Service Design Network Global Conference 2014 report

This is a report on the Service Design Network global conference,

held in Stockholm from October 6-8 2014. The authors of this report

have attended the conference in a group of 7 people with a varied

background, ranging from corporate organizations to academia to

design agencies and students.

During and after the conference we shared our findings and

experiences in a Whatsapp group, in order to extend our learning and

deepen our experience.

This report is a summary of the discussions we’ve had with the group.

It is not meant as criticism because we have enjoyed the conference

enormously. The venue, the crowd, the food, the parties, and the

organization were all perfect. It is more meant as constructive

support in making the next edition even better. If you would like to

discuss our findings in person, we are gladly available to support you!

!Cheers!

Wim, Edwin, Maarten, Ralf, Anastasia, Alexandra, Erik

1. Introduction

In general we experienced the conference as a great gathering

of fantastic people from all over the world, in an open setting

and with a great sense of community.

But we’ve found the presentations insufficiently engaging. We

felt they were too general, too much addressing a laymen’s

audience, and sometimes not clearly presenting a point.

Next to that we found that the workshops we attended didn’t

meet our expectations.

!We’ve been having quite some debate on why that was exactly,

and whether this can actually be solved in the setting of a 500

person conference where levels of expertise, interests,

backgrounds and expectations differ so greatly.

!Our conclusion is that we think it should be possible to design a

better conference experience for everyone, and on the next

pages we would like to share some ideas with you.

2. General findings “we missed some depth or at least

openness in the cases presented “I personally felt a lack of

detailing examples and cases, an exchange of

professional knowledge

“The conference talks stayed at a theoretical and abstract level

“We expect to hear more tricks, unexpected solutions, tools

that were redesigned/especially helpful used in

particular contexts.

There's probably not a lot of NEW things one could share for a

specialized audience. should be about raising questions

and discussion

✦ Introduce an expert track, with only highly specialized topics.

No generic stories on service design but only high level

complex topics.

✦ Forbid general case studies without a purpose. Each case has

to clearly illustrate a controversial point or else it is forbidden ;)

✦ Also forbid success stories, each presentation has to contain at

least 3 failures, mistakes, or unresolved challenges.

✦ Introduce expert discussion groups next to the workshops

where you can go to discuss a specialized topic with peers,

instead of participating in a workshop. Many of us are in

workshops all the time, they don’t challenge us enough.

✦ Introduce a track "impact on Service Design from other

(emerging) disciplines" as well.. Topics to suggest are big data,

behavioral economics, neuro-sience, robotica, Internet of

things etc.

3. Ideas on content “Presenting failures is good, I would also add success stories with clear points of how they

framed the challenge and what helped them achieve it.

“maybe not everyone can get in this expert track,

some kind of motivation or experience is required

“It's always good to have another perspective and broader vision on our field and to not let it become our religion, but we find the 2 days

program already too reduced in terms of insights and learning

“I would always include a few 'left-field' speakers such as

biologists, TV directors, whatever CEOs and especially

Buddhist Monks

3. Ideas on delivery“I have to link these nicely

formulated inspiring words with real cases or just small

examples to make it start living and growing in my

head

“This speaker corner could also likely engage

me better with the conference prior to it

“We as visitors truly expect to get some tricks, examples and

learnings we could directly apply. And learn from mistakes

and failures

“SDN should require speakers to be fully honest and tell their story

with all the failures and pitfalls and how they resolved these.

✦ Have some kind of speaker coaching, especially around

making sure you present a well defined and clear point in your

talk.

✦ Avoid too many ‘American-style’ presentations in the line-up.

The very flamboyant and ‘practiced way of presenting doesn’t

always resonate with Europeans.

✦ As a speaker, Wim Rampen found it makes sense to open an

online "speakers corner" to exchange conference details, talk

topics, material etc etc..

✦ Every speaker should bring failures and solutions, the applied

method in their way of work to be shared in a useful form,

insight in the ecosystem (project, budget, stakeholders,

methods, tools, suppliers etc) they built in order to make it

work and what they would do differently in a next project.

4. What we loved

“Olly King was very inspiring, as always”

“Kigge showed the power of simplicity,

integration of services and business models. And

some solid common sense.

“Brainport Eindhoven could be seen as such a system Kigge

referred to. Aims to foster economic growth and

employment in the Eindhoven area. Includes a wide variety of services and an ecosystem that

spurs innovation

“Denis Weil’s"stop trying to prove the value of design to your

stakeholders, just shut up and deliver valuable

outcomes”.

✦ Oliver King held a very useful and clear presentation, openly

sharing a very valuable Engine tool with the audience.

✦ Kigge May Hvid made a good case that we do not need more

services and products. We need connecting of products &

services into large scale systems that provide solutions for

bigger problems. We do not need a newer wheelchair.. We

need to take care of the elderly.

✦ Fred Leichter from fidelity showed some great examples of

conversation prototyping. The family conversations at the

kitchen table were impactful.

✦ Denis Weil did a good job showing us the challenges that lie

ahead for designers in the future.

5. Our key take aways - 1✦ Erik: Integrated system design (the kind Kigge referred to) gets

really complex. Too much so for service designers alone to be

relevant. At the TU Delft we do quite a bit of research into

networked, multi stakeholder innovation where dynamic

complexity and uncertainty are very high. Most integrated

product service systems have these qualities. It's an emerging

hybrid domain with a lot of work to do for smart service

designers, on the condition that we learn to work closely with

other knowledge domains.

✦ Maarten: I think there's nothing wrong with the need for

recipes. It works extremely well for companies such as

Southwest in delivering outstanding services by all employees

(see 'Great by Choice' by Collins). Problem is that such recipes

are hard to generalize. They work for focused businesses.

✦ I would be interested to see a bit more about behavioral

psychology, sense making/laddering in regards to customers

and stakeholders in the next conference.

5. Our key take aways - 2✦ Edwin: We are moving from design as a skill set to design as a

mindset and movement within an organization. Added value

will come naturally without having to ask, safeguard or have

permission from the board. Stop complaining that we have the

wrong position or aren't heard yet; do it, show it, proof it with

value and meaning for the customer. Start small, make steps

with little proof, acquire budget for a pilot, build knowledge

and more proof, build a community internally, develop tools,

let others do projects as well etc etc. This is the internal

movement. When mature enough ( years later, but maybe

small initiaties already earlier), connect to the outside, where

you tend to step into social design and over arching issues and

values. I would be interested to see more examples and

experiences that support these steps in either small or big

companies or environments. And that form a new ecosystem

within these environments.

5. Our key take aways - 3✦ Wim: I tend to disagree when people advocate their discipline

needs to be more up in the value chain. For several reasons:

1.What side of the value chain is up? I think it's the

opposite of the customers end, in most minds. Not sure

that is the best end.

2.There isn't enough room at the boardroom table to host

all disciplines.

3.If what we need is outcomes we should not put (part of )

the solution to getting there at center stage.

✦ Erik: Designers often say they want to move up the value

chain. But what they may mean is that they want to be on the

side of the initiative, the responsibility, the decision taking.

And at the same time at the side of the customer. We think

that’s what makes design entrepreneurship (or

intrapreneurship) interesting: to sit not at the boardroom

table, but at the customer’s coffee table. But with the vision

and the initiative to make things happen.

5. Our key take aways - 4✦ Ralf:

1.SD is not an isolated phenomenon any more, but rather an

ecosystem where a) where services, established and new are

integrated with each other and b) front-end and back-end

systems need to be synchronized in order to generate superior

service experiences.

2.service Design tends to be a highly customized challenge in

terms of coming up with appropriate solutions. However the

current state of the profession shows that the evolution of SD

models, methods and tools provide solid strategies addressing

the challenges ahead

5. Our key take aways - 5✦ Erik:

1.I like the challenge for SD to create eco-systems that deliver

integrated experiences, whereby the integration has two

dimensions: a horizontal integration of touch points in time,

and a vertical integration of those touch points with the

channels, staff, IT, technology, data, and culture that enable

them.

2.I think this idea of networked service design is interesting and

important: integrating partners in value networks delivering

service eco-systems that from the customer perspective feel as

a seamless experience but from the business perspective

require many different capabilities to deliver them. (Health

care, urban spaces like brainport, airports, etc)

3.SD only makes sense if you integrate it with other value

generating business efforts and resources, it's not an isolated

discipline, in fact it's not a discipline at all. It makes sense

combined with big data, HR, brand, CEX, CI, IoT, etc

5. Our key take aways - 6✦ Alexandra:

1.The trend in Service Design Implementation is Minimum Viable

Products. But we’re not designing for Minimum Viable Humans. As

responsible service designers we should avoid just speeding up the

pace of innovation. We should always ask ourselves, our clients and

their customers: “do we actually want this innovation?”.

2.As service designers we need to gain trust from Business people. The

trend: design agencies will be moving in the direction of ‘classic'

business consulting to gain credibility & from C-Level. That will

ensure implementation through validation by business metrics. This

prompts collaborations between business and design schools and

inclusion of business strategy in design schools.

3.To make service design viewed as an effective tool for addressing

societal challenges and to mainstream it within public services, we

need to provide our new audience more concrete evidence of

impact and return on investment. Some kind of Service evaluation

model should become part of every service designer’s toolkit.

5. Our key take aways - 7✦ Anastasia:

1.I see a trend where CX, UX and SD are merging together in a

customer-centric world and the borders between them become

quite blurry (especially so for the outside world). We need to

define more clearly what the overlaps and differences are between

them and what kind of different business and customer issues

they deal with. As practitioners we need to have a debate around

whether amidst all these the emerging disciplines Service Design

has a solid place to fill, or whether maybe it should merge with

these other emerging fields into one coherent whole.

2.My personal take away is the adjustable maturity model that

Oliver King has shown us. Self assessment of the maturity level of

customer experience within an organization is vital and helps it to

become much more focused in the CX efforts they pursue.

3.I find the topic of behavioral psychology very interesting and

relevant for us as service designers and I woud love to learn more

about it in the next conference.

5. Our key take aways - 8✦ Maarten:

Our critique slightly aims in two different directions: on the one

hand we call for more / deeper expert knowledge sharing, on the

other, we wish for a more broader agenda including adjacent

academic terrains such as behavioral psychology. Not saying that

one should exclude the other, but SDN’s aim to connect to a wide

audience is in my opinion the best path to avoid situations like with

DMI, where each conference the same question comes up: "what is

the meaning, value, ROI... Etc of Design management... (Or service

design for that matter)?" The quality of this community is in its

diversity and its capability to attract new and adjacent (business)

audiences. Too much self reflection can threaten this quality, I think.

To me the biggest insight is that we really need to figure out how to

integrate our expertise in other fields to start contributing to

'coherent systems'. This question should precede each venture; how

will my business improve/contribute to existing 'systems'.

5. Our key take aways - 9✦ Edwin:

In general I think that the quality of the conference will benefit if

the SDN community shares a common idea of bringing the SD

field further. Then one will share more beneficial insights, cases,

solutions and tools. Oliver King sharing an valuable tool to the

audience is a good example. For the next conference an expert

track on tools would be perfect for that.

I would be interested to see more corporates, (big) clients from

healthcare, finance, energy, insurance, municipals, government etc

that use SD from their own perspective. We all (kind of )

understand what we should do with SD, but the more interesting

perspective is what they expect - and this is where the money is

and where the decisions are taken.

Wim: “In other words: SD has evolved from the design of products to the design of services to the design of experiences. Now it’s taking the next step towards designing for outcomes.

This not only requires a move from design doing to thinking, but also from integrating & orchestrating touch points to integrating

capabilities & services into ecosystems that deliver these outcomes.”

!!

We want to thank the organizers and all attendees for a great conference experience! !

Wim | Maarten | Edwin | Ralf | Anastasia | Alexandra | Erik

Service Design Network Global Conference 2014 report

Business

Transcript of Service Design Network Global Conference 2014 report