Conference Program
Theme 1: Designing with the System
Service design’s customer-centered focus is not unique and not enough. We also need to master the organizational system and align with other transformational practices such as strategy, product management, and agile. How can service design better integrate knowledge and practice within organizations while increasing our influence in how they create value?
Service design’s customer-centered focus is not unique and not enough. We also need to master the organizational system and align with other transformational practices such as strategy, product management, and agile. How can service design better integrate knowledge and practice within organizations while increasing our influence in how they create value?
Break
Healthcare in the United States often struggles to innovate in delivering optimal patient experiences across acute and non-acute settings. However, those service designers who work within large health systems get to experience first-hand on why it is extremely hard to implement changes in a singular or multi-level service interaction across healthcare touchpoints. In this case study, you will hear first hand learnings on how to influence the decision-making process of solutions that shape the patient and the clinician experience.
Long Break
At Airbnb, we’re in the midst of integrating service thinking into a product-minded culture, aiming to harmonize our high digital standards with the realities of operational service delivery. This collaborative, iterative effort involves partnerships with product, policy, customer support, and more. In this talk, Airbnb Service Design leader Rebecca Gimenez shares learnings from this ongoing journey, offering insight on the practice of service design within a complex organizational system.
Break
As part of a MHCLG funded transformation programme, we were tasked with redesigning an outdated, manual planning system into one fit for the 21st century. Planning officers were grappling with systems that didn’t meet their needs. They were spending a lot of time on manual tasks and dealing with the impacts of human error.
Our brief was to deliver a planning service designed by its users, in this case local authority planning officers. We took a radical approach of embedding with a team of subject matter experts, sharing knowledge around digital and agile as we went. This approach meant that user needs drove every action we took but also that the transformation of thinking and approaches from agile and service design started to have an impact on the local authorities themselves.
We developed a set of design principles to keep both user needs and our collective vision at the heart of the process with a focus on moving from documents to data, reducing ‘noise’ and bringing the right information to users at the right time.
Long Break
The Challenge/Problem: Service designers often struggle to apply their methodologies effectively when working in-house within organizations that have low or developing design maturity. This resistance arises because service design is inherently about getting to the root of issues and facilitating deep, transformative change—something that can be intimidating or unwelcome in environments that are not yet ready for such shifts. The challenge lies in finding a way to navigate this resistance and still enable impactful work. (These environments can also be resistant to design thinking, making it difficult for service designers to implement changes or demonstrate the value of their work. The challenge lies in finding a way to meet the organization where it is, rather than forcing design practices that may not yet be fully understood or embraced.)
Break
Connect with the Advancing Service Design Community
Join us the evening of Tuesday, December 3 to play Cozy Juicy Real—an engaging online board game where the purpose is anything but trivial: creating authentic and truly meaningful connections with your peers.
This is an interactive session and spaces are limited. RSVP is required!
Whether you’re looking to expand your network, meet your next client or connect with collaborators, this is your opportunity to make it happen.
You’ll experience Cozy Juicy Real, a simple, effective board game that’s been played in 71 countries. It’s proven to create stronger team bonds at the world’s most successful organizations – including Google, Adobe and the UN.
“You will connect. Cozy Juicy Real is the best way to foster connection online.”
– Marcia Goddard, Chief Culture Officer, The Contentment Foundation
👍 Cozy Juicy Real Team Building
Your Host
Jon is the Founder and CEO of Hiro Studio and has 22 years of experience as a Facilitator and Lean Management Consultant.
Jon hosts Cozy Juicy Real events for teams and conferences around the world, to bring communities together and quickly create new connections and stronger team bonds.
Theme 2: Designing in the System
Service Design must engage with the wider system that services exist within to be more effective and address meaningful challenges. More and more challenges – such as in healthcare, the green transition or with advanced technology – are seen as systemic. They exist across organizations and actors both in business and in society. How can service design work with systemic challenges and bring design qualities to help us collectively address them?
Service Design must engage with the wider system that services exist within to be more effective and address meaningful challenges. More and more challenges – such as in healthcare, the green transition or with advanced technology – are seen as systemic. They exist across organizations and actors both in business and in society. How can service design work with systemic challenges and bring design qualities to help us collectively address them?
In response to the existing health equity gap for communities of color, which the pandemic exacerbated, this collaboration tackled the challenge of increasing COVID-19 vaccination rates and improving health equity among Latina/x/o individuals of childbearing age in southern Arizona. Partnering with the local health department and a diverse Community of Practice, our team employed a Human-Centered Design approach to co-create and pilot solutions that address critical health needs and strengthen patient-practitioner trust. Our year-long design process led to the successful implementation of a community and a clinical pilot that enhanced healthcare navigation and engagement for our primary users, with early outcomes showing positive impacts on the local healthcare system. This experience underscores the power of creating space for cross-disciplinary collaboration and offers valuable insights into integrating equity-focused practices within service design. Attendees will learn about the effectiveness of coalition-based approaches and strategies for broadening service design practices to address complex health equity issues affecting diverse, low income communities.
Break
Fleeing the horrors of war, only to find yourself trapped in a system of inadequate services there to aid your survival as a refugee, often leaves vulnerable women and children in a paradox of despair. For South Sudanese and Congolese refugees in Uganda’s West Nile Region, this is a daily reality. This talk highlights the urgent need to redesign better support services in these camps and surrounding communities, challenging us as designers to advocate, through our practice, real change in a broken development sector.
Long Break
Moving beyond the service blueprint or user journey map, this case study explores some of the more non-traditional outputs and outcomes driven by service design, particularly through the lens of creating long-term transformational change. Stefanie will overview a variety of recipes for achieving transformative outcomes at three levels within a single government agency: the product/service experience, program-wide or platform initiatives, and fundamental agency technology operations. The challenges for each layer are unique, but also offer different opportunities for where service designers can achieve sustainable, real impact. We’ll explore specific examples achieved by a breadth of designers, product managers, and engineers working within a single federal agency before demonstrating how this model might be replicated across other partner government agencies to achieve our vision of making more government services become as simple, effective, and accessible as possible.
Break
Cross-disciplinary collaboration is key to tackling large scale change in hypertension rates (Margins of Victory) in underserved communities (Innovation at the Margins). Low income minoritized populations have shown to have a high prevalence of hypertension but a low treatment rate . There are many factors that play a role in these statistics many of them which are historical and systemic. In order to design a hypertension study for these populations, co-design methods that emphasize collective good must be employed by a comprehensive team.
Our process to build this study focused on sharing power with members of the community to decentralize the designer and build design capability with the participants. We prioritized building relationships to combat mistrust of healthcare professionals and address difficult topics like social determinants of health (healthcare access, housing challenges, employment, etc) – both key factors in high hypertension rates.
This presentation will bring together the collaborative team that built the Pressure Check study. First, a Yale cardiologist who is an expert in this space and acknowledges the influence and perspective that the design process can provide. The second speaker is a design research and strategy professional who defined an inclusive and relational protocol that tapped into the deepest needs of the study community and translated them into the study materials. The third, is a visual designer who incorporated the learnings into patient education and study tools to overcome deeply ingrained perspectives on healthcare. This team and the outputs demonstrate how critical it is to have a team that brings in shared and lived experiences into service design.