The liminal spaces of service design

I’ve just started listening to the audiobook of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. The book is about epilepsy and different cultural understandings of sickness, but there is a passage in the preface that pulled me up short because of how well it weaves together a few concepts I think about all the time. I stopped walking down the street to transcribe the following:

I’ve always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the centre of things but where the edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were at the middle of either one.

Lovely, right? This evokes two key concepts for design: seams and positionality.

Seams are a useful metaphor for designing services. Pretty much all services are a composite formed of many elements (e.g. databases and printing presses and stacks of paper and the knowledge in people’s minds). You need to understand each part on its own, but you also need to know how it might relate to each other part. Without that knowledge, you just have a set of separate pieces sitting idly by like some sort of unassembled slot car track. Without understanding and designing the connections and moments of transition, you don’t have a service to speak of. The seams define the form.

Positionality comes out of the way an organisation is shaped. The roles that exist and how they are arranged into a hierarchy have an effect on how people work. Some examples:

• If you are situated in a product team, what is your responsibility for processes that cross product boundaries?
• If product and platform teams are hierarchically equal, how do you balance the competing needs for incremental feature improvements and system-wide coherence?
• If you are responsible for the direction of an organisation, how do you ensure that the lessons learned at the front-line are able to percolate all the way to the top and be heard?

In each example, there are challenges and possibilities that exist solely because of how people are arranged relative to one another. The form of the organisation may not always be entirely intentional, but it does always have an effect on what the people inside it can see and know and do. Viewed this way, organisation design is one of the most critical elements in producing good services because it establishes in advance what might be possible (even if you don’t know it).

Negotiating the trade-offs created by the structure can be a role for management and thus for me. That is probably why the quote from Fadiman’s book resonates with me so much. It brings together one of my pet theories of design (seamfulness, an idea I’ll get to in a longer post at some point) with my role of trying to connect people and ideas, which can be difficult to navigate within the structures of the NHS. Design management or “leading” design or whatever can be an awkward, diffuse activity because it tends to happen in the spaces between things. Hopefully the “frictions and incongruities” that exist in those liminal spaces are also generative.