A collage is the assemblage of existing things in new ways that create the opportunity for new meanings to emerge. The process of collaging can be very exciting when elements drawn from unexpected sources are placed in new relationships that are surprising in form or meaning.
When I do collage as a creative outlet, I gather things at random or sift through the random items I’ve accrued walking through craft or thrift stores or found on the street, and suddenly see ways they can relate to each other. A heavy subject can suddenly be infused with humor, a trivial subject suddenly be deeply meaningful, and sometimes the relationships are purely aesthetic or remain mysterious in an intriguing way.
To find new relationships, I find it helpful to let my mind go a little blank and start moving things around into different orientations until something clicks. An intention emerges, and everything begins to fall into place. Then, I know exactly what I need to complete the piece. I’ve done this with music, 2-D and 3-D art, and poetry. It’s a very easy way to unlock creativity and intuition and get into a flow state.
Though I see service design as a creative field, I’ve generally considered my artistic practice separate from my professional practice. My artistic practice is intuitive, abstract, and spiritual. My professional practice is rigorous, concrete, and goal-oriented. I have not considered allowing these worlds to touch. However, one thing I find in service design work, both among practitioners and clients of service design, is a tension between a desire to discover the unseen and arrive at remarkably novel, creative solutions and yet a need for everything to follow a logical, linear, efficient path from goal, to problem, to solution, to result.
This dynamic may have to do with optimism and pessimism in the economy. For a long time, the economy was optimistic about novel solutions, and venture capital was poured into startups with flashy pitches and novel ideas but little rigor. The undercurrent of economic uncertainty that has influenced investment in the past three or four years has pushed the pendulum the other way. With this shift, we as designers have shifted our tone, focusing less on the power of creative thinking and more on the results. Big conversations in the service design community are focused on how we show our ROI, how we ensure our work will result in quick wins and a long-term vision, how it saves time, and how we do it faster, more efficiently, and cheaper. In this atmosphere, I’ve found that things as small as adding 20-minute activities to workshops that aim to push people into more creative territory are seen as a waste of time and are less likely to be taken seriously. When this is the attitude, making these activities valuable is very hard. There must be a certain willingness to explore to execute a valuable exploration.
So how can we see more deeply into the opportunity and problem spaces we face, see what has not been seen, and bring novelty and creativity into our solutions while being efficient, rigorous, and concrete? I propose introducing elements of collage into service design, both literally and abstractly. One way this is utilized today is in workshops and research environments, seeding participants with diverse elements and engaging them in the construction process, as Liz Sanders encourages through collaborative co-design methods such as Make Tools. Taking this a step further, here are a few more ideas for how to use collage in service design practice, starting with the most literal, building to more conceptual:
- Make a mood board collage before an engagement. Take the subject matter of the project opportunity/problem space and create a digital collage using headlines and images from across the internet on anything related to that or adjacent fields from the past six months or even along a timeline dating back five years. Use this to see patterns in the current state of discussion on the topic.
- Design teams might start a practice of collecting and collaging digital headlines and images from digital sources around topic areas to draw on for insight or inspiration when future needs arise. I have done this with a design team I have worked with in the past, and it sparked a lot of great conversation and inspiration.
- Collaging stages of a service: once concepts are formed and end-to-end experiences are starting to emerge, take the time to change the order of events, see how it affects the rest of the service experience to put various things before or after other things in new ways
- Collage with capabilities. Once we work with our clients to develop a future vision for their service, we often break this service down into capabilities – what must the organization be able to do to make this service happen as visualized – what if we first listed their existing capabilities, and then experimented with novel ways of combining them to develop solutions to enhance existing or create new services?
- Play with the act of interpretation. Create purely visual stories and have research participants or workshop participants use them to describe what is happening with the service experience and comment on what comes to mind that would be good or bad experiences in the story that they are interpreting.
- Collage perspectives. In classic multi-source paper-cutout collaging, the process is exciting when we bring together components that didn’t seem to go together before but suddenly reveal themselves to have unforeseen relationships. What if we think of people in the same way, where a person’s life experiences, subject matter knowledge, and motivations are the components and the collage forms as we move these components around looking for unseen relationships? How would we do that?
- Thought prompts that require people to share perspectives and stories with each other before beginning a design/workshop or research activity?
- Right now, we almost do this when we use affinity mapping in design research analysis. However, what if we looked less for affinities and more for surprising connections and relationships? What could we do with that information?
The economic moment we’re in may not be the most conducive to the kind of experimentation and abstraction I’m proposing we consider as designers. However, pendulums tend to swing, and there are already signals that corporate investment in new business ideas and startups is returning. With this in mind, I believe that continuing the conversation among designers around ways to find more novel and exciting opportunities and solutions and tapping into the intuitive art of collage through various means may be a worthwhile exploration for us.
References:
https://www.ey.com/en_us/insights/growth/venture-capital-market-to-seek-new-floor-in-2024
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-companies-head-into-earnings-facing-high-expectations-2024-07-12
Images used in collage courtesy of Unsplash https://unsplash.com/
