Rong Hua

I joined Service Design programme with a 10-year-architecture background. After practicing in various projects of service design, speculative design, strategy and organisational design, my attention has expanded from the physical world to the digital world, frontstage to backstage, top-down to bottom-up. My background has brought me multidimensional thinking, which strengthens the holistic way of analysing and solving problems in various projects. The habit of “learning by making” urges me to convey the value of projects by engaging people with prototypes throughout the design process.

With the exploration of continuous projects in the Future of Work, I became increasingly interested in how to apply speculative design and storytelling in a business context. And willing to discover values of service design of how to deliver real impact for people and organisations.

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Service Design (MA)

We are living in a constantly evolving world with rapid technology development. Especially under the recent impact of Covid, this trend has accelerated. The Covid situation has impacted individuals and almost all the industries. Individuals are being forced to adapt changes in lives, ways of working. Also, companies are being forced to be resilient about the way they work, reform how the company is structured, all the way to reimagining what their goal or purpose is. But that’s also an opportunity for us humans to see the value of life and the need for connection, for organisations to equip themselves with the adaptability for future challenges. As a designer, how to empower people and organisations to embrace changes, and even drive changes, is the field I want to explore.

Meta introduction — How might we create a methodology that uses storytelling through metaphors and speculative design in a business context to help engage employees in large organisational decisions like creation of company strategy, vision, organisational changes, etc?

Engaging employees of all sectors and levels for future thinking — Meta is a methodology that uses the power of storytelling, speculative thinking, and metaphors to enable employees to participate in extremely divergent conversations to come up with new and creative ideas for organisations to prepare themselves for future challenges. Through carefully designed workshops, we help participants broaden their perspective of the current scenario of the company, understand and discuss the changes that are happening and what could happen in the future. They then agree upon aspects or values of the company vision, or the ‘preferable future’, where after the goal is to come up with either implementable ideas or create a roadmap for change from immediate to more long-term actions to achieve the preferable future in x amount of years.

Values for who — Through the Meta experience, individuals in large organisations will feel heard and valued by the company, enhancing engagement and motivation from them during organisational changes. On the organisational level, Meta helps rethink or reframe the company vision as well as build an actionable strategy to achieve it. The workshops can be iterated multiple times for maximum participation, as well as be adopted for different purposes like regular catch ups for the leadership team, off-site team building exercises, or yes, we’ve even heard of it being like therapy sessions for employees. As for small or medium-sized companies, Meta will allow the company to clearly set a shared future vision and action strategy that is easily communicated to everyone involved. Especially for those small, fast growing companies who have many newcomers and can iterate the experience as employee bonding exercises.

Why now, and why Meta? — The Co-vid19 pandemic is forcing companies to be resilient about the way they work, reform how the company is structured, all the way to reimagining what their goal or purpose is (just like it forced us to be resilient and flexible in the way we do our workshops). These are huge, complex issues and the conventional, top-down approach won’t suffice. Instead, Meta engages various individuals in the organisation,asking them for their input and their stories, and taking a bottom-up approach. It uses stories and metaphors to communicate and deliver messages. Because humans are story-driven, we can help create change that resonates with people, leading to a long lasting change. Furthermore, helping organisations think about the various possibilities in the future, we are helping them be more proactive about their future, rather than being reactive.

If you want the experience first-hand... — There are two possible ways clients can access META. The first is to purchase our digital toolkit complete with an instructions manual and relevant resources to facilitate the META workshops themselves. This can be found on META’s official website, www.metaworkshops.com; The second is to hire us to facilitate and co-create with them. We help clients navigate through the metaphor with illustrations and animation clips, create a story that works with their company, and find those key service design opportunities that they can act upon today to achieve the preferable future they set during the workshops.

Special thanks to Chris Moore, principal consultant at Thoughtworks and RCA-SD PhD candidate, as well as all the wonderfully active participants of our workshops from Thoughtworks

Size: March - May, 2020

In Collaboration with:

Nayoon(Lucia) Lee
Lucia is a wonderful teammate. We collaborated and supported each other throughout the project. To find more about our project follow this link above.

W&T, A consultancy company of 2030 (concept) — Organisational Structure of W&T, a consultancy company of 2030 (concept) In the future, individuals will have increasingly diverse expectations and career paths that can not be supported by the current business models / organisational system of consultancies. How might we design a consultancy company that does support these diverse individuals’ professional needs? W&T, a concept consultancy in 2030 has a different organisational structure than the conventional two-dimensional, linear structures of today. If we think the poles in the image above as different departments with different levels of seniority, people are not confined to their own departments, but are free to branch out of their expertise to learn from, interact with, and try out other department roles. When this is reflected in the company structure, it becomes a 3-dimensional structure like this. It is also organic- something that changes along with the changes of individuals inside the company.

TREASE, an internal information platform used by W&T — Trease is W&T’s internal platform available for all employees and management in the form of a forest as the company, departments as home ground, and trees as professional expertise or relevant soft skills. The video explains the different features of TREASE including company structure visualisation, profiles, communication, company dashboard, etc.

Image of TREASE model — TREASE model displayed on the RCA WIP show 2020.

In light of changing market needs and demands triggered by the evolution of businesses, W&T gives inspirations for how consultancies can rethink their internal structure and company boundaries, while TREASE supports more flexible and self-driven career exploration and development for individuals.

For more explanation of the design process or details of the outcome, please visit the TREASE website: https://trease.squarespace.com/

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Meta, Engagement for Future Thinking

W&T + TREASE, Explore the Future of Consultancy