The Service Gazette, Vol.2 by Service Design Berlin

vol. 2 , no. 1

by sarah drummond

service experience camp 2016 edition

Designing movements like a service

eu € 5 / uk £ 4.75 / us $ 5.50

inside, outside and on the edge During the past decade of my career, I’ve had the good fortune of working on the inside, outside and on the edge of large institutions. Be that government, public bodies or for profit entities, I’ve been both employed and hired to re-design services for them. At Snook, we’ve always designed with people at the heart of the approach. That’s meant a fair bit of time with senior leaders talking about top-down change to align their organization to meet user needs, as you’d expect. A strange consequence of my career though, has been the amount of time I’ve also spent promoting and designing bottom-up activism. As Ezio Manzini points out in ‘Design, When Everybody Designs’, the problems that were once owned by one organisation now cross boundaries of several organisations, stakeholders, producers and user groups. Problems are shared, so their solutions need to be too. One design project commissioned by one organization won’t sustainably solve it. Instead, we need to create the spaces that allow the people involved in that problem to come together to solve those problems together over time. Simply put: we need to design activism. I’ve spent the last 10 years designing these spaces for this to happen effectively and here are some things I’ve learned. 1 What you build isn’t as important as the effect that thing has In 2009, Snook launched MyPolice, the uk’s first online police platform that allowed users to give feedback to their local police. It was landmark at the time, and the police didn’t want to happen – at first. It took us two years to implement even a prototype of the platform. The technology was easy, but the mindset of the police was hard to change. We worked with victim support groups, community groups and citizens to define how the service should be built. →

opinion

How can we integrate business design? More than half of all service design projects never move past the concept stage. As service designers, we also have to think about implementation and the ensuing business aspects. Marzia Arico makes a proposal for how service and business design can be combined to increase the feasibility of service design projects and the likelihood of their success. → page 12

community

What does it mean to design for impact? Over the past years, Berlin’s service design scene has grown into a vibrant, inspiring community. To reflect this, we wanted to understand how local service design agencies design for impact. Seven local companies share their definitions of ‘impact by design’, with examples of how their teams create it. To learn more, check this issue’s centrefold. → page 10

co-conference

How can we create new learning experiences? Companies invest in building in-house service design capabilities, but will also need external impulses to stay competitive. Given that, how can we enable learning outside organisations to foster innovation inside? We share our view on creating an interactive conference format to nurture inter-organisational peer-to-peer learning among service innovators. → page 20

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Contents 1

Designing movements like a service by Sarah Drummond

Design for impact

Improving lives of women

A coup for Berlin

Five success factors for building an in-house design capability by Tobias Kruse

Death by double diamond by Kate Ivey-Williams

Radical collaboration

Produced at the piano factory by Marko Thorhauer

10 Impact by design

by the editors by Marie Hartmann

by Moritz von Volkmann

by Manuel Großmann

by Berlin service designers

12 Service design + business design by Marzia Aricò 13 Hack your org

by Jan Schmiedgen

15 A manifesto for mini service design by Daniele Catalanotto 16 The manly guide to menstruation by Mike LaVigne 17 When services harm people by Maria Izquierdo & Martin Jordan 18 Self organisation 19 Think circular

→ However, seeing the needs of their users, slowly the opinions of the police, commissioners, local authorities and all the sub-user groups within the system started to change. What we were building was more than a website, it was conscious cultural change. As Dan Hill notes in ‘Strategic Design, Dark Matter and Trojan Horses’, the Hitchcock term ‘Macguffin’ is a good way of thinking about these kinds of design activities. For Hitchcock things like ‘finding the bad guy’ or ‘rescuing the hostage’ weren’t important in and of themselves, were used purely as vehicles to bring about a plot. MyPolice was that. By delivering a working, what some might call speculative prototype, we opened up a series of much wider questions about safe social media use, contributed to national policies due to the hearings from our work, and we supported developing legal frameworks on what to do when something negative happens online. When it wasn’t our job to continue the ‘product’, we let that go and accepted our role as the Macguffin.

by Caspar Siebel

by Svenja Bickert-Appleby

20 Creating open learning formats by Katrin Dribbisch The bank of the future

by Sebastian F. Müller

Imprint The Service Gazette • Vol. 2, No. 1 Editors Martin Jordan, Katrin Dribbisch, Manuel Großmann Contributors Anastasia Linn (lectorate), Dörte Lange (styling) and the service design community Person responsible according to German Press Law Martin Jordan Publisher Service Experience UG, Wittstocker Str. 3, 10553 Berlin, Germany

2 Build effects that can scale a network In 2013, I sat down with a friend for coffee to discuss how we could improve the experience of cycling. As keen two-wheelers we discussed how we might bring the tools and practice of design to the cycling world. What we came up with was CycleHack, a working title for a global movement that would bring together multiple perspectives from a place (think planners, pedestrians, cyclists and policy makers) and put them in a room for 48 hours, asking them to prototype tangible improvements for cyclists in their area. From the outset we joked: what would happen if this got big? There were only three of us at that point (Johanna Holtan, Matthew Lowell and myself), how would we scale to deal with demand? So we consciously designed every artefact to consider scale. The ideas would be uploaded to an open source catalogue, the logo would be customisable to every location, a hack pack would be shared with others explaining how to do run their own local version. Importantly, we gave the idea away. Instead of investing in IP, we invested in enabling people to use that IP. We considered all the user groups from city volunteers to CycleHack participants, local investors to more established cycle charities, designing each bit of communication and material to fit their needs. As Ezio Manzini said: “Today, we need groups of people with skills across several disciplines, and the additional skills that enable professionals to work with, listen to, and learn from each other as they solve problems”. This is what we’re doing: providing a platform that brings together all the perspectives around a place and arming them with design tools. As Tommi Latio says, “Both DiY production and open design empower the user by putting professional tools in the hands of the masses”. We give away design tools in a safe space and the results are incredible. People get excited about making the change they want to see happen. And we’re non-restrictive. Results range rom re-designed physical road signs to interactive data sets of

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cycling expenditure, campaigns to shut streets for first time riders to policy hacks on the process of learning to drive. What was the result? In less than three years we scaled to over 30 cities. In 2017, we hope it will go even larger, to 50. • CycleHack Amsterdam gave birth to the city’s first bike mayor. • CycleHack Brussels met the Minister of Transport. In Scotland, CycleHack ambassadors are going into local communities. • CycleHack Manchester now regularly works with Sustrans to improve transport policy. We don’t own any of the ideas, we just helped the network to come together. We’ve empowered everyone to consciously design together as a global network. What’s important, however, is that the participants understand their local areas and contextual issues. In the words of Patrick Geddes, a famous town planner and philosopher, always, “think global, act local”. 3 Designers don’t own the change For me, the last ten years has been a long deconstruction of what I knew as the design industry to be: hero designers, lone innovators, infamous design studios. A network of people brought together by ‘a thing’ that asks more questions than it solves and promotes a democratic exploration of needs is far better than the lone wolf designer solving a ‘problem’. Whenever my team is given the challenge of ‘solve this problem’, my first reaction is to step back and ask “who needs to be involved and how do we empower this group to solve it?” Before you can think about changing the world – think first about how you can remove yourself from the equation. There are no heroes in design. We must promote the empowerment of people with design tools to solve problems themselves and take action. Ultimately, this is about designing consciously to stimulate movements and providing the products that enable people inside the system to re-design it themselves, and well.

Sarah Drummond is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Snook, a consultancy working at the forefront of civic, public sector and democratic innovation.

icons by luis prado from the noun project

november 2016

Design for impact by the editors

peaking of impact in design warrants some clarification. What do we mean when we say impact? According to the dictionary, impact can be defined as “having an effect or influence on someone or something”. But who do we influence? We could continue by asking why, how, for how long and in which way do we affect them. Many designers – and a lot of other people, too – seek work that is meaningful and impactful. They strive for purpose in their jobs and want to see change happen in the world. Design intends to make an impact. To quote Herbert Simon: “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” 1. But what is the preferred situation? What are the consequences of our actions? Take the designer-founded company Airbnb, for example. While millions of users enjoy its experience and convenience, the behaviours it enabled have had a severe impact on local neighbourhoods and the prices of flats around the globe. Beyond the connotation of positively impacting people’s lives, designers also have to consider the negative consequences. In other words, what is the impact we want a service to have? We also need to think about the scope of our impact: Are we designing for a few individuals, a larger group of people or a whole society? Moreover, designers do not act on their own. They work in teams, together with business analysts, product and service managers, all kinds of engineers as well as researchers and sometimes even policy-makers. Designers might have to re-think their role if they want to design for impact.

This second edition of The Service Gazette takes a broad look at ‘Design for Impact’ – applying a number of lenses to understand what impact can mean. Opening this issue, Sarah Drummond shares her experiences as a civic hacker who works with local and central governments and the European Union to improve public services. The next two contributors share examples of designing service experiences. While Designit portrays how they redesigned a breast cancer diagnosis experience, Moritz von Volkmann from bcg Digital Ventures gives an insight into the launch of a new urban electric scooter service. As service design resources move inside organisations, we have two different angles on this: that of the design agency Fjord who helped to build these capabilities inside one of Germany’s biggest banks, and that of Kate Ivey-Williams who worked in design agencies for many years before joining the British Government as an in-house designer and now reflects on the differences. Next, we juxtapose the perspectives of a small owner-led agency and a large corporate one. Fuxblau’s Manuel Großmann envisions a new role for small agencies and how they can survive and contribute to the in-house movement by taking a radically collaborative approach. Marko Thorhauer from Aperto, now an ibm company, on the other hand, discusses how a digital agency that has been in business for 20 years changed and how its perspective on impact changed, too. The centrefold spread is dedicated to the Berlin service design scene’s view on ‘Design for Impact’. Seven local businesses share their definitions of ‘impact by design’ and an example where their company made an impact.

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Service design cannot exist without business design, so Marzia Arico makes a proposal of how the two can be integrated to increase both the feasibility of service design projects and the likelihood of their success. Sometimes starting small can make a big difference. Jan Schmiedgen, who studied the adoption of Design Thinking in large-scale organisations for years, recommends starting with smart little hacks that get the ball rolling. Daniele Catalanotto suggests a similar approach in his ‘manifesto for mini service design’. Mike Lavigne from Clue penned something rather unusual for the male half of our readers: a manly guide to menstruation, informed by his experience designing a popular female health app. Maria Izquierdo and Martin Jordan, both working at UK Government Digital Service, take a critical perspective on data and how – if not well designed – data usage by services can impact people in negative ways, emphasising the responsibility of designers. Looking at the bigger picture of ‘Design for Impact’, Svenja Bickert-Appleby suggests we reconsider our linear economic view and move towards circular thinking, a business approach guided by the principle of sustainability. We share our view on creating an interactive conference format to foster inter-organisational peer-to-peer learning among service innovators. Last, but not least, our cartoonist Sebastian Müller envisions what banks would look like if they took inspiration from our favourite communication tools. We hope you will find this Service Gazette thoughtprovoking and discussion-triggering. Let us know what impact by design means to you, what it needs and how to measure it. 1 – Simon, Herbert A. (1988). The Science of Design: Creating the Artificial. Design Issues, 4(1 / 2), 67 – 82.

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Improving lives of women Redesigning breast cancer diagnostics by marie hartmann

omen with a heightened risk of developing breast cancer waited up to three months before scheduling both an examination and diagnosis at the Oslo University Hospital, the largest hospital in Scandinavia. Supported by the Norwegian Design Council’s Design-Driven Innovation Program (DIp), Designit worked together with a project team at Oslo University hospital to change the patient experience for the better. The goal was to reduce waiting time and improve the overall patient experience. The collaborative, visual, and iterative process enabled the hospital staff to work closely together and envision a new system. re-thinking the process with service design The Oslo University Hospital decided to rethink the process. The ideal user journey was mapped out, completely independent of the existing process and its challenges, and the team then worked backwards from there. Together with the designers, the staff came up with solutions on how they could work differently with new routines that reduced the diagnosis period. The team then ran co-creation workshops with staff members where they developed prototypes, mainly in the form of scenarios and user stories. The scenarios were tested by presenting them to patients and staff. The designers did some alterations based on the test results in collaboration with the project team until they had a solution that was both feasible and met user needs (both back-end and front-end). As a result, it was defined what the radiologist, the nurse, the pathologist and the patient coordinator had to do to deliver this experience. The solution aimed to improve cancer patients’ lives by rethinking behind-the-scenes processes from a patient’s point of view. The hospital staff play an important role in their patients’ lives and this had to be acknowledged. A large part of this included the hospital recognizing, accepting, and working on improving their customer service experience leading up to diagnosis. service design with impact for humans The new process at bDS was officially inaugurated at Oslo Hospital on the 4th of November 2013 with the Norwegian Minister of Health and the Norwegian Design Council attending the event. With the new process, patients should feel confident that they are in the care of the hospital the moment they leave their general practitioner’s office. The goal was to create a straight-forward path from the gp to diagnosis, getting the patient an answer on diagnosis as soon as possible.

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The journey towards a diagnosis has been radically reduced down to a total of seven days, a previously unthinkable goal. From day one, the patient receives a brochure from their gp with information detailing the steps they will go through to diagnosis. They are also equipped with a direct phone number they can call in case they have any questions. On the backend, the hospital now assesses the referrals daily, ensuring timely reviews. If the practitioner reports a suspicious lump, the woman now gets an appointment within seven days. In the cases that are not as alarming, the patient may wait longer, but never more than four weeks. On the day of the examination, the patient is greeted at the centre by a radiographer. The patient then meets the radiologist and is given a preliminary diagnosis. The patient receives a follow-up appointment the next day where the diagnosis is confirmed and if approporiate, receives a treatment plan. Instead of meeting once a week, all the specialists involved meet every morning to discuss the patients. The test results are ready four days after the examination, and are evaluated in this meeting. This ensures that all patient cases are discussed in a timely manner and the waiting time doesn’t accrue. Prior to this, it could take up to 12 weeks before patients received a letter for examination at the hospital. Now, patients are contacted, either through phone or letter, just a few days after receiving their referral from the gp. All in all, the time from referral to diagnosis is now between 7 to 28 days, depending on the severity of the case. The new process represents a 90% reduction in waiting time. Service design proved to be a valuable method in starting up this project and contributed to creating a real change. After the design phase, hospital staff drove the new process through implementation. The key to success throughout the project was the close collaboration between the designers, project group, and hospital staff. The designers brought the patient perspective while the project group and staff identified the where the pain points lay. In addition to the ownership created through co-creation and involvement from the staff, top management had committed from the beginning of the project to realize the solutions. This combination enabled an ambition within the groups that led the project through realization and impacted patients’ lives. Its success inspired the National Standardized Procedure for Breast Cancer, introduced in January 2015.

Marie Hartmann works as a Design Director at Designit in Oslo. She has lead several service design projects within the public health sector.

NOVembeR 2016

A coup for Berlin Designing for the urban mobility challenge an interview with moritz von volkmann

his year, a new mobility service was launched in Berlin: coup eScooter-Sharing. We asked Moritz von Volkmann, a senior experience designer on the project, to tell us about the design process. Moritz, you have been part of the project team at bcg Digital Ventures that designed coup - an eScooter sharing service. Could you tell us about the starting point of the project? The starting point of Coup was a bit unconventional for us at bcgDV: there was no time for upfront ideation, and little time for warming up. Our corporate partner Bosch came up with the idea and determination to enter this space, along with a pretty clear vision of what we should aspire for: an eScooter sharing service with the capabilities to become the preferred electromobility sharing service globally. Quickly, the leading question became not so much ‘why’ or ‘where’ but ‘how’ to enter and thrive in that space. So we immediately started to get our hypotheses together and to run a lot of research, in Berlin and beyond. Some of us even went to the West Coast to try some of the most advanced mobility services first hand, all to get a sense for customer needs and how to excite them with a new shared mobility platform. One of your colleagues once said that Digital Ventures is a startup builder. How exactly was coup built and what was dv’s involvement? bcgDV’s mission is indeed to incubate, operate and invest in digital startups in partnership with the leading industry players out there. We believe that this new approach can unlock some powerful, unique advantages. I like to think of it as a ‘super-boost’ if a startup like Coup is backed by a company like Bosch, incredible 130 years of experience and an equally incredible track record of breakthrough innovations in the mobility world. We were sitting together with Bosch team members in one office since the beginning of our venture and had many inspirational discussions and brought up lots of thorny but important questions to solve for. DV ramped up an expert team covering the areas of growth, product design, software engineering and analytics and thus complemented the Bosch team. Of course it is not

always easy to run at startup speed – and at the same time factor in all corporate requirements. But none of us believed that landing a coup was easy. We found great teaming to overcome the small and big challenges that come with setting up something new and unlocked tons of advantages, for example, when it came to buying hardware or simply access to the right topic matter experts. One extremely important aspect for us has always been the digital experience. We want to compete with the best mobility apps out there. In weeks and months of intense work we developed a user journey and found out tons of pain points. We engaged with users who had no mobility sharing experience at all, as well as users who already adopted them to their daily habits. In weekly cycles, we developed first concepts and made dozens of prototypes which we then tested with users to get closer and closer to a truly fitting digital experience. This said, the digital part was only one aspect. We constantly have to link it back and map it to the hardware and the business requirements. This is one thing that excites us all – it is a digital service embedded in and catering to real urban life with permanent transitions from digital to physical experience and back. It seems like you basically built a company from scratch to implementation. How long did it take from project kickoff with Bosch until the launch this summer? And what were the challenges along the way? Project kickoff was in second half of 2015 with a rather small ‘founders’ team. Since then, we literally built Coup from scratch. Right now we are a team north of 20 people. We grew pretty fast, especially when we started the production work. As already mentioned, we faced several challenges; especially regarding the hardware. It was surprisingly hard to find the right scooter which met all our requirements both technically and designwise. Luckily, we managed to get Gogoro on board, an extremely design-driven innovator with, what we believe, the best connected eScooter in the market. Another example was finding the right helmet. We had the idea to make the helmet an essential part of our brand experience and to connect them visually to our scooter and to our app. Having decided that, we

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realized what impact it had on our production flow. Suddenly we also had to think about how to put color on our helmets. We searched for an effective and still nice way to brand them, without spending too much money for customization. We made a broad variety of designs and the final result was one with a plastic coating but no stickers on the sides, because that would be the first place where scratches would show up. All these problems have made the whole venture super exciting and rewarding. It was really challenging to keep an eye on the core digital product as well as on thinking of all the business aspects such as making a business plan and thinking about the right pricing, marketing, legal topics (insurance, where am I allowed to park the scooter), operations (how to charge the scooters, how to relocate them), thinking of what it takes to scale the venture to profitability, etc. Coup is available in Berlin now. How will the journey continue? And how will you stay involved? Very soon, Coup will move from the bcgDV headquarter, where it was incubated, to its own office. We will move along and help Coup to improve and grow in all dimensions. Especially on the people side where we will be looking for a lot of talents to hire to the team. But also on the product side where we are eager to move on after going out with the base version of Coup this summer. We have learned a lot in the last few months and we continuously review the given feedback to lift our service to the next level. I am excited to stay on board for some more time, especially as we have tons of valuable insights that will help us to refine basically everything: the brand, the operations, the product, the website, etc. First steps have been done and we are really happy of how well everything turned out, but we stay hungry. Find us on joincoup.com, try it out and it will definitely make you smile. Might sound cheesy, but that’s what we worked for every day.

Moritz von Volkmann is a senior experience designer at bcgDV, currently working on Coup. Before, he worked for Edenspiekermann and iconmobile.

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Five success factors for building an in-house design capability by tobias kruse

what do you have to keep in mind when building design capabilities in-house?

n our 2016 Fjord Trends we have identified that more and more corporations invest directly in business incubators and innovation labs, bringing design capabilities in-house. It’s almost become the price of entry in the consulting and financial industries, with the recent acquisitions of Adaptive Path by Capital One, Spring Studio by bbVa, and Designit by Wipro Digital. More of our clients are asking us to set up design studios in collaboration with them. Here, we share our experience with bringing design in-house. what are the benefits of building in-house design capabilities? Organizations can benefit from design on very different levels, especially when it comes to customer connection, innovation potential and speed. Customers (and employees) have ever-higher expectations that now also transcend industry barriers. People expect that their bank’s online account opening process is as easy as booking a car-sharing service. In digital, you compete on the experience level, not within a single segment or industry. Therefore, companies need to become more customer- or people-centric and create experiences that resonate with the people using them. Human-centered design can help do that. With a holistic approach, designers are able to identify the real needs and come up with solutions for them. Design has also proven to be a major driver for innovation and new business opportunities as design capabilities have become a key differentiator in highly competitive markets and fast-paced surroundings. Ultimately, it’s about speed. A lot of companies have experienced that it is hard and slow to innovate from their core business, which is often burdened by cumbersome processes and structures. The agile design approach can help establish leaner innovation management. Beyond an iterative approach, organizations also benefit culturally from design as it involves different perspectives within multi-disciplinary teams.

C-Level involvement and collaboration Having buy-in from the C-level is a key success factor for building in-house design capabilities. It shows a company’s clear commitment, which is important for the credibility of the undertaking. Being close and friendly with other functions such as tech, ops, and business is crucial for impact. These are the allies design needs to have an impact and make concepts go live. Designers will always be change agents within the organization and hence will need to have the trust, space and influence to do so.

People / Culture / Space (‘People are your IP and API’) People are obviously the most important asset when it comes to building a design capability. In order to be successful it’s really important to focus a lot on culture. In our experience, it’s much easier to build a strong culture when companies partner with a design company that already has successfully established one and then helps to build on top of that. Building a strong culture from scratch is incredibly hard. The right space and location for the design team is also critical for success. Creativity also manifests in the creation of working structures that support the ideal process, setting the stage for making productive use of creative thought. And the most important thing: the office belongs to everyone. There should be no privileged, separate space for the leadership.

Design Definition When working with our clients on setting up in-house design capabilities, we at Fjord spend a fair amount of time defining what design can do to help the organization and what the concrete offering looks like. This helps with getting beyond the ‘design is making things pretty’ perception which you still find a lot in organizations today, especially in markets with low

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digital maturity. Describing this isn’t enough though – you also have to be prepared to spend a fair amount of time educating internal stakeholders about design. We usually do that by involving them directly in trainings or workshops.

Start now (create value straight away, start working on projects) In an ideal situation, the education is done on the job and by showing the value of design right from the start. We recommend to start by working on actual projects as quickly as possible in order to show results and gain trust quickly. Think about Pilots and MVPs as early as possible and definitely before the actual launch of the design capability. The decision for the first project should be well-thought-out to ensure it’s a great design challenge where you can prove your worth.

Capabilities to do it In order to be successful, companies need to not only apply design thinking, but also move beyond the theoretical and get design doing and design culture right. In order to achieve this quickly, it makes sense to incubate the team within a design company before implementing it in the larger organization. This enables you to hit the ground running which is the main success factor for creating buy-in and excitement in the organization. The look and feel that you want to create for people working with the new entity is a mix of a start-up attitude and a deep understanding of the company’s business and organization.

Tobias Kruse is a the Group Business Director at Fjord. He is an experienced creative business leader with a passion for developing digital products and services.

NOVembeR 2016

Death by double diamond How to stay in service by kate ivey-williams

’ve been lucky enough to work as a service designer both in a consultancy and now in-house with Government Digital Service in the UK. Working in these two very different environments has taught me a lot about the challenges service design faces and what we need to do to actually get well-designed services delivered. The challenge is in implementation. The service design industry has mastered methodology. We understand what a well-designed service should look like. We know what needs to be done to get there. We can even build prototypes that help us simulate and test the user experience. But something seems to happen before implementation. Service designers are rarely involved in actually implementing a service. This means that when the service actually goes live, it often isn’t the shape you’d so carefully crafted on the page and handed over to the client. A lot of this is because of the waterfall nature of the commonly-followed double diamond process. What tends to happen after the final ‘deliver’ stage of the double diamond is that the service designer will hand over a set of instructions to the client and leave them to implement it themselves. This can take years. And no matter how good the stakeholder engagement, the service can come out looking very different to how it was originally designed. It’s pretty demotivating for service designers to work in this way, where their designs get thrown over a wall without any certainty that they will ever get implemented in a way that aligns to the original vision. This is also a massive problem for the service design industry. It means we don’t have much in the real world to point at and say “we designed that”, which makes it hard to sell the value of our work

based on the quality of our designs. So instead we sell it on methodology, not real-world examples. And this methodology doesn’t include implementation. When it comes to implementing a service, each challenge is different. It’s hard to create a template for this. But service design is not a methodology – it’s the design of services. Just like graphic design is about designing graphics, and product design about designing products. Some service design organisations have been trying to influence implementation by selling training. They see this as a way to help clients keep the thread of service design once they’ve handed over the designs and gone away. An unfortunate side effect of this is that it can be seen as service design consultancies making themselves redundant. And, while it’s obviously great for as many people as possible to understand service design, a week of training isn’t the same as years of study or industry experience. So rather than teaching organisations to follow the double diamond process and use service design methods, we need to build our own capabilities as services designers to help organisations get services delivered. And we need to stick around during implementation to make that happen. Waterfall doesn’t work. But what I’ve seen – both in-house and in consultancies – is service design organisations increasingly moving to agile. There are several ways in which agile can help service designers get closer to implementation. First and foremost, agile helps service designers design for the real world – because they’re working in the real world right from the start. They’re not just creating a proposal and handing it over at the end. Agile is an iterative process. This means you can

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flex and change the service design throughout the process – right through to implementation. You can work out how to get to the best-designed service, one that responds to the way things actually work. And agile is less tied to methods and ‘deliverables’. You can choose and change how to approach each stage of the project based on what the challenge is and what you need to get out of it. Clearly it’s easier to use agile as an in-house designer where you are, in effect, both designer and client. But consultancies can and are starting to move in this direction too. Before I moved in-house, the consultancy I was working with started to build more account-like relationships with clients. This meant they could move away from the ‘discover-define-develop-deliver’ sales pitch towards more flexible contracts and budgets. This let them plan projects in a more agile way, and work with clients from strategy through to piloting services at a pace that worked for the organisation. We had a service designer on-site with the client almost full time, working with their senior stakeholders, making sure they were ready and willing to deliver the services we had designed. Service design doesn’t stop at delivery. It shouldn’t even stop at implementation. A service is an ever-evolving, iterating thing. For service designers to influence that, they have to be involved at every stage.

Kate Ivey-Williams is a service designer at Government Digital Service in the UK. Prior to this, she worked as a service designer for Engine Group in London.

the service gazette

n recent years, many larger service design agencies have been bought by global corporations. This has changed the market fundamentally. As co-founder of the small service design firm Fuxblau, I began asking myself how to compete in a market with huge service design companies that have C-level access to client companies on the one side, and large in-house design teams prepared to tackle any given design challenges on the other. Inspired by the network-based community approach that we promote at Service Design Berlin, our company Fuxblau and a few other companies in Berlin have started to experiment with truly radical collaboration. ‘Collaboration’ in the agency world is rarely deserving of the term. A large agency wins a project from a huge client, but hires a smaller agency to do the job. They add their margin on top of that of the smaller agency. The sub-contractor agency cannot do the job itself, so they hire freelancers and put their margin on top of them. The freelancer gets a company email address so that no-one notices the deal. Of course, everyone tries to bargain as much out of it as possible. In the end, the client gets the work of a freelancer but pays three times as much for overhead and the margins of two companies in between themselves and the actual value creator. For these and other reasons, we decided to try something different. In our model, we form teams that work across company boundaries for a limited amount of time. While still belonging to different entities, we work on a project as one team, sharing our skillsets and resources. For this to work smoothly and cost-efficiently, we agree to be 100% transparent. Internally, we openly share the initial client proposal with each other and communicate each others’ day rates transparently. This transparency leads to

mutual trust among the project partners. Sometimes, but not always, a small acquisition fee is added. The client knows that they are working with a team of different companies. We always make sure that the client has one point of contact who is responsible and approachable at any time. For the client, it is considerably more cost-efficient than the traditional model. We have experimented with this form of an ad-hoc cross-company network a few times and see several benefits: impact through collaboration Most companies with 5 – 15 people are not able to realise larger projects. This can be due to a lack of resources, experience or trust from the client that a small shop can do the job. When two or three small companies collaborate, this is suddenly a whole different story. Different skill sets help to make the project a success. The different areas of expertise of the partnering companies help to deliver output across the whole value chain, encompassing user research, strategy, concept, design and implementation even at a larger scale. growing the knowledge base Small companies cannot offer their employees the same amount of inspiration and co-learning that large agencies can, simply because the pool of people is smaller. Cross-company collaboration helps fill that gap. Cross-company collaboration can be even better than learning from colleagues in a large agency, because employees are exposed to a different work culture while working with another studio on top of the new skills they acquire.

being agile reduces costs When smaller studios link up to form a temporary larger entity, they only contribute what is really needed. Thus, the temporary team is lean. There are no project management costs that are just added to feed an extra person, and the client will not have to pay for an extra visual concept just because the agency needed to bill a designer that would have been unoccupied otherwise. Another step towards more radical collaboration would be a shared staffing plan. That way, each partnering company involved would be aware of availabilities. Of course, we also see challenges. For example, what happens to the brand of a company that becomes seemingly interchangeable with other partners? We are also aware that this collaboration cannot be done with anyone. The most important aspects are trust between the collaborating companies and the teams as well as a shared culture. After all, small agencies are also competitors. Although we are still at the beginning of this kind of radical collaboration, we believe that this is the future for small agencies success. It allows them to remain small and agile, and deliver impactful results on a larger scale at the same time.

Manuel Großmann helps organisations to create outstanding service experiences. He works as Service Design Lead at Fuxblau, a design firm he co-founded.

Radical collaboration How to survive as a small agency by manuel grossmann

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NOVembeR 2016

Produced at the piano factory A conversation with Marko Thorhauer of Ibm’s Aperto

ne of Berlin’s largest digital workshops is Aperto, based in Chausseestraße in Mitte. Aperto belongs to the Ibm family, and with around 320 people, its portfolio spans the full range of digital agency services. We met Marko Thorhauer, managing director and service design enthusiast, to ask him a few questions. Aperto was founded in 1995. What it means to be an agency with digital focus has changed quite dramatically since then. Marko, what would you say are the exciting challenges to work on these days? It’s a really interesting time for agencies, and designers within agencies. Many organisations face the challenges of digital transformation – be it in marketing, production, customer services or employer relations. They need professional partners to strategize with, to prototype digital futures, redesign their grown and to revamp their sometimes aged digital ecosystems or services. Everybody struggles with complexity and change these days. We do, too. Technologies and best practices are constantly evolving. Yesterday’s way of solving a design task can be obsolete today. This calls for constant learning and constant reinvention. Thus, as an agency, you have to be open by nature. Plus: users are really demanding these days. The last best service experience one has sets the standard for the next. That’s a very cool challenge for designers. Aperto was recently acquired and became an ibm Company. What impact does that have on your work? I guess the access to international clients and high-ranking decision makers is just one of the positive outcomes? Yes, exciting! Since 2016 we are part of ibm iX – ibm’s digital agency. The focus is on designing great interactive and integrated experiences on top of the software and technology skills of ibm. For us, this means, new colleagues and partners worldwide, very interesting new leads and business opportunities and the capabilities to tackle even very

large, international projects. It has also given us access to profound tech skills and new technologies like ibm Bluemix, Analytics, IoT or even Watson. ibm has close cooperations with organizations like Apple, Adobe or Twitter, which help us a lot when it comes to implementing ideas. On the other hand, ibm wants to learn from us, from our design, communication and ideation skills and our expertise in digital marketing, lean service and experience design, based on platforms like Magnolia, CoreMedia or Adobe Experience Manager. We have seen a lot of agencies joining larger organisations over the last years. To some designers, it is a scary thought to become just a small part within a global organisation. How did the team at Aperto react when you became part of ibm? Actually, everybody was and is pretty enthusiastic. We now face new challenges and more international work. It may also be because ibm is a bit different than, let’s say, big advertising holdings. The goal of our partnership is not primarily to grow profit, but to develop the dach market together and strengthen ibm’s design capabilities in Germany. ibm has a strong culture of respect for designers and is currently transforming itself – again – to become a design-driven company. ibm has one of the largest and most comprehensive design thinking programs. The acquisition definitively got some attention in the design community, and we are getting more international applications, especially from designers with an interest in tech. We touched on digital transformation in the beginning. What are the design methods you use to tackle the complex questions it brings up? Many clients approach us to produce prototypes for new digital services. They want to experiment, become part of the digital service ecosystem or positively disrupt their own business models. Unfortunately, by nature, most of the prototyping work we do is confidential.

We often combine Design Thinking and Lean UX with Agile Development. Recently, we started working with a mid-process artifact we call Design Vision which helps us communicate in multi-stakeholder environments like big corporations. It basically is a high-level visual concept and prototype which makes alignment across divisions easier. Customers get a vision of what they will receive before the agile (or scrum) ‘train’ starts. As managing director, it is your job to sell a broader vision. Could you still name a few examples of your recent work that’d make it more tangible? I personally work a lot with Airbus Group and Volkswagen. We did the complete redesign of the Airbus Group Web-Estate two years ago and now constantly iterate and refine the offered services. We work on a better hr experience, digital media relations, digital corporate storytelling or live experience at flight shows. With Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, we work on the full range of digital marketing communication and design new services for the car manufacturer, mainly in b2b. But I also have a personal interest in healthcare and education. For Asklepios, a leading hospital holdings in Germany with more than 150 locations and 2 million patients per year, we redesigned the digital brand experience. With University of Stuttgart and LmU Munich, we are currently redesigning the digital student experience. Thank you, Marko! One last question: This edition’s theme is ‘Design for impact’. How do you wish to design for impact? I like our design to make a difference, whether that’s differentiating a brand visually or experience-wise from it’s competitors, or by delighting customers. Or simply by making life a bit easier, saving energy, effort, clicks or any unnecessary hassle. I like clear, impactful communication, so for me, great content – and good, precise text – is always part of the design experience.

Marko Thorhauer is the managing director at Aperto, an ibm Company in Berlin. With his team, he develops next level digital experiences and service designs.

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Impact by design

How do you deﬁne ‘impact by design’? Impact always sounds like a big bang, but if the outcome of design helped reach a goal or improve someone’s life, even if it is a tiny thing, that’s impact for us. Can you give an example where your company made an impact? How did you measure it? Measuring impact from a business perspective is often about conversion rates or kpIs, such as the launch of a product or usage of a service. An experience perspective gives you qualitative data, like happy faces or ‘I LOVe IT’ quotes from users. Technologists see themselves as enablers of impact, but we’ve no clue how they are measuring it. Anyway, as we recently launched an employee-centric digital product, the kpI was to get 50+ internal sales reps to use the product. After 1 month we had over 100, which was a great success for the partner and an outstanding result of our work. For another partner, we developed the mobile interface of a ‘Lync’ App to make it more convenient to join video and telephone conferences via mobile phone. I remember one person telling me that this app became ‘the most important thing’ for his daily work and that if someone would take it away again, he would start crying. That’s another way of measuring impact.

by the berlin service design community

Over the past few years, Berlin’s service design scene has grown into a vibrant and inspiring community. To reflect this, we wanted to hear from several local service design agencies and firms and, in so doing, shed light on what it means to design for impact. We asked two questions: “how do you define ‘impact by design’?” and “can you give an example where your company made an impact?”. Seven service design companies shared their thoughts.

Pia Betton Partner at Edenspiekermann

How do you deﬁne ‘impact by design’? Design is not decoration. Our definition of design is creating impact. At Edenspiekermann we work to create beauty and relevance. We shape brands by creating smart, meaningful and seductive experiences. We measure our success by the value that we create for our customers and for their clients. A great experience is something that is easy, enjoyable, satisfying and fixes a real problem.

Lutz Haase Managing Director at FTwK

How do you deﬁne ‘impact by design’? It’s easy to water down ‘impact’ to mean almost anything, including entertainment. We define impact as positive social change. Defining what’s ‘positive’ is tied to our company’s mission: to advance research for and access to information about female health and promote the progression of sexuality and social equality.

Can you give an example where your company made an impact? How did you measure it? Three years ago we worked on an interesting project in the Netherlands for the Dutch Railways. The question was: “how can we fix the human traffic jams on the train platforms in Dutch Stations at rush hour?”s The disoriented crowds led to anger, frustration, dangerous situations and train delays. Together with ProRail and NS Dutch Railways, we developed a new transfer process for the platform to improve passenger experience. The final solution is a very long LeD screen that shows the train in real size minutes before its arrival. The easy to understand, simple graphics show the position of the doors, where the entrances for bikes and wheelchairs are and which parts of the train are already crowded and win which parts free seats are available The measurable results: easier orientation, happier travellers, a safer platform and fewer delays. Design made a great impact, improving the situation and saving an incredible amount of money (train delays are very costly).

Can you give an example where your company made an impact? How did you measure it? We are collaborating with researchers at Oxford, Columbia, Stanford and Washington to advance research into female health and have begun publishing. This affects not only Clue users, but potentially half the world’s population. Our app provides a book’s worth of scientifically valid information to 6 m+ users, covering the basics of female health in a way that’s easy to understand. That body of knowledge is free to everyone, and it’s growing by the day along with our user base. People have a lot of questions, and when they use Clue, they find answers. That’s why our tagline is ‘Now You Know’.

Mike LaVigne Chief Product Officer at Clue

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NOVembeR 2016

How do you deﬁne ‘impact by design’? For us at IXDS, impact is about creating products and services for real people, with real lives, in real circumstances. Design should help individuals achieve their dreams! We shouldn’t be using technology to create connected products and services just because. We should use technology for its best purpose: to enhance our lives. Can you give an example where your company made an impact? How did you measure it? We worked on a project together with the NgO miCT (Media in Cooperation and Transition) to create Pocket Fm. It’s a tiny, decentralized and energy self-sufficient radio transmitter that allows for the spread of information in crisis regions, during conflicts or natural disasters or where there may not be an existing infrastructure. You can illustrate the impact on the basis of the user: so far, Pocket Fm units are being used to air programs on topics such as health, agriculture, security and conflict prevention, created by more than 40 broadcasters in Syria, Iraq, Tanzania, Sierra Leone and Malawi. Typically, either community radio stations or organizations such as the uN Refugee Agency are deploying our system.

How do you deﬁne ‘impact by design’? Impact means enhancing the everyday lives of millions of people through better services. To achieve this goal, a successful service creates value for the customer as well as for the company providing the service. Our unique business design perspective ensures that every new service idea has market potential. Can you give an example where your company made an impact? How did you measure it? Our innovation process integrates three perspectives: customer, business and technology. That ensures that we design not only desirable services but also economically viable and technologically feasible ones. The impact of our work is in the success of truly innovative services. They influence the life and habits of people as well as the well-being of the companies we work with. But we don’t stop at designing services for our clients. We also strive to enhance their innovation culture. By applying and teaching our methods, we empower internal stakeholders to spread an innovative spirit throughout the whole company.

Reto Wettach Co-Founder & Creative Director at iXDS

Eva Pika uX & Service Designer at Si Labs

How do you deﬁne ‘impact by design’? Design impacts every part of our lives from waking up and hitting snooze on the alarm over booking a meeting room at work to going to bed watching Netflix. Everything around us is designed to impact us and encourage loyalty. It’s a very exciting time to be a designer!

Ioana Petrescu Co-Founder of Dark Horse

How do you deﬁne ‘impact by design’? We are applying design methods in various contexts, from business modelling, organisational development, creative spaces up to product and services development. In our understanding design is a holistic approach which infiltrates all parts of an organisation. “Everything around you … was made up by people … you can build your own things that other people can use.” – Steve Jobs

Can you give an example where your company made an impact? How did you measure it? Digital innovation consultancy Futurice created a mobile solution for the outdoor advertising firm Wall Ag, which helps employees to make better and faster decisions in the field. Billposting distributors, cleaners, technicians and controllers helped Futurice through ridealongs, interviews and tests to incrementally develop an application that benefits the field force. The primary goals were time saving and people acceptance. We involved employees and the workers’ council early and often. We created a robust, easy to use solution that takes the age structure of the workforce into account and works well in subway stations, bright daylight, torrential rains and while using gloves.

Can you give an example where your company made an impact? How did you measure it? Native Instruments is a German technology company that develops software and hardware for music production and DJing. Our shared goal was to integrate user-centric thinking and design in the core of the company. Therefore, we used a design thinking approach. We started a pilot incubator format in Berlin and Los Angeles. We worked together with 40 employees from all over the company on future products and services. After eight weeks working with design methods, we had a look at the achievements. The quality of the newly developed products and services, and the feedback of the employee convinced us to widen the whole initiative to the entire company.

Mark Schlusnus Design Director at Futurice

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Service design + business design SERVICE DESIGN PROJECT

Outcomes

by marzia aricÒ

rganisations today are increasingly opting to embrace service design as medium to tackle some of their most pressing challenges. Too often however, as a result of working with service design agencies, organizations are left with great concepts for customers that fail to take into consideration the current organisational capabilities for service delivery. A survey run for a global research project called ‘Design for Service Innovation & Development’ reports that 51% of the projects run by Service Design agencies never get implemented. The agencies’ contribution is often at the Idea Generation and Customer insight phases (Sangiorgi, et al., 2015). At Livework we call this ‘corporate entertainment’: generating ideas to entertain and inspire an innovation department in an organisation whilst being fully aware that those ideas will never see the light. embracing business design As a consequence, Service Design agencies have started a transition towards more business-relevant language and offerings. Today, almost half of the Service Design agencies around the globe offer Business Design as part of their offering (Sangiorgi, et al., 2015). Livework is one of them. Business Design is now recognized as a complementary capability, added to any Service Design project to the point that every project gets assigned both a Service and a Business Designer. This is done to ensure that every project meets customers’ expectations, leverages business drivers and metrics and takes into consideration the organisation’s policies, practices, processes, people, and systems. Livework is in the midst of this journey. At this stage, I will share observations on what it means to run a Service + Business Design project in practice, what the consequences are for the agency that delivers it and the gains from the perspective of the client organisation. inside a service design project A Service Design project puts the customer at the centre of any intervention. Understanding the customer and designing a superior customer experience are central aspects of any Service Design project. An eager reader of design thinking or Service Design publications would expect the process of the project to alternate between stages of divergence and convergence. This is exactly what it looks like to an external observer analysing the process. In reality however, what often happens is that the exploration continues without a real moment of convergence of the information. Figure 1 shows a simplified diagram of a Service Design project by Livework, as seen from the inside. The initial stage of exploration looks at de-

Service Blueprint Design of the Service (flow)

Customer Insights Exploration

Design of the Channels Experience Design of the Customer Experience High level Reccomendations

Organisation

figure 1 A simplified diagram of the process of a traditional Service Design project from inception to conclusion. The exploration phase looks at customers and involves the organisation to understand relationships and interactions with customers. The insight phase keeps diverging while drawing insights from the analysis of the exploration phase.

veloping a deep understanding of the customer from the outside-in. It also involves the organisation in the process to better understand the customer experience from the inside-out. Without clear boundaries being defined by the organisation, the project keeps diverging into an insight phase, which will eventually inform the idea generation and concept development. The result is a number of possible deliverables that often do not leverage business drivers and do not take into consideration the consequent impact on policies, processes, practices, people, and systems. Moreover, the organisation is left with a number of concepts which are tested to work extremely well with customers, but are not tested with the internal organisation. When no clear ownership is agreed upon, there will be lack of clarity on who should move concepts forward. Without clarity on leadership, vision, budget, or business case, the outcomes of a Service Design project are difficult to implement. inside a service + business design project Figure 2 shows a simplified process behind a project that combines Service Design and Business Design capabilities. The customer remains central and be-

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This will eventually inform the idea generation, concept development and prototyping phases, which will produce a number of deliverables that are tailormade to the potential customer experience.

comes the lens through which the team looks at the business as well as the organisation. The process explores three angles; it focuses on: 1 Understanding the customer 2 Understanding business drivers and measures 3 Understanding policies, practices, process, procedures, people, and systems. The business and organisational understanding provide the natural boundaries for the Service Design project. The deliverables are three important activities (on the right side of the graph). 1 Justifying choices by building a business case model. This is particularly important as it helps the sponsor within the client organisation to sell the concept internally and ensure implementation. 2 Visualising the desired customer experience. This is particularly important as it creates a shared service vision within the organisation. 3 Building a plan for execution and implementation based on current capabilities. This is particularly important when it comes to ensuring quick results.

SERVICE DESIGN + BUSINESSNDESIGN O V e m bPROJECT eR 2016

is the future looking bright? Organisations worldwide are facing profound challenges related to digital transformations and customer understanding. These challenges are increasingly undermining their capacity to remain competitive in their markets – and uncover the tension between what customers expect and what organisations actually deliver to them. The solution to these challenges does not only reside in the design of better services for customers, but also in understanding how to transform the organisation to deliver those services. The process of tackling these challenges requires a combination of capabilities that leverage both Service Design and service transformation. This article is an extract from a book chapter originally published in the book DeSmA Avenues, 2015 http://www.desmanetwork.eu/desma-avenues/

Marzia Aricò is lead service design and strategy consultant at Livework. She is PhD fellow at Copenhagen Business School and research fellow at DeSmA.

Business

Customer

Blueprint

Service Experience

Design of the service Design of the experience

Realise

Desired customer experience

Guidelines for implementation

Organisation

Capabilities

figure 2 A simplified diagram of the process behind a project that combines service and Business Design capabilities. In addition to the usual customer research, the team makes an effort, at an early stage of the project, to

by jan schmiedgen

Justify Business Case Model

Exploration

Hack Your Org How to diffuse a (service) design mindset without permission rrespective of whether you call it Service Design, User Experience Design, Human-centered Design, Design Thinking, or Lean Start-up: human-centric and hypotheses-testing management concepts have grown rapidly in popularity in recent years. And although nowadays even your CeO might talk about the importance of customer-centricity and agile working modes (shall I add ‘in times of digital disruption’?), you still feel that something is amiss ... Maybe you realize that you design one ‘successful added-value micro-service’ after another, but you are never allowed to touch the broken parts of your organization’s business model? Maybe you discovered that the user needs you identified and the way

Service Scenario

Hack (noun, verb \’hak\): Reading code rules differently than others do | Mod or change something in an extraordinary way | An appropriate application of ingenuity | A creative practical joke | A clever solution to a tricky problem

your industry develops juxtapose your organization’s strategy? Or you found, that incentives are bound to artificial business goals that even work against what your customers desire and the work that needs to be done? Or, maybe it’s just the countless workshops without any implementation? The list goes on and on ... All new management concepts – especially those with an outside-in focus like those named above – can only be as effective as the organization allows them to be. Management often wants to reap benefits, e.g. being as creative and ‘agile’ as a start-up, without having to face the consequences of injecting such ‘foreign’ DNa within the firm. We Germans have

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How to execute and implement

Execute

understand the business as well as the organisation. This understanding creates boundaries for the project. The deliverables are designed to serve the customers, the business and the organisation.

a saying for that: “Wash me, but don’t make me wet.” (Un)fortunately things don’t work that way. Once you bring in a new management trend, it will either both irritate and change the existing system or, worst case scenario: the system will fight back, corrupt the concept and render it useless. So, wouldn’t it be a great idea for management to deliberately support the concept from the very beginning by simultaneously building up those innovation capabilities the concept needs to thrive? Wouldn’t also Service Design profit from some design-friendlier context? Well, the harsh truth is: there are only a few organizations where leadership is really strategic about the introduction and embedding of design (read: innovation) capabilities (e.g. Intuit, Ibm, gDS). Far-sighted leaders at those companies adopted necessary precautions and tried to remove innovation barriers before the actual work started. If they weren’t able to discover them upfront, they at least established mechanisms to circumvent obstacles while they occurred. This is what I call “deliberate innovation capability building”. If done right and with perseverance, companies can end up with an innovation system that cannot only accommodate one management trend like Design Thinking or Lean Start-up but a mash-up of different management concepts, which have been adapted to the context of the organization. The reality in most organizations however, looks a bit different, to put it mildly. Instead of empowering innovation work, managers are incentivized to control deviant behavior (a.k.a. your efforts to challenge the status-quo). They search for quick fixes, recipes and shortcuts to muddle through. You, dear reader,

THe SeRVICe gaZeTTe

are probably in one of those organizations where no one rolls out the red carpet if you propose to extend the competencies of design practice to areas beyond its current operating range. Instead of getting support, you will be faced with resistance from many parts of the organization. Some people might even refuse to listen to you and your ‘dangerous insights’. Or worse: you might well be in one of those innovation theater companies where management proclaims to change ‘company culture’ by design (thinking) without undertaking the slightest effort to support its diffusion beyond workshops and fancy skunk works labs. Sound grim? Not at all! When the going gets tough, the tough get going. You don’t have to wait for others (read: top and middle management) to deploy the ‘right’ conditions for you to innovate. All you need is apply your creative energy to the systems and structures of your own organization and get a bit, umm ... subversive. If there was one pattern of behavior that I observed in people who made things happen in inert innovation cultures, then it was that they all were ‘hackers.’ Not hackers in the popular sense of intruding computer systems but rather ‘hackers of culture’ and ‘systems’ within their organizations. Describing the spectrum of hacks they applied to colleagues, managers, policies, and even spatial structures would go way beyond the scope of this article. I listed three inspiring ones in the sidebar. What unites all ‘culture hackers’ is the fact that they either built up innovation capabilities themselves or that they forced management to act and do so eventually. And you know what? You are in a perfect starting position to do that as well. Who, if not you, knows how to decode people’s behavior and systems in order to reassemble a better version of itself? So, stop complaining and get going: apply your designerly thinking to the system that hinders you and your design practice and unfold its potential. Change it from within. Become a hacker of your culture and build innovation capabilities from the bottom up!

Improved innovation capabilities are facilitating a wider use of the management concept, and the organization is becoming more open towards innovation.

The Hacks 1 fake press release How a cheeky innovation team shook up its sluggish management. → Situation: Although its business model was under heavy attack from start-up companies, the sedate management of an incumbent company in a mature industry would deny any threat. Against the perception of basically every employee, they claimed no challenger would be able to conquer their market space and that there would be no need for innovation beyond incremental. → Hack: The company’s under-financed, under-staffed innovation unit thought differently: if things would go on as they did in the past, their jobs would be at stake. Thus they faked a press release, drawing up a disruption scenario happening today, which was only realistic ten years from now. → Result: The management believed it though and got totally agitated. They made the press release an internal issue and tried to get even the earliest prototypes from R&D ready for a presentation at the next trade fair. They always claimed ‘there was nothing to fear’, yet they panicked and tried to ‘at least something against this new disruptive offering’ in customer and public perception. Once the innovation team revealed their plot, the management was very upset and thought about either firing the whole team, or providing them with more resources. They decided for the latter.

3 innovation roadshow How an engineer disseminated a billion dollar business opportunity against the odds of his organization. → Situation: A Design Thinking team had found a feasible opportunity that was unbelievably viable and desired by customers. However, they were a group of just two and no one would pay attention to their concept as 200 other high-profile people were already working on solving the same problem. Their solution sounded just too easy to be true.

2 pot sight If the engineers refuse to look at your insights, bring them to a place where they can’t avoid them. → Situation: A user insights team needed to find a way to get the attention of engineers as information was deliberately ignored (PPT not read, posters on black board removed, etc.). → Hack: In their desperation, the insights team decided to put insights in a place the reluctant engineers couldn’t escape. They created insight summary posters and put them in front of the pots. In other words, they attached them to their lavatory doors.

Building   Innovation  Capabilities

→ Result: The engineers surely weren’t amazed by that perky move but it worked. It was hard to refuse exposure to the material in these ‘moments of silence’ and the data from the field had at least an unconscious effect on them.

Start everywhere simultaneously

Changing  Mindset

Using   the new  Mngmt. Concept

→ Hack: To make people aware of their solution’s potential, one engineer had an idea. He glued a functional version of their network infrastructure prototype to the outside of his laptop screen. To permanently expose it to critical stakeholders, he went over months to meetings, cafeterias and different R&D units with his roadshow laptop. Whenever he was working with it, people started asking him about the prototype. → Result: By exposing their concept to many people, the Design Thinking team built a coalition of proponents. Eventually it got funded and integrated into the NPD pipeline. Currently, the final implementation is being done together with a key customer.

Jan Schmiedgen is an innovation consultant and design strategist based in Berlin, Germany. He is a HpDTRp Research Fellow at the Hasso Plattner Institute.

Individuals and teams are building competence, and by generating innovative solutions they are demonstrating the value of using the methodology or management concept.

figure 1 If a new management concept faces resistance and structural blocks, it cannot prove its value and will end up in a vicious cycle. To make it a virtuous cycle – without leadership support – its evangelists have to hack their way against the odds of the organization. (Carlgren, L. (2013). Design thinking as an enabler of innovation: Exploring the concept and its relation to building innovation capabilities (Doctoral thesis). Chalmers University of Technology, p. 62)

Leaders are becoming more open towards innovation, and values and norms are starting to change the organization.

An illustration of the interplay between innovation capabilities (IC) and the use of DT, in relation to building innovation capabilities in an organization. Carlgren, L. (2013). Design thinking as an enabler of innovation: Exploring the concept and its relation to building innovation capabilities (Doctoral thesis). Chalmers University of Technology, p. 62

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NOVembeR 2016

A manifesto for mini service sesign by daniele catalanotto

he first time you read a book about Service Design you usually think: oh shit, that’s going to be some pretty complex stuff. Service Design has a systematic and systemic view of the problems. Usually, Service Designers do not solve the problems people ask them to solve. They dig deeper and wider to find out the causes of the issues and then solve the real problems. That seems pretty complex. I know. The first weeks that I studied Service Design at Lucerne University, I saw the complexity. I decided that I would embrace the complexity, but act with simplicity. That is what I love to call ‘Mini Service Design’. The idea builds on the fact that sometimes problems are too complex. Systems are too wide, and if you dig too deep, you can lose yourself. When this is the case, we should act on a small scale and put in place little seeds of change. Mini Service Design aims to free us of this idealistic Service Designer image. This guy maps a whole ecosystem. He speaks about weird things like stakeholders, backstage, touchpoints, etc. The great Service Designer is the guy who does years of research. He makes you feel lost in the amount of data. On the other side, Mini Service Design uses the same tools and methods but in a quick manner. Mini Service Design is tangible. Mini Service Design shows simple solutions, simple hacks to create dialogue. Mini Service Design doesn’t produce only maps, blueprints or prototypes. It builds tiny artifacts. These tiny artifacts build trust in the community. They will see that change is possible. That it mustn’t be disruptive and disturbing. Change can be small, discreet, and still have impact. I have trouble sometimes with the traditional and academic approach to Service Design. It’s high level and quite abstract for communities or clients. Mini Service Design with mini artifacts makes the abstract tangible.

I see Mini Service Design as the 101 of Service Design: an introduction focused on showing results and building trust. Then, once we have gained trust from the communities, we can bring them in. We can show them the value of thinking a bit wider. We can show them the value of iterative processes. We can show them that the tiny things solve a tiny part. We can show them that maybe we need many tiny elements that are all linked together. This would then be the Service Design we usually practice. But today I believe that we should start with Mini Service Design first. Some case studies of Mini Service Design Mini Service Design isn’t something new; there are already plenty of examples. There are examples of tiny solutions that bring change. Let’s see some of these solutions. Improving the parking experience Parkings are super practical spaces. Park your car, enjoy the restaurant or movie. Go back to the parking area and then drive home. The one pain point we have all experienced is in the last phase. You enter in the parking and, wait … On which floor did I park the car? Once you remember the floor, you then have to find the right parking spot. And, of course, you forgot the parking number … There are two simple and tiny innovations that have improved this problem. The first one is the modern car key. You press a button, your car lights blink and there is a little sound coming from the car. That helps to find the car on a floor. The second tiny innovation is about finding the right floor. Many parking complexes use colors and pictograms to help you remember your floor with ease. Floor 3 or Floor E with the pink elephant pictogram is something far more memorable.

From 20% dropout to 0% An event organizer usually had 20% dropout. People signed up for the event, but when the day came, they never showed up. The attendees would have paid the subscription fee at the event location. They always did it like this, so everyone thought it was okay. The next year, participants had to pay the event fee in advance. Every attendee came. This solution generated unexpected results. When an attendee was sick and couldn’t come, he told the organizers that it was okay that they kept the money. By making the payment in advance, attendee understood that the event preparation had costs. They understood that the event organizers needed the money to make a great event. Simple change, but a huge improvement for the event organizers and the general atmosphere. Creating a cleaner city Motivating people to throw rubbish in the public trash bin and not on the street is hard. It has to do with culture, politics and behavior. In Sweden, innovators added a simple device to a trash bin. Every time you put something in the trash you have a funny falling sound. The sounds mimic an object that is falling into a deep cavern. In the end, it sounds as if the object crashes loudly on the ground. The innovators called it the “The World’s Deepest Bin”. That seems innocent, but in one day such a bin had 41 kilograms more trash in it. It motivated people to pick up the trash they found around the bin and put it in. People did it just to hear the funny sound again. The city of Lausanne in Switzerland reused this principle at much larger scale. These examples are stupid, simple things that people have changed in their services. But these stupid, simple things improved the customer experience. They even simplified the lives of the service owners.

Daniele Catalanotto is a Swiss service designer who thinks that the best hobby in the world is to help others. He leads design at Enigma in Bern, Switzerland.

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THe SeRVICe gaZeTTe

lue is a female health app and our vision is to positively impact menstrual health on a global scale. To us, ‘impact’ means positive social change – providing a service that’s useful to half the world’s population and advancing research for and access to information about female health. Our users and their partners told us that it isn’t just women who want to build a deeper understanding of female health. Many men also want to understand and support the women in their lives. That’s why we created The Manly Guide to Menstruation, the first in a series of articles and videos making it easier for men to understand and talk about female health. 1. Most adults still have a junior-high level of education about sexual health and the female body. You’re probably still operating with whatever you remember from school sex-ed classes. This knowledge gap doesn’t usually close until later in life when trying to have a baby if pregnancy doesn’t come easily, or if a medical condition occurs. Tip: It’s easier to talk about female health when you understand it. Be curious, ask questions and read on. 2. Around 1 in every 7 women is having their period right now. The median cycle length of Clue users is 29 days, with menstruation lasting a median of 4 days. This means women with a cycle are menstruating about 14% of the time and 1 in every 7 women you encounter is on their period right now. Periods are literally happening all the time. Tip: Keep a small number of regular absorbency pads and tampons on hand for the 1 in 7 women you encounter. 3. The period is obvious, but there’s a lot more going on. Every cycle, an ovary releases an egg for fertilization (ovulation) and extra blood and tissue are added to the lining of the uterus (the endometrium) where a fertilized egg can attach and grow. That extra blood, tissue and dissolved remnants of a tiny egg are all expelled from the body if pregnancy doesn’t occur. That’s the period. Tip: Everyone has their set of symptoms. Try not to make assumptions. 4. There are over a hundred premenstrual symptoms. Most of them are uncomfortable. Premenstrual syndrome is a set of symptoms that repeat each cycle in the days before the period starts. Most of these are physical - not everyone experiences changing emotions. Up to 88 % of women experience cramps every cycle; ~ 60 % of women get acne breakouts; ~ 70% have sore breasts; ~ 60 % feel bloated; ~ 25% have diarrhea. Tip: Learn about the premenstrual symptoms and coping strategies. You may be able to help. 5. A ‘regular’ cycle is 23 – 35 days long and may vary by as many as ±8 days from month to month.

The manly guide to menstruation

by mike lavigne It’s considered normal for a cycle to vary by ±8 days, so the first day of menstruation can often be a surprise. Menstrual cycles that fall outside of these ranges, and periods that are very long, heavy or painful, are considered clinically ‘irregular’. Consistently irregular cycles can signal a serious medical condition. Tip: Learn about polycystic ovary syndrome (PcOS) and endometriosis. Talk to the women in your life if they experience an irregular cycle. 6. A woman is only fertile for about 7 days every month. Telling kids that having sex on any day can lead to pregnancy is not true, but it’s the safest thing to say without going into the details. Her egg only lives for up to 24 hours, but your sperm can live for up to 7 days, meaning she can still get pregnant if you have sex six days before she ovulates. Watch this handy video to learn about ovulation: https://youtu.be/ m7q1vmfBbp4 Tip: Don’t stop reading without looking at number 7. 7. Figuring out when those 7 days are requires more than counting days. The days someone can get pregnant differ for everyone and can fluctuate by ±8 days cycle-to-cycle. It is possible (although unlikely) to get pregnant during a period. Counting days is not much better than guessing, leading to surprise periods and surprise pregnancies. Getting an accurate idea of ovulation timing requires methods like ovulation tests, tracking basal body temperature (bbT), or blood tests. Tip: Don’t rely on counting days, or average estimates, to avoid pregnancy. 8. How to avoid unintended pregnancy (...and STIs). In 2011, nearly half of pregnancies in the United States were unintended (45 %). The simple answer for men is to use a condom every time, and use it correctly. Other options include vasectomies, non-intercourse

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sex play or never having sex. The ‘pull-out’ method fails 18 % of the time and day-counting (aka ‘rhythm method’) fails 25 % of the time. Neither are considered reliable. Hormonal birth control methods don’t protect against sexually transmitted infections (STI). Tip: Find a condom that fits you well. Use a bit of lube on the tip, before putting the condom on, for greater sensitivity. 9. There is a huge amount of unacknowledged stress, and risk, for women who are sexually active. In the US, 1 in 3 women have had an abortion by the time they are 40. The unique stresses, risks and physical burdens of intercourse for women go largely under-acknowledged, including full-term pregnancy, emergency contraception, hormonal birth control with side effects, miscarriages and abortions. Nothing related to pregnancy can happen to men’s bodies. The burden of STIs also falls disproportionately on women, including more screening, more treatment procedures, more susceptibility to some STIs and more likelihood of severe long-term health consequences. Tip: Always have condoms and lube available to help offset stress and prevent unintended pregnancies and STI. Vaccination for HPV is available for men under 26. Hopefully this information was helpful, and if you’re lucky, some of the women in your life may be willing to talk about how those things affect their lives and that can be a great thing for their health and for your relationships.

Mike LaVigne is the Chief Product Officer at Clue. He lives and works in Berlin. Before, he held director positions at Fjord and Frog Design.

november 2016

When services harm people On designers’ responsibility for data by maria izquierdo & martin jordan

Sensitive

Personal

Pseudonymous

Anonymous

fig. 1 Types of data

level of care increases

ata is impacting people’s lives whether we want it to or not. With most services today being partly or exclusively digital, data is collected, stored and used in enormous quantities. It’s easy and cheap for organisations to collect data that might be useful later. This data includes information about service users, their lives and what they say, see and do. It is information which can and might be used against them. The collection of data is mainly driven by service needs and business needs. Service needs are about improving the offering. Business needs are linked to generating revenue and ensuring the longevity of the enterprise. But the user needs related to data are often ignored. A recent study 1 revealed how little confidence people have in services. 57 % people state that they do not trust organisations to use data responsibly. 92 % of the polled people do not understand how personal information is used. And more than half of service users say their data is being misused. A growing number of incidents gives people a good reason to be mistrustful. when things go wrong In 2012, the U.S. supermarket chain Target was able to calculate a so-called pregnancy prediction score based on 25 specific products. These included scentfree soap, extra large bags of cotton balls and hand sanitiser. The purchase of those items enabled Target to send coupons timed to very specific stages of someone’s pregnancy. In one instance, the company knew about a teenage girl’s pregnancy before her

parents did. For good reason, the girl’s father was upset and complained. In another case, the German car manufacturer bmw was able to provide precise behavioural data about users of their car sharing service DriveNow. While users were driving, DriveNow collected data about their route, speed, the outdoor temperature and even the location of the mobile phone used during the booking. This data wasn’t collected according to the service’s terms and conditions. This allowed the company to provide evidence in a case where a cyclist was killed by a DriveNow user. While the information was useful in this case, the sudden availability of this information upset many data activists and raised serious concerns about the service’s handling of private data. In 2015, Samsung issued a warning about their smart TV sets. In the notice, the South Korean company stated how the sets were recording spoken words including personal or other sensitive information, and transmitting the captured data to a third party. Through its use of voice recognition software, Samsung is constantly able to listen into people’s living rooms. Again, both media and the public got alarmed. With data breaches and hacks happening more frequently, people are increasingly aware of risks related to data and becoming rightfully worried. The examples illustrate how large businesses overstep ethical boundaries, ignore privacy principles, and disregard security risks. Companies have big hopes for the data they collect and, in realising them, neglect moral rules, disclose private matters and even endan-

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ger people. Services often seem intangible, but data appears to be even incomprehensible. data in services Data is “commonly, organised information, collected for specific purpose” 2. Data on people can be categorised in four categories. The higher the level of sensitivity, the higher the level of care. Anonymous data refers to data that cannot be used to identify an individual. Pseudonymous still allows for some form of re-identification. Personal data is any information relating to an identifiable individual such as name, date of birth or address. Sensitive personal data is information about their political opinions, sexual orientation and health condition. One of the reasons why user needs are ignored when it comes to data is that designers are not involved in those conversations. A key role of the designer is to be an advocate for the user and act on their behalf when designing the service. This includes negotiating how the needs of the business, the service and the users can be all met. It also means dealing with ethics as well as aesthetics. In the discussions with other service stakeholders, designers should find out what data the service is collecting, and why. They also need to know who owns the data, who has access to it, how is it kept secure, and how and when is it used. These aren’t questions designers can answer themselves necessarily, but they should ask them early and advocate for their users in discussions. With more than half of users suspecting organisations misuse their data, trust in digital services is fundamentally broken. To regain it, designers need to research user needs around data, consciously design for data and engage with peers in other disciplines to influence the decision making early in the process. when things go well There is a growing awareness of the benefits of designing for data and a number of examples of when this has been done well. For instance, the bbc published a privacy promise covering the topics transparency, choice, and trust. The broadcaster, which runs popular digital services, offers an explanation in plain English of how it uses and stores their users’ personal information and lets them users decide what happens to it. Clue, a female health app for tracking period, fertility and ovulation, also allows its users to decide where to store their sensitive personal data – locally on their phone or in the cloud. Co-op, a British consumer co-operative, is developing an app called Paperless which captures and stores users’ most important documents such as contracts or certificates. The team behind the app commits to a data relationship that is unambiguously clear and transparent. They promise to be clear on what they are going to do with the users’ data, and guarantee data ownership. The three organisations are rethinking the way data is handled, represented and used in a service, and they demonstrate it to their users. The way they

THe SeRVICe gaZeTTe

do not understand how personal information is used

57%

do not trust organisations to use data responsibly

say their data is misused 1 – Data, Black’s Law Dictionary, 1990 2 – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37476335 3 – https://medium.com/writing-by-if/ 4 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_by_design

deal with data appears to be tied to their values and is also highlighted in their communication. how to design for data A good starting point for designers is a set of principles recently presented by Sarah Gold from the London-based agency Project iF 3. She recommends applying the following when designing for data: 1 Keep other services in mind 2 Collect minimum viable data 3 Be transparent 4 Get consent 5 Put users in control of their data 6 Separate the data Another useful approach is called Privacy by Design 4, developed by a joint team of Canadian and Dutch policy-makers and researchers in the mid-90s. It comes with seven principles that help to consider privacy right from the start when building new services. Eventually, service designers need to ask what data is collected about whom, where, and how – and, of course, why.

Self organization and designing for impact

If designers are not advocating for the user, no one else will. Designers are those who bridge the understanding of user needs and the design of solutions to answer them. They have the responsibility to shape services that are easy to use, but also trustworthy, understandable and accountable. It isn’t proper service design if designers aren’t designing for data in the service. It is their job to find a balance between addressing service needs, business needs and user needs.

Maria Izquierdo is a designer working at uk’s Government Digital Service. She researches diversity and gender and designs for digital culture and the public. Martin Jordan helps create services that people value. He is a civil servant in hm Gov and the Head of Service Design at Government Digital Service in London.

by caspar siebel

Why is there such demand for creative techniques like Design Thinking? Creativity should be a deeply human quality that does not need training. My hypothesis: many organizations struggle with innovation because their creative cycle is split up into departments and hierarchies. People can be most creative in small groups with problems of manageable size. More and more companies are experimenting with splitting up into many autonomous groups with minimum shared overhead. Running organizations that consist of small, creativity-enabled groups can create a sustainable stream of creativity and innovation. However, it also requires new mechanisms of organization. Can you replace incentivizing mechanisms with transparency? Can you replace complex planning with a sense of purpose? Can you replace rules and processes with confidence in people’s sensitivity and creativity?

Caspar Siebel is a service designer at SI Labs in Berlin. He co-founded the Impact Hub Munich. Caspar is a holacracy practitioner and currently writes his first book.

Self organization‘s role in designing for social change Why is there such a demand for creative techniques, like Design ThinkingA? My hypothesis: Many organizations struggle with innovation because their creative cycle is split up into departments g e C1? 8Creativity is highand hierarchiesB. What are ways to enable individual creativity in largepaorgs D est in small groups . One idea is to split the org into many autonomous goupsE. Running orgs consisting of small, creativity enabled groups, requires new mechanisms of organizationF: A new G

NOVembeR 2016

Think circular Business models for a better tomorrow by svenja bickert-appleby

he famous psychologist and communications theorist Paul Watzlawick wrote that “one cannot not communicate”. Likewise, design cannot avoid impacting its subject. As service designers, we work with clients on new products, services and business models that are designed to have an impact. We may increase sales by streamlining a purchase process. We may increase user adoption, or we may increase profits by innovating a business model. Whatever it is, we’re always aiming to impact people, their lives, the decisions they make, and how they behave. It’s our job as service designers to be entrepreneurs. We look at a problem as an outsider and re-imagine how a business process could work. It’s in this role that we have an opportunity to move our clients from their traditional business models towards what I call ‘business models for a better tomorrow’. This is a chance to apply our design and business skills to help businesses increase their profits with solutions which benefit both the company and society. This is how we can design a ‘better tomorrow’. The Circular Economy is central to this effort. It stands for a new way of thinking about how we buy, use and discard products. “A circular economy is one that is restorative and regenerative by design, and which aims to keep products, components and materials at their highest utility and value at all times, distinguishing between technical and biological cycles”, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation defines. In a linear economy, the output of a process may be discarded as waste. In a circular economy, the outputs of one process are designed to be the inputs of another. Materials are circulated as long as possible through the use of recycling, remanufacture, reuse, and redistribution. Existing services like leasing and sharing can often be incorporated to avoid creating waste. Advocates see a general shift from a linear economy to a circular one. This shift requires innovative business models that replace or modify existing ones. While business modeling plays a major role, we should remember that the product itself needs to be deeply thought through. Materials, manufacturing, production, transport and further processing must be compatible and ready for re-circulation and materials must be fairly and sustainably sourced. It is

here where the concept of Circular Economy and Cradle-to-cradle thinking complement each other. While this comes with a lot of rethinking, it holds opportunities for innovation and competitive advantages in a world where resource scarcity is increasing. According to John Thackara, “eighty percent of the environmental impact of the products, services, and infrastructures around us is determined at the design stage” 1. Thus, we as service designers could play a leading role in pushing for a (more) circular economy. Circular Economy thinking is widely applicable across industries such as textiles and fashion with pioneers such as Ina Budde 2, industrial cleaning products from Werner & Merz, and even to sectors such as finance. Consider the concept of RePack 3 designed by Plan B From Outer Space Oy, a Finnish company. RePack’s mission is to create reusable packaging in order to reduce waste. Customers can choose RePack packaging when ordering from online stores. Once the goods wrapped in RePack have reached their customer, the packaging can be flattened and sent back for reuse. Customers receive a voucher for their next purchase as a thank you, the retailer reduces its packaging costs, and the world receives a little less waste. The concept of the environmentally responsible flooring manufacturer Desso 4 in the Netherlands is much more complex. Desso was an early pioneer of Cradle-to-cradle thinking. They continue to innovate by integrating Circular Economy principles such as take-back programmes and products with recyclable yarn. They have found uses for old fishing nets found in the sea, and 20,000 tonnes of chalk from local water companies. They even use 100% renewable electricity (hydropower) in their production locations. Desso’s CeO Stef Kranendijk’s keys were to re-think the company‘s business model and to transition from a traditional sales approach to a service approach. Instead of selling products, Desso leases them. This arrangement brings materials like floor tiles back to the company where the components can be reused. Desso saves the environment while also saving itself from purchasing some raw materials for its next generation of products. Desso and RePack show us the potential for circular thinking in service design. We can go far beyond improving a client’s efficiency and profitability. We

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can fundamentally alter how people think about business. We can move from a linear input-to-output to a circular input-to-input economy. This isn’t just good for the environment, it’s good business. Not every project offers the chance to redesign a company’s entire business model, but engaging with circular concepts and learning about them will affect your work as a designer and benefit you and your clients. It’s also clear that circular thinking should be part of formal (service) design education at universities. Business clients might better understand Circular Economy as a business or ‘circular advantage’ 5. However, it’s our job as (service) designers to design a better future. One cannot not design, so design as best you can. what can you do? where can you learn about circular economy? The Ellen MacArthur Foundation hosts an extensive collection of material and literature online 6. You can also visit events such as the Ecobuild / resource London in March 2017 7, meet your local Circular Economy group (there are several on meetup.com), join the Open Source Circular Economy days 8 or take an online class such as the eDX course of the Tu Delft 9. 1 – John Thackara, ‘In the Bubble: Designing in a complex world’, miT press, 2006 2 – see http://circular.fashion 3 – see http://www.originalrepack.com 4 – see http://www.desso.co.uk 5 – see https://www.accenture.com/gb-en/insightcircular-advantage-innovative-business-models-valuegrowth 6 – see http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/ circular-economy 7 – see http://www.ecobuild.co.uk/resource-andcircular-economy 8 – see http://www.oscedays.org 9 – see http://online-learning.tudelft.nl

Svenja Bickert-Appleby is a service designer, lecturer and entrepreneur. She is a co-founder of Future Flux and runs the Frankfurt Circular Economy meetup.

the service gazette

Creating open learning formats The Service Experience Camp

ervice design resources are increasingly promoted in-house. Big corporations and smaller businesses create their own service design units and roll-out large-scale training programmes to equip their staff with the necessary skills to ‘Design for Impact’. However, learning does not stop at the corporate entrance but transcends organisational boundaries. Open conference formats such as the Service Experience Camp foster peer-to-peer learning among service innovators. In-house capability building can be complemented by open learning formats outside the organisation. Companies have started to bring in impulses from outside by hosting talks by experts, engaging external trainers and using online courses for training purposes. Often true inspiration lies beyond what we already know. In our daily routine we can miss the forest for the trees. We need to leave our comfort zones to refresh our thinking and doing. The Service Experience Camp – 2016 in its fourth edition – offers an interactive learning format, studded with cross-cutting key talks, attendee-generated open sessions and special events. We call it co-conference because it is about collaboration between everyone involved, from participants, speakers and partners to the organisers. It is also about the co-creation of conference content. As a participant, you actively shape the event, creating your own learning experience. We want to break with the common conference design where you sit and listen to content on stage and seldom can tap on all the experts sitting in the same room – not even during the often too few and short breaks. Instead, we want to build a learning platform with the Service Experience Camp which everyone can adapt to their own needs.

by katrin dribbisch How is this done? First, the key talks framing the whole event feature cross-cutting topics that offer inspiration beyond the design scene. Tearing down the ‘wall’ between speakers and audience means that we facilitate interactive elements, such as a microphone that can be thrown around like a ball. Second, the open sessions are at the heart of the conference. It is a format generated by the participants. Following a service-dominant logic view, we believe that the value of the conference actually can only be created by the attendees themselves. The programme is therefore not predetermined by the organisers but co-created before and during the event. Everyone can host an open session, which lasts 60 minutes, to engage with fellow experts. It is an opportunity to present your work, discuss early ideas and prototypes and receive valuable feedback. Third, we make sure to schedule enough time to mingle and talk because some of the most exciting stuff and meaningful conversations during a conference happen beyond the official programme, during the breaks and evening events. Participants are also featured on the conference website to allow them to connect with each other before, during and after the event. All in all, open learning formats, such as the Service Experience Camp, allow participants to bring back impulses to their respective companies. We believe that such openness is not a threat but an advantage to survive in a competitive market for both talent and business opportunities.

cartoon by sebastian frederick müller

service design berlin’s team: Katrin Dribbisch has worked as Design Thinking facilitator and is an expert on service design in the public sector. She recently finished her PhD on this topic.

Martin Jordan helps create services that people value. He is a civil servant in hm Gov and the Head of Service Design at Government Digital Service in London.

Manuel Großmann helps organisations to create outstanding service experiences. He works as Service Design Lead at Fuxblau, a design firm he co-founded.

Mauro Rego is a multi-talented Brazilian designer with focus on motion and service design. He is a co-founder of Boana, a product design studio.

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Olga is co-founder of Fuxblau and an mba candidate at ie Business School. She mentors entrepreneurs and is passionate about innovation strategy. get in touch www.servicedesignberlin.de @SD_Berlin www.fb.com/servicedesignberlin