The first event of the «Tour de Suisse» series launched by the Swiss Chapter of the Service Design Network took place on April 4th, 2019 at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU). Andy Polaine, Group Director at Fjord Client Evolution, Sabine Junginger, Head of the Competence Center for Research in Design and Management at the HSLU and Jan-Christoph Zoels from Experientia talked about global design trends, the implementation of the service design approach in organisations and concrete applications in complex problems and thus offered new perspectives for contemporary design practice, which arise through service design.

Jan-Christoph Zoels explained Experientia's approach using the example of a project for a U.S. based startup. The task was to rethink pre-fabricated housing for the North-American market and designing a digital marketplace for home owners and builders. The approach to solve these task included contextual field research, co-creation workshops, service and interaction design as well as agile prototyping and leads to deliverables like field research reports, personas, customer journex maps, moments-that-matter design concepts and digital platform UI prototype. Find more about the work Experientia: http://experientia.com

Sabine Junginger spoke about the implementation of the service design approach in public services. In contrast to private services, people cannot choose whether to use a public service, nor can they choose whether to have to pay for it, and most people do not regard public services as a service at all. The question here is how public organizations go about designing? The magic word is co-creation: organizational staff and citizens co-create and ‘co-produce’, i.e., operate the new - not surprising for service designers, but challenging for public services. They need to realise that they offer a service and that this service could be designed - and that design means thinking about processes rather than documents. More about the research group design & management at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts: https://www.hslu.ch/de-ch/design-kunst/forschung/design-und-management/

Andy Polaine presented the Fjord Trends for 2019, which also provide clear indications and recommendations for the design of future services. For example, companies should find new and more mindful ways to establish relationships with their customers, and not shout out their offerings aloud, because in the age of social media and data flooding, silence is gold. Data is becoming more and more important - also in the eyes of people. Fjord also recommends to empower people to know what happens to their data, how it is used and what value they receive in return. At the same time companies should follow the data minimalism principle and only collect what is necessary to run their services. The Fjord Trends 2019 can be downloaded online at: https://trends.fjordnet.com/Trends_2019_download.pdf