This is my experience from the Service Design Global Conference 2014 in Stockholm 7-8^th October with the topic Creating value for quality of life. Because I arrived to Stockholm already on Monday 6^th October for participating to pre-events the experience for me was three full days of inspiration and learning. Those days included many interesting talks and speakers and most of them were very inspiring. Couple practical workshops where I had the opportunity to try new methods. Meeting new people and have great discussions with them. Sharing ideas and knowledge and learning from others. The best part was that I could do all that with many of my fellow students what made this experience even better for me. I was surprised how much energy you can get from the people who share the same interest: Service Design. Here are some of my takeaways from the conference.

How we can improve quality of life with the Service Design? and how we can make the difference with it? First of all it needs lots of changes in organizations. Good question was that where should Service Design belong in organization and the answer was simply: everywhere. We should start from the top when we want to start change in the organization, but at the same time we need to prove the power of Service Design for all levels. One suggestion was that we could start introducing Service Design with some small easy project which is easy to make it real fast after ideation. That would be practical way to show how it works and that it really works. Stop thinking, start doing someone said in the panel discussion and I believe that is what we need to do.

We need also good measurements to show the results of the Service Design. We heard many interesting ideas about that and I found particularly Nathan Schedroff’s talk about total value very interesting. We should remember that the customers appreciate more qualitative values when business looks more about quantitative values. In the end of the day quantitative values; price and function, is only the top of the ice-berg when we are looking the total value.

Related to changes in the organizations, very interesting topic in the conference and I think a hot topic in otherwise also at the moment is the employee engagement. Before we can make difference with the Service Design we need corporate culture which enables employees to do so. I think it is quite obvious for many that happy employees means happy customers. And eventually that means better results for the company, but how many companies really put efforts to that? We heard very inspiring talk from Mark Levy from Airbnb when he told how they are doing it at Airbnb. Especially I liked the goldfish rule which he presented that love your customers and employees like yourself, do little extras and give little bit more.

This blog post is a part of SID course The Current Topics in Service Design and it’s written by SID student Minna Myyryläinen.