Would you do this for a friend? - Newsletter of September 3d 2023

This is a copy of the Service Design Newsletter I sent on September 3d 2023. You can join the Service Design newsletter here to get future updates directly in your inbox.

Hey, lovely human 👋

After a few weeks of holidays, I'm back with some new Service Design content I'd like to share with you:

  • A short story with a rule of thumb to test any service Interaction

  • An invitation to a webinar about theatre and Service Design 🎭

  • 13 new answers to Service Design questions 🤯

  • 3 blog posts about the backstage of this project, for the curious ones 👀

The one thing

Yes, I know, this newsletter is pretty busy. Often, after the holidays, I'm usually super boosted to create content. That happened again 😅

But if you have just 30 seconds, save your seat for this webinar about theatre and Service Design.

Greetings from Switzlerland,

Daniele 🧔🏻

p.s. as always, you'll find all below for when you have the time to read this newsletter.

Upcoming Webinar: Theater x Service Design

Soon, I'll be hosting a webinar with the lovely Emmanuel Fragnière on how he uses Theater in his Service Design practice. The event is free (and yes it will be recorded).

Make sure to register to get the videos after the event.

Save your seat for free now

Would you do this for a friend?

The more I continue my journey of spotting tiny interactions that create lovely services (what I call Service Design Principles), the more I notice that many of them are bound together by one idea:

“Would you do the same if this wasn’t a customer but your brother, niece, neighbour, or friend?”

In fact, many interactions we create when we design a service are very professional and efficient. But they are not lovely.

Often, making something lovely isn’t that technological or that complicated. It doesn’t need a lot of energy and time.

Maybe that’s why we often forget to do these kinds of things.

That's why I love so much the tiny Service Design Principles. They help me and the other curious people who read about them to stop running after the complicated and fancy stuff.

Instead, they help us remember all the tiny things we often already knew but forgot and that we can do to be there for the people we serve in a lovelier way.

This tiny text is part of the introduction of my next book, "Service Design Principles 301-400", which comes out in just a few months.

I'll be doing an international pre-release book tour with other Service Design nerds who each comment one book chapter. So make sure to join the waitlist to get these videos.

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 do I verify that there are enough people with this problem?

  2. How can I make my SWOT analysis actionable?

Questions imported from SDN webinars

Over the past months, I’ve been hosting the Swiss Service Design Network webinars. I’ve imported parts of these conversations into the Q&A database:

In-house Service Design

  1. What's a better term than Service Designer?

  2. How can we prepare students for in-house Service Design jobs?

  3. What are possible futures for in-house Service Design?

  4. How to stay motivated as an in-house Service Designer?

Storytelling

  1. What are myths that block service designers from using storytelling

  2. What are good rules of thumb for storytelling that service designers can steal?

  3. What is the link or relation between Storytelling and Service Design?

  4. What are storytelling ingredients we can use to improve services?

Service Design in Switzerland

  1. What's the state of Service Design in Switzerland?

  2. Where do the Swiss service designers work?

  3. What's the history of Service Design in Switzerland?

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: