The co-directors of the Greenville Community Shelter Health Clinic suggested that my contribution could be redesigning the GCSHC web site to provide an updated clinic visit schedule, important documents for patients, and online sign-up forms for volunteer physicians and medical students. However, examining the medical history collection process within the clinic service experience was more worthwhile, whereby redesigning the web site could possibly be part of an overall innovative strategy to redesign the service delivery. Service design, a “collaborative process of researching, planning and realizing the experiences that happen over time and over multiple touch points with a customer’s experience,” provided a promising framework to address GCSHC’s problem of tracking medical histories to effectively diagnose health conditions.[1] The aim of using service design was to improve the public health experience by creating a service environment that fosters long-term relationships between GCSHC volunteers and patients.[2]
Service design is an emerging discipline that can help service organizations improve productivity, enhance competitive advantage, meet customers’ expectations, make use of technology to increase the possibilities of developing and delivering services, meet the challenges of pressing environmental, social and economic challenges, and share knowledge and learning.[3] The output of service design’s interdisciplinary methodology comes in varied forms, such as “rather abstract organizational structures, operation processes, service experiences, and even concrete physical objects.”[4] The processes and outputs are used to access different perspectives of actors’ relations and interactions with the service.[5]
Government and private agencies and organizations servicing the homeless in Pitt County have individual strategies that some times conflict with other efforts. For example, some independent shelter programs are not affiliated with federal, state, or local entities and may not abide to rules and regulations set forth by governing organizations. As a result, there are instances of a lack of cohesion amongst entities that either have the same, similar, or different policies or strategies to combat homelessness. A design method was needed to address how conflicts of policies and strategies impact public services for the homeless and how can mapping collaboration scenarios pinpoint opportunities to improve policies and strategies through better partnerships.
Service design’s journey mapping provided a framework to visualize the complexity of homelessness public policy strategies and collaboration scenarios. Journey mapping is used to visually represent an actors’ touchpoints with a service to “identify and design opportunities for improvement and innovation” through mapping scenarios.[6] The primary focus of visualizing touchpoints is to highlight actors’ multiple channels of service experience rather than examining one experience channel. For example, a bank customer’s service touchpoints may include ATM machines, web site, customer service representatives, and other points of accessing the bank’s services. Journey mapping was useful to examine how federal, state, and local homelessness public policies and strategies 1) effect the touchpoints of homelessness services in Pitt County and 2) can be improved through collaborative partnerships between service providers and customers.
There was no single design solution that sufficed for situations of conflicting policies and strategies, interagency and community collaboration, social exclusion, and information access. Each problem was caused by another problem, and different goals and values made it difficult to pinpoint appropriate solutions. Moreover, the interconnected problems were magnified by constant changes to federal, state, and local policy initiatives and regulations. To move forward and begin developing resolutions, a design methodology was needed to respond to dynamic situations rather than a series of planned actions.
I was inspired by responsive architecture as a method to develop incremental interventions for wicked problems by responding to the social actors. The premise of responsive architecture is that buildings can mimic living organisms by observing and responding to “their internal and external environment and change form to suit any situation.”[7] The value of responsive architecture to graphic design is that methods can be “conceived of as systems that change shape to improve the way people live.”[8] The goal of using a responsive practice was to focus on resolving interrelated social issues as they unfolded rather than a discrete action plan. A responsive practice does not limit the targeted outcome, but rather continually redefines situations to devise the best intervention at the moment.
[1] Steven Heller, “Answering the Call to Service Design: An Interview with Phi-Hong Ha,” AIGA, November 3, 2009, accessed February 5, 2012, http://www.aiga.org/answering-the-call-to-service-design.
[2] Shelley Evenson and Hugh Dubberly, “Designing for Service: Creating an Experience Advantage,” in Introduction to service engineering, eds., Gavriel Salvendy and Waldemar Karwowski, (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 403–413. Evenson and Dubberly noted that the process to create value for customers and long-term relationships with their providers must happen through an intentional process rather than by happenstance. At GCSH, the high turnover of physician and medical student volunteers and not having a data about other patients’ clinic visits weakens the type of long-term relationship that valuable for healthcare services that often service the same people over a period of time.
[3] “Service Design Network Manifesto,” Service Design Network, accessed July 12, 2012, http://www.service-design-network.org/content/sdn-manifesto.
[4] Ibid,14. Disciplines like psychology, business, anthropology, and product design are intertwined in service design.
[5] In reference to service design, actors represent the participants involved in the service, such customers and service providers.
[6] “Customer Journey Mapping,” Engine, accessed July 13, 2012, http://www.enginegroup.co.uk/service_design/m_page/customer_journey_mapping.
[7] Lakshmi Sandhana,”Smart Buildings Make Smooth Moves,” Wired Magazine, August 31, 2006, accessed July 7, 2012, http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/08/71680.
[8] Ibid.