Rainer Sax – It’s obvious

When we hear all these cases of service design in use, we think “what a great job”. I like these stories. One of my favourite is about an eye clinic that changed one thing – a parking lot issue – and the rates of use went up. It’s obvious in retrospect. Great service design is “I could do that” + “we did it!”. Sometimes we have to take a step back, and realise that we want to change everything. It’s a long journey, with a lot of small steps. We need to aim high, and enter a new frame of looking at things. New, surprising solutions are not always right. It should be obvious to customers when we have succeeded – not just to the people hiring us. If people miss things when we take them away, we’ve done it. Give everything you’ve got to the process – that’s rock’n’roll!

Christian Jourdant – Neuro Service Design

Neurmarketing focuses on the needs and desires of the customers – so it makes sense to link it with service design. Don’t ask your customers what they want – you get the same set of answers. This is why market research sucks. Rather than asking people to do a survey – we asked them to do a psychological test to learn something about themselves. The result – a personality description – is a reward. They learned that their clients are “soul” clients – from a model with four corners – Stimulus, Power, Duty and Soul people. These definitions do not map onto age. They apply to all ages – these characteristics help explain motivations and approaches. There are reasons from drinking coffee for all of these types. Changing pictures to match type can drive ups sales by 20%.

Philip Siefer – design meets technology

They do mass customisation for B2B customers. Why? User experience plus value add – they relate to the product. It has two parts – the front end user experience and fulfilment. They handle both bits. That’s what they do now – what’s for the future? More service design … PONYbastards – upcycling familiar brands. Send them a shirt with a familiar brand, and they’ll make it… special. They could turn virtual content into real objects – pictures on clothing? It was complicated – but they got there.

Jens Otto Lange – Creativity Jam Hamburg

You always have to embed stakeholders into the creative process to have a successful outcome. He was struggling with co-creation until he did a workshop in Berlin on design thinking. That lead to his first jam session here in the same city. on 2 to 4th November there will be a global sustainability jam in 50 cities world-wide – the theme will be revealed on the night. You do user research, collect knowledge, do personas, reframe the challenges, ideation, and then prototyping – all in one weekend. But there’s something else – you have speakers, so you learn a bit. There’s food and drink. And there’s being part of a global community joined through social media.

Felix Stöckle – the challenge for service design

We design services for brands. That’s what we do. A great service experience for him – a aircraft stewardess recognising him and using his name, might be terrible for his girlfriend, who wonders why she knows him… we developed a tool called the CustomerJourney, and that was adopted by the digital guys. A lot of companies don’t understand what customer journeys their products produce. What’s important is when you map it down.

But how do you make it work? The only way is to talk to people beyond the marketing and branding departments. You can go right down to micro-journeys and really innovate there. How will it pay back? There are different patterns for different industries. Purchased experiences have a big impact – they developed a tool called TouchpointEvaluate, allowing them to do competitive analysis. That allows modelling of how changes to the journey will impact on the brand.

Conor Delahunty – Gaps

He went through work crisis. He was making complicated online things, and he wanted to make very simple physical things. They made an app which allowed them to put big message on the screen of an iPad. They gave it to people without really telling them what it did – and saw what happened. It ended up being sued by teachers in Australia who sued it with deaf kids. That got him interesting in leaving gaps – they’re not failings, they’re where people do stuff. Users came up with all the interesting stuff in Twitter. People are using eReader notes to write fan fiction within books. Simple tools + framework + gaps = interesting. People are asserting ownership by taking bits of one service and bits of another and mashing them together. 3D printing will change people’s relationship with products. Leaving gaps is an interesting ensign strategy going forwards…

Thomas Schönweitz – employment service design

China’s having a really big sustainability problem – they come up with ideas, hire good people – and then they all leave every 18 months. Hiring can be really expensive. There are costs for HR departments. Your train them, you give them IT, and they build up knowledge – and then they leave, and the costs start over again. People counter that by giving them more money – but is there a better way? In the US – health insurance is a big issue. Over all, coworker interaction and job experience are more important than salary. People was purpose and autonomy. It’s a complex problem – it has many stakeholders, many touch points and happens over time. Time for service design to come to the rescue. You create experiences when you’re in a job, and you end it with a positive or a negative experience. You can model what makes a company experience more positive for your employees – use your service design skills to keep people in your company.

Matt Edgar – a message from your mobile

Smartphones were born into an expectant world – they saw Filofaxes and Psion organisers. They are made from earth, taken from a convict zone, crushed, rendered. Their hearts are measured in megabits a second. Where do they come from, daddy? When a phone and a computer love each other very much… Cats have evolved to mimc the cry of human babies. Smartphones do the same – they trick you into raising them as your own. They need to be stroked awake. At first their needs are simple – battery full, bandwidth. But they become what they eat from the app markets. The makers intended them to be indispensable, but they have become ubiquitous – in the bathroom and bedroom. When you see a celebrity or a QR code – you show it to us. We can recognise your faces, we know what you are thinking. We’ll strain your relationships. Others will be jealous of your bond with us. Soon we’ll be teenagers – are you looking forward to that? We’ll answer back and keep you awake at nights. What happens next is up to you…