to implementing the ideas, the team effectively has little or no workforce available that can focus specifically on getting ideas implemented.

Furthermore, individuals gradually come to concentrate their professional advantage in the research, concept development, and ideation phases, whereas the implementation stage usually requires bringing in people from outside the team—even outside the agency—to support execution, since the number of people capable of carrying work through the implementation stage is limited. This is especially true given that implementing certain service design outputs may require mastery in specialized domains such as marketing, human resources, finance, and so on.

In response to this internal need within service design agencies, agency leaders may turn toward permanently hiring people with implementation-focused expertise and bringing them into the agency. In our own agency, for instance, we had previously made efforts to move from being a service design agency toward becoming an agency for designing and implementing solutions. Among the scenarios we pursued to this end was bringing implementation-focused people into the co-founding team of the agency, but in practice, given our low revenue and the small financial scale of service design projects, we were unable to move from service design toward integration with other, more implementation-oriented specialties such as financial management, human resources, and project management, because we were not a financially attractive enough operation for new people to want to join.

Another scenario was collaborating with management consulting firms, which, compared to our small agency, had a much broader range of implementation-focused specialists at their disposal—but again, for the same reason as before, integrating our team into theirs made no financial sense for our small team. Furthermore, the management consulting firm itself was also uncertain about how to define the position the service design team could occupy within its projects; in one case, while we were negotiating with a management consulting firm about being absorbed and integrated, it seemed that the consulting firm, much like other clients, was more interested in recruiting individuals into its own team than in adding service design as a specialty integrated with the rest of the firm’s services.

Another scenario for meeting this need is one Fahimi says he pursued before this—forming strategic partnerships between the design agency and small consulting firms in various fields such as content, product, UX design, and so on. This too, by his own account, was not particularly successful, because those other firms, also constrained by the low financial scale of their operations, had too few projects in which they could involve another partner during the service design phase, and equally few projects that, after going through the service design phase, offered sufficient financial justification for bringing in another outside agency to collaborate on implementation. As a result, no stable collaborations formed that could endure over time and build meaningful strategic alliances.

Another scenario Fahimi has tried, and which likewise did not succeed—one that seems appealing to the present client as well—is the fixed presence of certain design team members for the purpose of implementing ideas. Fahimi had previously tried this idea with a different client, one that, incidentally, had a higher level of knowledge about design than the current client. But the result was that the design team member stationed within the client organization had neither the authority and responsibility of a regular member of the client organization, nor the access to top-level management—which an outside consultant would have—needed to influence implementation. In the end, after a few months, this collaboration came to an end.

Although, both we at our own agency and Fahimi at his have, wherever possible, brought in implementation-focused people—particularly in other areas of design—to complete our own work’s output, whether within the scope of a project or by directly introducing such specialists to the client. But this was not a need we were able to meet on an ongoing basis for our clients, and the various scenarios for meeting this need consistently have not succeeded. Fahimi is still trying to move the agency toward becoming a transformation consulting firm, and in doing so, perhaps offer a more integrated range of services for implementing more of the output of design projects—but he remains caught up in the complexities of this path.