For a series of events related to service design and design research, STBY will be in Barcelona this summer. We’ll present a few talks and facilitate workshop. Very much looking forward to it already!
Barcelona Design Thinking Week 2013
The Barcelona Design Thinking Week will be hosted by Elisava, one of the leading design schools in Barcelona from the 1st to 5th of July 2013. The theme of this year’s event is ‘Social Change, Innovation and Enterpreneurship’. STBY has been invited to both give a talk about case studies illustrating the key principles of service design thinking, and hold a workshop to offer hands-on experience with the tools and methods that are frequently used in this field.
Presentation on 1st July: This Is Service Design Thinking – the story
Geke van Dijk and Bas Raijmakers, key contributors to the This Is Service Design Thinking book, present the key principles of service design thinking. They will illustrate these with case study projects from STBY London and Amsterdam, and from the global network for design research Reach. This will clarify not only the thinking behind service design but also the doing, its practice in local and global projects, in health care, mobile communications, and more.
Workshop on 2nd July: This Is Service Design Thinking – the toolbox
Want to try Service Design Thinking? Doing it yourself is even more fun than listening service design stories, or reading the TiSDT book. Experience yourself how to get from a brief to service scenarios, taking some of your own experiences as a starting point. Lots of drawing, storytelling and even performing, if you like. These three hours will leave you inspired to use Service Design Thinking in your own work.
More background of the general theme of ‘Social Change, Innovation and Enterpreneurship’:
Creativity and service optimisation are an everyday issue and social and economic changes driving new perspectives inside companies and organisations at all levels. The last five years have brought many challenges and changes on every level across Europe leading to new strategies, ideas and mechanisms emerging that propose future scenarios in all areas.
This context has given a rise to several questions including: What are the new languages and dynamics that determine sustainable dialogue in today’s society and what will the new dynamics between business and society be? What will be the new role of the entrepreneur and how will companies cope internally to adapt to change?
These and many more questions will be raised and analysed during the talks, workshop sessions and activities proposed for 2013 at the Barcelona Elisava DT week.
WebVisions Barcelona 2013
On 28th July, Geke will also present a session at WebVisions in Barcelona. Seen as “the creative conference for the Web”, this conference explores the future of design, content creation, user experience and business strategy inspiring learning, collaboration and entrepreneurism. Geke has been invited to speak about our experiences in working with our clients on sustainable changes in their service offering and ways of working.
Tugboats and Tankers: Contributing to Longterm Organisational Change
Contributing to longterm change in organisations and their service offering involves serious commitment and stamina. You seldom see radical changes just on the basis of a single project. The results of that project might be mind blowing in itself, but in the longer term the effect of it on the wider organisation might seem disappointing.
The best way to achieve lasting, long term results, is to work in open partnerships with client teams. Be transparent, agile and generous. As tugboats, helping the big tankers change their course, we of course need to be ambitious and ‘out of the box’, but at times we also need to be committed, modest, sensitive and patient.