Trust, transparency and control

In March, Adam and Markus were co-hosting and facilitating a design jam around trust, transparency and control. How can we empower people in a digital world?  By bringing together regulators, privacy experts, academics and dozens of brands with designers and design doers, we were exploring new ways to create meaningful conversations around the way how people mange and understand how their data is being used. 

The design jam was co-created together with organizations including Facebook, strategic consultancy Ctrl-Shift, University of Southampton and Work Play Experience.

Service Design meets Negotiation and Leadership

Building bridges to related disciplines: Marc and Markus presented and held a hands-on workshop at the 2016 Negotiation and Leadership Conferences at Harvard University. The topic? Customer Journey Mapping – using service design thinking & co-created boundary objects during negotiations. 

A rather unusual location for a #servicedesign workshop today: With @markusedgar at Harvard Law School... :) pic.twitter.com/orQU8gHdj7

— Marc Stickdorn (@MrStickdorn) April 24, 2016

International MBA - Challenge Week at IE Business School, Madrid

In the last week of May, Adam, Markus and Marc had the pleasure to facilitate 350 students at the International MBA – Challenge Week at IE Business School in Madrid. 

With a mixture of concise input sessions on the basic tools of service design doing and some jam elements we helped the student team to create rock'n'roll services and solutions for a rock'n'roll corporate partner: IKEA Spain.

It was a pleasure to work in a team with IE Business School and IKEA Spain. Here is a great Storify published by IE Business School that lets you follow the, well, story of that week: 

Global Service Jam 2014

Three times a year, WorkPlayExperience organises volunteer global innovation events. Here is the film which launched the 2014 Global Service Jam in over 100 cities worldwide.

Executive School "This is Service Design DOING"

We've teamed up with our WorkPlayExperience associate Marc Stickdorn to develop a highly hands-on executive school. Marc is co-editor of "This is Service Design Thinking", and Markus and Adam also contributed some sections to the award winning volume. In the Executive School, participants get a good practical grounding in the basic tools covered in TiSDT. They then move on to more advanced tools and prototyping approaches based on our experience from the Global Service Jam and elsewhere. The course is rounded out by case studies and visits to service design practitioners working within organisations.

Two of the Schools have been held so far, in Berlin and in Amsterdam. Both were organised with the help of the Design Thinkers Academy, and both quickly sold out to a fascinating mix of people - from start-up pioneers to mega-org managers, and from service design newbies to professors. We had two terrific weeks, and it was notable how participants seemed to learn not just from the facilitators, but from everybody else on the course.

The film shows an overview of the first Summer School in Berlin. We've lengthened the programme a full day since then, increasing the amount of design research and service prototyping.

We are working hard to bring the School to other countries soon, focussing first on Europe and North America. One new date for Asia is already fixed - from the 15th to the 19th of September, we will be offering the school in Shanghai, this time with the prestigious Aalto Executive Education.  See you there?  (Link)

Exploring the intersection of (Service) Design, Agile and Lean

Together with our colleagues from Redfront (UK), we started a new initiative: MoDAL. MoDAL is an exploratory project at the intersection of Design Thinking, Agile Methodology and Lean.

What core principles underpin the broad purpose of each approach? What are the commonalities and conflicts? And how does greater cross-fertilisation inform specific applications?

Judging from our experience working with people from these fields and quite a few conversations over the last two years there is a great potential to be uncovered. 

To dig deeper into this conversation, we are happy to announce the first few steps: 

Upcoming events and workshops

Berlin, 22 October

A kick-off event, bringing people together and starting the conversation. Read more here and and sign up for notifications. Places are strictly limited.

MoDAL Drinks: Join us at Frollein Langner on 22 October, from 20:00 onwards, for a more relaxed discussion. Tickets.

Cardiff, 20 November

Service Design Global Conference,  Workshop around the convergence of Design Thinking, Agile Methodology and Lean. Conference workshop outline.