Tim Harris • Design Leadership
Creative strategist and strategic creative
Hello.
Hi, I’m Tim.
What is Design?
“Aesthetical planning,” wrote Bruno Munari in Design as Art. “A plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose,” Charles Eames famously said.
Design is the process of making specifications and conversations for building things – objects, products, environments – and non-things –services, brands, processes, experiences & systems.
What is Leadership?
“The ability to inspire and guide people toward a shared vision,” Peter Drucker taught. “Leadership is about coping with change,” opines John Kotter. “Somebody has to take responsibility for being a leader,” Toni Morrison reminds us.
Leadership is doing the right thing. Management is doing things right. A leader serves, guides, listens with compassion & empathy.
Being and doing
I'm a designer with 25 years experience in graphic arts & interactive technologies. I build and lead cross-disciplinary creative teams.
I like to know how things work so we can make them better.
As a service designer, I help make strategic and operational decisions to create and orchestrate physical/digital product/service systems.
I am an ethnographer and a holistic systems thinker with a healthy irreverence for the status quo and a deep respect for rigour & structure in art & science.
I've worked in a broad range of industries: printing, publishing, advertising, animation, entertainment, education, financial services, e-commerce, health, fashion, beauty, aviation and energy.
What I do, and why?
Research, concept, design, create...
experiences, products, services and systems that empower, engage, educate and entertain.
How do I do this?
Choose meaningful work...
with a higher purpose of positive global change and collaborate with passionate, talented creators.
Focus on storytelling...
the interplay of visual, verbal, sonic, physical and digital that inspires, motivates and enables behaviour change.
Apply human-centered design...
methods that connect people with themselves, each other, their environments and the planet.
Outputs to outcomes
As-is journey mapping
How and why are users doing things now?
A customer journey shows the path that a persona takes though a service system. It can show the emotional state and human need at each stage, touch point and context of their experience.
Digital touchpoints
Interfaces, context and seamlessness
Bring concepts to life through prioritised designs. Test and refine concepts, proofs, prototypes and pilots across the service system.
To-be service blueprinting
How users, customers, staff will do things better.
The service blueprint is a strategic and operational tool that enables an organization to orchestrate their service capabilities. It shows which interactions need to occur within and between systems.
Physical experiences
Way finding, signage and environments
Humans are embodied beings in space and time. Look, I won’t get too philosophical here, but the places people find themselves has a huge impact on how they behave and what they feel and think.
Prototypes, MVPs & Pilots
Start with Real Needs – Customer Experiences
Choosing which features and functions to start with requires careful consideration. We visualising complex systems and interconnections to decide.
It requires planning and orchestration to transform data into information, knowledge and wisdom. And then action. Learn by doing. Keep iterating.
Backstage operations
Signature moments
Services that people love are created by never letting customers see all the “behind-the-scenes” activity. When strategy, operations, partners, suppliers and other inputs are orchestrated and integrated effectively the customer experience can be relevant, meaningful, and seamless. This is called the Back Stage in service design.
What is Service Design?
Why it works
Service design is a multi-disciplinary practice that orchestrates the creation and delivery of experiences and systems across entire value chains to create end-to-end experiences.
Service design integrates behavioural sciences, systems thinking and human-centered design.
Service design has evolved from the “human factors”, “practical branding”, “user-centered” design and other participatory, empathy-led design traditions.
It is collaborative, holistic and evidence-based.
How it works
Plan & conduct immersive UX and Design Research
Synthesize evidence, articulate insights, identify opportunities
Design, build and test – prototypes, alphas and pilots
Launch products and services across physical/virtual, analog/digital, in-person/remote and other media.
Evidence → Insights → Prototypes
Immersive User Research
Ethnographies
Field Research
Behavioural Studies
Benchmarking Reports
Frame the problem by looking deeply into an end user’s context through immersive user and participatory design research.
Synthesis & Insights
Workshop design and facilitation
Personas
User Journey Maps
Service Blueprints
Roadmaps
Define important types of users. Describe their needs, goals, motivations and challenges. Personas enable us to keep the human needs in mind as we create services for them.
Prototypes & Pilots
Digital, physical, experiential and environmental
Rapid prototyping is an effective way to get feedback and insights into exactly how users behave. By iterating
Bring concepts to life through prioritised designs. Test and refine concepts, proofs, prototypes and pilots across the service system.
