Service Design Podcast

What does it take to modernise a live government system? Hefen Wong from Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower shares how an 18-year-old Employment Pass platform was transformed into a user-centred digital service: through prioritising user value, smart use of research, and agile ways of working.

We visit Sheila Kesselaers and Tomas De Preter at Reynaers Group HQ: how do they grow the shift to a Customer Experience mindset at a systems company in the world of building elements?

We talk with Mia Mo, Robyn Carino, and Samiha Essakhi as they take us through the innovative model they co-created to integrate health, social, and physical supports directly within Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCS).

We talk with Maarten Raemdonck, Head of Innovation at Aquafin, and Lien Dewitte from Leap Forward, about how innovation takes root in a large, technical organisation. From bold early experiments to building lasting change, they share honest lessons from Aquafin’s journey to make innovation part of everyday work in a company that treats the waste water of 5 million people daily.

In this episode, we visit AZ Groeninge in Kortrijk to meet Brian Desplinter and Jurgen De Klerck, the duo behind a unique collaboration between healthcare and telecom. From private 5G networks to co-designed care services, we explore how design thinking is driving real change in a clinical setting.

What if your home had a memory? In this episode, PhD researcher Sun Ah Hwang joins us to explore Digital Building Logbooks — the “health cards” of buildings. From DIY dreams to data-driven renovation advice, we discuss how DBLs are reshaping our approach to sustainability, ownership, and building design across Europe.

Dr. Samuel Huber shares his takes on how to design better futures from a planetary perspective. Being both a design entrepreneur and researcher, he utilises his academic side for real-life prototyping of strategies.

How do you engage active neighbours in saving energy together with the rest of their neighbourhood? How can you improve social cohesion in local communities? Djoera Eerland shares the challenges and learnings of kickstarting neighbourhood collectives at scale, with Buurkracht.

“All of Latin America is on fire at the moment. We’re losing thousands of hectares of ecosystems…”

This is how Coral brings us to Brazil at the start of our conversation. She is currently working for re.green, an organisation that restores tropical forests at scale, and she recently published her book on Ecosystemic Design.

How to make your services more inclusive and accessible? Tom Van Hoey from District09 and Yalenka Mariën from Knight Moves share insights from Flanders' City Deal 'E-inclusion by Design,' where they focus on crafting accessible digital tools for 13 Flemish cities. Together, we discuss the importance of small-scale experimentation, encouraging city officials to adopt user-centred approaches, and using storytelling for sustainable collaboration.

How can service design revolutionise maritime logistics? Sanna Vainionpää gladly answers that question as she shares how their 10 years vision concept for Finnish Maritime “Single Window” - named NEMO - enhances efficiency, reduces environmental impact, and optimises port operations. Don’t hesitate to dive into this engaging discussion on the power of service design in the maritime industry. A lot of opportunities lie ahead!

In this episode, we have a thoughtful conversation with Ashleen Nee and Linda Klotzbach going int-depth into their project “Save Time, Save Lives”, winner the 2023 Service Design Awards for Best Student Project executed together with YuYu Sun.

Adam B Cochrane is a Senior strategic designer at Lufthansa Innovation hub where he facilitates meaning, purpose and future visions through service design. Throughout his career - with previous employers such as Zalando, Taxfix, IXDS and Telekom - he developed a keen interested in ritual design and guiding new business ventures. Now, he ‘s also the co-director for the 2024 Service Design Global Conference in Helsinki - having been already a driving force for the 2023 conference in Berlin.

Khushboo Balwani is a designer, creative researcher, and futurist active in Brussels through her socio-artistic citizen lab BrusselAVenir. Enjoy this hopeful and inspiring conversation about Khushboo’s work, her approach for understanding and visualising future needs and the power of collective future building.

As designers, we assume a lot of responsibility when it comes to involving users. How can we do better, and how can we stay kind to ourselves? Giulia and Pardis share good laughs and serious answers on using the Do No Harm Framework in their daily practice at Designit.

Join us as we dive into the wonderful world of healthcare innovation with Jiri Vermeulen and Lola Bladt from Minze Health. Jiri and Lola share their personal experiences as entrepreneurial designers, narrating the transformation of a visionary idea in 2015 into an established digital healthcare company today with multiple products in the global market. Enjoy this honest and fun conversation about transforming healthcare through design.

Finnish strategic and service design agency Hellon has been working together with the Helsinki Regional Transport Authority (HSL) for the past 6 years to ensure the sustainable future of Helsinki’s public transport. For their productive partnership, they received the Service Design Award 2022 Best Non-Profit project!

We speak with Lotta Julkunen - design director and partner at Hellon - to discuss their well earned award, the philosophy of their partnership with HSL and many more interesting elements for doing successful service design at scale.

Leading up to her captivating talk at Knight Moves' Arena last month about ‘Trust Falls: catching users when they fall', we welcomed design strategist Sarah Drummond in our studio in Ghent.

We talk about how to build trust in the design process, innovation vs. familiarity and the value of predictable actions for users in order to trust the systems they use. Get immersed in this fascinating topic and learn how to design for trust.

We welcome Sydney Johnson and Kristofer Kelly-Frere from Canada-based studio J5 Design. They shared their experience working on the project ‘Braver Training Grounds: Customer Experience Design & Social Housing Organizations’ which earned them the global service design award best commercial project 2022.

Chu-Yi Vuong — winner of the Service Design Award 2022 for Best Student Project — came up with a service to nudge sustainable choices to consumers. We welcome her in our studio in Ghent to talk about her thesis, her journey into the world of service design and her job as a service designer at IBM iX. Learn how her innovative solution, "Save," can make it easier for consumers to shop for groceries with sustainability in mind.

We continue the keynote talk of Dr. Leyla Acaroglu backstage at the Service Design Global Conference in Copenhagen. We discuss sustainability, systemic change and most of all, actionable steps for us, service designers and humans to make a difference. Take in her inspiration for activating your agency.

In this episode, we share a heartfelt chat with two amazing people from the organising team of the Service Design Global Conference: Peter Nørregård from Playful Innovations and Christina Melander from the Danish Design Center.

Tune in to discover what designing for good means for them, and why having courage as a designer is so important—now maybe more than ever.

Tune in to this special episode where Stina and David pass the torch to Laurens and Jeroen and welcome them as new hosts of the Service Design Podcast. Listen to them reflecting on how Service Design has changed since the beginning of the podcast. We also talk about the change in hosts and what challenges Stina and David are taking on instead!

Next week the Service Design Global Conference 2021 will take place with again a great line-up! This years’ theme is ‘taking a stand’, we talked about the theme and other exciting stuff with two great people from the organising team: Ullah Jones and Agusta Callaway. Get excited about the conference and listen to the episode! Or let us convince you to still buy a ticket with a 25% discount (code: SDGC21_attendee_25%off)

Twisted studio won the ‘professional non-profit’ service design award for their lean approach to service design and prototyping. The project they won the award for is called LaMA, short for Laboratoria Mobiele Alternatieven. A co-creative design process developed to find creative and simple solutions with great impact on mobility issues in small cities.

We spoke with the two founders of Twisted studio; Marlies Deforche & Elisabeth Verhetsel. Because they are our Belgian colleagues, we invited them to our studio!

Read the whole story here: https://www.service-design-network.org/community-knowledge/lama-laboratoria-mobiele-alternatieven

Twisted studio website: http://twist...

Tom Szaky is CEO at Terracycle, a social enterprise on a mission to eliminate the idea of waste. Recently he founded a new company Loop, a global circular shopping platform that brings multi-use packaging into our daily shopping. Tom closed the Global Service Design Conference in Toronto with his talk ‘Loop: Solving for Disposability While Maintaining Its Virtues’. We managed to sneak in a 25 minute interview with him right before his talk!

John Powell is design director at an agency focussed on Artificial intelligence for leading global enterprises and governments. John’s talk was titled ‘We Have Met The Enemy and They Are Us. He talked about the social challenges humans created over the years and how it is time for designers to take responsibility!!

Steph Hay is VP design at Capital One an American bank. She opened the second day with her talk ‘Designing for Trust. Steph talked about the example of sesame street. In order for children to learn, they need to trust the person or puppet that thought them new stuff. Discover what Sesame Street and and the ‘I love you’ metric can teach you!

Waw! What a great edition this year's conference! It was great to meet the familiar faces again, but also many new inspiring people. We walked around with our microphones again and bumped into many interesting designers from all over the world. We talked to the organisators of this year conference and the organisers of the 2020 edition in Copenhagen. We already had a quick chat with some of the service design award winners. Off course we will invite them for a longer interview again later this year! We talked to many speakers, fellow podcasters, volunteers, etc. We hope you enjoy this...

You heard Chris Ferguson (Founder of service design agency Bridgeable) on this podcast before. We spoke to him as a visitor of the Service Design Global Conference, as a regular guest, as a winnen of and SD award and now as an organiser of the conference in Toronto. As always, Chris has many valuable insights to share and will get you excited for this year’s edition of the conference.

In anticipation of the in Oktober we spoke to , one of the local organisers of the conference. Shannon is Senior Manager, Experience Design at and was Principle, Design and Research Director at . Listen to find out about the theme of the conference, what to look forward to and where to visit in Toronto.

A couple of months ago, we noticed an interesting video on Linkedin. In this video Playmobil announced their new toolkit for professionals. We spoke with Victoria Dobbie, project manager at sub-brand Playmobil Pro. She introduced us to the tool and the process of designing and bringing it into the market. 

Increasing automation in our workplaces, demographic shifts and a customer-based economy are drastically changing the way we work. In order for people to keep up we will need a very different set of skills, particularly those that are unique to humans: imagination, creativity, curiosity, emotions and social relationships. How will we bring this skills transition into our jobs, and which implications will this have for employees, employers and organisations? In our 34th episode of our podcast you can listen to the round table discussion, i.e. an interview with the speakers of the evening and questions from the audience.

Tesco Bank and Modern human won the ‘best in private sector’ service design award for their project Phoenix. We spoke with Amjid Rasool, head of service design at Tesco Bank and Paul-Jervis Heath from the Service Design agency Modern human. Together with their whole team they redesigned the customer complaint experience of Tesco Bank clients.  

Fjord en West Midland Police won the award best in public sector for their project ‘Developing a police force’s digital experience for citizens’. We spoke with Giulio Fagiolini, who is visual design at Fjord and Kostja Paschalidis who was senior service design at Fjord and is now working as a freelancer.

Innovationsguiden won the Professional Non-Profit/Public Sector award. Innovationguiden is an ongoing project that aims to support and reinvigorate the Swedish public sector in collaboration with citizens through service design. This was done by providing various forms of support to municipalities, county councils and regions to work with user-driven innovation in their development work.

Cork County Council is the second largest local authority in Ireland. They offer over 600 services to the civilians of Cork. This means they have an all-time challenge to deliver the best possible services for their customers. A few years ago, they came across Service Design, and started experimenting. They formed the Service rePublic team, and never looked back since.

As we shifted from a product-based economy into a service-based economy, customers are more and more pampered with good services. To be successful, companies more than ever need to offer services that exceed the expectations of people. So in order to offer the best services, companies can do two things. On the one hand they can work closely together with external professionals. On the other hand, they can expand their in-house expertise by training their own employees to think more human centred. To introduce and present both ways of working, we invited two international speakers who shared their knowledge. 

We went to the Service Design Global Conference in Dublin where we attended lots of inspiring talks and hands-on workshops. Again, it was a truly amazing edition! It’s surprising how this conference manages to touch new topics & give new inspiration every year. Hats off to the organisation!  We also really enjoyed the social aspects of this conference. Since this wasn’t our first SDGC, we saw a lot of familiar faces and like every year we had the chance to get to know many new people. During these moments we got the opportunity to interview some service design ‘rockstars’. You can f...

Marc Stickdorn is a well-known person in the Service Design world. That’s understandable for many reasons!  He is one of the writers on the ‘Service Design Thinking’ and the ‘Service Design doing’ book. Since this week also the ‘Service Design Methods’ book. Besides that he is co-founder and CEO of ‘More than Metrics’, a company that offers tools and stuff for customer experience and service designers: Smaply, Experiencefellow and Mr. Thinker. Marc speaks about Service Design at many conferences around the world.  Great to have him at the podcast!