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. 

Marc Stickdorn is a well-known person in the Service Design world. That’s understandable for many reasons! 

He is one of the writers on the ‘Service Design Thinking’ and the ‘Service Design doing’ book. Since this week also the ‘Service Design Methods’ book. Besides that he is co-founder and CEO of ‘More than Metrics’, a company that offers tools and stuff for customer experience and service designers: Smaply, Experiencefellow and Mr. Thinker. Marc speaks about Service Design at many conferences around the world. 

Great to have him at the podcast!

New technologies, a continuously changing lifestyle and new jobs and disciplines present serious challenges in the field of education. Old education methods and skills are challenged in a society where personalisation, collaboration, information and e-learning are taking over. Professionals have to re-educate themselves and schools need new tools and solutions to be able to innovate and make these changes manageable. How can Service Design help education deal with these challenges and inspire people to solve problems in a creative way?

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.