_Video produced by Tais Di Sciascio
_Music composed by Alvaro Angeloro from HookSounds.com
Service Design Workshop in Healthcare
My role in this project was, together with Marta Kuroszczyk, to design and facilitate workshops within the Service Design in Healthcare course run by Laurea and Metropolia universities in Helsinki. The goal of the workshops was to teach service design methods and tools in practice to master's students in Global Health.
The Process
We started with critical thinking about the brief, and many questions and doubles arose in our minds. We did a literature review to better understand our challenge, roles, and what service design would be in the Healthcare context. To support our analysis, we also explored some related articles and case studies. We co-created a new value proposition for the workshop and the entire course flow with teachers, along with the knowledge gathered by the students. The outcome was to design a workshop that would be better integrated into the course content, and by doing so, we split the workshops into 2 days. During the first day, a "problem phase" workshop would help the students share knowledge and choose their service problems and customers. During the second day, a "solution phase" workshop would be held in order to wrap up all the content in practice. We also realized that for the "problem phase" workshop, the students should have some knowledge of the industry, and we should encourage them to do research. We created a pre-assignment where all students searched for demographics linked to specific topics related to healthcare. In this way, the students explored the context, built knowledge to start the design process, and understood the importance of researching.
After setting up a new schedule, we started to work more on the value proposition. At this point, we realized that for students, we wanted to deliver educational services. We put a lot of emphasis on the learning aspect and experience throughout the workshops. We chose certain methods to support the learning experience through the double diamond process that was also presented during the lectures, and we decided to stay in line with that. We created our Facilitation Plan and the Schedule Manuscript with the proposal to explain our roles as facilitators, timing strategy, and plan B strategy. Once we achieved the agreement and aligned our goals, we started to draw the canvases and build our presentation to support us during the workshop.
Outcomes: The workshop
During the first workshop day, it was important to identify the problems on which participants could work during the second workshop day, identifying potention solutions and prototyping them. We started the first workshop by splitting the students into groups and giving them a space to share the knowledge gathered by the pre-assignment and also a moment to get familiar with each other. We compromised here in a way that there was so little time that we resigned from group building exercises, but I guess these are the choices of every facilitator. So we started with ideation. As we decided on the 20/20 drawing idea method, we knew that a warm-up to make the students familiar with drawing and break initial barriers was needed. However, we noticed that not everyone managed to draw a lot during the ideation method. One or two students switched to writing, but at the end, every team had two to three problems for further evaluation. It was also interesting how quickly that little piece of paper became something very profound, an artifact with meaning, and how fast visual expression built a direct understanding of what a particular person had in mind. As the problems were still quite raw, we proposed to work with the "How Might We" method to finalized workshop with a proper problem description that was not too broad or too narrow but gave a team a great starting point and context to think about until the next day. During this exercise, it was nice to see that some teams left their chairs and started to work on the wall after a little bit of encouragement from our side. Even though the space didn’t support this kind of activity, it was interesting to see how dynamic things changed when people put their post-its on the wall and started discussions. After the workshop was over, we collected our first feedback. We also noticed a need to include more examples and case studies to support our explanation of certain tools. We reflected on these issues and updated our presentation to strengthen the next day's workshop.
Before our second workshop day, we really needed to work with space once again. And that space really worked against us. It looked more like a corridor than a workshop space, with almost no walls. But we did our best. Another challenge to tackle from our perspective was that it was almost impossible for the students that were sitting in the back to see the presentation. Because we went many times throughout our duties, we were confident enough to carry on the workshop without visual support. Our plans for this day were quite ambitious, and we almost handled everything with minor changes along the way, which did not influence the final outcomes regarding our well-planned Plan B strategy. We started our workshop by summarizing what we had done until now and what we wanted to achieve throughout the day. We also proposed a warm-up to help us activate and physically engage the students. It was very important, as they were having lectures the whole morning. We planned three stages during the ideation phase. As we knew that we would be under constant time stress, we decided to go with Silent Brainstorming at the beginning. Just to make it the most effective and stop unnecessary discussions. From the facilitation side, it was challenging to stimulate idea flow. Some teams went great, but some needed more support and encouragement to search for new solution ideas. On the second stage, we proposed the "Thermometer" method. During this exercise, we realized that we needed to introduce another tool that helped students choose the most promising solution idea for further work. We drew the Impact/Feasibility Diagram and explained how they should evaluate the process. Then, we finalized ideation with a design statement. It was a very good decision to use this method. It closed the process and made the team ready for the next method: the "Customer Journey". It was time to build the service they wanted to provide. We introduced some healthcare examples to allow them to visualize and understand the process and what they had done until that moment. For the first time, we were also using words from their world, which was very important and enhanced common understanding. This exercise was the most challenging from the facilitation point of view, as it really demanded from us almost peer-to-peer facilitation. Finally, we start to prototype the potential solution. For that, we decided to go with the "Desktop Walkthrough" method because of the time limitation and level of difficulty. Another reason for choosing this particular method was to create a common language in which each member of the group could assess and co-develop the prototype. It also created a good possibility for exploration of the service environment, making it more tangible and easy to communicate and ask for feedback on what our next task for the prototype phase was. The feedback session went very well. It was a meaningful learning experience for those who had to communicate the solution and for those who gave feedback. We closed the workshop with a reflection section with the students and many interesting points raised by this discussion, such as the importance of getting feedback, how difficult it is to understand the customer's needs, how important it is not to fall in love with your solution, and so on. We also collected feedback from the students and teachers regarding the workshops and us as facilitators. Those were mostly positive, which makes us very proud of our effort. They also provide us with good reflection and insightful data to improve our work in the future.
