How to design your services without AI - Newsletter of July 28th 2023

Illustration of a person holding a mug

This is a copy of the Service Design Newsletter I sent on July 28th 2023. You can join the Service Design newsletter here to get future updates directly in your inbox.


Hi lovely human 👋

This week I want to share with you:

  • A short story about the importance of simple tools 🛠️ (not AI).

  • 4 answers to Service Design questions (like my hate/love list about the service designer job) ❤️ 🤬

  • A backstage blog article explaining why I'm migrating my content to an Intercom Knowledge base 🦾 (which this time has some AI stuff 🤫)

Greetings from Switzlerland,

Daniele 🧔🏻


How to design your services without AI

I created a tiny video to explain what affinity sorting is in simple words and shared it on Linkedin.

This then sparked a lovely conversation with Niels Corsten in the comments on that post.

It's interesting to see how it's often the simplest technics that bring the most.

That’s true for affinity sorting, but the same goes for interviews too. In some way, it's a dead simple technic: having a conversation with someone leads to really powerful learnings.

In a time when we often crave complex tools with AI and stuff.

It can be refreshing to go back to the most basic tools that get results now and have been through the test of time.

So what is my non-AI, super basic toolbox to better serve the people around me?

  • One-to-one conversations or interviews

  • Group work to get shit done, or workshops

  • Sticky notes, pen and paper to make sense of all of that, also called visualisation, affinity sorting, mapping, synthesis

Service Design doesn’t have to be so complex or fancy.


New Service Design Questions

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

  1. How can I find a Service Design internship in Switzerland?

  2. What is an affinity map, and how to use it?

  3. How can I start to implement Service Design?

  4. What are the parts of the Service Design job I love the most, and which ones are the ones that I hate the most?


Next webinar I'm hosting with Marc Fonteijn

On the 9th of August, I'll interview Marc Fonteijn about "The Future of In-House Service Design". It's a free one-hour webinar organised with the Swiss Service Design Network.


Backstage blog article

For the curious nerds who want to know how I'm building the Swiss Innovation Academy in the backstage, you can check out this latest blog article:

Why I’m migrating my content to a knowledge base built with Intercom