A couple of months ago, we noticed an interesting video on Linkedin. In this video Playmobil announced their new toolkit for professionals. We spoke with Victoria Dobbie, project manager at sub-brand Playmobil Pro. She introduced us to the tool and the process of designing and bringing it into the market.
Increasing automation in our workplaces, demographic shifts and a customer-based economy are drastically changing the way we work. In order for people to keep up we will need a very different set of skills, particularly those that are unique to humans: imagination, creativity, curiosity, emotions and social relationships. How will we bring this skills transition into our jobs, and which implications will this have for employees, employers and organisations?
In our 34th episode of our podcast you can listen to the ARENA round table discussion, i.e. an interview with the speakers of the evening and questions from the audience.
Tesco Bank and Modern human won the ‘best in private sector’ service design award for their project Phoenix. We spoke with Amjid Rasool, head of service design at Tesco Bank and Paul-Jervis Heath from the Service Design agency Modern human. Together with their whole team they redesigned the customer complaint experience of Tesco Bank clients.
Fjord en West Midland Police won the award best in public sector for their project ‘Developing a police force’s digital experience for citizens’. We spoke with Giulio Fagiolini, who is visual design at Fjord and Kostja Paschalidis who was senior service design at Fjord and is now working as a freelancer.
Innovationsguiden won the Professional Non-Profit/Public Sector award. Innovationguiden is an ongoing project that aims to support and reinvigorate the Swedish public sector in collaboration with citizens through service design. This was done by providing various forms of support to municipalities, county councils and regions to work with user-driven innovation in their development work.
Cork County Council is the second largest local authority in Ireland. They offer over 600 services to the civilians of Cork. This means they have an all-time challenge to deliver the best possible services for their customers. A few years ago, they came across Service Design, and started experimenting. They formed the Service rePublic team, and never looked back since.
As we shifted from a product-based economy into a service-based economy, customers are more and more pampered with good services. To be successful, companies more than ever need to offer services that exceed the expectations of people. So in order to offer the best services, companies can do two things. On the one hand they can work closely together with external professionals. On the other hand, they can expand their in-house expertise by training their own employees to think more human centred. To introduce and present both ways of working, we invited two international speakers who shared their knowledge.
We went to the Service Design Global Conference in Dublin where we attended lots of inspiring talks and hands-on workshops. Again, it was a truly amazing edition! It’s surprising how this conference manages to touch new topics & give new inspiration every year. Hats off to the organisation!
We also really enjoyed the social aspects of this conference. Since this wasn’t our first SDGC, we saw a lot of familiar faces and like every year we had the chance to get to know many new people. During these moments we got the opportunity to interview some service design ‘rockstars’. You can find a compilation of these interviews here.
Marc Stickdorn is a well-known person in the Service Design world. That’s understandable for many reasons!
He is one of the writers on the ‘Service Design Thinking’ and the ‘Service Design doing’ book. Since this week also the ‘Service Design Methods’ book. Besides that he is co-founder and CEO of ‘More than Metrics’, a company that offers tools and stuff for customer experience and service designers: Smaply, Experiencefellow and Mr. Thinker. Marc speaks about Service Design at many conferences around the world.
Great to have him at the podcast!
New technologies, a continuously changing lifestyle and new jobs and disciplines present serious challenges in the field of education. Old education methods and skills are challenged in a society where personalisation, collaboration, information and e-learning are taking over. Professionals have to re-educate themselves and schools need new tools and solutions to be able to innovate and make these changes manageable. How can Service Design help education deal with these challenges and inspire people to solve problems in a creative way?
Together with the city of Rotterdam, service design agency Muzus won the award for organisational impact in the public sector. The city of Rotterdam is offering a mobility service to people with special needs to make sure they get to the where they want. They realised, however, they did not know the people they were offering the service to. Muzus conducted qualitative research in various ways to give the city of Rotterdam insights in these users. These insights were used in various ways to offer the best service possible.
In this episode we speak to Hyunyim Park who won together with her team the student award for business innovation in the private sector. Together with Jaehyun Park and Culainn Boland Shanaha they designed the Smart Black Taxi Service Flo to tackle London’s air quality. Their service offers real-time time data about slow traffic, road works, busy spots where people look for taxi’s, etc. By offering this data the taxi drivers will be able to make better choices and reduce their driving time without passengers.
In this episode we speak to the Service Design award winners for the best commercial project. Judy Mellett is director Service Design, Innovation and Strategy at Telus and Chris Ferguson is founder and CEO of Service Design agency Bridgeable. Together they won the award for redefining the TELUS Renewals experience.
Ella Walding won the Service Design student award for her graduation project at the Royal Collage of Art in Londen. Together with the government of Malta she developed a set of Service Design tools aimed to create change in the organisation. These tools can be found at servizz.gov.mt
After her studies Ella started working as a service designer at innovation unit.
This year Service Design award for systemic change in education went to ‘Design Managers Australia (DMA)’ and Macquarie Primary School. We had the great opportunity to have both Mel Edwards, co-principal at DMA and Wendy Cave, principal at the Macquarie Primary school together on the show.
Chris is a Service Design Strategist, founder and CEO of the Canadian Design Agency Bridgeable. At Bridgeable they work with some of the largest organisations in sectors like healthcare, telecom and government. Together with their clients they deliver great customer experiences though designing organisational en service-system level changes inside these companies.
BC is a game changing technology that brings some unique benefits. For us there are some properties that make Blockchain highly interesting for Service Design.
Distributed
Blockchain is a distributed technology, a blockchain run on multiple nodes that can should on different physical locations. When one node is compromised, nothing in the blockchain is lost.
Immutable
The assets in a blockchain can not be duplicated or changed without recording the action to do that change. With a blockchain it’s not possible for two people to have two different instances of the same data.
Secure
On top of these aspects the security to access one asset in a blockchain is huge and each asset has its own security.
Transparent
A blockchain can be designed to be entirely transparent, recording and sharing every single transaction that happen in the blockchain.
These benefits are qualities that traditionally are taken care of by human-beings in transactional processes. When we think of transferring credit, property or certificates, it is people who ensure that this happens in a reliable, transparent and fair way.
With blockchain we have a technology that can potentially take over some of these human processes and this will affect the experience of these processes and have consequences for the people involved. It is therefore only natural that we are highly interested in exploring what blockchain can mean for our work.
We chose blockchain as the topic for our latest ARENA event and we recorded the round table conversation with the speakers.
We were happy to join the Global Service Design conference again this year. During the conference we talked to speakers from all over the world, volunteers, organisers and many more. You can find a compilation of all these interviews and our own recap here.
Tanarra Schneider is group director at Fjord Chicago where she leads a large team of talented people. She loves keeping teams motivated to design new services and businesses. She is passionate about design as well as food, dancing and being a mom.
This year in Madrid will mark the tenth edition of the Service Design Global Conference. We talk to Birgit Mager, Alex Nisbett, and Jamin Hegeman about 10 years of Service Design conferences. They take us back to the start, share their personal highlights and get us excited for the upcoming conference. Have a listen in anticipation of the next edition and come and find us to say hello in Madrid.
INTERESTING LINKS
The Power of Ten - Ten years of Service Design conferences
Service Design Podcast is brought to you by David Morgan & Stina Vanhoof from Knight Moves and the Service Design Network
Per Kristiansen one of the people who helped make Lego Serious Play into what it is today. As partner at Trivium he goes around the world training people to be Lego Serious Play facilitators. Together with Robert Rasmussen he is the author of the book “Building a Better Business with the Lego Serious Play method. We talk to Per all about the early days of Lego Serious Play and what makes it such a great tool.
Frederik Vincx is a Belgian social service designer. He graduated ten years ago and worked for six years in communication agencies as a designer. In the following four years he founded his own company Prezly, where he put his heart and soul in. After these ten years of hard work he wanted to shift his energy towards more meaningful challenges. Even though he really loved his job he felt that he should do something else that matters even more.
So he took the brave decision to go on a one year Social sabbatical. The word sabbatical might make you thing he is taking a rest but that’s definitely not the case! Fredrik is taking ten internships in one year in organisations he would like to do something meaningful for.
Esben Groendal is a Danish Service Designer working in Japan. He is a former Service Design master student at Aalborg University and the initiator of the Service Design Tour.
Virtual and augmented reality promise to change the way we perceive our surroundings, interact with each other, create, teach and play. As the technology evolves at stellar speeds, each day more and more opportunities open up for businesses, brands and organisations to connect with their customers. But it also leads to new questions. Will this new way of seeing blur the line between real life and virtual reality? And how will we design the best user experiences for it? In our second live episode we talk to Stijn Michiels and Demis Holvoet about VR, AR and Design.