How Service Design Can Transform Vegan Businesses
Service Design is one of the most powerful tools vegan businesses can use in times of crisis.
Vegan businesses are not immune to the ongoing challenges of balancing growth with change. In fact, because vegan businesses are mission-driven, the desire to always do the right thing can sometimes get in the way of adapting to obstacles. All businesses struggle. It’s in the times of struggle that we find out what our vulnerabilities and weaknesses are. The difference between a resilient business and a businesses that may never bounce back is the ability to adapt.
“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.”
Service Design allows us to bend situations to our advantage and to adapt to adversity.
Just as water can flow around a boulder in a stream, businesses can adapt and move forward when obstacles appear in their paths.
What Can Designers Offer?
As designers, we think about problems differently than most business owners. You may see an immovable obstacle. We see opportunity. Businesses that don’t change stagnate, and stagnation inhibits growth. When vegan businesses don’t grow to their potential, everyone looses. It’s in all of our best interest to get behind vegan businesses and help them succeed, especially when they most need help. We do this through a process called Service Design.
You may have never heard of Service Design, but rest assured, companies that you’ve heard of have been employing this tool for decades. You interact with Service Design every day. Any time you’ve been frustrated by the way something is done, or that your life has been made a little bit easier because of a feature or process, Service Design (or its absence) is likely responsible.
Service Design uses design thinking to think critically about problems as they arise.
So What is Service Design?
Service Design is strategy and thinking of the entire customer experience in the context of how the business meets a market need through its product or service offering. This critical thought is fundamental to how a business structures itself and its solution, along with communications surrounding the business and its solution, and is extremely useful in defining and shaping important decisions regarding the business as it moves forward.
Service Design includes research, exploration, prototyping, and testing. Ideas are defined and formulaically pursued in order to develop key learnings and identify opportunities. The end result of Service Design is a presentation of the company’s total assessment and recommendations for improvement, all backed by Design Thinking, the paradigm of problem-solving through design systems.
Service Design is the design of the way a business interacts with its stakeholders, and what that experience is like.
For vegan businesses, Service Design involves looking holistically at the company from the mission up, evaluating points of stagnation, missed opportunities, inefficiencies, and potential growth points. Sometimes, this can result in revelations about the way a company is addressing its mission that can lead to what the startup world calls “pivots,” which is when a company shifts what its doing in response to learnings gleaned from a previous business iteration. Sometimes, this can result in reinvestment or reallocation of resources in order to fix problems or enhance products. Sometimes, this identifies ways that the company can make seemingly small changes in ways that transform the business and dramatically increase profits.
Whatever the result of Service Design, it’s an invaluable tool that every vegan business should have access to.
Service Design can teach us how to make lemonade when life hands us lemons.
Learn More
If you’re interested in learning more about Service Design and how we might be able to help your company, contact us.