NEXT Service Design 2013 will welcome well-known thought-leaders in the field of service design and design thinking who have developed innovative projects for high-profile brands and organisations like BMW, GE and BBVA, one of the world’s largest banks.

As the boundaries between products and services are blurring, the design of services is gaining more and more importance. Nils Wollny (Managing Director Strategy at SinnerSchrader) is one of the curators for NEXT Service Design 2013. Here he explained how service design affects his daily work and why it is especially important in digital business: „Service Design enables us to create solutions that inspire people to engage and interact with brands. It adds differentiating value to commodity products and thereby helps to unlock additional growth potential. The digital ecosphere offers all the tools that merge products and services into a holistic brand experience.“

The BMWi Wallbox case is a great example for well designed service. Therefore, we are happy to welcome Stephan Augustin (Industrial Designer at BMWi, enquired) and Julia Werner (Design Lead at IXDS) at NEXT SD13. They will showcase the development process of the BMWi Wallbox – from both the view of the customer and the agency. The Wallbox is a simple, beautifully designed product and a highly functional service. It allows you to charge BMW’s recently launched and much acclaimed electric car, the i3, at home. The company understood that eMobility provides an opportunity to create new business models. Augustin and Werner will present one of these and will share intimate insights into the process of how it came to be.

In addition, the Co-Founder of BlablaCar, Nicolas Brusson, will explain how – by doubling its number of users to 3 million in just one year – his company is now challenging Carpooling, the ten year old European market leader. Brusson will describe the influence of an active community on the success of the French carpooling service, that has successfully expanded into various European markets and recently launched in Germany.

Axel Averdung, Senior Strategic Consultant at SinnerSchrader and also a curator of NEXT SD13, shared his views on the developments of service design with us: „Today, we are dealing with progressively more sophisticated consumers where traditional marketing tactics more and more lose its momentum to address their needs. One promising solution is to provide offerings and business models that foster the value-in-use of products and services.“

To illustrate this point he invited Patrick Lithander (Burda Creative) to present the award winning case (3 BCP Awards) of Electronic Beats at NEXT SD13. Despite the fact that both print magazine and online experience are a product of corporate publishing for Deutsche Telekom, it gained the customers trust with a successfully implemented concept to engage the readers. Additionally, Sandra Kröger, CEO of Rascass, will share insights into the workflows of the service as well as the data driven approach of the project.

On our second stage, Jens Otto Lange & Thomas Stegmann will conduct a whole-day Service Innovation Lab together with NEXT Service Design 2013 participants. Under the guidance of these two experienced designers, you will have the chance to work on a practical service design topic and gain hands-on knowledge. In small groups, you’ll have the unique opportunity to acquire experience in all phases of a service design project. The groups will then present the fruits of their work on the main stage and will undoubtedly receive rapturous applause!!

We will be publishing the full programme of NEXT Service Design 2013 in the upcoming week, and will provide you with comprehensive information on the case studies and workshops.