We can’t believe its already our 25th episode! In september 2016 we published the first episode. Not sure where this adventure would lead us we decided to just give it a try! Since then we have been speaking with inspiring people from al over the world. In this 25th episode we reflect on the conversations we had, we’ll let you know which episodes were our favourite ones and what we have learned from experts in the field.

Together with the city of Rotterdam, service design agency Muzus won the award for organisational impact in the public sector. The city of Rotterdam is offering a mobility service to people with special needs to make sure they get to the where they want. They realised, however, they did not know the people they were offering the service to. Muzus conducted qualitative research in various ways to give the city of Rotterdam insights in these users. These insights were used in various ways to offer the best service possible. 

In this episode we speak to Hyunyim Park who won together with her team the student award for business innovation in the private sector. Together with Jaehyun Park and Culainn Boland Shanaha they designed the Smart Black Taxi Service Flo to tackle the London’s air quality. Their service offers real-time time data about slow traffic, road works, busy spots where people look for taxi’s, etc. By offering this data the taxi drivers will be able to make better choices and reduce their driving time without passengers.  

In this episode we speak to the Service Design award winners for the best commercial project. Judy Mellett is director Service Design, Innovation and Strategy at Telus and Chris Ferguson is founder and CEO of Service Design agency Bridgeable. Together they won the award for redefining the TELUS Renewals experience.  

Ella Walding won the Service Design student award for her graduation project at the Royal Collage of Art in Londen. Together with the government of Malta she developed a set of Service Design tools aimed to create change in the organisation. These tools can be found at servizz.gov.mt

After her studies Ella started working as a service designer at innovation unit. 

This year Service Design award for systemic change in education went to ‘Design Managers Australia (DMA)’ and Macquarie Primary School. We had the great opportunity to have both Mel  Edwards, co-principal at DMA and Wendy Cave, principal at the Macquarie Primary school together on the show.   

Chris is a Service Design Strategist and the founder and CEO of the Canadian Design Agency Bridgeable. At Bridgeable they work with some of the largest organisations in sectors like healthcare, telekom and government. Together with their clients they deliver great customer experiences though designing organisational en service-system level changes insight these companies.  

BC is a game changing technology that brings some unique benefits. For us there are some properties that make Blockchain highly interesting for Service Design.

These benefits are qualities that traditionally are taken care of by human-beings in transactional processes. When we think of transferring credit, property or certificates, it is people who ensure that this happens in a reliable, transparent and fair way.

With blockchain we have a technology that can potentially take over some of these human processes and this will affect the experience of these processes and have consequences for the people involved. It is therefore only natural that we are highly interested in exploring what blockchain can mean for our work.

We were happy to join the Global Service Design conference again this year. During the conference we talked to speakers from all over the world, volunteers, organisers and many more. You can find a compilation of all these interviews and our own recap here.

Tanarra Schneider is group director at Fjord Chicago, where she leads a large team of talented people. She loves keeping teams motivated to design new services and businesses. She is passionate about design as well as food, dancing and being a mom.