UXA2023 Karina Smith and Alexandra Almond - What we learnt about service design living in France

France: a world of baguettes, armagnac, beautiful towns and villages, and delightful people. But for us it also involved a whole lot of misunderstandings, not just because of language but because of fundamentally different world views.

What does this mean for Service Design? Sometimes the culture needs to change; sometimes what we do needs to change to work for the culture.

Transcript

1. Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. www.captionslive.au | captionslive@outlook.com | 0447 904 255 UX Australia UX Australia 2023 Friday, 25 August 2023 Captioned by: Kasey Allen & Bernadette McGoldrick
2. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 86 STEVE BATY: Hello, everyone. Welcome back from lunch. We are down to three talks to go. I know! Post-lunch, we've got a holiday slide show, is how I have been told to introduce this talk. Alexandra and Karina from Meld spent three months in France, and because they can't help themselves, deconstructed that into lessons about service design. Please join me in welcoming Alexandra and Karina to the stage. (APPLAUSE) (FRENCH MUSIC PLAYS) >> Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. And welcome back after lunch. Yeah, we are gonna give you a slide show. People were asking at lunch if we were nervous, and I'm like, "No, I'm literally talking about my holiday! It will be great." >> In our stripy shirts. >> In stripy shirts. Actually, we are gonna start with an acknowledgement of country. This is the French version of a children's acknowledgement of country. So, bonjour... (SPEAKS FRENCH) That's the last French we're gonna speak! (LAUGHTER)
3. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 87 >> So, welcome, everybody, to our holiday. Yes, as Steve said, we were very, very lucky to spend the first three months of our year in France. Alexandra and I both love France. We love the French language and we wanted to kind of immerse ourselves in the culture and in the language so we can improve on our pronunciation and our vocabulary and all those sorts of things. So, bien Villeneuve-sur-Lot. We did a house swap. House and car for their house and car, in a little house, right between Bordeaux and Toulouse. It's terrible, looks awful! It is the middle of winter. They're having quite a warm winter this year. One of the things we did want to do was ski. Unfortunately, we only got five days of skiing because there was no snow. However, that enabled us to spend time immersed in this beautiful town and with these people. We met so many new friends. The people who had the house, all of their friends adopted us because "les Australiens", these two women who had flown over the other side of the world to spend a couple of months in random France. They're like, "Why? Why are you here?" ALEXANDRA ALMOND: By the end, we were walking down the street and they're like, "Oh, Australians!" Great. It was lovely. This is a slide of the cultural context in which we were both, yeah, operating. And this one is actually - sorry, I feel like I'm standing right in the way. This is actually the couple that we swapped with. This is Christian and Sylvette with my mum in the middle, because Mum and Dad took them to the footy. My mum and dad thought they needed the Australian cultural experience. This is them at the MCG watching Collingwood defeat Port Adelaide with 70,000 other people. They are being force-fed a cold pie and a warm beer. And Mum is really enjoying this! (LAUGHTER) They told us afterwards, "It was lovely!" (LAUGHTER) Because the thing is, food is very, very important to the French, and you're not actually allowed to eat
4. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 88 on the go. Like, you literally can't walk down the street eating your baguette that you just got from the boulangerie, because lunchtime is not when you sell things, that's when you sit down at the table and enjoy the meal. Food is very, very important. So, this was a real cultural experience for Sylvette and Christian. This is what we're having on the other side of the world, same day. This is our market hall. Which is just two days' food. Three days' food. The market is on again on Tuesday, when we'll stock up again. This is the middle of winter as well, so it's not like it's... Yes. KARINA SMITH: So, why are we here? What's this got to do with design? Alexandra, do you want to flip to the next slide? We come to design with a point of view about things. Many of us come into this world because we really want to make a difference to people - people's lives. We want to kind of move things on and kind of improve the world, I suppose. So, we've talked a lot about this over the last couple of days. And we advocate for a lot of things. So, we come into organisations and we're helping them think about the way they go about their work, we're helping think about what they do, we're thinking about who their customers are and who the people are that sit in the system, and how can we just make things better. And that's fantastic. It's what we want to do and it's what drives us. However, all of this is cultural. And every single point of view, every single thing that comes out of our mouth, every single decision we made, everything we hear from anyone we do research through that comes out of our mouth into some kind of insight or presentation has a cultural lens and a bias over it. You know, that's not bad. It's not bad. We are our culture. However, what we need to think about is the culture of design. And the culture of the way that we do things, the methods. Zoe has already talked about it today, you know, the way we do things has come through certain perspectives, good or bad. Those contexts in which
5. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 89 we do design, the people we are doing it with, the time and place that we're doing it, the environment we're doing it within, and also the organisations and their point of view. And all of those things provide lenses on that. Now, is that bad? Not necessarily. It's not necessarily bad. However, everything we do has influence in some way. And so what we're thinking about, when we went through this holiday, we just started walking down the street and going, "We're thinking things but not!" So, it's not great! (LAUGHTER) ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Is it great, is it not great, or how do we know? And I think one of the things, because Karina said, "Is it a bad thing that we come to design with a point of view, that we come to every project with our own cultural context?" No, that's not bad. But the question you've gotta ask yourself is, how do you know you're right? How do you know that your point of view and your cultural context is a good one for the circumstances in which you find yourselves? I was actually at another conference a couple of weeks ago, where someone put this diagram up about certainty and correctness. They're on an X-Y-axis. Like, you would like to think that the more certain you are, or the more certain you are about something that the more correct you are. But, actually, it doesn't work that way. You can be 100% certain about something and 100% wrong! And another way of looking at this - this is Gurwinder - I don't know if that's how you say it - on Twitter, and he does this threads of ideas to think about. This idea of epistemic luck. You know that you'd lived in a different place or time, read different books, had different friends, you'd have different beliefs, and yet you're convinced your current beliefs are correct. So, are you wrong or the luckiest person ever? That's what we want to talk about today. Is we're gonna share with you some of the things that we realised we were probably wrong about! As we
6. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 90 were travelling through France, but also want you to think about this in terms of your design practice. KARINA SMITH: What's important to French people? This was observations we had in this one town or a few places. We're not saying this is pervasively French or anything, just from our perspective and our point of view of what we experienced. Let's take a journey of the story. In our first couple of weeks there, we were really excited. We got the first time in years and years of our life, we've got all this time on our hands. It's like, "Great! I've got personal projects I want to get on with." The house had a sewing machine. I'm obsessed with sewing. I thought I would buy French linen, make something nice, it's gonna be great. So, on Monday morning we're off to the shops and this is what we see. Um... It wasn't exceptional that but everything was closed. It was Monday morning. Nobody works on Sunday, but what about Monday? There was nothing there to tell me why. OK, it's closed, and it's actually closed Monday afternoon as well. Then I went the next day and it was this... Which is, "For circumstances, today the store is closed." ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Then we kept going at lunchtime. We would go at 2:00, and closed. KARINA SMITH: Closed. I was frustrated. I was frustrated. I'm not a big shopper but I wanted to get on with my project! And I'm used to the 24-hour shopping culture that we can have in our country here, which is I could probably order something online or I could go down to Spotlight on Sunday at 6:00 and buy the fabric I wanted to get. That was not happening and my patience was being tested. What we discovered over the time of kind of talking with people and getting, you know, navigating
7. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 91 this space, is that, actually, it's not about the customer. The French don't care about the customer in the same way we do. We are customer-obsessed in our customer-experience world. I think that's actually a principle of Amazon, is to be customer-obsessed. But what does that actually mean? That means we will do anything to make the customer happy, and potentially in the marketing world, buy more stuff. In France, no. The French care about their life. They care about living, they care about their family, eating good food. What does a good life mean? It is not working. And there is a lot of, sort of, literature out there about that. It's actually about the work is there to help me support me have that good life. Work is there to fund me and there will be enough, but at the end of the day the customer is not the reason I am in this business. And we'll talk about why they are in business. That obsession is not there. So, if you look at their laws, what I came up against on Monday morning was there is a must have at least 35 hours a week where you're not working. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Every employee in France. 35 consecutive hours. KARINA SMITH: So, if you worked on a Saturday, Saturday afternoon, you don't need to go back until Monday. You can't be sent an email by your boss and be expected to read it after 6pm. You'll have a minimum of five weeks' annual leave. I have friends in France that have up to 12 and 16 weeks' annual leave now at the moment because of the tenure in their organisation. There are 11 public holidays and around those public holidays, if they fall on a Thursday or a Wednesday, you can officially have the "pont jour", which is the Friday and Monday off, without taking annual leave around that. So, in May, where there are four public holidays, you are gonna be working around five days in that month. And a
8. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 92 couple of months later, it's August and then you're gonna have the whole month off and everything stops. Never travel there... ALEXANDRA ALMOND: "Fermeture annuelle" happens in January and always in August! (LAUGHTER) It's four weeks off. The tea shop closed for two weeks because it was the school holidays. Because the people running these businesses are running the businesses for their life, not for you. Not for us. The other thing I want to talk about on this particular slide, because I started taking pictures of the fermeture slides - the fact they're all hand-written is great. I got this online. This one on the right. It actually means "we're closed for compelling reasons"! (LAUGHS) Which is great. So, I got that online. And that was an article from a UX designer, who was talking about how you could redesign this experience to be better for customers. I think you're missing the point! That is kind of exactly what we're talking about, is we would have designed this experience to be better for us as well, but that's not why it is the way that it is. KARINA SMITH: And so a classic action that happens, as they have put all the bags out the door, they're in the back of the car, they're like, "Must put the sign up!" And that's what they do every time. So, it's, yeah, this is it. Life is what matters. You know, and this whole thing about living plays out - many of us have heard about strikes and the French are really good at striking about things. We love that. We heard about in a town they had a big strike because the council had taken the Christmas tree down, which is like the annual thing they put up. And literally work stopped for a week. And they built their own Christmas tree out of found objects and things like that, and it just shut the whole town down. Traffic couldn't go anywhere.
9. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 93 ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Everyone loved it. KARINA SMITH: Everyone loved it. So, next year the Christmas tree went back up and has never been taken down since. They stand by the things they believe in. We were there during the strikes, which was all about - this had been going on for years - increase the retirement age from 62 to 64. 64! You know?! And they are so upset about it. Steve almost did not get his plane back to Australia because the whole country had shut down for months about this. And they don't care that the country has shut down for months, because we want the government to know, we are unhappy about this. And if we can't get to work and we can't get to school, doesn't matter because we're gonna stand up for what we believe in. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Standing up for what's important. And the fact is, it's not actually just about the retirement age, this is about the philosophy of life and work. The philosophy of life and work. And why they exist and why they are the way that they are. Yeah. Still more about work. This is our Chopin guy. KARINA SMITH: We never knew his name. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Matthieu? He called us les Australiens. (SPEAKS FRENCH) You've sold our pain aux raisin? It's only 7:30 in the morning, are you making more?" "No, they're done today." This is a young guy who has this amazing boulangerie around the corner from our house. Most amazing bread. We tried all of them in town to get the best bread and I said to Karina, I've come home from the market, found a better bread.
10. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 94 It's great. Turns out it was him with a market stall! (LAUGHTER) Great. And it's a tiny, little shopfront that's open for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening, so you can get your morning bread or your afternoon bread. And he's got books in there and music playing. KARINA SMITH: Because he loves classical music and literature. You go in there, there's one chair. Can't even have a coffee with someone, there's no coffee machine. He likes sitting in there, reading books, playing music. If you buy his bread, that's good. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: The brioche that they only do on Saturdays because that's the only day they can be bothered making it. Yeah, it's lovely. But he's absolutely passionate about it. If he was in Melbourne, then the Chopin Bakery would be a chain because they'd absolutely have the best bread. KARINA SMITH: Through Australia, it would be a chain. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: And he has absolutely no interest in doing that because he is doing what he loves, which is this tiny little bakery in this tiny town, where he has a relationship with his customers and he gets to read books and make bread. KARINA SMITH: And France is full of people following their passion. They're in business because they're passionate about things. There's a little guy I visit in Paris every time I go, and he does calligraphy in magenta ink. For years, I have been visiting him. I love handwriting. I have been at that pen stall a lot today. And that's literally all he does. Yes, it's a big country, there's a bigger market for it. But he doesn't even
11. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 95 care. He's just doing the thing that he really wants to put out in the world. Yes, he's found his customers and the fact his business is tiny and he makes just enough money and he's in a not-great shopfront in a not-great area of Paris, it doesn't matter to him. He's following his dream. This whole thing about growth and we always have to grow, he doesn't have an Etsy store. Same with the wine people. We went to the Loire Valley, found a beautiful wine. It was our first wine of the trip. Every other wine was beautiful. We were excited. Our first week. We loved it, it was a variety we hadn't tried before. We thought we will go home, order some, and get it shipped back to Villeneuve-sur-Lot. No, the email bounced back, website crashed. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: It was a disaster. KARINA SMITH: We sent them an email, never heard back again. Basically, it wasn't because they didn't like us. It's, "Unless you're gonna come to my vineyard, you're probably not gonna get my wine." ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Efficiency, it's not about efficiency. This is the butcher at the market. But we had another local butcher that we went to as well. And going to the butcher was, like, quite time-consuming because there were usually quite a few people waiting. And everybody took anywhere between five and 15 minutes to be served, depending on what sort of relationship they had. Because all of them had some kind of relationship. Always a conversation about what you were making and what would be the best meat for that, and had you tried this other thing that we've got in today? And how did that work last week? And that was really good, and how's your son going, or whatever? And with us, it was teaching us French! (LAUGHS) It was very, very keen to make sure we
12. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 96 could say the thing properly before we left that we were making, before we left the shop. It was fantastic. And the market is very much the same thing. Everything was a conversation and a relationship, and it's not about efficiency. So, there are so many ways that we could redesign, and we were - the first time we were at the market, we were like, "There's all these people going everywhere. Why do these vegie shops over here and something else? You could do this better." Yeah, sure, you could. That's not what it's about. It's not designed for efficiency. KARINA SMITH: We even had conversations with people we were staying with, around this, and one of my friends in that picture was telling me that, actually, it's really important for children to learn patience - that's one of the, you know, all children should have patience. And one of the things they do is they are conscious of making their kids sit through these million conversations at the market, that the parents are having, and, yes, they'll be chomping on a pain aux raisin, probably, but they wine, complain. I'm not a parent, full disclosure, but I have nieces and nephews. And we want to get them out of the stores as quickly as possible because it's distracting and the kids are tired and hungry and they're hot and thirsty. But here it's almost like not punishment, but, "You must learn how to sit through the queues and sit through all of our conversations because it's part of life." So, it's part of kind of life lessons to sit through these queues. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: And the other example on there is the piano. There's a piano in the house. And Fabien was playing the piano quite a bit and it was quite out of tune. Thought it would be nice, we'll get a piano tuner in and tune the piano for the people whose house we're looking after and we're having this amazing time. And the piano tuner - you can
13. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 97 tell this story, actually. KARINA SMITH: He turned up! He turned up. And he was a quirky guy but he got his tool kit, turned up, pulled the front off the piano and he was like, "No. Oh, no." And the French that came out, I could not understand the speed of it. Fabien got on the phone to him because he was not there. They had an hour conversation about the piano tuning. And I was saying, "Can't you just do a quick job?" This is again my cultural bias. "Do a quick job of it!" ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Just make it a bit better. KARINA SMITH: Because that's as good as better. And he was horrified! It's like I had killed his mother. (LAUGHTER) He was... Like, he was actually, like, "I'm either gonna do the job or I'm walking out the door. I'm not interested in a half-job because this is not about efficiency or getting in and out the door as quickly as possible. And doing the same 10 piano tuning jobs in a day." He got paid the same amount and it wasn't a lot of money. But the thing for him is the pride in his work. "I'm not here to be efficient, I'm here to be good." Walking in and out that door, it sounded like a concert piano after the whole thing. It was amazing. We don't want to hear dong, dong, dong, dong all day. But for him it was doing the thing well. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: I just want to put this in context. Like, our view and his view, there's no right or wrong here. And if that - we were fine. We had three months off. We actually had nothing else to do that day except make dinner! (LAUGHS) Which is fine. And so it was fine. But if that had happened to me in my life here in Australia, I would have been
14. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 98 so annoyed because it would have ruined my day, having to have that piano tuner there when I had planned for it to be a one-hour or two-hour thing and I had other things to do. So, it's not that there's a wrong. Like, it's not a judgement thing. We weren't wrong, they weren't wrong. But, yeah, it's just different. It's a cultural context. KARINA SMITH: I want to give another example about efficiency too, while we're there. We volunteered for a food bank while we were there. It was one of the things about immersing ourselves in the language and being forced to speak it. The food bank was set up that you walked in the door and there were some vegies there and tins of meat and tins of vegies and tins of things. It was - anyway. And people would walk through and make choices from each of the sections. It took us about 15 minutes, and Alexandra and I are at the back, going, "This is so inefficient." People are trying to cross in front of each other. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: If we just switched those two things around, everything would go so much smoother! KARINA SMITH: Literally 10 minutes into being there, we had redesigned the whole experience. You've got paper checklists. What are you doing a paper checklist? They have to add this up at the end of the day. Sitting out in the back office, total, total our stuff around it. And then after being there for a week, we discovered that what's really important is the conversations and the time they spend with people, having conversations as they go through in making the choices about their vegetables and things. Because for many of the people, this is the only conversation they're gonna have with another human in that week, and be seen and heard to be able to make choices. So, if we had blindly gone in there and
15. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 99 redesigned this to be faster, to get through faster, that would have been less time that they get to spend with other humans, to be able to talk about what's going on in their lives and some of the challenges that they're facing. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Yeah. And so Arnaud, who ran that session, he was telling us that, really, your only purpose for being here, you know, here's the checklist, the process, you kind of need to understand it, but your only purpose is to have a conversation with them. And we're like, "Oh, I feel sorry for them!" But we started every conversation with, "I'm Australian. I don't speak very good French." And that was such a brilliant start to the conversation because that then gave them something to talk about, us being Australian. They had a relative who once went to Australia. Or, "I don't speak very good French either. We can learn together." And it was really good. It didn't have to be that we were perfect, it just had to be that we were talking. OK. Alright. I'm actually gonna start on the right here, 'cause this is a TGV, a very fast train. When we very first arrived, we had a couple of days' crossover with the couple we were swapping houses with. Christian was taking us around the town, showing us the sights. The old bridge, the market square, we're seeing all of the lovely old buildings and the river. It was amazing. All of these fantastic place were just, "Oh, my God, this is so great! We are gonna have the best three months here. It's fantastic!" And Christian just pulls up and he puts his hands on his hips and says... (SPEAKS FRENCH) "You walk like the very fast train!" (LAUGHTER) KARINA SMITH: Because we're like... ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Yeah, OK. We do! Sure. And so for the rest of the
16. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 100 holiday, we were - we'd walk out the door and set off, and, "Walk like a French person. Walk like a French person. ""and it's very, very hard to do. It's very, very hard to be that slow and not to get frustrated with people who are walking slowly in front of you. KARINA SMITH: Because we were on a mission all the time, you know? My siblings do say, "You look like you come from Sydney when you walk because you're trying to get there." But what about the fact that the process may be more important than where you're getting to? And if you slow down, you might see something that takes you in a different direction? Hello, serendipity, that you don't allow anymore because you're so intent on getting to the place. Isn't that in our digital world too? We've narrowed things down so much to be able to get us through the thing efficiently that we're not getting those kind of moments that kind of might send us off in other directions and help us learn new things and see new things? So, this direct course of action, fast, is not necessarily always the best thing. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Yeah, and so that comes down to the being in the moment. Like, taking time and being in the moment, and being where you are. A few more examples of this. But this one, you could not get a takeaway coffee in the town. No such thing as takeaway coffee because you had to sit and drink your coffee, you had to sit and appreciate it. Even if you were only there for five minutes, and quite often it was a quick coffee. But, yeah, you couldn't take it away. The other thing about coffee, the other cultural difference about coffee, is you couldn't get a good cappuccino in the south of France. Part of it is it's all long-life milk, it doesn't taste very good. The main part is if you put milk in your coffee, you are an infidel and deserve everything that's coming to you! There are
17. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 101 cultural things coming out in the coffee that is neither good nor bad. No, the coffee was pretty much all bad! And food. KARINA SMITH: So, this is a vending machine at the local station where we were, in the village next to us. Very small town. And you come to the station and usually you would see the vending machine with the chips and the chocolate and soft drink. No, no, no, no. Here is the vending machine with - I'm coming home from work and there were snacks and things in here as well, but I'm coming home from work, I need to get my fruit supply for dessert, my soup mix over there with my carrots and my little bit of onions and things in it. Some fromage, of course, some cheese, wine. Even fresh anchovies in jars in this little thing. Isn't that magnificent? Like, fresh food is just so abundant and so cheap and so available. And if you did want to buy the chips at the station, it was difficult. (LAUGHTER) Not so fresh! Although, it's not fresh. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: It's not-not fresh. So, there actually is a shop in behind here which we saw them opening it and restocking it. They do make the pizzas behind here. They don't make them when you order them. They make them, put them in a fridge. They showed us the little arm and how it works. All exciting. Not very good pizzas, though! The contrast between this and our shopping at the market every week, twice a week, and, yeah, and that was quite extraordinary. Alright. KARINA SMITH: There's something really lovely too about those two examples of traditionally, I mean, I go to France a lot, and technology is just not a massive part of their lives as it is here.
18. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 102 ALEXANDRA ALMOND: They thought she was from outer space when she paid with her wristwatch! (LAUGHTER) Oh, and the lady at the church concert. So, in a tiny church hall, maybe 50 people there, who paid with a cheque! Five euros with a cheque! (LAUGHS) KARINA SMITH: They're not like us walking around with their headphones on all the time, listening to music. They do not sit on their phones like us. Particularly, yes, in Paris, but in the regional areas, not so much on the transport. We were always on our phones. You see books everywhere, which is so lovely. And just technology has not - outside of, kind of, space and planes and things like that - it's not in their everyday lives as much as it is for us. But things like those pizza machines and the vending machine for the fruit has popped up. I love this, we're using technology to advance our culture and our way of being. Not buying into the other ones. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: I'm conscious of time. We're good? Cool. We're going to delve slightly deeper into one particular topic. Dogs - dogs are people too in France. Cats are appreciated. (LAUGHTER) Dogs are part of the family. So, dogs go everywhere, they're in restaurants, they're wandering around the street with you, they're just allowed to... This is a dog that is looking after the village square. KARINA SMITH: Traffic stopped for that dog, mind you. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: The traffic did stop in order to let the dog go past. Dogs are amazing. We were joking about there being more vets than doctors in our town. Because there were. There were more vets. There were more pooch pampering places. And we were like, "Yeah, the French really love their dogs!" And then we also went - actually, there's more
19. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 103 pharmacies than I've ever seen in my life. So, like, this is our - the area where we were living, and there's - I forget how many. Eight, 10... KARINA SMITH: 13 pharmacies. There's five more pharmacies than there are boulangeries, bakeries. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Within the radius of our house. There are alternative therapy places. So, hypnotists was really big. And I was kind of joking with Karina, "My God, the French are hypochondriacs." Where are their doctors? What's the deal here? What is happening? They love their animals so much that they've stopped looking after themselves?! What's the deal? Pourquoi?! And what's actually happening here? It's really way more complicated than that. I think it's one of the things that we wanted to, in terms of our culture, we were making jokes about the things that we were seeing that we thought were culturally funny and very, very different to us. And so we did, we asked why. We put our curiosity hat on and we asked one of our friends, Roger, why? And he explained it to us in French over the course of a 2-hour car trip, he was taking us to see the sights. I'm not 100% certain that we understood everything that he told us, but we did a bit of research afterwards. And healthcare in France is free. It's completely and utterly free. As far as I can tell, there's no private health insurance, it's all government-based. So, if you're in the medical system, then you are supported by the government, it's all paid for by the government. Everything is free. But that's obviously very expensive. So, back in the 1980s, the government restricted the number of doctors that were allowed to train to be doctors. So, they restricted the number of university places for doctors. And now there simply aren't enough doctors. There are no doctors in our town, a town of 25,000 people.
20. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 104 KARINA SMITH: You would have to drive an hour and a half to two hours to get to your doctor, and that's if you can get in, because there's a short supply of doctors in those regional, bigger cities, and then a short supply of doctors in the country. So, basically, when we actually ended up talking about this, they said, "Just don't get sick." Or you go to the pharmacy and the pharmacy is your pseudo-doctor. And people are queued in there for hours, describing all their symptoms and getting medicines that we would never be able to get over the counter here because you can't get to the doctor. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Yeah. So, it's either the pharmacy or the emergency department. There's pretty much nothing in between. And, like, that's... It's horrific, in many ways. Like, it doesn't feel right and it doesn't feel good. But also, we would never have got that if we hadn't asked. And so one of the things that we think, one of the ways that we think you can overcome your cultural boundaries, or actually understand what your cultural bias is, is by asking, is by being curious and just saying, you know, "Pourquoi?" What does this actually mean? All of these lovely stories about how the French are different to us and our cultural bias there. What does that actually mean for design? It's a lovely slide show. We've done work with a lot of different people. Sorry, the thing that I probably wanted to say here is obviously you're not going to be designing for French people - almost certainly not. There might be some French people or people with French cultural heritage who might be part of the things you're designing, but we're not in France, so what does this have to do with you? The fact is, even here in Australia, even if you're designing for other people living here in Australia, there are different cultures. There are different cultural biases that we all have, and that
21. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 105 workplaces have, and that are all very, very different. And as we heard from Erin on the first day, the workplace and the structure of the organisation is what is actually going to create the product and the service and how that's going to work. These are two very different organisations that Karina and I have worked with over the last - in the last few years. So, we did a project with Who Gives A Crap, we did a project with Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. And both of them were not one-off pieces, they were both long-term sort of organisational change projects. Culturally, how do you reckon they compare?! (LAUGHTER) They're very, very different. And, yeah, and we can't... You could not go into the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and do work in the same way that you did - that we did with Who Gives A Crap. We tried! (LAUGHTER) No, we didn't, really! KARINA SMITH: But that awareness, even going in, and understanding who are - you know, this anthropological study you almost do on the first couple of days is, "Who are these people? What's important to them? What is the way they work and why do they work in that way?" You know, in each of those organisations, we had our own frustrations because we have our point of view about where we think things could go, based on what we're learning, and how we want to work, based on what we're used to doing and how we think they could benefit from our ways of working. But we have to adjust all of that along the way because we actually tried to ban PowerPoint in PM&C for a week because 20-page PowerPoint decks was the standard of any way of communicating with anyone. And we are not 25-page PowerPoint-deck people. And so we had this middle ground. We said, "Let's try it for a week." And, actually, it was a really interesting experiment because they were just horrified. They're like, "I can't even imagine any other way of doing anything."
22. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 106 ALEXANDRA ALMOND: We had someone call in sick because of the PowerPoint ban. They did not know what to do if they could not create PowerPoints! KARINA SMITH: Exactly. Some of them picked up their styluses and created amazing things. We had a lot of moments for reflection as we tried to change some of the things to get them over their ways, was we actually set some bombs off in that place at various times. It wasn't good. And we reflected on the fact that we need to be much more sensitive, you know, we want to push things, but we've gotta go more sensitively into it. Who Gives A Crap was a different environment altogether. They were ready, up for it, "Let's do things differently and get all of the coloured bits of paper out." ALEXANDRA ALMOND: We were almost the other way around with Who Gives A Crap. As in, "Do we know how to push them far enough?!" It was really different. But the one thing we learnt, because the Who Gives A Crap one was recently, we literally spent two days, we sat down with them on the very first day we were there, and said, "Tell us what's happening." And we talked for two days with no outputs. Like, other than understanding what is happening in their space. And, like, I will do that with every project I ever do from now on, as much time as they will give me. They were incredibly generous with their time. But just that whole, "What is the context in which you are working?" and be really, really conscious of what my bias is, and what am I bringing to this? KARINA SMITH: So, takeaways. Revolution! I think the thing is that, really, it's about listening and watching and observing, and asking lots
23. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 107 and lots and lots of questions. We went in there making some assumptions. We went in there were frustrations that sometimes we actually, like, ergh! But actually when you settle down a bit and stop walking like the TGV and take that time to listen and observe and really take in those cultural "what's going on around you", I think we can be so much more effective as designers. And this is the one-on-one of what we do. But it's always good to have that reminder, that curiosity and just taking that step back and not running so fast towards the things that we think are important, are really important. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: We would have designed a very different France in the first week than the one in our last week. And so... You know, you probably won't have three months to sit back and absorb the culture and take that on. But think about what it is that you can do and what it is might be your cultural bias that's stopping you from doing that. KARINA SMITH: And house swap! It is amazing! So amazing! ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Yep. (APPLAUSE) ALEXANDRA ALMOND: So, apparently we've got 6 minutes and 56 seconds left, so we do have time for questions. But we would actually like to ask you a question. Has anybody got an example of cultural bias that you have brought into your work that, you know, maybe you've only just realised it, listening to us? Or that are you are already aware of and would like to share with us? I'm actually gonna give you one, sorry. I know, I meant to do this... KARINA SMITH: Sarah has got one.
24. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 108 ALEXANDRA ALMOND: While we're waiting for the microphone, I'm gonna tell you mine. I'm part of a writing organisation. We had a conference a couple of weeks ago. And so there was a trans rights awareness week several months back, and there was a whole lot of stuff going on online about trans rights readathon, so everybody read books by trans authors and promote them. It's fantastic, I love it, it's great. All getting into it. The writers' group, organisation that I was a part of, was all getting into it. Everybody was hashtagging trans rights awareness. I contacted the organising committee for the conference and said, "Hey, we've got trans authors speaking at the conference. We need to do this. It's all just performative if we don't put our money where our mouth is and start showcasing this." I kept getting pushback. "Come on, what is this?" Finally, the head of the diversity committee, a trans man, rang me and said, "So, it's not a safe place. We can't have - we can't invite trans speakers into this conference at the moment. We have work to do first." And I was like, "Oh! OK. I thought I knew what was right." I genuinely thought I knew what was right. But I was coming in with this whole, "OK, cool, I have no idea what's going on." So, I'm no doubt on the diversity committee as someone who can help them do what they think is important, not push things of my own making. Sarah. SARAH: There was one time when I was doing some career coaching with somebody from Bangladesh that was a student of design in Sydney. And she was talking about her background and how her parents were quite progressive at that time, and I thought about progressive, what that means for me. And then later on in the conversation, she said how she wasn't allowed to go out on her own, she had to go out with a chaperone. I'm like, "OK, so my version of progressive is very different to your
25. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 109 version of progressive." So, sometimes words have different values, depending on where you are culturally. And that was a big learning for me. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. Words matter. Thank you for sharing. STEVE BATY: Over there. >> Hi, thank you for your lecture. So, basically, my background, Russian. I'm designer in Australia. So, I can say that the big difference between Australian market and Russian market is tone of voice. Because what we think is OK in Russia is very direct in Australia. And sometimes very rude as well! (LAUGHTER) ALEXANDRA ALMOND: That's such a great learning! So, how are you working with that? Like, are you changing yourself to be more like Australians? Or are you...? >> So, I have Aussie friends, who are actually helping me a lot. So, my very close colleague, I ask, "Please, can you check my grammar when I'm speaking?" And also generally when I'm not professional for Australians. Because to be professional in Russia, and to be professional here in Australia, is absolutely different. Absolutely. In Russia, you have to be even more quicker. You said that in France, it's slow. For me, Australia is slow. (LAUGHTER) So, yeah. And sometimes I say, "Please, do something else for me if I become rude for Australians, especially on meetings," because I collaborate a lot with marketing departments and with developers. Developers are fine, actually! (LAUGHTER) But marketing
26. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 110 department. So, always thinking about the tone of voice, how we speak with our customers. And also it's important for them how I speak with them as well. And sometimes I have issues that, for them, I'm not as professional. Because I'm focused on professional in Russia. Yeah, to be quick, to be quick, take a task, come back very soon, with already first tries, and show this. In Australia, it's more about, "Let's do meetings. Maybe then..." (LAUGHTER) Waiting for what we are looking for... Yep, so it's absolutely different. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. KARINA SMITH: That's a great example. STEVE BATY: It's coming. >> Thank you. So, I'm gonna share about my Japanese experience. I just came from Japan. So, we all comfortable with McDonald's shopping experience, self-service, and we're lining up, and we design it to be as everybody grab food as fast as they can. Even driveway takeaways, right? So, when I was in Japan, I was buying a manga piece, and I went to a building, I went there and got my manga and walked into the checking out. I'm looking for, "Oh, where should I start my line?" Literally, the people are lining up, basically occupying the whole shop, filling up each the gap of the shelves. And they were enjoying it. And they were enjoying it! Like, lining up, it's a culture in Japan. Everybody is so comfortable with lining up. And they had no complaints. And once you line up, you know that's a good start, and you go line up with them. (LAUGHTER) KARINA SMITH: The queues are good!
27. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 111 >> Yes! I'm very amazed. And there is a huge culture gap between just Japan and the world. Japan and the world! (LAUGHTER) I'm looking forward to hear you talking about service design in Japan! (LAUGHTER) ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Next year! KARINA SMITH: Thank you. STEVE BATY: One more at the back. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: And there is one over here as well. >> I got the opportunity to work with an Aboriginal community on Awabakal country in Lake Macquarie. And we were trying to gather stories to create an application where we could share stories on site. And we thought we could do this over eight months, and what we learnt was we didn't have the right to learn those stories in the first place, and it takes decades to actually get the authority to learn those stories. We basically had to postpone the whole project for some time. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: Wow. That's amazing. I love that so much. There's one. STEVE BATY: That will be the last one. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: That's the last one, OK. >> I just have a cute little one. Years ago, I got to do some design in
28. CaptionsLIVE Raw Transcript _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Note that this is an unedited transcript of a live event and therefore may contain errors. This transcript is the joint property of CaptionsLIVE and the authorised party responsible for payment and may not be copied or used by any other party without authorisation. Page 112 Samoa, working for a big multinational conference. And I was asked to do corporate graphics and experience design. And I'll never forget the clerk of the Legislative Assembly of Samoa tell me it wasn't corporate enough, it needed more colours and flowers! (LAUGHTER) It was a good learning. KARINA SMITH: Love it. ALEXANDRA ALMOND: That's lovely. Thank you so much, everyone, for listening. KARINA SMITH: Thank you. (APPLAUSE)