Eleonora Carnasa Meet the service designer
Eleonora Carnasa is a Bulgaria-based service designer and founder of Fabrica 360, a design and innovation agency. In this profile, she had a chat with Jesse Grimes, Touchpoint’s Editorin-Chief, about her efforts to grow service design in Eastern Europe, and how she overcomes the associated challenges. Eleonora Carnasa is a Bulgaria-based service designer and founder of Fabrica 360, a design and innovation agency. She is the chapter representative of SDN Bulgaria and an SDNaccredited Master Trainer. eleonora@fabrica360.eu
Jesse Grimes: Nice to catch up again and see that you’ve been pushing service design and design thinking ever more forward in your part of the world. Can you let me know a bit what keeps you busy?
Eleonora Carnasa: In my work I’m wearing different hats: On the one hand I am a service design practitioner and as such I am involved in innovation projects and in workshop facilitation. On the other hand I have to find a way to make my business sustainable in a very young market. Indeed, doing service design is the hard part, but selling it is even harder. And last but not least, I love developing training programmes that contribute to the development of the horizontal bar of the service designer’s ‘T-shapedness’, such as creative leadership, storytelling, systems thinking and platform design. How did you come to start practicing and teaching service design?
I wasn’t born a service designer, and I don’t have a formal degree in service 86 Touchpoint 11-2
design. During my education 20 years ago, there was no such thing as Design Thinking or service design. I am an economist and I have an MBA. Later on, I specialised in service design at Central Saint Martins in London, and I took many classes, read books, became part of the SDN and applied my knowledge in practice. I am still learning. I remember clearly how it all started for me with service design thinking. I used to work for the Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce and Industry as an innovation management consultant, and at some point made a specialisation at the European Innovation Management Academy. It involved a questionnaire you use to assess companies’ innovation management capabilities, and there were a few questions about the application of the design approach to innovation. They triggered me to dig deeper and deeper into the topic and educate myself. It was only a matter of time before I had set up my agency as a side project initially, which then became my main focus.
