Katrin asks, should we really make all experiences less shitty? Okay, very philosophical question. I think If I had to give a gut feeling, I would say today, there is already enough pain in the world. And it's quite good to, remove as much pain as we can. That's my gut instinct. And this is something that that I've shared already in the past in another webinar with this.

With this new service design principle that I kind of love, which is make me want more of this shitty experience. And the person who asked the first question reacted in fact to this principle. Let me go a bit deeper here. In this story, when you are a kid, you have to put sometimes an eye patch over one of your eyes because one of your eyes is a bit weak.

And so having that eye patch reinforces the other eye. Good thing, very positive. That's awesome. But the problem is it's an eyepatch and kids hate them. Why? It's sticky. It makes them look funny. Other kids make fun of them. Not a good experience. And it itches. It's not something to like, but some smart eye doctors have found ways to make kids like this experience, even if it's a shitty experience and sometimes even ask more of this experience.

And that's the example that Swarina shared with us in the service design community. With this little poster where the kids can put at the end of the day. They put the little eye sticker on the poster and it then reveals a bigger story or a bigger visual. Quite lovely.

And the other thing that they do is on the eye sticker, they put a funny character on it or something fun for kids, which then makes other kids feel like he has a super cool eyepatch with Donald or with this Pixar movie hero on it. And That feels cool. I'd love to have that.

So yeah, they turn something which is lame into something fun. That's cool. And they make the kids see the progress with this little poster. But sometimes pain has value. And that's something that we see both from our bodies and its services. When you pat your hands on a hot stove you have a lot of pain.

And this pain makes you react and take out your hands from there. Which is a good thing. That pain was a useful information that made you do something that is quite healthy. And in some services, pain or friction is something that can be useful too. For that, we have another example from another service design principle, which is from the book Service Design Principles 1 to 100.

And the principle is called Uncertainty Makes Users And that's a story where in a village, a small city, all the traffic lights just didn't work. For a period of time, they were broken. Quite a dangerous situation. If you don't have any more traffic lights, things might go wrong. You might think, okay, there will be a ton of accidents, maybe even some death, terrible things.

But what happened in reality was that people were way more careful. So even traffic flow was better. So not more accidents, just a better traffic flow because everyone was more careful. So here the pain this friction was in fact something that was useful for people in some way. Not all pain is terrible, and not all pain should be removed.

So in short, we can say, as always with every service design philosophical question, it all depends. And the kind of rule of thumb we could have is this one, if paying is unnecessary for growth, if it doesn't help, if it has no value for the person, then remove it. If it's not a valuable information, if it doesn't make people more careful, if it doesn't make them grow, then why keep it?

You can just remove it. But when it has this value. When it makes people grow, when it makes people learn new things, react quicker, then maybe that pain is necessary and we should keep it.