Everyday Service Design Handbook Workshop Invitation

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Swiss Innovation Academy

Hi lovely human 👋

Here is the overview of all the new Service Design content I've worked on in the last few days:

1 invitation to participate in a crazy Service Design project

Everyday Service Design Handbook: A one hour workshop where you share your experience and ideas on how to use Service Design for everyday life situations. (Register only if you are a Service Design practitioner)

2 Service Design Principles:

Needs: Don’t serve people only what the crave, but also what they need
Strategy: Balance Quick Wins with Big Bets

1 Service Design Q&A :

Networking: How do you get help from very busy people?

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.

We're building something. And we need your help.

Maria Carla Sarrecchia, Leili Mirzakhalili, and I are creating a Everyday Service Design Handbook. It will contain about 50 exercises showing how to use Service Design skills outside of work.

For your relationships. Your mental health. Your morning routine.

But we don’t want to do this alone. We’re sure there are other people like us who are Service Design nerds that want to (or already do) use Service Design skills in their everyday life.

So, if you are one of those people, join us on January 28 at 20:00 Swiss Time (CET) for a co-creation workshop.

You'll write. We'll compile. Everyone benefits.

This is your chance to shape a handbook that will help hopefully a bunch of other people.

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 a person delivering fast food with a scooter

Don’t serve people only what the crave, but also what they need

What I think I want right now and what I'll really need in the future are two very different things.

When I’m hungry and I go buy something to eat, I might end up eating some crappy food. It’s what I want at that moment. But if you ask me, belly full, to make a plan for the week of what I want to eat, it’s gonna look much more healthy.

I think that as service owners, creators and workers we often make the mistake to serve the immediate wants, and not the needs.

It’s something that I’ve been seing when I compare what I see in my RSS reader (1) versus what the Youtube algorithm recommends me. One only shows me what I made the conscious decision to learn about. Not much crap in there. But my Youtube algorithm is basically me just me in a candy store. Lots of fun stuff, but not really fullfiling.

Action question

What are parts of your service where you mostly serve to people immediate wants? How can you find out the deeper future needs that your customers have?

Footnote

(1) A tool that allows me to see content that I decided to subscribe too and nothing else.

Daniele's notes

This is the first shitty draft of this principle
This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.
If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.
Written with AI help: This principle draft is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand.

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Another principle I shared this week:

An illustration of a person creating a plan

Balance Quick Wins with Big Bets

In short: Big organizations are scared about big strategic changes. Balance those with lovely quick wins that give a sense of progress and motivate for the big real stuff.

Read the full principle

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 giant smartphone with messages

How do you get help from very busy people?

In short:

Make it short: Keep your message super short and to the point.
Ask for ridiculously little: Ask only for 15 minutes or even less, not one hour.
Ask for help and own it: Don't pretend helping you will help them. Make it clear you're asking for help.
Show you’re committed: Mention one specific thing you appreciate from them and that has helped you. Show that you are committed to the relationship even if for now it’s a parasocial one.

Read the full Q&A

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.

EU to put climate on the curriculum: "The EU’s commitment to climate literacy was made as nations submitted their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the Paris agreement. It means that 152 countries now have climate education included in their national commitments." (Positive News)
Egypt defeated an ancient disease: "It has been present in the country for 3,000 years, but this week trachoma – the world’s leading cause of infectious blindness – was consigned to Egypt’s history."
World ‘on track’ to meet renewables target: "According to a report by the energy thinktank Ember, nations are on course to meet the target of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030, as agreed at the Cop28 climate summit." (Positive News)

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