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Factotum Sponsor the DesignOps Global Conference

The preeminent global conference for #DesignOps #ResearchOps #CreativeOps #ContentOps #StudioOps #BusinesOps & #InnovationOps for professionals working in digital transformation.

The DesignOps Global Conference is for design leaders, researchers, developers, practitioners, product managers, service innovators and business leaders that are defining the way we design and develop new products and services.

Factotum is a Gold Sponsor and Factotum’s founder Peter Fossick will be taking at the event that he co-founded with David Iball. Factotum has been an early advocator and adopter of DesignOps, ResearchOps and Peter has been helping shape best practices an approaches to systemising operations as a way to work at speed and deliver new products and services more effectively.

Check out the conference here: https://designops-conference.com

TEDx Reset – Why Robots Need To Dream

Peter Fossick, of Factotum was recently invited to talk at TEDx Reset about ‘Why Robots Need to Dream’. We’ve posted a link to the video here, in which Peter talks about the selling of technology of Utopian futures that often have social, economic and cultural impacts that favour the few while penalising not only the majority of people but the environment as well. Peter argues that this is the result of new technology but rather the principles, ethics and practices of modern neo-liberal capitalism. If you enjoy the video you can catch Peter at UX Istanbul in February where as a guest speaker he’ll be talking about DesignOps.

DevOps meet DesignOps

Factotum’s Pete Fossick recently spoke at the Service Design Global Conference in Madrid where he discussed service design, agility and the emergent field of design operations (DesignOps or DesOps) and how they are part Design 4.0 – an emerging approach to designing for Industry 4.0. A brief history of design… Design 1.0 was paper and pen, using physical tools like a ruler featuring a human agent. Design 2.0 was computer assisted design (CAD) featuring applications driven by a human agent. Design 3.0 was assisted design using CAD apps where knowledge based systems learn from the human actor. Design 4.0 is fully autonomous or semi autonomous design that may or may not involve a human actor (a designer, developer or product owner). Design 4.0 is an approach to design that marries design for transformation and advanced technologies to deliver innovative and breakthrough products and services for the outcome economy. My talk seemed to resonate with a large number of attendees and there is a sense that there is a shift underway in the practices and approaches we need to use in an agile world informed by huge quantities of data that involves people-to-people, people-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions. Design 4.0 marries BizOps, DevOps and the emerging field of Design Operations (or Design Ops) to support design that features semi-autonomous and fully autonomous computer systems (machine learning). While Design 4.0 as a term has been used in different ways to describe design that is focused on social innovation (GK Van Patter, 2009), my definition extends the application of design as a transformation practice to include business thinking and Dev Ops thinking where machine learning and assistive technologies support and inform the design and transformation process. The conclusion of a new Government-commissioned report by a group representing some of the UK’s top companies, led by Siemens UK and Professor Juergen Maier indicates that robotics, autonomous systems, artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technologies in IoT can deliver huge benefits where Government and industry co-operate and may be able to create 175,000 new manufacturing jobs and generate an extra £455bn in GDP in the UK. Service, experience, interaction and visual design as a set of practices offer strategic and tactical approaches to designing products and services that are proving highly effective in a world that is undergoing a digital transformation. Coupled with Design Thinking and Human Centred Design they have utilised contextual research and participatory work with users, employees and customers as part of a collaborative design process to gather both qualitative and quantitative data undertaken in an iterative and phased process. However, design thinking (Rolf Faste et al) as an approach has its origins in the 1980s as set practices that are essentially analogue in nature and are both people and time intensive. However, increasingly design is informed with data-derived insights using advancing data collection techniques and processed using increasingly ubiquitous machine learning and cognitive computing applications. A traditional phased design model or lean approach is not always fast enough or efficient in an agile world where bespoke services and user experiences can be configured in an instant to match a users preferences, behaviours and location and their unique circumstances. For companies to compete in the Outcome Economy as a part of industry 4.0 requires a new model; Design 4.0, that will increasingly feature machine intelligence and a data informed driven strategy that features data garnered using people-to-people, people-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions. More on this in the coming weeks and months!

Factotum’s Pete Fossick Talks ‘Service Design’

In the latest issue of Touchpoint, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes caught up with me to learn about the opportunities afforded to me as a service designer and to hear my thoughts on where service design education should be heading. As the Service Design Program Director at IBM and the founder of the IXSD Academy in London, I have a background that includes developing ground-breaking curriculum in design as well as over twenty years working with start-ups, SMEs, and corporations using service design and design thinking to deliver disruptive innovation. “In the future designers will need to be polymorphs and trans-disciplinary, where they can adapt to a fast paced changing world. I would like to see a Polytechnic approach in higher education; the University system in the UK is broken in parts and it’s failing its students” I recently established the IXSD Academy to provide coaching, training and education that has a focus on collaborative and co-creative approaches to develop skills and thought leadership in design, innovation and transformation in the digital economy. I have been at the forefront of shifting approaches to design education since working with Prof. Norman McNally at Glasgow School of Art in the early 1990s and over the decades I have been involved in developing innovative and ground breaking curriculum in design thinking and pioneering service education in the USA. Check out what I have to say in the SDN’s Touchpoint Vol 9 Edition 1 ‘Education and Capacity Building https://www.service-design-network.org/touchpoint/touchpoint-9-1-education-and-capacity-building/pete-fossick

Service Design Playbooks

In an ever more complex world, with seismic shifts in the way we work and live, there is increasing demand for new approaches to the way design as we transform business and industry. Developments in previously disjointed fields such as artificial intelligence, big data, cognitive computing, the internet, IoT and mobile are all conflating and amplifying one another. Furthermore, we are all aware that over the past four decades we have shifted from economies of scale with mass markets where we manufactured tangible products, to delivering intangible services in long-tail markets using advanced information technologies on the world-wide-web. As a Practice Manager and the Service Design Program Director at IBM in Dublin, I work in the Global Technology Services Group where were are developing and evolving our approaches to the way we work together with our clients to define the future. At IBM, Global Technology Services (GTS) we work with clients from all Europe to design and develop a wide range of technology services that run the foundational systems the world relies on. These are the platforms that enable the backbone of the world’s economy in Banking, Telecoms, Retail, Airlines, Government and Insurance to operate. The challenges we face individually, in our business and in that of our clients, are complex and we need to have collaborative approaches that are agile and can deal with complex and entangled eco-systems of services and products. Service Design in Enterprise Over the past six months I have been working with Tim Macarthur and Diego Dalia to develop a Service Design Playbook that we can use with our teams as we work at the cutting edge of technology and service innovation.

At IBM we take design very seriously and as a technology company it has always valued design. From the early days of personal computers to the first mainframe computers to the most recent work in cognitive computing, design is crucial.

IBM has invested in developing a unique approach to design thinking that is used not only by its 1500 designers but also by its engineers, developers and throughout the whole organisation. IBM Design Thinking has been developed to enable disparate professionals and experts to focus on developing user-centric experiences and innovative digital solutions by working collaboratively with each other and with clients. IBM Design Thinking’s framework is a means to solve users’ problems at the speed and scale of the modern digital enterprise. Designing Services IBM Design Thinking has its roots in traditional design thinking but more recently I have been working with Diego and Tim to augment IBM’s design thinking to include and embrace Service Design. Whether we’re re-envisioning a customer experience for a multinational bank or exploring ways to beat cancer, or helping government deliver better services, Service Design helps us focus on what matters to our clients and importantly their end-users. Service in the Outcome Economy At IBM, success is not measured by the features and functions but rather by outcomes. Whether we’re helping clients discover a cure for cancer, collaborate across the globe, or deliver financial services, our clients rely on us to deliver outcomes. Diego, Tim and I are shifting the conversation from one about features and functions to one about users and outcomes and by so doing we deliver more useful, usable, and desirable services that enable our clients to define, differentiate and disrupt their markets. We use Service Deisgn Thinking to help us pivot away from focusing on designing products to designing outcomes; a shift from the tangible to the intangible. It has become an important means to deliver value while working with our clients on very complex problems in entangled eco-systems. The value of Service Design in the Digital Enterprise Working in IBM means you work with very smart people. The smartest I have ever encountered. I was recently in a workshop that featured technical experts with numerous patents for technologies like Blockchain and Cognitive Computing. To give you a measure; IBM filed 8033 patents last year. Working with smart people means you have to be able as a designer to add value in the team. Typically we work in ‘core’ teams to examine problems holistically rather than reductively to understand relationships in complex eco-systems. As designers, we work with technologist and business experts to frame challenges by working with clients and end-users and to identify changes in domains and spots areas where we can create value. We find that that using service design thinking really helps our teams with a strong technology focus connect with designers because the tools service designers use are similar and in some cases adapted from areas like systems and IT design. We start by using methods in our Service Design Playbook to define insights based on user research and data insights. We focus on opportunities that we add significant value. and then we ideate in our teams to then move quickly to prototyping so we can resonance test with end-users the systems and processes that support new offerings in a service-product continuum. Importantly we do not only design interactions and experiences; we also define the processes and eco-systems. This means we increasingly look at new organisational structures with new roles and that need people with skills that are at the cutting edge of technology. When we design with new technologies, we are also helping to define new industries and new markets. It’s very exciting. Service Design Playbooks Working with Diego Dalia and Tim Macarthur we have developed a Service Design Playbook and practice guide to help design and collaborate with our collegues. The Service Design Playbook contains methods and activities for teams to use in implementing radical collaboration that put the client and their users at the centre of our thinking. Each Service Design method can be used in combination as part of a broader set of activities in a Playbook. Our Service Design Playbook enables us take typical and atypical situations and develop a unique approach by using different combinations of service design methods and activities suited to the project or a particular sprint within the project. Our Service Design Playbook breaks down into three distinct flavours of Observe, Reflect and Make so we are aligned with IBM Design Thinking’s Framework. Importantly, Service Design at IBM is part of a larger ‘Playbook’ of IBM Design Thinking. When We Use Service Design Service Design adds significant value when applied in the one or more of the following circumstances: Service design as a methodology with activities and tools combined in playbooks that deliver optimised service offerings and experiences. Service design as a people-centred process to address operational and organizational needs as part of a transformation process or in a new venture. Service design as a collaborative and participatory process that requires a co-design approach. Service design as a methodology to optimize complex systems and interconnected ecologies. First Published on Linkedin by Peter Fossick, Service Design Programme Director at IBM and Founder of Factotum Design