“The need for interdisciplinary conversation is particularly important in the development of new technology, where we need both the scientific understanding of how it works, and the designerly understanding of what it means to real people, and these two questions cannot be fully separated.” (Schaathun 2022)
You will have to be something like jack-of-all-trades when creating a digital service, don’t you? You will need to know something about digitalisation and the opportunities that it brings along. You’ll need to understand the people that hopefully start using your service. And you will need some entrepreneurial and business skills to ensure the economic viability of your service. On top of all those, you will need to be able to communicate your ideas to different stakeholders.
As you notice, digital service development is much more than just being tech savvy. The human side – or as we say in DigiReactor ‘loving the problem’ state of mind – is at least equally vital for success. Loving the problem equals to setting the problem: what is the object to be studied, and how to describe it and with what, and how do you know how good that representation is? The big questions. Following setting the problem phase is solving the problem phase. And yes, this is an on-going learning loop back and forth.
The technical and human approaches are seemingly opposite, but they are both needed and they actually complement each other. This was agreed on and emphasised also by two distinguished scholars: the grand-old-man of design studies, professor Donald Schön and the pioneer of AI studies, Nobel laureate Herbert Simon (see Schaathun, 2022).
This spring all our DigiReactor participants started with different skills and projects that they wanted to work on. Hence, also their learning objectives for the couching set varied. Each of them has had her or his own individual learning path based on what capabilities they needed the most either to develop themselves or, more specifically, to make their development project become reality. Now there is still one more workshop to come and then it is time to evaluate, what each participant has actually learned during the spring. Pretty exciting, we’d say!
One thing that they and we as coaches have learned, is that since one person can seldom master all aspects of digital service development, team building is a relevant part of digital service development. At best a team of 3-5 people has much wider variety of competences than just one person. Therefore, finding a good team for your start-up or some other trusted people who can help you is essential for your service’s success. Actually, to offer the participants a first-hand experience of team building, we divided them into small groups during the couching set.
But, even if you do not need to master all the aspects of digital service development, you do need to understand the whole spectrum – both the human and the technical side of the development process.
Literature:
Schaathun, H. G. (2022). Where Schön and Simon agree: The rationality of design. Design Studies, 79, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2022.101090.
Antti Tuomisto
Lecturer
Turku School of Economics
University of Turku
Satu Aaltonen
Project Researcher
Turku School of Economics
University of Turku