Markus Edgar Hormess: Teaming with AI in Service Design – Episode 17

Markus Edgar Hormess Markus Edgar Hormess offers this advice: "Never prompt alone." Markus was working with AI long before the current wave of excitement. He experimented with early versions of ChatGPT and quickly identified new opportunities to collaborate with both his human colleagues and his new AI coworkers. He's currently building a community - Teaming with AI - to study and share these new practices and to explore the future of teamwork in the age of AI. We talked about: his background in strategic prototyping and how he's applying it in his Teaming with AI initiative his first exploration of AI, in 1986 one his first applications of current AI tech, a use of ChatGPT-2 to accelerate service design prototyping activities his work and experimentation on ways to engage AI tools as collaborators on design teams how to consume research on AI, but also the importance of getting out in the field since research develops more slowly than professional craft his insight that you should "never prompt alone" so that you and your collaborators can eliminate bias and get better answers some of the opportunities that AI creates for real-time research and accelerated implementation of research insights how important it is "to put people in the center of this" the benefits for design practitioners of diving in and experimenting with AI tools, always with collaborators Markus's bio Markus Edgar Hormeß is a well-known consultant, practitioner and educator in the field of service design and design thinking. In his daily work, Markus helps organizations tackle complex business problems and make team cultures more agile and human-centered. The focal point of his work is strategic prototyping, where he constantly pushes the boundaries of what a dedicated team can achieve with limited resources. Markus is a strong believer that we should break down the perceived boundaries between technology, design and business – and that cheap experiments and prototypes are efficient tools to move your company, your strategy, your team, or your project forward. Based on this mindset, he has shaped multi-year programmes to help multinationals shift towards a more hands-on, pragmatic and effective approach to customer experience and innovation. Markus has a passion for good design, human technology, practical experiments, authentic services, and playfulness in all things. He is co-Founder of WorkPlayExperience, a service innovation consultancy which helps organizations worldwide change how their staff, partners, and customers work together – and – how they can strategically discover and create new products and services. His practice builds on his experience of service design and business consulting, and on his background in theoretical physics. In 2010, Markus co-initiated the world’s biggest service innovation event: the award-winning Global Service Jam. This was soon followed by the Global Sustainability Jam and the Global GovJam, and Markus has been a leading figure in establishing the culture of experimentation and prototyping which Jammers worldwide call “DoingNotTalking”. Markus co-wrote “This is Service Design Doing” and “This is Service Design Methods”, top-selling books which have become the standard reference books for many practitioners and academics. He teaches service design, innovation, and sustainability at various universities globally, and is adjunct professor for service design thinking at IE Business School in Madrid. In 2023 he co-initiated the Teaming with AI conference and community. His growing interest centers on how AI influences our approach to teamwork and collaboration, as well as the broader impacts on innovation and the development of strategies that are resilient in the face of future challenges.. Connect with Markus online LinkedIn Teaming with AI website Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/HlHhpsr2lW4 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 17. As AI tools arrive in our workplaces, we're discovering that this isn't just another technology adoption cycle. The generative nature of tools like ChatGPT permits rapid iteration on ideas and quicker learning about their impact. For a prototyping strategist like Markus Edgar Hormess adding these AI agents to his service-design teams has been a boon, letting him and his colleagues collaborate and experiment in ways they couldn't have imagined just a few years ago. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 17 of the Content + AI podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Markus Edgar Hormess. I first met Markus a year ago at a service design workshop in Amsterdam, and we've been talking ever since about getting him on the show. So it's great to finally have you here, Markus. Larry: Markus, he's one of the co-authors of the book This is Service Design Doing. He's real active in the service design community and in that world he's really focused on strategic approach to prototyping, which is what we first wanted to talk about. And then AI came along. So we're on the Content + AI podcast. So anyhow, welcome, Markus. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Markus: Hey, Larry. Thank you for having me. Yeah. So you mentioned it, so I'm super interested in strategic prototyping and prototyping in all kind of aspects. And when this whole wave of AI came about, we thought, "There is no books, there is no papers that tell you how to do this, so we need to prototype our way into this new world," and that's why we set up an initiative, which is called Teaming with AI, where we focus on the impact AI tools have on the way we collaborate in teams. So a small group of people that have a common goal, that trust each other, hopefully, and try to make something happen in the world. Might be nonprofit, for-profit, wherever you are. Markus: And so we set up a couple of events, a little Unconference early last year and one in the middle of the year. Then we started writing a white paper about this. This is about to be published soon, so hopefully we get some conversation about this. But all of this is really about giving a space, a play space for people that are interested to explore what is happening there. Only a few people actually focus on that team aspect. That's why we have a strong focus on that, because you know it, service design, what we always say, it's what is the key skill that you have to have in service design? That's facilitation. That's working with a group, whether you're part of that group or if you're facilitating a different group. And now one part of that group is AI and how does it change things? It changes it, and it doesn't change it in other parts, but certainly a lot of shift going about. Larry: Yeah. There's two things in there that are really interesting to me. One is that we're all still humans and we're going to be throughout this, whatever this AI thing turns out to be, but also the fact that, I feel like, you're living in the future a little bit, because when I met you a year ago, you were already deep into this and really exploring it. And now you're way into this collaborative paper and you've given it a lot of thought and you're going to be providing these materials that you just said didn't exist yet. So thank you for that. But tell me a little bit about when and how did you first get interested in AI? And how does it fit in specifically with your... Because you first came to my attention or you really stood out in that workshop as the prototyping guy. And so talk a little bit more about that. Yeah. Markus: Yeah, sure. I gave this a bit of thought, and then I remembered something, that back in 1986, I think I was in seventh or eighth year in school, I did a big presentation about the state of AI at the time. That was during one of these first waves, big promises in AI, "We're going to fix this by the end of the decade," and it never happened. But that was still when there was this kind of, "Oh, we can maybe do this." So this was time of programming languages like LISP and stuff. I think that was where I got curious. Then I forgot about it for a long time. And then just after I finished university, I started to work at the Bavarian Research Center for Knowledge-Based Systems, which basically was a spinoff of the chair of AI at the LMU University. But that was, again, during a time where we were in niche use cases. The machines weren't fast enough to do the big stuff that we can do today. But that's where I learned that, yeah, niche use cases can be useful and they still are to this day. Markus: And then fast-forward, me getting into service design and innovation. And three or four years ago, no, three years ago now, when GPT-2 came out, it was accompanied by a wave of tools that would allow you to come up with better marketing texts. And that's where we pick them up and use them in prototyping. Because in service design, if you design a new customer experience or service, how do you make this tangible, right? And one super simple way is to create a little advertisement for a new idea that doesn't exist yet. It's easy to test because people know the format. So it's a really good way to test the waters if people like that or value that way you're trying to sell. Markus: And using these tools, there's this little, "Oh, give me 10 variations of a Facebook advertisement or a Google ad." And then the teams would just use these tools within our workshops. We get these 10 and then curate the ones where it's, "Oh, yeah, that fits what we thought." And they could go faster, which is, I'm not obsessed by faster. There is a caveat there, but within the design process, being able to get something faster means you can iterate more, and that means you can learn more. So you can reflect on, "Oh, what does this do?