Service Design can learn from religions

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Swiss Innovation Academy

Hi lovely human 👋

Here is a the overview of all the new Service Design content I've created in the last week:

3 new videos

Religion: A 4 minutes video where I explore what Service Design stole from religions and what it should avoid to steal.
Best discipline: A 2 minutes video where I answer the question: What is better: UX, UI, Service Design?
Principle: A new Service Design Principle draft, in a 3 minutes video, about sustainable Service Design from my next book.

1 backstage blog articles:

Cost: How much does it cost to send these newsletters and run my website?

Greetings from Basel, Switzerland,

Daniele 🧔🏻‍♂️

p.s. As always, you'll find all below for when you have the time to read this newsletter.

A tiny UX question for you:
links or no links in the overview?

My goal with this newsletter is that it doesn't overwhelm people from the start. That's why I put a lot of space between the overview and the rest of the newsletter.

It's also why until now I've always decided to not put the links in the overview, so that it doesn't push people to overconsumption right away.

But on of you told me that's painful. So I'm eager to know:

Do you prefer to have the links directly in the overview like I did in this email, or do you prefer to have it plain and simple, and then scroll down as it was done before?

Just hit reply to tell me what you prefer :)

Service Design Principles series

I'm writing the fifth book in the series Service Design Principles, where I explore simple tips, tricks and provocations that can help us make services a little bit less shitty for the people who use them and the planet that hosts them.

"I want to make services more sustainable" 🥱

It's a "miss universe" statement that service designers make.

Like a miss universe statement, it doesn't change the world.

Because it's an idea that blocks us.

The challenge is so big that:

We get lost in analysis paralysis.
We get overwhelemed by all what should change.
We get frustrated by the lack of support we get from others.

And finally we don't do anything.

The antidote:

Start small.

That's the advice that Haley Anderson, a service design and sustainability nerd, shared with me when I asked her: "How we can build more sustainable services?"

Start with the skills you have.
Start with the people who want to help.
Start with what makes you naturally passionated.
Start with the opportunities that are already there where you are.

Just start.

Thanks to Haley for the 1-hour long conversation we had in march that inspired this first draft of a new Service Design principle that might one day come out in the book "Service Design Principles 401-500".

Yes, I'm back at writing it.

Or at least at making first shitty drafts in video for it.

Watch the 3 minutes video

Service Design Q&A

I'm slowly building a library of answers to the most common questions about Service Design. Here are the new ones:

Is Service Design becoming a religion?

I hope not.

But I see it stealing some great aspects of religions: community building, having a set of shared values.

But that's not enough to be a religion.

The more interesting aspect is to reflect: what can we steal from religions to make the practice better, and what can we learn from past mistakes, religious individuals made?

In that last part there is something especially dear to me:
Let's not become the too zealous practitioner, super prescriptive who judges the practice of others.

Instead let's continue to be curious of what others do.

Like many of religious friend do.

Watch the full 4-minutes video

What's the better discipline?

I hate this question: 🤬

That's one of these questions that I get asked a few times every year.

And my short, and very Swiss answer is: none is better.

It depends on where you live.
It depends on what you're interested to do.
It depends on what are the skills you already have.
It depends on the type of impact you would like to have.

Because UX, UI and Service Design complement each other very well.
So instead of asking what is better, I find the question: what better fits me, is a much richer question.

Watch the full 2-minutes video

Backstage Blog

I love to explain how I'm building educational content. I'm trying to be as transparent as possible so that it might motivate others to create such content too. These are the latest blog posts I've written:

How much does a website and newsletter like the Swiss Innovation Academy cost?

In this article I'm sharing how much I pay for my newsletter and website (short answer: about a grand), and why this makes sense to me.

Read post