I’ve been teaching Service Design solo for the last eight weeks or so and after the first two weeks of jitters, I think it’s going well.
Service Design, like most of my classes, is a class I inherited. It’s one of the core design classes and is extremely popular and well-regarded. I’ve had a lot of students tell me it was their favorite class they took at CMU (both before and while I’ve been teaching it). The material and assignments have been honed over many years. So my job is basically not to fuck it up.
But it’s also now my class and in theory, I could throw everything out and teach it however I like, as long as what I’m teaching meets the learning objectives for the class (which was possibly set by the curriculum committee years ago—or possibly not, who knows, but if I wanted to change them I would certainly have to consult the committee). There are a lot of reasons not to do that, mostly because it’s a lot of work to create a class and, like I said, the existing class works really well and students learn a lot and enjoy it.
Side note: One reason the students like the class so much and get so much out of it is the second half of the class is designing a service design innovation for a local, real client. Last semester it was for Penn Avenue Fish Company, a fish market and restaurant in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. This summer it is Alliance Therapy Center, a mental health provider and therapist “incubator.” There is really nothing that can replicate the conditions of designing for an actual business with actual constraints and clients who have actual opinions and values. Faculty can pretend to be clients but it’s just not the same. Our capstone projects are similar, just longer (one or two semesters vs. the seven weeks we have in Service Design) and usually with larger clients (NASA, Bloomberg, Meta, etc.) although we have had Dick’s Sporting Goods and Home Depot as clients in the past. I daresay Service Design can be more challenging than capstone because the clients usually have far more limited resources, so it forces students to do more with less. But I digress.
One thing I did want to change about Service Design was the teaching of personas. The students audibly groaned when we taught it in Spring. For some of them, this was their third time learning about them. Worse, the trend in the industry is away from personas. “Personas are cringe” a designer bluntly told me. So I knew that I wanted to swap that module out. So then it was what to replace it with. A number of people suggested Jobs To Be Done, and since I had used JTBD when I was at Twitter and was familiar with it, I took personas out and put JTBD into the syllabus.
What that means in practice is putting new slides together about the topic, creating discussion questions, removing personas from any assignments, and picking new readings. For those, I chose “Know Your Customer’s Jobs to Be Done” and Chapter 1 of Competing Against Luck.
Side note #2: I had a really cool experience with the CMU library getting that chapter. We have the book in our library, but all I needed was that first chapter. All I had to do is ask for it to be scanned and made into a PDF (legally ok for education purposes because it’s less than 10% of the book) and like magic (thanks presumably to some poor student on work-study) it appeared in my inbox a few hours later. I sometimes forget the enormous power and resources that a university has. So many assets (not to mention so many brilliant people) in so many areas you don’t even think about. But again, I digress.
The first chapter of Competing Against Luck tells a story about researchers wondering why customers at a fast food chain were buying milkshakes early in the morning. So of course I had to bring milkshakes from McDonald’s to class.
As it turns out, getting 20 milkshakes from a fast-food restaurant a few miles away from my classroom was not easy. It took some planning. I got up early, put a cooler in my car, then drove to McDonald’s in East Liberty. I will never forget the look on the cashier’s face when I ordered 20 milkshakes to go. But these folks were pros and 15 minutes later I had a box o’ milkshakes.
McDonald’s milkshakes do not have the sealed tops of yore. No, these modern tops have a large hole in the top. This does not encourage travel. I slopped one all over the trunk of my car putting them into the cooler, and one more tipped over in the cooler as I wheeled it from the parking lot up a steep hill to the classroom, where we all enjoyed having one while discussing the JTBD readings. The students didn’t know it was happening, although I did tease that today was going to be “Milkshake Day.”
I’d love to do this again for my fall class, but it has 4x the amount of students and I have no idea how I’d get 60+ milkshakes to campus. Especially before that class start time: 8am. A problem for Fall Dan to solve.
For now, I’m just glad my students had a fun, memorable moment. And that’s good service design.