Cense

Innovation to Impact

Concept Scenarios + Storyboards for Service Design

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If you are looking to generate a sense of what your planned service looks like in practice why not draw it out?

Filmmakers know the importance of the process of storyboarding.

A storyboard is simply a visual representation of what you expect might happen from moment to moment in a service encounter. Storyboards allow us to ‘see’ the service before it’s made and spot potential issues tied to use, resources, interactions, and possible touch-points.

A storyboard tells the ‘story’ of your customer or client and you and your staff as you walk through the service. Storyboards require that you start to develop a vision — literally because it’s being drawn — of who you are seeking to serve.

This builds on the use of personas (which we’ve discussed before) and allows us to visualize relationships between these imaginary participants using data and how they interact with our products and services.

As we can see from the image below when we storyboard we also start to sequence steps involved in the service. For example, when we think of getting a coffee it’s easy to look at the act of ordering and receiving it, yet so much more is going on.

Kumar, V. (2013). 101 Design Methods. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons (p.239)

Concept Scenarios

A concept scenario is a form of storyboarding that begins with data collection and organizing ideas together — often through the use of a whiteboard or visual tool like Milanote. By pulling together ideas in discussion and through examination of concepts tied to your service or innovation, we develop the raw material to put it together with a narrative.

More traditional storyboarding starts with a story and pieces together the elements into a narrative and extracting concepts from it, concept scenarios are more of the inverse. Both yield storyboards. What concept scenarios do is help us to piece together concepts and identify where assumptions might need rethinking.

This method is participatory and involves a few days or weeks to fully undertake depending on the amount of detail you need, the availability of research opportunities, and the resources (human and otherwise) to come together and visualize ideas together.

Practice Notes

Concept Scenarios begin by doing background research and learning about what it is that you are looking to develop and eliciting the various concepts associated with that — asking who, what, where, when, and why. This involves research and then synthesis of this research and group-based discussion to pull concepts together.

A whiteboard or digital space to add those ideas together is a strong asset to support this work. Simple words on a sticky note can work to record concepts and allow for manipulation and movement when used on a tool like a whiteboard or tool like Miro, Mural, or Jamboard.

Next, select the concepts you are most attracted to and best fit with what you’re looking to do.

Step three is to begin imagining scenarios where you might put these concepts together. Consider the key interactions and relationships that are involved, the timing of what is to happen, and the actors involved.

The next step is to visualize these into a series of panels (see above) and illustrate the ideas in a narrative.

The last steps involve interrogating the scenarios to see how they hold up to assumptions and start asking questions about what might be missing and what else might be needed to make the scenarios more realistic or why or how they might be achieved if they are novel or innovative.

Reference: A great summary of this method can be found in the 2013 book 101 Design Methods by Vijay Kumar.

We do this work with our clients. If you want help to learn the method or to use it as part of your service design, strategy development, or evaluation contact us. We can help.

Cover photo by dix sept on Unsplash

Developmental Evaluation, Learning and Innovation

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What does it mean to undertake a developmental evaluation (DE)?

DE is simply another way to say evaluation for learning and innovation. That’s really all it is in practice, although anyone looking to do DE might want to look a little closer to see if it really is the right approach for them.

In this post we look a little closer to help you understand what it means to do evaluation for innovation and what developmental evaluation has to do with it.

Understanding Innovation


Innovation is a word that can mean much and requires clarification when it’s used because of this. When we speak of innovation, we refer to this definition of learning transformed into value through design.

Developmental evaluation is a concept that was first put forward by Michael Quinn Patton through many books, articles, and other teachings. It’s now become a popular approach within social innovation and the public sector.

DE is often referred to as a means to strategic learning because rather than assume the conditions of whatever is being evaluated (e.g., program, policy) are stable, it assumes some level of complexity. This is dramatically different from what most other forms of evaluation do where the assumption is the ‘thing’ being evaluated is stable – it’s the users of that thing that might change.

Because DE is focused on learning it assumes that there will be some kind of change with the actual process of learning itself on the way from one state to the next. 

Understanding Design’s Role in Innovation

What DE does not do well is account for the role of design in supporting innovation. If we come back to the definition of innovation presented earlier, design is really the means by which innovation occurs. In most of the literature on DE the matter of design is not discussed much, if at all. 

With much of DE the assumption is that those doing DE know how to take what they learn and transform it into value. From our experience, this is an assumption that rarely holds up. The reasons are many, but most central to this is that most people think of design as beginning from a standing start when in practice much of what do when we innovate takes place from a moving position.

We sometimes refer to this as developmental design, but more appropriately expand how we see this relationship between DE and design as something called Design-driven Evaluation. In this case, design and evaluation are intimately connected and the processes of using both to mutually inform one another are embedded in the innovation process. 

Understanding Evaluation’s Role in Design & Innovation

Evaluation is the means to provide the necessary feedback to contribute to innovation. Evaluation determines the quality of the design in achieving its purpose. If your design is meant to change behaviour, evaluation is the means to assess whether that happens and to what degree.

Evaluation also is the means to document the circumstances in which this takes place to help you assess whether the implementation of your innovation goes as intended. Without evaluation, your innovation is a wish, not a result. Evaluation is the means to determine what the results of your innovation are. 

Evaluation is also the means to assess the quality of your design work. It’s one thing to develop something and put it out in the world, but is it any good? Is it fit for purpose? Many innovations fail to deliver value because they don’t provide the means to learn about the quality of the design itself. They don’t achieve a positive impact because they were never designed to in the first place. 

To innovate is to learn and to learn is to evaluate. Design is what ties them all together. 

Next time you’re looking to embark on a new program of activity, create a new product, it’s worth considering how these all go together and whether DE alone will help you to get there. 

For help in generating powerful design-driven approaches to innovation and evaluation, contact us. We can help

Mind Maps For Complex Projects

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A mind map is a powerful, simple organizing tool that features a lot of information on a single page. We use mind maps and other visual tools to communicate relationships between ideas, people, project components and topics with our clients and partners. We present a short introduction to how and why you might want to use mind maps in your work.

A mind map is a visual representation of a project that links actors and actions together. This article focuses on using mind maps, not creating them.

Below is an example from software provider Lucidspark (which is a tool for creating mindmaps) that illustrates what a mind map is and how it can connect ideas and actions together.

Visualizing our Relationships

A search of Google (or any other search engine) will find thousands of visual examples of what a mind map is. There are few ‘essentials’ for mind mapping, which is among its most attractive features.

A complex project is one where there are many things happening at the same time, at different time scales, and involving many interdependencies and actors. That’s just a way of saying: there’s a lot going on.

It doesn’t matter how you organize your mind map only that it is useful. That means it provides information that you can make decisions with and act on. If it does that, it’s a good mind map.

Once we have that in place, the mind map allows us to examine the relationships between the nodes and topics to assess their fit. The expression ‘getting on the same page‘ reflects an ability for all of those looking at the document to have a similar representation of what’s on that page. The mind map allows us to verify relationships between entities, determine gaps or inaccuracies, and explore different ways of connecting things together.

There may not be a single ‘master’ map that is better than all, but there may be a map that is more useful than others.

How to Use Mind Maps

When we use this with clients and partners on projects we aim for the following:

  • To examine the assumptions involved in the project
  • To explore alternative relationships of fit and see if the map is the best representation of what we are looking at
  • To guide the project and keep the topics on track
  • To provide a building block for connecting ideas together (in ways that weren’t done previously)
  • To map out a system of relationships
  • To use colour and visuals to surface feelings, thoughts, and other emotional aspects of the project that might influence the strategy or outcomes

By creating a visual representation we see the whole project and the relationship context. Relationships are the key in any complex system. When we visualize these relationships it allows us to see how the actions in one relationship can affect others. Visual maps can aid us in anticipating possible effects.

(Note: We don’t use the term ‘unintended effects’ – just effects because in complex systems it’s too hard to predict cause and effect with any degree of accuracy).

We continually refer back to our maps to help ensure we are accounting for all relationships of importance throughout the project and not just those that have the most amount of activity within them. It’s incredibly difficult to track this in our heads or in something like a spreadsheet or text document.

Mind maps can be great tools to visualize a lot of information and get you and your collaborators on the same page when it comes to understanding what is going on in a complex system and program. Try it out — they are easy to create and simple to use.

If you want to use this approach to visualizing your programs and using this to help you innovate, contact us – we’d love to hear from you.

Perspective Taking Circles

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The power of perspective is one of the things that differentiates high output and impact innovators from others. It’s easy to get lucky or have good timing, but it’s another to create value when those things don’t happen.

One of the ways we do this is by engaging in some perspective-taking. This simple exercise and question set can help build some of the ‘thought muscles’ that can help encourage us to see, imagine, and engage things differently for creative benefit.

The Exercise

This works best when physically in the same space and can work online as well. What you need is to create a space where people can re-position themselves against a central object that can be almost anything except a ball (because it looks the same from every angle). Place your participants around the object with a comfortable space to sit or stand.

You can do this virtually using a dynamic space like Kumospace or some other virtual reality-like environment. It can also work using a board like Miro or Mural with some designed object in the middle, but it is more awkward.

The idea is that everyone has a chance to literally see things from a different point of view.

This can be done as an observation exercise but is more enhanced when it is combined with drawing. Asking people to draw what they see — no matter what kind of skills or abilities participants have with sketching — is a great means to engage people in thinking more deeply about their perspective.

Once individuals have had time to observe and reflect on what they see, the next step is to have everyone share their perspective. This is where drawings are useful as people can speak to what they drew as drawing focuses us on certain elements and provides a means to account for those perspectives. It also allows others to point to the drawing and make specific, not general comments.

It’s that specificity that is key to illuminating and articulating differences of perspective.

Uses

The role of this method is to reveal how where we sit in a system — even a small one of people interconnected around a shared experience of an object — can have remarkably different perceptions of the same thing in the same space.

It begins to build cultural practices around creating space for exploring and sharing perspectives within an organization and can serve as a base for better organizational design and learning.

It’s simple, engaging, and revealing in its method.

Designing for Awful

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One of the most profound, fun, and engaging techniques for creating an attractive service or product design is oddly focused on the exact opposite: Designing for Awful.

How to use this

This strategy is as simple as it is effective. When workshopping ideas allot some time to have participants develop ideas and designs for the worst possible version of the thing they are designing.

This is a flip of a traditional ideation session where people try to develop suggestions for what to focus on, whom, and what the best use of resources might be. In Designing for Awful, we do the opposite. It is used usually in tandem with ideation sessions that are focused on surfacing ideas in general.

This can be used to frame a service, product or describe the experience of doing something like a survey or participating in an event. It’s a simple, fun, and sometimes counter-intuitive way to surface assumptions, biases, and qualities in what we want, need and don’t want in our design.

Like any ideation-focused exercise, it must be managed appropriately. Individuals need to feel safe in surfacing ideas, free to discuss them, and preferably, offer an opportunity to share at least some of them anonymously. People generally have a lot of fun with this simple exercise.

Benefits

The benefits of this are many.

Firstly, it focuses on the things we tend to avoid — unpleasant feelings, experiences, or sensation — and thus, might be missed in consideration of our design.

It also overcomes an optimism bias. Design is largely a positive-oriented practice where we look to solve problems, not make them. Designing for Awful helps us to move around this bias by looking at what is not addressed.

This approach is also excellent for helping surface values in practice and in specific terms. To illustrate, it’s one thing to speak in a positive or affirmative tone such as a statement like “we value inclusivity.” Designing for Awful could lead us to be specific “Our service is inaccessible to someone with a mobility disability” or “it is sexist” or “our product can only be used by people who are right-handed.” By surfacing what makes something not work we are better able to see what will.

This approach is also excellent in helping, paradoxically, surface what we want by framing things in terms we don’t want. How often have you met someone who first tells you what they don’t want in something before they get to describing what they want?

This allows people to have a little fun and we find that some people are more bold and assertive with their creativity in the negative, than the positive and this technique lets that come out.

Lastly, the exercise can be a useful way to surface who needs to be at the table moving forward. We find that the need for having the voices of certain individuals, groups, roles, or departments in the discussion is better clarified when we consider how bad things would be without them.

Try this out at your next design session or team meeting as part of a check-in and you might find some laughs and some deep insight along with it.

If you want to inspire new thinking and better design in your organization for engagement and impact, reach out and contact us. This is what we do.