Designers don’t want to listen to their customers — we want to be validated
Bitesize Dissertation | Part 7
Whilst the key purpose of Service Design (SD) is to fulfil customer needs, the positionality of the service designer is taken for granted in the process of accomplishing this task.
There is a clear relationship in the nature of SD between service designers and customers — they (the customer) hold the potential to enable practitioners to create a great service, and it is the designer’s job to unlock it. Learning how to do Service Design (SD) implies going through methodologies of how to manage and incite this information from the customer and consequently turn it into something meaningful.
There is a very real issue however, in which customers become the amorphous entity at the end of whatever it is created, only involved to validate assumptions. In this case, the biases of the designer trump all other insights.
A great example of this is the case study of the so-called ‘racist’ soap dispenser. The head of Facebook’s platform partnerships, Chukwuemeka Afigbo, posted a video of a soap dispenser that only reacted to white skin versus dark skin with the caption ‘If you have ever had a problem grasping the importance of diversity in tech and its impact on society, watch this video’(Afigbo, 2017, youtube.com). Afigbo raised the issue of diversity — no one involved in the process of the soap dispenser was a person of colour, hence they did not consider to test it for different skin tones. The biases each designer carries will inevitably affect how they test, who is involved and why. The soap dispenser was placed in the market as a product that passed all necessarily regulation, and yet it managed to show biases. These biases can be applied to all designers at many different levels of society, renown architect Frank Lloyd Wright famously said that if he had been a few inches taller, his housing designs would probably look much different (Wright, 1953 in Preiser and Smith, 2011, p.35).
He suffered from what Kat Holmes calls ‘exclusion habits’
‘An exclusion habit is the belief that whoever starts the game also sets the rules of the game’ (Holmes, 2018, p.36).
Service Designer Liliana Lambriev validates this in an interview — ‘It starts with already in the beginning of the process where you think about who to recruit, who to include in your research, who to execute and for what reasons (…) if the intention wasn’t there from the beginning, that means they didn’t want it to be all inclusive.’ (Lambriev, 2020, Zoom interview).
The word ‘inclusion’ was used in the previous chapter to explore the othering mentality that it brought. The word implicitly suggests that there is a specific group of people not being accepted into a wider, more powerful section. In design terms, this is called ‘inclusive design’, also dubbed ‘universal design’ or, slightly different, ‘designing for the extremes’.
The nuances of these terms are extensive and complex, however there seems to be common understanding in the fact that —
‘Inclusive design’ and ‘universal design’ refer to the practices in design that take into consideration all and any kind of disabilities, and the legal and economical discrimination that this may cause (Preiser and Smith, 2011; CABE, 2006; University of Cambridge, 2017, inclusivedesigntoolkit.com; Swan et al, 2020, inclusivedesignprinciples.org; Design for all Foundation, 2020, designforall.org).
‘Designing for the extremes’ however, relates to the cases in a group of users that have ‘extreme’ behaviours, habits, opinions or beliefs. Renown design agency IDEO explains that there are users that ‘sit squarely in the middle’ of your target audience, and those that sit on the extremes of it (IDEO Design Thinking, 2020, designthinking.ideo.com). The ‘extremes’ are those users with ‘anormal’, ‘extreme’ behaviours from a set group of already chosen people. This is a problematic definition, as this chosen group could already be filled with biases.
As explained, the customer is then seen as a resource at the disposal of the service designer, even the term ‘designing for the extremes’ features this — service designers create for people, not with them.
More importantly, and to the full relevance of the dissertation, where do gender-non-conforming people fit within these concepts? Transgender identities do not fit within the set description of ‘disability’ in universal design or inclusive design.
Some spaces widen these concepts to fit other parts of the population, or even sustainability practices, however they are highly dependent on country, industry and even organisation, and do not follow any academic definition found in this research (Ostroff, 2011, in Preiser and Smith, 2011)
Designing for gender-non-conforming people (GNCP), a highly discriminated group, is part of the conversation regarding inclusion in the workplace, connecting the issue with the most obvious solution — if a GNC person is present in a specific workplace, they will create more ‘inclusive’ designs by default. Deeper research would be needed to discern if this is a statement that prevails in practice. Whilst the insights from the GNC community suggest its validity, this will be a historic process, easily taking hundreds of years.
This is why the issue of language becomes so relevant — both in the way we use terms such as ‘inclusion’, as well as how there is currently no term for the practice of thinking WITH discriminated groups full of intersectionalities.
As game markers, designers hold the power and responsibility to influence and leverage life at many different levels, with a wide range of influence and impact. The personal posilitionality and biases of the designer play a colossal role in the process, as shown by this analysis and the insights from the GNC community.
There is a clear gap in the language of Service Design to tackle the issue of positionality and the power of the designer. Something needs to be done, and we, the designers, have the responsibility to make it happen.
I put out the question to the Design community — what would you do?
The writings dubbed Bitesize Dissertation are the results of the dissertation created for the Masters in Service Design in Ravensbourne University. They will be published in small excerpts. The research question was — ‘In what ways can the redesign of business models gain insights from the transgender community and how can Service Design facilitate this?’ To view the full dissertation click here.
