www.ijdesign.org

International Journal of Design Vol.5 No.2 2011

S. Clatworthy

Assisting Embodied Communication and

Cognition

One of the ﬁndings from observing card-use in teams is that the

cards afford embodied interactions at the individual and group

level and thus support the cognitive and social processes involved

when carrying out tasks within teams. This was an unexpected

result, since the cards were developed primarily as a visual

checklist of touch-point examples. It became very clear that the

way the participants used the cards showed a clear interaction

between mind and body. The following modes of use clearly

demonstrate how the physical form of the cards, together with

physical position and movement, assist the workshop process.

Chunking - Grouping Cards Together to Save Short

Term Memory

This is perhaps an expected pattern of use - participants in the

workshops grouped the cards in their hands as a type of short-

term memory storage while they focused on other cards. There

was a continual negotiation between potential new cards and the

group in hand that occurred physically. The participants would

pick up a card and hold it up to the group in hand to question its

relevance to the group. This seems to use a combination of visual

cues, position cues and movement cues to identify relevance. It

became obvious that the action of moving the new card toward the

group assisted the cognitive process of grouping.

Negotiating Alone / Evaluating Through Position or

Movement

Participants would hold a card (or sometimes more than one) and,

whilst still holding it, move it physically around the table to see

if it ﬁt with other cards. This is a form of negotiation through

physical movement and position in which the physical movement

becomes a strong support for cognitive processes.

Negotiating or Explaining Within A Team Through

Movement or Position

This is a behaviour in which a card (or sometimes cards) are held

in the hand and moved to assist a verbal argument or explanation

within a team. This mode of use is similar in both cases, although

the former is a form of questioning within a team (“what if this

was the main touch-point at this stage”) while the latter is used as

explanation (“you can see that this touch-point doesn’t ﬁt here”).

The physical movement seems to be slightly different between the

two. One being a physical expression of questioning by the way

the card is moved and the timing of the movement expressing

uncertainty. This can be compared to more deﬁnite movement and

different timing that gesturally expresses fact.

These modes of use of the cards suggest that the cards

themselves, together with their content actively assist the

processes of mapping, grouping and social negotiation through

their form and use. This assistance is not afforded by lists or

through a digital sorting mechanism.

Discussion

The work presented here is one of the few research investigations

covering touch-points and service design. Although its focus

is upon a toolkit for innovation through touch-points, it also is

one of the few documented studies of service design at the fuzzy

front end of service innovation. As such, it offers insights and

raises points for discussion at multiple levels. These range from

discussion of the touch-point cards themselves, methods in service

design, and reﬂections upon the nature of service design itself.

This section therefore discusses both the speciﬁc and the general,

and is divided into sections of broadening relevance, starting with

the cards themselves.

The Card-based Tools

The touch-point cards and related tools were shown to have a

positive effect upon the three main requirements that the project

had identiﬁed from both research and practice - cross-functional

team building, analysis and mapping, and idea generation.

One issue raised by workshop participants is the danger that

they can in some way constrain thinking within the content shown

on them. Does the tool direct innovation towards incremental

innovation rather than encouraging transformational innovation?

A set of cards showing existing touch-points might be considered

to encourage an inductive approach to innovation, and therefore

a focus upon

what is

. However, our ﬁndings show that this is not

the case. At the early stages of a project, the goal is divergence,

i.e. to generate a large number of ideas covering a broad area. We

found that the cards encourage an abductive approach where the

goal is to consider

what can be

, rather than just what is (Margolin

& Buchannan, 1995).

Evaluation of the cards by participants

shows a high score for number of ideas, idea relevance and idea

novelty. We conclude, therefore, that transformational innovation

using touch-points does not mean the invention of a touch-point.

Transformational innovations can as much be the removal of

an existing touch-point, the reordering of touch-points within

a customer journey, or the addition of a new (to the service)

touch-point.

Internet trading of stocks and shares is an example

of this, in which an existing touch-point has been utilised in a

new context, rather than the invention of a new touch-point.

This

conclusion has implications for service innovation with touch-

points, since the goal is not necessarily to invent touch-points,

rather to introduce new (to the service) touch-points, a reordering

of touch-points or harmonisation of touch-points. As such, the

ﬁndings here support the term “orchestration” used by Shostack

(1984).

Additionally, we noticed that design students particularly

enjoyed framing non-analytical use of the cards, such as “forced

association” or “can I use it here” in which random combinations

of cards are used to generate ideas. The open nature of this form

of use was considered fun, exciting and liberating, even though

many of the ideas generated were not usable in a commercial

context. This enthusiasm was not shared by participants with

business or marketing backgrounds. They found the open

approaches offered by these to be too open, and considered

them inefﬁcient since they produced a relatively large number