More than 50 Service Designers joined us for Service Design Day (6/1) this year to celebrate the global campaign of “Do Good - Give Back”. More than ever, we call upon our practitioners, students, agencies and academics across the globe to join in and lend your support to those organizations most in need of our services. To honor this campaign, Service Design DC hosted a virtual event where seven global service design leaders from various sectors shared their experience, case studies, methods, and perspectives. 

Each speaker had exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds to share their short, visually-stimulating presentation. Here are the highlights of each talk:

The first presenter was Diana Jeffery, Area Director of Performance Improve at Marriott, who has been traveling the globe for 7 years to learn about building the best experience for guests. Diana shared with us her journey in discovering the most prominent needs of Marriott’s premium luxury guests, and the key insights that helped transform a guest’s experience: less is more- focus on customer need first, craft a total journey from the very first touchpoint, be curious and explore new ways to delight customers, and lastly people matter—invest in your staff. 

The second presentation was a joint effort by Molly Oberholtzer and Ko Wongpichet presenting from Germany. They shared a design strategy called “Play Base” which utilizes role-playing to stimulate a fun and collaborative design process that emphasizes play. The method mirrors the popular game Dungeons & Dragons where each design session has a game master and characters with different roles. Each mission assigned by the game master is a learning engagement that’s solved by the team through describing, deciding, and rolling to complete the journey together. 

The third presenter was Floor Blindenbach, founder and CEO of Organizing4Innovation, who shared her insight and experience with helping teams large and small deliver results and transform innovative ideas into new revenue streams. Floor shared how big businesses and small local businesses need different innovation processes due to differences in developmental risks, appropriability, and scalability. In her opinion, the easiest approach to building innovation is to invest in teams instead of single providers. 

The fourth presentation was by Tim Shaw, Director of User Experience Design at Forum One. Tim shared a new tool that he jokingly calls “Mawwiage” as it is a combination of a service blueprint and process flow. The tool captures the paths a service may take, as well as the front stage and back stage touchpoints, which includes multiple layers of people and systems. The tool has helped his team identify issues/disappointments, inconsistencies, and opportunities in the as-is journey as well as helping stakeholders identify points of change and prioritize solutions. 

Lastly, Lourdes Martinez and Nicolle Belaunde from Design Impact Peru shared their journey in finding and leading an all Women-led service design community in Peru. The organization uses service design to tackle the country’s biggest social issues. Through their campaign and activism, they are giving women a voice by empowering them to lead the changes that are happening around the country. Currently they are creating a Design Impact Activation toolkit to help other women lead Design Impact Chapters around the world. 

The virtual Pecha Kucha event was a true success in engaging service designers from around the world on new methodologies, perspectives, and tools while virtually connecting with each other. If you missed the event or loved the event, we have great news! Service Design DC will host Pecha Kucha Nights regularly so see you all at the next Pecha Kucha Night!

View the entire event here