Sustainable services: complexity without anxiety?

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Swiss Innovation Academy

Hi lovely human 👋

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

5 new videos

Solving tensions: In this 3-minutes video I explore ow to create common ground between teams that have a lot of disagreement.
New life: In this 10-minutes video we explore with my mate Andy Polaine how to cope with the overwhelming start of a Master program and new life.
Improve a service in one day: In this 3-minutes video with three learners we give a sneak peek in what happens on the first day of a two year Service Design program.
40 minutes prototypes: In this 12-minutes video, you'll see from 12 Master Service Design learners what type of service improvements can you prototype in just 40 minutes.
Interview: In this 49 minutes video we explore together with Igor Jimenez how to embrace complexity without anxiety when it comes to building sustainable services.

1 backstage blog articles:

RSS is back: How a good old RSS reader helped me watch less Youtube

As a bonus you'll also find at the end links to 3 positive news from elsewhere to end on a high note.

Greetings from the train to Paris,

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.

It’s not that simple to build or make services sustainable.
But that’s okay.

That’s what I chatted about with Igor Jimenez in an interview for my next book, which is about creating services that are lovely for humans and the planet that hosts them.

Igor Jimenez is a service designer, digital strategist, and systemic thinker focused on regenerative projects.

Igor founded CoDeck, an innovation for regeneration consultancy in Mexico, which helps businesses use innovation skills to create life-centred projects.

Igor is also a community lover who leads the local Interaction Design Foundation in Mexico.

With Igor, we uncovered 4 early Service Design Principles at three different scales

Personal: scale: Stop and accept that it’s a crisis.
Organisation scale: Build the motivation for change.
Use a certification like B Corps to guide you.
Finally, to tie this all together, don’t forget to be part of a community. It will help you move beyond the crisis, rebuild your motivation, and learn from others who made progress before you.

Thanks so much to Igor for this lovely conversation.

Watch the 49 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:

How to create common ground between teams that have a lot of disagreement?

It's counterintuitive but it works:

To solve tensions, start with the details and move up from that to create common ground.

It makes it possible to highlight what are the things that people have in common
We can then group them under a new name that isn't biased towards one culture or the other. We're creating a new shared language.
When working in a deductive or from the top approach, where we start with coming up with general principles first it has a tendency to create more disagreement.

Watch the 3-minutes video

From the Master Service Design Blog

Part of my job as one of the co-leads in the Master Service Design of the HSLU, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, is to share to the community what happens in the behind-the-scenes of the program.

How to cope with the overwhelming start of a Master program and new life?

Starting a master is overwhelming, challenging, hard. But...

As an optimist, I see a hidden opportunity in all these challenge. Sure it feels like starting a new life. But that also means you can start fresh, without the baggage of your past.

You can re-invent yourself.

Or you as we would say in Service Design lingo, you can prototype and test out new routines, new ways of living, new ways of interacting with others.

To all students starting now a new program and all people going through a big life change now here is my action question to you:

What's a change that you can only make happen now and that you dreamt about for a long time?

Watch the 10 minutes video

What do you do on the first day of a two year service design program?

The short answer: we don't share theory, we make people practice.

In more details each learner did the following things:

Choose a service: Learners explore different topic ideas and choose one, a skill that will come in handy when selecting a subject for their Master Thesis. Each learner had to find 5 possible services, and pick one.
Understand the human that use it: Learners speak with the humans that use or make the service that they want to improve. Each learner had to interview at least 3 people.
Make sense of what people told you: Learners synthesis visually what they learned from the interviews and observations. Each learner had to create a visual synthesis of the field research in 15 minutes.
Imagine how you can help: Learners generate ideas of how they could improve the service based on what their visual synthesis.
Make it tangible: Learners build small prototypes that make their ideas tangible and help people feel how it improves the service. Each learner had to create at least two prototypes in 40 minutes.

I've asked three learners from the Master Service Design to share their key takeaways of their first day in the program in video form.

Additionally we're open sourcing the slide deck and planner used to run that workshop.

Watch the video and read the details

What type of service improvements can you prototype in just 40 minutes?

The short answer: at least two using Legos, Playmobil sticky notes, and even 3D tools like Sketchup.

To see what people who just started their Service Design journey can do watch what the learners of the Master Service Design prototyped in 40 minutes (after field research, synthesis and ideation).

You'll see 20+ prototypes and for each a 30 seconds pitch.

Watch the 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:

How a good old RSS reader helped me watch less Youtube

In this short article I share how I'm using Reeder Classic, an RSS reader app to only watch the content I want to see from Youtube without the algorithm recommendations.

Read post

Positive news from elsewhere

I’m an optimist and as there is so much bad news out there at the moment, I want at my scale to rebalance things by sharing also some positive news for service owners and creators.

Switzerland is the most innovative country: for the 14th time in a row, a UN agency has found that globally Switzerland is the most innovative country. This is often unknown to many people so definitely worth sharing (WIPO found via RTS)
Tripling renewable energy capacity is ‘within reach,’ report says: it’s gonna be some hard work but it’s possible! That’s what a new report found out when analyzing if we can keep the promise made by 200 countries to triple global renewable energy capacity by the end of the decade. (The Verge)
Green gardens and streets competition: Netherlands city compete to see which city as replaced more acres of grey concrete with trees, grass, vegetable gardens and vibrant flower beds. (Positive News Magazine)

If you want more positive news make sure to checkout the website positive.news that offers more in depth articles.