Servicescape is the biggest differentiator in healthcare experience. Traditionally, it is designed to satisfy the needs of healthcare provider in terms of performance and efficiency. Starting from patient’s experience and applying service design methods combined with interior architecture, design agency Diagonal has created innovative healthcare experience providing benefits for both staff and patients.

Diagonal – designing servicescape for Fimlab

Juha Kronkvist from Diagonal has presented the project, as the fifth and final case in the competition for Service Design Achievement of the Year in Finland 2013 in Service Design Breakfast event at Startup Sauna on November 27^th. Juha is one of the leading service designers in the field of health care and well-being.

Healthcare design

Three main components of healthcare design are performance, process and experience. As Juha explains, focus is usually on performance and process, while experience is often overlooked. What this case shows is that by studding experience, performance can be increased and processes made more efficient.

According to Juha, one of the key starting points in service design is to find out how people assign the meaning and make sense of the environment. When those assigned meanings are aligned with organizational point of view, they should create positive customer experience. Servicescape is not only about physical things. It is about what those things communicate and what value they provide. Therefore, servicescape is critically influencing customer experience.

The Case

Components of healthcare design

Fimlab is the biggest Finnish health care laboratory chain with 90 laboratories, some old built in 50s, 60s and 70s, some completely new located in shopping malls.  Their objective was to provide great customer experience but in reduced laboratory space.

For this project, Diagonal assembled a team of service designer and interior architect. As usually, they took double diamond design process approach, starting from customer understanding.

First step was crafting a customer journey. Whole service process was mapped. It started from orientation at entry point and continuing through the several stages. They have then moved to examine a real place, laboratory in mid-Finland. There, they mapped the artefacts, sampled interactions, and collected a lot of observations. Then, the prototype was created – a small laboratory made of cardboard. They included all the points of interaction into this space and invited people in. They walked people through the orientation phase, observed their reactions and asked them for a feedback.

Key findings were related to clarity of the steps especially at entry; ambience, e.g. pleasant and relaxing waiting area; and functionality that is ensuring fluent work for staff. With servicescape understanding in place, they went to pilot implementation phase.

At the end of the pilot, Diagonal have received positive feedback from patients. They better liked the environment and how the service was done. That proved the point that by focusing on experience the process can be improved, as people are better informed. Staff liked their work more and also liked the environment although it was smaller. Function was improved as well, since people were more relaxed, so that sampling succeeded usually from the first attempt.

After the pilot, they started scaling it up. Customer is excited as the next step is about increasing the offering.

“They just thought that we are coming in to design their laboratories, but through this process, they have gained much better understanding how they should be starting designing for the whole customer experience” Juha concluded.

Written by Predrag Miskeljin, Laurea SID Student 2013

A group of representatives of the public sector, service designers and the University of Lapland visited Milan from 26 to 30 November 2013 in order to benchmark how service design and social innovations are used in public services renewal.

Theoretical background: A meeting with Anna Meroni at the Politecnico di Milano

Our trip started from the Politecnico di Milano. Established in 1863, Politecnico di Milano is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. It is ranked as one of the most outstanding European universities in Engineering, Architecture and Industrial Design, and also regarded as a leading research institution in the world. Anna Meroni, Assistant professor of Service and Strategic Design, told us at Bovisa campus about the background of Service Science, service design master classes and DESIS network. The key reference disciplines of Service Science are ethnography, social sciences, management, engineering, behavioral sciences and computing.

Politecnico School of Design offers two-year master classes in such areas as Product Service System Design, Product Design for Innovation, Communication Design and Social and Collaborative Housing. The goal of the Product Service System Program is to integrate the designer to the whole service system instead of an individual innovation. The goal of the Product Design for Innovation Program is to integrate creative product development into experimentation, design and enterprise activities. The goal of the Communication Design Program is to cope with strategic communication problems and provide innovative solutions and coordinate all the roles and competences needed in a complex communication project. The goal of the Social and Collaborative Housing is to design and manage private social housing and public or private forms of collaborative living.

Politecnico is a member of DESIS (Design for Social Innovation towards Sustainability), which is a network of design labs, based in design schools and design-oriented universities, actively involved in promoting and supporting sustainable change. The network was established in 2009 and today consist of 43 design labs around the world. The nearest labs to Finland are at Linnaeus University in Växjö and Malmö University in Sweden.

Social innovations in Practice

According to Anna Meroni, the goal of design for social innovation is to “support and enhance the capacity of society (people, organizations, public administrations, entrepreneurs) to take action, become proactive and be innovative in sustainable way”. Politecnico di Milano acts as a partner in each of the following examples of social innovations.

Social and Collaborative Housing

Architect Giordana Ferri, who also teaches in Politechnico di Milano, told us about the concept of social housing in Italy. Ten years ago, the core of the concept was to offer a financial solution to housing for tenants who couldn’t afford a flat of their own in a big city like Milano. Now the core is to create new community participation. This new sociable, active and collaborative way of living presents the transition from concentrated housing to flats with semi-private places such as common kitchens, garage and laundry facilities shared with neighbors. The tenants are chosen from four different age and annual income groups: 25 % of the tenants are families under the age of 35, 20% are couples under the age of 35, 20 % singles under the age of 35, 15 % are senior citizens and 10 % are people in serious housing need referred to the service by the local council. All tenants are selected one year before they move in and are taking part in the community building workshop series.

Social promotion at PACO’s studio

PACO’s studio is a multi-disciplinary design collaborative and a network that is sharing design tools and education in order to make projects that have social importance at the institutional level in fostering social innovation, sustainable behavior and business opportunities. One of these projects is Super Heroes, a three weeks game together with school children fighting against candy eating monsters. Another project is a Design School for children.  PACO’s studio was also hosting Global Service Jam in March and Milan Kids Jam in November, which was a proto for a Kids Sustainability Jam.

Social enterprises at Hub Milan and in Make a Cube

Once a month Hub Milan organizes a Sexy Lunch, where social entrepreneurs present their business ideas to the public for the first time. We heard about hybrid products that are designed in a community and about the idea of a third industrial revolution, where products are produced only when needed; for example, furniture could be downloaded from the Internet and printed in a small 3 D studio anywhere around the world.

Founded 15 years ago, Make a Cube is a social enterprise incubator in the field of sustainable development and the first Italian low-profit firm. Make a Cube works together with businesses, NGOs, local governments and EU Commission. Make a Cube focuses on the early stages of the development process in the area of market failure of companies that have social mission. Services that are developed in the incubator can be from four different areas: Services for individuals (Health care, home care); Collaborative services for communities; Services for companies (Eco-design) or Services for Public administrators (participatory decision-making process). Make a Cube works also as a Think Tank creating new markets to social entrepreneurship by arranging twice a year workshops for different universities at European level. One of the mottoes of Make a Cube is “You can’t work at European level if only acting locally. “

This blog post was created as an assignment in SID course New Service Development and Innovative Service Systems.

More about public service design in Milan:

The Politecnico di Milano http://www.polimi.it/en

DESIS network: Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability http://www.desis-network.org/

Social and Collaborative Housing: http://www.fhs.it/

PACO’s Studio: https://www.facebook.com/PacoDesignCollaborative

HUB Milan: http://hubmilan.wordpress.com/

Make a Cube:  http://www.avanzi.org/english

Figure 1 – Multicultural faces, source: http://geoffallan.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html

Hello, Culture!

The cross-cultural issues in service was my first elective course with in my Service Innovation & Design MBA study; with the expectations set to provide a better understanding to cross cultural aspects of service design, and I wasn’t mistaken at all!

Coming from an background where I have lived in four countries before, visited dozen in my business and leisure trips and worked with most of the nationalities in the world in my professional life, I thought I had that good cosmopolitan mind-set that will help me to better tackle service design issues with different people coming from different background. But as I have over gone my studies in the course, I have found that cultural understanding does not come from only dealing with people from different cultures, it comes from deeply understanding the one own culture and what are the real values a person is believing in first, then trying to understand both the underground and surface levels of what others value and finding a common ground where the two cultures can meet with the minimum collision(s) possible.

Service design is all about human centered design and the human understanding, where a service is tailored to satisfy the real needs of certain stakeholder or stakeholders. But as we humans vary in our own cultures and with the global environment we are living in, Its important to understand how services can fit to match a different cultural groups and how it can be tailored to respect the values that a group of customers belief in, in a way that make the service more relevant, homecoming and familiar.

Meet… Richard Lewis!

For that, a lot of discussion has been done on what is really the definition of a culture and what does it stands for. Based on the cultural framework that I had studied which is the Richard Lewis cultural framework, Richard Lewis has drawn what is his interpretation of a culture as follows:

Figure 2- Richard Lewis drawing of a culture, when he asked to define it

So based on the drawing, you suddenly happened (I shall leave the causes out of discussion for now )! Later you are brought to the world where existing belief, values, attitudes and a certain viewpoint of the world is there around you. You enter this atmosphere! Where you will be like a sponge and start absorbing from these beliefs, values, attitudes and viewpoints until you are an adult. Note that the smaller the atmosphere you live in, the more focused / concentrated beliefs, values and view points are imprinted in you mind. Later, when you are a big enough to be on your own, you start to diffuse what you have learned in your life to others! Based on Richard Lewis observations also, the first 10 to 13 years of your life a very crucial to your cultural imprinting process.

That’s why when culture its discussed, its more thought of as an iceberg where we see only the surface (or the tip of the iceberg) and we need to dig deep to see those inner and guiding elements that a culture is really composed of to have a better understanding of that culture.

Figure 3- Cultural iceberg (adapted from AFS inter-cultural programs)

Back to Richard Lewis theory that I have studied, the main thing about understanding a culture is to be competent when dealing with that certain culture both for business or personal needs, which means the following steps need to be taken as per the recommendation of Richard Lewis:

1. Know your own culture
2. Know the basics of the target culture
3. Identify the possible areas of conflict
4. Take steps to deal with these possible area of conflict

I will leave you with this wonderful video lecture by Richard Lewis, which talks about the “Cross-Cultural Competence is the basis for Successful International Business” which have been done in Russia in early last year (click on the image to see the lecture, or simply visit the YouTube at http://youtu.be/xANs-xE_sdE ):

Figure 4- Cross-Cultural Competence is the basis for Successful International Business By Richard Lewis

Culture Is Not Only About Customers!

It’s also very important when looking at culture understanding to notice that it should be taking from a holistic point (as we have been thought in Service Design) to include employees, partners, etc. This is very important; as the globalization is becoming a norm in the small world village we are living in. A good example and case study that was presented to us was by a member of Kone (which I forget the name!), which she talked about how Kone as a company, they are doing deep cultural understanding for each of the country they are working in and adapting both the value proposition and the company process to that specific country / culture.

For example, here in the Middle East the concept of time is differently interpreted than what’s in Finland for example. Saying 8:30 AM in Finland means 8:30 AM! But in the Middle East, I can say it depends! As the time buffer may vary between 5-10 min to 1-2 hours, depending on which country you’re talking about ! (Examples are excluded by intention).

Tax’s… Anyone?

Our course study had been a very interesting one, as we tried to tackle the issue of communication with construction workers in Finland. As the Finnish Tax Administration (Vero) decided to launch a new service called “Raksim”, which is about tax information reporting in the construction sector. The purpose of this service is to have fine-grained tax reporting for the construction workers in Finland to combat the existing grey economy.

We had worked as a group of four students to help Finnish Tax Administration to communicate with employers and employees in construction industry effectively and ensure the new service can be implemented successfully, from a cross cultural point of view. This is due to that a big chunk of constructions workers are non-Finns. Coming from countries like Estonia, Poland, Russia and other countries.

To cut a long story short, we have used our service design magic to find possible solutions to tackle the communication with these diverse cultural groups with out any change to the existing underlying service.

Abracadabra (AKA The results?) 

We have come up with the following matrix as design criteria for our possible solution areas, as in the diagram below:

Figure 5- Design criteria for different cultural groups

The explanation of the design criteria’s is a follows:

1. Communication Channel: Which the type of channels we need use, either online or offline.

2. Communication Granularity: Which is the granularity of a communication and is it best to be one-to-one or group communication.

3. Communication Message Language: Which is the language of the message, shall it be more focused on the reward (carrot focused) or focused more on the punishment (stick focused).

4. Communication Message Style: Which stress on the message style, shall it be an emotional type of message or more rational focused on the facts and figures.  

We have used these criteria’s to define an area that is suitable to search for ideas for each culture we are targeting. Also beside that, we have found that all the messages from Tax Finland should have two main elements, which are clarity and translation to the local language of the targeted construction group.

Later, we took two of the criteria’s to brainstorm ideas that can be suitable for realization. We have come up with 9 interesting ideas, which have been shared with the Tax Finland representative in last course session. We hope these ideas will help bridge the communication gap with the construction groups (we have our fingers crossed! )

Figure 6- Final 9 ideas from brainstorming

Take a Break! Cross-Cultural Comics

Here are some cross-cultural comics that may give you a smile!

1- Greetings!

Figure 7- Comic1, Source: www.global-inetgartion.com

2- Start Kissing!

Figure 8- Comic2, Source: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-02-24/

3- Stick to the script!

Figure 9- Comic3, Source: http://www.callcentercomics.com

The Key Takeaways!

Here are the key takeaways that I can recommend for any service designer:

• Services are designed for humans, and humans are different! It’s not about age difference, or race difference, but more than that in beliefs, values and attitudes. So make sure to have a bit understanding for the culture(s) you are designing for before jumping ahead

• Having your digital service touch-point(s) translated to different languages is good, but not enough! Make sure that you revisit the content and the message your delivering to be culturally aware, the structure and the coherence of the message sometimes need to be different for each cultural group

• Don’t forget to have the cross-cultural understanding diffused into your organization. Having your employees equipped with the right basic cultural understanding for each one of your targeted customers can be a key differentiator for you as a business

• Bake cultural understanding into your service design process. Make sure that it will be part of your ethnography process, ideation and even prototyping, it will give you guidance on how to design services that really talks different languages!

• Take the cross-cultural elective course if you got the chance (use the promo code: ILOVECULTURE when registering with Tarja to get 10% grade increase ), you wont regret it!

Personal Reflections On The Course!

The course as whole is a great course to attend, beside Tarja  has done a good job to incorporate different senior visiting lecturers who they have a massive multi cultural experience to speak to us and show us how did they tackle cross-cultural issues in there every day business.

The group was also a diverse group where we people from Spain, Norway, China, Nigeria, Sweden, Germany, Estonia and my self-representing The Sudan Republic J! This also added another layer of cross-cultural discussion and atmosphere that made the course much more enjoy-full.

The only take away that I can take on the course is that it should had been a full time course where the hours are not limited to the three hours per contact session as what we have done!

Bonus, Taste a Culture!

Since you have been patient enough to view my post till here, I have a bonus for you!

I come every month from the Middle East to attend the contact sessions, and as a habit I have created for my self, I use to get every month Arabic sweets to the class to let them taste the culture I am coming from.

So for the February contact session I will be getting an extra pack of sweets for any one wanting to have a taste of the Arabic culture, so feel free to drop at Laurea Leppavaara on 6^th of Feb at class 181 to taste the wonderful Arabic sweets. We open at 8:30 AM!

Figure 10- Yummy! Arabic sweets, come on 6th of Feb room 181 (First In, First Feed )

Contact Me!

I would love to hear your feedback! Let me know if this post made any sense! This post is part of the assignments for the cross-cultural course, the final one, and thanks god!

Also, I am reachable at Twitter @MussabSharif for any more information and on my Laurea Email at Mussab.Sharif@student.laurea.fi

Peace!

Service design is allegedly a human-centered method for developing new services. A great effort is made for capturing users’ needs, mental models, experiences, desired outcomes… —you name it! Although this is done specifically borrowing techniques from ethnography, there’s barely no mention to cultural differences! With increasingly global companies, rising migration rates or whole sectors —such as tourism— based on making customers experiencing other countries, isn’t it time to deeply embed cross-cultural issues in service design?

My personal journey

Yes! That was my initial motivation to enroll the Cross-cultural issues in service development course. I couldn’t believe such an amazing topic was included in our Service Innovation and Design MBA.

Somehow, I’ve always been aware and curious about cultures. I come from a region shared by two, right on the border of a third one. I’ve travelled to foreign countries on my own since I was twelve. I lived abroad for some years. I’ve been living for the past thirteen in yet another culture and language. And I’m a trained translator with some five years of experience in this profession. Plus, lately I’ve signed on commuting to —a very exotic to me— Finland once a month for studying…

Nevertheless, my view was very narrow. I came to the class just thinking: “research the culture, pass the knowledge to the rest of the design team and build a great service. That’s it!”.

My journey during the cross-cultural issues course

Of course, that wasn’t just it. And I had to learn much more. Gain a broader view. Discover there’re theoretical frameworks that help you understand cultures. Suffer some cross-cultural issues myself while doing the cross-cultural assignments with a multi-cultural team… And only then, by the end of our term, with the help of my Chinese, Norwegian and Sudanese classmates, while attempting to solve a service challenge for the Finnish tax agency involving Estonian, Russian and Polish construction workers… —OK, this sounds totally like a joke by now— then I started to grasp how and when can you involve culture in service design!

But let’s start with the view broadening!

What do you mean by culture, anyway?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary highlights three definitions:

1. the beliefs, customs, arts, etc., of a particular society, group, place, or time.
2. a particular society that has its own beliefs, ways of life, art, etc.
3. a way of thinking, behaving, or working that exists in a place or organization (such as a business).

All those definitions are a little vague. They don’t reflect the complexity of culture. But if you want to go deeper, I recommend taking a look at Mussab’s post in this same blog “Do your service speak different cultures?”. He’s included a great image of an iceberg representing what we are aware of and what we’re not in terms of culture. As you’ll see there, most of our culture is invisible to ourselves. It’s the fabric of our values, patterns of behavior, visions of the world…

But there’s one thing interesting in the Merriam Webster’s definitions: they don’t attribute culture to just nations or ethnic groups. They include other groups to which we can belong, time and organizations. And that’s true: our personal culture is shaped by many other factors apart from our nationality. Our particular family, our education, our professional background, our place of work, our age range… All of those and many more other factors overlap —as layers of culture— and make us quite unique.

Factors that shape personal culture; please note that this is just the way I picture cultural layers in my head, not a scientific view here!

So, first thing you have to bear in mind when approaching cross-cultural issues is that they are not referred only to national or ethic cultures. Misunderstandings and difficulties in people’s interaction caused by cultural differences can come from many other factors that have shaped their culture.

“So, what?”, you may be thinking. Well, the practical implication is that basing your reasoning, behavior —or service— on stereotypes or generalizations —even if grounded in solid theory— can lead to unexpected and undesired results. After all, we’re individuals. And respond to things in a personal way. So, don’t take cultural theories too rigidly. Prepare to respond individually. Simply listen to the person you have in front. And be flexible.

First broadening: always remember that culture is not only referred to nationality or ethic group. Beware of generalizations.

Cultural theories…? What’s that?

Until now, whenever I went into a new culture —business, country…— I’ve been used to observing first and acting later: trying to understand how people are behaving, what they consider normal, what kind of language they use… and being aware of my own behavior and reactions to it, explaining why I do things if people around seem shocked. This is quite common sense, I guess. And respectful. But a little limited. It takes a long time to be familiar enough with the new culture and it limits your scope to cultures you’re really familiar with. Plus, this knowledge is always subjective and intuitive, difficult to pass on to others.

So, if you want to overcome this limitations, there’s something you need to be aware of right now: cultural theories. They’re structured and scientific approaches to understanding different cultures, comparing them and predicting people’s preferences and behaviors according to a few traits or dimensions.

During the course I’ve been in closer contact with two:

• Geert Hofstede’s 6 dimensions model.
• Richard Lewis’ model of culture.

Hofstede

Hofstede’s is one of the most widely used theories of culture. It was first presented in 1980 and was based on a large survey made by thousands of IBM employees around the world. Initially it comprised four dimensions of national culture —relative values that distinguish country cultures from each other— and it’s been updated to six through subsequent studies based on research by other authors and World Values Survey data (1991 and 2010).

The 6 Dimensions of National Culture are:

• Power Distance (high versus low): how the less powerful members of society accept power unequality.
• Uncertainty Avoidance (high versus low): how threatened people feel by uncertainty and ambiguity and try to avoid them.
• Individualism (Individualist versus Collectivist): whether people look after themselves and their immediate family only or belong to groups who look after them in exchange for loyalty.
• Pragmatism (Pragmatic versus Normative): whether people behave in a pragmatic or future-oriented way rather than adopting a normative or short-term point of view.
• Masculinity (high versus low): whether the dominant values in society are achievement and success or caring for others and quality of life.
• Indulgence (Indulgence versus Restraint): how much people try to control their desires and impulses.

The culture dimensions are used to compare countries through a scoring in a two-end scale on which each country is relatively placed. In Hofstede’s website you can find scores for 76 countries and regions. And you can even compare up to three at a time at their country comparison page.

Finland vs Spain according to Hofstede (Source: geert-hofstede.com)

Lewis

The Lewis Model of Culture is also a practical and theoretical model that classifies cultures into three broad categories:

• Multi-active: people from multi-active cultures value most family, hierarchy, relationships, emotions, eloquence, persuasion and loyalty. In terms of social and business behavior patterns, they tend to talk most of the time, do several things at once, plan grand outline only, show emotions and feelings, confront emotionally, provide good excuses, interrupt often, be people-oriented, put feelings before facts and have a flexible notion of truth.
• Linear-active: basic values of people from linear-active cultures are facts, planning, products, time-lines, institutions and law. They translate into talking half of the time, doing one thing at a time, planning ahead step-by-step, being polite but direct, concealing feelings, confronting with logic, disliking to lose their face, rarely interrupting, being job-oriented and preferring truth before diplomacy.
• Reactive: main characteristics of reactive people are intuition, courtesy, networks, common duties, collective harmony and the protection of everyone’s face. Those values imply an extremely polite social and business behavior where people listen most of the time, react to other’s actions, look at general principles, are polite and indirect, conceal their feelings, never confront each other, must not loose their face, don’t interrupt, are very people-oriented, consider statements as promises and put diplomacy before truth.

According to the Lewis model, each country has a cultural profile, that either fits perfectly into one of the three categories or lies at some point between two of them.

The Lewis cultural model (Source: crossculture.com)

Take a look at the world map classified per category (Source: crossculture.com)

If you want to know more about Lewis model, take a look at their interactive presentation of the model.

Second broadening: there’re theories that can help you gain some basic insight about cultures and a framework for interaction across cultures.

Third broadening: those theories not only provide you with a theoretical base —dimensions o categories— for reflecting about cultures. They are based on data and can give you concrete scores with which you can compare cultures. You no longer depend solely on your subjective and intuitive grasp.

So, how do those theories relate to service?

In the cross-cultural issues course, we have use the gaps model developed by Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Berry in 1990 as a basis for understanding service and framing the several cross-cultural issues that can affect providing and receiving service.

Service gaps model (Source: Services Marketing by Wilson et al, 2012)

The model shows a comprehensive structure of the activities that the service provider organization needs to perform and their relationships:

• Sense customer expectations.
• Set appropriate service designs and standards that match customer expectations.
• Deliver against those standards.
• Communicate with customers.

Plus the 5 gaps that can impact service quality:

• Customer gap: occurs when the perceived service —subjective assessment of the service experience— does not match the customer’s expectations —reference points that the customer brings to the service experience.

• Provider gaps 1-4: are the underlying causes for the customer gap and happen within the provider organisation.
  • Gap 1 occurs when the organisation does not know what customers expect.
  • Gap 2 occurs when the wrong service designs and standards are selected.
  • Gap 3 occurs when employees do not deliver service designs and standards.
  • Gap 4 occurs when service performance does not correspond to service promises.

If you are wondering what parts of the service can be impacted by cultural differences, what gaps can be affected… Let me show you: all and more! Here are some of the questions we’ve been asking and trying to answer during the cross-cultural issues course.

Gaps model and cultural issues

Forth broadening: service is more than service design. Even more than service design and service research together. Many issues relate to the provision of the service itself and the internal relationships amongst employees… Issues also arise when customers form different cultures receive one same service. They impact each other while they receive it. And they can have very distinct expectations, sometimes difficult to combine!

But… can you use all this for designing better services? How?

Certainly you can. Actually we did a pretty realistic practice of it. But I’m not going to say it’s easy!

In my team, we started by selecting a model for the process of service design. In this particular case, we used the design thinking process model of the Austin Center for Design. In this model, we set when would be the most appropriate phase to introduce cultural issues.

Note that before introducing culture information into the process, we used the gaps model right at the start, to frame the problem we were solving.

Austin Center for Design process model with culture & service gaps

We introduced cultural issues during the discovery phase:

• We considered cultural theories as part of the secondary research.
• Once we had gone through our theory of choice, we did some primary research as well.

This way, when we synthesized our findings, cultural insights were embedded and shaped our ideation.

Our assignment finished there. But it was clear to us all that specific testing of the results with people from the different cultures was a must. And previous co-creation of the solution with communities of the different cultures was also very advisable.

Conclusions?

• Cultural theories are a great tool for secondary research during service design processes.
• Additional primary research can help overcome the stereotypes, fill the scoring with some real stories and gain deeper knowledge.
• It’s always important to remember that people have their own individual layers of culture. And will not exactly fit theories about national cultures or expectation based on stereotypes or even previous personal experience.
• Service design is only a part of the activities necessary to provide a service. And many more cultural issues arise in the rest of the activities. Providing flexible standards and empowering front-line employees to develop culture sensitivity and react to different situations accordingly is fundamental.

That’s all from me. If you want to learn more… you’ll have to take the course yourself!

Post by Itziar Pobes, first-year SID student

”Could you send a female inspector?”

This is how Jaakko started our pitch at Sitras’s Service Design competition on March 3, 2014. The competition was part of Sitra’s new security forum, and it intended to test how service design could help to improve public services and make them more user-centric.

The actual design goal set by Sitra and the Finnish Ministry of the Interior was to think of ways to lower the barrier of reporting a racist crime.

Statistics show that the amount of reported crimes has dropped significantly. This is not necessarily good news. As the amount of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds has rised in Finland, the question is whether the amount of racist crimes has actually diminished or whether people don’t just report them anymore. Is the reporting process clear enough for people of foreign roots? Do people have the skills and the motivation to bring their issue forward? Do they trust the authorities? Is there enough knowledge? Could service design help to improve the situation?

This was the challenge of our design team, comprising four enthusiastic first-year SID-students, Jaakko, Ida, Hanna and Mervi. In addition to our service design studies, we all have different educational and professional backgrounds and skills – a group of truly T-shaped people. For us, the competition was a great opportunity to test our newly learned service design methods skills in action. We wanted to learn in practice and do something concrete. Earning some course credits while we were at it didn’t harm, either.

We knew we were competing with professional agencies and experienced service design researches and that made us all the more motivated. Heck, we really wanted to win and show what we are capable of! It turned out that our motivation, determination and willingness to prove ourselves earned us a second place in a very tight competition. We played to win. ”The hungriest team” as one member of the jury put it.

Walkthrough of Our Design Process Background work

As soon as we knew we were accepted to take part in the competition, we started to work on the challenge. We did a lot of background research and dug as deep as we could. We read several reports and studies. We made phone calls to police officers and non-profit organizations that have a lot of experience in working with immigrants and minorities. Piece by piece, we found out important information related to our design challenge.

We also collected and discussed our own previous knowledge. The request for a female inspector, which started this story, was a true case that happened to Jaakko about a year ago. He was scheduled to make a fire inspection in an institution for immigrant women. If a male fire inspector might be too intimidating for them, can you imagine them to walk to a police station and report a crime, most likely meeting a severe-looking policeman behind the desk asking them all kinds of questions about the uncomfortable, maybe even humiliating situation they encountered? Can you picture her trusting him? We couldn’t. It became obvious very soon that we were dealing with quite a wicked problem that had to be approached holistically.

Personas and Stakeholder Map

We used many different service design tools in our design process. After a quick brainstorm and a lot of post-its in Jaakko’s living room window, we decided to create personas. They turned out to be a great starting point. “Ali”, “Cagri” and “Zahra” helped us greatly throughout the process. Their images in mind, we were able to empathize and hold a user-centric focus.

Early on, we started also to create a stakeholder map including all the service providers, non-profit organizations, institutions, and facilities that were relevant for potential crime victims. We figured that since they already are in touch with our target group, they could act as “fixers” for victims of racist crimes.

Watch our videoreport from the workshop

Interviews

It was clear to us that despite we had tons of second hand information, it would not be enough. We knew we would have to hit the field, and we were eager to do so. We went to Helsinki city center to interview immigrants and ask their feelings and thoughts about the matter. Have they confronted racism? How would they report it? Do they trust authorities?

We discovered things that were not only really relevant but also truly eye opening. Racism is really a common phenomenon; almost everyone of our interviewees had experienced it in some form. We also heard about really severe hate crimes that our interviewees had witnessed, heard of or been victims to.

Watch our videoreport from the scene

Rapid and even more Rapid Prototypes

One of our initials concepts was a web service. While the rest of us were working with other aspects of the design problem, Jaakko created prototypes for the service. The prototype was iterated throughout the process according to user tests Jaakko was able to pull of despite the extremely tight schedule.

Watch our videoreport about prototyping

Our final concepts at Sitra Workshop

We had worked quite intensively the week before the competition, but it was nothing compared to the intensity of the competition day. We got some more relevant information from the officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs that triggered new ideas and helped us to see the client’s point of view.

At the end of the day, we had three hectic hours to put all the findings, ideas, pieces of information and other data into a compelling A1 size poster and an eight-minute pitch for the jury. It was quite a ride but we delivered!

Watch our report from Sitra workshopday

We were the 4th team to present our concepts for the jury, right after the professional Service Design Agency Palmu Inc – talking about setting the bar high! Jaakko started with the female inspector quote and together with Ida they rolled out our concepts in a compelling and engaging way. We felt so proud!

So what kind of concepts did we present?

1. Introducing support people

Creating an empathetic first touchpoint by co-operating with non-profits and organizations. Ministry of Interior could train people to specialize in helping crime victims and encouraging them to file a report. The support people would be those who already are in active dialogue with immigrants and who are therefore easy to approach.

2. Storytelling: Turning jargon and government language into meaningful, understandable real-like stories

Visualized story scenarios would explain what to do, where, how, and why, and what happens after that. Police officers are also represented in an empathic way in a ”behind the scenes” video where tell more about the process, how the hearing goes, what kind of questions are asked and why, and how the process continues after making the report. Storytelling could help victims to see the other side of the story and build trust. How do you otherwise know that a police might have over 100 cases to investigate at the same time and despite their efforts, the process can take a really long time?

3. Technical improvements and a digital service

Making the exhausting crime report form easier to use, creating a website for story content and materials, and creating a tracking code system for crime cases. Tracking would work like DHL tracking system for delivered packages. A person making the report could follow the progress of her case and get an automated SMS when the case is moving forward in the system. This would be important because we discovered police does not have the resources to contact everyone personally. If you don’t know this, you might just think you filed the whole report for nothing and your case was buried. And if you tell this further to other people, it won’t motivate them to act if they become victims themselves.

Afterword

So how did we feel at the end of the day? We were really happy about a lot of things but would like to share especially these two things.

First, the jury was totally taken by surprise how much service designers could deliver in such a short time. I think the day also managed to switch their mindset from institution-focused into really understanding the users point of you. This is a great thing since public services could sure use some service designing!

Second, we were really happy about our own professional growth. It was a such a boost for our self confidence to notice that we had approached the problem well like real designers do and had all the elements professional service designers had – and even more. We didn’t suck. On the contrary, we were pretty darn great.

In the final scene of our project video, we are thanking people for contributing to our success. Mr. Marc Stickdorn is really one to be thanked. He was such an inspiring facilitator for our Service Design Process course. He gave us the encouragement and the skills that helped us make this happen. If you want to get an idea what we learned, here are Mervi’s graphic (and not so graphic) notes: NotebookServiceDesignProcess .

Watch the final scene, our video report after getting the silver medal

Sitra blog posts and video about the competition (in Finnish)

http://www.sitra.fi/artikkelit/tulevaisuus/lisaa-turvallisuutta-asiakaslahtoisyydella

http://www.sitra.fi/blogi/palvelumuotoilulla-oikeutta-rasististen-rikosten-uhreille

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWy6lfGW7OI

SID design team, 1st year SID-students:

Hanna Jaakola, Customer Insight Planner
Jaakko Porokuokka, Fire inspector
Ida Rainio, Entepreneur, Content Designer, Owner at Sisus
Mervi Rauhala, Learning specialist, aspiring service designer and storyteller

Child Sponsorship is highly motivational form of regular giving. Largest child sponsorship organizations in Finland are currently Plan, World Vision and Fida. Picture taken from Fida’s project in Tanzania by Erkki Salo.

In this blog post, I Introduce my master thesis and share some of my personal experiences from the MBA studies. As part of my master thesis (which can be downloaded from here: Salo Erkki Master Thesis) I developed Service-Dominant Logic based business model canvas application for child sponsorship organizations. With the help of the canvas, value propositions for the child sponsorship of the case organization Fida International were developed.

Turmoil in fundraising

Child sponsorship is a highly popular and high impact form of giving that affects to the lives of 90 million people. In child sponsorship donor, called a child sponsor, supports a child in a developing country through regular donations. With the support, sponsored child receives improved chances in life. Case organization Fida International is one of these organizations with its 5200 child sponsors helping 10 000 children in poor countries.

Child sponsorship organizations, like any other charities, are facing changing world as donor generations are aging without the younger generations filling in the gap. In order to adapt to the change, donor customers cannot be treated as passive receptors of marketing messages, but as co-creators of value. By co-creating services together with customers and with other stakeholders, door can be opened for innovations.

New Business Model Canvas application for child sponsorship

Starting point of the thesis was that the Business Model Canvas (see my previous blog post) introduced by Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) can help organizations to visualize and innovate successful business models. Despite of its strengths, it is said to represent an old paradigm of service marketing called goods-dominant logic.

The new paradigm of service marketing introduced by Professors Vargo and Lusch (2004), called the Service-Dominant Logic, challenges the Goods-Dominant Logic. In the Service-Dominant Logic, value is always co-created with customers and is solely determined by the customer, and the aim of marketing is to maximize the interactions with the customers

Therefore, I decided to apply the Business Model Canvas with Service-Dominant Logic and to add also insights found from the fundraising literature and from other available business model canvas applications, such as the Lean Canvas and the Nonprofit Business Model 1.0. After the analysis, I used the original business model building blocks by Osterwalder and Pigneur, but altered the original key questions.

Developed business model canvas application was used as part of the service design process to develop value propositions of the case organization’s child sponsorship. Multiple different stakeholders were involved, and focus was on the big picture. Chosen service-design process was the Double Diamond. As outcomes of the thesis, case organization gained a deeper understanding of their donor customer needs and how the developed value propositions were linked to the donor customer’s public and private desired outcomes.

Applied Business Model Canvas for Service-Logic Oriented Child Sponsorship. Erkki Salo. 2014. Adapted from the Business Model Canvas (www.businessmodelgeneration.com).

Final version of the developed canvas can be downloaded from here: Child Sponsorship BMC. In the canvas, lot of focus is in the public and private desired outcomes of the donor customers. I hope the developed child sponsorship canvas could be developed forward and possibly serve also other child sponsorship organizations in their missions to help others.

Becoming a Master of Business Administration in a Great Company

How was the experience to study Service Design and Innovation master program in Laurea and accomplish it in 1 year and 8 months as a father of two children and as full-time worker? For sure, it was demanding challenge for example in time-wise, but it was also amazingly rewarding and motivational experience.

Service design workshop taking in place. Picture by Katri Ojasalo.

The best thing about the studies was to meet amazing new people and get fresh perspectives. It is not often you have a chance to co-create together with such a versatile group of professionals with various backgrounds. In our group, we had participants from 13 different nationalities who had experiences from start-ups, enterprises, and third sector. Our contact classes and projects were simply fun and engaging, and countless of “out of the box” ideas pop-up. Here are some highlights from our contact sessions: the SID journey of the SID12 group.

Content of the study program was rich and accelerated my professional learning. We learned for example how to facilitate and lead workshops, link strategy and futures insights, learned the principles of design thinking and strategic thinking and leadership. This study program gives a great platform for learning beside your work. Personally I enjoyed greatly making group work’s for real organizations such as the Finnish Toy Museum Hevosenkenkä  and Runner’s High. Whether you are a business person, marketer, designer or engineer, for sure you will find this master program once in a lifetime experience. Here is a short video of our student group’s journey.

Master thesis as the culmination of studies

For me, writing thesis was the most challenging part of the studies. It truly expanded my understanding of what am I capable of accomplishing. At the beginning, the work-load felt effusive, but as I found the suitable rhythm, it was almost hard to stop as ideas kept on emerging. Here are some “pointers” how to find possible your rhythm.

• Choose a thesis topic that is close to your heart. You will spend a significant amount of time with it, so why not choosing something that you are really passionate about? For me, helping others and serve God are close to my heart.
• Don’t make it too complicated. Have a clear focus. You need to be able to explain yourself and others what you are doing.
• It is just a master thesis. Understanding that even thought this is once in a lifetime opportunity, remember to have fun and enjoy. Decide your focus, keep on moving and like Nike has put it: just do it. Don’t take it too serious and especially, don’t get frozen.
• Don’t make compromises. When you have a feeling for something, turn the stones.
• Visualize the road ahead. What you visualize, you can achieve. Everyone can make simple visualizations of how things are connected. Draw a simple flow chart that will tell you what to do. Then just keep on moving forward until you are done.
• Remember your priorities. Family first. There is always enough time for what is important. I studied during late evenings in order to minimize time away from the family.
• Find the right rhythm. Everyone has their own rhythm. Learn when are you most effective and find the way to use it. For me it was short sprints with high intensity for example before sleeping, reading on the exercise bike in the gym and finding new ideas while running.
• Have also other inspiring things in life. Everyone can get bored focusing only in one subject. When having also other motivating goals, such as participating to a new sport event, it is possible to find balance for studies.
• Little bit accountability helps a lot! Share your plans with others and especially with your family and your tutoring teacher. You will be amazed how much it helps. Plus having regular deadlines to present something keeps you moving.

Ultra-runner Dean Karnazets, the author of Ultramarathon man, once wrote ”Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness.“ Writing master thesis is in a way just like a long distance running race. By going beyond your comfort-zone, you can find also enjoyment. With determination, you will eventually reach the goal. Just keep on running and remember to enjoy it.

Text by Laurea SID student 2012-2014: Erkki Salo.

By the way: Why don’t you make your thesis for some suitable non-profitable organization and have a chance to do something good at the same time ?

What is The Global Service Jam? It’s a global innovation burst of 48 hours. Think of a bunch of musicians starting to play together. They all have their individual instruments, but after some try and error, they will be able to reach harmonies and create a unique sound and create new music. It’s the same with innovation, having a group of motivated people with diverse backgrounds, ready to work hard together. And perhaps most importantly, as the Jam rules goes, they’re ready to have fun. This blog post focuses on the storytelling method that influenced me the most during the jam, and how it was utilised through out the service design process. The Jam event it self was an excellent example of a successful use of storytelling, as the event followed a dramatic structure from the start-up sequence to the fade out.

Tampere Global Service Jam had a great location at Finlayson factory area. No Jam is a Jam without the Emergency Rubber Chicken.

Tampere Global Service Jam

This story begins at the creative and beautiful setting of historic cotton factory in the Finlayson area in downtown Tampere, Finland. One of the old factory buildings (actually called the New Factory held a Global Service Jam event.  Tampere Jam was hosted by experts Tirri, Anna and Reetta from Kolmas Persoona, and Mikko from Solita. There were also inspiring key notes from Anne from Tarinakone and Juha from Diagonal. The idea of a jam is good and simple: get together, get inspired by the given theme, ideate, form groups, develop the service together and finally present your service prototype. We had three groups of jammers developing their ideas who designed from the same starting point totally different service prototypes. All the individual service processes used multiple and different design methods, ethnography and storytelling being common to all groups.

The results included:

•  A new jam idea, Creativity Jam for Kids (join in on their Facebook page)
• Daring tasks to challenge yourself
• Spacial – a whole new way of decorating and designing your interiors

So how to get all this amazing work done in such a short time? Using appropriate tools and getting inspired by the hosts, key note speakers and other jammers. Storytelling had a strong place in each and every design at Tampere Jam, during all the process. As one of our key note speaker Anna from Tarinakone told us, storytelling can be utilized not just in the final presentation of the service prototype, but along the way as well. You can find Anne’s great presentation on Slideshare.

The Power of a great Story

Stories attract and engage people, thus the method of including them in your design process is a very effective one. There’s a neurological explanation to this: our brain produces stress hormones when we get excited and “feel-good” hormone when we see adorable characters in the story. A happy ending of a story releases dopamine, leaving the listener to feel more optimistic. A mixture of these three elements produces a good story and gets your audience’s attention.

The above video is a good example of this, it grabs your attention right away and builds up the story surprising you in the end. This kind of short emotional roller coaster ride definately keeps the customer watching, and is easily memorable. Anna from Tarinakone told us jammers to “make a feeling and a meaning” in the service story. In Tampere Service Jam context the highlight, amplyfying the jam story, meant a three course gourmet dinner from 4 vuodenaikaa, in beautifully decorated space by KAIKAI, and having the atmosphere perfected by live music of SumuPuu. What a memorable experience!

Amplifying the atmosphere: Tampere Service Jam surprised us with a romantic dinner!

The story’s length and the its sequences can vary but the general structure of an effective story remains the same. Well structured story creates meaning for the customer, and makes the service memorable experience. Storytelling can also help the designer to better understand the meaning of the service, remember details and more easily share their insights during the development phase. In the Tampere Service Jam this meant gathering customer stories by ethnographic research and developing them by going through and acting out story scenarios. Our group developed a service around interior design, gathered stories from the field included flying hammers, family crises and passionate opinions on context related TV-shows. In our service, creating a memorable customer experience was crucial and having this kind of real-life customer stories was a wonderful starting point.

..and they lived happily ever after

There’re great examples of effective storytelling used in business. One very obvious case would be advertisement. HBR Blog network recently talked about the subject by examining the dramatic structure of best Super Bowl ads. The most successful advertisements use very basic dramatic structure with a simple message. There are different kind of structures to describe dramatic structure, one of the is the Six Act Structure by Ola Olsson, a structure for a fictional film. The structure includes:

• start-up sequence
• presentation
• amplifying
• culmination of conflicts (or acceleration, heating up or clashing)
• resolution or solution
• fade out or vanishing

When designing a service experience, paying attention to this kind of structure can help with making the experience more memorable for the customer. To get your story flowing, think of the pace of the story and how to engage the customer throughout the story.

Prototyping by Storytelling: Following a dramatic structure helped during the design process. It kept the physical customer experience in mind, even developing a digital service.

Tampere Service Jam story had definitely a happy ending and an amazing positive after effect. Some of it was captured on video, our reply to New York City’s Jammer who challenged us to be happy.

Text by Teija Hakaoja

On 24^th of September 2014 a group of enthusiastic entrepreneurs participated in a lesson which focused on customer understanding and service-centric business. InnoEspoo organized the event which was a first part of “Osaamista ja oivalluksia” (Know-how and inspiration) entrepreneur -coaching events.

The keynote speaker was Katri Ojasalo who works as Director of Master level education at Laurea University of Applied Sciences (UAS). In my opinion she can be called as a service design guru. Ojasalo has gathered a lot of knowledge and experience about service business via studies and projects during the past 20 years. Ojasalo presented the basics of service design. You might have heard about Bain & Company Survey i.e. 80% of the companies believed they delivered a superior experience to their customer. But only 8 % of their customers agreed. The survey was made in 2005 but it is still relevant.

Jani Jylhä from the company Green Drivers presented how they have managed to make this gap, between service providers´ believes and customer opinions, smaller. Their secrets were to understand customers´ needs and usage of service design in a business concept development process.

Learning by doing

In a workshop part hosted by principal lecturer from Laurea UAS Leena Alakoski, participants worked with customer personas, customer journey and Lean Business Model Canvas. At the end of the session every group shared their results.

I interviewed few entrepreneurs about their customer relationships.

“Today my feeling just got stronger that I am on the right track. I just have to find even more ways to contact and involve customers to my business. It is really rewarding when you get good feedback from a happy and satisfied customer”, says Pakarinen.

Outi Pakarinen/ Kude Design http://www.kude.fi

Outi Pakarinen owns and runs a company called Kude Design. Kude Design offers cloth coaching and Kude is also a clothing brand. Pakarinen has worked many years in clothing and textile industry.

“With the help of my work experience I gathered a great deal of customer understanding before I established Kude Design. I made benchmarking and researched future trends about customer behaviour. I also got to know different industries and found that way something new for my business. I would say I got the whole business idea from the customers. We make products based on a real need. I use a designing by listening –method when designing new clothes. We do not make products if there is no demand from the customer side. I want to have an impulse from the customers so they can e.g. decide which colours they prefer to be in Kude collections.I communicate and gather customer insights through my website and Facebook page. I meet lot of people at the fairs. I am also very active in B-to-B networking”.

Annastiina Mäkitalo learned from Katri Ojasalo´s lesson: “Customers want to buy solutions not services and products”.

Annastiina Mäkitalo/ Kiinnoste http://kiinnoste.fi

Kiinnoste is an advertising agency that offers illustration and visualization services. Mäkitalo gets new ideas through customers needs.“As an entrepreneur I’m always learning something new”, Mäkitalo says.

“I have customers all over the Finland and I haven’t met all of them face-to-face. Usually I communicate with customers by phone and via emails. I also have a blog and Facebook page where I keep in touch with customers. When I meet a new customer, at first I gather a deep insight of her/ his needs, situation and mindset. Then I explore carefully customers´ web pages and when needed also competitors´ pages.”

Marja-Liisa Torniainen

Marja-Liisa Torniainen/ Pisteen paikka http://www.pisteenpaikka.fi

Torniainen is an entrepreneur from Espoo. She has a company called Pisteen paikka that offers communication services for small and medium size companies and different public organizations. Services from Pisteen paikka are custom-made: “My services are actually always tailored case by case: co-operation starts with discussion and asking questions. I also work together with my clients. When I was starting my business over a year ago, I ran a market research to ask what kind of services my potential customers need and would most likely to buy”, explains Torniainen.

Many of the entrepreneurs said that they got new aspects to their own businesses through other entrepreneurs´ different backgrounds and point of views. Almost everyone also agreed that they got some new tools and ideas for the development of their own businesses. The next event will be on 16^th of October 2014. You can find more information here: http://www.innoespoo.fi/?page%20id=449

Text and pictures by Laura Rinta-Jouppi Laurea SID student 2014

The ability to design is undeniably an essential part of human intelligence. Everyone is a designer. Just like everyone is capable of creative thinking. We may not be equally talented at it but using Design Thinking tools can amplify our chances for success tremendously when working on tasks or problems at hand.

Over the span of the two-day intensive Design Thinking course taught by experts of the field Dr. Katja Tschimmel, Design Professor at ESAD Portugal, and Gijs van Wulfen, Innovation Consultant, I was exposed to some already familiar Design Thinking tools as well as completely unfamiliar techniques I had never used before. The course emphasized the importance of visual triggers and sensations for our idea developing process and collaboration within your design team. Collaboration is known to be especially fruitful when the team members have diverse backgrounds and are experts in different fields (Brown, 2009), which put us into a perfect setting for our hands-on group design project carried out as part of the course. Working through the different stages of a service design project within a diverse multi-background team also presented the already familiar tools in a new light to me – as being much more applicable in a business environment than I used to think before.

Figure 1: Visual triggers during idea generation: Moodboard, Brainwriting, Mindmap

Especially to my liking among the previously unfamiliar techniques and something I will definitely adapt to my professional life are visual and semantic confrontations, part of the group of tools used in idea generation and experimentation (Tschimmel, 2012). Combining and connecting unrelated things with each other can lead to very unique and new ideas. This technique reminded me of a quote by David Byrne from his book Arboretum: “If you can draw a relationship, it can exist” (Byrne, 2006). The creation of relationships and links between so far unrelated things can be an ideal source for new innovations and is therefore a very good starting point for any design process.

Another important takeaway from my first close encounters with Design Thinking is the understanding that designing means exploring (Cross, 2011). It is an expedition, a journey filled with explorations – a concept Gijs van Wulfen brought to the world of innovation with his FORTH method. Previously I was prone to stick easily to the first idea and develop it further, by all means, to the end product – without even considering other options. I will put much more emphasis on the idea generation process in the future to start with a pool of ideas I can then dive into to find connections and pathways that will lead my work onwards.

Since I spend a lot of time designing user experiences in a digital context, prototyping has been already a familiar and often used tool. However, I learned that it can be even more effective when used much earlier in the design process – early prototyping. This goes hand in hand with another realization I made: I always used to keep much of the design process inside of my own mind. But designing is not a solely internal process (Cross, 2011). The design tools that we use serve as bridges between our minds and the physical world – exactly that strange and foreign place where the final product or service we design is going to be used, by real people. Regarding yourself as a user throughout the design process and to test your ideas early on in a physical way, e.g. through early prototyping, is therefore highly recommended when wanting to achieve a usable and user-friendly outcome. Design Thinking is, after all, human-centered (Brown 2009, Tschimmel 2012).

Figure 2: Getting physical – Lego desktop walkthrough to design a service

References:

Byrne, David, 2006. Arboretum. New York, United States: McSweeney’s.

Brown, T. 2008. Design Thinking. Harvard Business Review, June, 84-95.

Brown, T. 2009. Change by design: How design thinking can transform organizations and inspire innovation. New York, United States: HarperCollins.

Cross, Nigel 2011. Design Thinking. New York, United States: Berg

Tschimmel, Katja 2012. Design Thinking as an Effective Toolkit for Innovation. In: Proceedings of the XXIII ISPIM Conference: Action for Innovation: Innovating from Experience. Barcelona.

-Written by Corina Maiwald, first year SID student

E6/E4, FORTH, HCD, 3 Is, Hasso-Plattner, 4D/DoubleDiamond, SDT…these are all methods that have come up during the reading for this class and in class. Whatever the method, the point is to have a process that is collaborative (between team members but also between the team and the intended consumers and also the unintended consumers), with well-placed moments of divergence and convergence, and involves some kind of hacked prototype. Only from these very roughly described actions can a team have the beginnings of a workable idea. Depending on what you are trying to accomplish and who is involved will depend on which of these many models serves you and your team(s). These processes then rely on a handbag full of various “tools” that can be accessed when needed. And you will not need all the tools all the time.

During the first days of classes we were introduced to the “Top Ten” tools in Design thinking (Tschimmel, 2012). Of those ten we used 6 in the class project: minds maps, brainwriting, visual confrontations, storyboarding, rapid prototyping, and storytelling. But we also used interviews and a mood board to get the process started in class. One of my favourite points that was reiterated over the three days and in the readings was the fact that the first ideas are the ones “in the box” and that to really access the great ideas you have to go through many processes to jumble everything up first. This allows the participants to step back and really let their imaginations work on another level.

Photo credit: Jaakko Porokuokka

Who will be the creators?

The 21^st Century is, and will continue to be, a complicated place where there is a huge diversity in experience, access (to wealth, services, freedom, etc), wants and needs. So the services and products that will need to be designed will be created for hugely diverse groups of people. My favourite line from Tim Brown’s Design Thinking article say “Time and again we see successful products that were not necessarily the first to market but were the first to appeal to us emotionally and functionally.” I have often struggled with my ideas as to whether they have been done before and have pushed them aside when I see that they have. But the truth is, there is room for more than one when you really get the design (and the business model) right. As it has been pointed out in many places Apple was not the first mp3 player, Facebook was not the first social media space and Google was not the first search engine…but they have all succeeded. Keeping the customer central to your design is crucial to be successful and know what their experience can and should be keeps a business on the right track.

Storytelling

This concept of keeping the customer central to your business is not new nor is it the sole domain of design thinking but it is vital. Tim Brown’s book Change by Design is stuffed full of examples from his company IDEO and I love this style of expressing processes and reasoning through storytelling. A very good demonstration of this comes on page 50 when he discusses the issue of empathy and the case of the SSM DePaul Health Center. It is tangible to me the process of the team member lying on the gurney being rolled, quite disorientingly, through a hospital. This shows that the hospital was built to suit the workers not, in fact, the “customers” or patients.

This continual repetition of customer-centred processes have really stuck with me and I now not only know it intellectually, I actually feel it to be true. In addition to really knowing that the customer needs to be at the centre, there is also the need to really define who your customer is. And in fact, you must know that before you move further than the early prototyping stage otherwise…who are you prototyping for?

By Pamela Spokes

You’ve got a great idea, now what? How to get innovation off the ground in your company?

“You can invent alone, but you can’t innovated alone.”

– Gijs van Wulfen

In the first course of our Service Innovation and Design studies we got to tackle the fascinating subject Design Thinking in an innovation process. In class we developed a new idea to enhance learning at Laurea in groups of 4 or 5 people.

Not only did we get a great exercise in team work, but also learned to use different DT tools such as interviews and observations techniques, brainstorming and brainwriting, mind maps and rapid prototyping, which are introduced in Katja Tschimmel’s article “Design Thinking as an Effective Toolkit for Innovation”. In the end we got a chance to present our new service concept to Laurea faculty members.

I found the DL toolkit and The FORTH method of Gijs van Wulfen very useful and interesting considering my own work and projects in the company I work for. FORTH is an innovation method for creating new concepts. The chapter titled “Raise Ideas” explains how to develop great ideas and get internal support for them inside your company.

Why do great ideas fail?

“What’s the use of brilliant ideas if there’s no support within the organization?”

- Gijs van Wulfen

Van Wulfen begins his book with words: “innovation is highly relevant to every organization. Yet, eighty percent of innovation projects never reach the market.” Everything might be working for you: it’s the right time to innovate, you are prepared and know the purpose and direction of the innovation, but still the project fails. Why?

Often this is due to the lack of support from the management. You might not receive resources to complete your project or the management might not get behind the idea and rejected it. It is impossible to innovate alone in an organization! A great idea needs to be bought by – not only the public – but management, colleagues and employees of your own company as well. Your vision needs to be shared by everyone in your organization for it to be successful and the idea to come into fruition.

Important question to ask are:

• How do we get support on the work floor?
• How to we create sponsorship on the top?
• How to we communicated ideas to the right people?

Selling your idea inside your own company is not as easy as you might think. This is why team approach is emphasized in the FORTH method. In order to get everyone behind your idea it is important to “promote positive energy and cooperation within your organization by letting those colleagues, who will play a role in the development and introduction process, participate in the ideation of their own innovation. You have to give them a change to discover for themselves what different paths are possible, what can be developed and what is realistic.” When people can give their own input in the project, they will be more invested in it.

Brainstorming is mindless?

In the classroom we discussed brainstorming and how it is are often viewed as frustrating and pointless, since nothing innovative comes out of the sessions. However, with the right team and right techniques, brainstorming can be very effective way to develop ideas.

“Designers not only develop innovative solutions by working in teams with colleagues, researchers and stakeholders, but also often in collaboration with the final customers and users of their creations.”

- Katja Tschimmel

Choosing the right team might be challenging, but it is important to remember that the bigger the team, the greater the diversity. With the right people involved in the project you not only get intern support, but having people from different departments, you get new ideas as well as different qualities and expertise.

Making ideation and brainstorming work:

1. Someone must own the innovation project, but he or she doesn’t work alone
2. Get new people every time for each new project
3. Get people from different departments who will be involved in the process
4. Don’t be negative, Accept ideas without prejudice, don’t say “that won’t work”
5. Management shouldn’t kill ideas in the beginning even if they are far-reaching
6. Take your time
7. Forget old ideas
8. Have a structured creative process

Don’ bet everything on one horse!

 

“For every seven new product ideas, about 4 enter development, 1 to 2 are launched and only 1 succeeds. “

–Gijs van Wulfen

The FORTH book suggests that it takes 3000 raw ideas to get to one successful product. That is why you should never bet everything on one horse!

During the Design Thinking course we developed new concepts using a structured creative process with warming-up exercises, brainstorming techniques and asking opinions from outsiders. It was very interesting to see how from 30 suggestions, the final idea crystalized.

On the FORTH expedition we learn that using the right brainstorming techniques you should get over 500 ideas, then 12 best concepts get chosen to be worked out in smaller groups. In the end you should end up with 3 to 5 product ideas or service concepts that can be worked out as mini new business cases. It is very important to get everyone who has not been working on the project in the company excited about the new ideas. The final step is to make a creative presentation to management – and then just wait for the green light for your innovation!

- Leena Salo, first year SID student

Sources:

Innovation Expedition. A visual toolkit to star innovation, Gijs van Wulfen, 2014. Bis Publishers.

Design Thinking as an effective Toolkit for Innovation. Katja Tschimmel. (2012) In: Proceeding of the XXIII ISPIM Conference: Action for Innovation: Innovation from Experience.

Pictures:

Leena Salo,  Map from Thye innovation Expedition by Gijs van Wulfen

Tim Brown, in his book Change by Design (100% recommended), urges a global change by what he calls Design Thinking.

Tim proposes to the world a new way to face the upcoming challenges, the small but also the big ones. A new way of redesigning the world. He offers a tool usable for every person to solve any problem in a creative, innovative and effective way.

He has been designing things every day during his whole professional life and that’s why he analyses the way designers thinks each time they have to face an assignment, a problem to solve, a question to answer.

This metal process, this mindset, this way of thinking is what he calls design thinking (in lowercase) and seems to be simply the way designers think and work in every project.

This mental process always follows the same scheme, the same stages in broad terms. This structured process, consolidated in the design sector as a practical and effective methodology to achieve the established objectives, is what he proposes as a framework to deal with any challenge to improve the world whatever its nature.
So this process abstracted and subsequently converted in a tool that could be used in every situation is what he calls “Design Thinking” (now with uppercase)

Brown sustains that everyone can solve wicked problems using Design Thinking (DT) as a toolbox even if you are not a designer. That’s why DT is an open source tool that can be applied in different disciplines. Even more if those disciplines lack creativity.

Tim Brown urges designers to play a bigger role than just creating cool, fashionable objects. He urges to think big, he calls for a change to local, collaborative, participatory “design thinking” as the 19th-century design thinker Isambard Kingdom Brunel did.

Think Beyond and think GLOCAL

While it is true that it is necessary to face small or big issues that influences everyone with DT methodology, on the other hand it is also true that we must do it with a positive global transformation purpose while working locally.
This balance between global and local is called Glocal.
Common sense helps us realize that the resources in this world are finite and inequality is not the path to progress.

DT, innovation and creative problem solving lose effect if we do not use design in order to transform our world with a triple purpose: economical, social and environmental.

Make it convivial.

Also design is needed to be more generative. We must involve users in the design process. Because they are experts of their own experience, we cannot just ask them, observe them or let them take part just in some project stages.
We are to give everyone the opportunity to design by our side.
We should bring the people we serve through design directly into the design process to ensure that we can meet their needs and dreams for the future.

Now we have techniques to help users to recognize, construct and express their knowledge about their own situation in ways that can be used in designing services that are supposed to fulfill their needs (Elizabeth Sanders & Pieter Jan Stappers 2012).

Learning Design Thinking by Developing

During my last three years I’ve lead many workshops with clients and users as a service designer in rrebrand. Meanwhile I have trained many people in Design Thinking methodologies and skills.
For this reason I have experienced many similar learning methodologies such as “learning by doing”, constructivism and also constructionism’s “learning by making” and I was so excited to dive into Laurea’s Learning by Developing methodology.
Laurea’s SID degree programme started this year with a master class about Practical Design Thinking with Katja Tschimmel and Gijs van Wulfen.

First I have to say that I really enjoyed it and I learned so much from our two guest lecturers and from my classmates. It really was very interesting to live the whole experience of applying the Design Thinking Tools in a concrete case as we were learning them.
Maybe some extra time for discussing in order to fix knowledge at the end of each practice would have been desirable towards improving the two days session.

Gijs van Wulfen invited us to join The Innovation Expedition, the Forth methodology to innovate. It was very interesting to see how you can push your ideas to become a real project and how to take them to implementation stage. However Forth innovation method seems to be more appropriate for the in company innovation process of big companies.

On the other hand, Katja Tschimmel approach to Design Thinking appeared to be a more open minded vision, introducing different Design Thinking models and different tools to use in each context, situation and stage of the design process. I felt more confortable with Katjas vision because of the holistic and adaptive approach.

Sensemaking innovation.

Every DT model I face seems to lack the same stage for me.
I really believe that we should innovate for a better world, not just for the isolated fact of innovating.
I think that before facing any design assignment we should ask ourselves about the driving motivations, the deep sense of the issue. The first stages of any innovation process should begin with questions: like what for? What is driving you? What are the individual and collective experiences that build yourself?
Every person, every company innovates the way they really and deeply are.
We must know what is inside. What is giving us sense.

Nowadays any form of innovation needs to ad a sense stage to the process.
At rrebrand we call it Sensemaking Innovation.

By Luis Miguel Garrigós, MBA SID Laurea 2014

References:

Tschimmel, K. (2012). Design Thinking as an effective Toolkit for Innovation.

Brown, T. (2008). Design Thinking. Harvard Business Review.

Brown, Tim 2009. Change by design: how design thinking can transform organizations and inspire innovation. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Sanders, Elizabeth & Stappers, Pieter Jan 2013. Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.

van Wulfen, Gijs 2013. The innovation expedition – a visual toolkit to start innovation. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.

Have you ever read the story about the funniest customer feedback in the world? It is the one directed to Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group. It was sent by a passenger who flew from Mumbai to Heathrow with Virgin Airlines and who wasn’t too happy about the food catering or the inflight entertainment during the flight. Apparently Finnair doesn’t want this to happen to them, so they hired a creative technology company called Reaktor to improve their in-flight entertainment service. Reaktor describes itself as a constructer of well-functioning services. The reason they believe they were chosen was that they could deliver both the design and development from the same house.

Starting Point

It had previously taken a huge amount of time to navigate through the entertainment system. For the new system the aim was to have less levels to navigate, show the content on the first page and of course for it to be faster. The main goal was to improve passenger satisfaction. It was interesting to hear about the development process, which was reputedly a new way of working for Finnair and Panasonic, the manufacturer of the hardware. The displays in the planes have a computer inside and it was impossible to take them out of the aircrafts as they were flying daily. It required people from Reaktor to travel to Panasonic office in California where they had the equipment needed for the development process.

The Designing Process

The team consisted of five smaller groups: Development, Coaching, Concept, UX (user experience)/UI (user interface) and Visuals. According to Reaktor the team worked seamlessly together during the process. The kick-off for the project was in June 2013 and the installation started in August 2014. They had possibility for only two plane visits, which was surprising to hear. So they decided to build a test lab where they then performed user research and tests. The process wasn’t linear, but instead went from designing, developing and testing back to beginning several times.

The Current Situation

The new service is now being installed to all Finnair’s aircrafts which have flights lasting at least seven hours. It certainly helps fight that boredom on those long flights. According to Reaktor two or three Finnair planes have the new system now and after it is installed to the others, Finnair is going to make a customer survey. Presumably they’ll get better feedback than Virgin did.

The reflection

Why did Finnair feel the need for a new in-flight entertainment service? It is plausible that their previous customer surveys had shown that the customers really needed this. Moreover the low-cost airlines like Norwegian are offering high-level in-flight entertainment service during their flights including free WiFi on board. That is surely a big reason for Finnair to make improvements of their own. Reaktor told us that Finnair decided not to have analytics in the system at this point, but maybe that is something they want to add in the future. Along with some features that help to improve tax free sales. I guess that would be very convenient.

They say that service innovation can only be successful when there is an actual need for the service. And in Finnair’s case I think there really was. The new system appears to be a great enhancement for the old.

Written by Marja Roine

For more info, please see the presentation:

The Service Design Achievement presentations continued at Nordkapp’s office as Sami Niemelä, Creative Director, from Nordkapp and Jussi Juntunen, Service Designer, from OP-Pohjola presented the story of Pivo, the Finnish mobile wallet application. The other parties included in the Pivo project were N2 marketing, and Toinen Phd media agency.

Jussi started by introducing the Pivo team that is located in Oulu, Finland. It was interesting to notice how much the team had grown since the start of the project. Jussi continued by telling a little bit of background of the Pivo. OP-Pohjola, the largest national bank in Finland, had noticed that there is a need for a Finnish mobile wallet and they wanted to create it themselves before a global competitor steps in. They also wanted to separate the new resulting brand from the OP-Pohjola brand, so they needed to create a new brand from the start as well. This was because OP wanted the app to be expanded to other banks. The aim was to create a personal financing application that offers a beautiful and effortless way to follow and understand daily consumption, and tap into various offers and loyalty programs at once.

Sami and Jussi presenting the story of Pivo app.

In the beginning of the project the OP’s Pivo team had free hands to start developing the app and they started to try things out, making prototypes and interviewing people. From the very start the team had a common understanding of the vision based on a moodboard that Jussi had made. They had decided to make the coolest app in Finland. They came up with the idea of “Am I broke?” -concept, which meant basically a quick glance to one’s finances in the form of a graph in the app. To build the Pivo app flat design was used.

Nordkapp then stepped in somewhere in the middle of the project. The intense development time was approximately 7-9 months. Sami from Nordkapp talked about LEAN design and the importance of iteration, but reminded also about the “over iteration” that could possibly happen. At some point you just have to make decisions. With the brand name, for example, they came up with different name ideas like Lompsa before Pivo was chosen. A brand workshop was also held and they conceived four different brand attributes describing the brand. These attributes were; well designed, human, intelligent and credible.

Jussi explained that in OP they do a lot of user research in general. In Pivo’s case it included tools such as interviews, usability tests, concept validations as well as continuous feedback. Feedback often comes in the form of emails, or as comments in Facebook and Twitter. The Pivo team then tries to react and respond to that feedback as fast as possible. Sami continued that the UI (User Interface) is the actual product in this case, and Pivo is therefore quite untypical Finnish service or product.

The below pictures give a nice example how the design has developed from start of the project (pictures from the presentation).

Pivo in the beginning of design process.

Pivo application after the design process.

The end result was a success and the app climbed on top of the Finnish app store in less than six months from the release and claimed the spot of most used banking app in the country. Pivo has also been awarded several times already. What were the main factors that lead to this success? They were things such as light process, passion for the product, frequent user research, fail fast and often, and strong vision. However, the development still continues as service development is never over.

I found the Pivo presentation very interesting. It was also useful for me learning wise, as creating and designing mobile applications is a something new for me. I downloaded the Pivo app to my mobile just to see how it looks, and it did look good. Too bad I currently have a different bank, so I can’t really take full advantage of it just yet.

You can check out the whole presentation in here.

Written by Heini Kauppinen, SID Student

The series in the Service Design Breakfast (#SDA15) continued with an exciting topic on November 5th, when OP-Pohjola, the largest national bank in Finland, and design company Nordkapp presented how they designed and developed the Mobile Wallet Pivo – one of the most successful banking applications in Finland.

Pivo Wallet has an intuitive and simple UI.

What is Pivo?

Pivo is a digital wallet application for smart phones. With an intuitive and simple UI, it offers an easy way for customers to glance at their account balance, while simultaneously viewing their purchase history and an estimate for future spending based on their buying habits. It helps customers to be in control of their daily spending and to know what they can afford. Pivo has also integrated loyalty programs into the service offering, such as PINS and Cityshoppari, enabling the customer to find offers and coupons based on their interest and location. Thus, Pivo is a platform for mobile payments, focusing on the purchase moment, before and after the actual payment. The aim has been to develop one common brand for other partners and banks to build on.

Continuous feedback from the customers

A Lean UX design process was used to develop Pivo Wallet, with the continuous circle of thinking, iterating and measuring. Customers have been involved throughout the entire design process. Actually they were involved already before the concrete concept was defined. Feedback was asked from customers based on a vague idea using a video prototype communicating the concept thinking. A lot of qualitative and quantitative user research was made already in the beginning of the process. The hypotheses were validated with interviews, demos, usability tests as well as private alpha and public beta tests. Pivo also has an active user base providing continuous feedback and improvement ideas via Facebook, Twitter and email.

Lean UX design process was used to develop Pivo Wallet.

The UI is the actual product

The design process had an articulated vision from the beginning. Mood boards were used to capture the visual look and feel for clean, minimalistic and modern UI. The goal was to do one thing well. It was interesting to hear that inspiration and analogies were searched from other mobile applications that usually have excellent UIs, such as weather applications.

There were four elements chosen as design attributes for the UI development:

• Well designed (simple, minimalistic, modern)
• Human (e.g. personalized greetings)
• Intelligent (e.g. estimate the future spending)
• Credible (reliability for a bank application)

Simple, minimalistic and intuitive UI has been the core of designing Pivo Wallet.

Pivo Wallet has been very successful. Since its launch in May 2013 there has been over 350 000 downloads. 33% of the users open Pivo every day and 66% on a weekly basis. The average rating for Pivo Wallet in iTunes app store is 4,5/5. Pivo Wallet also won a Reddot Award for communication design in 2014.

More information about the Pivo #SDA15 presentation can be found at Slideshare and Pivo Wallet website.

Susanna Turunen, Laurea SID 2014 student

Helsinki Airport (picture from Finavia).

What could make airport service experience more pleasurable for transfer passengers? Well, you could get some ideas as Kirsikka Vaajakallio and Jaakko Wäänänen from Diagonal, as well as Juha Vasko from Finavia presented their Travellab project at Service Design Breakfast last week. Diagonal’s Travellab is also a candidate for Service Design Achievement 2015 in Finland.

What Travellab?

Diagonal created the Travellab concept, which is a model for testing ideas at the airport. More precisely it’s a model for rapid prototyping and idea ranking created for Finavia to improve the transfer experience at Helsinki Airport. It’s also a great example of using service design tools and design thinking in a creative way to develop services.

Diagonal and Finavia presenting Travellab.

Background of the project

Starting point for the project was Finavia’s strategy to make the Helsinki airport the most desired transit travel airport and to support this goal the Travellab was created. The project started with a positive problem as Finavia had been gathering service ideas during the years and already had 200+ existing ideas for enhancing the customer experience at the airport. However, some help was needed and the brief for Diagonal was to design a model for Finavia for prototyping and validating ideas in a consistent way. It had to be taken into consideration that transfer passengers spend relatively short amount of time at the airport, approximately 1,5h.

Travellab in action

With the brief in mind Diagonal then created the Travellab concept. By using their idea funnel technique, they first started by reducing the ideas from 200+ to 40-50 ideas, and in the end came up with 12 prototypes that were tested during the project (picture below is from the presentation). Another important focus was on measuring the impact and how that should be done, as well as what kind of business cases there could be for future purposes. Targeted benefits were also agreed before starting the project, mainly de-risking through prototyping, communicational benefits and maximizing media coverage, as well as strategic growth target of the airport.

During the Travellab project different ideas that have a true impact on the transit travellers’ experience were tested and the experiences was measured, assessed and further developed. After kick-off and preparation phase, Lab 1 and Lab 2 phases were the main prototyping periods taking altogether eight weeks. Finally, impact on customer experiences was measured and analyses were made. Diagonal also had international trainees to help in the project to be able to get the feedback in several languages. It was very important that the work was done together with the passengers, who loved testing the prototypes. Additionally, Finavia had a customer insight research ongoing in parallel so that the inputs from the research could be used for Travellab project.

In the below video you can see the Travellab in action. Yoga gate was the biggest hit of the prototypes.

Outcomes of the project

The results of the Travellab were systematically gone through with Finavia for their future actions. Diagonal also created a model for prototyping for Finavia’s further use. The model includes the experiences, challenges, learnings and knowhow that was gathered during the Travellab project. Furthermore, Diagonal created a ranking model that Finavia can use for evaluating prototyping results and to make investment decisions. Development work at Finavia is currently ongoing.

Travellab outcomes in numbers (picture from the presentation).

I think the Travellab project really showcased the impact and importance of prototyping and co-creating with the customers. It was also interesting to learn a bit more how airports operate and how the moneyflows are organized but that’s another topic altogether. As a sports lover I have to say that my personal favorite of the prototypes was the yoga gate and I hope that service will be available in the future too.

If you are interested to find out more about this project, go check out the whole Service Design Breakfast presentation.

Written by Heini Kauppinen, SID Student

Have you ever get bored at the airport while waiting for the connection flight? Would you like to use your idle time for relaxing yoga or have a cup of coffee at the gate served from coffee bicycle?

19^th of November Service Design Breakfast took place at Diagonals´ office at Punavuori. Kirsikka Vaajakallio and Jaakko Wäänänen from design agency Diagonal presented their Travellab case with SID Master’s student Juha Vasko from Finavia.

Juha Vasko, Kirsikka Vaajakallio and Jaakko Wäänänen

Travellab project started with a positive problem. Vasko told that Finavia had over 200 service ideas from the passengers how to enhance the customer experience at the airports. Because Finavia did not have a system to proceed with the ideas they asked for Diagonals´ help.

Diagonal created a concept called Travellab. Travellab was an effective, reliable and experimental model for testing ideas affecting and improving the transfer passengers experience at Helsinki airport. Over 200 ideas were categorized and prioritizes through “Idea funnel” 12 of them were prototyped and tested. All the prototypes e.g. restaurant day and yoga gate were tested in the real life and context with Finavias´ customers.

“Idea funnel”

I interviewed Kirsikka Vaajakallio about the Travellab project.

What kind of unexpected results did you get?

We were happily surprised how well travellers took part into different prototypes e.g. yoga and also how eagerly companies come along to the projects. We learned that you can test the ideas with affordable prototypes but it is quite time consuming. It took more time to build and coordinate the circumstances and partner networks than we expected, Vaajakallio told.

What kind of service design methods did you use during the process?

We used different kind of workshops. All the prototypes were visualized in every phase so everyone could follow how the projects proceed. It was also easy to communicate and develop the prototypes with visualized materials.

Rapid prototyping with the minimum viable idea/service was used. Then we developed the service based on feedback from the passengers. E.g. the cardboard photo wall, called Selfie from Hel where you could take a picture of yourself as a Santa Claus, did not work until we cut a hole to it so people could put their head through it.

We used also observation, interviews, inquiry, and conversations to gather feedback about the services.

The main issues were: visualization and learning through interaction and co-operation with different stakeholders and customers, Vaajakallio summarized.

Travellab is one of the finalist cases in the Service Design Achievement of the Year. Last year Diagonal won the award and I think they have a good chance to win it again this year.

Yoga gate got very good response

Text and pictures by Laura Rinta-Jouppi SID student 2014

(c) FORGE Service Lab

A couple of months ago our SID 2014 group started the courses New Service Development and Innovative Business Models, as well as Deep Customer Insights Through Ethnographic Research. As learning by developing is the key in this Master degree program we were about to get hands on with a real life research and service development process. The case company we got an assignment from was DIGILE, more specifically their FORGE Service Lab.

What are DIGILE and FORGE Service Lab?

DIGILE is the Center for Science, Technology and Innovation (SHOK) focusing on Internet economy and related technologies and business. You can learn more about DIGILE from their website.

FORGE Service Lab has been created to accelerate the digitalization of services in Finland. It is a development laboratory, where digital services can be created. The video below shows an illustration of the journey that FORGE Service Lab can offer to the world of digitalized services.

Working on the assignment

We were divided into teams of five and the task was to create a customer value proposition and service design support concept for FORGE Lab. We started our assignment in October’s contact session by staring to analyze the current state of FORGE Service Lab, and we also had the opportunity to discuss with DIGILE’s two representatives. After the classes each of us was to conduct an interview with a current or potential FORGE Service Lab customer.

After the interviews we continued our work in teams in November’s contact session. Based on our customer insight findings it was time to have an interactive workshop using the CoCo Tool Kit, which is a collection of tools and a workbook designed to support service businesses in adapting co-creation activities. I actually wish we had had more time exploring with the CoCo Tool Kit. If you would like to know more about the tool kit please check these pages.

In November’s workshop we also worked on creating a Service-Logic Based Business Model Canvas for FORGE Service Lab. Service-Logic Business Model Canvas is a modification of the most popular business model framework and takes into account the service logic principles (Ojasalo & Ojasalo 2014). The purpose was to clarify the value proposition and redesign the service concept. We were to reflect on what could be the valuable service design support that FORGE offers to its customers. It was challenging I must say, as we also had to consider a systematic and efficient approach that enables creation of innovative, global services and raises the Finnish competence level towards leading position. Below is a picture of how our canvas looked after the workshop, so we still had a lot be accomplished and refined.

Service-Logic Business Model Canvas in the making.

Next steps were to finalize our proposition. The final presentations to FORGE Service Lab representatives were due in December. Our team mainly used online tools like emails, facebook and skype for working on our presentation. Here’s our whole development process in short.

Our team’s development process throughout the assignment.

Finally, it was time to present the outcome to FORGE Service Lab. Our team’s presentation included findings from the interviews, Service-Logic Business Model Canvas for FORGE, the new value proposition, description of value delivery process, suggested service design toolkit, attributes of an ideal FORGE Service Lab project, as well as some learning reflections. We received constructive feedback and based on that can then finalize our report. Furthermore, it was interesting to see the different approaches the other teams had taken!

Conclusions

Overall, this has been a great experience of learning by developing. However, it turned out to be much more challenging than we initially expected given the rather vast assignment, short time period and everyone’s busy schedules. But excuses aside, we will still be refining our final report as there’s always room for improvement. Hopefully, FORGE Service Lab will be able to utilize any of our students’ reports in the future.

Written by Heini Kauppinen, SID Student

References

Ojasalo, K. & Ojasalo, J. 2014. Adapting Business Model Thinking to Service Logic: An Empirical Study on Developing a Service Design Tool. In Gummerus, J. & von Koskull, C. (eds.) The Nordic School – Alternative Perspectives on Marketing and Service Management. Helsinki, Finland: Publications of Hanken School of Economics. (in print).

Browsing through a mountain of photos.

“I’m walking over a pile of 900 000 photos representing an amount of photos loaded daily to Flickr, image hosting website. It feels weird to step on photos, on someone’s face, on a cute baby, a guitar… I don’t think I have ever done this before, not in a photography exhibition at least”.

That was part of my customer journey through The Finnish Museum of Photography’s #snapshot exhibition that was co-designed with Futurice, and with help of Tampere University and Aalto University. Risto Sarvas from Futurice and Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger from the museum presented their case for the Service Design Achievements 2015. This was also the last Service Design Breakfast of this year, and what a great way it was to end it at the Finnish Museum of Photography.

Service design challenge

The service design challenge with #snapshot exhibition was to turn culture into something that people can walk into and have an interactive physical experience. The #snapshot exhibition’s objective is to explore how the Internet and digitalization has changed contemporary photographic culture. As you all probably know there’s a large amount of photo sharing websites and applications, and everybody’s basically carrying a camera with them in their smartphones.

Futurice was really up to this challenge, as they wanted to design for public good purposes and make a social impact. And of course it was also a very interesting design challenge. It was different from their typical project as there’s no technical platform, no clear organizational structure in museum, no existing solutions, no business drivers, and no ready brand.

Anna-Kaisa and Risto presenting #snapshot.

Walking on a photomountain.

How to tackle the challenge?

The whole process started approximately a year ago. The team realized that they couldn’t start with a typical design research and needed help from Academia (Tampere University and Aalto University) resources who had been researching photography for years. Then of course co-operation with the museum was needed, as they are the experts in organizing exhibitions. First of all, interviews were conducted, and after the interviewing process became the ideation and concept phase, followed by designing and finally building the exhibition, which opened in August 2014.

After interviews nine different profiles of people aged 13-52 were created. Then nine target visitor profiles were created. The team wanted to consider how to make it a rich, coherent experience. Through service design process team used tools such as brainstorming, Lego blueprint, working on paper, making prototypes, and building customer journeys. With prototyping they tested customer feelings and emotions by making an exhibition about people’s private photos and by observing their reactions. Futurice also build a mini customer journey of the exhibition in their office so they could test how the journey actually worked in practice.

#duckface, #flexing, #meitsie…

Why do I take photos -wall.

The end result; #snapshot exhibition

The end result is an interesting and interactive exhibition about the ongoing cultural change in photography field. The exhibition is about the photographs we all capture and share. It’s also about snapshots of tragedies and snapshots with political impacts. Additionally, the exhibition includes contemporary artwork by Catherine Balet, Erik Kessels, Niklas Kullström, and Sisse Stroyer.

After the presentation we had an opportunity to take a journey through the exhibition guided by Risto Sarvas. The photos on this blogpost, honoring the spirit of the exhibition, are snapshots from my iPhone captured during the journey. My snapshots might have shortly flashed through the real time Instagram feed wall at the exhibition. What’s more, I even learned a couple of new terms like #vadering and #meitsie. It’s good to learn something new every day :)

Taking a closer look at Niklas Kullström’s artwork at the exhibition.

Risto from Futurice guiding us through the exhibition.

The #snapshot exhibition is open at the Finnish Museum of Photography until 18^th of January 2015, so you still have a chance to check it out before it goes on tour to Germany! You also have a chance to view the whole presentation here.

Written and snapshots by Heini Kauppinen, SID Student

The course New Service Development and Innovative Business Models brought us first real life experience in service innovation and design by working in groups on an existing service concept offered by FORGE Service Lab. FORGE, mothered by Digile, is a non-profit accelerator for digital service creation with the ultimate goal to assist boosting the internationalization of Finnish companies. Being still a young business, FORGE asked for our ideas to validate or challenge their value proposition and how to strengthen the role of Service Design in their offering.

At first, our team struggled with what seemed to be a very vague service idea and to fully understand what FORGE actually wants to offer to what kind of customers. A lot of time was spent trying to shed more light onto this by discussions within our group and together with a FORGE representative. None of this seemed to move us forward. In retrospect this was a good thing – working in service design, this will be a standard situation one should embrace in order to let creativity run free without getting caught up in trying to figure out everything in the very beginning of the process.

In conjunction with the course Deep Customer Insights through Ethnographic Research our team set out to conduct interviews with potential FORGE customers or organizations that could help bring more clarity to the needs of Finnish companies when it comes to developing digital services. We individually interviewed a technology company, the City of Helsinki, a luxury watch manufacturer, a representative from hospitality management, and a co-housing company. Even though the interviews mainly brought us insights speaking against the need for a service like FORGE’s, we took this as a great starting point to find ideas on how to improve the offering, starting from the value proposition.

A great help in this was working with CoCo Cosmos and simultaneously with the service logic business model canvas. Through CoCo we managed to create a clear service flow from a company’s idea for a new digital service, their need to validate this idea and to find the right partners to develop it further, until commercializing the now existing new digital service. The service logic business model canvas help us to figure out the “what’s really in it for me” part from customer perspective.

Image: CoCo Cosmos – Evolution of FORGE’s service idea

Visualizing the digital service development journey via CoCo enabled us to realize that there are different building blocks and the thought arose that customers should be able to pick the blocks they need and drop others. In addition, we realized that a FORGE customer does not just want to develop a digital service. The customer wants to find out if this digital service will bring profit in the end. We took this point as one of the main items used to develop FORGE’s offering and value proposition further.

After presenting our enhanced service concept and value propositions, we received additional feedback from FORGE and based on that finalized our proposal for them. This concluded our journey through a real life service design project from an fuzzy starting point to conducting interviews over to using service design tools to bring order to the still fuzzy chaos and to finally uncover a service flow with room for improvements. What studying service innovation and design has taught us so far was confirmed during this hands-on experience with FORGE: There is always room for improvement and service companies should welcome this fact to keep evolving and growing.

Image: FORGE in a visual nutshell, according to us 

By Corina Maiwald, SID student

References

Ojasalo, K. & Ojasalo, J. 2014. Adapting Business Model Thinking to Service Logic: An Empirical Study on Developing a Service Design Tool. In Gummerus, J. & von Koskull, C. (eds.) The Nordic School – Alternative Perspectives on Marketing and Service Management. Helsinki, Finland: Publications of Hanken School of Economics. (in print).