Service Design for the Poor?

How Design Thinking Can Inform Service Delivery for the Poor

Student Name: Priti Rao

Close to half the world’s population of 3 billion people live in poverty and are deprived of essential services.

Explanations for this persistent condition has chiefly centred on political and institutional causes. On the other hand,designers and design discipline – whose mainstay is to ‘change existing situations into preferred ones1 - have focused very little on this problem. It is argued in the research that the ‘wicked’ problem of designing and delivering services to the poor calls for an interdisciplinary inquiry. It aims to explore whether design thinking can provide a new lens to understand and inform services for the poor. Further, to what extent current concepts in service design literature written largely from a private sector and for profit standpoint, are useful to look at public or social sector type organisations providing services to the poor.

The central research question to address the above purpose is framed as:Can service design thinking help to understand and design better services for the poor?

For the purpose of this research, the term ‘service design’ is defined as a‘description of: the set of actors involved in the direct production and consumption of service, the service offering (what is being offered and how)and the service benefit or value that is accrued to the user’. ‘Service design thinking’ refers to broad design thinking as well specific concepts on services within the management and design disciplines. The research investigates the question through real world cases of artisans in India. There are an estimated 20 million artisans in India living on less than $2 a day, who depend on craft as a main source of livelihood. Amongst these the research focuses on artisans from Orissa, who weave beautiful and complex tie and dye textiles known as ikat. In order to pursue their livelihood these artisans need a range of services such as access to raw material, marketing and finance amongst others.These are provided by public, private and not for profit agencies.

The research method uses service design thinking to analyse artisan services as provided by different agencies. It intends to demonstrate that the use of service design thinking can help to highlight three things:

i)  which services are more efficient and cost effective
ii) which services are most enabling from an artisan perspective
iii) how to balance trade offs to meet the triple bottom line of service provider capacity and business viability, user desirability and value alongside issues of sustainability. In other words it aims to demonstrate that viewing it as a ‘design problem’ will help to move from existing situations to preferred ones where a greater understanding of conflicting points of tension can produce innovative and optimal solutions instead of ‘either-or’ type of solutions which current analyses which focus only on the economic, political and social aspects of services to the poor tend to produce.

This has implications for what one analyses when looking at service delivery to the poor, how one arrives at the solutions and finally who are engaged in solving social problems.

1 Simon, Herbert (1982), The sciences of the artificial, 2nd ed, MIT Press,Cambridge, Massachusetts