Service Design Show

When it comes to putting a price tag on service design many people struggle. It can be hard to articulate the value that you create through your work. Therefor many service designers just avoid the topic in general. What if you would treat the pricing of service design as a design challenge in itself where the goal is to come up with a solution where all parties benefit? The conversation about value, price and money becomes much less uncomfortable! In this episode. Dan Mall explains how you can do that through an approached called value based pricing. The things you're going to learn in this episode will not only help you to charge more for your work while at the same time delivering more value for your clients. --- [ GUIDE ] -— 00:00 Welcome to episode 107 01:40 Who is Dan 03:20 60 second rapid fire 05:40 Why talking about value matters 08:30 Feeling valued 09:30 The stigma around business 11:00 Object value pricing 13:15 The basis of value pricing 15:00 Creating alignment around a goal 18:10 What is i

As a customer you've probably already experienced that most services don't fail because of bad intentions. Often services fail because they run on top of systems that don't support a different outcome. The classics "The computer says..." statement is just one of the many example. This isn't just a major frustration for us as ordinary customers but also for us as professionals trying to make things better. Let me ask you a question: How often have you been in a project where you had the mandate and budget to address these deeper systemic issues To my experience this almost never happens. So we keep working on projects with a limited scope that only have a chance of delivering a temporary fix at best. If you really want to address the bigger challenges in our organisations (and society) you have to shift your thinking from programs and projects to a more systemic mindset. You need to work on changing the underlaying and supporting structures. Which is by no means is an easy thing to do. Someone who has b

Taking risks is an inherit part of design. Trying things you haven't done before. Doing experiments. Exploring uncharted territory. It's exactly these things that give us fulfilment and that we're frankly just very good at. But doing this type of work has its price. And that price can be high. When you're in the business of putting new things into the world you never know what the response will be. The response might be praise but it also might be total rejection. We just don't know until it's out in the open. And here lies a major problem... Many designers tend to identify themselves with the things they design. Which means that they take any type of response as an judgement about them rather than about the thing that you've put into the world. This causes completely unnecessary stress, anxiety and mental suffering. And ultimately prevents you from giving everything you've got to the world. Is there a solution? Yes, there is. You have to find a way to be critical about your work while being compass

In order to make real impact on customers and business you need to have influence on the strategy of an organisation. The truth is that strategy isn't necessarily associated with the practice of design. So once you do start working on strategy it's very easy to get sucked into the traditional corporate culture and mindset. You'll tend drift away from the core values of design. An important part of your job already is figuring out what the right thing is to do. So not getting involved with strategy isn't an option. Unless of course you're okay with letting others do the thinking and just focus on execution. So how do you fully embrace strategic thinking without losing the thing that makes design so valuable? In this episode Leon Hovanesian shares the lessons he learned on his journey. You'll learn what it means to form and express a new identity. How to create bridges between disciplines. And why actions speak so much louder than words. This is a great episode if you want to have more influence on busine

There's no doubt that your service design skills are needed more than ever these days. Many pressing (social) challenges have emerged over the last months. Challenges that just scream for a design approach. The big question though is what's the most effective application of design in this context? Rushing in with our tools and methods isn't the best way to contribute to sustainable solutions. In this episode Linda Pulik shares here experience with designing solutions for the social sector. One of the key success factors seems to be that you have to find the perfect balance between being a design leader and a design facilitator. How to find that balance is center to the conversation in this episode. In this episode you'll also learn what rise and fall of #DesignThinking means for the design community. There are many signs that design thinking has become a victim of it's own succes. So the question becomes what's next? We as a design community need to look in the mirror and rethink the value we're delive

Imagine for a moment that you're playing a board game. A game that requires some strategic thinking. Let's go for one of my favorites: the settlers of Catan. After having played that game a few times you pretty quickly understand how to play in order to win. So it's time to make things a bit more interesting. Let's add some expansion sets to the game (Catan has 4). Whoah, now with these expansions you suddenly have a ton more options to find a winning strategy. Yes, the game becomes more complex but also more rewarding. But what if you weren't playing Catan... What if you were designing solutions for the challenges we face these days? Wouldn't it be great if you also had expansion sets that gave you more options to come up with winning solutions? Well as it turns out service design does have an expansion set and it's called systems thinking. In this episode of the Show Tristan Schultz shares how systems thinking helps you to break free from our limiting over rationalised view of the world. And in tha

What do you learn from talking to 99 service design leaders over a course of 4 years? Find out in this 100th episode of the Show! I invited you, the Service Design Show community to send in your questions. And you did. From all over the world! So in this episode I’ll be answering your questions about service design, about the Show and even some questions about me. You’ll also learn about the change that’s going to happen on the Show in the coming weeks. Because after 4 years it’s also time for the Show to go through an iteration. Finally I’d love to know what the biggest challenge is that you face which is holding you back right now as a service designers? Leave a comment or send me a message on LinkedIn! Remember. Every. Share. Counts. :) --- [ GUIDE ] --- * 01:20 - How has service designed transformed your life personally? * 02:52 - What to expect from the Show in the near future? * 05:11 - What problems do NOT suit service design as an approach to solve them? * 07:00 - What are the not yets of s

How can you successfully drive, facilitate and guide change as a service designer? It helps when you're aware of the type of change process you're involved in. Your classic top down change process requires a significantly different approach than a bottom up crowd driven movement. In this episode Robert Bau talks about the 4 main change processes in an organisation and how service designers relate to them. Over the years Robert has identified 7 key roles a service designer can play. When you map these roles onto the different changes process a clear picture emerges that helps you to understand on which activities and skills you need to focus. The last topic in this episode is employee experience. And specifically how employee experience is the new frontier for service design. More and more organisations start to see that in order to deliver a great customer experience they also need to provide a great employee experience. Robert explains how you as a service designer can help to shape these employee e

The dominant form of design privileges certain, often western oriented norms and values. This has big ethical implications and a direct impact on the people we are designing for. In this episode Yoko Akama shares her thoughts about how we can embrace diversity and make service design a more inclusive practice. It's a healthy and important conversation we need to have as a community. The topic of ethics within (service) design falls into a larger discussion about the future of our field. Yoko poses the question how we can rise above our individual interests and shape the future of our practice as a collective. At the end of the episode you'll learn more about the ServDes 2020 conference. Yoko is the co-chair for that event and she explains how you can become part of it. If you know someone who might be interested in what we've discussed please share this episode with them. That way you'll help to grow the service design show community and help me to invite more inspiring guests like Majid. Remember. Ev

What is a service? No really, what is it? As you might imagine it's quite an instrumental question a service designer. But as it turns out, surprising little knowledge about services is embedded in our practice. So in this episode Majid Iqbal talks about service design from the service rather than from the design perspective. We often feel that service design is a strategic practice. Majid has a different take on that. So we talk about how strategy translates into services. And how designers can become strategists. One of the big challenges in our field is to get people in a project aligned around a desired outcome. The holistic nature of services requires that. Majid shares a methodology called the strategic narrative that helps to do this. Finally at the end of the episode there's a book give contest where you can win a signed copy of Majids book. Check the detail below. If you know someone who might be interested in what we've discussed please share this episode with them. That way you'll help to gro

Have you been following the classic design process in most your projects? Moving from research to insights and from opportunities to prototypes. Well you're not alone because most service designers do. It's the process that has been described in many books over the years and become the de facto approach. But what if this isn't the most efficient way to design good services? What if you could tweak the design process so that you get better results in less time? Would you be interested in that? Perfect! Because the guest in this episode - Lincoln Neiger - shares how he has reshuffled the design process with great success. One of the things you'll learn is why it might be smart to start with prototyping rather than design research in your projects! Imagine that :) Have you ever heard of Service Design Gifts? Well neither did I prior to this episode. But as it appears these "gifts" are a very effective (and fun) way to create buy-in. Kindness as a design strategy. That's the final topic in this episode. Li

If the service you've designed goes against the existing socials structures it's bound to fail. That's why it's essential that from the very first moment you're aware of these social structures and use them in your design process. But how you might wonder... Josina Vink has done a lot of research on this topic and in this episode she shares her most important learnings. One of the reasons social structures are so important in service design is that they dictate interactions between people. Organisations are, for a large part, made up of social structures. Explicit but mostly implicit ones. If you can understand these structures and shape them you're basically designing the way an organisation operates. Which is really powerful if you want to turn ideas into reality! In service design we pride ourselves that we're always thinking about the user. But we rarely if ever design for the user as part of a larger collective. A collective like a family or a sports team. Which is quite strange if you think about i

Empathy, understanding and compassion. These words are not commonly used in many large organisations. But why? That's what we're going to find out. Our guest in this episode, Maike Klip, has embarked on an inspiring research project to learn what it means to be a compassionate civil servant. As an employeed of the Dutch Government herself Maike recognized the stories about organisations not having enough empathy for the people they serve. So she got curious and wanted to understand how much empathy is enough? And if we're lacking empathy why is that? And maybe even question if we really want organisations to show more empathy... because empathy has it's flaws. If you're sometimes frustrated with the lack of empathy from organisations this episode holds some valuable insights about the dynamics that are at play here. And if you want to open up the conversation about empathy in your own organisation, Maike's design research method will definitely be a great addition to your toolbox. If you enjoyed this e

What do CEOs need to know about design? This was the question Audrey Crane tried to answer in her latest book which carries exactly that title. Make sure you stick around till the end of the episode because there's a little surprise... Sometimes it might seem that design is already a well established practice and field for most organisations out there. But the reality is that it's far from. There are still (many) business leaders out there who don't have a clue what design is and more importantly how they can use it to build better companies. So in this episode Audrey shares some of hers most successful strategies and tactics to convey the value of design. You're also going to learn about the common mistakes people make with regards to design. Hello unicorn designer anyone? And of course what you can do to avoid these mistakes. Finally Audrey poses the question how we can spread design beyond our small community? What's needed to break out of our design bubble? We would love to hear your thoughts in the

Why is it that so many service design projects still get stranded before they have been able to make an impact on customers? In this episode Linn Vizard shares her experience with what it takes to make service design real. Linn has an interesting perspective on how we might start looking at the outcomes of service design. Because the outcome of our work almost never is an actual service... So what are the outcomes we create as a community? And how can we do a better job at communicating those outcomes? Another thing that we explore in this episode is what would happen if we start treating the organisation as our design material? If services are the software that we design then we might see the organisation as the hardware on which they run... and in that sense it's quite important to understand the properties of this design material. If you've ever struggled to get your service design projects beyond the concept stage than this is definitely an episode that you don't want to miss! I hope you'll find this

Could you become a better service designer by just sharing more? According to the guest in this episode that's definitely the case! Daniele Catalanotto has been writing and sharing a lot about what he knows (and doesn't) related to service design. It might sound counter intuitive but Daniele argues that you first and foremost should share for your own benefit. If other people find the things you share helpful, that's great. If not then that definitely shouldn't make you share less. Now you might think that you have nothing to share. Or that you don't have the time to share. Or that sharing won't give your any real value. Well in this episode you'll learn that these are often just false believes. Next we dig into why so many service designers overlook the simple solutions. What would happen if we would concentrate on fixing human to human interactions before we jump into designing the next shiny new service? And finally, as Daniele is a Swiss based service designer, we're of course going to talk about rul

What if clients buying service design projects? Which is already happening if you look closely. It's not that the appetite for service design work is getting smaller. On the contrary. More and more clients see the need to do service design. Rather it's the fact that clients are building in-house service design teams and taking on the work themselves. This requires agencies to rethink how they are going to add value in the future. In this episode Emma Aiken-Klar, who is the SVP Human Insights at Idea Couture, which is part of Cognizant Interactive, shares her experience with moving away from service design projects and embarking on a new type of client engagement. A type of engagement which is quite liberating and aligns much better with the true nature of service design. Next to this Emma also talks about the influence of AI on the design of services. How can we use AI in our service design practice in a responsible manner and make sure it's inclusive. Finally we dive into the world of anthropology. With

When is a challenge really out of scope for a service designer? What's the point where it becomes obviously too far fetched? As designers we are overly optimistic. In general we don't shy away from new challenges. It doesn't really matter if we haven't worked on a similar challenge in the past as we'll just figure it out as we go along. This confidence in being able to solve any challenge often feels like a superpower. But it's also a major pitfall. Are we as service designers overly optimistic in taking on organisational challenges? Are those kind of challenges really part of our job? Simon Mhanna recently wrote a provoking article to stir up the much needed debate around this and in this episode you'll hear what he has to say. We also discuss why it's so hard to implement service design work within organisations. What kind of skills do organisations need to develop and put into place in order to increase the chance of ideas actually getting turned into action? We'd love to have you join in this im

There's a good bit of tension in most service design projects. Often caused by factors that aren't obvious when you start. Factors like the fact that designers bring a quite different approach, attitude and mindset to the table. Your typical "they just don't get it" (coming from both sides) is a pretty strong indicator that there's some tension in the room. In this episode Sarah Schulman shares how she and her team at InWithForward have found a way to embrace this tension. And actually use it to deliver better outcomes for their clients. At InWithForward Sarah works on major social challenges which often require you ask the tough and uncomfortable questions. Questions that also shine a light on the dark side of design. For instance who will suffer from the solution we're designing now? But asking these questions early and often is the way to break through existing paradigms and create solutions that are more effective. This episode ends with a big question. What does it mean to do purposeful work? Sa

Co-creation is still an ad-hoc activity in most organisations rather than something which is deeply embedded into the operating system. How can we change that and take co-creation to the next level? In this episode you're going to get some inspiration from Swiss direct democracy. I bet you didn't see that one coming. Peter Horvath has studied how the Swiss have embedded co-creation into their democratic system. A system which has been operating for about 150 years now. Involvement of customers was for a long time considered an unconvinient distraction by organisations. Then slowly but surely organisations started to involve customers inn their product and service development. Now we're seeing organisations who use customers as strategic partners who help them to shape the future. Just like the Swiss are doing with their citizens. But there are some important things you need to get right before you can adopt this next level of co-creation in your business. And in this episode you'll learn exactly what