RSA Design & Society.

What is
Embedded Design? Transcript of
an expert seminar held on Monday
10 May 2010 at the Royal Society
for the encouragement of Arts,
Manufactures & Commerce,
8 John Adam Street, London wc2.
With Lucy Kimbell, Tony Coultas,
Ben Reason, Simon Roberts
and Lynne Maher, chaired by
Emily Campbell.
 Background and speakers

As little as a year ago it seemed that in-house design teams, in both

the public and private sector, had practically vanished. So had senior
civic roles in design: Leeds City Council was often named as the last
remaining local authority to employ a Civic Architect. With a handful
of notable exceptions – Apple and The Guardian, for example – it had
become conventional for organisations to buy design services from
independent consultancies.
The Design Council has reported a 10% growth in in-house design
teams since 2005, while also, quite suddenly, we are witnessing a
growing trend for ‘embedding’ design within the structure of public
and private sector organisations. This means that anything from a
private telecommunications provider to a local authority housing
department, which might previously have subcontracted discrete
design tasks, might now have designers on staff. Rather than apply
their discipline narrowly to specific issues and projects arising – to
corporate publications or product development, for example – these
new recruits are usually paid to have a holistic view of the organisation;
to apply so-called ‘design-thinking’ to its whole structure and all
its functions. In many cases, the designers’ role is described quite
elusively as ‘service design’ or as a source of unspecified but strategic
problem-solving capability.

If you take away design's obvious ‘effects’ – products, publications,

brand marks and communication devices – what are we left with to
call design? — Emily Campbell
While designers may be pleased at this new recognition of their
deep strategic value, the dislocation of design from patently designed
things – from publications, presentations, products and so on – makes
design hard to explain.
Is holistic service design new, or a new name for something that
designers have always done? Along with embedded anthropology and
artists-in-residence it is fashionable, but has the interest in embedding
design happened for specific social, political or economic reasons? If it
has, what are they? How likely is it to stay with us as the wind changes?

— In practical terms, what is the job description for an in-house

designer with a holistic brief ?

— How does an organisation wanting to embed design go about

recruiting designers?
rsa Projects
Emily Campbell, Director of Design
— How is the effectiveness of staff designers paid for their holistic
8 John Adam Street, view to be measured?
London wc2n 6ez
+ 44 (0)20 7930 5115 — How does the design of services, structures and strategy respond
to cost-benefit analysis?
Registered as a charity in England and Wales
no. 212424 — How is the language barrier between designers and other
specialists to be overcome?
The RSA is an enlightenment organisation
devoted to finding innovative practical solutions
— How are creativity and innovation to be managed within large
to today’s pressing social problems.
and often cautious or risk-averse organisations?
www.thersa.org
www.thersa.org/projects/design
www.projects.rsablogs.org.uk

Designed by John Morgan studio

Discussion and comments
These presentations provoked a discussion that
focused on three themes: the nature of embedded
service design; the assessment of value and efficiency;
and the challenge of scaling-up and rolling-out
isolated or local successes.
Embedded service design
Service design has the potential to bridge the gap
between artists and business managers, but we need
to move from old language to a new language of design.
At the same time, there’s a risk of service design being
seen as the ‘emperor’s new clothes’ of design if it’s
over-branded.
Design is an emerging curriculum for mba students in
business school; that is, the process of having an idea
and testing it like a designer does. A lot of people have
ideas but they don’t know where to go with their ideas;
this is the skill that designers have.
The goal of service design is to enable organisations
to see themselves from a customer’s point of view,
and design themselves in response to that. Being on
the inside of an organisation gives you a greater chance
of changing things; of ‘embedding’ the changes so
they still happen when you’re not there.
Ten years ago Microsoft recognised that they needed an
anthropologist on the team developing the next version
of Windows. Today, the characteristics of design, as
distinct from anthropology or ethnography, are still
unclear. But design certainly has the advantage
of opening possibilities up by forcing an engagement
with real tangible objects; whereas enthnography
stands on the outside.
(continued on page 4)
An alternative view of design accepts that the end of the process is
not known at the outset; design is ‘enquiry’, and during the enquiry
the problem and the solution co-evolve. — Lucy Kimbell
3 What is Embedded Design?
rsa Design & Society organised this small, expert seminar for the benefit
of representatives of public sector agencies considering embedding
design or already doing it; for private companies who employ or antic-
ipate employing in-house designers; for service designers, policy
thinkers and journalists specialising in design and service innovation.
Five speakers were invited to give a ten-minute response to the
background note above, followed by a discussion between 35
participants, chaired by the rsa’s Director of Design, Emily Campbell.
The speakers were Lucy Kimbell (Clark Fellow in Design Leadership,
Said Business School, Oxford), Tony Coultas (Head of Service
Innovation, Skills Development Scotland), Ben Reason (Director,
live/work), Simon Roberts (Head of Social Science and Design research,
Intel Digital Health Group; Ideas Bazaar) and Lynne Maher (Interim
Director for Design and Innovation, nhs Institute for Innovation and
Improvement).
Presentations
Emily Campbell introduced the session by pointing out that design
used to be done by designers and result in things you can see and
touch. Now it’s often collaborative – not only done by designers –
and frequently yields things you can’t put your finger on. She also
commented that the trend for employing designers on staff, with a
holistic responsibility for an organisation and its functions, goes far
beyond the ‘procurement’ practice which has preoccupied design
management in recent decades. Effective procurement depends upon
a clear definition of discrete tasks in hand, but embedded design
promises differently. If you take away design’s obvious ‘effects’ –
products, publications, brand marks and communication devices –
what are we left with to call design? This Campbell identified as the
real subject of the morning’s discussion.
Lucy Kimbell had been asked to focus her presentation on what service
design is and how it came about. To explain this, she stressed that we
need to understand what design and service mean separately, then
bring the two together.
Design is often defined as ‘problem solving’, particularly among
engineers, computer science and business managers. It presents a
desired state of affairs, or result, at the outset; a problem to be solved.
An alternative view of design accepts that the end of the process is not
known at the outset; design is ‘enquiry’, and during the enquiry the
problem and the solution co-evolve. The output is more process than
product, and the process itself is more social than problem-solving.
The former is a view of design often found in engineering; the latter
is more evident to the arts-based tradition.
The traditional understanding of value is based on a manufacturing
logic: someone produces something, with value added during the
manufacturing process, and it is consumed. The product has a final
value: what people will pay for a product. According to the newer co-
creation model, value is represented by a constellation of multiple
actors; this is value in context rather than value in exchange.
 Value and efficiency
In healthcare it’s important to demonstrate how better
service design can help you get cash out of the system
by being more efficient. You have to find ways to let
people go home earlier, to take waste out of the system
and to have fewer safety incidents. Telecare has been
a successful prototype. Patients phone when they have
an episode rather than two weeks later or whenever
they can get a hospital appointment. It’s not exclusively
a service design win because there were other factors,
but fewer people come into hospital when they use
telecare. Closing wards is perceived to be the only way
to reduce a hospital’s spend, but closing wards is con-
troversial in the community. Many hospitals have only
one efficient ward: the trick is to allow efficiencies to
spread from one ward to all.
The Social Innovation Unit in Kent worked with many
families who were classified as ‘just coping’ – this clas-
sification covers one in six children in Kent. The service
design challenge is how you use design for services that
don’t already exist; for preventative services.
The value discussion is dead; we shouldn’t claim
money savings as a service design ‘win’. The work is
valuable but not necessarily in the sense of saving
money. The wrong metrics are in operation: the value
of a service is not its share price but its use. It’s worth
remembering here that the consumption of many serv-
ices is not voluntary – school, for example, or prison.
Designers can bring a very low risk method of
innovation. Apple, for example, get the right product
in the most risk-free way possible with lots of prototyp-
ing. Paper prototyping is cheap; and prototyping of
any kind creates an evidence base. Service design is
cheap, compared to hiring a team of coders to design
a computer system. With design, you’re buying a
method rather than an outcome. You’re educating
people in resourcefulness when you do a workshop in
service design. And that’s what managers see: “This
frontline worker is resourceful,” though they may not
be designers.
4 What is Embedded Design?
Within management and organisational theory, there is a long
history of studying and trying to understand service. The idea that
product and services are really different emerged in the 1970s; now we
have witnessed a shift to the idea that everything is a service. This shift
has been very decisive. What matters now is not a product’s exchange
value, but how a service is valued over time and how people engage
with it in the contexts in which they co-create it.
Bringing together the four perspectives of problem-solving, enquiry,
the user-centred design tradition and the idea of value in context offers a
way to understand designing for service. The value of service design isn’t
pre-defined but emerges through the practices of end-users, customers
and others.
Tony Coultas introduced Skills Development Scotland as an
organisation focused on skills development, from an all-age career
service to delivery of an initiative called Modern Apprenticeships.
It has placed a priority on service design within the organisation and
has recruited a service design team. There are two reasons: to develop
better services, and to influence service delivery across the public
sector in Scotland.
Coultas explained that experience for customers is the ‘touchpoint’
of how sds works as an organisation. Service design is not a marginal
concern, but part of several organisational functions including
marketing and new media, customer service and strategic projects.
These different organisational functions come together to focus on
development priorities across the whole of Scotland. Focusing on
one local area won’t work: service design has to be dispersed across
the organisation.
The first challenge for sds is to help all the people in the organ-
isation really understand the value of design and how it fits into
promoting better customer experience. New customer services tend
to move too quickly from policy to delivery mode, and sds is trying to
build design into the space between; trying to use customer experience
to inform which direction is taken at every stage.
Another challenge is around language. The introduction of service
design needs to engage colleagues across sds, to “win hearts and
minds” across the organisation. The fact that people do not understand
design is a major barrier. Part of the service design function is to
transmit the customer voice; helping to articulate a voice that will bring
change. The real benefit of trying to build a service design function
in-house comes from its ability to help the whole organisation deliver
better customer experience, especially in facing the certainty of
diminished resources over the next five years. You can’t just have
one part of the organisation understanding how design thinking
can benefit their work: the whole organisation needs to know it.
There are some caveats. Firstly, to learn from customers’
experiences requires real impartiality. It’s important to stand apart
from the organisation, and resist getting sucked in to the status quo
of organisational thinking. This is a challenge for an in-house team.
Secondly, in-house teams can be lost in large organisations: the sds
service design team has six or seven people in an organisation of 1,300.
It becomes important to manage expectations early on, and that’s also
more difficult for an in-house than an external team.
 Scale and roll-out
How do you go from designing discrete, local projects
to scaling them? Partly by empowering staff; you can’t
achieve anything without staff buy-in. The issue of
scale is a major issue for an organisation of the size
and reach of the nhs. A key tactic is to ‘segment’ the
narrative – for example by asking “what will appeal to
me as a nurse?” Everybody in the nhs perceives that
they’re working at 110% capacity. Managers need to
help people see why and how they could work differ-
ently, by seeing from their staff’s perspective. A shared
perspective is a key part of scaling up.
One of the most important things service design can
yield, and which facilitates the scaling up of solutions,
is coherence. Design addresses the whole person, the
whole system, the whole configuration of people and
tasks; it helps you see services in the round. And train-
ing is key to answering the common complaints about
design jargon.
Some elements contradict the received wisdom that service design is
about intangibles – live/work designed plenty of tangible collateral
items and printed things that help people to think. — Ben Reason
In the discussion of scale, we need to distinguish
between being a designer and being a good designer.
Design is a specialised practice – you can’t just teach
it to someone in lecture. Only by going through a
design process will people understand it. It’s fair
to say that design methods are good for everyone as
long as we recognise that this doesn’t make everyone
a good designer. A propensity to understand design
is different to a fundamental and trained ability to
create things.
To be an effective change agent you have to do it from the inside.
— Simon Roberts
To scale services we just need a few solutions opti-
mised for different situations. We should aim to start
not centrally, but at a distributed level and make the
solution work upwards: informing management and
strategy as it grows. In this respect the Apple compari-
son is very dangerous. Apple look at selling a lot of a
few products. The Police and the nhs can’t command
and control in the way that Apple can. You can’t just
say “this is how we can control wards” and roll it out.
5 What is Embedded Design?
Ben Reason argued that you can embed an external design consultancy
into an organisation. live/work’s project for Streetcar was the counter-
point to the ‘embedded’ idea. live/work helped to develop a smart card
and other elements of this car-sharing scheme. Some of the elements
contradict the received wisdom that service design is about intangibles
– live/work designed plenty of tangible collateral items to make people
think. Over six months, live/work delivered service design that has
continued to yield benefit for six years. Streetcar didn’t need an in-
house design team.
In a different contractual situation, live/work ran 4 day-long design
workshops with Haringey Council’s housing service team over three
months. Haringey knew that many customers were not applying for
housing when in need or were looking to the private sector. When
live/work asked staff to actually go out and talk to service users, staff
discovered a range of useful facts and individual cases: a Kurdish
family, for example, in need but unable to apply for housing because
they didn’t know the system. Encouraged by live/work’s insight-
gathering methodology, staff realised that they needed to be more
sensitive about how housing fits with people’s life planning – and
became less scared of customer interaction.
live/work have also worked as consultants to Tony Coultas and
Skills Development Scotland who were unsure whether to task their
own internet team or an external consultancy with the design of an
online service. live/work’s intervention made the online cv concept
My Learning move forward more quickly and it has now been returned
to the new media group at sds for completion.
Reason speculated that, had they still been working with Streetcar,
their role would be to keep asking Streetcar to make changes, rather
than keep doing what they are doing, “although they are doing perfectly
well doing what they’re doing”. This perspective is granted more easily
to an external consultant than to an in-house designer.
Simon Roberts has experience as an anthropologist both outside
and inside organisations. He describes his job as re-framing the
organisation’s relationship with people; studying customers who
are likely to be miles away from your own personality.
Roberts believes that to be an effective change agent you have
to do it from inside. However, there are several advantages coming
from outside as a consultant.
He declares himself to be continuously navigating between
hard and soft outcomes for his employer, Intel. Soft outcomes
include the reframing of assumptions, opinions and understandings;
ultimately shaping the sensibilities of individuals within a large
organisation. Hard influences might be strategy, product plans or
intellectual property. The anthropologist’s job is to deal in sensibilities
rather than deliver the hard outcomes. There has been progress
and recognition in this respect. For example, in the early years of
Intel’s engagement of anthropologists in the mid 1990s, one obvious
impact was an increased understanding of cultural complexity and
diversity across its markets. So the organisation talked less about
America and “the Rest of the World” and grew more sensitive to the
country level differences.
But in a way you can control wards and roll out
learning. Ideas don’t seem to stick in every place, but
you have a better chance of making innovation stick
if strategic culture change happens at the same time
as a commitment to improving services.
The nhs looks for designers because they don’t
see themselves as the experts but as the translator
and channel. For example, the nature of the nhs is
to be risk-adverse, but service design is about taking
risks in order to spread the learning. This compares
interestingly with science: it can actually take 17 years
for something that has been scientifically proven to
become widespread – an equally long process from
experiment to embedded practice.
Entitlement makes public services different from com-
panies like Apple: you can’t choose your market. Apple
provide a product for the people who choose it; public
services have to provide for everyone. Because public
services are facing a massive cut, it‘s a unique opportu-
nity for them take risks because they have to. Managers
need to conceptualise problems and redesign services
to meet budgetary savings. Designers need to get invol-
ved, and for this reason it’s an advantage for higher
education to be massively over-producing designers –
they’ll have to find new opportunities.
People telling their stories have a bombshell effect: then you don’t
have to convince managers and staff to change, they just want to.
— Lynne Maher
6 What is Embedded Design?
It can be a mistake to assume that organisations always behave
rationally, not least because of the sheer complexity and size of the
modern company. As an anthropologist you have to understand
individuals and where they are ‘located’ in an organisation, what shapes
their outlook, what constrains their influence and “which tribe are they
in?”. If you don’t understand that then you can’t play your message to
them in the right way. It’s crucial to think about what they hear rather
than what you say, because it may be heard differently by different
people depending on where the person is within the organisation.
Lynne Maher has been working with service designers in healthcare
for five years. Most healthcare staff have a background in the sciences
rather than design and one of the biggest challenges her team has faced
is getting both sides to understand each other. Designers use terms
like ‘embedded design’, ‘service design’, ‘co-creation’, ‘co-design’ and
‘touchpoints’, most of which are gobbledegook to people educated in
health sciences.
The nhs Innovation and Improvement Institute exists to help
the nhs solve its biggest challenges. One of those challenges was
to work more closely with patients and family in the design of health
services. While exploring the issue Maher looked at other services –
hotels, for example – and found a ‘common denominator’: many of
the comparable services employed service designers to help integrate
the customer’s experience more deeply into the design. Wanting to test
some new approaches in health care, she recruited a service designer
and an anthropological researcher to work with a small hospital team
and patients.
The combined team identified a range of issues to do with commu-
nication, safety, waiting times and patient dignity; and this first test
resulted in 42 ideas for changes. “Word about those 42 changes got
around the nhs more quickly than we could get a paper out about it!”
This helped the Institute to start to break the language barrier of design.
Initially feedback had been “designers make chairs don’t they?”.
Designers often didn’t help themselves by turning up in jeans and
sneakers to meet service managers in the nhs. That was another part
of the ‘language barrier’ in a way, but now it doesn’t happen; the
designers have learned that it’s not acceptable.
Maher has been working to achieve improvements in the nhs
for quite a long time and declares that she has never seen anything
as compelling as the experience with service designers. People telling
their stories have a bombshell effect: then you don’t have to convince
managers and staff to change, they just want to. Nor has she found
anywhere that the ‘experienced based design’ approach doesn’t work:
Multiple Sclerosis services, renal patients, cancer patients, diabetes.
The thing chief executives worry about is the £20bn gap that needs
to be closed over the next four years. nhs staff are beginning to see how
co-design with patients and staff could lead to increased productivity
and to cash savings but it’s necessary to keep a focus on those outputs.
To keep innovation and improvement fresh, and to build capacity in the
nhs, the Institute knew it needed an experienced designer: it now has
one full-time service design employee sharing their expertise widely.