Slow Services and advanced prototyping

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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:

2 new videos

Slow: A short 2 minutes Service Design Principle that explores: What if we applied ideas from the slow movement for better and more sustainable services?
Prototyping: A 12-minute video where I share 5 advanced prototyping methods I use today, and 5 that I'm excited to use more in the future

1 backstage blog articles:

Video effects: the two video effects I use to turn my video recordings from "meh!" to "good enough".

Greetings from Basel, Switzerland,

Daniele 🧔🏻‍♂️

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

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.

Slow food helped make the way we eat more sustainable and tastier.

What if we did the same for services?

While I was reading the latest book from Cal Newport, Slow Productivity, I stumbled upon this idea:

To change this we need to have:

A viable alternative that we can use now
And we can steal it from the past, where we can see how things worked for hundreds of years (we just forgot about it).

Watch the 2 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:

What are advanced prototyping methods for Service Design?

Five prototyping methods that I use a lot today in my Service Design work:

Conversations: use precise and provocative questions with key decision makers to test how far you can go.
End results first: build the end result at the start of the project, without research to clarify what people expect from the project.
Competitors: use websites of competing services and a landing page of a new service idea to compare your service idea with users.
Storytelling structures: use storytelling structures like Meet John or The Five Lightbulbs to show how the service works for the user and test the idea further.
Notion: use Notion to create landing pages, full websites or knowledge bases for users. Or use it to imagine internal tools that teams could use to better work together.

Five prototyping methods that I'm excited to use more in the future in my Service Design Work:

Theater: Create scripts that are played out by real staff to show how a service works and spot problems early on.
SAP Scenes: Use the SAP Scenes library of printable illustrations to show how a service works.
Sitemap to wireframe: Use tools like Relume to turn a sitemap into wireframes to quickly gather feedback.
Red Teaming: Ask yourself what could go wrong, how could people misuse the service or how could the service harm people, the planet or society?
Financial Modeling: Go further than the Business Model Canvas, and build proper financial scenarios with numbers to first imagine how the service could be financially viable before doing anything else.

Watch the full 12-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:

The two settings that turn my videos from meh to good enough

In this article I'm sharing the two settings that I use when recording with a webcam on my Mac that make the image usable.

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