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Research.Design.Impact.

Visual Thinking

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Service and product design involves creating something, envisioning it’s use, consideration of its effects, and hopefully seeing it achieve a goal. When we are creating or planning our project we need to consider all of that on top of the many ideas we have about what that product or service ought to involve. That is a lot to hold in our heads at one time.

This is why designers often rely on visual thinking and communication to help illustrate these ideas as systems. The benefits of this approach are many and include:

  • Providing a way to communicate your thoughts in multiple dimensions. Time, space, sequence, and effects are all different considerations for service design and visualizing that allows us to see these all in one space. Our language is linear, visualizing allows for linear and non-linear effects.
  • It creates a space for everyone to participate. Whether you are a skilled visual communicator or someone who hasn’t drawn anything by hand in 20 years, nearly everyone can draw. Visual thinking tools can provide a means to literally get people working on the same page. Simple methods like the Sketch Map are easy to employ and get everyone sharing ideas together.
  • Visual language – such as that illustrated by XPlane in their useful guide to visual thinking transcends spoken words and allows us to communicate even when our shared spoken language isn’t strong.
  • Visual thinking allows us to use metaphors, express complex emotions, and connect physical and emotional things together during a service journey in a way that is difficult to convey through oral or written language.
  • Visuals provide an artifact that can be interrogated, explored, and reviewed from many different perspectives allowing people to point to objects, relationships, and structures and ask about their purpose, illustration, and meaning without requiring much technical understanding of the problem-domain (allowing outside and alternative perspectives to meaningfully contribute).
  • It also provides a means to generate a shared understanding of the system boundaries, components, and purposes that guide your development of the service. It gets people on the same page metaphorically and literally.

Visual communicator Angelika Skotnicka provides a strong case for why we want to consider visual thinking and how it is done from the perspective of graphic recording.

Consider ways to bring in visual thinking to your project planning, service design, evaluation, and strategy development. It is low-risk, high-reward and is an engaging, low-cost, and often enjoyable way to generate enormous insight quickly and effectively.

Want to learn more? Contact us and we can help you bring your ideas to light visually and more.

Creating Design Pathways for Learning

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Capturing learning requires a focus on the journey, not end. Thinking like a designer can shape what we learn and how.

Learning is both a journey and a destination and it’s through recognizing this that we can better facilitate intentional, deliberative learning to support innovation and development. By approaching this journey through the lens of service design — as a design-driven evaluation — we can better design the data and insights that come from it to support learning.

What is learning?

Learning comes from perception, experience, feedback, and reflection. You first encounter something and perceive it with our senses (e.g., read, observe, hear, feel), experience something (e.g., movement, action, tension, emotion), which gives you feedback about the perception and experience that is synthesized through reflection (e.g., memory, comparison with related things, contemplation).

Evaluation is principally a tool for learning because it focuses our perception on things, monitors the experience, provides the feedback and can support reflection through offering a systematic, structured means to makes sense of what’s happened.

Evaluation is simply the means of answering the question “what happened?” in a systematic manner.

For those developing an innovation, looking to change, or seeking to improve the sustainability of our systems, answering ‘what happened?’ is the difference between real impact and nothing.

Mapping the journey with data

A journey map is a tool that is used in service design to help understand how service users (e.g., clients, customers, patients, students) might encounter the service and system to achieve a particular goal. These can be displayed visually with great artistry (see here for a beautiful example of the Indigenous cancer patient journey in BC) or simply with boxes and arrows.

It is one of many types of maps that can be created to illustrate the ways in which a user might navigate or approach a service, decision, or pathway to learning.

For innovators and evaluators, these tools present an opportunity to create touchpoints for data collection and deeper understanding of the service throughout. Too often, evaluation is focused on the endpoint or an overall assessment of the process without considering ways to embed opportunities to learn and support learning throughout a journey.

We feel this is a lost opportunity.

Without the opportunity to perceive, gain feedback, and reflect on what happens we are left with experience only, which isn’t a great teacher on its own and filled with many biases that can shift focus away from some of the causes and consequences associated with what’s happening. This is not to say that there isn’t bias in evaluation, yet what makes it different is that it is systematic and accounts for the biases in the design.

Service design meets evaluation

Design-driven evaluation is about integrating evaluation into the design of a program to create the means for developing systematic, structured feedback to support learning along a service journey. One of the simplest ways to do this is to build a layer of evaluation on the service journey map.

Consider a detailed service journey map like the one illustrating the patient journey map cited above. Along this windy, lengthy journey from pre-diagnosis to the end, there are many points where we can learn from the patient, providers, system administrators, and others associated with the health-seeking person that can inform our understanding of the program or system they are in.

By embedding structured (not rigid) data collection into the system we can better learn what’s happening — in both process and effects. Taking this approach offers us the following:

  • Identify activities and behaviours that take place throughout the journey.
  • Provides a lens on service through the perspective of a user. The same service could be modelled using a different perspective (e.g., caregiver, healthcare professional, health administrator).
  • Identifies the systems, processes, people, and relationships that a person goes through on the way through, by, or in spite of a service
  • Allows us to identify how data can fit into a larger narrative of a program or service and be used to support the delivery of that service.
  • Anchors potential data collection points to service transitions and activities to help identify areas of improvement, development, or unnecessary features.
  • Provides a visual means of mapping the structural, behavioural and social processes that underpin the program to test out the theory of change or logic model (does it hold up?).
  • Offers opportunities to explore alternative futures without changing the program (what happens if we did X instead of Y — how would that change the pathway?).

These are some of the ways in which taking a design-driven approach and using common methods from service design can improve or enhance our understanding of a program. Not a bad list, right? That’s just a start.

Try this out. Service design tools and thinking models coupled with evaluation can provide access to the enormous wealth of learning opportunities that exist within your programs. It helps you to uncover the real impact of your programs and innovation value hidden in plain sight.

To learn more about this approach to evaluation, innovation, and service design contact us. We’d love to help you improve what you do and get more value from all your hard work.

Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash , Billy Pasco on Unsplash and  Startaê Team on Unsplash . Thank you to these artists for making their work available for use.

Uncovering Layers of an Innovation’s Impact

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Revealing Many Layers of Impact

Innovators — those seeking to take an idea for a product, service, or policy and make it real — usually have a pretty clear sense of what they are trying to achieve with their innovation. This is the primary purpose and may reflect where the innovation achieves the greatest impact. But is this all it does? Could it be doing much more? 

Evaluation can play a key role in revealing where an innovation achieves more than just its primary purpose and can serve as a means to uncover layers of impact that can demonstrate various returns on investment (ROI) and open up opportunities for further exploration and exploitation of resources. 

Innovation typically involves considerable investment in time, energy, money, and attention and an evaluation can help showcase the return on investment in unexpected ways. Let’s consider something like an event — a learning conference — as an example to illustrate this layering of impact and how evaluation can aid in revealing these layers and supporting innovation. 

Change or Impact for Whom?

A look across many conferences finds relatively consistent language in their purpose that includes mission phrases like:

to inspire…, to educate…., to connect…, to showcase…, etc..

Among the first roles an evaluation can play is articulating the theory of change explaining why something is intended to achieve an outcome. A look at the phrases above is likely to prompt questions in an evaluator like: for whom are these to happen? Is the effect expected to be similar for most people? What are the means that people are using to showcase products (e.g., knowledge) and for the audience to engage with content?

These are some of the questions that an evaluator might ask from these initial goals. For an evaluation of a learning event, this might translate into metrics like: 

  • Attendance including details on those in the audience (e.g., professional background, previous participation, basic demographics)
  • Number of sessions taught and description of those sessions (content)
  • Overall satisfaction with the conference (including session content, speakers, food and drink, format)
  • Self-reported learning outcomes from participants
  • Financial details: Profit, loss, and expenses; sponsorships
  • Registration information (e.g., online vs. in-person, timing, categories, etc.)

This is a pretty standard set of metrics. We see similar evaluative outcomes across educational programming in different contexts. These might work well for simple purposes, but it only provides a small amount of what it could yield and for innovation, going beyond the usual is one way to separate a new idea from a successful one. 

Looking Differently at Outcomes & Impact

An outcome looks different from where we sit in the system that surrounds an innovation. Consider the role of the design of physical space and how that influences outcomes and shifts our understanding of impact. 

A common seating format at conferences is round tables in front of a stage (‘Rounds’). This is usually done where there are meals served and for that purpose, the format works well for everyone — except most of those in attendance and the keynote speakers. Rounds are ideal for serving people including the setting up and clearing of dishes. They are generally lousy for talking with people because, with the exception of speaking with one other person, an attendee must either turn their back on another person to speak to someone else or speak over or past someone. 

Rounds show high positive impact — efficiency, ability to monitor, reduced errors — for the catering staff. This might be an important outcome for a conference, although probably not. Consider how this format might enhance or degrade the impact of things like the keynote address or the networking expectations of individuals in attendance. 

Consider some other potential impacts:

  • It gets people away from their families and friends (this could be positive or negative).
  • It pulls them away from work (it gives them a break, provides an incentive, it adds to their workload, disrupts the teams they leave behind, or all or some of these).
  • It provides supports conference centres and organizers.
  • It creates connections between people like connecting with ‘old friends’ and colleagues; sustains a connection to a field of practice or discipline; re-affirms a mission; instills a sense of perspective at how much a field changes (or doesn’t) over time; instills a sense of alienation of a field or peers.  
  • It generates or maintains employment in a region
  • It’s a tourism and prestige generator. 

These are all possible outcomes and are a sample of what additional areas of impact that a learning event might influence. This is for illustrative purposes, but should still provide some ways to show how an innovation (service, product, or policy) might have additional outcomes and impacts that could emerge through an evaluation. 

Expanding the Field of Vision

Service Convention Sweden 2018

Consideration of these additional outcomes might reveal an opportunity and can more fully demonstrate the impact and potential ROI. Asking different questions can also help prioritize what kind of outcomes make the most sense to optimize the design of your innovation. 

Conferences like the one pictured above have optimized for creative thinking within a traditional learning structure by including a poet who composed a unique work summarizing each talk, a (literal!) gallery walk showcasing a prominent local artist’s work (Lars Lerin), and hosting a series of interactive conversation sessions over coffee and snacks.  

For Service Convention Sweden and others like it the outcomes might include the standard ones and a deeper look at the new professional connections made (and followed up along with the material products generated from them), the application of the lessons learned, and the integration of learning into organizations by those participating sponsors. 

Evaluation is not just about the obvious outcomes when deployed in an innovation context. It can demonstrate not only whether an innovation is achieving the expected impact, but the reach of that impact outside of expectations.

And isn’t innovation all about exceeding expectations? 

This is the latest in a series on Evaluation: The Innovator’s Secret Advantage. This series looks at how evaluation can be used to support innovation in service design, product development, and policy implementation. For more on how to do this and any help with it, contact us at www.cense.ca/contact.