ServDes.

That is nothing new in saying that the world is changing really fast in the past decades. But what can’t one ignore is that it affects every single aspect of our lives. The globalization brings challenges to enterprises in achieving new markets, technologies ask companies for continuous innovation and to handle with all these changes also new professional profiles should be arranged.

Designers know that well as we are all the time reinventing our profession. We are looking for theories, tools, methods out of our boxes every day. Bringing knowledge from other areas to ours, compounding a multidisciplinary repertory. In the other way of the same route, design is spreading its mindset, tools and methods in tangent areas, sometimes not obviously related to it.

This drives design to look at management, but also causes business management to look at design. As the design mindset propagates as a new answer to these gaps in business, it would be useful to have a discussion about how can Design Thinking can be applied as a management approach, especially if we think in terms of service design.

What we would like to talk about?
I would like to start a discussion about how design thinking can work as a new management approach.
What impact can it have on Service Design and in Design activity in general – but also in Design Management and in Business Management?

What is the relation and impact of that in innovation?
There are real challenges to Business Management in having administration models in reach as the work world changes, search for innovation and needs from stakeholders.
We would like to ask the participants to share their thoughts about the potential of this “new” approach and share insights, strategies, expectations, experiences or doubts. The discussion will be driven to focus in three main areas: market, society and education.

Is this session for you?
People can feel fee to drop in and out of this session (Room 8), getting updates every break. Ideally we’d have a diverse group of people sharing ideas including design managers, business managers, students interested in management and everyone interested in Design Thinking.
As UnConference is meant to be an open discussion, what I expect from this meeting, than is that all participants can learn from each other, network, and share a deeper vision about Design Thinking.

What do I do?
I´m a student in the Masters of Integrated Design program of Köln International School of Design in Cologne, Germany. I’m also a Masters of Sciences in Federal University of Paraná, in Curitiba, Brazil. My main research theme is Design Thinking as a Management Approach, focusing in innovation and Service Design. I want to discover what kind of professional culture differentiates designers and business managers and how we can learn from each other. Also I want to present to managers and designers the great mindset designers own and how take profits of that. In both programs I´m in touch with several different research topics and people, who give really nice and interesting inputs to my work.

How to participate
Look at the program which will be placed at the door. It will have an  introduction to each theme. During discussion breaks, we will identify the main concepts from the participants and place them ask notes on the door.

Who am I?
I´m a graphic designer with a particular interest in management, decision making, collaborative work and innovation. I´m a foreigner in the city in which I live and I feel like a foreigner in each knowledge area I look into. I am just trying to keep my eyes open towards the new and looking to see the common from a different perspective.

/Juliana Bach

Markus & Adam from WorkPlayExperience and Marc from MCI and Destinable team up to offer an afternoon packed with service design insights and lots of fun.

Instead of only talking about, we’ll be working with the Customer Journey Canvas and theatrical tools to quickly map your journey towards Linköping, find common patterns among these and try to understand what went wrong at your pain points. While doing so, you will learn extremely effective iterative methods of service design thinking on the example what all of us are in Linköping: tourists.

Introducing policies for freedom of choice in the public sector are more often applied today than some decades ago. In Sweden we have seen pharmacies, health care, elderly care, schools etc. opened up for competition and policies for freedom of choice. This development highlights the user perspective in those services. Health care, and other public sector services, could use the design thinking to impose the use of user perspective, but in policy discussions about public sector the design perspective is rarely used.

In such a development where freedom of choice policies brings out the user perspective, design will play an increasingly important part of developing products and services that not only competes with the lowest price. Likewise, health care providers compete on an international market. For the markets in which globalization comes into play, design can help creating the uniqueness a supplier need to create “their” market.

For services (regardless of where they are produced) a main driver of innovation is the user and/or the customer. When the user is the main driver of innovation the design process methodology helps to understand user needs, visualize the basis for strategic decisions and thus, becomes an important part of innovation policy work. Strategic efforts to link design processes and healthcare development would certainly lead to new perspectives on how innovation can be conducted also in the health care industries. Using design processes as a strategic tool becomes crucial for developing services suitable for areas where freedom of choices is applied and international markets.

The discussion wishes to highlight how research about design thinking and design can be used to a greater extent by policy makers and health care providers. Join this discussion about design and public sector and how Sweden can transform the largest sector with help of design thinking.

/Eva-Karin Anderman

Calling all service designers!

My research involves the development of a service design evaluation method, and I am planning to run an evaluation workshop on the afternoon of 2nd December as part of the conference.

Whilst this could be a rather dry re-run of a previous case study, how much more interesting it will be if we can carry out the evaluation trade-off analysis on some fresh “competing” service designs that have been developed during the Unconference, December 1st.

Agreeing what problem to solve

To start with, we need an interesting service design problem for which alternative solutions can be developed. Designs will need to be developed to the point where they can be described and contrasted with other designs by the end of the day, so the problem space must be limited in size and scope. And the domain must be understandable by all Unconference participants. Otherwise, there are no constraints on what problem we could tackle.

Defining the requirements

To kick off, participants will explore the range of stakeholders, describe the service requirements, and develop a set of scenarios using a service quality model. These scenarios will later form the basis for the trade-off analysis that forms the heart of the evaluation workshop the following day.

Developing “competing” service designs

By now, we know what is wanted from the service, and by whom. What we need are innovative service designs that address these needs. The evaluation method places no constraints on how the service designs are arrived at – all that is required is the ability to describe the solution in enough detail to enable the review workshop to assess risks.

The challenge is for teams or individuals to develop service design solutions during the rest of the day (ideally we want between three and five). This exercise could perhaps be used to demonstrate a particular design method, tool or capability.

This is not a competition, in that there is not an ultimate “winner” or “loser”. The evaluation method highlights that different designs represent alternative trade-offs between competing quality characteristics. Exploring alternative designs and articulating their different characteristics can help organisations select the design that best meets their complex needs.

Evaluating the designs

The workshop to conduct the trade-off analysis of each service design takes place during the conference, in the afternoon of 2nd December. You will have to be a full conference participant to join this workshop.

What is the timetable?

Now: Discuss online

1st December:

10 am Agree the service challenge

Specify the stakeholders

Scope the problem and define the scenarios

Complete the context using the quality model

11.30am – midnight (and beyond!) Develop service designs

2nd December

1.30pm Evaluation Workshop (trade-off analysis)

Want to get involved?

If you have questions, suggestions, or want to propose the service design problem we should be tackling, contact me or the conference oragnisers.

For more information about the evaluation method (Service Architecture Review Method) see here.

Simon Field

University of Glamorgan Business School