Photo @mewroh
First SDN UK National Conference: a Success
June 30th 2016 saw the first SDN UK National Conference take place in London, hosted by the SDN UK Chapter. It was an exciting opportunity to bring the SDN to the UK, where there is so much service design activity and application. First off I’d like to thank everyone who was involved in its design and delivery. So the speakers first, SDN HQ in Cologne, our event partners in London – Four Communications, our wonderful volunteers, all the participants and my colleagues and co-designers Ruth Watson and Matylda Szmukier. We’d decided on a fairly open theme for the conference – IMPACT – which we broke down into three parallel strands. Society Impact, Commercial Impact and Future Impact. Of course these raise really big questions but by leaving the theme fairly open to interpretation, the speakers were able, and did, provide us with a very broad range of provocations, cases and discussions. We’ve had some wonderful feed back from many quarters, including: 82 Touchpoint 8-2
“I had a great time [at the conference] and really enjoyed the day. It was excellent to meet likeminded people and listen to some really inspiring talks. I found it was a different level of quality compared
that the questions raised after the results of the recent referendum on the UK’s place in the EU gave many of the speakers, especially those in the Society Impact track, good reason to speak passionately and constructively. Carrie Bishop from FutureGov made a heroic plea to see how we, the service design com munity, could help to make change.
to similar conferences that I've attended. It was really helpful from a professional and career development perspective…” Chris Cope, Customer Journey Improvement Manager at British Gas
There were so many highlights as the quality of talks and conversa tions were so high, but it was clear
Alex Nisbett, Head of Design at Livework, SDN Management Team member and ‘conference concierge’ at the SDN UK conference.
