Although Service Design in China is still at an infancy stage, we can see, the country has already begun evolving from commodity-oriented market stage to product-oriented and now, entering service-oriented.

There is an emerging trend in service design. More and more corporates and academic organizations are devoted into this field. With nearly a hundred colleges, shanghai boasts abundant talents, who are promoters and innovators for design thinking. Therefore, Shanghai is the most ideal location for the nationwide promotion of service design.

Service Design today in your region 

 

Although Service Design in China is still at an infancy stage, we can see, the country has already begun evolving from commodity-oriented market stage to product-oriented and now, entering service-oriented.

There is an emerging trend in service design. More and more corporates and academic organizations are devoted into this field. With nearly a hundred colleges, shanghai boasts abundant talents, who are promoters and innovators for design thinking. Therefore, Shanghai is the most ideal location for the nationwide promotion of service design. Besides, as the city is the largest contributor to China’s GDP, Shanghai is undergoing rapid development in all aspects. The cycle time of service design from building concepts to producing results and entering the market is much shorter than in developed country.

For this reason, our service design events such as Global Service Design Jam could serve as a promotion tool to spread awareness on Service Design ideology and methodology for business, logistics, life, transportation etc. Using Chinese market as a prototyping platform, it enables iterative evolution of local designs in China.

In addition to business service, public service is another category in service design. Currently, public services that strive to create social innovations are lacking designers’ involvement. Meanwhile, although Chinese government has yet to incorporate the principles and methodologies of service design, it is strengthening its investment in providing public services.

Seeing this trend, CBi China Bridge, together with Shanghai DianJi University and China Telecom are collaborating together with full passion to trigger a sustainable development of service design in Eastern China.

 

 

Chapter Vision

How can you enlarge and strengthen the service design community.

Service Design is comprised of business service and social service. For CBi China Bridge, we always strive to be a bridge between business and society. Hence, beside providing innovation consultation on business service, it also devotes 20% of its annual work hours on social innovation, of which, some of the projects have be realized and is creating positive social impacts. Moreover, CBi China Bridge’s successful innovation model can be leveraged by other service fields to generate impact.

To achieve this goal, we intend to work with a cross-disciplinary team to co-create a service design ecosystem, with the goal of creating a value-chain that enable social innovations to create business value and social value.

We intend to collaborate closely with SDN branches in Beijing, Taiwan, and other locations to help elevate awareness of Service Design in Eastern China while building a Shanghai team with both local and global vision.

bio
bio - Chairperson at CBi China Bridge

Under Cathy’s leadership, Cbi introduced The Global Service Jam and The Global Sustainable Jam (the world biggest non-profit event on sustainability) to Shanghai in 2009 and 2011 respectively, starting the journey of triggering service design’s development in China. From 2009 to 2015, about 12 jams were 9 held. Many projects were carried out as a result of co-creation in the 48-hour jams. Among all the projects, the Power Park was a project on which Cbi cooperated with WWF (World Wide Fund of Nature) and was carried out in Jingan Sculpture Park. To amplify the impact of service design, the 2014 Successful Design Competition added new categories such as service design, business model and social innovation. In 2015, Cathy was invited as the chairman of juror panel for Core 77 Global Design Awards. And in the same year, she attended New York Service Design Global Conference. Meanwhile, Cathy was keeping exploring the methodologies of Service Design used in business. She was the first one to combine double diamond methodology with U theory, which gained high recognition from people in the industry. To provide a suitable space, environment and eco-system for all the innovators who’d like to change the future, including service design practitioners, Cbi, utilizing service design methodologies, designed WECO co-creation center, which is first design-based co-creation eco-system in China, which combines both physical space and online platform. By leveraging service design, lean production and business blueprint, effectively integrating the internal and external resources, creating a physical space that is perfect for design related practice, Cbi built an online-to-offline co-creation community without any limits in industry.

bio
bio - Director of China Telecom’s Shanghai Research Institute Customer & Market Research Department

In one of the “General Manager Project”, which aimed to enhance the efficiency of China Telecom’s physical customer centers, we adopted a Service Design approach in the development process, my team started by pinpointing the pain points in existing customer journey, which helped us to identify innovation opportunities. Ultimately, we designed a new service blueprint for enhancing the physical customer centers, while creating new solutions such as “centralized processing 13 center ”as well as addition of “mobilized sales model”. Additionally, I helped building up Service Design theories & methodologies for applications within my organization, enabling Service Design approaches are properly applied for innovation in telecommunication industry.