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Conference Report: Service Design Seminar
By Christina Stampfli
This year’s DMI conference in London introduced inspiring speakers, was highly informative for newcomers, and made the rookies think about the next big thing. However, for me, the highlight of the week was the more intimate, two-day optional seminar, “Service Design: Key Methods and Strategies” led by Engine! There is no better way to learn about ‘transforming design’ than getting one’s hands dirty.
During Engine’s seminar, we studied various service design tools and methods such as “distributed scenario brainstorm,” “desktop walkthroughs,” “personas,” “issue mapping,” and “customer journey mapping,” just to name a few. In teams of six professionals from various backgrounds and countries, we took on the role of service designers with great enthusiasm and applied those tools with a user-centered approach to real-life case study exercises. Following are some of the key takeaways from the seminar:
We are moving toward a service economy, and even more so, toward an experience economy. Competing on price only becomes more and more challenging. New differentiating factors such as innovative services need to be introduced to business models. The flexibility of a service depends on a company’s brand: while the “magic touch-points” should remain, what can be changed in the service process to make it superior and create a “branded behavior?” Service design can influence beyond touch points and experiences; it can become design-led change on an organizational level. The service itself is not a stand-alone, but complemented by a “pre-experience” and “post-experience.” These might not belong to the company, but should be taken into consideration nevertheless when (re-)designing a service. A service is a holistic system. Service design brings a structured approach to this complexity and should be a co-creation of various stakeholders. Service design does not only work in favor of customers, but employees as well. It can work throughout the organization and probably lead to a higher retention rate. Experience your own service, and when tackling service design problems, it is essential to work with a different mindset and be empathetic with customers and employees. Service design still sees challenges in the areas of intellectual property, measuring ROI, and cost-benefit analysis.
When it comes to service design, there are hardly any limits to what can be created to differentiate a brand, making the brand and one’s job experience only more exciting. As a whole, the DMI conference and the seminar were a great success, resulting in new business connections and friendships and pushing boundaries a little further, yet again.
Christina Stampfli – Biography
Christina recently graduated from Imperial College in London with an MBA, focusing on Design Strategy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship. She holds a BA in Architecture and a certificate in Marketing, both from the University of California, Berkeley. Christina is of Swiss-Greek origin and grew up in Zurich. She spent ten years in San Francisco, California, where she worked at EHDD Architecture, marketing sustainable architecture. Christina is passionate about uniting business, design, and innovation to create stakeholder value and wants this passion to be the focus of her career.
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