Can we end austerity-era service design?
Just before a general election that ended 14 years of a conservative government, Aida Edemariam published an article in the Guardian about the role of libraries in local communities.
In it she described libraries as “an informal citizens advice bureau, a business development centre, a community centre and a mental health provider. It is an unofficial Sure Start centre [a government scheme to support babies and young children], a homelessness shelter, a literacy and foreign language-learning centre, a calm space where tutors can help struggling kids, an asylum support provider, a citizenship and driving theory test centre, and a place to sit still all day and stare at the wall, if that is what you need to do, without anyone expecting you to buy anything.” The list is expansive, and telling in its scale and breadth.
“When there is nowhere else to go” said one library staff member, “...this is where they come”
Since the dawn of the internet, amazon and cheap print, libraries have become a part of our civic infrastructure that we don't always quite know what to do with. No longer the primary source of books to the majority, they have become the overspill to services that we can't quite fit anywhere else.
If you don't have access to the internet, if your circumstance doesn’t fit with the norm, if you have needs that are too complex, or you don't fit into the strictly defined ‘happy pathway’ of life, this is where you go. In some sense, this is what libraries were always designed for.
Humphrey Chetham, founder of the oldest surviving library in the UK said in 1653 that he wanted Cheltam’s Library in Manchester, and all future libraries thereafter to be places that ‘should require nothing of any man that cometh into the library’. Casting aside Chetham’s assumption of the gender of library visitors for a moment, it’s maybe as hard if not harder to imagine a place that ‘requires nothing of us’ in 2024 as it was in the 1650’s.
Libraries have become what all other services don't want to be anymore; the point of human contact and support for the most in need, the most complex and therefore expensive ‘needs’ that we have as a society. If you wanted any further evidence for this, Edemariam goes on to describe that “Library premises are hired out for children’s parties, visa processing, life-drawing, NHS health checks and English language lessons” - in essence, they are a village hall for all civic life that can no longer fit anywhere else, in hospitals that are too small, schools that can’t afford after-hours insurance, or government buildings that were never designed to accommodate ‘customers’.
Libraries, and their equivalents from charities to citizens advice bureaux are the flexible, supportive overspill to a rigorously defined set of rules we are all supposed to follow in order to do what is required of us to pay our bills, buy things, get jobs or live our lives and they are the consequences of what I've started to describe as ‘austerity service design’.
Austerity service design has been going on for so long, and has crept up on us so slowly that it isn't something that we even notice anymore.
What is austerity service design?
The sole purpose of austerity service design is to save money or raise revenue above and beyond delivering value to users. Its objectives are always short-term, focussing on what is within reach quickly, not what would be the right thing to do in the medium to long term.
There is little talk of investment, just as there is little talk of the future beyond the next year, quarter or transformation program end date. Things will always be better ‘once we’ve delivered the new website / CRM / TOM / customer account etc’ but that horizon never seems to come closer because austerity service organisations are always in a rush, doing too many things at the same time with not enough people to do it.
You do not ask big questions in austerity service design, lest you try to ‘boil the ocean’ (a slightly ironic phrase considering that’s what we're doing to the oceans precisely because of short-term thinking). Projects are rigorously managed so that they are on time and within budget, but completely miss the point, creating more long-term costs and impacts on society.
In austerity service design, organisations' funds might go down, but they try to do more with it so corners are cut, there is no time to think, time for research, or time for design. They make mistakes and become ever more risk-averse with each inevitable mistake. Every day, the stakes become higher, the ability to work successfully with less people, time and budget create ever-increasing odds of failure.
Staff churn is high (since these are immensely stressful and unfulfilling circumstances to work under) but these organisations are now starting to make redundancies. The first to go are those ‘luxury’ roles that are not ‘business critical’. Roles in design and user research, but also in technical operations, security, user research opps, design systems, community development, learning and development.
This is an extreme picture of austerity service design at its worst, but I have met hundreds of organisations over the past four years of running the school who are experiencing this to some degree. If this is you, and you are in this situation, you are not alone, it’s not just you and no, it hasn’t always been this way.
If you want to stop reading here, I get it. Alongside all of the issues it causes to our users and our organisations, austerity design is taking its toll on the mental health of service designers.
But there is hope, and that hope comes from understanding how we got here.
An image of Google Trends data showing search numbers for 'sharing economy' on a timeline from 2004 to 2021. The number of searches went dramatically up in 2010/12 after the conservative government announces their 'Big Society' solution to reduce public spending
Where did austerity service design come from?
Austerity service design has been going longer than we can remember.
In 2009, in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis the UK Conservative Party leader, David Cameron popularised the term ‘age of austerity’ in his keynote speech to the Conservative Party forum to end years of ‘excessive government spending’.
It’s a familiar conservative doctrine, one that’s been rolled out every time a conservative government has taken over from labour, but in the wake of a financial crisis that led to mass government bailouts of banks - calling for more personal responsibility and smaller government had a deeper meaning.
To blur the boundaries of what could very well have sounded like wholesale cuts to public spending, Cameron’s ‘era of austerity’ emerged alongside the launch of the party’s ‘Big Society' campaign. Promises were made to finance and ‘equip people and organisations with the power and resources they need to make a real difference in their communities’. It was ok that the government wasn’t going to do it for us, we were going to do things ourselves instead.
Casting our minds back to 2009/10, at first glance the notion of a ‘Big Society’ might have felt like a worthy strategy, like one giant street party or church roof fun-run, but under the thin veil of Government marketing, what Big Society was really asking for was local authorities, the NHS and delivery organisations to do more with less and to use volunteers to plug the gaps.
At the start, the service design industry welcomed austerity with open arms. We lauded ‘big society’ and its private sector twin ‘the sharing economy’ as a way that organisations could reduce their overheads by not owning or delivering anything directly themselves. Whether you call it outsourcing or ‘becoming a platform’ - removing the physical commitment to deliver food, care, housing, tools or cars was the solution to every organisation’s cashflow and risk problem, and it meant more work for service designers as we designed ever more services to access these resources. To some, this constraint of removing ownership of physical things felt like an opportunity to rethink how we deliver value to users and operate services. We saw an explosion of ‘uber for XYZ’ ideas floating in corporate boardrooms and almost overnight, everything became a ‘platform’.
But big society and the sharing economy did not step in to fill the gap that austerity created. And it did not stop us from buying fewer cars, tools or other physical things. For those living middle-off the bell-curve life - with enough money to live, stable housing, no disabilities, difficulties accessing technology, or long term health conditions it might have seemed like nothing changed, we took Ubers, rented air BnBs, ordered food on Deliveroo and barely spoke to our local authorities.
The axe blow of Big Society and the sharing economy did not hit the wealthy. With every drive for efficiency, our services have become ever more tightly optimised for the middle of the bell curve, with edge cases of disability, poverty, mental ill-health or just plain overwhelm being all but removed.
It’s what we see bubbling under the plot lines of I Daniel Blake, the recent carers allowance scandal in which millions have been forced to repay debts they shouldn't have had in the first place, why Lambeth council hiked energy prices for residents instantly, then failed to pass on the savings when prices went down and councils like Nottingham, Birmingham and Woking going bankrupt.
This collective tightening of purse strings has led to a narrowing of the guard rails on who does and doesn’t get to use services, under what circumstances, when, where and how. The bell curve of who our services support and how has narrowed.
In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Chief exec of the Institute for Customer Service Jo Causon points to the worrying yet obvious contradiction we’re facing: “In a cost of living crisis, customer problems are more complex and organisations need staff who are trained to deal with a wider range of issues,” she says. “Yet every organisation I speak to is struggling to recruit and retain the right people.”
My entire career has been framed by austerity. Saving money has been the heartbeat to my career so much so that I studied economics to try and communicate more clearly about how much money my work could save. Every service design case study you see from the last 10 years is framed with ‘we saved £x money’ in redesigning this service.
But at 38, I’m only just old enough to remember what service design was like before austerity took hold. When there was money for user research and strategy, when we laughed about writing endless ‘2020 visions’ and where - at the risk of sounding like someone approaching middle age becoming nostalgic - there was not only time and space to think about the future, but that future was something we wanted to think about. Cost and risk reduction was part of our work, but it wasn’t the only part. We were also there to design new products and services, think about their longevity and scale, create new organisational strategies to develop new audiences...our work was diverse. This is still the case for some large, financially buoyant industries and agencies today, but is no longer the norm.
If I barely remember this world of pre-austerity service design then most designers in their 20’s to mid 30s are unlikely to know any different. What to me and older practitioners seems like a distinct kind of service design that it is all about saving money at any cost, is just what service design is and may have always been presented to anyone under 30. Those organisational outcomes of ‘save money’, tightening of purse strings and briefs that talk about automation and delivering more efficiently set a strong flavour for the practice.
Pre-austerity service design is still taught in universities (possibly because the tutors are mostly my age +) but this is not what service design is for most designers now.
Not only does this lead to disenfranchisement when those designers find work, but also means that they don't necessarily have the tools, techniques and resources to deal with operating in this often hostile-feeling environment (this is the reason why we created our Writing Business Cases for Service Design course).
Austerity service design is a vicious cycle
When you learn to sail, you get taught how to manage a crisis. The first step is always to slow yourself down, take deep breaths and not to panic. You lose 20% of your ability to think when you panic. You want your whole brain functioning in a crisis, but this is precisely what we’re struggling to do on an industrial scale right now.
The problem with cost saving is that it is a vicious cycle. Short deadlines, spending reviews and having to do more with less causes us to panic, and the panic is causing us to make worse and worse decisions.
Short term decisions after short term decisions will lead you to more problems. If you combine that with high staff churn, lack of investment in learning and community development, you end up with an ever increasing pile of problems that you can't fix.
Organisations simply cannot afford multiple, multidisciplinary teams working permanently on the number of services they want to change at the pace they feel like they should. So rather than doing less, they cut back on time, people and quality, rather than scope, ending up with teams working on multiple projects ‘on the side of their desk’ or ‘fixing the aeroplane while it’s still flying’.
Austerity X Moore’s Law + efficiency of scale = a recipe for reactivity
The internet is always changing, the world never stands still. Our services are increasingly a delicate stack of stuff that other organisations own, who are at liberty to change it whenever they want.
In his article in the Guardian about the UK’s delicate food system, George Monbiot described the fact that “capitalism wants a monoculture” that there are an ever-decreasing set of food growers and suppliers, just as there was a decreasing amount of banks just before the financial crisis. What Monbiot describes is a fundamental principle of physics in systems - the gravitational pull of efficiency slowly congeals what was once a diverse set of options into a much smaller set; efficiencies of scale are exponential. The same is true of technology. What was once a diverse set of suppliers, platforms, systems and infrastructure is getting ever smaller and out of our control.
We’re starting to see the effect of it in the number of industry-wide tech failures, and in last month’s global outage caused by CrowdStrike. Just as we see instability now in our services, we saw it in the banking system back in 2008
We may think that once the transformation is ‘done’ to our service we can move on, move our resources elsewhere so that we can keep that motion going but we never come back to fix the compromises we make in the urgency of what we’ve created. And we are increasingly not in control of what we need to change and when, as our services are owned and provided by a patchwork of other suppliers with increasing levels of control and vulnerability.
The exponential change in technology, coupled with the decreasing amount of suppliers and our increasing reliance on them, is a recipe for an increasing amount of change that we’re not in control of, and an environment where we have to drop everything in order to react to whatever change suddenly needs to be made to our services. They are at an ever-increasing risk of making mistakes in this kind of environment of the type that we’re starting to see hitting the newspapers with increasing regularity, but with every mistake, we become more risk averse, less likely to take risks by prototyping or asking big questions. Reactivity does not create space to think long-term, and it’s a vicious cycle.
Replacing austerity-era service design with scarcity-era service design
We have always lived on a planet with in some cases limited or finite resources.
This is a fact that many of in the global north are now becoming increasingly aware of due to rising costs of materials and the visibility of the impact of hundreds of years of extractive colonialism.
As we face an uncertain future where global supply chains become increasingly difficult to maintain, we will need to make increasing adaptations in order to survive, but we are - to a large extent - here because we did not think about the long-term consequences of our actions (perhaps if we’d ‘boiled the ocean’ more intellectually, we wouldn't be doing it quite so much physically) or the impact of our products and services on the communities we outsourced the bits we didn’t want to do to.
Design with this realisation of scarcity is not the same as design for austerity. Austerity demands that we solve problems now, just for ourselves and not think about the future or the wider context of our actions. But short-term local thinking does fix long-term global problems.
Scarcity is here to stay, and our approach to design with scarcity has to take a different approach. Rather than perpetually chasing the next short-term cost saving, or imediate revenue bump, we need to think about the long-term changes we need to make and work backwards from there. But how?
Take a deep breath
The world around us will become increasingly reactive, divisive, fraught and out of our control. When people have to fight for scarcer and scarcer resources, whatever those resources are we will face conflict. Conflict could readily lead to more risk aversion and the continuation of austerity-era service design. But there are some things we can do to:
Talk about design as a way of de-risking decision-making
Creating prototypes, ‘failing fast and early’, testing, and doing research with users are all ways of making sure we don't make mistakes. ‘Not making a mistake’ is technically the same as ‘doing the right thing’ but if you’re in an organisation where your negativity bias is on such high alert that your stakeholders care more about not making a mistake than they do about doing something well, then talking about design as a tool to de-risk work is going to resonate much better than design as a tool for positive change.
You can do this by looking at your team’s risk register and adding to it, talking about the negative consequences of not doing research / making improvements. Look through your work and try to reframe it to describe what bad things might happen as a consequence of not doing the things you’re suggesting.
Tip: a negativity bias can be hard to spot, but if your senior leadership team are rewarded for saying no more than yes, applying caution or there is a culture of ‘whataboutery’ your stakeholders are likely going to care more about risk than reward. Take a note of point 5, working in negative space rather than a positive mode is mentally taxing.
2. De-escalate the crisis
It is almost impossible to get an organisation to think long term when it is in crisis. Sometimes that panic is of our own creation through a lack of prioritisation, and an ever-decreasing tolerance for risk but it’s exceptionally hard to see those long term patterns when all we can think about is the next deadline.
If you’re in a position to do so, prioritise what you’re working on. If you were to do the things you're currently doing properly, with the right user research, the right number of people and the right amount of time, how many projects could you reasonably do? What does ‘doing things well’ look like for your organisation? Can you describe it? Is it different to what you’re doing now? If you had 10 years, how would you approach what you’re working on?
The unfortunate truth is that you’re likely to need to do less, but to be able to feel like we can do that, this means taking a step back and reflecting on just how urgent the things in front of us really are.
3. Make the long-term as risky as the short-term
To do this we’re going to make it clear how short-term thinking is impacting us in the long term. Find evidence that our short-term focus has sacrificed longer-term stability or growth. Is your focus on ad sales driving decreased customer account sign-ups? Is reducing the quality of our materials leading to more returns?
The short-term thinking your looking for might have been going on for a long time, so look for areas where investment hasn't been made in a long time and where nothing has been done as well as where the wrong thing has happened. What effect, for example, is not having a content designer on your website doing to the number of phone calls you’re getting of customers asking basic questions?
4. Think systematically about your technology choices
Nobody gets fired for choosing Microsoft rite?! Well, not until last month. You might go through a fair and open procurement process for your next supplier, but how many other services are reliant on that one supplier? How many of yours? Our infrastructure defines us more than we think, so if you feel like you're being kept at arm's length from those decisions, go forth and investigate your data, your storage, your CRM, find the contracts for them.
5. Look after yourself
The people who care the most are the people who burn out the fastest. Since you’ve got to the end of this post I imagine you’re more than just casual about the role of design as a way of making the world a better place…but there’s a reason why you’re told on flights to attach your own oxygen mask first. You can't help other people if you’re struggling yourself.
Only you know how to find time and space to look after yourself, but this work is not a short-term task. One thing to remember is that there is no shame in prioritising your time on things where the odds of success are higher, whether that’s a new job or just a different approach to your current work, there’s no such thing as ‘giving up’ - you’re making a choice to do something else.
Change doesn’t always have to come from within organisations, and you don't always have to be the one to do it. Are there things that it would be helpful to share as a blog post even if you can't do anything with it? Could another organisation benefit from your idea? Are there behaviours you could model? Communities you could join or form? Most importantly though, look after yourself.
What’s next?
Austerity is back baby! Was the Novara media headline a few days ago on the back of rumblings coming out of 11 Downing Street, where Rachel Reeves the new chancellor of the Exchequer sits. We don’t know exactly what’s next but in the medium term, it’s likely we’ll continue in an era of austere times after Rachel Reeves announced more public spending cuts in her Commons statement.
Can we end austerity-era service design?
How we choose to deal with it as a community this time around though, doesn’t have to be the same. We know we face uncertainty from global conflict and the outcomes of climate change. We desperately need new solutions, new ideas, and genuine transformation of business-as-usual models. In short, we need long-term thinking.
But I find myself holding onto something Rachel Coldicutt said at Town Hall 2030;
“Keeping the lights on whilst we rewire the house”
We need to work plurally. On one hand, keeping services running and doing what they need to do, as best we can, even if it requires some sticky tape whilst we make space to do the rewiring. The other side, envisioning new ways delivering the vital things we need in life, and how our services work. If you find yourself in a position to make space, pitch and influence those around you for some new thinking, take the opportunity to do it. And if you need some help, you know where we are.
For now, if you’re looking for inspiration, check out the brilliant work of the Long-Now Foundation, or this extremely soothing episode of 99% Invisible about John Cage’s 639-year-long piece of music
Images:
Images used from the Flyde Conservative Download site
Links of interest
Big Society Archive FAQ document
Why do councils go bust and what happens when they do?
‘Councils technically can't go bankrupt - but they can issue what's called a section 114 notice, where they can't commit to any new spending, and must come back with a new budget within 21 days that falls in their spending envelope.’
