Let’s assume that you want to design a new service with the human de-centered design approach.
How do you go about doing this?
Successful services have always embodied a new culture.
We have already seen that McDonald’s epitomized the modern culture as opposed to the premodern culture.
Starbucks similarly epitomized the new elitist culture emphasizing cultural sophistication.
How can we design this kind of innovative service by designing a culture?
One thing is for sure;
you cannot do this by discovering and addressing customers’ requirements.
Again, McDonald’s epitomized a modern culture in the 60s.
It negated those rooted in the premodern culture.
They had love-hate relationship with this pre-modern culture and wanted to move out of it.
In other words, people faced with anxiety how to define themselves.
This anxiety was conditioned by the major change of the society, from premodern to modern.
How about Starbucks?
Dr. Douglas Holt and his colleague made an interesting analysis of how Starbucks constructed a new culture.
I highly recommend this book “Cultural Strategy.”
Starbucks was successful not because it offered a third place to study at or good coffee.
There were many coffee shops like that.
Why did Starbucks alone succeed?
The answer is that it constructed the elitist and sophisticated culture
but also made it accessible to the mass population
that could not completely identify with this elite culture.
That is to say, Starbucks realized that customers wanted Italian language,
not necessarily authentic Italian espresso.
Why was this important?
Again, we need to understand the anxiety people had about how to define themselves.
Starbucks resonated with people’s identity project in the 70s.
The young generation at that time grew up in the post-war era.
Their parents could define themselves
by getting a good job in corporate America, having a large house in the suburb, and driving a nice car.
But this young generation could not define themselves with the material affluence.
What did they seek?
They sought cultural sophistication.
They wanted to show that they appreciated subtle flavors of coffee and wine, for instance.
Starbucks epitomized this culture.
But again, they had a love-hate relationship and could not completely identify with such an elite culture.
So, the cultural sophistication needed to be accessible, not completely elitist.
So the central idea of designing a culture is the anxiety people faced in defining themselves.
Such anxiety is tied to social change.
The generational shift from premodern to modern, from material affluence to cultural sophistication,
was the important condition.
A new culture emerges as an occasion to let people prove themselves.
The new culture negates people and challenges them to find a new self.
Here is heuristics of design.
You should be attentive to strange stuff that people cannot stop talking about.
Often, it is related to subculture, aficionados, oddballs…
You may find it intriguing that people are attracted to strange things on TV, magazines, and the Internet.
Pay attention to it
and try to figure out what kind of self people are seeking and what they are trying to move out of.
Finally, this is an important thing to remember.
People cannot be simply happy in stepping into a new culture.
They are negated.
Therefore, they often have love-hate relationship with this new culture.
They are attracted to this new culture but cannot completely identify with it.
Professor Kincheloe came to hate McDonald’s.
When designing a culture, this design embodies this ambivalence.
Often, a design is elitist but familiar, sophisticated but quotidian, austere but indulgent…
So, service design has much more opportunities than simply applying human-centered design to a holistic service.
Service design can be approached from a cultural perspective.
Although it may be comforting to identify and address customers’ requirements and to design a service in a holistic and consistent manner,
there is no clear methodology for designing a service from a cultural perspective.
At least at this moment.
I am working hard to develop such a methodology.
But for now, you should have gained a lot of ideas from this MOOC.
I would say precisely because there is no clear steps to follow in designing a culture,
you would be ahead of competition after having taken this MOOC.