This is a copy of the Service Design Newsletter I sent on February 25th 2023. You can join the Service Design newsletter here to get future updates directly in your inbox.

Hey lovely human 👋

This week I want to share with you: 

• 1 Service Design Principle from my latest book called "Don’t overwhelm me right after my vacation"

• answers to 4 Service Design questions

• the summary of my webinar on AI + Service Design

• two next events on Service Design

Greetings from Switzerland,
Daniele 🧔🏻‍♂️

p.s. all the details below for when you have time 👇

Principle 276: Don’t overwhelm me right after my vacation

You’re back from holidays (1). You feel fresh and energetic. Nice! A colleague runs up to you. He says, "Finally, you’re back! We have an emergency!" You help him fix his issue. Then comes another colleague, and another one. Add to this your email inbox with tons of messages and notifications.

Now, all the energy you stockpiled in your vacation says, "Bye-bye", and you ask yourself, "Was it worth going on vacation? (2)"

My friend Olivier uses a small hack to avoid this. He adds a day between his return to work and his return for all his colleagues. For example, in his automatic out-of-office email reply, he says, "I’m back Tuesday 13th October." But, in reality, he’s already working on Monday. Olivier uses that solo day to get up to speed with calm and focus.

Then, on Tuesday, he’s calm and ready to handle the emergencies (3).

Action question

What can you change in your work tools and culture to create a calm return from vacation?

Footnotes
(1) See Principle 274: Give me more vacations for more details about why time off is so essential for both workers and companies.
(2) This thought can have dramatic consequences, as shown in a comment from community member JJ Turner. ’Some people in the US don’t take much vacation because the work is crushing when they return. Or […] they continue working remotely so they won’t fall behind.’ –
(3) It’s also positive for the productivity of the company and even his colleagues, as they get more of his attention when he is 100% up to speed and there for them.

This story is part of my latest book 📗

Service Design Questions

I'm slowly building a library of answers to the most common questions about Service Design. Here are the new ones:

New questions

1. What are schools that teach service design in Switzerland?

2. What are Service Design communities in Switzerland ?

3. Where can I find Service Design jobs in Switzerland?

4. In which Swiss cities are there more service design opportunities?

Updated question

1. What are examples of useful generative AI prompts for Service Design? Added 6 new prompts

Service Design Events

Latest webinar

Thank you to all the participants of tuesday's webinar in collab with the Swiss Service Design Network on AI+Service Design ❤️
For those who couldn't join you can get the summary, Miro board and highlights of the webinar on AI and Service Design here

A big thank you to Lincoln Neiger for the facilitation of the event and special mention to the long time friends like Swareena Joshi and Nikky Lenstra 💌

My next free webinar

The next webinar is called “An early history of Service Design in Switzerland”. 
It’s again a collaboration with the Swiss Service Design Network and it will happen on Friday, 24th March, from 17:00 to 18:00 (Swiss Time).

You can already save your seat for the webinar now.

Event from the HSLU and SDN
There is an exciting event that I will watch this tuesday: Design Endings and applying it to AI. It's a talk by Joe Macleod where he shares insights from his book Endeneering.

Behind the scenes articles

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:

1. How I used Notion AI to write a summary of a webinar

A question for the curious human

You made it to the end of this newsletter, well done mate! You're definitely a curious human being! I have a question for you:

Do you like it that I share with you in my newsletter one piece of my latest book? 

I'm thinking about adding one principle from my latest book in each newsletter. Is that valuable to you?