Service Design Podcast

Next week the Service Design Global Conference 2021 will take place with again a great line-up! This years' theme is ‘taking a stand', we talked about the theme and other exciting stuff with two great people from the organising team: Ullah Jones and Agusta Callaway. Get excited about the conference and listen to the episode! Or let us convince you to still buy a ticket with a 25% discount (code: SDGC21_attendee_25%off)

Twisted studio won the ‘professional non-profit’ service design award for their lean approach to service design and prototyping. The project they won the award for is called LaMA, short for Laboratoria Mobiele Alternatieven. A co-creative design process developed to find creative and simple solutions with great impact on mobility issues in small cities. We spoke with the two founders of Twisted studio; Marlies Deforche & Elisabeth Verhetsel. Because they are our Belgian colleagues, we invited them to our studio! Read the whole story here: https://www.service-design-network.org/community-knowledge/lama-laboratoria-mobiele-alternatieven Twisted studio website: http://twistedstudio.be

Tom Szaky is CEO at Terracycle, a social enterprise on a mission to eliminate the idea of waste. Recently he founded a new company Loop, a global circular shopping platform that brings multi-use packaging into our daily shopping. Tom closed the Global Service Design Conference in Toronto with his talk ‘Loop: Solving for Disposability While Maintaining Its Virtues’. We managed to sneak in a 25 minute interview with him right before his talk!

John Powell is design director at an agency focussed on Artificial intelligence for leading global enterprises and governments. John’s talk was titled ‘We Have Met The Enemy and They Are Us. He talked about the social challenges humans created over the years and how it is time for designers to take responsibility!!

Steph Hay is VP design at Capital One an American bank. She opened the second day with her talk ‘Designing for Trust. Steph talked about the example of sesame street. In order for children to learn, they need to trust the person or puppet that thought them new stuff. Discover what Sesame Street and and the ‘I love you’ metric can teach you!

Waw! What a great edition this year's conference! It was great to meet the familiar faces again, but also many new inspiring people. We walked around with our microphones again and bumped into many interesting designers from all over the world. We talked to the organisators of this year conference and the organisers of the 2020 edition in Copenhagen. We already had a quick chat with some of the service design award winners. Off course we will invite them for a longer interview again later this year! We talked to many speakers, fellow podcasters, volunteers, etc. We hope you enjoy this episode and relive the conference!

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 in Oktober we spoke to , one of the local organisers of the conference. Shannon is Senior Manager, Experience Design at and was Principle, Design and Research Director at . Listen to find out about the theme of the conference, what to look forward to and where to visit in Toronto.

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? In our 34th episode of our podcast you can listen to the round table discussion, i.e. an interview with the speakers of the evening and questions from the audience.

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 en 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, who is visual design at Fjord and Kostja Paschalidis who was senior service design at Fjord and is now working as a freelancer.

Innovationsguiden won the Professional Non-Profit/Public Sector award. Innovationguiden is an ongoing project that aims to support and reinvigorate the Swedish public sector in collaboration with citizens through service design. This was done by providing various forms of support to municipalities, county councils and regions to work with user-driven innovation in their development work.

Cork County Council is the second largest local authority in Ireland. They offer over 600 services to the civilians of Cork. This means they have an all-time challenge to deliver the best possible services for their customers. A few years ago, they came across Service Design, and started experimenting. They formed the Service rePublic team, and never looked back since.

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. One of the highlights of hosting this podcast is meeting our guests and listeners at conferences or online. We would love to interact more with our listeners and know who you are. Therefore we launched a newsletter where we will publish new episodes but also ask questions to the community.   GIVEAWAY!! When you you have a chance to win this with some of our favourite Service Design tools!  A Neuland workshop case that we use for all our workshops. The Service Design Award Annual A Moleskin sketch book to note down all your great ideas. A Kingdom card game to boost all your workshops And more ... Check out the   THANKS, THANKS, THANKS! Thanks to all the guests that have been on the show! Thanks to for partnering up!  Thanks to for giving us time to do the podcast. And of course thanks to all of you who have been listening to the podcast! Here's to another 25 episodes to come!

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 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, founder and CEO of the Canadian Design Agency Bridgeable. At Bridgeable they work with some of the largest organisations in sectors like healthcare, telecom and government. Together with their clients they deliver great customer experiences though designing organisational en service-system level changes inside 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. Distributed Blockchain is a distributed technology, a blockchain run on multiple nodes that can should on different physical locations. When one node is compromised, nothing in the blockchain is lost. Immutable The assets in a blockchain can not be duplicated or changed without recording the action to do that change. With a blockchain it’s not possible for two people to have two different instances of the same data. Secure On top of these aspects the security to access one asset in a blockchain is huge and each asset has its own security. Transparent A blockchain can be designed to be entirely transparent, recording and sharing every single transaction that happen in the blockchain. 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 chose blockchain as the topic for our latest and we recorded the round table conversation with the speakers. 

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. 

This year in Madrid will mark the tenth edition of the Service Design Global Conference. We talk to Birgit Mager, Alex Nisbett, and Jamin Hegeman about 10 years of Service Design conferences. They take us back to the start, share their personal highlights and get us excited for the upcoming conference. Have a listen in anticipation of the next edition and come and find us to say hello in Madrid. INTERESTING LINKS   Service Design Podcast is brought to you by  &  from and the

Per Kristiansen one of the people who helped make Lego Serious Play into what it is today. As partner at Trivium he goes around the world training people to be Lego Serious Play facilitators. Together with Robert Rasmussen he is the author of the book “Building a Better Business with the Lego Serious Play method. We talk to Per all about the early days of Lego Serious Play and what makes it such a great tool.

Frederik Vincx is a Belgian social service designer. He graduated ten years ago and worked for six years in communication agencies as a designer. In the following four years he founded his own company Prezly, where he put his heart and soul in. After these ten years of hard work he wanted to shift his energy towards more meaningful challenges. Even though he really loved his job he felt that he should do something else that matters even more.  So he took the brave decision to go on a one year Social sabbatical. The word sabbatical might make you thing he is taking a rest but that’s definitely not the case! Fredrik is taking ten internships in one year in organisations he would like to do something meaningful for.

Esben Groendal is a Danish Service Designer working in Japan. He is a former Service Design master student at and the initiator of the .

Virtual and augmented reality promise to change the way we perceive our surroundings, interact with each other, create, teach and play. As the technology evolves at stellar speeds, each day more and more opportunities open up for businesses, brands and organisations to connect with their customers. But it also leads to new questions. Will this new way of seeing blur the line between real life and virtual reality? And how will we design the best user experiences for it? In our second live episode we talk to Stijn Michiels and Demis Holvoet about VR, AR and Design.

We recorded a special bonus episode for Service Design Day at the first of June! This episode is a compilation of interviews with Service Design pioneers from all over the world. Together we talked about the status of Service Design in their continent and the cultural difference they experience.   

Mark Willems is pedagogical employee in innovation and ICT integration at the Gemeenschapsonderwijs, in short GO!. A Belgian governmental institution that organises education in Flanders. We personally know Mark and GO! because one year ago they came to us, at knight Moves, with the question ‘How can we provide the right tools for education in a rapid changing world?” Together we went on a journey of tackling this challenge. In collaboration with all stakeholders we developed a tool that changes the classroom into a place were every student can follow its own path, were students can learn more then the theory and were teachers are more like a coach to support the students in their learning. Throughout the whole project there was a read treat, the vision of GO! to combine push & pull learning.

Sanne Kistemaker is co-founder of the service design company Muzus, and teacher at Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. Sanne founded Muzus, a user-centered design agency 10 years ago, together with her sister Neele. Over the years they evolved into a 10 person service design agency that creates products and services by providing insight in the world and motivations of people.  One of the approaches they use is contextmapping. Contextmapping is a method that has been developed at the Technical University of Delft, and allows researchers and designers to map the context around a certain subject. During this interview we talked about the opportunities but also the disadvantages of co-creation, the values of the context mapping technique, service design in education and Sanne provides us with some concrete examples of projects at Muzus.

This is our first Arena episode! Arena is an event organised bij Knight Moves packed with inspiration, learnings and hands-on action on some of the most relevant design topics of today and tomorrow. Three times per year, we bring hot topics into the ARENA and invite two speakers to throw their expertise in the field from different perspectives. Besides that, different partners bring spectacular projects to the Marketplace, a place where guests get the chance to see, explore and experience the secrets of the topic in question. Inspiring evenings full of marvel and action, proudly brought to you by .  During the arena event we have a round table conversation with the two speakers in front of a large audience. We are recording this live and publish it as a special ‘live arena’ episode. The episodes will start with a small reflection of us on the topic and its relation to service design. We wil publish an Arena episode 3 times per year. 

Frederik Kraft is Senior Expert Change & Transformation at Deutsche Telekom, one the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies. Their core business is the operation and sale of networks and connections. To continue their succes Deutsche Telekom evolved from a traditional telephone company into an entirely new kind of service company.

Sophie Andersson is strategic designer at Transformator Design, a Stockholm based Service Design agency. At Transformator they design services based on customer needs and help organisations towards customer centricity. One of those organisations was the Swedish employment agency, together they won the service design award for systemic and cultural change in the public sector.    We were very pleased that we could involve Caroline Enevold, customer-driver business development manager at the employment agency in the interview as well. This shows what real service design is about, service designers working together with their clients as one team.

Gayle has recently completed a PhD at The Glasgow School of Art in which she responded as a researcher and a designer to difficulties young people who were leaving care and their workers experience when working together. For this work she was acknowledged with the first ever ‘service design award’ for best student project.    Gayle is a graphic designer by background, she got into Service design because of her interest in the impact she was creating with her graphic design work. She realised she had to better engage with people that would be using her designs to better understand their needs. That’s how she got into research but soon she realised she could not really use this in the commercial environments she was working in at that moment. Therefor she made the shift towards Service Design.

Kaarel Mikkin is de co-founder of service design & branding consultancy Brand Manual. An international agency establish in Tallinn and Stockholm that designs customer experiences. Brand Manual used to be a marketing company that saw the need to expand towards a service design agency.    “Service design is the new marketing”   Band manual won the service design award for best commercial project with their project That reinvented the bookstore for Apollo. They redesigned a bookstore into an inspiring entertainment environment, bringing books, music, a juice bar and even a cinema together under one brand. This resulted in a customer centric experience and increased the amount of customers with 200%. 

Erik Flowers is the Principal Service Experience Designer at Intuit, and Megan Miller is a Senior Service Designer for Stanford University’s central IT organisation. Together they are the founders of Practical Service Design. In this episode they explained the importance of the word “practical” in the service design community, and the need for a channel to get people who are new to service design on board. We also talked about the use of data and making something meaningful out of it, and they explained their approach to service design as building bridges between the different silos. They also shared their experience as in-house designers, and we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of this role as opposed to an outside consultant.   I do think that if organisations want to make a lasting change and transformation they need to bring design in-house, but I also think we need that budget for the agency and the third party to come in, because when I’m in-house, I can’t do the radical shake up that an agency could do coming in. - Megan Miller - People with a service design toolset in any company can build the bridges between the different silos, smooth out the internal scene, get the information flowing and have a higher-level view, like a bit higher altitude and watch what’s going on at multiple silos at once and coordinate between them. […] That’s why our logo for Practical Service Design is a hot air balloon.  - Erik Flowers -  

With our mobile podcast studio we walked around the Global Service Design Conference and bumped into some very inspirational people! We talked to speakers, volunteers, visitors, chapter builders and many more, all coming from different parts of the world from Japan to Sweden.  But one thing they all had in common; they were all passionate about service design! Relive the conference here!   INSPIRATIONAL PEOPLE YOU CAN LISTEN TO IN THIS PODCAST:   Sarah Schulman  Partner at Inwithforward - Speaker and nominee Erik Roscam Abbing Managing director at livework - Conference host Birgit Mager President of Global Service design network Katie Koch UX designer at Spotify - Speaker Kevin Fox Service design intern at Nile - Volunteer Jesse Grimes Management board member SDN Hatem Elnaggar  Service design director at Iwan designs - Visitor Cathy Huang Founder of ChinaBridge - Speaker Thomas Schönheit Managing partner at Whitespring Service Design Thinking - Visitor Sophie Knight Design Researcher at STBY - Visitor Kautsar Anggakara Design research lead at Pulse lab Jakarta - Speaker Maya Macbeth Glasgow School of Art graduate - Volunteer Jamin Hegemai Head of Service design Adaptive path - Visitor Simon David Chatworthy  Professor in Service Design - Visitor Alexander Koste  Service Designer at Screen Interaction - Visitor Diane Shen Reporter Taiwan SDN Chapter - Visitor   And if you're interested in Kingdom, you can find more information on

Simone Carrier in head of service design at FutureGov, that focusses on service design project for governments. Together we talked about what service design means to governments, what the differences are between government over the whole world and how service design will evolve in the future. Simone also gave some great insight tips on who they successfully run these project at FutureGov.  Discover more insights about this conversation   Our experiences are so shaped by services like Deliveroo, Uber, WhatsApp, snapchat, and Instagram. We are used to receiving really good services. But if you want a new passport or do your tax declaration it brings tears in my eyes because its so complicated - Simone carrier - Interesting links: Linkedin:  Twitter:  FutureGov website:  

Jesse Grimes has been practicing service design from the very beginning of its existence. He’s a senior service designer at Informaat and plays an important role in the service design community as management board member of the Service design network and as Editor-in-Chief of Touchpoint.  Jesse explains how service design became a well established discipline in lots of different disciples around the whole globe, he shares his experience on visiting China. We also talked about the importance of building a netwerk around service that is broader then the practitioners itself but needs to contain buying for all different discplens as well.  Links: