Service Design Show

Your work as a service designer is not just about successfully finishing a single project. The goal is to contribute to long lasting change and influence the way of thinking within organisations. Ben Reason makes the argument in this episode that "service design makes things more humane". If this is the case it's far too important to be driven you all the time. So there is a lot at stake to change...

When it comes to putting a price tag on service design many people struggle. It can be hard to articulate the value that you create through your work. Therefor many service designers just avoid the topic in general. What if you would treat the pricing of service design as a design challenge in itself where the goal is to come up with a solution where all parties benefit? The conversation about val...

As a customer you've probably already experienced that most services don't fail because of bad intentions. Often services fail because they run on top of systems that don't support a different outcome. The classics "The computer says..." statement is just one of the many example. This isn't just a major frustration for us as ordinary customers but also for us as professionals trying to make things...

Taking risks is an inherit part of design. Trying things you haven't done before. Doing experiments. Exploring uncharted territory. It's exactly these things that give us fulfilment and that we're frankly just very good at. But doing this type of work has its price. And that price can be high. When you're in the business of putting new things into the world you never know what the response will be...

In order to make real impact on customers and business you need to have influence on the strategy of an organisation. The truth is that strategy isn't necessarily associated with the practice of design. So once you do start working on strategy it's very easy to get sucked into the traditional corporate culture and mindset. You'll tend drift away from the core values of design. An important part of...

There's no doubt that your service design skills are needed more than ever these days. Many pressing (social) challenges have emerged over the last months. Challenges that just scream for a design approach. The big question though is what's the most effective application of design in this context? Rushing in with our tools and methods isn't the best way to contribute to sustainable solutions. In t...

Imagine for a moment that you're playing a board game. A game that requires some strategic thinking. Let's go for one of my favorites: the settlers of Catan. After having played that game a few times you pretty quickly understand how to play in order to win. So it's time to make things a bit more interesting. Let's add some expansion sets to the game (Catan has 4). Whoah, now with these expansions...

What do you learn from talking to 99 service design leaders over a course of 4 years? Find out in this 100th episode of the Show! I invited you, the Service Design Show community to send in your questions. And you did. From all over the world! So in this episode I’ll be answering your questions about service design, about the Show and even some questions about me. You’ll also learn about the chang...

How can you successfully drive, facilitate and guide change as a service designer? It helps when you're aware of the type of change process you're involved in. Your classic top down change process requires a significantly different approach than a bottom up crowd driven movement. In this episode Robert Bau talks about the 4 main change processes in an organisation and how service designers relate...

The dominant form of design privileges certain, often western oriented norms and values. This has big ethical implications and a direct impact on the people we are designing for. In this episode Yoko Akama shares her thoughts about how we can embrace diversity and make service design a more inclusive practice. It's a healthy and important conversation we need to have as a community. The topic of e...

What is a service? No really, what is it? As you might imagine it's quite an instrumental question a service designer. But as it turns out, surprising little knowledge about services is embedded in our practice. So in this episode Majid Iqbal talks about service design from the service rather than from the design perspective. We often feel that service design is a strategic practice. Majid has a d...

Have you been following the classic design process in most your projects? Moving from research to insights and from opportunities to prototypes. Well you're not alone because most service designers do. It's the process that has been described in many books over the years and become the de facto approach. But what if this isn't the most efficient way to design good services? What if you could tweak...

If the service you've designed goes against the existing socials structures it's bound to fail. That's why it's essential that from the very first moment you're aware of these social structures and use them in your design process. But how you might wonder... Josina Vink has done a lot of research on this topic and in this episode she shares her most important learnings. One of the reasons social s...

Empathy, understanding and compassion. These words are not commonly used in many large organisations. But why? That's what we're going to find out. Our guest in this episode, Maike Klip, has embarked on an inspiring research project to learn what it means to be a compassionate civil servant. As an employeed of the Dutch Government herself Maike recognized the stories about organisations not having...

What do CEOs need to know about design? This was the question Audrey Crane tried to answer in her latest book which carries exactly that title. Make sure you stick around till the end of the episode because there's a little surprise... Sometimes it might seem that design is already a well established practice and field for most organisations out there. But the reality is that it's far from. There...

Why is it that so many service design projects still get stranded before they have been able to make an impact on customers? In this episode Linn Vizard shares her experience with what it takes to make service design real. Linn has an interesting perspective on how we might start looking at the outcomes of service design. Because the outcome of our work almost never is an actual service... So what...

Could you become a better service designer by just sharing more? According to the guest in this episode that's definitely the case! Daniele Catalanotto has been writing and sharing a lot about what he knows (and doesn't) related to service design. It might sound counter intuitive but Daniele argues that you first and foremost should share for your own benefit. If other people find the things you s...

What if clients buying service design projects? Which is already happening if you look closely. It's not that the appetite for service design work is getting smaller. On the contrary. More and more clients see the need to do service design. Rather it's the fact that clients are building in-house service design teams and taking on the work themselves. This requires agencies to rethink how they are...

When is a challenge really out of scope for a service designer? What's the point where it becomes obviously too far fetched? As designers we are overly optimistic. In general we don't shy away from new challenges. It doesn't really matter if we haven't worked on a similar challenge in the past as we'll just figure it out as we go along. This confidence in being able to solve any challenge often fe...

There's a good bit of tension in most service design projects. Often caused by factors that aren't obvious when you start. Factors like the fact that designers bring a quite different approach, attitude and mindset to the table. Your typical "they just don't get it" (coming from both sides) is a pretty strong indicator that there's some tension in the room. In this episode Sarah Schulman shares ho...

Co-creation is still an ad-hoc activity in most organisations rather than something which is deeply embedded into the operating system. How can we change that and take co-creation to the next level? In this episode you're going to get some inspiration from Swiss direct democracy. I bet you didn't see that one coming. Peter Horvath has studied how the Swiss have embedded co-creation into their demo...

Customers don't care about your internal departments. They only care about the experience they have with your service. So in order to deliver great services you need to organise around your customer. Not the other way around. But breaking down internal silos is easier said than done. Many have tried and failed. Big time. In this episode you'll learn from Emma Laurentz how customer insights can hel...

What is the best place for an internal service design team so that it can bring the most value to the organisation? A question which is becoming more and more important. Even if you're with an agency or freelancing. Because knowing where service design fits into the organisational structure allows you to help your clients more effectively. Judy Mellett leads an internal team at Telus. In this epis...

In this episode you'll learn about some time and cost effective ways to do proper user research inspired by the world of copywriting. Successful conversion copywriter Joel Klettke takes you along his process to craft copy which deeply resonates with readers. As you'll hear that process evolves for a large part on conducting user research in order to understand the people you're going to write for....

Are you saying that I have to stop practicing Human Centered Design? Well yeah that's basically the answer. According to Nik Parekh human centered design has brought a lot of positive change to the world but it's not sustainable. And to be honest Nik isn't the first one to make this argument. Former guests like Mauricio Manhaes and Anab Jain have also made a similar plea. We have to adopt a differ...