You heard Chris Ferguson (Founder of service design agency Bridgeable) on this podcast before. We spoke to him as a visitor of the Service Design Global Conference, as a regular guest, as a winnen of and SD award and now as an organiser of the conference in Toronto.

As always, Chris has many valuable insights to share and will get you excited for this year’s edition of the conference.

In anticipation of the Service Design Global Conference in Oktober we spoke to Shannah Segal, one of the local organisers of the conference.

Shannon is Senior Manager, Experience Design at Ontario Digital Service and was Principle, Design and Research Director at Usability matters.

A couple of months ago, we noticed an interesting video on Linkedin. In this video Playmobil announced their new toolkit for professionals. We spoke with Victoria Dobbie, project manager at sub-brand Playmobil Pro. She introduced us to the tool and the process of designing and bringing it into the market. 

Increasing automation in our workplaces, demographic shifts and a customer-based economy are drastically changing the way we work. In order for people to keep up we will need a very different set of skills, particularly those that are unique to humans: imagination, creativity, curiosity, emotions and social relationships. How will we bring this skills transition into our jobs, and which implications will this have for employees, employers and organisations?

Tesco Bank and Modern human won the ‘best in private sector’ service design award for their project Phoenix. We spoke with Amjid Rasool, head of service design at Tesco Bank and Paul-Jervis Heath from the Service Design agency Modern human. Together with their whole team they redesigned the customer complaint experience of Tesco Bank clients.

Fjord and West Midland Police won the award Best in Public Sector for their project ‘Developing a police force’s digital experience for citizens’. We spoke with Giulio Fagiolini (senior visual designer at Fjord) and Kostja Paschalidis (previous senior service designer at Fjord). 

Innovationsguiden (translation: innovation guide) won the Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector service design award. Innovationguiden is an ongoing project that aims to support and reinvigorate the Swedish public sector through service design in collaboration with citizens. By providing various forms of support to municipalities, county councils and regions, they encourage them to develop towards user-centricity and innovation. 

Julianne has been working for Cork County Council since 2003. Just like the council has evolved over time, her job has changed a lot too. She started in IT and over the years she moved into another role within the Council, more focused on the evaluation of their services. With this new perspective, she started looking into the opportunities of a Service Design approach to transform some of the Council’s services. 

As we shifted from a product-based economy into a service-based economy, customers are more and more pampered with good services. To be successful, companies more than ever need to offer services that exceed the expectations of people. So in order to offer the best services, companies can do two things. On the one hand they can work closely together with external professionals. On the other hand, they can expand their in-house expertise by training their own employees to think more human centred. To introduce and present both ways of working, we invited two international speakers who shared their knowledge. 

We went to the Service Design Global Conference in Dublin where we attended lots of inspiring talks and hands-on workshops. Again, it was a truly amazing edition! It’s surprising how this conference manages to touch new topics & give new inspiration every year. Hats off to the organisation! 

We also really enjoyed the social aspects of this conference. Since this wasn’t our first SDGC, we saw a lot of familiar faces and like every year we had the chance to get to know many new people. During these moments we got the opportunity to interview some service design ‘rockstars’. You can find a compilation of these interviews here.