“Design for the individuals, the society and the planet”: a conversation with Lou Downe

Lou Downe, world leader in service design, met with our Global Lead of Public Digital Transformation, José Subero, to reflect on the role of design in public administrations. During the meeting, they explored topics such as planet-centred design and the main challenges faced by designers in this sector. 

Lou Downe is author of Good Services, the bestselling book on how to design services that work and the founding director of the School of Good Services, an organisation that helps people to build the skills they need to design and scale great services. 

They are the former Director of Design for the UK Government where they founded the discipline of service design, growing a 2000 strong team of designers into one of the largest, and most influential design teams in the UK – winning a Designs of the Year award and a D&AD lifetime achievement award. 

Mónica Giménez: Tell us about your background, your career and about yourself.  

Lou Downe: I think my background is quite typical of a lot of people who end up in service design. There isn’t one path into service design, so originally I studied Art at university and then I went to work for the Tate Gallery as a writer and, then, a producer. And I had a moment when I was installing audio guides into the museum that was for use on people’s mobile phones. And there was a person putting a sign up in the gallery that said, “please don’t use your mobile phone”. 

And at that moment, I thought, “oh, it’s probably important that people design the entire experience of going to the gallery, including the audio tours and the signage and the ticketing”. So that’s what led me to service design.  

I worked in agencies mostly, a lot of corporate work, before joining government as well. Where I started, which was the first service designer, to where I ended up, which was a director of service design and standards. This means looking after the part of the UK government that sets the standards for public services and make sure that all of the bits of government that need to design better services can have the materials that they need in order to be able to do that. Things like design patterns and training and skills and community development, and everything in between. 

After doing that, I wrote a book called Good Services about the things that any service needs to do to work for its users. That was written partly out of frustration because I had had that conversation many, many times with so many people, on repeat. So I thought, “well, if I write it down, then at least people can read it without having to have me explain it to them”. 

Then, four years later, I’m running the School of Good Services, and we provide training and coaching and upskilling to all sorts of different organizations on how to design and deliver better services for their users.

Mónica Giménez: Now you’ve released a new book, Bad Services. It’s interesting that you’ve chosen the opposite title from your previous book. Why this change? 

Lou Downe: I think the first thing that I should say about bad services is that it’s not about just looking at bad services. I think probably a lot of service designers can learn a huge amount by looking at services that go wrong. There’s enough of that, actually, in Good Services. 

So Good Services, although it’s very positive, has a lot of examples of bad services and what not to do in it. Ironically, Bad Services is a lot more positive. And, actually, it’s about how we build organizations that can design and deliver better services and why we get ourselves in the situation, so often, where we aren’t able to do that and where we perpetually keep building and delivering bad services. 

So that’s why it’s called Bad Services. It’s really about why we end up in the situation where we’re delivering bad services and what we can do about it. I’m writing that because I realized, after delivering hundreds, probably thousands of hours of training to many, many people, the thing that they’re really struggling with is how to negotiate and embed the things that we’re talking about in Good Services within their organization.  

So, how do they help their organization to see and understand their users? How do they help their organization to become less risk averse? How do they help the structure of their organization support services that they’re trying to design and deliver? 

Often what we end up doing is designing lots of really great ideas and those ideas don’t get delivered. So this is a book about how we get the ideas that are coming up in Good Services to be delivered.  

Mónica Giménez: Do you think that the situation of the public sector has changed significantly since the release of your first book?  

Lou Downe: Yeah, I mean, it’s been four years, so things change a lot. Aside from the political changes, which have definitely happened in the UK, we have a new government now. And, also, the political changes that have happened worldwide. There’s been a sort of global shift to more conservative policies in general, I would say. That has definitely put pressure on public services being egalitarian and open and user focused because, the more right wing a government is, the less likely it is going to be spending a huge amount of effort thinking about things like public welfare and thinking about the most vulnerable in society. 

You can read my politics in that statement [laughs], but that’s certainly how it appears to me, in my experience. So, there’s the political side of it. The other side of it is just the long tail of digitization of government services has really progressed. That will always be there, there will always be PDFs, there will always be phone lines, there will always be face to face only services or postal only services, but I think those are getting fewer and fewer. And, with that, I think there’s a bit of a change in people’s perspectives from 10 years ago. In that time, if we did a digital service, we could really pat ourselves on the back. Now it’s very much, “if we don’t do this, we are really, really in trouble”. 

And I think that message has shifted quite a lot. But, at the same time, budgets have got tighter with a lot of organizations. And so, they’re having to work in the most complicated services, that they left till last, with the fewest people with the smallest amount of budget. 

I think a lot of that energy around designing things that work for users, about doing them in agile, open, iterative way, is still there, but it’s more complex. And maybe it’s harder to hear some of those messages. So, I think we are starting to see a little bit of a diffraction in the quality of some digital services because of that, because movement can only stay clear for so long. So I think there’s a little bit of a resurgence that needs to happen around shifting the message from being about digital services, and “isn’t it great that we have them on the internet”, to “how do we actually go beyond just digitizing what we have already” and making those things work for people. And agnostic of structures and using the true functionality of digital technology and overcoming all of those organizational silos and barriers that we had before, when we were taking something and just putting it on the internet.  

So, it’s a mixed picture. There’s some really great things to be thankful for and to be optimistic about, and there’s some things that have made life more difficult. And it’s important to acknowledge that doing this type of work isn’t easy, particularly now, for our own mental health.  

José Subero: As you have said, service design has changed over the past decade. Do you think we are evolving, that we are in a more mature phase of service design? Would you say that service design has “grown up”? 

Lou Downe: I think it’s interesting because I’m now so old that I’ve heard that a lot. I’ve heard that saying before, and it was about 10 years ago and they were like, “service design is definitely great” [laughs]. 

And I definitely am with you, but I think there’s something inherently optimistic and something inherently naive about service design. That’s actually really, really important to keep. And it’s that idealism and that belief that it is, even though very, very difficult to do, really important to bring together all of the different parts of a service as one experience for a user. 

I feel slightly ambivalent about that idea of growing away from that aspect of service design, that idealism and that optimism, because I think that’s so important. I also see that still, in the industry, and I see it in people who have been there for 20 years, and I see it in people who are just coming into the industry, which is great. 

I think the growing up bit of it though is actually acknowledging that this is difficult. I think that’s what I’ve certainly started to see. And books like Bad Services, but also books like The Service Organization by Kate Tarling, which is fantastic, are really acknowledging what are the materials of the organization that we have to design with, rather than going, “we want the service to be like this, isn’t it fantastic?”. And then, “oh no, a silo”, “oh no, a difficult stakeholder”. Like, actually acknowledging that that is just the reality of delivering a service. And this is part of our work. And training people in that, and learning how to do it is also really, really important.  

So yeah, I’m with you, José. I do think there has been some growing up, but I also don’t want it to grow up completely. I don’t want it to become a cynical, “everything is complicated” kind of profession that it could be, I think it needs to remain optimistic.  

There’s something inherently optimistic and something inherently naive about service design. That’s actually really, really important to keep.

José Subero: Maybe we are still teenagers [laughs].  

When working with governments, I find that they are slowly realizing that they must change some services in order to deliver good services to their people, even though silos and obstacles keep on being a struggle. And we, as a design team, need to focus on what we can do and what really matters.   

Have you found some of these struggles in certain areas or services?  

Lou Downe: I think so. I think what’s really fascinating is, like you, I’m starting to see service designers popping up in places that I didn’t expect them to be, which is really great. And there are often places where they can’t talk about their work. 

So, you know, I’m starting to see service designers embedded in prisons, and in the healthcare system, and calculating climate impact and other things like that. That’s really, really great to see. Because it used to be, I mean, I’m talking about back in the first days of service design to 2008, it was only the big, rich corporate clients that could afford it, and the local authorities and charities. 

So it was like these two kind of ends of the spectrum. You had massive corporates who would chuck loads of money and loads of consultants in improving mobile phone bills. A service which, by the way, is still not great in a lot of places. 

And then you have the charities and the local authorities trying to do really great stuff on a tiny little shoestring. I think what’s really interesting is that middle space. Of start-ups, small organizations, medium-sized businesses, family businesses, areas where actually you would think talking about user needs would be challenging and difficult. 

So, in the courts and prisons system, they really started to move forward and develop its own culture around what service design looks like in those contexts, which I think is really fantastic.  

Mónica Giménez: I know you’ve talked a little bit about this already, but what do you think are the main goals that service design has achieved in these years? And what do you think it’s coming in the future? Or, furthermore, what would you want in the future? 

Lou Downe: I don’t think I can speak for the achievements of all of service design because I don’t know what they all are and I think, if I were to list all of the achievements of service design, it would be very much from the perspective that I’m coming at it from. And I would naturally overlook all of the fantastic stuff that’s happening in other countries and in other areas and other communities. So I wouldn’t  want to summarize that, but I think, if I were to sort of collectively give us all a pat on the back I would probably say the thing that we’ve really achieved is visibility and, in a lot of places, credibility as well. 

 And that has been a really hard one. You know, going back to that, what I was saying about the optimism and the idealism, it’s hard to maintain that when 50% of our job is just explaining why we’re in the room in the first place. But we need to talk about users. Bringing these things together is really expensive and it’s going to take a really long time, but it’s important. And that maintained energy that we put to that work, as a global community, is really, really important.  

Another thing that I would say, as well, is the generosity of the community. In sharing toolkits and sharing user research and talking to each other on social platforms about bettering the community, bettering our work, making it more inclusive. 

There was definitely a time where service design, like most industries, was not the most inclusive of industries, and we did make mistakes because of that. And I think there’s been some really fantastic efforts to move that forward. There have been some humble and brilliant responses from people who are senior in the community that knew that changes were needed. That has been really fantastic to watch, actually. Many people who were there at the very beginning of service design, which I missed [laughs], would acknowledge that they probably never quite thought that it would end up where it has. It was very much an idea of “wouldn’t it be great if we design services as things”. And I think they would be very proud of where it has ended up.  

But, like I said, I wouldn’t want to speak for everyone’s experience, because the fantastic thing about service design now is that it is so varied and it happens everywhere and it’s so diverse and everyone has their own amazing achievements to talk about. 

It’s hard to maintain the optimism when 50% of our job is just explaining why we’re in the room in the first place. But we need to talk about users. Bringing these things together is really expensive and it’s going to take a really long time, but it’s important.

Mónica Giménez: You are one of the most visible referents in service design. How do you feel about your position in the community? Do you feel that you influence people in the sector?  

Lou Downe: Recently, someone told me that they were talking to an AI tool about service design and that it used my voice. Which I was really creeped out by [laughs]. I think there’s some influence that I’m having that I’m not aware of, potentially. 

I think everyone feels ambivalent about having influence on something. And, if you don’t, then possibly you need to kind of check your privilege [laughs]. But I do feel the weight of that responsibility a little bit. I am starting to see it being important to use my voice to make service design more realistic and more inclusive. 

Going back to what I was saying about what the industry has done to change, one thing that I’m seeing is still really important to talk about is acknowledging how difficult this profession is within the context of the organizations that we’re in. Often we’re the only person doing that job. We’re the person who’s bringing all of this stuff together. We’re advocating for users. We’re often doing it in contexts where that user is very vulnerable. They can’t speak for themselves within the organization. And that puts a huge amount of pressure on service designers.  

And so, that’s what we’ve really tried to do with the School [of Good Services], is to create learning materials and training and coaching and support in the types of skills that people need in those contexts to be able to do that work. Things like writing business cases for service design or leading stakeholders or talking about sustainability or prototyping, all while trying to hold up that community and support it. Also offering free bursary places and trying to address the imbalance that there often is in professional networks towards people who have the privilege to be able to do what is essentially quite a professionally risky job sometimes.  

You know, we’re often having to point out that something’s wrong at the same time as being told that we shouldn’t be causing too many problems. And that can feel like a very difficult place to be if you don’t have the confidence and privilege to be able to make your voice heard in those contexts. So our role is supporting people and supporting the industry to be a more diverse and inclusive place. 

Mónica Giménez: What do you think are the main changes that public governments must face to improve public services right now? 

Lou Downe: Let me give you my list [laughs]. I think that the things that are needed are pretty straightforward, but they’re actually quite difficult to do. The first one is that we need to get rid of the assumption that leadership means being detached from the detail of the delivery of your ideas. I think that is the most fundamental damaging thing to service delivery. We need to get rid of this idea that the 80s and 90s taught us. Because that is the thing that’s causing the separation between the decision-making part of organizations and the delivery part of the organizations. 

And that mistranslation that happens between there, where the delivery part of the organization will see the challenges that users are facing and see how that service needs to work, but they’re facing a very top down organization that isn’t listening to them. Getting rid of that assumption that separation between ideas and delivery of ideas is a good thing, it just needs to go.  

And that’s not just in government, that’s in the private sector as well, it is equally guilty of doing that. I think there needs to be a real reconnection with who our users actually are and what they need. And on a regular basis, not just as one-off user research that we do around a particular change to our project, but actually as an empathy building exercise for the organization to be able to make better decisions and more informed decisions based on what people need. 

You know, how are our finance decisions affected by users? How are our operational decisions affected by users? All of those things should be present, but they’re not at the moment.  

There needs to be a real reconnection with who our users actually are and what they need. And on a regular basis, not just as one–off user research that we do around a particular change to our project, but actually as an empathy building exercise for the organization to be able to make better decisions and more informed decisions based on what people need. 

The third thing I would say is, and I think this is true of a lot of organizations, deescalating our risk aversion. The global financial and political situation has forced a lot of organizations to be very conservative in their approach to everything. T hey’re worried about making mistakes. They’re worried about spending money. They’re being very, very cautious, but that caution is leading us into a position where we are not taking the types of small risks that will alleviate the big risk of our service failing in the future. So we’re not experimenting. So we’re not making better services. So we’re not solving the problems that we need to. It’s a false economy.  

So I think taking an organizational breath and actually saying, “let’s really look at these risks” and, going back to what you were saying, José, about growing up, service design actually acknowledging there are risks to our work and talking about what they are and seeing them in a bigger context, I think that’s really important.  

I’ll add one more. Talking about technical literacy in our organization is really important, with a “no judgment”, safe space approach to help everyone in the organization understand really basic and fundamental concepts like, “how does data work? Why is it important? How does it underpin our services?”, those sorts of things. Because, without having those conversations, we are starting to make mistakes with the technology choices that we’re making. Like really long contracts that we can’t get out of, or thinking an off the shelf AI engine will solve everything, but we need to stop making those mistakes so that we can have more money to experiment and we can actually make better services. 

So I think technical literacy for everyone is essential in the organization so that we can feel comfortable talking about the technology and the materials that our services are made of, because what something’s made of and how it works are fundamentally linked. We know that as people who make services, but that isn’t often clear to the wider organization. 

And I think just understanding the material of the internet and of digital technology is really important to make those decisions. This is the sort of stuff that I’m writing about in Bad Services. So hopefully that will all become clear.  

Technical literacy for everyone is essential in the organization so that we can feel comfortable talking about the technology and the materials that our services are made of, because what something’s made of and how it works are fundamentally linked.

José Subero: And how do you generate this “design mood” in an organization? 

Lou Downe: I don’t think there’s one way of doing that. It is about people, at every level of the organization, feeling like they have the ability to talk about and deliver input into the design process. 

And that doesn’t mean designing a service by committee, but it means that it’s everyone’s responsibility to make sure that that service works so that the person who’s making the finance and HR decisions knows what impact those decisions will have on the team who’s delivering a service. And it isn’t something that’s really far off for them. I think it is about a mood and an atmosphere in which everyone feels like they are part of one thing. They’re part of delivering a thing. And often that comes down to things like building communities of practice, helping people to share skills, doing show-and-tell so that everyone knows what the service is and what’s changing about it, celebrating success as well. 

I think we overlook that. We spend so much time talking about what we can improve about a service and we forget to celebrate when we’ve actually done something really great. That’s so important for building that momentum and that feeling that everyone wants to be part of that.  

With Gov.uk, it was incredible. The transition that people had and how they felt about design as soon as we won a Design of the Year award. We were in the UK Design Museum! So, it’s about celebrating design and about celebrating that as an achievement and helping people to realize what impact they’ve had in that. And making it fun, making it something that people want to be part of. A huge part of what we did at the Government Digital Service and the design team was just communications, you know, stickers, posters, talking about our work, blogging videos… Making it seem like something that people wanted to stick on their laptop. They wanted to be part of, and that was a huge part of what we did as well. I think that’s not to be overlooked.  

Mónica Giménez: Can you share with us some good practices related with public services? The places you draw inspiration from, your favorite designers… 

Lou Downe: I spend so much of my time talking about things that are bad, it’s hard to think about things that are good [laughs]. It‘s particularly difficult with good practices because a lot of the clients that I work with are doing that stuff confidentially and they’re not talking about it. So I feel like I can’t really necessarily name names and saying this organization is doing this particular thing. Cause that’s their story. 

One thing that is happening that’s really brilliant at the moment, and I mentioned it earlier on is that service design is becoming more embedded in the justice system. But what I’m seeing certainly here in the UK is that that’s being done in a very pragmatic and interesting and different way. So, rather than having a kind of detached central service design team who occasionally turn up in the context of delivery, I’m starting to see service designers embedded in those organizations at the front line of service delivery. And they are tasked with prototyping services live in real time at the point of delivery. That’s a really important thing to see because, I think, part of what service design has been a little bit guilty of is being too strategic and not enough involved in the making and the doing of the doing. And that’s often led to. Some of our ideas just not being practical or deliverable.  

There’s other examples I can think of in the healthcare system as well. And this is happening globally. But, you know, seeing again, service designers embedded into hospitals and into frontline care, and they’re doing very similar things of taking those services and starting to work on them in real time. 

And there are some great examples as well of services that are thinking beyond just inclusion to actually think about co-design with the communities that they are delivering to. There’s some wonderful work happening particularly in Australia, actually co-designing with indigenous communities to be able to deliver better services for those communities. 

There’s some really great examples of being embedded in delivery, being much closer to the practicalities of the service itself but also being much more inclusive than just doing extractive user research. Actually supporting and raising up the voices of the communities that we’re designing the services with. So, a little bit less of “service designer is the seagull a thousand miles above strategically” and a bit more of being embedded in the actual work. 

José Subero: We want to talk about some trends in service design, as well. You have talked about inclusive design, but I wanted to also talk about the planet-centric design. I have seen the primary works of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs of the UK government, I feel that they are really interesting and really important. But the question is if we are ready for planet-centric design or not.  

Lou Downe: No, we’re not ready, but we have to be [laughs].  

With every important social movement, the vast majority of the people who are affected by that thing will not be ready to make those changes, but it’s our job to help. And that’s why, earlier this year, we launched a course focusing on sustainable services. 

The reason why we talked about sustainability was because we need to be pragmatic and to talk about that middle space, because obviously sustainability at the moment is not sustainable. We can’t carry on with the current consumption. It’s about reduction of our impact on the planet rather than sustainability. 

But I think there’s a real missing gap in helping organizations to, firstly, understand why they need to care beyond just doing the right thing. Because it will impact them. We’re starting to see physical businesses going out of business because of huge amounts of flooding in the UK, and that is happening in a much grander scale everywhere. We’re starting to see huge global impacts of our work. 

But it’s also important from the perspective of service design and, going back to that question of ethics and doing the right thing, we shouldn’t be in a situation where we are recommending changes to a service that don’t consider our impact on the planet.  

It’s just adding another layer. We think about individuals. That’s great. We need to think about society. Also great. We need to think about our organizations. Yes. But we also need to think about the planet that all of those things exist on as well. And yeah, that is a huge, huge area. The more people that can be talking about it, the better. 

We need to be quite careful with things like this, that we don’t heap coals in progress and say, “well, that’s not doing that thing properly”. And this is how we should all be doing planet-centric design.  

It’s just important that we talk about it. It’s just important that we get comfortable with that idea. And whatever an organization does at this stage to improve its impact on the planet is better than nothing, in my books. So, that’s a real area that we’re starting to focus on: actually helping organizations to start to understand their impact on the planet and to be able to make small, pragmatic changes right now. 

I really do hope that we spend more time talking about it and that it doesn’t become just a temporary conversation that fizzles out because it’s hard to do. It’s going to be hard, but it’s vital that we do it.   

Sustainability at the moment is not sustainable. It’s about reduction of our impact on the planet rather than sustainability. 

Mónica Giménez: Last question. What do you think about artificial intelligence and how can we improve public services with artificial intelligence? 

Lou Downe: It’s already here. People are already using it. And I think there are loads of opportunities to use artificial intelligence for service design, both in the design process, to speed up the bits that take us a long time, but there are also opportunities to provide better, more inclusive, more intelligent services as a result. I do genuinely believe that there are some benefits to it as a technology.  

Having said that, there are also some potential problems that it exacerbates and accelerates. And one of them is the lack of transparency that we have around decision making in our services. So, most services will make some sort of decision at some point, particularly public services that say whether you get this benefit or you don’t get this benefit, or you get to move into this house rather than in this house, or you’re going to prison for this reason. There are decisions that need to be made. 

And we’re really bad, generally speaking across the board, explaining why we’re making those decisions and being transparent about them to our users and giving them any kind of agency in that situation. And what I worry about, with any kind of technology that speeds up that decision making process and automates it and takes it further away from human beings, is that we have less visibility and less control of those decisions that we’re making.  

We’ve been seeing for years the algorithmic decision making: if it’s designed by a very narrow set of people, it will end up being biased towards that narrow set of people. So we see racist algorithms in the court system. We’ve seen algorithms with Facebook tagging and identifying human photographs of people of color as non human. We are already making those sorts of mistakes because of the biases of people who are making those algorithms and making those artificial intelligence entities. 

There’s more transparency that’s definitely needed around that before we start applying it wholesale to our services. And I think we should definitely learn the lesson that, just because something is new, does not mean that it is going to create a better world for us. 

And to go back to that question of climate impact, AI is having a massive impact on the climate. There’s a lot of data, it’s a lot of processing. I think we should really question that before we leap to saying, “this is the new thing and we should all do it”. 

It may not be the answer for everyone. And I think there’s definitely some more testing and more transparency about decision making, more transparency about the data that we’re holding, that’s needed, before many organizations make that leap into applying it in any way to their services. 

So that’s me being a cautious perspective on this perhaps, but I think it’s important.  

José Subero: That’s fine because AI is a compulsory question now, in 2024, so we have to build the foundations of what we are going to do with it.  

Lou Downe: I think that is exactly it. It’s about making sure that the foundations that we build that technology on are good and are working on our things that we understand. And, going back to that, that thing we were talking about around technical literacy in our organization, we need to work on that alongside bringing in these new technologies. Otherwise, we will end up making the same mistakes, but faster. 

Mónica Giménez: To finish the interview, do you have any wishes? 

Lou Downe: Oh, so many [laughs]. I would say I have a wish for anyone who’s listening or reading this to look after themselves because, as we’re told on airplanes, “attach your mask first before helping other people”, service design is often a profession where we spend 99% of our time thinking about other people. Spend a little time thinking about yourself and making sure that you’re okay doing this work because it is difficult.  

And the other thing I’d just say is that the book will be out at some point next year. And I hope that it will be helpful to the types of conversations that we’ve had already today.  

At hiberus we have a specialised area of expertise in Digital Experience Design, where we focus on the people who use public administration services. Our team will analyse your needs and will advise you on the steps to be taken to improve the experience of users and the efficiency of processes.