Keyboard vs pen: When do I like to use the Remarkable folio keyboard?
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.
Design Leadership webinar
My good friends Andy Polaine and Marzia Aricò are hosting a webinar on Design Leadership. Here's what they say about the event:
Design leadership today is demanding in ways that are hard to name and harder to navigate alone. Ambiguity is constant, authority is partial, and the space to think clearly is shrinking.
In this free webinar, Andy Polaine and Marzia Aricò introduce the thinking behind the Leadership Renewal Retreat, hosted at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design in Bergamo, April 9–12, 2026.
We will share the purpose and structure of the retreat and unpack the emerging themes we consistently see in our coaching work with senior design leaders, including: - Leading when clarity must be constructed, not received - Holding narrative and direction under pressure - Renewing personal authority without burning out
This is an open conversation about why leadership renewal is becoming a core responsibility for design leaders, not a luxury.
If you are curious about the retreat or feel the need to step back and think more clearly about how you lead, you are very welcome to join.
I'm slowly building a library of answers to the most common questions about Service Design. Here are the new ones:
Why it's important to remember bosses and colleagues are also just kids?
In short: When you see the kid in your colleague you want seperate what they do because of their role and what they do because of their personality. Both parts might have different needs, fears, wishes, etc.
In short: use a mix of official moments (committees, work meetings, emails) and unofficial moments (watercooler discussion, coffee chat, superior talks, etc).
How can you avoid stupid critics from the people who will grade your work?
In short: Frame your project in a way where you define what is the zone of combat. Here four things you can do practically:
Use a project that creates a mental image
Say what type of project it is with an additional adjective (for example: an impact led association, a redesigned customer experience, a service startup, etc.)
Say what's in the scope and what isn't in the scope of your project
Say what is the role you take in this project (activist, in house service designer, social designer, etc.)
How can you push yourself to test and iterate more?
In short: Recruit first. Prototype second. start by recruiting testers and scheduling multiple test moments. This gives you a positive pressure to have to show up with something to test as there are people waiting for you.
Why you should see a Service Blueprint as a mirror?
In short: Understanding that a service is a mirror between front stage and backstage pushes us to research both sides, test both sides, and to put as much care in both sides.
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:
In this tiny article I share why I like to mostly use the Remarkable folio keyboard mostly in trains and prefer to write by hand when I am not in movement. Hint: the train makes my hand wobble.
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.
Renewables to become cheaper than gas by 2028 – report: "The findings came out of a new report by the organisation, which compares the long-term value of scaling up renewables under the government’s Clean Power 2030 Action Plan vs no new investment in renewables." (Positive News)
Children born in Bangladeshi brothels were given state recognition: "This week it was revealed that more than 700 children have now received a birth certificate, thanks to organisations such as anti-slavery organisation Freedom Fund, which identified an ‘overlooked stipulation in the law’." (Positive News)