260+ Service Design pieces of content

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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 previous week:

1 Service Design Principle:

Decision making: When in doubt, look for the co-benefits

1 Service Design Q&A

Testing: How do you involve Design Sprints participants in the testing if you do it after?

1 backstage blog posts:

Review: What did I achieve in 2024 around Service Design? In short? 260+ pieces of content 🎁

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 Basel, Switzerland.

Daniele 🧔🏻‍♂️

p.s. As always, you'll find more details 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.

When in doubt, look for the co-benefits

How do you choose between two options to make your service more sustainable? Sometimes these decisions feel like a vanilla or chocolate decision. A moment where you have to decide between two lovely things, but you can’t have both.

A great tip from sustainability nerd Haley Andersen is to look for what benefits the most the humans we will serve.

If the change we put in place has both an impact on the world and humans, it can be very motivating. As the humans who’ll have a lovely experience from it, will often show it and that will boost your motivation (1).

Action question

What’s a decision that you have waited to take because you weren’t sure which option to take? How could the idea of focusing on the co-benefit for the humans you serve help you?

Footnotes

(1) Sadly we haven’t found a way yet for trees to smile back at us or say: “Thanks that you made that decision mate!”.

The inspiration

We discussed this principle with Service Design and sustainability nerd Haley Anderson. Watch that part of the interview here.

Share feedback

The three guest portraits: Daniele, Andy and Tetyana Kalyuzhna with the title Coaching with A.I.

How do Service Design learners use AI for Personal and Design coaching?

With my mate Andy Polaine, we invited Tetyana Kalyuzhna to share her reflections and practice around AI and Coaching.

Tetyana is a Service Design learner from the Master Service Design of the HSLU, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Within the program she and her colleagues prototyped "coaching in a box" an idea to blend human coaching with AI coaching.

I have a Swiss culture, so any time people give me a black or white choice, I'm asking: couldn't it be somewhere in the middle in the gray zone?

And that's exactly what I feel this conversation shows.

For some things AI coaching can be pretty good. And for others it really sucks.

And sure, the same is true for a coaching with a human!

Watch the 15-minute 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 do you involve Design Sprints participants in the testing if you do it after?

In short:

Calendar scheduling during the sprint
Add calendar invites to make sure it’s in their calendar
Have a shared note taking board for the testing
Let people do it by two
Do a demo during the sprint
Send a tester guide

Read the full Q&A

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:

What did I achieve in 2024 around Service Design?

In this article I'm looking back at all the things I've created around Service Design and that happened around it in 2024 for me: 260+ pieces of content, 3 big milestones and 3 important shifts.

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.

Historic youth climate judgement: Young climate activists in the US state of Montana celebrated a historic supreme court win this week after a ruling affirmed their right to a “safe and liveable climate”. (Positive News)
70 is the new 60: A study seems to show that senior people are fitter than what they would have been in the past (EurekAlert found via Good News)
Free public transport in Belgrade: All public transport in Serbia's capital Belgrade will be free from next month - the latest European city to adopt the radical measure to counter gridlocked roads. (France 24 found via Good News)

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