The Service Design class I co-teach is the first design class some of the students have ever had. (The students can be from all over CMU, undergrad and grad. There are engineering students, psychology students, product manager master students, etc.) Right now they are working on their first assignment, which is basically to make a conceptual model of a familiar activity.
When you first start doing design—any design—you often do the most obvious thing you can think of. Often because you’re still fumbling with the tools and with concepts and because you latch on to the first concept you have. That concept seems the best and inevitable. But usually it’s not the best idea. That’s usually somewhere between concepts 3-7, sometimes even concept 34. You’ve gotta dig around to find the non-obvious idea.
Why care about the idea being non-obvious? For one thing, especially with conceptual models, the obvious can be dismissed. “We know all this.” What you’re trying to do is illuminate some aspect of the service/activity/topic for a particular purpose (intent). You want to make the familiar unfamiliar to illuminate aspects or parts of a service to either show something (a problem, it’s criticalness) or to show where it could be changed. The obvious conceptual models are usually time based (a sequence) or a relationship (spider) diagram. Both of which are great places to start so you can just understand all the parts and the lay of the land. But you can do better.
I wrote some quick ideas to improve conceptual models on the whiteboard.
Also for the first time I hijacked the class slides and added in a few of my own from the Tim Gunn essay I did years ago.
Thanks for sharing this! I hadn't read your Tim Gunn essay before and I'm so glad you mentioned it.