Evolve Collaborative

My Reflections

Being the first of anything comes with privileges and hurdles. Being the first Service Design intern allowed me to explore unforeseen territory within the company while providing me the opportunity to advocate for Service Design as a practice, along with my contributions as a Service Designer.

Evolve’s internship program includes a mentorship to expand and guide students’ explorations and learnings. My mentor was Michael Abeln, a senior designer who lead many of Evolve’s digital platform projects. Together, Mike and I developed two goals for me to explore:

1) Explore how Service Design can be incorporated into product and research-based projects.

2) Observe, examine and document different leadership styles within Evolve. Then, journal about my observations to thoughtfully craft my personal leadership style.

Incorporating Service Design into Product and Research-Based Projects

Throughout my internship experience, I learned that Evolve, like many organizations, is still learning about Service Design and how it can be best utilized with clients and internal operations. Evolve specializes in developing and designing digital platforms, and I was able to learn how Service Design could support these processes through holistic systems thinking as opposed to the linear product development process.

Learning to blend Service Design Logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2004), with Interaction Design methods was initially challenging because the two disciplines operate on two different perspectives, differing between the micro vs. macro scale. However, this tension inspired me to spark conversations with the other designers within Evolve, and learn more about their subjective approaches to the crossroads of Service Design and Interaction Design. These conversations were fruitful, and allowed me to proceed with a deeper understanding of how my Service Design skillset could be made most useful to my teams. Sometimes that meant creating ecosystem maps, meaningful infographics, service audits, asking critical questions to better understand the placement of products within large organizational environments, and simply digging into research to ensure the product context was well understood.

However, my biggest learning was that the title of Service Designer shouldn’t limit me and what I define as my skillset. My biggest learnings from this internship stemmed from opening up my skillsets, and trusting that choosing to be an interdisciplinary designer is a decision that would reward me with resilience and fortitude.

Once learning this lesson, I was able to understand Service Design is a passion and specialty of mine but by no means does it represent all the tools I have in my expansive toolbox as a designer and creative.

Observing Leadership Styles and Designing My Own

Throughout my internship, I bounced between 3-4 project teams at once. Belonging to several project teams simultaneously provided me the opportunity to observe the many different leadership styles within Evolve. In these teams, I noticed some preferred to lead from behind, and others from the front. Some preferred detailed execution, others preferred open exploration. Some wanted clear hierarchy, and others wanted equal autonomy.

It’s not my place to determine whether these leadership styles are either good or bad, I don’t think anything is that binary- there should always be room for nuance and complexity. However, I did observe which aspects I preferred as someone being led by these design leaders.

In future leadership opportunities, I’d like to combine several of these leadership qualities to be an effective leader. The leadership style I responded best to was a dynamic rooted in trust, autonomy, and a balance between getting lost in exploration and lost in the details. I felt valued when those in leadership positions trusted me, welcomed my contributions, and found a way to showcase and unify individual talents on the team while matching the client’s desired deliverables. In these cases, there was clear creative freedom for us as designers that promoted uncharted thinking and unique solutions to the design problems we were being asked to solve.

Evolve allowed me the opportunity to explore my own leadership philosophy, and craft it into one I feel is representative of my work style, personal philosophies and personality.