Life Principles and Children books

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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 few days:

1 new project: A children book series about tiny life principles.
1 Service Design Principle: Think about the stuff that you leave at the end of the service
1 Service Design Q&A: How Has My Use of Timers Evolved in Workshops?
1 backstage blog article: What Are the Apps I Use for Lovely Mental and Physical Health?
Reminder: 1 New AI course in French: A 2 hour course in French all about AI for beginners. There are five spots for newsletter readers to get it with 60 bucks off.

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.

I'm working on my first public children book series

For a few years I've been designing custom children books for my nephews, son, or godson. Usually these were made as emotional gifts for the arrival of the baby. A tiny bit poetic and sweet but not with big stories.

As my son is becoming bigger and is now really interested in the content of the stories and asks questions about them, I'm planning to write a series of tiny children books based on life lessons I've learned.

Basically it's a condensed version of my Service Design Principles that apply to everyday life and that can make sense for a kid.

I'm just starting the process at the moment by collecting a few transcribed audio notes. But here's two things that make this project different:

I'll make these children book public, so they'll exist both in Swiss German (the language I speak with my son) and in English (so that others can understand it).
These children books will really be not just sweet and emotional, but also have a bit of a lesson behind them. This is different to the first few children books I've designed for friends and family members.

Discover the project

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.

An illustration of two people holding puzzle pieces that fit together

Think about the stuff that you leave at the end of the service

We spend an enormous amount of time into thinking how things should start (1). Service creators and owners spend also a good chunk of time thinking about how people use the services they offer to the world. But only a fraction of us thinks about how a service ends.

The big specialist on this is Joe Macleod who says he is the founder of the “worlds first customer ending business” (2).

This is especially important to think about when a service has some material impact. For example, is it needed that at the end of a webinar or conference we keep the full recording of it (3)?

Action question

What stays at the end of your service? Is this stuff needed? Can you reduce how much resources it needs or just remove it?

Footnotes

(1) The whole field of marketing is about getting people to buy or start using a service.

(2) Learn more about Joe and find his books here: Joe Macleod. Who is Joe? AndEnd. Available at https://swis.ac/joe accessed 24 November 2024.

(3) Yes that’s the type of questions I’m still thinking about as someone who organizes a lot of remote conferences and workshops and everyone wants the recording once it ends.

The inspiration

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

Share feedback

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:

An illustration of a person next to a huge analogue alarm clock

How Has My Use of Timers Evolved in Workshops?

In short: My approach to using timers in workshops has shifted from visible countdowns to verbal time cues, allowing more flexibility.

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 Are the Apps I Use for Lovely Mental and Physical Health?

In this tiny article, I'll share how apps (Apple Fitness, Noom and Headspace) and a psychology framework (Motivational Interviewing) helped me transform my mental and physical health.

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.

Gaza ceasefire deal agreed by Israel and Hamas (Positive News)
Swiss people eat less meat (RTS, article in french)
A Swiss university has found a way to transform C02 into an useful material (RTS, article in french)

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