A social experiment to help a lovely service designer - Newsletter of May 7th 2023

An illustration of three people in an online community chatting

This is a copy of the Service Design Newsletter I sent on May 12th 2023. You can join the Service Design newsletter here to get future updates directly in your inbox.


Hey lovely human 👋

This week I'd love that, as a community, we help Julie find her next job in the world of Service Design

And once you've helped with that, you'll find below:

  • 2 new and 1 updated Service Design Principle for user testing 🔎 and the workplace 🏢.

  • 6 new Service Design Questions answered on coaching ☕️, portfolios 💼 and accessibility 🦮.

  • An idea about creating a specialised ChatGPT just for Service Design 🤖

  • A blog post about how I use audio recordings 🎙️ to "write" when the energy is low


Have a lovely weekend, and as always,
Greetings from Switzerland,
Daniele 🧔🏻‍♂️

p.s. many of you are new to this newsletter, so welcome to the community ❤️










A social experiment

Let's do a social experiment: let's help Julie find her next job just by sharing and commenting 👇


Julie van de Kreeke is transitioning from e-commerce (and philosophy 🤯) to Service Design, and I think she deserves to get invited as a candidate for a service design role.

It's hard to find people with exceptional curiosity and empathy that can be in your Service Design team. I know... but I can root for Julie. She has passed the Service Design Network Academy "Service Design Practitioner" accreditation and is finishing my 5-week intensive Service Design course.

She is:

  • a curious mind with tons of energy

  • a quick learner

  • she has proven she can transition from one field to the other in the past

Now she just needs some help from the Service Design community to find a home to practice all the skills she has learned.

What you can do

So if you know anybody hiring, please put them in touch, and if you don’t know anybody but would love to help anyway, comment and share this Linkedin post, it really helps. And if you want to get in touch directly with Julie, just hit reply, and I'll connect you with her.


A second brain for Service Design

A screenshot of the early prototype of a knowledge base built with Intercom

The idea of having my own ChatGPT but specialized for Service Design is something I'm playing with...

I have written so much Service Design content over the years in different books, posts and places. I'm trying to figure out a way to bring all of it into one searchable place.

It the last weeks, I've seen how the people at Intercom are doing something pretty great with knowledge bases that can answer questions in chat mode (exactly like ChatGPT but based on my content).

So I'm playing around with the idea of bringing all my content in one place in an Intercom knowledge base which would have three ways of interacting with it:

  • Classical search: you search a term, and it finds all the places where that term is written

  • GPT style answer: you ask a complete question and it writes a summarized answer based on the content that is in the knowledge base

  • Classical navigation: you choose a type of content, for example, "Service Design Tools", and then explore that topic.


What do you think? Would that help you? And why?


New 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.

  1. Do a five second test

  2. Tell people if they are worth more than what they think


Updated Service Design Principles

Pro tip: When you open principle a principle that has been updated scroll to the bottom of the page to see the latest version.

  1. Give me a way to reach you (turned early thoughts from video into text)


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’s the difference between Graphic Design and Service Design?

  2. What are rules or norms to make digital services more accessible?

  3. How can you help people to find the solutions to their problems by themselves?

  4. What are useful references when it comes to coaching?

  5. How can I customize a Service Design portfolio easily?

  6. How do you evaluate a coaching session?


Next Service Design Webinar

As a reminder, next week I’m hosting a webinar on Service Design and Strategic Foresight with my mate Pascal Wicht for the Swiss Service Design Network. The event is free and will be recorded. You just have to register here.


Backstage blog 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:

How I use audio notes to write when I'm not motivated