A bit of context 

Innovationsguiden, the project from which this process is taken, is an ongoing project that aims to support and reinvigorate the Swedish public sector in collaboration with citizens through service design. In this particular project the brief was to provide support to public organisations who wanted to strengthen their employees' innovation skills and create new and better public services based on user needs.

What I like about it 

This process looks a lot like many others from the Service Design world. But there is one thing that I particularly like: the notion of focus. Field research and ideation are key steps of any service design project. These steps open a lot of possibilities and sometimes also generate a bit of chaos. So I find particularly interesting to brining the notion of focus in there in such a prominent way. 

In the public sector, as in many other sectors, I imagine that resources are limited and therefore deciding on what to focus is really a key part of any project. In fact, I personally think that we can take this as an inspiration and go even further. What if after each step of a Service Design project we would have a "re-focus" moment which makes us ask key questions like:

1. Are we still going in the right direction?

2. If not is it a better direction or should we move back to the earlier path?

3. Will we really have impact with what we plan to do next?

4. What's the one thing we learned that makes a big difference?

Service Design can sometimes feel pretty overwhelming so having a reminder to simply and focus is always welcome.

Go deeper 

I found this process in a case study published on the Service Design Network website. The case study was published in 2018 and gives more context about the process used by the team behind the Innovationsguiden project.