Design Synthesis and a new home for the Q&A library

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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:

1 Service Design Principle:

How to start: Start local, or with your passion, where you have skills

1 Service Design Q&A:

Design Sprint: What type of experts do you invite for interviews in a Design Sprint?

1 Course preview

Synthesis: How do you go from research data to insights? A course preview from the Master Service Design of the HSLU

3 backstage blog posts:

Book process: Why I'm writing my next book in quarters?
Migration: Why one year later, I migrating my Q&A library back to Podia
Retreat design: How to not do a retreat

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.

Start local, or with your passion, where you have skills

Where the fuck do I even start? That’s often the question that the students I coach ask me when they embark on project that are related to big goals like ending world hunger, making the world more sustainable and so on.

I often joke by calling such projects “Miss Universe” projects as they sound great for a “Miss Universe” speech but aren’t practical yet.

To make them practical, I often recommend to start in a very pragmatic way. Starting with the skills and access that you already have. For example, someone trying to fix world hunger could mean working to improve the work of an association that is already active. Or working with a specific community that has that issue.

I feel that a real small impact is much nicer than a huge dreamt impact that never becomes true.

Action question

If you make a list of all your passions, skills, things that are already available to you, Which ones could be of use to build more sustainable services tomorrow?

The inspiration

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

Share feedback

Course Preview

I strongly believe in the power of open source. That's why I'm super grateful that I get to make parts of the Service Design Master program of the HSLU, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts open. I hope that other educators can build on it, and learners can use it to deepen their skills.

How do you go from research data to insights?

That’s the question that the first-year Service Design practitioners of the Master Service Design of the HSLU, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, explored today. This exploration is part of the series on « Service Design Basics ».

To do this, the students followed a « Learning by teaching » approach: shared learnings from reading material, shared personal tips from experience and practice, and all of it through practical exercises following the following questions:

What are Synthesis and Insights?
What are tools that can help me do a Synthesis?
How can I use a Service Blueprint for Synthesis?

In the blog article you’ll find all the details about this approach, you will get access to the reading material used, and even get the slide decks that the learners created for their « learning by teaching » moments.

See the preview

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 type of experts do you invite for interviews in a Design Sprint?

In short: a mix of internal and external experts, including key people that couldn’t participate in the whole sprint.

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:

Why I'm writing my next book in quarters?

In this article I'm sharing the no-fun tasks that are needed to make a book happen and why I decide to spread them over the year instead of doing them in a marathon at the end of the book writing process.

Read post

Why one year later, I'm migrating my Q&A library back to Podia

In this article I share what technical reasons make it possible for me to bring back my library of hundreds of Q&A back to Podia.

Read post

How to not do a retreat

I'm finishing a 4 day retreat and I'm using this tiny article as a way to reflect on how to make the most of my next retreat.

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.

Swiss voters said ‘no’ to new highways: A plan to expand Switzerland’s motorway network has been rejected by Swiss voters in a referendum framed as a win for the climate. (Positive News)
Returned colonial-era objects to Indonesia: Rotterdam has become the first Dutch city to return art objects looted during the colonial era. (Positive News)
Cash for homeless people: People experiencing homelessness are to be given direct financial support as part of a pioneering UK trial. (Positive News)

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