I was lucky enough to attend Marc Stickdorn’s three day workshop on Service Design Thinking. For the uninitiated, service design is a holistic approach to… you guessed it, designing services! In Australia, this is more commonly referred to as user centric design, customer experience design, user experience design and the like, which is typically the domain of products. So it was refreshing to dedicate three solid days to learning a few new techniques to discover what customers really think, do and feel, using a combination of traditional ethnographic techniques (good news for anthropology students!) and lean/agile methodologies with a sprinkling of theatre!

A mix of students, educators and industry people from a wide range of disciplines attended the workshop. Confronted with the challenge of such a diverse audience, Marc started by disrupting the environment (ie. moving the chairs/tables away) and setting us an impossible 10 minute challenge – service design thinking on a napkin. For this task, we were asked to map out a service – internet banking for toddlers – in 10 minutes using nothing but a piece of paper (ie. the napkin). Teams of three were constructed and away we went. The scrappy first draft was produced and we all breathed a sigh of relief – our first task was complete and it was too larger brief to worry about succeeding or failing. First rule: fail fast. Sounds familiar?

From there we broke up into groups, created a service to enhance and spent the next three days exploring value network maps, assumption personas, customer journeys, the theatrical method, business model canvas and even a few service ads, but I’ll save those for another post!

As with most workshops, unconferences etc that I attend, I couldn’t help but mindmap the journey, so here you’ll find the days events over two mindmaps:

(For those of you who asked, this was done on my iPhone using an app called simple mind)

I was delighted to see that service design thinking is much like the Pollenizer way – a hybrid of user centric design, lean startup and agile methodology – the main difference being that service design incorporates ‘a touch of theatre’, which I’ll be sure to explore over the coming weeks at Pollenzier!

That aside, there were a number of uniquely distinct things about this workshop worth highlighting here:

• The workshop itself (like good service experiences) had a story arc, much like a James Bond film – or as Marc put it: Boom! wow…wow…wow…Boom! Ahhhh…. The peaks and flows meant that we were never bored and always living in anticipation of the next scene.
• Marc helped us understand the meta, the process behind the process, running the workshop as a ‘train the trainer’ session so we could understand the why, not just the how.
• The theatrical method is a unique way to gain useful insights into the motivations of human behaviour. There are a number of rules such as ‘do – don’t talk’, abstraction (eg. use a rubber chicken in place of prop X) and many more. But to really understand it, you need to see it, so here’s an example from @adamstjohn.

Finally, a big thanks to Selena Griffith at UNSW for opening the doors to us industry folk and of course to Marc for a thought provoking three days – thank you for sweeping us off our feet!

If you have any questions, hints or tips be sure to leave a comment below.