As the director of FORA, Jørgen Rosted acts as a policy advisor to the Danish Government. His presentation at the Service Design Symposium identified service design as a new area for exploration and expansion within Denmark, and described his work to create a framework encouraging the development of its practice in Denmark.
In his talk, Jørgen identified innovation as one of the main drivers behind interest in service design. According to him, “Companies today ask WHAT instead of HOW, or WHAT before HOW.” Companies want new concepts, and while the HOW can be devised both internally (R&D) and externally (management consultants, design companies) using traditional capabilities, the WHAT increasingly comes from new and different places.
Jørgen used the term “concept design” to define the method of creating the WHAT. Transformation design, service design, concept design…in his view, they’re just different names for producing basically the same thing. That is, “a new concept is a solution to a problem that has not yet been solved or which so far has been solved in an unsatisfactory way. A new concept is a platform for (a series of) new products and services.”
The goal of his work is to benchmark Denmark against the rest of the world and develop recommendations for nurturing concept/service design within Denmark. Interestingly, in the process of mapping the world’s concept/service design companies, he noted that there were few, if any, in Asia.
His research revealed three archetypes of concept design companies. The first is the holistic concept design company, which is capable of all phases of creation through production. The second is the design expert concept design company, which is very good in design and can push clients into a more holistic view. The third type is the strategic concept design company, which creates concepts and hands the work off to others for production/implementation.
One point that I found particularly interesting was with regards to user feedback. Typically, designers have to assume that users don’t really know what they want, that we have to observe them to discover their real needs. Jørgen cautioned against the blanket application of this attitude, using Michael Schumacher as an extreme case of someone who could very clearly articulate his needs. When working with someone at this end of the spectrum, you need to listen to what they explicitly say to determine what you need to do. At the other end of the spectrum is someone who cannot express their needs; in this case you need to use observation to figure out what to do.
For more details, check out the video below. Jørgen’s complete presentation as given at the Symposium also follows. Stay tuned for Ezio Manzini’s talk, which will be up in about two weeks.
