Service Design Workshop with Marc Stickdorn @UNSW
I feel very fortunate about attending a 3 day workshop with Marc Stickdorn co-author of This is Service Design Thinking over the last few days. It was organised by UNSW and consisted of a really interesting mix of people from diverse backgrounds including students, academics, professionals and UX/Service Design practitioners.
1. Why You Should Care About Service Design
Some supporting literature
a. Experience Economy by Pine & Gilmore 1999
b. Service Dominant Logic – Vargo, S. and R. Lusch (2004), “Evolving to a new dominant logic in Marketing,” /Journal of Marketing, /68, 1-17
c. The rise of Social Media: trust in peers more than trust in organisations.
2. The Workshop Format
Marc made us work but it was fun so it didn’t feel like work! We broke into groups and over three days used various service design tools to design a new service or solve a business problem. It was really great to learn new methods by doing. His process is really experiential and I do not believe that you can really learn it without doing it. It was great to do the activities and then reflect on them afterwards on a meta-level in order for us to experience the process as well as better understand how to facilitate these methods.
3. The Process & Learnings
3.1 Do! Don’t talk.
Marc gave us a really short amount of time to do things so we could not talk about it but had to jump straight in and do it. We created lots of “shitty first drafts” which we could then refine. This proto-typing method enabled the free flow of ideas – both shitty and not shitty. We started the day off creating a very shitty first draft of a new service in 5 minutes – so we got failure or the fear of it out of the way early on in the day.
3.2 What workshops are really about…
Workshops are about getting people who usually don’t talk to talk. They are about creating empathy with the customer within cross-disciplinary teams and about seeing things from multiple perspectives. Services are complex and co-created by many different actors over time. These workshops enable an understanding of this complexity, and it’s associated relationships, dependencies, value chains and power structures. All of which play important roles in customer experience and service delivery.
3.3 Activities
Some of the exercises that we did in our groups included. These can all be found in the This is Service Design Thinking book.
- the mapping of value networks (example below) – who are the actors involved and what are their relationships and what values are exchanged?
- quick ad-hot personas (although these should have been data-driven!)
- Customer journey maps
- Service Blue-prints
- Creating a service ad (poster for our service)
- Prototyping through theatrical methods inspired by Work Play Experience
- Business Model Canvas (see the book Business Model Innovation)
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