Service Design Global Conference 2019 recap: building bridges

It doesn’t matter if you are new to service design or just new to the community. Everybody is just really open and welcoming, and I think that is one of the best things so far that I have experienced here at S.D.N.

At the very start with Discovery, we take the lead, and as we progress and it is more tech led. Then we are going to have experts, data scientists, research engineers that are will take the lead. But as a designer we need to make sure that we continue to be there to represent the users and always match that to a user experience and not just the technology itself.

Yeah, so I really believe that designers are already inherently good at designing for behavior change; because intuitively we kind of know how people behave, how they kind of feel and we really, through emphasizing with our users and customers, I think we’re already really good in creating meaningful experiences. But I think we can be more effective in doing so. And behavioral science is a really good addition to our skill sets.

At the very beginning when you are starting an idea you care so deeply about the idea, and then you hope everyone else also cares about the same way. You know, I care about eliminating the idea of waste. And I go to these corporations and say, we have figured out how to recycle diapers, do you want to enable it? Or we figured out a way to recycle coffee cups, would you want to do it? And we get meetings but it wouldn’t go that far, it would stay pretty modest. And we realized that the framing shouldn’t be that. The framing should be, hey diaper company here’s a way you can sell more diapers, beat your competition by recycling your diapers. Or here’s a way, coffee shop, you can sell more coffee, more than the next door by recycling your coffee cups.

So I always believe small action by many can cause a big difference in the future. So I think, yeah, keep this mind.

There’s a desire for boldness, and bold visions, and often the reality is that that’s very, very difficult to make happen. And so I am also really interested in this idea of like what I kind of think of as like tiny design or these incremental improvements. And I think part of that, for designers, is understanding that, like, we actually don’t in these complex systems have control. But we can be part of that ripple effect.

I find that quicker I can put something in front of somebody to react to, the sooner we can get to what is actually going to be, a better, more contextualized answer, that could be tested.

I’m really interested in processes making the invisible visible. So, what are the kind of ways and approaches we try to really bring some of these social structures, contradicting social structures, out into the open. Whether that’s kind of mapping things visually all the norms and rules and roles that we have in our daily lives, or playing them out in role play, and then calling out what what are these underlying social structures and kind of naming them as a way to bring them to the surface.

I see the intersection between critical making as an exploratory practice and service design as a more pragmatic practice. That that’s the, that’s the unison that really creates good outcomes and good opportunities.

I think it is a very inspiring place to come for vendors like myself, for people working in agencies, or just people that closely could be related to delivering a service. It’s a great place to come and refresh and get new ideas.