Good Design needs hard conversations
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Good Service Design leads to difficult conversations
That’s one of the things I’ve learned while virtually stopping in Indonesia to chat with Nurul Ibrahim during my international book tour.
Nurul is the founder and director of Hume, a purpose-centered design consultancy that wants to make life better through design.
Nurul is also a guest speaker at universities, academic institutes and international conferences.
In this 37-minute-long conversation, we explore topics like:
Thanks to Nurul for this lovely conversation!
This conversation was recorded as part of the international book tour for my next book on Service Design.
p.s. prefer reading the transcript to watching the video? At the end of this email, I've added the full automated transcript 👇
Backstage blog
I love to explain how I'm building educational content. I'm trying to be as transparent as possible so that it might motivate others to create such content, too. This is the latest blog post I've written:
How I respond to aggressive comments
My process, why it's important to answer, and why I don't take it too seriously.
The full transcript of my conversation with Nurul
This transcript was generated using Descript. So it might contain some creative mistakes.
Introduction
Daniele: Hey, Nurul, such a big pleasure to see
Nurul: you. It's a nice pleasure to see you as well. Thanks for having me, Daniele.
Daniele: Thanks for accepting the invitation. In fact you're one of these people that I'm very glad to get to know. As I told you a bit in the preparation part that we had before, as I'm an introvert, These kind of settings are really good for me to meet new people.
Nurul: Likewise, I'm also a little bit of introverted but I love meeting people from all around the world and.
Also bright minds like yourself and especially who are passionate with service design. So I'm glad to be here.
Meet Nurul
Daniele: So let's jump right into it. I have one first question for you, which is when you go to a birthday party, how do you present yourself usually to the strangers that are in there, knowing that we are both a bit introverts?
How do you handle those situations?
Nurul: I say I'm Nurul. My name is N Brahim. I'm from Indonesia and I'm a designer. I currently run Hume Design consultancy and basically just manage the day-to-day work work with clients and hopefully we do impact through our work.
Awesome.
Service Design in Indonesia
Daniele: And, so I'm quite curious, because you are from a country which I know nothing about. And I'd like to know, how is a bit the design, service design, innovation scene in Indonesia? How does that
Nurul: look like? My evolution in design has been quite an experiment myself. I've been prototyping my life a lot.
I've been a designer for maybe 16 years. I started as a graphic designer. Evolved into art direction. I had experience like in agencies where I wasn't satisfied. I think a lot of designers come from that background, right? And then I was very fascinated with human centered design. I believe as a designer, oh, this is what design should be like.
It should be based on people. It should be serving people, not, a lot of assumptions or a lot of just make, making up things not disrespecting that, that industry just wasn't for me, it doesn't align with my values, and I believe that maybe I should leave so I was, I left to a startup actually here locally, and that's when I started to learn a lot about UX and design research.
But I saw there was a lot, still a huge gap in terms of how to deliver a digital product. And one of my first experiences was we were helping to design a shrimp farming app for shrimp farmers locally here in Indonesia. We worked with like university graduates who are so smart and they were creating the system.
And I was like, Oh, they don't need this app. They don't need this. They don't need this to monitor, the. The, essentially the, if I could bring context, essentially the product was to detect the pH level of the water, so they know when to harvest the shrimps and these people were very seasoned.
They had a lot in terms of how they understood the technology. The nature they understood how to harvest and farm and everything without digital tools. But what was missing and broken was this system, this end to end system, where they weren't getting a lot of support in terms of how they could harvest and have this ready to be marketed to, just the consumers.
The other side was how they could be supported in terms of The quality, making sure the quality of these shrimps. And so I went into you can imagine, like a jungle. I went there and talked to a lot of these farmers. And it was just surprising to me how entrepreneurial they were. They independently learned about like Facebook, creating websites.
And they made those digital platforms on their own because they had nobody to You know, rely on and to make them. So they were in control of their entire ecosystem and I thought that was so fascinating. How could we provide a better system? How can we provide a better filling the gaps from supporting the farmers, the commercial side of that?
And launching into the market, there needs to be a better system. And I then studied in Hyper Island in uk and was inspired by a lot of different systems and services that was available. But I didn't know there was service design. I thought it was really like systems design. So when I came back, I thought.
Oh, this is where I really need to apply and use this practice because it has so much potential in mature markets like in Europe, you can already see that, Governments are already valuing this practice, even I know gov. uk is the most service design oriented unit under the government.
Right now there's a huge design team there, and where we are going right now in Indonesia is very interesting since the last five years. Digitalization has been taking off like by storm, but then like I mentioned systems had, has a lot of issues, there are broken systems, there are systems that independently are created by actors and, the the whole sector or people independently, getting out of the system, making their own.
And so this raised a lot of questions to myself where can I actually support this? And I really believe that service design has this capability of looking at things in that holistic way, where you can guide. People towards that kind of change that we want to see, even though it takes a lot of processes and a lot of steps.
So where we are right now is that service design is not still very much known in a lot of the companies or commercial sector. But there's a growing demand from the civic design, public services area from governments that are looking towards changing certain systems. And they also don't know what that is called.
So where we step in is to introduce and educate people what that is. So there's a lot of educational element to what I do in terms of educating what service design is, getting people on board to service design, and practicing it. And we're very grateful that more and more clients are starting to see this value that we had I think, a few long engagements with previous clients from last year, where they actually came to ask for a service design rehaul But again, like I mentioned, there's so much educational side that needs to be introduced as we are not a market that is as mature as like European market or American market.
So that's where we are at right now.
Daniele: Yeah. It's lovely to see how the kind of public services, are the ones. who have a kind of like a maturity sometimes without the name, like the, where they say, Oh, this is something we need that we need this end to end perspective. We need to have a bit of a more systematic view on these things and that there is their eagerness to to start the conversation there.
Service Design communities in Indonesia
Daniele: So if I was to relocate to Indonesia obviously I'm I'm sure I'm going to love it. But what are communities where someone who is interested in service design or who is a practitioner can find, like minded people?
Are there communities, places that people should know about?
Nurul: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There was a huge UX community since the 90s that grew and branched out into a lot of different hubs. But we're very, there's not a lot of design, strategic design firms like we do in Hume. So we know each other.
Everyone in the community is like sisters and brothers. So I think since 2016 we started to be part of the ServiceGem chapter here in Indonesia, and slowly the community has started to grow. So there is that community service design practitioners. I think, like I mentioned, you would still see a lot of, Intersection with UX though, so Some practitioners are still maybe owning the title of a UX designer, interaction designer, or even the name strategist because it's still more understood by the industry and more accepted.
But you are, you're starting to see now like service designers as a name. So even at Hume, we took the risk of having service design roles early on in the beginning. And I know it was a little bit crazy. A lot of the clients that we had were asking, what is that? Who does, who, what do they do?
But I thought. Maybe that's a good entry point, for people to learn about this. Why not make that role? But I do benchmark the role and progression to global kind of standards. And this is why I often keep myself updated to people like yourself. to what the industry practitioners are doing or, neighboring countries like Singapore.
That we're also making sure that the career Progresses of people are up to date. I know that's not what you're asking, but I'm, if you're asking about the communities one thing they're also having in their mind is how do they grow in this field? Because they, there's a lot of desire to, to be design service designers right now.
Daniele: Yeah, it's I love how, when. When the maturity, if we can call it like that, the service design maturity, isn't that high, strangely enough, the knits or the closeness between people is much higher, because it's, you're only a few in it that you always feel, I love the way you put it, you feel like brothers and sisters, where you're together in it.
Nobody uses the term or just a few. And therefore we need the help of of people like you, and you and the work that you do at Hume where you say, Hey, let's be a bit provocative. Let's use the new term and let's put it out there. But still, let's also be smart enough and empathic enough for the, for other people to know that.
But we need to do the translation, we need to say, hey, this is, it's like UX, we add this part of it and we love UX, it's a good thing. And we do this tiny part different, but basically it's 99 percent is the same and it's good. But we, the 2 percent make a quite big difference for us and therefore we use that other name.
And I think that's always a good A good way to to put it.
And so I slowly have a bit of an understanding of who you are, but I'm curious to to know more through your critical point of view. And I shared with you the book, Service Design Principles 301 to 400 and I shared it with you in the idea to just share. I've read one chapter with you, but you're so generous that you read the whole book.
And so I'm very excited to hear from you.
The good stuff
Daniele: Was there something in that book that resonated with you?
Nurul: Oh, yeah, definitely. As a designer, I can't just read one chapter, right? I need to learn. I'm learning myself. I need to be, I need to be exposed as much as possible. So I was really excited when you shared this.
Recommended by LinkedIn
But Daniele, I want to congratulate you first. It's amazing that you're putting this together. This is incredible. Congratulations to you, kudos to you that, you actually sort this out, organize this, talk to people and put this together. It's so helpful. So my first impression was that how the entirety of the book and how, why it exists was so helpful.
I immediately wanted to share it to my team. That was my first impression. I really like how thorough it was and how thoughtful that you put together all possible scenarios in dealing with the people, like clients, or maybe people internally, if it's an in house thing or just stakeholders and, just general people who are part of the transformation, while also having some principles that include business that are oriented towards businesses.
And also with experiences. So I'm a huge nerd. I think you, you wrote service design nerds or something like that. I would testify. I'm one of those people too. I, oh I love theories. I love I love theories. I love anchoring solutions based on a solid foundation like principles.
Or strategies based on principles especially if it's tried and tested before, and it's always such a delight to have that moment of sharing to people you know what, There's this point of view and this anchoring principle that we might use or influence clients to do that, too.
I really enjoyed I really enjoyed these principles put together. The other side is that all of them have a illustration to visualize the context. So I'm also a visual person. I really like how those illustrations show. Pain and straightforwardness and sometimes satire as like what it is to explain what it is.
So I like how it's structured. This is what it is. This is a visual that you're trying to express. And there's actually a source. There's you tag the source based on somebody, right? Like an some expert or academic or a quote. And so I really liked how those chapters start with this visualization.
And what I also appreciate was how the titles of each of these chapters are conversational. Like I know you are talking to me and you talked about like friends previously before this, right? I know like you're talking to a fellow. So I like how it's conversational. It doesn't have Feeling sometimes when you would read a book that is academic and in nature or somebody from maybe academia making that, and you can feel a little bit intimidated.
You feel like, oh, did I make a mistake when I thought about something else before? I really like how It's like casual, you talked about the especially with the section on frustration and you introduced the book also, like you can read this in the toilet, if I'm not mistaken. Those are the things that I remember when I went through the book and I remember in the final bit, you invited people to collaborate, right?
You can contribute with your own principles. So I feel like it's. It's very engaging that way. It's I'm a part of something and you're not seeing this as this is the end of, this is the end. It's going to evolve. So I really resonated with how you create the book, like it, it is also like an experience for us
Daniele: as a reader.
One thing that is very dear to me and what you're saying is that you feel This conversational part, it's been interesting because obviously, I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm working with proofreaders and one of the feedback I got was like, Oh, your titles are not like usual book titles, the questions, why you have questions, there should be more statements, and and we had a conversation with the proofreader where I was like, yeah, but. I know it's a bit weird, but that's like why I why do I want it like that? Because I want people to feel that it's a conversation, and the best way to make it feel like a conversation is to ask a question.
Because when you ask a question, I feel that people are already answering the question in their mind, so it's they're already part of the book. I see that with my kid, and he's listening a lot of audiobooks. And in the audiobooks, sometimes, you have the narrator asking a question.
And what's so funny to hear, to see with a kid is that he answers to the book. So for example, in, in the story, there is Oh, and who do you think is the biggest animal on earth? And he's T Rex, and I feel that we have this thing as humans. Whenever we have a question, we want to answer it ourselves too.
And and seeing that. This kind of hypothesis worked with you is like a very great a lovely piece of of feedback. So thanks so much for that. But outside of all the compliments, because the goal for me is obviously not to fish for compliments but also to to hear your perspective and and go further.
I'm quite curious in your experience at Hume and in your professional experience, what's one thing that you would say Is something that helps to make either services more friendly, more humane a tiny thing where you feel, yes that's definitely something that is important, can be from the book, can be from your experience, but something that you say, oh, if I had to take one element and give it back to people, Do that.
That's something that, that works very well.
Principle: The customer is king but you get too choose your king
Nurul: Yeah, I think there's a misguidance sometimes. I think I remember your chapter about customer is a king and you need to choose your king, right? So that one I resonate because We are in doctrine with that kind of principle. Whoever introduced that to us, I don't know who did that.
But I think as long as I live, that was the kind of mindset that we always have had, right? And I also have a background in agencies. All my career, I served. I serve people, I serve clients but then, like how well do the clients know what they actually need? And many times clients don't know what they actually want, no offense to all my own clients.
But I think when we're practicing human centeredness with our approach, whether we're delivering it through a strategic service or AUX, there needs to be a clear understanding of what, what matters and what is important. And and that's not people pleasing sometimes. It's not about, okay I'm engaging with you, you sign a contract and you're paying me so I'm serving you, you need to sometimes put like a bad cop hat and show them the reality of This is, if you're pursuing this, you're going to fail.
You're pursuing this, you might just waste a lot of money. And this ends up with a lot of difficult conversations. And what I think in this practice the confusion around human centeredness is, doesn't mean for me to be a people pleaser and comply towards, okay, advocating one. One user group.
You need to see holistically. You need to be able to see this part and that part like a middle child. Coincidentally, I'm also a middle child. So you need to see all that 360, right? And then that question of what is important? What's important for them? At the end, there is you're, it's not an ego contest.
You need to also understand. What is important? Many times I ask this question, all that facade of the fear and ego comes crumbling down. At the end, it's a fearful client who is very afraid of failing, or sometimes it's a fearful client who wants to make sure that they're investing in the right.
Company, or like a firm like us, and that we are actually guiding them, not just asking for their money. Or, if it's a government, they have a lot at stake. It could be they're, they're maybe under a ministry, but also people, right? The entire community could be up against them, and they could protest against them.
And so there's a lot at stake that we need to manage, right? Even if it's not, we're not going to have that responsibility forever and they will hand it over, we're sharing it with them. So asking what matters was a game changer for me. And so this is why I liked how you also put in areas or principles of the dynamics on how to influence and how to have these conversations.
I think you, you mentioned like a mindset, right? Because we, we need to forge that. We need to build that and we can't just be stagnant in just, okay, one values, one value and one, one mindset. We also as designers need to be like a sponge to build that bridge. That's. That's where I think good good design and good experiences with working working with other people comes into play.
Serving doesn't mean slavery
Daniele: It's it's very inspiring, as you were speaking, came to me this image, you said serving, doesn't mean slavery, it's like a different word, it's not called slave design. It's called service design, which means it's not, we're not doing.
Everything that the master asks, but we are serving the master. And sometimes the master is going in a direction where we say, if this is your strategy, if you told me you want to reach that goal, and you're doing this, based on my experience, I would say be careful. Maybe we could try something else.
Maybe there is other things to try. And I think this is a very important reminder for people just to say, Hey. Service doesn't mean that it is this kind of like master versus slave relationship. You are really into it with the person. It's our duty also to to come up with the nasty question with the difficult feedback
Nurul: absolutely. Yeah. We had a case like this last year where a client there was an education tech company that was growing at rapid speed. And before they know what they had a hundred something people in less than one year, and they don't know how, which area to solve within their company. And so they assumed delivering the service better would have better.
Would support their operations and the entirety of their cost structure. Which is a good point of view. It was true, but once we started to, of course, we do research, right? And talk to everybody inside the company. Once we understood the real problem, we had to invite them to these difficult conversations.
Which is, you've got a lot of people that are not functioning very well because you don't have the right vision or even the vision to, they don't understand what your vision is and it was like a slap in their face. And so we guided them through like a series of these workshops, which we call Purpose Centered Workshops, Purpose Centered Design Workshops.
And to get them aligned to that vision, then you can trickle down everything in terms of that operations. But once we get to the point where, okay, you're going to have to make some really important decisions, which are roles now. And it's either you guys step up or some roles need to be rethought.
And we never asked them to, okay, look, just lay off a bunch of people, but we had to give them that option where you need to make these decisions. These are going to be very difficult decisions. And if you like, we can guide you through to making those decisions. Eventually they had to make those calls because otherwise they'll go bankrupt if they continue the way they were doing.
Those were, are very hard, those are very hard areas where we as facilitators of a transformation where we stand, where our ethics are also, and what we are responsible to needs to be really expressed and carried out in a very mindful manner. So all these conversations and the principles that you designed are really useful because you, you need to move things through, that, the dynamic of hard conversations, whether we like it or not.
Daniele: And so you're making the transition very easy for me. I'd love to hear one of those hard conversations by listening by hearing from you.
The bad
Daniele: What's one thing that you will change in the book or that you feel Daniele, here I need to take my bad cop hat and give you a bit of a more critical feedback.
Nurul: I really, I, like I mentioned, I, I really enjoyed how conversational everything is. I wouldn't say disagree. You asked about like how I disagreed, right? I think like this is coming from your personal experience and your values. So if there's anything I would improve upon with your with your book is if we could make it Maybe not compact, but more I guess direct to what area of focus it is.
For example there's a lot about the frustrations and dynamics, right? And some of the frustrations, and I think, I believe in this section was there's a combination of staff or work related, right? Workplace related also. And. The fact that principle is for the designers to, to work on.
I really love all those principles. It would be great to see if, okay, this whole chapter is how you as a designer could deal with people and those people like clients. These are different frustration scenarios. Let me guide you to my experience on what those are. I think junior designers would love that.
I myself, I still am learning about dynamics. Like I mentioned to him, I'm an introvert also, so it would be really helpful for me to learn about different different ways of dealing with like people and clients or just stakeholders or even like the staffs because sometimes the staffs are also people.
In opposition to what transformation, so if there's a way to structure or categorize all of that into this is about people and dynamics of people, I think it would be a lot more consumable for me as a reader. And then I really like how there's another segment for different principles of like businesses.
I think those are so useful and direct right towards, okay, these are service and business principles that we can experiment on. So that speaks to me as a designer on, okay, if I need where do I go if I need to solve something with a certain thinking or certain hats of thinking, that section is where I would go.
I think it was like. I don't know if it's like clustered that way. I would think it would be a lot enjoyable as an experience.
Daniele: I love your idea. I'm gonna rephrase it in maybe other words to see if I'm getting it right. But, so basically you're saying it would be great to have maybe a sort of index where I can say I'm this type of person, which principles would be interesting for me?
I'm a designer, poof, these are the things that could help you in the relationship with your client and so on. Oh, I'm a business leader, oh, then these stuff would be very interesting for you. Oh, I'm just a staff guy and I can't take the decisions, but I have to live with decisions that have been made for me.
That's the things that that these are the principles that I should read. Oh, I'm someone who's frontline frontline worker, maybe read that kind of stuff. Oh, I'm more in the backstage, read more of this kind of stuff. Am I understanding your feedback in a
Nurul: Yeah we're brainstorming here.
That's lovely. I think you could make like series of these books too. It could be like that specifically for the dynamics, like people dynamics. Would be a place. Okay, that's I dunno, volume one or something and yeah. That's consumable and 15 ways. And compact of dealing with hard conversations with people.
Yeah. That would be where I could, ah, this is my go-to, and then I remember there was about not just business, but I think it was how to make information less overwhelming, right? Yes. So those would be where designers would need support on. Ah, how to make a better, maybe, user, right? A user experience within the service design realm.
But it doesn't necessarily mean they need to deal with people, right? They need to design certain principles better, like case one, I don't know, like a pathway or wayfinding. I don't know, something like that, right? So that way we could have go tos of, ah, this is where I go to as a manager and a junior designer.
This is where I go to for dealing with all my clients. And this is where I go to for when I have to transform like people in, staffs of government. I don't know. This is, it's structured or clustered in that way. That would be. Really lovely if that was the case.
Daniele: Thanks so much for that because I think next year once I will publish the fifth one.
So there will be 500 principles after next year. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to steal your idea and build on upon it, to maybe have playlists, having, you can explore, oh, this is maybe a playlist which maybe is curated by someone else saying, Oh, for these kind of problems, take these principles.
If you're more business mind take these principles. If you're more this and maybe have instead of just looking at through roles, but more playlists, sometimes it can be a role, sometimes it can be a topic, but, and then mixing all the books together, that could be, it could be very lovely.
And then to say, Oh, this is a playlist. With 20 principles on X, Y, something, and then people can go through it with this kind of like less overwhelming, it's just 20, but it's very focused on just one. So thanks so much for that, it's very helpful.
Recommended resource: Purpose Design
Daniele: I know you are a very nerdy person and you have a lot of very interesting things that you're reading.
What's a book or something that you would recommend for people to go further?
Nurul: I really like this book called Putting Purpose into Practice. Has not a lot to do with service design, but more about the way we could think or rethink about businesses even like capitalism. The purpose of having companies, why companies should exist, and the sustainable aspect of it.
of having a business so it's not actually business driven, but it's more about there's key examples in nature there was an example of a chapter like the bee of how, we could organize ourselves for longevity and think about longevity and sustainability, not in a way that rushes, that is rushing but it's, Mindfulness and where businesses really excel is when their core purpose and existence is really impactful to people and changing people.
And I know that's a lot of these words and jargons that we often use. I want to create impact, I want to do this and that. In reality, the practice is really difficult. The practice is not that easy. There's like you, we talked about this, like there's a lot of these mindsets that needs to be established, which is why the role of like us, what we're doing as designers is becoming a lot more challenging because we need to introduce not just, okay, this is how you do things.
And we'll get to that point from A to B. But you're introducing values, you're introducing ways of thinking, and that alone is actually very impactful if you, we can utilize the momentum. So it's quite when I read this, I thought about, oh my, there's a lot that we do that really can impact change in such a granular way.
And so I really like that putting purpose into practice allows me to think about, okay, what is it, what values am I going to instill here if I'm transforming this? Will this company not just, excel in their practice, but also in their revenue and success and everything? What about what they're doing for the society too?
So that kind of thinking holistically to the end, to the world, is something I resonate a lot with through this book.
Daniele: Indeed, purpose is definitely one of the difficult parts of our jobs, because it's not just a challenge for the workplace, but it's also a challenge for people, is this service that I'm paying for, is this serving a bigger purpose than just the service it is?
These are very deep questions and I love that there are resources out there like that book that can help us ask ourselves these difficult questions that go way beyond what we're usually focused on.
I'd like to ask, as a final question:
Get in touch with Nurul
Daniele: You shared a lot today with the community and you're already doing a lot for the community.
But what can the community do for you?
Nurul: Community do for me? I think I would like to just be connected with like minded people who are passionate about this field. But also, using, who wants to use this practice and this skill set. To really see transformation in a very positive way, and I know it's a very hard journey to go through, I just love being connected to people who are very passionate about doing this and wanting to see change.
I think I'd love to just be connected to anybody who's, practicing all around the world. And hopefully through those connections, maybe we could forge collaborations work together. It's an exciting time right now. A lot of global movement, global changes, and I think, the world is getting even smaller.
We need to find ways to like, unite sort of way and, move all the values that are not aligned and differences. And just put our good thinking hats together and work to all these. Social problems that are pressing right now. And I think for me, what'd be really great, I'd be really grateful for is don't stop sharing about service design with love for people to recognize us as our future.
Services too. So I think that's the only thing I would probably probably would like to see. But otherwise I'd love to just be connected.
Daniele: Awesome. So find Nurul on LinkedIn, get in touch with her and I'm sure you're going to learn a lot with these interactions as I'm learning a lot.
I'm learning
Nurul: a lot
Nothing: too from you.
Closing words
Daniele: Thank you so much, Nurul. It's been a big pleasure to meet you. You're doing something very interesting for the service design community at large in Indonesia. It's so great to see that you're pioneering that field. Also with a bit of a provocation bit, by putting the word in front of people and having the hard conversation. It's been very inspiring. And thank
Nurul: you a lot. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Daniel, for inviting me. It's really been inspiring for me too.
Daniele: So I just have to end with wishing you a lovely end of the day.
Nurul: You too.