#48 - Designing for trust with Sarah Drummond

Welcome back to the service design podcast. My name is Lauren Soherz and I'm here on the page. And today we are honored to welcome a very special guest in our studio. She's a service design leader turned filmmaker with an amazing track record of impactful projects. When I was still in high school in 2009, she co-founded the award-winning service in studio Snook and let's the company for over 12 years. And currently she's running the School of Good Services as a director. And yeah, it's clear she likes to found things because she is also behind the initiatives of my police, Cycle Heck, Dearest Scotland, Aloha Pride, the Madder and Mental Health Design Pattern Library. All initiatives that do good things from challenging the relation between state and citizen, for example, to also providing platform for young people to learn new skills. And apparently besides her fantastic career as a designer, she also spent some some elusive tunes under the mysterious but disclosing name DJ Drummond Bass. Welcome to have you in our studio Sarah Drummond. Thanks for having me. I always feel awkward after that, but that's great. And now I'm guilty of spinning very good jeans. Perfect. Nice to set the scene this way. Yeah, it's so nice to have you here. Physically in our studio in Gens. Is this the first time you are in Gens or? Yeah, first time. I mean, I've been to Brussels a couple of times for work, but this is like a much smaller, maybe you might not appreciate this, but like a much more relaxed Brussels or Amsterdam. Yeah. It's very, very nice. Yeah, of course. And yeah, how are you doing? I'm very well. Yeah, I'm really, really well. I had lovely coffees this morning, went for a little walk around the area. So yeah, I'm feeling very relaxed actually, which is not usual for me. Sounds like a perfect start of the day actually. We're welcoming you here in our studio in Gens. Because tonight you are giving a talk at one of our events, Arena, an event's night moves organizers, and the theme of our event is designing for trust. So for listeners who can't attend tonight or haven't even heard about it. Could you perhaps explain a little bit what your talk will be about later tonight? Yeah, definitely. So I'm talking about trust. And my talk tonight is actually a play on words. It's called Trust Falls, catching users when they fall. It's called Trust Falls is this idea that you ask someone to fall back into your arms and you have to have trust that that person will catch you. And the reason I'm sort of calling it that because I often think about trust as predictability and expecting something is going to happen. So I'm talking about that, but more specifically around how we actually look after users or customers in the services that we offer to them and how we keep them safe users, you know, they want to have that predictability that they'll be looked after by you if they're investing, you know, their effort, the belief system or their money into you. So I'm talking quite a bit actually about safety by design, how platforms can kind of increase their trust and safety initiatives, and really in the face of online harms, increasing the people that are facing. So you've asked me to do a 20-minute talk, which I did say to the organizers. It's immensely hard to talk about this topic in such a short period. But yeah, we're going to try and explore trust and safety. Quite a few topics actually that we'll be covering tonight. In 20 minutes, we have a bit more time today. Yeah. So maybe we can dive into one of these topics a bit more. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, I think we have a lot of topics and questions aligned. But I was also wondering designing for trust is such a, I think, relevant topic right now, especially in the world with everything that's going on. But also, it's getting more and more of an issue sometimes as well for designers to really establish trust with those organizations, to be trustworthy, and for users to trust the services that they use. But where does your passion interest for this topic come from? Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I mean, designers, right? I think designers are interested in everything. So that's my first answer. I just have a general interest in everything in the world and how it works. I think technology for me, I'm a bit of a technologist. I think it's really important as a designer to understand and look at emerging technology and what it's capable of potentially doing because our role as designers is to take that technology and apply it in the real world to meet needs of some kind or to create some kind of intervention. So I'm super interested in technologies are kind of starting point. Then I'm interested in the ethics around that technology because design isn't just about doing UX, you know, user interaction design. It's really actually about what you're actually putting out there in the world and the impact it's going to have. So I start kind of first with technology. I'm just infused about. But then I think growing up, my brother had these books about like hideous crimes. So I read a lot of quite scary books about serial killers and people doing bad stuff. So I've had this kind of obsession with criminology. I guess disasterology as well, like things going wrong. I was a massive George Romero zombie film fan growing up. So I always was like, what happens if zombies invade the world? What will we do? How do we plan for it? So I guess like disaster and bad things happening is kind of in my plot. Not that I'm doing the bad things, by the way, that I'm more interested. And then I read this book quite a few years ago. They really solidified my interest and where I am now actually working on some of the stuff, which is a book by Mark Goodman. And it was called Future Crimes inside the digital underground in the battle for our connected world. I read it on a beach, which I wouldn't really recommend. It's not that relaxing. And it sort of blew my mind about where we are on the cusp of humans doing bad things but at scale. And the impact it could actually have on full global systems, like power stations, cutting out power for people through cyber attacks and stuff like this. As we start to take technology and put it in our body, what does that mean if you can take control of someone's arms and their mind? So all of those things kind of coalescing. And it had been really lucky when I was at SNCC to work on a few projects that kind of cross over thematically into this space. We did work with comic relief on, it was called tech versus abuse. It was looking at perpetrators use of technology when they're kind of committing domestic violence against people. So that was kind of hugely fascinating if it felt very passionate about helping them look at what we can do in that space. I've worked on verification systems for the government, so how you do digital identity to kind of reduce online scams. And I worked with neighborhood watch, which is a kind of UK charity where community groups come together and form their own sort of little community group to try and come back crime in their area. And we did work with older people who had been victims of online fraud, which was, I mean, I just like feel like I cried the whole time doing watching our team doing the research. So I just, all of that together for me is just fascinating really. So it kind of emerged from working with SNCC and government public services, but then also noticing how actually private companies have huge impact on this online space, this not so safe space today because everything is connected as well. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you look at in the UK anyway, the you can see statistics come out every year. So like an online internet report looks at people's internet usage and their feelings about the internet and last year, I think that they said that the average user spends between this quite a wide stat between six minimum and 22 hours a day on the internet. So this is kind of quite wide and at a large amount of time on the internet and that is interfacing with every type of service provider, you know, we live our life through services online now, whether you're watching television, whether you're paying for something, whether you're interacting with the state to do something to meet a law, we are living our lives were intimately connected with technology. And I think if you're not interested in that, then how can you be designing any of these services for that? I think we really need to be interested in that as designers. Yeah, of course, and I was just thinking about something that happened recently, just as well as I know that we actually live in Antwerp and the or yeah, the government was hacked around Christmas for I think a month or two. And there was really this difficulty, everything was just blank and there was this difficulty of changing, for example, your driver's license even or your identity card was this white very impactful hack. I just thought about it now, but it's super relevant for the topic of today as well. Basically, every service, every public service was down, you couldn't even lend a book, you couldn't go to the swimming pool or the payment system was even connected was also down. But most importantly were citizens and we don't even know what data they actually hacked or still it's not disclosed. So we don't even know how much. Yeah, the impact of the attack, they're very vague about it as well, because it's also political challenge, I think, but yeah, it's crazy that it happened and just hearing you talk about it, I was also wondering because I think designing for trust has a lot of aspects and topics and maybe things that we have to watch out for, but can you maybe elaborate a little bit on what does it mean to design for trust or what does it mean to establish trust as a designer? You know, what are some things that could be of views there? Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, I also had this in where I live, like, it was one of the biggest little authority cyber hacks that had ever been. And I think that reduced people's trust in the council, we call it a council there. So, I mean, trust is like, it's again, like doing this talk tonight in 20 minutes, it's such an ambiguous term and so many scholars before me will have ideas about what trust actually means. I really like this little framework by Rachel Botsman, she has this little framework called trust framework and she talks about reputation. So, that's what people say and there's a kind of element of trust around that and then trust itself, you kind of believe so what people believe. And then trustworthiness, which is behavior and it kind of affects how users behave. And I kind of think about that quite a lot in tandem with this idea about trust as predictability. There was this quite a lot of studies done. This is a bit of a tangent, but come with me on a story about spiders. There's been studies done about why people were scared of spiders. I'm probably on the edge of being a racquetal bit, like I really hate them. I had an experience when I was younger, one popped up on my bed and I just freaked out. And I've always wondered, like, what is it about spiders that makes me so scared? So, I did a bit of digging and research and it's the unpredictable movement that actually scares people, that they can't foresee what's going to happen. So, I've always thought about when I was putting this talk together and being here today about this idea that as customers, as users, we like things to be predictable. We don't like when things are erratic or they change from what we expect to happen. So, I kind of think about trust in sort of like five things. One is that my investment that I give to you, and again, whether that is money, my time, my belief system, will give me the value or outcome that I expect. So, it's predictable. I expect you to do something for me if I give you something. And the second kind of that works with that is that things will work in a way that I'm really familiar with as well. So, really that's, if you take Lou Down's book, Good Services, and what we do at the School of Good Services, that is the thing that we train. Like, design good services for people are familiar and they understand how they're going to work, and they'll get the thing that they expect. And then there's these kind of other three layers that I think are a little separate to that. So, the third thing is really that the brand that I believe, or what I believe to be the brand, and brand comes with ethos and values, is that it will not stray from that thing that I believe it to do. So, take Twitter, for example, and the great, we call it the Great Twitter Exodus, when everyone left Twitter, when Elon Musk, not everyone, but a huge proportion of people left Twitter, and went on to Mastodin or other social media accounts. They went because Elon Musk's quite out there, values and ethics. Quite unpredictable as well. Well, this is really interesting, right? So, Bloomberg and I feel they're kind of like American newspapers, when they were reporting on Elon Musk taking over, they used the words erratic, unpredictable, unknown, you know, all these kinds of things coming right back to spiders. No one could see what he was going to do. So, when I think, when we think about trust and predictability again, it's about you not straining away from what you believe to be the ethos of that. And then I think the final thing, really with that, is if you have a belief in their brand, it then strays to your safety, right? So, none of us want to come to any harm. So, I want to make sure that when I'm investing in something that I come to know harm. So, I think that's the fourth thing, is that investing in this process, this organisation, it will ensure that I am safe and it will do harm towards me. And if I am harmed, the fifth thing is that they will take action. And so, I know that's quite a sort of vast answer to what you're asking, but it's such a vast word. For me, it's, you know, first two things, the services design, well, it will do what I expect, you know, the spider will move in the way I wanted to. Away from you. Yeah, away from me. I can control it. Hey, I met a Toronto one, so it was not a fun experience, so moved very fast in an unpredictable way. That the brand will not deviate from what I believe it to do, so again, it's a predictability. And then finally, that if I'm going to invest in this and take part in something, I will not be harmed and you will treat me well. And I think about those five things when I work with any company. What I find interesting about the framework is that we regularly as designers designed for the, this is the ideal journey. It would be so nice if it works this way and all of these needs are met. And this is the perfect experience. And we designed for that. And we also designed to solve some problems, some pitfalls that occur in the current service, but we don't often do this. What the things go wrong outside of the predictable path that we already, yeah, imagine ourselves together with the team, together with even users, interviews. We don't really do a failure mode and effects analysis kind of thing that you haven't certain industries. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I always talk to organizations about doing failure design and also consequence scanning, so thinking about these two things together. I mean, I tell companies to think about a lot of stuff. I mean, design is hard, right? You have to think about so many things. But designing for failure is like such an obvious thing you need to design for because if you help a user recover when something goes wrong, the trust will build back up in you. You know, so if you kind of leave users and let them go and do the wrong thing, I mean, I'll tell you a very quick story, right? The ones went to New York and I was standing at the little carousel, went to pick my bag up, happy, happy, went to the hotel. And this is a real story. I'm not like over-egging this. I opened up my bag, expecting my clothes, you know, my toiletries, and I opened up my bag, and there was an Irish rug, be sure it. Three pairs of socks and one tab of Viagra. I'm serious, right? And I'm like, I don't think this is my suitcase. So what had happened? Which item gave it away? I think the rugby show. So I tried everything. It was British Airways, so I called British Airways. I went on to the website. I was basically caught in really badly designed loops. And at one point they sent me to this, like, what I call the Dwarf of the Internet. And it was World Tracer, which is the third party like bag like Tracer, that most airlines actually use the outsourced their failure, which is actually really interesting as well. They haven't really designed the connection between the outsourcing of that journey. And it looked like something from like, almost like HTML 1992 Internet. And I'm like, is this for real? Is this a fake as well? So anyway, long story short, I end up going on to Twitter, because that's where most users go when stuff goes wrong. And being like, I need my bag bag, you need to like come and take this one and swap it with whoever it is. And they actually accused me under the US law in public of theft. And I could be arrested if I didn't return the bag. So this is all in all. I ended up getting my bag back by using Facebook and somebody finding me and getting my name from somebody who shouldn't have given it away and was a big story and we got it back. But they just did not design that journey at all. And it left me with like absolutely no trust in that organization to look after me when things fail. And I think those when we don't design for failure, you carry that mistrust. It's almost, you know, if you think about trust as well, you can be a bit beige in how you feel about an organization. Yeah, it's just like, it's just Netflix or they mess up all the time. But when it's quite serious stuff like you're in another country, there's a little bit more jeopardy or you're trying to do like deal with your money at bank, you tend to take trust in either more of a positively active way or a really negative way as well. Yeah, and so the more experiences you have with other services who don't design for failure, the more active you become and distrust for others. So it's failure design is so linked with the trust that we have towards brands to look after us. If we don't design for those failure points, then you know, you're kind of you're doing to service to everybody else in the industry or other industries. So yeah, I think it's really important to think about this stuff. Yeah, when I think about about your survey and traveling as well, I must admit that been pointing like when you trust an organization or service, it's quite hard. Even for me as a designer, sometimes I just my gut feeling tells me, okay, this is trustworthy, but the example you gave like this website looks too old that's already another factor, maybe there's something to be checked or is it really trustworthy. But I wanted to maybe zoom in and go back a little bit to predictability as well, because I was also thinking about. Yeah, the the the the border between let's say predictability and family familiarity and really designing something that people know and expect, but also like the not towards innovation and new services and maybe new kinds of ways of doing things. How do you see them relate to each other or how do you see them as a designer? Yeah, work together to provide the best service possible at the given moment. So you mean like when we sort of start to see new like user interaction patterns with new technology? For example, or for example, if you're designing a journey and we could have the tendency of, ah, because that is new orders, for example, the QR code, so we talked about it earlier that's like a nice design pattern. Everybody is is doing it. Let's do it because maybe it's new or maybe we want to put it out there in the world that we're doing some some more innovative things like the QR codes are innovative anymore, but for example, a chatbot, but maybe people aren't really familiar with it at all. Do you have some some some ideas about that? Like how do you relate the predictability as well with innovation? Yeah, I mean, I think even going back a little step around thinking about something new being implemented is actually the design process of getting there. So it's so important that when we are designing stuff that we test it, I mean that that to me actually is what design is about. There's a lot about doing research, doing the journey mapping, et cetera, et cetera, design. Any type of design is about testing and learning, whether you work in architecture, interior design, user interaction design, textile design, testing how it goes in the washing machine, what happens, you know, we have to test stuff. So in terms of like getting introducing something new and and and ensuring there's a sense of familiarity is is testing that that works for users and you get them to the outcome that you're seeking to get before you get there. And I think when I think about the stuff that we expect in the world, the way we walk around it, you know, if there's a handle on the door, I know that if I pull the handle, it's going to open. You know, if there's a button, I mean most humans want to press buttons, but I know that I have to press it. So when we're designing, we shouldn't really be introducing completely novel and new things. We should be building on existing design patterns, we know that we'll bring a certain behavior forward and move a user forward. So I think it's important that we don't always bring in completely new stuff. You know, when we think about the introduction of like voice assistance and that sort of technology, you know, back around I can't even remember now when Siri came out for the first time and we introduced a Lexus, but it doesn't mean that a government website changes and all you can do is like, you know, hey, and for government, get me my passport system, you're not just leaving that one channel to do that, you're still providing other ways of doing something, but you're introducing an alternative that people might eventually adopt. And in which to do that, so I think when we introduce completely new ways of interacting with stuff that we still have, I don't know if you want to call them older or more familiar channels and roots to do stuff, I think this is really interesting actually with the advent of the introduction of artificial intelligence technology. So, dare I mention chat GPT, which everybody is obsessed with and really isn't actually the big thing that's about AI, I'm also obsessed and I really enjoy playing with it, but chat GPT and the other LLM, so large language models that are coming out in the code that goes with that are really I think going to transform how we interact with services, but we can't just again close down all services and just put a little box and hope users will understand because it's only the people who are. We talk about the technology adoption, technology adoption curve, it's maybe you and I, who are the extreme users at the moment, but that will slowly become a more familiar pattern that users become familiar with. So yeah, I think really my answer to that is, you can't replace things with completely new stuff, I think you should keep multiple options. And also maybe be aware of the underlying expectations and the underlying more, maybe slower moving needs and desires and patterns that they already know, not really focus on this new technology as this is going to solve everything. Yeah, absolutely. Really focus on the back story as well. Yeah, the used to use this time in government digital service used this time quite a lot. I'm not sure if it's actually still utilized but called digital assistance and it was a terminology given to thinking about ways to help people use the services, but they couldn't get online. And we have like a, you know, at the time of digital assistance being a term we were using, a lot of people still couldn't get access to the internet for various reasons, whether they lived in poverty in California, whether they didn't have a good device to do that in the UK at the time there was about an estimated one million people that didn't actually have a device that could access the internet. Or their skills weren't at a stage where they could kind of get online and so digital assistance really was this way of thinking about making sure that when the government is is really pushing to do online transactions and the obvious reason is to reduce, you know, increase the efficiency of running public services and save money. That we still had a process for that so you can see these things sort of starting to take place and then, you know, people get used to not being very sweeping statement here but digital skills according to off-com have increased particularly amongst elderly populations. People have got more access to devices now not everyone I don't want to claim that it's completely changed but our behavior and our ability to use new things will eventually follow that technology curve. So yeah, I think just introducing slowly that are new and hopefully you won't fail. Yeah, I think you were also talking about the consequence scanner. I once read this article about Black Mirror brainstorms as in Black Mirror, the popular Netflix show, I don't know if it's an Netflix actually, the show really holds this kind of mirror to what could go wrong with technology. And I was wondering like the consequence scanner is this kind of the same philosophy like thinking about what are all the consequences that could go wrong or how does it work and how could people think about consequences via such a scanner? Yeah, definitely. I mean, so I mean, I think you're right. There are lots of different methods that people might have called consequence scanning, you know, they would have let me start that again, sorry. I think consequence scanning is a term that has lots of other terms as well that people have been using for quite a long time. My connection or understanding of it comes from a think tank that was found by Martha Lane ThoughtVox called dot everyone who now sadly don't exist anymore but they really looking at the challenges of internet and technology and its impact on society and the planet. So they sadly closed down but they still have their website out there so they released a publication all about consequence scanning and they said this is a way for organizations to consider the potential consequences of their product or service on people communities and the planet. And they said there's kind of three core questions that you should ask. So one is what are the intended and unintended consequences of this product or feature that you're building to what are the positive consequences we want to focus on. So what we really try to do that is good and that's all about responsible technology and that sort of stuff. And three, what are the consequences we want to mitigate and they had a series of kind of prompt cards to think this through. You know, really thinking bring it back to the planet sometimes is there an unintended consequence on the planet. You know, if we look at, I don't know, the production of iPhones and we actually see where the mining is being done and the low wages and all that that comes with it, you know, that's a really bad thing. Somewhere else in the world that's it's not an America. So if we want to make this phone, what is that going to mean somewhere else? It's the same for like using any form of technology that needs moderation, which is just about every social media platform and service where people can interact online. Who's going to do that moderation? Well, most of the moment gets outsourced into places like China, Asia, Africa. We even find out that the day that chat GP, was it chat GPT? I hope I get this right. I had undertaken a contract with an organization in Africa, paying like literally like minimum wage. And these poor human beings were having to look at and review really things you don't even really want to imagine. I don't really want to mention, but you know where I'm going with that. And these are unintended consequences of the stuff that we want to create a news in our lives. And I think it's really important we think about that. But you can't do that without having a diverse team because you need to have lots of different viewpoints and people that can ask questions that you may have not thought about that you may not be considering. So I think really consequent scanning for me is about getting a diversity of people in a room together and asking the hard questions of should we really be doing this if it's going to create this harm. And for me, if you, I mean, you can be a designer and help, you know, I don't know, a war criminal like make more guns sure going to do that. But for me, design is really an ethical and a protest point of view in this world that you and its political you should do good stuff with design. So I think consequent scanning is actually really kind of like political questions system on where I kind of belief question set that you should be asking to make sure that you're doing good in the world. And also getting comfortable with the questions you have to ask yourself that you're not used to answering perhaps. I think just having a diverse team will not be enough if you're not able to give a podium to asking these different viewpoints and bringing them up, discussing them as well. And I'm not making this up myself. I've heard this from a training we had actually last week about inclusive communication and one of the statements that struck me was that we have to get comfortable getting uncomfortable as well. And it was this openness. It was I mean, it was a simple statement. But it was quite empowering actually to hear this to be yeah, to just be open to not getting a right of her time as well. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think there's lots of systemic points of sorry ingrained like systems of things like racism, homophobia and stuff that you might not even be aware that you have inherited through your way of growing up in the world. The belief system that you have developed because of the experiences that you've had the places you've been places you haven't been and I tried to be as self aware as I can. And I'm someone who's neuro diverse and is queer. So I have my you know, I have an understanding of the world. It's often very we might say cis heteronormative like if I go to the doctor, for example, I'm consistently asked if I'm pregnant not all the time. They're not always asking like, you know, but they they will ask me and I'm like, I've told you so many times that my partner is unable to get me pregnant, you know, like and it's and so you can if you want to design any service or products you have to have a diverse team. If they had someone queer on that team, they might change a line of questioning of the doctor. It's the same for like neurodiversity as well, you know, you might think as we call people who are maybe not thinking about things. That autism and ADHD like that you want to have a big open plan studio. Well, that's that's awful for me because I need somewhere I really like being in an open plan space. But if you don't have a room for me to go, then it's really difficult for me. So if we don't have different viewpoints in the room and different experiences, then we're unable to ask the questions that we need to ask and the points of view that we need to bring up. And I'm not saying there's a really easy, it's easy to do that. But I think we have to strive to bring that diversity into the room even if it's not on the team. So if you come back to the beginning of our conversation where you said designing for trust is encompassing quite a lot of topics and we're just designing the service is not enough. Also, the team, the organization that is implementing the service is designing or thinking of the service, we also have to maybe not reinvent it, but at least consider it how it's structured how it's behaving. So is there things that you've learned at Snoop perhaps how you how you made the organization aware of yeah behaving in a certain way to to enable this. Do you mean sorry to like enable asking these kinds of questions and. Yeah, maybe to add on that. I'm also very interested in when do you do this in a project because I can sense with you as well with all the experience that you've had and maybe also the personal investment that it's very clear. I think for you it's always there the moral and maybe also the consequences it's by default that you're already very aware of the things that could go wrong or the things that you want to intent. But that for me, for example, is something that I'm still learning to do. I'm really curious as well. From your experience in Snoop, for example, is it something that you really plan workshops for or is this something that you do every week or at the start or at the end. How do you see this practically getting a foothold in a project. Yeah, I mean, this is a really tough question because there's there's no easy way to do this. I mean, just taking a step back like I think what's really difficult for designers as a first point to make is that we are in service to the business model that's being created right and the outcomes set. So for example, if you're working for a big social media platform, but you're worried about users spending too much time online. You're what you want to do for users is completely in contradiction to what that platform wants to do because they are there is an attention economy right they want to make sure that you design more features that bring that person back to that platform. So I just start with that because it's just not easy. So my first bit of advice to people any designer at snook or not is if you cannot work in that environment and find ways to do good within that overarching business model, don't be there. So the first thing is to walk away I know you can't walk away from a project when you're in consultancy because that would topple your business. But if you are working for an organization, don't go there if you don't if you can't hack that. But that being said, I do think working for big commercial organizations, even organizations that might have policies that you disagree with. There's still good work that can be done there to help kind of minimize harm to users and stuff. So that's sort of the first thing really to take note of in that. I think the second thing moving on from that is that you can't topple the business model of an organization. So I remember and hopefully if anyone from snook who's worked with me listens to this, I think we it's safe to say we were all quite sort of very strong on our moral viewpoint and ethics and about stuff. And at some points and projects we get really almost staff like upset with like they're just doing bad things they want change and what I would say is that find anywhere you can make a change even if it isn't in the user interface. So can you go and work with a policy team and change what they're doing? Can you go work with finance and change what they're doing? Can you find I call it full stack service design? Can you go to other parts of the organization and change what they're doing in a really positive way and just start with something really, really small to make that change. So again, coming back to sort of like internet and trust and safety, which is what we're talking about tonight. Like I just saw the TikTok has I don't know if it's coming now it could be right now or the last couple of weeks, but for anyone under the age of 18 they are now implementing a mandatory one hour maximum on the platform, which is huge right like it's really quite a big thing. And one hour each day, so after one hour you get cut off and I don't get me wrong, I think young people will just get more accounts and more phones, I'm sure they'll try and figure a way to do that. But you know, if you wanted to make that happen, they said that they'd read research from this like kind of health and situ looking at young people's like mental health. You might have been the designer that slipped that in the right room to start a conversation or you might have looked at upcoming policy around keeping you the safe and slipped that in a conversation. So you can make as a designer little changes by being quite strategic in the way that you're performing or acting in an organization, even if you're being frustrated with not being able to design for the right outcome. So my answer to your question, my very long answer, sorry, is that there's no one moment in a project where you do this. I mean, you should definitely do consequent scanning failure design. You know, once you've tested your kind of proposition and how something's going to work when you're moving into more like fidelity, like sort of really detailed fidelity of the service design and the product, you should be doing that stuff there for sure. But you can be acting in a good way at all times with different strategic moves inside the organization. I think as designers that I've mentored or coach are trained, I see that getting forgotten quite a lot. You have to be doing that. It's finding these openings and taking advantage of them on your seat or grading opportunity to introduce an idea. Yeah, totally. So we do training on like leading stakeholders and helping designers to really think about how they make change inside organizations. And I just come across like a lot of people who are not even thinking about that area of the work when they're designing. I've heard someone say like stakeholders don't care anyway, so we should just get on with our work. That's like such the wrong sentiment to your work, like you really need to think about how you get stuff over the line, how you make things happen. And we've always said that 90% or 10% of service design is ideas, 90% is... That's the code that services, right? I think service and 10% design and 90%. Convincing people that you're trying to do the right thing. That's the work. That's the work. And you can't forget it. I mean at the end of the day, organizations are just like hollow structures with a bunch of human beings inside them. Trying to make stuff happen and all performing because we have like metrics and measurements on our jobs, right? So we're all trying to do the thing that helps get the organizational outcomes, which often you serve user needs. And we're as designers trying to get user needs to be taken seriously. So we have to take seriously that 90% of work. And so we think about consequence scanning failure design or the stuff. That is your 90% but it doesn't happen in one moment. It's not a workshop. It's all the time and you need to be influencing and getting people to think about the stuff, starting campaigns to get organizations to care about it. And that is actually arguably more of the work of designers and service design these days. And it is actually doing a journey map and thinking about designing for a failure because if you design for failure, it's going to cost you money. And the organizations don't really want to spend more money. So you are influencing people to care. And I think that's a skill that or activity that's often forgotten. I think that's also the advantage then of having good teams as I mean as in a good constitution of team members. Maybe some people who do not care about this stakeholder management aspect or this influencing just want to focus on the craft, which is actually I find fair. Not everyone has to be interested in managing all these expectations, nudging people towards something but then staffing a good team who is like complimentary is really important. Yeah, 100%. I used to think about service designers as very different. Again, it's such an ambiguous term. What is a natural service designer? It comes with so many different skills. So I think there are, when I think about service designers are craft, it's people who are a bit like a mechanical engineer for a car. They can look at an organization. They have so much experience and they can be like, that policy is harming that user journey. That way that we finance how we run the service is harming the experience. It's not getting the outcomes we need. So you have someone who is very deep craft based, but they might not be great and notice respect to anyone that I met like they might just not be very good at. They might be very good at convening and bringing people together and that is what you often do in medium to large organizations is kind of start campaigns, bring people together to believe in something. So yeah, you're absolutely right. You need complimentary skills and they might all be called service designers, but it's deciding as a team who's going to do what work. Everyone has a role to play in convincing and influencing even down to the minutia of what do you put in a slide deck when you walk in a room and you pitch to your stakeholder. That's part of it as well, but I definitely agree with you. You need does influencing people. And whether we call them service designers or I don't know, could be anything. The product owner, business analyst, manager, director doesn't really matter, but someone has to be really holding the team to account on doing that influencing work. Yeah, but I also like the example you gave from Tiktok and implementing that could be also something very, very concrete because you also have this on I think Instagram as well that you could set up this timer and then you have spent 10 minutes or an hour or whatever you can also click it away. But you see these platforms now it's social media. I think it's also with other services trying to come up with strategies or new features or no functionalities to, yeah, establish trusts in some sense or give some agency back to the users as well there. And maybe on that note, I was interested as well in, for example, digital resilience and making it's also in the team of scamming and fraud and false all these things that are coming up in the news quite often more recently. Do you have some experience there to share about how to establish digital resilience or how to protect maybe yourself as a user because we're all users there, but also as a designer when you're designing something. Yeah, definitely. Well, maybe just break down what we mean by digital resilience because I think it's quite another ambiguous term in this space. So I came to digital resilience and the concept through working with parents on who are a fantastic charity who look at supporting parents and children, particularly on the internet in the UK. And they were part of a working group in the UK called digital resilience working group and part of the UK Council for Internet safety so they convened like a lot of different partners together. And they talk about digital resilience as learning by engaging online, the potential challenges and experiencing them that might come with it, rather than taking avoidance or safety behaviors. So a lot of policy that has been thrown around for a while in different countries is being quite reductionist. So it's like, we just, we can't let under 18s on the internet. No one is doing that because that would probably throw quite a lot of human rights questions up in arms. But we also have under United children's rights convention a role to protect them as well. So there's this kind of concept around like should we just like take them off it, not give them it, but it's been proven through studies that young people and children who actively engage online and meet these challenges develop much more resilience to deal with them in the future, not just online, but actually in their everyday lives with with negative things that might happen to them. So it's my belief and those of some of the organizations I've worked with that we should be really pushing people, not pushing, but getting letting them online. And so digital resilience or framework is about four things. So it's about helping a user understand when they might be at risk online. It's knowing what to do if something does go wrong. It's then learning from your experience of being online and then being able to recover from any difficulties or upsets. So, you know, there are lots of online harms as the off-com report shows, the one around internet use and behavior online. People's experience of online harms in the UK anyway. And I would probably say it's the same everywhere else is increasing, particularly from online fraud scams where we're doing things like romance scams, we catfish them on, we pretend to be someone, you send them money because you're getting married and they never show up or pretending that you have a pet to sell like a poodle and you don't show up. So, these kind of scams are increasing. So, platforms are now looking at how they build the digital resilience through education, you know. So, a good example is, I mean, Twitter pre-eal on musk, let's just put it that way. So, back in the day before either musk was in charge of Twitter. If you remember during the COVID pandemic, the amount of, I mean, I would say it was lies that Donald Trump was putting out there around vaccination. Okay, good. I'm just checking we're in the right political arena here. But he was, you know, he's getting people to drink bleach and there was this amazing bit of research done by Cornell University. The analyzed 38 million English language articles about the pandemic and found that President Trump was actually the largest driver of the infoldemic, which is people kind of really not trusting science and believing some of the stuff that he was spewing out. And what Twitter did, what I have in front of me on the screen, I know the listeners can't see, but was this little green sign that came under Trump saying things, reminding them that this might not be true. So, there's this tweet that says, Donald Trump says, "A rigged election because he thought the election was rigged in the United States." And it's just a little green thing below it that said this claim about election fraud is disputed. Now, you probably wouldn't get that now, but at the time the Trust and Safety Team at Twitter were educating users because misinformation is an online harm and it's one that's increasing. So, that's really what digital resilience is about. So, I think we see ourselves doing the understanding and education part. Same as like if you go on Twitter and I don't know if they still do this again. Pre-Elon Musk, but when you used to go to retweet an article, it would pop up and ask you, "Have you read this before you retweet it?" And actually, when they tried that out, so this little pop-up that would come up, people increased the reading of the articles by 40% before they retweeted it and some even cancelled the retweet after I think that was 33% of people. In terms of digital resilience and designing, I think we're doing a lot around these first two parts of digital resilience. Where we're doing less, I think, is learn and recover qualities. You know, we've really got down this idea of the design patterns around reporting, flagging content. I mean, pretty much on every platform now, you can complain in an easy-ish way somehow. But how do we do the aftercare of digital resilience? So you make a report and it's like it goes into a black box and you're like, "Well, what might be the outcome? How long is it going to take?" And what happens if someone's experienced trauma from something that they've seen or they've been attacked? How is that any different than that happening on a street in their home when someone is doing something bad to you? And we sort of seem to separate that. So for me, I don't have answers to exactly how you should do that, but the digital resilience library that I'm working on with Peron Zone at the moment, we're developing a range of speculative and conceptual patterns that we're going to put out there on the internet to say, "This is what you should do when you implement a reporting intervention or process." And so some of the patterns we've come up with is things like telling people how long it might take to just get a response. We've got stuff like, "We're calling the pattern. This is wordied really badly, so we haven't finished this yet." But help a user to find an access for this and further seek support, probably a little wordy, but basically it's saying, "We recognize that something has happened to you. Do you have somebody in your network that you can reach out to, might be a teacher, a friend, a member of your family, someone in your community, and here are some conversation starters for you to get that across." And that stuff doesn't exist right now, so we have to design for this really learning from the experience and supporting people in the internet, we just don't do that. Yeah, because in my experience, I think there's also kind of stigma, right? If you have been scammed or thought that it's still something that you don't really like to be to share or to be talked about, but I was just thinking maybe it's a stupid example, but if you want to learn how to survival, let's say in the first, you have to just know how the first look like and what kind of tools you can use and also kind of patterns are there. And you have to develop experience, there is all right. So I was also thinking about my childhood, I'm a 90s kid, so I grew up with the internet already, but it was still like this very open space. There wasn't really like my first social media was my space, I think, when I was, I don't know. Let's see your account, it's probably still there. But it does give you some confidence that you have seen a lot of different platforms and a lot of different patterns and things and some more, I've never been scammed or anything, but some more sketchy things help in defining what is really sketchy and what is not. But if you don't have that experience, you're sitting duck, I think, for new innovative crime patterns. I mean, I think it's really interesting what you're saying, we sort of, if you grow up with a technology, you probably are able in some way, not all the time, because people really clever, it's gapping people to recognize when there is something bad happening. But I think we're in the precipice, I don't mean to scare anybody, but I read this book by Mark Goodman, so I'm going to do my Mark Goodman now, which is his first page that says, I dare you to read on, if you really, you know, this will change your life. And when you do read it, you're like, oh my god, everything is bad, everyone is evil, everyone will cause me harm. But I think we're on the precipice of a really difficult new technology, which is AI, right. So I think just going back one step, like human beings have always done bad stuff, right. Like always done bad stuff. There was a, you know, like think about deep fakes. So we now have deep fakes, you might have seen the Trump pictures that were made, where he's getting arrested, it's all very dramatic, and he's been pulled through the streets of New York. Like that's a deep fake made by a piece of software called mid journey, which is a, you know, it makes images from text prompts for anyone who doesn't know what that is. But we've been doing deep fakes for years, right. So I always think about the pictures of the Loch Ness monster from Scotland, which was a monster seen, apparently seen in Loch Ness. And that was turned out 60 years later after the photo was was released to be fake. So we are still doing bad things, but just with new forms of technology, the way they made that actually was by like sort of drawing it into the negatives. And even made footprints with fake hippo foots, which were popular umbrella stands at the time. This isn't like the 19 like 30s. So they were using any technology they could find to do that. The same is for like scams, for example, where people are impersonating or selling stuff that doesn't exist. There was a guy who was called George C Parker in the 1880s and 1890s. He actually sold the Brooklyn Bridge bridge many times to different people for $50,000, which is an insane amount of money. Apparently he did this like over 10 times because he convinced people that he owned that bridge and that if they bought it off them, they could charge for people to walk between Brooklyn and New York. And it's not right. And he he was such a career criminal. He was like the con man. Right. So he did other stuff like he would pose as prison wardens to get out of jail. He had different pseudonyms like James J. O'Brien warden Kennedy. And he did exactly what we know is impersonation online fraud catfishing all the sort of stuff that we know today. So human beings haven't changed. And I think what is scary now is that we're on the precipice of the new technology that we don't quite understand. And people who want to do bad things are going to start using that to do bad things to us. So the newest scam that I have seen that I think is actually quite scary is people using AI voice impersonators. And they are calling family members so that that data is really easy to get. You can find just about anyone's phone number, especially for a PI private investigator. Most people you can just find out on Facebook. And they're calling those family members using their voice and saying that something really bad has happened and they need money right away to be wired or they're pretending that they've kidnapped people. And so families are actually developing a safe word that they can use to know if something is true or not. But that's just new. I mean, I know that because I have an interest in this stuff. And I've been talking to my family about having some kind of silly safe word just in case. But I think that's what's scary now is that even if we think we know the technology, we haven't grown up with AI. So that will be used to do a whole bunch of stuff, but it will still do the same stuff. It's still impersonate people. It will still sell stuff that doesn't exist. It will still take people's data, which we know now. So I'm. What do we do now with that? I think we just need to really keep educating people and take it seriously. Do it in schools at a young age, media literacy, technological literacy. Because if we can understand how technology works now and it feels like a bit of a black box with algorithms and stuff like that, what the hell is going to happen when AI is being used to automate some of these. I mean, I think you'll get people like AI bots being humans impersonating people. I mean, it's kind of mind blowing. So we need that constant education as adults as well, I think to really combat this. It also comes back to this digital resilience and designing for trust, the framework you've mentioned for both one in the beginning, one now just just before. It's very similar. It's again repeating the same structure in our methodology in our mindset and the way we do the work. So I'm hopeful that we'll manage to mitigate you said, I think mitigate the harm or the unintended consequences of this new technology as well. By including that in our process, by including this in our methodology, when we design actually. Yeah, and I think it's really worth anyone who wants to look it up. If you just Google, you know, UK government digital resilience, you'll find it. It's super simple framework, but I think what we're trying to do with the library, the digital resilience library that I'm building with parents on and with the school of good services is to give designers and. People anyone who's making design decisions actual examples of what this might look like as a series of patterns that you can implement because you get. You know, there's been a lot of really great effort in creating principles for digital resilience and safety by design, but and they're really good directional principles, but they don't really get to the heart of actually. If I'm designing a user flow or user journey for reporting, how can I actually embed digital resilience into it? So that's what I am really passionate about is sort of making things clear for designers about how to how to do it and, but also with, you know, with any library, it's the same for the mental health design part library. It's really about building a community of practice of people who can keep innovating that keep changing it because I don't believe for a second that the content that we put on there will still be relevant in six months, 12 months, 18 months time. It's kind of refreshing it and making sure that we're looking at new stuff, you know, but I think, you know, as designers and organizations, we have a responsibility to do this work. But now there is a legal mandate to do it as well in the in the Europe, which we are, I'll mention again, sadly not part of any more in the UK, thanks Brexit. But you have the Digital Servities Act coming in in 2024. So that is really pushing organizations and most organizations who perform transactions and peer-to-peer interaction on the internet to look at how they mitigate the harm that will be encountered by users of all types, but also make sure that they've done these risk assessments to do it. And you know, the UK is slowly getting through an online safety bill, which is of similar ilk, of course, not being in the EU. We need to have a wrong one. Sure, but we've got to do this. So there's going to be a legal imperative now for us to actually do this this work. So for designers listening, like you should go and read, it's quite a long read, but you should go and look at what these bills are actually asking these platforms to do. And what's going to happen as a result if we don't do it. We have these guidelines or these, these patterns and thought process, but what does it really mean? And sometimes you really learn more of seeing a scam in action. There's this one that stuck about this guy who is replying to the emails of like this scam artist. And I learned a lot about how they communicate just because it was so real. And it was really an example instead of just watch out for scam emails. But yeah, how do they look like what is being said? How do you notice? So I was really interested in the examples when when they when they will be life. Yeah, I mean, I think that's an interesting like user need that I find when I was doing my research to build this thing that's not in the world yet, but called the digital resilience pattern library that we're prototyping right now is giving people the examples of online harms, but also the journey. The people go on as they spiral more into that harm and where there are intervention points for digital resilience foundations like learn, educate, understand, recover. Because, you know, someone can be an online scam can happen in a second, but quite a few of them happen over a long period of time. So how can you intervene? So it's really important, again, like teams, I talked about diversity of teams earlier that we have done the research and we understand what bad things people are doing. I think that's great research to do. What are the bad stuff people are doing? I grew up reading that and like how did murderers commit their crimes, you know, but we should be interested in that because we have to design against it. And we do, and you know, technologists, we use what we call penetration testing, which is testing for cyber security. And we have come out of a friend who works for a company that literally does that, like they have hackers working for them to test their systems and make sure that they are robust and no one can hack them. We should be doing the same for safety by design and digital resilience. I also like when I hear you talking about it, I also like the perspective of, like, good versus bad. It's kind of like a novel itself, right, or a movie or you really try to do good things. And I like it for me, it's also resonating positivity and trying to not doing design because you have to, but really trying to come up and understanding why things going wrong is also. Is this activism spirit of this, fighting the evil were the good guys really goodies, maybe I just like bad stuff and I'm really actually I don't care about the good stuff I'm just interested now. We should exchange books, though, I have some, I have some reads for you. This is real, right, when I was, when I was like 15 years old, 14 years old, in English class, we were asked to like give a talk and remember walking in and you had to bring like some prompts as well and do this five minute talk. And like all these kids like came in with posters of, I don't know if this will translate to all your listeners, but like Westlife boys own all these like boy bands and stuff like all the girls had this. The guys had like arsonum and just united like Celtic ranges and I came up and I put up a picture of a serial killer called the Yorkshire Ripper and all his victims and talk through like every victim and the teacher took my mother's side to parents evening. I was like, we need to talk about Sarah. Is everything more right? Yeah, it's like what's the time? More bit fascination. I just think, yeah, I have a more bit fascination for band stuff, but knowing that it's bad wanting to do good stuff about it, yeah. I think that's a great way to enter this episode of this day. Oh dear. So maybe just as a nicer closing word. I hear that there's a lot of good stuff coming up actually. So maybe one of the first questions I have to move you're working on, when will it be out? That's the golden question. When will it be made first, I think. I mean, films I've realized take a really long time to make. Next year would be great if we can get there, but making a film is like a design process. You need to prototype it, find more money, convince somebody as we said. So hopefully next year. Do look forward to that. Thank you. I'm also looking forward to your talk. Later this night on Night Moses Arena. But maybe in the meantime, for the listeners who cannot join tonight or will listen to this episode a month or a year from now. Where can they experience, see, read your work? What do you want to tell them? Well, they can come to, you can come to school of good services. That's where I'm predominantly working out with Lou Downe who wrote good services. So we do training. So you can come in on a training course if you're interested with us or just read what we're writing. I write personally on Sarah - Drummond.com and you can read about full stack service design there. And if you're interested in the film, you can come to section 28 film.com. And I generally inhabit the internet as a monochrome called ruffle map in. So if you're on Twitter or other places, you'll find me under that very silly name or on LinkedIn. So I'm generally in and around the internet researching bad things but doing good things. All right. Thank you so much for having us. I have a new university. Oh, you're welcome. Pleasure to have you here in my office. I love the conversation. It was really nice. Much more to talk about. But yeah, we look forward to your talk tonight. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, thanks for having me. And for the closing of this episode, we also like to mention upcoming events from the service design network because a lot is going on. We want to promote the service design global conference in Berlin happening on October 5th and 6th this year. 2023. There's also a pre conference event with workshops and meetups and all kinds of cool things on the 4th of October already. Please go and buy your tickets. The team for this year is catalyst for change with topics as smart tech. For example, AI and chat GPT you already heard being discussed a lot this episode but also digital transformation employee experience and of course sustainability and circular service design. Are you working on a project related to these topics? Don't hesitate to register as a speaker. There's a cover speakers for the conference officially open now and you will find the link on our website or via our Instagram in our bio. There is also the service design awards that are still accepting entries for both professional and commercial project as well as nonprofit and student categories. The deadline for submissions is June 30th and you can also find the link in our bio and on our website. So don't hesitate to either buy your ticket or register as a speaker or even as a service design possible award winning projects. Unless but not least, we also want to highlight the SDN Academy where you can learn from various service and trainers all around the globe. Check the latest service and courses that match your service and level from beginners to experts and have there's a call a course for everything. And roll today to up your skills and maybe you can even become a member of the SDN Academy. Thank you so much for Sarah drones being here and also for night moves and the service and network for making our platform possible. See you next time. Stay tuned for more.