Exploring the O-Gap.

De O in O-Gap staat voor Organisation. ‘Hoe zorg je ervoor dat je prachtige plan niet struikelt bij de uitvoering in de organisatie.’
2 presentaties, afgewisseld met opbouwende discussies. De sprekers zoomden elk in op een methodiek; één vanuit design perspectief en een vanuit business perspectief.
Het was een inspirerende avond, met 2 presentaties, goede discussies en napraten met een drankje.

31Volts was ter plaatse en bracht verslag uit voor de site van het Service Design netwerk Nederland.
Het verslag is hier te lezen, inclusief presentaties. Ook kun je hier aankondigingen van nieuwe activiteiten volgen.

Freelance Friday

This was the first Utrecht edition of a successful event that has been running in Amsterdam for quite a while. A very relaxed and informal event with around 60 attendants and 4 speakers on the topic of trends.

The organizers gave me 15 minutes to talk about trends in service design. But because for most people in the audience this would be their first encounter with service design in general, I decided to just explain what we do in our studio. Service designer can be so abstract in describing what they do that at the end of the story you don’t have a clue what he or she actually does (yep, happens to me a lot). This time would be different! So I basically create a slideshow using >40 photos from our projects and show all the situation we get our self into from day to day and tell the story.

This resonated pretty well with the audience. A lot of positive feedback and I even got a “So you’re into usability… cool” and “you improve processes right…” instead of the usual “…so what do you do again?”.

Marketing Pioneers 2010

I got invited to Marketing Pioneers to give a short pitch on service innovation. There were about 250 people, primarily with a marketing or sales background. This edition of Marketing Pioneers was all about “supersize your sales”. There were different 5 pitches in total which all had the challenge to squeeze 18 slides into 6 minutes… something no-one managed.

The lead character in my presentation was Carla, a small entrepreneur from Utrecht. I talked about the challenges Carla encounters while running her business. My goal was to show the audience why an insurance company must invest in new and better services for Carla in order to survive. I also talked about the 3 biggest barriers for organization why not to invest in service innovation. Although I got the message about the need for better services across, I ran out of time before I could shed some more light on actually how to do it.

Luckily there were a few minutes for Q&A so of course the first question I got was the famous “and what is it that you actually do”. So I could straighten that out a little but people still felt somewhat left in the dark I guess. A questions you can expect from a sales crowd is “how do you measure the results of your work“, I said that it was thought but a much better answer would have been that we actually don’t.

What did I learn

I noticed that a lot of people really like to see the inner works of a service design process. Showing a creative session done in a regular train gets a lot of people into the design spirit. It might be better to tell a high-level story using down and dirty examples.

Because this was a very creative crowd I took the opportunity to focus very much at the here and now of service design. This resulted in a presentation titled “the life of a service designer”. Trying to give the audience an overview of what they would experience if they’d join our studio for a week.

My leading questions was “What does a service designer do?”

To answer this I just simply looked at what it is that we actually do at 31Volts… I ended up with a short list where I accompanied each item with a real-life project and some tangible deliverable.

This is what service designers do:

• we design the process
• we take you outside
• we develop tools
• we bring insights and concept to life
• we help people co-design
• we try stuff out

It was very refreshing to do a very practical presentation for once. Usually service design presentations tend to be pretty strategic and discuss things on a meta-level.

I’d love to hear If you have some valuable additions to the list!

Update: here’s the presentation:

The video of the presentation should come online in the coming days but the whole thing is in Dutch so better start practicing ;)

The presentation by Bruce Tether, professor at the Imperial Collage in London, addresses “User Centred Design & Innovation in Service Systems“. It sounds more complex than it actually is because what it boils down to is the way design has evolved and the key role it has in service innovation. Bruce’s presentation shares a lot of elements Marcel also uses in his presentation “Service design, a new design discipline” that he posted earlier this week.

Although the whole presentation is great, I especially consider the last 3 slides valuable because they make things actionable!

I’ve uploaded the presentation onto slideshare to make it more accessible and easy to share. Of course all the credits and copyright belong to Bruce. You can download the orginal PDF of the presentation here (it contains flipped pages!).

I finally translated my presentation in Enlish. Here it is:

My goal was to show the most important lessons we’ve learned in our projects over the recent years. I took a somewhat different approach that is usual for a CHI conference. No scientific theories or models on Service design, but rather practical and inspiring stories from working in the field. I titled my talk The world is a garage: designing services is a messy job as I realized that our lessons learned somehow miraculously also apply to a mechanic working in a garage.

I discussed 4 lessons learned:

• Doing research is messy
• Be pragmatic with tools
• Balance between co-creation and experts
• Design frameworks and embrace hacks

The takeaway that I wanted people to remember after attending the presentation was “that in order to create value for people, today’s challenges require organizations to get messy”.

Below are my slides to which I added a few quick notes so you can make some sense out of all the photos. The presentation was also recorded on video. As soon as I get my hands on that I’ll update this post so you can hear the words that come with the photos.

I skipped past the “what is service design” part completely as I assumed the audience had some background information and there was a whole keynote dedicate to the topic later on. So it could very well be that my presentation made more sense to some people after they had seen the keynote on service design basics :)

I really enjoyed the Art-Track at the conference, good move by the organizers! But the highlight for me at the conference was Gilbert Cockton who stunned the crowd with his talk “Designing is at Least Quadricentric”. My head is still spinning from that presentation. I would recommend everyone to view the video registration (at least twice) as soon as it comes online!

(You need Silverlight to watch this video)

In his great brilliant How to Lie with Design Research presentation, Dan Saffer sheds an interesting light on design research by putting things in perspective. Check out the video and slides below.

I tend to like his somewhat over the top performance, it’s certaintly better then watching a bad presenter killing great content.

Feel free to pass it along!