Listen Now

Next week the Service Design Global Conference 2021 will take place with again a great line-up! This years’ theme is ‘taking a stand’, we talked about the theme and other exciting stuff with two great people from the organising team: Ullah Jones and Agusta Callaway. Get excited about the conference and listen to the episode! Or let us convince you to still buy a ticket with a 25% discount (code: SDGC21_attendee_25%off)

Twisted studio won the ‘professional non-profit’ service design award for their lean approach to service design and prototyping. The project they won the award for is called LaMA, short for Laboratoria Mobiele Alternatieven. A co-creative design process developed to find creative and simple solutions with great impact on mobility issues in small cities.We spoke with the two founders of Twisted studio; Marlies Deforche & Elisabeth Verhetsel. Because they are our Belgian colleagues, we invited them to our studio! Read the whole story here: https://www.service-design-network.org/community-knowledge/lama-laboratoria-mobiele-alternatievenTwisted studio website: http://twistedstudio.be

Tom Szaky is CEO at Terracycle, a social enterprise on a mission to eliminate the idea of waste. Recently he founded a new company Loop, a global circular shopping platform that brings multi-use packaging into our daily shopping. Tom closed the Global Service Design Conference in Toronto with his talk ‘Loop: Solving for Disposability While Maintaining Its Virtues’. We managed to sneak in a 25 minute interview with him right before his talk!

John Powell is design director at an agency focussed on Artificial intelligence for leading global enterprises and governments. John’s talk was titled ‘We Have Met The Enemy and They Are Us. He talked about the social challenges humans created over the years and how it is time for designers to take responsibility!!

Steph Hay is VP design at Capital One an American bank. She opened the second day with her talk ‘Designing for Trust. Steph talked about the example of sesame street. In order for children to learn, they need to trust the person or puppet that thought them new stuff. Discover what Sesame Street and and the ‘I love you’ metric can teach you!

Waw! What a great edition this year's conference! It was great to meet the familiar faces again, but also many new inspiring people. We walked around with our microphones again and bumped into many interesting designers from all over the world. We talked to the organisators of this year conference and the organisers of the 2020 edition in Copenhagen. We already had a quick chat with some of the service design award winners. Off course we will invite them for a longer interview again later this year! We talked to many speakers, fellow podcasters, volunteers, etc. We hope you enjoy this episode and relive the conference!

You heard Chris Ferguson (Founder of service design agency Bridgeable) on this podcast before. We spoke to him as a visitor of the Service Design Global Conference, as a regular guest, as a winnen of and SD award and now as an organiser of the conference in Toronto. As always, Chris has many valuable insights to share and will get you excited for this year’s edition of the conference.

In anticipation of the in Oktober we spoke to , one of the local organisers of the conference. Shannon is Senior Manager, Experience Design at and was Principle, Design and Research Director at . Listen to find out about the theme of the conference, what to look forward to and where to visit in Toronto.

A couple of months ago, we noticed an interesting video on Linkedin. In this video Playmobil announced their new toolkit for professionals. We spoke with Victoria Dobbie, project manager at sub-brand Playmobil Pro. She introduced us to the tool and the process of designing and bringing it into the market. 

Increasing automation in our workplaces, demographic shifts and a customer-based economy are drastically changing the way we work. In order for people to keep up we will need a very different set of skills, particularly those that are unique to humans: imagination, creativity, curiosity, emotions and social relationships. How will we bring this skills transition into our jobs, and which implications will this have for employees, employers and organisations? In our 34th episode of our podcast you can listen to the round table discussion, i.e. an interview with the speakers of the evening and questions from the audience.

Tesco Bank and Modern human won the ‘best in private sector’ service design award for their project Phoenix. We spoke with Amjid Rasool, head of service design at Tesco Bank and Paul-Jervis Heath from the Service Design agency Modern human. Together with their whole team they redesigned the customer complaint experience of Tesco Bank clients.  

Fjord en West Midland Police won the award best in public sector for their project ‘Developing a police force’s digital experience for citizens’. We spoke with Giulio Fagiolini, who is visual design at Fjord and Kostja Paschalidis who was senior service design at Fjord and is now working as a freelancer.

Innovationsguiden won the Professional Non-Profit/Public Sector award. Innovationguiden is an ongoing project that aims to support and reinvigorate the Swedish public sector in collaboration with citizens through service design. This was done by providing various forms of support to municipalities, county councils and regions to work with user-driven innovation in their development work.

Cork County Council is the second largest local authority in Ireland. They offer over 600 services to the civilians of Cork. This means they have an all-time challenge to deliver the best possible services for their customers. A few years ago, they came across Service Design, and started experimenting. They formed the Service rePublic team, and never looked back since.

As we shifted from a product-based economy into a service-based economy, customers are more and more pampered with good services. To be successful, companies more than ever need to offer services that exceed the expectations of people. So in order to offer the best services, companies can do two things. On the one hand they can work closely together with external professionals. On the other hand, they can expand their in-house expertise by training their own employees to think more human centred. To introduce and present both ways of working, we invited two international speakers who shared their knowledge. 

We went to the Service Design Global Conference in Dublin where we attended lots of inspiring talks and hands-on workshops. Again, it was a truly amazing edition! It’s surprising how this conference manages to touch new topics & give new inspiration every year. Hats off to the organisation!  We also really enjoyed the social aspects of this conference. Since this wasn’t our first SDGC, we saw a lot of familiar faces and like every year we had the chance to get to know many new people. During these moments we got the opportunity to interview some service design ‘rockstars’. You can find a compilation of these interviews here. 

Marc Stickdorn is a well-known person in the Service Design world. That’s understandable for many reasons!  He is one of the writers on the ‘Service Design Thinking’ and the ‘Service Design doing’ book. Since this week also the ‘Service Design Methods’ book. Besides that he is co-founder and CEO of ‘More than Metrics’, a company that offers tools and stuff for customer experience and service designers: Smaply, Experiencefellow and Mr. Thinker. Marc speaks about Service Design at many conferences around the world.  Great to have him at the podcast!

New technologies, a continuously changing lifestyle and new jobs and disciplines present serious challenges in the field of education. Old education methods and skills are challenged in a society where personalisation, collaboration, information and e-learning are taking over. Professionals have to re-educate themselves and schools need new tools and solutions to be able to innovate and make these changes manageable. How can Service Design help education deal with these challenges and inspire people to solve problems in a creative way?

We can’t believe its already our 25th episode! In september 2016 we published the first episode. Not sure where this adventure would lead us we decided to just give it a try! Since then we have been speaking with inspiring people from al over the world. In this 25th episode we reflect on the conversations we had, we’ll let you know which episodes were our favourite ones and what we have learned from experts in the field. One of the highlights of hosting this podcast is meeting our guests and listeners at conferences or online. We would love to interact more with our listeners and know who you are. Therefore we launched a newsletter where we will publish new episodes but also ask questions to the community.   GIVEAWAY!! When you you have a chance to win this with some of our favourite Service Design tools!  A Neuland workshop case that we use for all our workshops. The Service Design Award Annual A Moleskin sketch book to note down all your great ideas. A Kingdom card game to boost all your workshops And more ... Check out the   THANKS, THANKS, THANKS! Thanks to all the guests that have been on the show! Thanks to for partnering up!  Thanks to for giving us time to do the podcast. And of course thanks to all of you who have been listening to the podcast! Here's to another 25 episodes to come! 🍾 David & Stina

Together with the city of Rotterdam, service design agency Muzus won the award for organisational impact in the public sector. The city of Rotterdam is offering a mobility service to people with special needs to make sure they get to the where they want. They realised, however, they did not know the people they were offering the service to. Muzus conducted qualitative research in various ways to give the city of Rotterdam insights in these users. These insights were used in various ways to offer the best service possible.