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