What service designers should know about complexity
How to implement service design in complex systems
[A talk by MindTheSystem CEO Agnes Kwek. Originally posted on Medium by the Service Design Network New York Chapter]
In today’s talk for the Service Design Network New York Chapter, Agnes Kwek presented to us the challenges of implementing service design in government and gave us a framework of practices to overcome those challenges.
Chief among the tools she suggests we embrace when designing for complex problems are futures thinking, systems thinking, and psychological change management. She also suggests a greater emphasis on designing the politics of the design brief, upfront stakeholder analysis and engagement to understand collective intelligence, and spending more time at the beginning of the design process on problem-framing and hypothesis formation. Additionally, for service design implementation to succeed, she spoke of a need for a leadership mindset shift where people embrace a mentality of constant improvement and accept failure as part of the iterative nature of the design process.