On Saturday 19th of February 2022, we sat together for 45 minutes with Caio B. Nishihara de Albuquerque to explore a service experience he had with Service Ninja's while visiting castles in Japan with his grandmother and family.

The story

While exploring a historic site with hills and many stairs, Caio and his family could use a local "Ninja" service. Three helpers in ninja costumes carried the wheelchair of the grandmother on the stairs, kept her company when the rest of the family explored inaccessible spots and created an alternative experience just for her when it was needed.

The learnings behind the story

From this one experience, we could find three early "seeds" of Service Design Principles:

1. Every service, even the most simple and boring one, can add a wow factor to it.

2. Offer the same service but alternative experiences that include everyone.

3. Leave me with a physical reminder and summary of the service.

Details about the accessibility principle

And when it comes to this second very early idea of a service design principle, we explored these ideas in more detail:

1. Be ready to provide an alternate experience 

2. Don't compensate the experience make something new

3. One service spread over different experiences 

4. Keep the same service and information but change the experience

What was this, and why did we do it?

This was the first experiment where we co-created in a live session some rough ideas of service design principles from an experience someone lived in a totally different context than what I'm used to. The goal of this is to add in the future voices, stories and learnings from all around the world in the Service Design Principles series. This will first happen in the next book: "Service Design Principles 201-300".

In the upcoming days and weeks, I'll turn this conversation into short written service design principles as I usually write.

Thank you note

A big thank you to Caio for going through this experiment with me. For his time, his kindness and the lovely moment we shared.