A bit of context 

This process was used during a challenge set by OrganiCity, a three year project that asks how can we make cities ‘smarter’ using digital technology, experimentation and co-creation with citizens. This process was used by the team Colour-in City one of the 16 teams across London, Santander and Aarhus who explored this question.

What I like about it 

I really like how this process shows what good feels like for each phase. At the end of each phase you have a sentence that summarize how you should feel at the end if the job has been done well. For example at the end of the "Set up and planning" phase it's written: "We have the right people in the room and a clear project direction". I think it's pretty smart to translate into a sentence someone could say about how he feels what the end result should look like. It's nearly impossible to have standard KPIs with numbers to check if you are doing well in the process as every project is different and the numbers of one project wouldn't make sense for another. But such sentences can easily be used for any project.

There are also two stages I particularly like: the "Setup and planning" phase and the "Grow" phase. In fact, many Service Design process start with research, when in fact, before you even can start there is a lot of stupid admin work to set up the project right. This process seems to take this reality into consideration and recognizes that we often aren't as quick to start as we would like. The "Grow phase" is interesting to me because it shows that the work isn't finished once you launch a new service. It's only the start. I think that here the "Continuous Service Design process" from the guys at Futurice is then a good companion to show in more details what could happen in such a grow phase.

Go deeper 

I found this Service Design process in an article called Service design and the city published in 2016. The article is a short 4 minutes read written by Emma Field and Rebecca Birch.