Imagine you're planning a trip to a new city. You probably wouldn't just jump on a plane and wing it - you'd do some research first, right? The same principle applies when you are trying to understand your customers. You shouldn't try to engage with customers without understanding their journey. Customer journey mapping is all about figuring out what your customers are thinking and feeling at each step of their journey with your business. It's a way of putting yourself in your customer's shoes and seeing things from their perspective. Figure 1. What is it? Figure 2. An Example Figure 3. To ..read more

Despite what many practitioners of design thinking may say, collaboration and group brainstorming are not normal behaviours for many. Design Thinking requires confidence in our own creative capabilities and prompt us to exhibit a playfulness and extroversion that may be unsettling at first. This can be particularly acute for introverts who may find group collaboration, of the kind advocated by design thinking, deeply uncomfortable. A secondary issue is that people are often simply embarrassed to attempt to do something creative, having been discouraged from such behaviours in school and at wo ..read more

Roger Martin in his book “The Design of Business” describes how some companies protect themselves from the randomness of intuitive thinking. Companies that adopt this analytical thinking approach, attempt to replace instinct and gut feeling with quantitative data and rigorous analysis. This is sometimes the case in universities too, where students are taught to question assumptions and plan for the future by critically analysing the past. Best practice is often favoured over next practice. An alternative “intuitive thinking” approach places an emphasis on creativity and human ingenuity above ..read more

Trying to establishing a career in a relatively new field can be difficult. Service design is multidisciplinary and often ill-defined. Sometimes it’s hard to know the boundaries between UX, design thinking and service design roles. The sheer number of different role types can be overwhelming.  I’m often asked by students about how to get a job in service design? In the past I’ve searched through jobs sites and LinkedIn and maintained a spreadsheet of openings and deadlines which I share with them.  Recently I came across a Service Design Jobs board created by Daniele Catalanotto. D ..read more

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Natasha Iskander, NYU Wagner Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Service, declares that “Design Thinking is Fundamentally Conservative and Preserves the Status Quo”. Understandably, the article drew some pretty strong reactions. Iskander makes some good points and highlights some of the misgivings of many pragmatic design thinking practitioners i.e. design thinking is not clearly defined, design thinking is a re-branding of old methods, many of the benefits of design thinking are anecdotal. None of these concerns are new and have been ..read more

Yesterday marked Cork's first Service Design Conference. The conference was organised by ServiceRepublic - a joint initiative by Cork Institute of Technology and Cork County Council. The lineup of speakers was diverse. The UK has led the way in service design for many years and the UK public sector was well represented with Louise Downe (Head of Design, UK Government Digital Services), Cat Macauley (Head of User Research and Service Design at the Scottish Government) and Samantha Jones (Former Director of New Care Models Programme, NHS) who all provided great examples of how service design can ..read more

Nice short video explaining how Coca Cola uses Service Design internally Service Design at Coca-Cola GBS from Michal Steckiw on Vimeo ..read more

What is service design? from Design Council on Vimeo ..read more

Service Design Master Class from Cork Institute of Technology on Vimeo. Great to see an emerging community of Service Designers emerging in Cork ..read more

Image Courtesy of Frog Design The Collective Action Toolkit from Frog Design, puts design thinking tools in the hands of non-designers with the aim of allowing communities to come up with tangible solutions to real world problems.  Similar in vain to IDEO's Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation,  the kit encapsulates Frog Design's take on design thinking in an effective, fun, and practical manner. More information about the kit and the download here.  ..read more