“We think about lives in narrative terms, as stories. They are our way of dealing with the fact that we are going to die. That’s also the reason why we are addicted to Facebook and Twitter. Those technologies give us the possibility to tell little stories every day,” Louisa Heinrich explained at the beginning of her keynote at NEXT Service Design.

According to Louisa, the best services are those that allow us to tell our stories. And the next challenge in design is based on the fact that more and more objects are connected. The amount of data available about all of us and our environment is growing tremendously. But what to do with this data? Our lives are not made up of data, but of choices: a thousand small choices everyday. And stories. Data becomes valuable when it is interpreted by humans. We have to make sense out of it. And we should use it to tell better stories, richer stories from which we can benefit.

Louisa Heinrich is Head of Strategy at the international service design agency Fjord. Her role there is to answer the question “What’s next?” for her customers, and to help them find more engaging means of accomplishing their goals. Before joining the company, she had worked in the digital user experience design space for over 13 years.