How play encourages bolder outcomes in collaborative service design, with Kris Kelly-Frère

Kris Kelly-Frère is a singular individual.  When we first met at a design event, the room was filled with austere design folk in cookie-cutter black t-shirt and black jeans. Kris was the only person wearing a kimono.   You just knew that he'd have something interesting to say.

It turned out that Kris has a lot to say about the concept of Play . Especially how fostering the conditions for play helps groups to collaboratively design better and bolder solutions that are relevant for them and their stakeholders.

He's passionate about taking concepts developed for encouraging autonomous and intrinsically  motivated play in kids and applying this to service design engagements.  This very different approach, has yielded very different outcomes with materially better impact.

There are two things to note in the podcast. 

First, although we started out with the intention of following our  YAP interview framework, Kris' "natural talent for storytelling" meant that we  departed from the framework before we'd really started... and the episode is all the better for it. 

At one point a woman dresses as a bee and rides a penny farthing.  Sometimes you have to give in and go with it. 

Second, this is the first time that we've used AI to edit the episode. The results were interesting, rather than time saving. I'm sure that things will improve.

About Kris

As Creative Practice Lead for J5 Design, Kristofer Kelly-Frere makes magic serious business and wants to help you explore the edges of what seems possible. J5 is a design studio dedicated to creating a kinder, more beautiful future together in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

With more than 15 years of experience in senior design roles, Kristofer has worked across a range of public, private, and government institutions to craft experiences, lead deep engagement, found design labs, and deliver ground-breaking social impact projects. Kristofer led the team responsible for “Braver Training Grounds” - a project with Red Deer Housing Authority that won the 2022 Global Service Design Award. Success like this is the result of his love for playing in the mud of ambiguity in order to move innovative dreams across the threshold into reality.

Links & Peeps  that Kris mentioned in our podcast:

The Land.  A short film about adventure play in England/North America.  Kris said that he's  intrigued by the kinds of questions it asks if you start thinking about comparing the dynamics between the play workers and kids vs. designers and clients. And for me lets us think about the magic and messy space between design (solutions) and art (questions) that we might call play.

In the episode Kris mention some incredible folks who have influenced his  practice.

Erin Dumenko, Lisa Latouche (https://lnkd.in/gKqsjrfB), Meghan Durieux, Moraig Mc

Service Design YAP is developed and produced by the Service Design Network UK Chapter.
Its aim is to engage and connect the wider Service Design community.

• Episode Host: Stephen Wood
• Production Assistance: Jean Watanya

Transcript

Generated with AI.


Welcome to another edition of Service Design YAP. I'm your host, Stephen Wood. In this edition, we have a free-ranging conversation with Chris Kelly-Frayer, a designer whose unique background has contributed to his remarkable design practice. If you've ever struggled to co-design with groups, I guarantee that you'll steal at least one of Chris's tactics for encouraging clients to be bolder and more imaginative as they explore possibilities. This episode is the first one that we've edited with AI. While we're not entirely convinced, we felt we needed to embrace the new technology. As Chris says at the end of the podcast, maybe we just need to change our definition of perfection. Enjoy. 


Welcome to another edition of Service Design YAP. Now today we are stretching the envelope of talking to the UK community to reach out to the Commonwealth and we are talking to Chris Kelly-Frayer today who's located in Calgary in Canada. 

How are you doing Chris? I'm doing really well. It's great to chat all the way across the pond. As a wonderful thing. 


Chris is a creative leader at J5 and we met at the SDN conference last year where Chris gave an inspirational talk about the role of play within design. And I think many of us are told that it's time to put away childish things and stop playing around and get on with serious work. But one of the great takeaways from Chris's lecture was actually these two things aren't mutually contradictory. So Chris, we usually start Service Design Yap with a quick fire round. And for you, we've got a consolidated version. 


So we'll start with the first question. I'm ready. For you, was it design school or was it the school of life? You know, people ask like, well, where did you start? And the honest answer is in the tap dance studio. I was a dancer originally, but I ended up getting my masters in architecture. And I think I'm still trying to peel apart the, I don't know, the line between those two things. I'm struggling to work out whether my next question is how or why. So yeah, it's what took you into tap? Yeah, well, you know, it was probably that I was spinning around my mother's living room too much, and she's like, we need to get this kid into something. And so the dance studio down the road was the place to do that. And, you know, probably being the young queer kid, it was a nice, safe space to start to explore. But what really happened for me was that when I was about 16, I met an incredible artist named Lisa Latouche. She is from Calgary and is sort of in the process of unpacking the black diaspora and using tap dance to understand like where she's from. And she invited a bunch of us into this tap dance company called Mad Rhythms. And we had a sister company in Chicago. And so I spent good four years dancing an ungodly number of hours a week, but doing two things, learning repertoire. which is that kind of thing that you do where you learn the historic steps, you memorize the dances and you get them into your muscles. But then the other thing we did was do improv and that oscillation between like learning rep and then circling and listening and finding ways to kind of play in new modalities and stuff like that, that really shaped my brain. And I still feel like I'm jumping between the circle and the archive even today. You mentioned that you went down the road to the dance school.

 To what degree do you think that actually proximity helped you to go on that path?  Was it easy for your parents and there was easy access to this, so it was natural for you to go in that direction? 

Well, it's interesting because I think a lot about what is our frame, right? What's available to us? What does the environment around us afford? And I think sometimes, this is probably a good lesson for us as designers, is that half of the work is holding the frame and understanding what's available to you in that environment. And for sure. those early steps are about the path of least resistance, the place that feels good, that intrinsic motivation. And then later on, it kind of grows into something more. And fast forward, you end up working all of your weekends, teaching five-year-olds how to dance, which is where I learned how to facilitate, and still doing the same thing now with executives when we're talking about strategy or service design. There is a difference between the five-year-olds and the execs. There isn't, right? Everyone's human, so we tend to forget that. They just have slightly more expensive clothes to the kids these days. I think we've been talking earlier about access to design within education and that being removed and you start to think about as we start to make it more difficult for children to participate in these types of formative activities, is that going to have a long-term impact or has that vacuum just been filled with TikTok? Yeah, this is on my mind a lot. I'm lucky enough to have an eight and a half year old at home and she teaches me something new every day. the opportunities to be curious and the opportunities for people to tap into following their gut, being intrinsically motivated. Think that we are putting our kids more and more into structured worlds and there just isn't time to be bored. There isn't time to follow your intuition as much. And we owe it to ourselves and to the next generations to clear the way so that they can get back to this very... innate, very natural way of being alive. Like playing is the mother recipe. It's the secret. It's how everything learns. But I do think a lot about, for me, creativity is the outcome. It's an output. It's like the tip of the iceberg. Curiosity is the thing that's actually happening under the water. And so in terms of digital tools or making things in our family system, we tend to lean towards digital tools that are just that, they're tools. They're things that let her. assemble and notice and amplify cameras, filters. We've got a fashion mannequin in the living room behind me where she's starting to drape clothes, right? Right. Yeah, there we go. Well, but here's the, you have to, you have to, like, I don't know. I want my daughter to be able to practice being human and to try on different ways of being and to be curious about what would be different if she showed up in a different way. And I think there's a big gap. between the thinking and creativity and the aping and the broadcast. You see a lot of things that are derivative online. There are very few things that you sit down and say, oh, that's really fantastic. That actually changes my worldview. That's really been well thought through. So we got a little bit through the story of Chris and covered the tap angle. How did you go from tap to architecture? Well, it was because I didn't want to be an oncologist. Okay, we're gonna have to unpack that. Maybe that's a propologist, I don't know. No, one of those things. As a younger person, I was really curious about cities and about the world that I lived in. And I love analyzing and noticing and understanding complexity. And I was always pretty good at drawing. And so early on someone said to me, oh, maybe you could be an architect. And Later in high school, I was around a lot of folks who were doing a lot of science and didn't really listen to my own inner desires and said, well, I guess I'll follow that path. I'll go into medicine. And it just didn't work. And so I ended up doing an undergrad in urban studies and sociology. So understanding how people live, what cities are made of and what the dynamics are in them. And architecture was a natural extension of that. I ran really quick from undergrad right into grad school. But then pretty quickly found out that field is stuck in the 1950s in a lot of places. And architects suck at listening to community. They want to have this kind of master plan. And the reality is that there's so much more going on. And so in grad school, I started to mix dance and performance as a way to sort of shock the system and understand what might be possible in a place. You can imagine when you go and dance in a street or you... play in a different way in public space, it teaches you something. And so I started to explore that as an architect and pretty quickly fell into the field of science centers and museums and my career went from there. It's pretty difficult to use expressive dance to show a maquette, but talk to me about your experiences. Dance your thesis. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, you've got 5,000 words, so that's going to take you a few days to dance out. Let's talk about dancing in the street. a questionable song from the 80s, but an interesting experiment. How did that go down with the people that you met? This was a time when I didn't have the language of service design to call it user research. But what I was doing was trying to say, hey, if I want to understand what's happening in a place, I need to be an active participant maybe in that. And so we have these skyways in downtown Calgary that connect buildings and people walk from one building to the other when it's cold outside. one time for a project, we were like, well, what's public, what's private, who owns this space? And one of the fastest ways to get that answer is to play tango music. And you will very quickly discover the power dynamics present in that space and what is allowed and what isn't and who you need to be friends with. And all of those are great inputs to a design project. Fantastic. Provocation. I remember it's probably in the nineties when they were starting to talk about the removal of public spaces within towns, working out what was actually private or what was public. It became very, very blurred. And you started to see things like evil design, where you have benches with arms in the middle and no sleep, bumps put near hot air vents that actually shows, well, this is a private area and it's no longer a public area. So it's a really fascinating topic. And I think often people don't realize how little. public space there is in urban areas that has a massive impact on those that are disenfranchised. And I think it's a really interesting question. Sometimes I've heard people say that design is about solutions and art is about questions. And I think that the really powerful work happens at the intersection of those. And sometimes we need to do things that allow us to question what is possible, not just provide a solution to a problem that we think we understand. we call these pedways in Calgary, is a way to provoke, to ask a question. And it lets you do it in a way that people think they might stop. They might not say no right away because they like the, their hips are wiggling or I don't know. I think we forget that we're human, like you said at the beginning. And was this done during rush hour? Cause I just love to see a video of a tango in an elevated tower between buildings with everyone else's bell and desperate to get to work. There's not a ton of video of that one, but if you dig deep enough, there, there is footage of me somewhere tap dancing on a sidewalk with someone dressed as a bumblebee. Okay. It was a community place making project, trying to understand how we could get neighbors to talk to each other. And so I had some wonderful colleagues who held space. in an abandoned building and made tea every day and said, whoever wants to come in can. And if you want to run a program, we'll help you. And one of those programs was Dancing in the Street. You know, it's funny, I haven't talked about this for years, but I realize it's still informing my practice today. And the bee. Tell us about the bee. Where does that factor in? Oh, well, an incredible artist named Jamie T. You know, you need people to do this kind of work. You need people who make you feel brave. and you want to make other people feel brave. And Jamie is one of those artists who just is great at shifting the frame. And so she rode up, and I'm not kidding you, she rode up this massive hill to the place where we were tap dancing on a penny farthing bike, dressed as a bumblebee with aviator goggles. What that did, if you picture that, she's tap dancing on the street, it shifted the frame so that someone who maybe never thought they would tap dance on a street put on a pair of shoes that we had, and they're like, well, at least I'm not a bumblebee. I'm not that bonkers. And I think that that's a really important thing in trying to make good change in the world. Sometimes you need to sort of hold a bigger space. It just sounds like a prompt you put into Mid Journey. Bumblebee on Penny Farthing, airing aviated goggles. And it was like, no, that's improbable. It probably would break the AI. And I think, you know, in the talk that you mentioned in Berlin that I was a part of, I talked a little bit about the field of play work. and this idea that there are practitioners whose job it is to help other people play. And play has a pretty broad definition, but one of the things that a playworker does is they hold the frame. They create opportunities that afford other people to step in. And sometimes that means like leaving the pencil crayons on the table or drawing a really crappy drawing or doing something like that as this kind of cue that other people can then respond back to. Right. It's like smiling at a baby. When they smile back at you, you suddenly have a volley. You have this serve and return and that is the magic cycle. If you put something on a table, you're opening the door and it's almost like a permission giving a granting for you to do something. And you talked about people who were there to enable play. Do you think that play is something that is not natural for many people? Or is it something that's been socially restricted? I think it's something that capitalism. pushes back on, something that hierarchy pushes back on, I think it is an innate process. The UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child has this definition of play, and they say, play is intrinsically motivated, freely chosen, and personally directed. And it is the way that we learn to understand how to behave in an environment. It's asking, so what, now what. It's trying something and getting feedback and trying it again. And so I think if we strip away the kind of primary colors that come with play or the Lego, which is also a great tool, but you strip that away, it's deeply human. But we definitely live in a world that says, if it's not serious, it's not valuable. And if you have a hard time measuring it, it's not worth doing. Absolutely. We seem to be in a very quantifiable world, which drives you into an educational paradigm where actually how easy it is to mark and measure actually dictates the way that children are taught. So if you think about exams, especially in the UK, a lot of it, even when you get up to A level, before you get up into the university level, the majority of it is around retention. What have you remembered? Very little of it is around critical thinking. And it's like, hmm, okay. So when you get into the work environment, the thing that you've spent decades of your life learning, you know, hey, I can conjugate a verb in Latin, but yeah, that's not really gonna be. much use if you're facing a problem, you flick to the back of the book, there is no answer there. I love the Ken Robinson Ted lecture where he talks about the paradigms for education being geared towards an industrial society and us being past that, but education has not moved on. Well, something I've observed in a lot of studios right now is that the next generations of designers are coming into the workplace actually really ready to collaborate. really ready to work in groups, really ready to be sort of inquiry based. But then we also still have these old stories about like, what does work look like? What does school look like? And you know, the younger grades are definitely more, at least in Canada, are often more exploratory and inquiry based. But sure, when you get up into high school or university, it becomes that really structured form. experiential based learning where you're in the early grades and you know, there are lots of kids outside. We have forest school in some schools where you can go out and get really hands on. And then the moment you hit 11, you go into a school that looks like something from the 1950s. You have a desk with a number, you sit down, you shut up, and then you get on with this task of listening, remembering, and regurgitating. It's weird. It's as if we expect over a summer holiday, people's mental models of what it is to engage with the education system. actually changes. So I'm kind of obsessed with this idea of complexity compliance right now. And the fact that so many of the tools and processes we have, whether they're like what we're learning in school or what we're using as designers, actually aren't fit for purpose in a complex and ambiguous and messy world. But it's those earlier things that we learned, the being curious, getting a little messy, trying something before you're ready. Those are the the mess that we're in. I'm a big fan of the story about the physicist, Izzy Rabbi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize. And when he got up on stage to accept his award, they said, oh, have you got a speech? He said, no, I just want to thank my mother. I went, okay. He said, no, because every day when I came back from school, she said, did you ask any good questions? I said, because all the other kids, their mothers would ask, did you give any good answers? And my mother worked out that actually, yeah, you can give an answer by remembering. But if you're actually engaging with the topic and you're thinking about, so what's next? So what does this mean? You ask a question. And I think at the moment, the education system, to an extent, even when you get into design school can often be around, can you remember the right answer? Or looking at the news at the moment, have your citations been quoted in the right format so that you're actually paying your dues to those who've come before, rather than focusing on, hey, what were the great ideas that you had in your PhD thesis? Yeah, like 100% and we're still chasing those moments of genius designer thing. Look at how wickedly smart and clever I am in my design. And sure, maybe we want those once in a while, but the most of the work that needs to be done in our world right now has to come from collective understanding. It's not going to be one blinding moment of genius. It's going to come from those small experiments and working together and playing together. So that beautifully segues into the second question in our quickfire round. We like to ask our guests whether they believe that the designer as genius, as person of vision, or as someone who is able to collect and gain insight and design with data is the approach that generates the best solutions. What's your take, Chris? Well, you know, that faster horses quote that often comes up here, I think is missing something because we expect people to imagine a future with a pencil box from the past. And I think part of what we have to do is offer folks raw material to dream about what's possible. How would they think of something else if they've only ever seen horses? Part of our role as designers is to give them the raw material to also be a part of the dreaming. And I think that's where it can't just be a moment of pure genius by the designer, because you're missing out on the wisdom that a community or someone who's not a designer might have that can contribute. And I think we're still in an age where we worship and handsomely pay those who set themselves out as the single point of vision, the design genius, unfortunately. But then if you come back and especially if you look at those people who are working in the social realm, I think there's more of a movement for the designers to become catalyst rather than hero. It's yet to really filter into the corporate world to the same extent that it has in the public sector. One of the disservices we're still doing in design school is we're not spending enough time with community and recognizing that it's also really nerve wracking to be outside of the studio and on the street. And I think that's where, you know, if we're gonna take it back to the tango or to the tap dance is that being on a stage or dancing with other people or improv-ing with them, you kind of have to practice the muscle of leveling the playing field and getting out the door and knowing what it's gonna feel like to be uncomfortable. and not just saying those words when we write down some sort of manifesto about our facilitation practice on the wall. Like get uncomfortable. It's like, what does that actually mean? How are you practicing that? And you know, wearing a ridiculous hat and walking down the street could be one way you build that muscle. Yeah. And there are very few barriers to actually doing that. You don't need huge amounts of money. I think it probably works quite well for those who are extroverted, but yeah. Or who have power and privilege. Yeah, absolutely. There's a piece of that too. or people who are very good at running. So if you fit into all of those categories, it's probably great. But have you come across any techniques that would help those who maybe would see themselves as more of an introvert? How could you encourage them to start to engage with community? Well, there's a couple things. I think practicing having conversations is a really important piece of just being alive and being human. I think... Practicing having conversations that don't have a purpose, learning again how to sit down and have tea and to really just listen and be curious with someone is one way. Another one that I'll offer that's not directly related to engaging with community, but I think most of us have access to is thinking about what you wear. And I was talking to some students a couple days ago, I invited them. or I challenge them every day to wear something that made them feel like themselves. It doesn't have to be big and it doesn't even have to be something that someone else notices, right? It doesn't have to be a cloak or a cape or a kimono. It could be a ring or a pair of socks. But by doing that and reflecting a little bit on who am I today, who do I want to show up as, you start to, I don't know, you start to build that muscle and you can use that to recognize... when other people are doing it too and connect authentically around that. So those are two ideas I'd have. The other is to take an improv class. If you haven't theater and improv are a great way in, and there are a ton of different kinds of courses and ways to try that. Yeah. Those are a few. Small talk is always something that introverts is always a dreadful thing. If you stop. building up by thinking about, okay, what are nice open questions that are not going to offend anyone and just open the door, ask the questions to your feet, then look at their feet when you're asking the questions, then gradually work your way up to having a face-to-face conversation. It can become a slightly easier conversation. I think as designers, we have to be able to ask questions, but then listen. It's not around you being a sage on the stage and setting out what you think. about asking maybe that one question that uncorks the people that you're working with and enables them to flow. Because you get more information by listening than you do from talking. And I think, you know, it is also possible to do it with things and with making and with our hands. And, you know, my favorite flip in small talk is instead of asking, well, what do you do? You can ask someone, what do you like to do? And that tiny word, that tiny word, like. can be a magical door opener because it takes it away from work. It takes it away from the answer they think they're supposed to give you and opens up all these possibilities. And that's another thing that prototypes can do is a prototype can show you. What does someone want to do? Yeah. I think one of my favorite questions that I've seen asked in prototype testing sessions is what would you like it to be? I say, Oh, what's this? Well, what would you like it to be? What could it be? And hopefully, you know, the prototype is. concrete enough for people to be thinking in the right sort of direction, but they will then give you ideas about how it could be used that you will never have come up with. And that's again, a way where you recognize the mouth to ear ratio, which is always good in designers. Tell me what you think about this, Stephen. What if we put the prototypes in the first diamond, right? And this is something that happened when I was working in science centers, a traditional model of making exhibits is you have a list of 10 things you want to teach people about water. And then you try to create experiences that make them learn those 10 things. But it's that old version of school, right? It's this kind of forced experience. What if instead you started by trying to create experiences that just made people lean in, right? You know, it's an open-ended thing. Like it's water running through sand, like in the back alley, you know, and suddenly you see kids have spent eight days playing with the trickle of water running through the dirt and instead of trying to tell them the 10 facts. we listen to the questions that they asked while they were playing. So if you start with an intrinsically motivated experience that people wanna do, a service that people want to engage with, they really wanna take this thing apart. They really wanna share a secret. They really wanna ask a question. They really wanna look closer. I think that's another way into the same kind of piece. And I think sometimes we keep prototypes too late in our process. And if we played with them earlier, maybe we might find more value. design double diamond, uh, whispering the words heresy at this moment, Chris, but prototype first, let's call it a provocotype. So if it helps us to fresh question, because no one goes into a design engagement with a completely blank sheet of paper is like at some point, you know, okay, I think there's an opportunity in this area. How can we start to gather data around? this opportunity could be, what the dimensions are of the opportunity space. And you could have provocotypes in there that help you to suddenly work out that there are certain areas that are richer than others. And I'm always keen on trying to find ways to create that grit in the oyster that helps you to go, wow, actually, yes. And if suddenly you find that the grit in the oyster has turned into the sand and the Vaseline, it just means that some things get ruled out. It's just that that's not the way to go. Oh, I love that. I don't know if you just made up the term provocatite, but I'm stealing it. It's something that I would be strung up for if I click. Yes. That's mine. I made that on the spot. You can read my book coming out in the spring, provocatipes and everything. But that question that, you know, these things, they teach you something about the problem. They teach you maybe something about your solution. They teach you something about the system and they teach you something about yourself. And if we come back to the tango that experiment does all those things. This is great. I'm just going to, I'm not going to let that one go. It's going to be the name of your autobiography, isn't it? Tango in the street. There we go. I think as service designers, and especially people who work in a predominantly digital area, we tend to shy away from creating physical things. Even prototypes, we talked about maquettes from an architectural perspective. And I think one of the really interesting things that I saw at a very early stage in the design engagement was. Do you remember as a kid, you had those little paper, like triangle things that you could have, be red, blue, green, yellow, and then someone would choose it and you could open it again. And one of their design headsets, Sequoia Capital, brought in one that had poke and stoke on it. So you could choose whether you wanted someone to give you more of a questioning critique or some encouragement to build on your ideas. And that helped with that ideation, but it was just a physical thing. And it was a moment of joy in the room when they were brought out because everyone was nostalgic. And it also showed that, Hey, this is a moment of play. This isn't a, well, actually we're half the way through the process. We've got budget, we've got senior approval. And this was actually, we're sitting in the stages where we're in the world of not make believe or let's pretend, but you know, everything's on the table. So that was my favorite little, wherever design prop, the now prompt or a provocotype. What else have you seen that works really well? at that first stage in the diamond. And people talk about icebreakers as this like thing that are going to be about getting people ready to do the activity, but they're often also a really powerful tool to help you understand whether or not that system is ready to learn, right? Is it in a place where it can actually respond and be creative and be excited? And you can use that as a facilitator to try to help understand what the next step is going to be. I love adding in a bit of competition into the beginning of these explorations and often use a kind of this game where you create two teams because people immediately, once there's a team, they, you know, it's probably a good and a bad habit of being human, but they sort of up the stakes themselves. We're on the red team, you're on the blue team, we want to win, we're going to ask better questions, we're going to try to reflect on our learning in different ways. But anyway, give these teams small challenges too. learn each other's names, learn each other's favorite fruits, learn each other, like all these facts about each other, and then perform them physically. And the team that can learn them all and perform them physically the fastest wins. And what it does is it wakes up all of our neurons that are running through our entire body. So I think that's a fun and fast way to get going. The other is to do physical brainstorming. So asking people to build their ideas instead of draw or talk about them. and to do that with as much miscellaneous nonsense as you can. So, you know, expanding the tickle trunk of stuff from the dollar store, but also bringing in bigger props that have some nostalgia, like you said, like typewriters and other materials. You really need to understand what a tickle trunk is. What is a tickle trunk? Okay, maybe this is like a Canadian thing. It's the idea of like a trunk that is full of costumes and materials and strange objects. don't really have, they're like loose parts, random things that are beyond a fancy dress. You can use to actually, it's, it's a lot more eclectic. Yeah. And I think my friend, Aaron Domenco uses this term, miscellaneous nonsense. And as she assembles materials for a tickle truck that you're going to use in kind of physical brainstorming and to be good miscellaneous nonsense, you have to really good miscellaneous nonsense. People want to steal. and they can't explain why. It's like, why do I want to take that cowbell home? It's like your hotel's got really good toiletries when they keep going missing and they go into people's luggage. If people want to steal it, it's a great thing. No one steals it. Yeah. And that's what all the materials we bring to workshops should feel like. Yeah. That's a bit of a challenge. So what's the thing that gets stolen from your tickle Well, you know, it's funny because this is back to we're all still six year olds in adult clothing. It ends up being like the gems and the jewels. People pop them in their pockets and like wander away. Yeah. Or a really good marker, a really good pen. People steal those all the time. And I once had a tiny accordion go missing and then find its way back to my studio months later as of sheepishly being returned. You've got people listening to this going, yeah, I go into workshops with Post-it notes and Sharpies. The Sharpies always get stolen, but yeah. And not jewels typewriters and miniature accordions. Could you tell us just a little bit about how the miniature accordion was factored into one of these icebreakers? Well, I'm gonna actually sidestep that question and say, I think sometimes there is another side to this, which is instead of having absolutely beautiful and magical materials. you use the stuff that's around you. So you flip the tables in the room upside down, you turn the chairs on their sides, you pull the books out of the shelves and you say, this is the stuff we're gonna make our prototypes out of. And then what you add to it are good adhesives, so tape. And maybe one or two unexpected items like that miniature accordion. Often when I'm asking a group to sort of move through a design process or go through some prototyping, It's adding the special material halfway through that can really break open their imaginations. And so the miniature accordion, for example, comes in when you're having a group talk about a cancer diagnosis pathway, and they're in the process of talking through, how are we going to connect these digital service providers to this biopsy program? And they're sketching it out. And then you ask them, what if music was involved? And you hand them the accordion. And they start instead having a conversation about the time where people are waiting on the phone and what are they listening to or talking about what does it mean to smile during the process? So it's not always linear involvement, but it's definitely a way to push people to be curious and to respond. So you've taken a Dadaist approach to design here. I know it's going to be a lot more abstract than the approaches that most people take for ideation. But have you found that the participants in these sessions react? well, or do you have to tee up the fact that you're going to be a bit more abstract in your ideation approach? You absolutely have to build it up, but I think you can go faster than you think. In my experience, people are more ready for this than they know. The other thing that I would offer in, when I'm thinking about play, I actually kind of draw a two by two quadrant in my head and one end of the axis is structure and the other is unstructured. And then you have intrinsically motivated and extrinsically motivated. and many design activities are structured and extrinsically motivated. They're very much like a soccer game, right? There's a coach who's telling you what to do, there are rules and there's a way to win, right? Like I fill in these eight spots on a piece of paper and I come up with ideas and I've won. And so that's one kind of play or design activity, but there is another quadrant, which is intrinsic motivation and unstructured. It is very hard to access as consultants or as designers. But if you can think about Is there any way for me to take the exercise I'm gonna do and make it a little bit less structured? Can it have less rules? Is there any way that I can move this from me telling them what to do to them choosing how to do this? You end up in that other quadrant or moving towards it at least. And I think we see a lot of language around co-design asking these same questions. And it's more about putting your finger up in the wind and saying, which way am I moving right now? Am I moving as a facilitator towards taking control or am I giving it over? Are they deciding or am I? And that's sort of what I would encourage people to think about. And that means rethinking the materials we bring, it means rethinking the kind of templates that we use, and it also means rethinking the way we cost and structure design processes. I think that's one of the tensions that often drives our movement back towards, okay, I know that I can do this workshop in this many minutes, and we're gonna have some kind of success, but I don't know if it really is what the world needs in terms of... responsive, connected, co-created work. Does the intrinsic, extrinsic divide kind of map onto, there was a quote from Rick Rubin where he talked about when he creates something, he always creates it, not for the audience, but he does something for himself that he's really passionate about because he knows that if he is 100% invested in it, he's going to develop something that is really of great quality. And actually, by-product will be something that everyone else will benefit from as well. Is that what you're talking about when it comes to intrinsic play? That's a piece of it. And it's, it's around intrinsic motivation. So it's like, is this idea coming from something that is tied to things they can't explain? And I think this is a real tension that we're starting to explore inside design practice and in service design and co-design processes where letting the user really drive the process. means that we're not always going to understand what they're saying. So Chris, could you give me an example of where you've worked in a workshop with a participant and their intrinsic flow has made them come up with a suggestion that you have problems contextualizing? Yeah, this is maybe not the example you would think, but it makes me think about what happens when you let the client or the system play the way they really want to play. I had the privilege pre-diagnosis cancer pathway, working inside of a big complex health system. And we kept trying to get the system to do the design exercises, to do the service design, the journey mapping, the personas, all of that work. And yeah, we did it and we got some good information. But the way this system really wanted to play, like its intrinsically motivated drive, was to create very rigorous flow diagrams. These like MS, I can't remember what software it is, but just like. Yeah, Vizio, right? Like very technical flow diagrams. And then they wanted to run over them, run them through everyone that they knew and add to them. And it was this like hyper structured thing. Or it felt to us like this hyper structured thing, but it was the love language of the system. And once we let this health system do what it wanted to, alongside our way of thinking as service designers, some real magic happened. And the specific change that we weren't expecting was that The project had started off with a bunch of leaders saying, this project will have failed if our answer is system navigators, because we don't want system navigators. But by the end of it, they had literally drawn their own map that said, oh my gosh, all these kind of side loops. One of the doctors called it a collateral artery. That was very medical. Using their own language. Yeah, all of these bypasses that they flow mapped themselves weren't a weakness, they were a strength. They were actually a quality of the system that meant that if something went wrong in one part, there was a backup. And so their view completely changed and ours did too. We actually wouldn't have seen the collateral arteries, these, all these bypasses that existed in the health system if we had forced them to play our way, if we had forced them to just live in the blueprints and the journey maps. So I think that's kind of an interesting example about like finding out how does the group you're working with want to play, what's their love language. Visio and the idea of actually we're talking about less service design more almost the BA. How do I map? What's there? I Started to think this was going to turn into something that was relatively dry but then you said that everyone came along and added to it and it just reminded me of like when kids tell stories and they're making things up and There's almost like a shared authorship. Oh, yeah And and another thing and this and that and so with this shared ownership you actually end up with something that is surprising and delightful and imaginative. They literally got into a flow state with Vizio. It's a sad thing, but to each their own. But it's what it needed. And I think that like the joy of being a play worker in that sense is like holding the frame so that the people can move into flow. And it's a cycle, right? And you can't stay in that flow forever. Like playwork, they have ways of mapping it. Say like a queue is offered, people respond to it. And there's this term that sometimes you actually adulterate the play. And that's where an adult comes in and, you know, tell someone, oh, you're doing this and it just falls apart. Adulterate. I love the fact that we can do that too as designers. Well, isn't it a great word? This is the idea of a play worker. And if you think about designer and maybe that's got a capital D and a play worker, that's, that's a very different concept. Where did the term play worker come from? It's a UK concept. There's actually play workers working in the UK. They're the people that run the adventure playgrounds. And so for our listeners who haven't seen it, an adventure playground is a playground that doesn't have any equipment in it. It's full of two by fours and mud and junk. And the play worker's job is to create the play frame, offer play cues and get out of the way. And then when no one's looking, their role is also to help people who are there to play risk and avoid hazards. So a risk is a challenge that you choose to take on, right? So I wanna climb up into that tree. The hazard is the branch that has a crack in it that you can't see. And the play worker's job isn't to take away risks, it's to manage hazards. And I think that inside of our design processes, that's actually one of our challenges too, right? Because risk is where we grow, it's where we come up with new ideas, it's how we change. providing cues. My mind always thinks about bias and leading the witness. What would be an ideal format for a cue? So a cue is paired with an idea of this thing we call affordance. If you think about a chess game, I'm learning to play chess with my daughter right now. And some pieces on the chessboard really only move one way, right? Like a pawn doesn't have a ton of variables that it can access. Whereas the queen can move in all of these different directions. There are materials and processes that we offer our clients that afford a lot of different choice and others that are much more structured. So I do a lot of healthcare work and I'm working on a clinic consolidation project. So we have a healthcare provider that had seven separate clinics and they're all moving into one space and they're trying to design this space. We could have brought them together to argue about what paint color the walls need to be. That doesn't have a lot of affordance as a cue, right? Like I put down paint chips on the table. Those don't have a bunch of affordance, but instead we're asking them, what are the ingredients to a good visit? What are the design principles that need to be underneath the paint color choice? And so that as a provocation has more affordance. It's a better cue. In the adventure playground, handing someone a shovel is a powerful thing. You don't tell them to go dig a hole, you hand them the shovel. Great. It's not a verbal cue. It's something that triggers an action. Oh yeah, usually like the cue is in the physical environment. Another way to offer a cue is to highlight something. So if someone does a drawing or your kid does a drawing and they just leave it on the table, it's very different when you put it in a frame or when you put a spotlight on it, or you move it into the open. Sometimes just positioning something, like whether it's conceptually or physically can be a way to offer a cue. It lets someone see it in a new light, hang it upside down, turn it. in, you know, cut it in half. Cutting your child's drawing in half typically cues some negative feedback, I would hazard a guess. Oh, in my head I'm thinking about like a tie. Oh yeah, that's, I was just still stuck on the kids drawing. It's like, yeah, okay. I can just hear the tears hitting the snow in Calgary now. My dad cropped my drawing in half. Oh, I think we've all been the victim of indelicate cropping at some time, but there we go. So Chris, we've talked a little bit about intrinsic motivation. but one of the other elements of play that you talked about was free choice. And how does that play out and how can we relate that to using play in our design process? I think it's an interesting challenge because sometimes design projects are already so far down the road that the free choice piece is more challenging. And I think good design research does kind of embrace this in a sense in that it, it helps people talk about not what color bench do you want to sit on and what shape should it be, but what do you want to do in this space? And I think that when we engage authentically with a community, when we start with a kind of strong relationship, we're able to have those risky conversations where people talk about what they actually want or need or want to do. And that supports, I think, that free choice element. I also wonder, too, when we are... setting up a design project, if we stick too tightly to practices and methods, we remove the ability for ourselves as designers to have some free choice and flexibility in terms of what is the next step here. Those are some of the pieces that I think about there a little bit too. And it's hard, right? So much of being a designer is about removing options, moving towards that funnel. And it's risky for our clients. to go the other direction. Creating options, making choices, it all comes back to the diamond. So we've talked about limitation of choices at the later stages of the design process. And we've talked about play as something that helps to free people to be more creative. How do you encourage people to be bold, to actually be more imaginative in the way they approach the problem space and define solutions? One of the roles that we can play as designers is to be good friends with the people that we're working with. And what I mean by that is that if you had to go do something scary, you know, if you had to go do something that you didn't feel ready to do, having someone hold your hand or walk with you can be a really powerful thing. We were working on a project with a housing provider and they had a lot of back office staff that sort of support, I think in the UK it's called council housing, it's social housing in Canada. you know, hundreds of units in the small city that they were located in. But many of the staff had never actually talked to the people who lived in their buildings. They're running the numbers, they're approving the spreadsheets, but they never had any FaceTime with them. And so our role was to pack up. a fire pit, like a gas fire pit into the back of a car, buy a Costco bag full of marshmallows, and take the finance staff out into the community and sit with the people that they were serving and start to talk, start to get to know them. And by doing it with them, it helped them feel more brave and it helped them be more connected. And they told us, I never could have done this on my own. I needed someone to be here, but now I feel more comfortable. And so I think that's part of what we can do to make that kind of difference. We always talk about human centered design. And when you actually talk about, okay, well, where's the data coming from? And it's like, well, you know, we've got a firm to do a quantitative survey and we're using that as, oh, okay. Right. And when was the last time you actually spoke to a customer? Often the people making the decisions of signing off the budget have not spoken to sort of an end user. in years. I know there are some companies that I didn't work with a financial services company. I got a lift back to my hotel from one of their execs and they played some of the calls for the day. Every day they were given 10 calls to listen to. So they could hear the experience that their frontline staff were having with their customers and hear the stories the customers were telling so that they didn't get to abstract it from the reality of that customer interface. But very few firms tend to do that as a ritual within their culture. Yeah. I'll spend one day in the call center every year, but for the rest of my working life, I'm up in the boardroom getting tea made for me and decided who gets budget and who doesn't, it seems a very odd approach. Yeah. And like, I think I can connect that back to some of these questions around play in terms of being unstructured data into the conversation can be a really powerful thing, bringing the raw voices. of folks into boardroom meetings or into briefings, creating those moments where it's not as controlled. It can be a way for us to make a new kind of meaning and a new kind of connection. Yeah, but I think people tend to shy away from the qualitative research. Often when you bring in that story or something that's come from qual, people say, well, that's great, but it could be an outlier. And they say, well, how many qualitative surveys have you done? Actually, is that statistically viable? and then they have problems getting their head around the fact that actually, if you're asking the right sort of questions and you've got the right sort of customer set lined up, actually a small number of qualitative interviews can generate fantastic insight that could be universal. Oh, absolutely. And this is where I think we need to be better friends with traditional research because that's how you can learn to manage the hazards of user research. Some of my most powerful experiences in writing ethics applications with people who are really good at it. And I used to think that was going to get in the way of playing or prototyping or doing all of that. But instead, you know, there are incredible fields of qualitative research and methods that I think we can learn a lot from. I think there was one project you shared that drew me that was called Fire Pit Fridays. Was that the housing example? I was working on a public health research project about using risky play, messy play, in the suburbs of Canadian cities to try to get people to be less sedentary. And so what we were hoping to do was to build these adventure playgrounds in the suburbs. But it turns out it's actually very hard to get the buy-in from the communities to say yes to that. And so I had a brilliant colleague named Morag who said, well, if they're not ready to say yes, I'm just going to show up. And so she showed up every Friday with a fire pit without fail in the different sites where we wanted to eventually build these play hubs and offered marshmallows. It's kind of where he borrowed it from that other project. And it was a beautiful example of using a playful gesture to create a pattern. And the fact that Morag would show up every Friday meant that the community could start to rely on there being other people to hang out with. And eventually those fire pit Fridays turned into programmed Fridays where we drop off a pile of loose parts. And then eventually the community would say yes to a shipping container that we would put in the park and a permanent program. And so it was this idea of kind of using almost a systemic lens to think through what are the events I'm going to host that can turn into patterns that eventually allow us to build structures and change people's minds. It sounds a lot like when you talk about how culture's formed, you talk about rituals, sagas and heroes and fire pit Friday sounds like one of those rituals. And it starts to create that foundation for a new culture that would be, let's say less concerned about having a shipping container on the outskirts of the suburbs. I think there's a lot of nimbism that would just rule that out because it sounds as if it's going to be noisy, messy and may impact on house prices. But if you start establishing the, well actually there are things we could do and There are different ways in which this could evolve. Doesn't necessarily have to be one size fits all. We can see what's right for your community and also what's going to be viable for your community to run itself. It could be disastrous to sort of dump something off in the middle of a community, expecting that someone is going to be there and provide oversight. The way you described the play workers helping to structure the play in the UK example. I think that's a really great way to dip a toe in the water. and create the first steps towards putting in something that's a big change for a community. I think it's exactly that. This is the bridge between service design and systems thinking. I love this idea. You said playful rituals. In my head, I'm adding our complexity compliant. Complexity compliance. This idea that we need more playful rituals that work at a fractal and small scale to into the designs that we need. I think a lot of companies would describe their culture as ones that were not open to innovation. And just starting with these rituals that helped to provide a foundation for more imaginative interaction. First of all, it helps you with the innovation agenda, but also all those companies that say, yeah, our most important assets are our humans. Well, actually this gives you a way for humans to come and interact and be people together. You're ticking two boxes for the price of one. But again, I think you're probably going to come across the conceptual barrier of this not being serious. And you've got like the Lego brand of serious play, which kind of confronts that mental model of, well, actually there's play in this serious business. And we've seen the demise of corporate innovation labs. as budgets of time. So I think we're always going to have to try and address that tension between is it going to lead to real commercial outcomes and will it signify that I am a serious player in this business? That's one of those buzzwords that comes up. People get obsessed or excited about, let's design rituals. And I don't think that you can always pick the winners in advance. I think some of these things like the fire pit Fridays, or I ran a municipal innovation lab for a few years inside the city of Calgary. with a number of other brilliant folks. And one of our most powerful rituals ended up being this morning reading club we called Mug Club. It was inspired by the work of another designer who had brought it to the science center, Megan Durio, and we sent out an article, said I'm making coffee because I miss talking about exciting things and I wanted to see who would show up. And for the first few weeks we had six people. And then by the time I left the city, there were 400 people on the mailing list and the city manager read the article every week. And we couldn't pick that ritual. We had to let it grow. And so I think this is some of that work that doesn't fit into your sow. It's as a designer, we need to watch for those rituals as they're starting to grow. We also need to let them grow in the direction that is easiest for them. It's like you might sort of actually have done this in another project, another company works incredibly well, but you're coming into a different culture. You're working with different people and actually it might evolve to be completely unrecognizable. But if it becomes something that is, Oh, that's something that we always do. I was like, oh, great, okay. So first of all, you've got, we always do it. So it's a ritual and people are using the we. And it's like, ah, fantastic. So there's some form of bonding. People are coming together to achieve something, but it's really easy to say, yeah, we're gonna put a football table in the old basement. That will make us a really innovative company. And I was like, okay, it's more difficult. And that's where we're back to, is it intrinsically motivated or extrinsically directed? Is it structured or unstructured? And thinking about those really powerful rituals start in that other place in the intrinsic motivation. Calgary is on this like tipping point between three ecosystems. And if you add water, very different things start to happen. You either get a forest or you get berry or you get the badlands, these kind of hoodoos or a canyon. And they're all hyper complex, but they're very different. And they depend on how you add water or take care of the soil. But if you live in some place like a coastal rainforest, you can't really shift that system as much. And so you're not as sensitive to it. And I think that spending time in tipping points in edge conditions for designers can help them build the muscles to notice those rituals, to be playful in different ways and to be good friends on the road to things that are trying to grow. Can you give me an example of where you've seen in a business context, the signals of a tipping point? So in that cancer diagnosis project, it was really interesting to watch what happened when we started to bring, you know, it's funny you brought up that listening to the calls. We started to bring raw audio from our user interviews. We're talking to people, cancer patients, talking about their experience. And we started to open our weekly meetings with just listening to a chunk of the audio from the week before. the executives who are used to handling these like billion dollar healthcare budgets, start to talk about individuals and start to wrestle with the complexity of we need to build a system that works for everyone, but we also need to work for the outliers. And you could watch them ask different kinds of questions. And that was, I think, a great example for us about that tipping point starting to come towards us and making time inside the meetings for those. that was emerging. Yeah, I always remember there's a story about Laughley at P&G who saw that all of his execs were spending 99% of their time either in the office or at some country club. And he said, okay, we're going to go down. And I think they went to China to watch people using their product to wash clothes. So they actually went down to a river and actually there was so divorced from the actuality of how their product was used by the customers, their minds were blown. And it was a similar thing where they looked at the design of soap boxes. where they suddenly saw everyone using a screwdriver to get into the soap box. And they said, why are you using a screwdriver? I said, well, you know, the way it's done now with the perforations, it's so thick, I'm gonna break my nails. I was like, oh, right, okay, fantastic. So for that demographic, the people who probably spent quite a lot on their nails, this was a design problem they'd never really encountered because they were so focused on focus group outputs, spreadsheets, Excel sheets. and just asking people, how do we increase our margin? How do we increase our top line? Independent of what function you sit in, the benefit of spending that regular time with the people that are giving you money, that are fueling your business, is invaluable. And I think one of the unsung skills that all designers need to be good at is to be able to throw a good party. Okay. I'll explain that a little bit more, but like one of the things that people say about J5, is that they really love the experience of working with our designers. And part of why that happens is because we take the time to make sure that there is a cup of tea out, that there is good food to eat, that we're in an interesting place when we need to talk, that the seating is comfortable. Like, these are all the things that you just like kind of, you know, you've grown up around people who know how to host. That's really important. Because the magic comes after that. You can't decide in advance that the party is gonna be good, but you can make sure that some of those like core factors are present. How do we create the conditions for success? What are the things that are gonna give us direction, but also flexibility? Should suddenly we find that maybe everyone is fashionably late? Yeah. Or can we see if we think that the party is dying, how can we flex to try and change the dynamics? People get value from their interaction. Although that's a terrible way to describe a party. And even the biggest CEOs get hungry or the, the community member that's coming into a workshop wants a comfortable place to sit. Absolutely. If you can get the basics done, but also you can use it to create prompts, to make people think of things that are out of the ordinary. So how could you potentially, Tango music is one maybe providing cricket based snacks for the CEO when you're talking about climate crisis and helping them to think beyond just. ESG reporting. So what does this make you think of? Well, maybe they've never had cricket protein based snacks. Yeah, it's a great way to start a meeting with almost a question. It comes back to your very first statement around asking the right question, providing the right cues is the secret to actually getting a great design engagement. 

So Chris, we always end services on the app by asking what was the question you wish we'd asked that we haven't? I wish you would ask me the question about how my dog relates to design. I have a dog who is reactive, you know, he gets really frustrated by the world around him. And a thing that opened my eyes and made me understand play and design more deeply was actually this idea that the fragile social back and forth that you can have with a pup, you know, where you're just like kind of playing gently with them is a really powerful indicator about whether or not their nervous system. is in a place where they can heal and learn. And I picture myself in a field with my dog all the time when I'm kind of back at work, because my pup might be trying to learn how to be okay when there's something scary nearby, like a big loud car or another dog. Everything seems so simple when I'm playing with him. And this idea that just by the act of being together, by exploring the world, he can become braver and I can support him, makes me realize I don't have to make things so complicated sometimes when I'm back at the office or when I'm trying to parent or do something like that. And so maybe the actual question I wish you asked me was, where else can we learn in our lives or where else are we learning? And that's what I would have said to you. I'd like to ask whether you're going to be in Helsinki for the global services eyeing conference in October. I am planning to that's the, that's the plan right now. We will tango in Helsinki. That sounds wonderful, Steven. Thank you so much. Have a great day, Chris. I Service Design Yapp is a production from the Service Design Network UK chapter. It's hosted by me, Stephen Wood, with production assistance from Gene Wotania. Music is by Ducker Stats.