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In this article, we discuss that service designers are particularly well equipped with skills and tools to create change in organisations and can do so more explicitly by applying a flywheel capability model to their work.
Service design and agile practices are leading approaches to create and deliver value. Here, we present a successful case where both approaches accelerated the implementation of new service experiences, supported nation-wide scalability and created a new organisational culture.
Patti Hunt is the founder and director of MAKE Studios, a service innovation company based in Hong Kong. For this edition of the Touchpoint Profile, she had a chat with Jesse Grimes, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, about her work with multi-national corporations, NGOs and start-ups in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the unique challenges posed by practicing service design in Hong Kong.
The energy and utilities sector globally had a natural reluctance to ‘jump’ into new technology without prolonged periods of assessment and testing - at times lasting decades.
It was not so long ago that if one were asked the question "What is design?", the response would likely have described a creative process resulting in the production of a tangible object that could be seen, touched, smelled or even consumed.
Eleonora Carnasa is a Bulgaria-based service designer and founder of Fabrica 360, a design and innovation agency. In this profile, she had a chat with Jesse Grimes, Touchpoint’s Editor-in-Chief, about her efforts to grow service design in Eastern Europe.
Communicating the value of service design to those who are unfamiliar with our tools and processes can be a challenge. This creates problems for designers as well as the organisations and communities we hope to serve. Perhaps our use (and misuse) of metaphor to describe our work contributes to the confusion.
Product designers Joydeep Sengupta and Adam Cochrane look into the issues of prototyping at scale, sharing insights on how fashion retailer Zalando is going about building a prototyping culture within a 14,000 person organisation.
The project was set to design a service concept around long-distance driving (one-hour or longer). A strong focus was set on user research, touchpoint identification and how they could be re-imagined.
The project focused on the current experience of financially and emotionally struggling British citizens who require support in cases of familial separation and child custody, but are not entitled to benefits.
Unfortunate circumstances could occur at any given instance — we will never know when we might lose a loved one. At that point of time, many would be at a loss of what to do.
This service design project was conducted as a master thesis project for three design students. The project concerned using service design to improve women’s maternal health in rural Nepal and resulted in a new health service co-developed with users and field experts.
How service design was used to create a new kind of coding school in Helsinki and radically change people's perception of computer programming.
Heart Failure (HF), the inability of the heart to effectively pump blood around the body, takes a serious toll on a person’s life. For people living with HF, walking up a few stairs leaves their heart pounding, lying down makes it hard to breathe, and their lives are instantly turned upside down by a prognosis of only a few years left to live.
This case is an illustration proving how machine learning models can seamlessly support the work of service designers and successfully forecast the business impact of specific design efforts. This understanding can be used when making decisions on where to invest.
How service design plays a vital role in the transformation journey of a Brazilian insurance provider: from a brick-and-mortar business into a health-insure-tech.
The project was initiated to help the charity achieve its vision is to create a society where those affected by dementia are supported and able to live without prejudice.
LaMA is short for Laboratoria Mobiele Alternatieven. It is a co-creative design process developed to find cheap and simple solutions with great impact on local mobility issues.
After almost a century, and several failed attempts to establish a coherent rural land identification and registration system across the whole of Portugal; a cooperative initiative between different Government sectors was created in 2017. This initiative had one goal: to finally understand who owns what, and where.
Compensation Funds are private non-profit organizations of the Chilean Social Security System. Its purpose is to deliver benefits in the form of social benefits, financial products, deals related to health and education, and to manage state legal benefits. Companies join them free of charge, and their collaborators become affiliates who have access to the benefits offered. This project was developed with Chile’s most prominent company in the industry, which serves more than 4 million affiliates.
Start-ups and innovation environments represent exciting, challenging and relatively-uncharted terrain for service design. Despite the fact that we as service designers are barely visible in the start-up world, and mostly unmentioned in their literature, my own experience as a service designer working with start-ups and innovation programmes has proven to me that we can add significant value in these settings.
A quick Google search for ‘innovation’ pulls up thousands of results: leading edge technology, business school case studies, how-to guides for innovation in corporate environments, and more. ‘Innovation’ is a big, ambiguous term that often looks very different depending on where and how it is applied.
Established in 2010, Livework’s São Paulo outpost is a service design pioneer in one of the world’s top-ten largest economies - Brazil. Since then, the team has worked with an enviable roster of clients, but also experienced the challenges of carrying out service design before it became widely recognised. In this edition of the Touchpoint Profile, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes speaks to Luis Alt, one of the studio’s founders.
