Thesis published - practices and principles in Service Design

After three years of hard work and countless editing, finally, my PhD thesis is published in the form of a book via lulu.com publication.

"How do service designers manage multiple stakeholder involvement in complex projects? How do they generate knowledge and disseminate it? What is a Community of Service, and why is it important to the future of service design practice? In this book, based on her PhD thesis, Qin Han examines the practice and theory of service design, identifying three common design approaches to stakeholder management, and the knowledge that service designers need to develop projects and groups. This ground breaking study of the relatively new discipline of service design offers a useful summary of existing literature from related fields and places it in a design context. Dr Han concludes with important proposals for the future study, practice and teaching of Service Design. A must-read for practitioners, academics and students of design, business and management."

You can order the book directly here for £24.65

Free summary for download

Also for those who don’t have the time to read through the whole book, I provide a summary for download here <- it doesn’t cost you anything but a tweet, so please enjoy the work and spread the words.

Hello again

It was not my intension to leave this space empty for such a long time, yet, my thinking has not stopped during the absence of blogging. In stead, I have reached some really interesting findings of my research, and glad that the challenging job of writing and reflecting the three-year journey has gained some positive feedbacks.

Yesterday I went to London and visited Participle’s little but busy office at Tanner Street. Participle has a clear vision that challenges the current state of public service and policy making. One of their most famous projects might be the Southward Circle, a social enterprise aims at solving problems for the aging society using the power of local community. I was delightfully surprised when I heard that they actually live prototype services in their little office – turn their office into the headcounter of a social enterprise for a good couple of weeks to find out what’s working and what’s not. It is exciting just to imaging live prototyping a service rather than writing it up in a report or business plan (not saying writing is not important but you know what I mean) This reminds me of We Are Curious’s method of establishing office at their client’s site in order to develop and exhibit their learning with the key stakeholders. Locations for Service Design seems to be a rather interesting topic to have a look at, it does reflects the inspiration of building a community of knowledge around a functioning service system, isn’t it? Maybe someone should collect examples like these and make it a method… how about call it ‘real space for service prototyping’?

Jennie Winhall, the friendly senior consultant at Participle, asked me what do people do with their big thick thesis. I said, well, disseminate it. So here comes the question of how. Getting back to blogging. After the long break it is good to be back and start again with a fresh mind, with a new background (Who wouldn’t love a blue sky?) Also I am preparing some paper for different purpose right now, one about the different aspects of design outcome for Service Design, another one for design education, and potentially another one for designer’s role in change management. But maybe the best way of realizing the value of the big thick book of knowledge is through practice. Here we go, a Service Design PhD looking for a job to make a difference. So if you happen to know of any opportunity to offer, I would love to hear from you.

Thesis 3.0 ?!

I was writing the Research Design chapter last night and had a sudden panic - realized that I will need a third round of sampling ( well... theoretical sampling this time) to further some inquires around the recognition of KM in SD practice... Still working on the best way to ask these questions... trying to find a way to grab some data quickly by the end of this year :-S

Any suggestions on how to do it? I am thinking of skyp interviews or email interviews... maybe kidnap some people on SDThink night on 19th Nov will be another solution ;-) By the way, anyone who is going that night (and perhaps want to be kidnapped as well...)?

Good news is that the categorise are coming together - slowly... my god... time, time, time...

Last week, I made a revisit to the thesis structure and here we go, a thesis 3.0:

PhD summer school

I was in the PhD Summer School last week for four days, had a nice eye-opening on the PhD projects going on in Dundee and also couple of from elsewhere in Britain. The first day we were asked to bring in a poster, thus, there is my homework:

On the second day we watched a video explainning the process of viva, and it was really great to see how the process is likely to be and what are the tips we can take. I am only writing up, but it's always good to know the next step.

I also did a 10 min presentation on the project, and got a lot of feedbacks - especially useful comments from Seaton. He also commented on the idea of 'unity of the diversity' - exactlly what I was look for in the case studies, that holding idea that makes Service Design Service Design, it can be a ideology or just a believe... mmnnn... Eva who did her PhD on craft and visualisation was saying 'to craftman the craft practice is a lifestyle', so what is Service Design to service designers?

We had two finishing PhD coming in talking about thesis writing and viva experience as well. Some good tips here:
* add a biographical note - it's nice to let the readers 'know' you as a human and understand how many decisions in the research process are influenced by where you come from;
* have a thesis outline as part of the introduction - I have done that, and my supervisors and I are using it as a graph tool to communicate the achieves of my writing, it works really well!
* bring evidence to viva - one of the outstanding characteristics of Art and Design research lies in the visual thinking process, therefore, it is reasonable to show that process as supporting material in the viva. I guess all my big big A1 sheets and wallpapers are getting into the room with me!
* prepare some tea or coffee, make sure the viva environment is as comfortable for conversation as possible. Sometimes viva can go over 2 hours, so having some water by hand is always handy (for you and the for your examiners...) also it is ture that the purpose of viva is to give the candidate the chance to indicate their ability of taking part in academic debate and defencing their arguement, so it is more like a discussion you can pick up in the conference rather than a question-answer type of interview.

Well... the future seems bright so far... Aiming at first draft before November, so... go go go~ this week I hope to hit at 20,000 words!

Thesis Outline ver2

Here is an update of the thesis outline, after a really helpful chat with my dear supervisors.

We had a in-depth discussion on Research Questions: what are they for in a thesis - I mean after I have done all that research, it is not simply where I started, it is somehow where I will end up going back to discuss in the final chapter as well. I, guess as well as many PhD researchers, started with a huge research question collection in the first year into the research, then we somehow end up focusing down a bit in order to concentrate our energy in actually carrying out some sort of actions to find out answers to some of the questions – well, whether we find the answer is another story yet. But when it comes to write up, it is about telling the story of this journey of finding, which means the research question here serves a different purpose. Somehow we are post-rationalize our research and try to make sense of it with very limited time and materials as we could manage to achieve in three years of learning-by-doing. It doesn’t mean that the answers we could find shapes the questions, but they do influence how we select the research questions to present in a 80,000 words thesis.

As I sign posted in this image, the literature give birth to research questions, so when we write up, each piece of literature we quoted has an aim and the findings point at the questions, which then will be structured and lead to Research Design – sometimes called the methodological approach in some thesis. The findings answer a selected group of these question collection, the discussion structure the answers again. So in terms of writing, it is very likely that we actually start from the answers and return to the questions – not that we invent research questions along the way, we select and refine them. The criteria is that they are important, they are relvant and they are interesting to read!

Any writing is about telling a story, sometimes we can start from the end of the story rather than from the start.

PhD Thesis & Originality

I spent the whole day re-structuring my thesis outline. Here is a taste of the result:

I was told that writing up process is tough, but I have a really ambitious deadline and am still confident in achieving it. I felt very lucky that I have friends to discuss different views and progress about writing up ‘the big book’. The other day, Lauren and I talked about the originality of a PhD in our email exchanges. To be honest, I have never really seriously think of ‘protecting’ my thinking or my PhD progress – tell me that I am wrong and maybe I am! But I do consciously select things that I would like to tell in this blog, simply because I don’t want to cause misunderstanding due to the immaturity in my thinking. Originality in a topic like Service Design seems to be easier, compared with working in a well-established knowledge, as the theoretical models and concepts are relatively underdeveloped, and most importantly people are more open to new suggestions and research approaches. My understanding of originality is that if you can *prove* that your thesis is original then it is fine. I mean we all know that our research question and its landscape changes, especially in a project lasted for 2-3 years it’s almost impossible that no other individual in the world, at certain point, had a similar idea to what we are doing. But our literature review suggests our originality of the inquires, our empirical studies ensure the originality of our findings. Nobody knows my research better than me. Even if there are others out there doing similar research, there is always something original about all these works. We just need to be confident enough to claim it and work hard enough to prove it. After all, PhD is a learning process as well as a research process, we are not working towards Nobel Prize level breaking throughs…

Well, I don’t really know what I am saying here is right or wrong… if you have done a PhD already, maybe it would be great to hear what you say about this matter.

process, people and knowledge

I have been avoiding blogging for a while - just try to concentrate on the project. After all, I am now officially in my final year…

Although away from the internet, but I was working as hard as always~ Firstly, big big ‘thank you’ to all the inspiring conversations I had with the brilliant designers from Livework, Engine, Plot in London, We Are Curious in Glasgow and Professor Alan McKinley in St Andrews!

This morning I was editing the article for Re-public's special issue on Service Design, which hopefully is going to be published soon online!

As usually… the discussion/conclusion paragraphs got me dead… and as usually I start to doodle on post-it notes



Process can be a chain of stages where people feed their relationships and knowledge into.

Process can be carried out in such ways that it actively form itself to fit into people’s relationship and capture their knowledge.

Maybe there should be a third one:
Process can be guiding people through to build new relationships and create new knowledge.

a holistic view for (service) design team

image from Boxes and Arrows

After reading Joseph Selbie's post 'Bring Holistic Awareness to Your Design' on Boxes and Arrows, I quickly made this graph here and start to wonder what is a holistic view for Serivce Design team? What's interesting is that in Joseph devide the role in the design team as Stakeholder Champion, Project Manager, Busines Analyst, User Representatives, UI Developer, Programming Lead. Although Joseph is talking about using user-central approach in web designing, I can instently see characters being reflected in many other design practice that uses a user-central approach...

What in fact bugs me a bit is the right corner circle, and I wonder if that is more of the role that service designer will play as facilitator/navigator rather than as a technology expert. But then I add on 'tool' here... in many cases service designers act as the observer or the researcher using enthnographic tools, but they also act as visual tool creator as well, eh, well that kind of fit back into the facilitator's role, isn't it? I am a bit confused here, and wonder if any of you guys has an oppinon on it?

If we step back and have a look at the 'holistic picture', we might be able to get a sense of the wholeness of all three parties. This model can be an interesting starting point to interpret the dynamic roles of people who are involved in a design project - that many of them play multiple roles at different stage or even simultaneousluy. Whomever is involved in a process at a certain stage is there for a reason, they either has certain knowledge, skill or technique to contribute, or can be benefited from the participation. Design process is often an intensive knowledge exchange, even knowledge integrating process where designer often achieve a certain level of 'inaugurative learning' (Jevnaker, 1993) with the client. So in Service Design, firstly, what is the definition of a design team? What do service designers benefit when people are involved in a project? How they make the decisions of when certain stakeholders should be getting on board, when to leave them aside? What communication techniques are used if team members come from a different background and has different purpose to join the project?

small things make big changes

Last Friday, I had an interesting discussion about the gaps between strategic planning and the implement process and organisational learning. Somehow the conversation lead to the two dimensions in system implementation: a technical dimension and a social dimension. The technical implementation is often top-down, for example a new admin policy being introduced to the organisation internally. While the social system works bottom-up in terms of organisational culture, attitude change, learning motivation among the individuals. Marty Neumeier talks about how brand only exist in the minds of people, while I believe it is a turth to many other things. So in any system that involves human interactions, including service system of course, you only get one chance to have ++ situation. And in most cases, we naturally land in +-, or even worse --. If we say the technical problem can be solved by introducing new structure, new media, new technology, new strategic statement; then, in order to solve the social problems, we may need to look upon smaller changes - the 'tipping points'.

Interestingly, in another meeting last week, a very talented MDes student Lauren Currie, or kown as Redjotter in cyberspace, talked about her experience in working on a emploibility work she did in Amsterdam with DesignThinkers. She said it is often small changes you need to make to get the system work. For exampel employing a female driver for the shuffle bus, so that women can go to work without religious concerns from their husbands. Small change, big differences.

So is it possible that in Service Design, there are two processes going on in every project simultaneously? You have a tecnical top-down process with structures such as 'blue-print' and a bottom-up process with conversations among all the individuals who are involved in the design process, directly or indirectly. Wonder if anyone has any similar thoughts? it would be interesting to hear what kind of reflections you guys get from practice :-)

and...oh yes, I am still halfway through the Tipping Point , far behind all my hard-working students here ;-)

Tell me about...

the people you work with... live with... share enthusiasm with !!!

My Wall

I guess that's my visual methodology... I can't really do drawing...
Not sure if my office-mates love me or hate me for the mess...
First door left is mine office by the way...
Welcome to pop in anytime for a nice afternoon chat :)

New Year~ New Start~

I had a lovely chat with Lauren Tan over dinner last night - a perfect beginning to get me back to work. It was very interesting that we actually started our PhD around the same time on very similar topics - excited! what's more interesting is that we started with very different in research methodology: Lauren with Grounded Theory so she start with data collecting; while I doing Case Study, starting with structure developing... but the results & reflections of our research so far echo each other so wonderfully.

This year I shall be doing the empirical part of my research and begin to writ up - excited again!!! I am really looking forward to having more conversations with design practitioners and other researchers - wish that they are as good as this one! And this might be the last year I work in the Master of Design course as a Teaching Fellow, so... really hope that all the students will do a great job in 2009! Besides, I agreed to help out DHTP with some teaching work so I am looking forward to meeting my group - also wish to use this chance to overcome I fear of 'young people' ;-)

stupid research

The importance of stupidity in scientific research, by a PhD surviver, Martin A. Schwartz... wonder if it applys to design research as well ?! Guess most of the designers are hit by the 'nobody did' problem on an everyday base...

Thanks to Naida for the link... we are on the same boat of being stupid, productively hopefully :o)