My service designer mom :)
Stories of my mom that made me realise that she uses service design as a way of living
Being a designer by EDUCATION, I was introduced to the emerging innovation mindsets and methods such as service design and design thinking during our college education and later while working professionally. Because of the way it was introduced to me, (unfortunately) I had started thinking that these mindsets can be learnt or taught mainly through workshops to get hands on understanding and then can be implemented in one’s daily work and within the organisation. All the buzz around this also makes it sound like an exclusive approach to problem solving. Where as on the other hand, there is my mom (I call her aai); who is a mathematics graduate, highly pragmatic and has exposure to the design world only through me and my sister. She has never attended any of these workshops or heard of these terms and yet, I feel she is one of the most intuitive service designer I have ever seen.
Like everyone, I also used to take aai’s behaviour for granted and used to think this is how all parents are ‘supposed’ to be. It is funny how we miss seeing what has been in front of us the whole life but sometime it just takes that one moment of realisation and everything starts making sense suddenly. I had that ‘aha!’ moment in the first month of our company when we were building our capability deck. We were looking for day-to-day life examples to explain Service Design for everyone to relate easily and then I got struck by the thought that my mom is one of the biggest examples of it! When I started consciously observing her actions from the perspective of service design, I saw her more than just as a caring, loving mother to a thoughtful service designer and a systems thinker. She is someone who intuitively thinks in ‘user journeys’ and for all the ‘touchpoints’ in every situation without being intentional about it. Right from the way she would plan for dinners to packing our tiffins for school she thinks and acts on most of the principles that we study.
So here are three of her quotes that I would like to point out to show her intuitive superpowers as a service designer —
1. “Think from other person’s point of view as well”
Making us empathetically think of end-to-end user journey of everyone who comes to our house and working towards making it simpler
EMPATHY + USER JOURNEY
It is a practice in our home to rinse the dishes ourselves before giving it to the house help to clean it. The woman who comes to our house once a day for helping us to clean the home, do the dishes and she has been with us over a 10 years now. (It is a common thing in most of the Indian homes to have domestic help for carrying out daily chores especially for cooking and cleaning). Rinsing dishes is a practice just for us to have a good habit of cleaning our own dishes but it is to help the domestic help. Since she comes once a day, our dinner dishes are kept unwashed till the next morning which makes the left over food in the dish dry making it difficult to clean the next day morning. It is more of a problem especially during summers. Hence, rinsing it as soon as you finish your food helps the person while cleaning it the next day. When I think of this I can hear my mom’s voice saying, “Imagine if you had to wash someone else’s used dishes, how would you feel, it’s not a good site to see the dried dishes so let’s do basic cleaning of our dishes so as to make her task easy.”
To put this from a service design’s perspective, what she is trying to set a chain of stakeholders to do their activities in such a way that the next person in line faces less problems and this is done while being empathetic to each of the stakeholder. But this was just being ‘caring’ towards each other for aai.
2. “Let me try giving you snacks in a different tiffin this time and see if it works… otherwise I have another idea.”
Experimenting with different tiffins so as to make my drive easy while I snack
ITERATIVE TESTING
Here’s my favourite story of snack packs that my mom gives me to eat on my drive back home from work. Since I was a kid, I have had a habit of eating snacks in the evening. But on most working days because of some or the other reason I forget to have evening snacks and ends up getting super hangry during the hour long drive home (It is now becoming very common in India to have long daily commute. A report says that an average commute length in India is ~30 min or 35km/day). I guess my mom wasn’t happy to see me like that every single day and she found a way to make sure that I eat something on my way back home while driving. She started packing a small tiffin for me filled with dry fruits (which I LOVE). I place that tiffin in the car itself so that I don’t forget to eat and is also accessible while driving. But it was a process to decide to give me dry fruits versus something else. Aai had tried giving me different types to food such as — cut fruits, cupcakes, chips, chiwda (an Indian fried snack) etc. Some of this food used to make a lot of mess with it’s crumbles (and no-one likes messy car), others were difficult to eat with one hand or without using a spoon/a fork and also without looking at the tiffin (remember, I am driving!). So finally we arrived at dry fruits an an option which was perfect for me. We also had to try out 3–4 tiffins until we found the perfect one which doesn’t make the dry fruits soggy and also fits perfectly in my lap while driving.
I believe if all the airlines starts thinking like a mom, they won’t be offering us croissants / puffs in flight which most of the times gets messy. The cramped space between the seats also doesn’t help to clean up the mess. They also wouldn’t offer heavy meals for all the passengers without knowing their plan after deplaning. If the airlines had the ‘mom instinct’, they would have offered services based on the passenger’s mindset while on the flight and their personalities by getting to know the ‘end-user’. And this is not related just to the food experience but the entire travel experience.
3. “Let’s label all grocery containers and set the menu for all the guests to work independently.”
Making sure that all the planning is done before hand for the new guests & new cooks to work around the kitchen independently, so that my mom has more free time to spend with the family during all the wedding functions
THINKING OF BACK-END & FRONT-END STAKEHOLDERS
As any typical Indian wedding, we were going to have close relatives (around 15) come over to stay with us for 2 weeks before my sister’s wedding to help and experience the last minute jitters together. So in total, we were going to have approximately 20–25 people living in our house, for 10 days at least! To arrange meals for everyone, we had hired a caterer who used to cook or deliver food to all of us everyday. My amazingly sharp minded mom said, “I neither want to be stuck around the kitchen when everyone is here to help them with tea/coffee, nor do I want to be stuck to answer all the questions of the caterer.” So to make the new cooks (back-end stakeholders) independent of working in our kitchen and all the guest (front-end stakeholders) to help themselves, we made a schedule (yes, in an Excel sheet). It had food menus planned for each meal, with the dates on which specific groceries need to be bought, and also responsibilities allotted for those purchases. Along with this, we also labelled each of our containers in the kitchen for everyone to help themselves. All this pre-planning was so successful that all the back-end stakeholders and front-end stakeholders were functioning independently yet in a sync and most importantly; they were happy while doing it.
I can recall many such stories of my family where I can see them unknowingly and seamlessly taking on the role of a service designer to solve their everyday problems. This makes us believe that sometimes innovation lies in everyday actions and everyone is an innovator in their own way for us to get inspired from. I am also very confident that this is not just the story of my family but also everyone who is reading this. We sometimes just have to pause and appreciate the smaller nuances of our behaviour which we take for granted. When I started observing similar behaviour in people, it also became very easy for me to explain to them what I do for a living and what is service design, which I had been struggling to find an answer to for a while now.
