This is a copy of the Service Design Newsletter I sent on December 14th 2022. You can join the Service Design newsletter here to get future updates directly in your inbox.

Hey there 👋

This week I want to share with you:

• A little reflection on why throwing a party is a service design project 👇

• An alpha version of a free course called: How To Build Your Own Principles Library 🎁

• 2 new Service Design Principles

• 5 new Service Design Questions and Answers

• A good news about my next book (the proofreaders are soon done 🙌) 

Greetings from Switzerland

Daniele 🧔🏻

🤵 We all serve others. You too.

Serving others is limited to service design professionals. Definitely Not!

When you throw a party, you are using the same skills as a service designer.

You think about what type of music will make people feel welcome. You think about when you have to change the music so that the party really starts. You design how you put the food on the table so that people see you really care about them. You design how you welcome people. You even design how you tell them when is the good time to arrive. Do you say let’s meet at 10 pm sharp? Or do you say let’s meet between 9 and 10pm?

These are all decisions that you make to design an experience for people.

We all serve other people. We serve people when we throw a party. We serve people when we play with our kids. We serve people when we plan what to say for the next meeting. We serve people when we answer a phone call from a disappointed customer.

We serve people whenever we are with others, whether it's our job or not.

We all serve people. And Service Design is the discipline that teaches how to do that best.

But nobody throwing a party will do a two-year course about Service Design. You don't need a Service Design master to throw a lovely party! But you can benefit from a few principles that the experts of “serving people” have learned for you to make your party even more lovely.

For example, here five principles from my next book that could be useful for your next party:

1. Offer many tiny distractions

2. Let me do the bad behaviour in a safe way

3. Make it at the eye level of kids. (hint, it's gonna be great for wheelchairs too)

4. Make everything workable with one hand or one less sense

5. Show me if I can bring my kid

This tiny article is inspired by one of the “Seven Powers of Principles” I mentioned during my Service Design Webinar of December 2022.

📝 Changelog

Below you'll find a list of all the new and updated service design content I've been working on in the last few days.

Next book

Good news, the proofreaders will finish their work on my next book Service Design Principles 201-300, by next week! I still have some work to get done to finalise the design, but I'll be able to launch the book before the end of the year!

New course

Free Course: How To Build Your Own Principles Library

You definitely know you're Swiss when cleaning and making order is a relaxing activity. At 3 am this morning, my body told me: hey man, we're rested. Time to get up.

I wasn't yet ready to do some hard mental work, so I did some spring cleaning on the 36 Questions and Answers I have about Service Design Principles and turned it into an alpha version of a course called "How To Build Your Own Principles Library".

Service Design Principles

“A Service Design Principle is an idea, a tip, an advice or a principle to improve the human experience.” These are the latest principles I've been working on.

New principles

1. Tell me the salary before I apply to this job position

2. Steal from many sources

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. How hard should you work on your Service Design Principles Library?

2. What are healthy goals to have for a Service Design Principles Library?

3. How can you make a Service Design Principles Library that is useful for others too?

4. What are daily practices I could have to build my own Service Design Library?

5. What are ethical consideration when building a Service Design Principles Library?

6. Where can I find Service Design Principles ideas and inspirations?

7. How can you create your writing routine?

Service Design Webinars

Latest webinar

You can watch the recording, get the slides or watch selected clips of the latest webinar that took place on Saturday 3d of December 2022.

• Service Design Webinar 005: The Power of Principles

Transcripts

I’ve added automated transcripts for these past webinars

1. Service Design Webinar 001

2. Service Design Webinar 002

3. Service Design Webinar 003

Backstage 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 created a course with a small burn or little effort mindset

2. How I create and maintain my Service Design Questions and Answers Library