The Service Design Podcast

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 Hypergiant, 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 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 Service Design Global Conference in Oktober we spoke to Shannah Segal, one of the local organisers of the conference. Shannon is Senior Manager, Experience Design at Ontario Digital Service and was Principle, Design and Research Director at Usability matters. 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?

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.

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.

Marc Stickdorn is a well-known person in the Service Design world and that’s understandable for many reasons!  He is one of the authors on the ‘Service Design Thinking’ and the ‘Service Design Doing’ books. 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.