Learning to visualize – say it in 3 frames!

In my first bar camp session, Mauro Rego from Service Design Berlin promised us the attendees to learn how to visualize and do a canvas tool on anything. First assignment for us was to illustrate in 5 frames how to do a toast (=toasted bread). After the individual assignment, we as a team would have to agree which 5 drawings out of 25 in sequence represented the action best. Then we had to reduce the frames in 3 still keeping the message clear! It is astonishing how well illustrated pictures can speak so much. The next assignment was way more difficult – with the same process we would illustrate as a team how to help a group of people to plan their shared holiday trip. Here the different perceptions of the assignment would step in and we got a bit stuck. But in the end we managed to produce the following holiday planning canvas/tool which is cool! The benefit of these kind of tools is enabling communication.

The second and last barcamp session was lead by Marc Stickdorn (author of This is design thinking) and Klaus Schwarzenberger. They introduced a tool for making contextual interviews on existing services. The tool is called Experience Fellow and the person making the journey and reporting on it can download it free from application stores for IOS and Android. We experimented on the app and Marc showed us what kind of analysis can be drawn from the data entries. It seemed handy and was priced reasonably for research use.Marc recommended to use diverse data types (qualitative, quantitative), to use diverse researchers and diverse methods when aiming at deep insights on customers. Triangulate – triangulate – triangulate!A bold plan of improving the health of african women

The last key note speech of SXC15 was held by Melanie Wendland, who works for M4ID and teaches also a course in Laurea on SD in digital context. M4ID is involved in an impressive project to improve women’s health in Sub-Saharan Africa with the means of service design methods. They engaged diverse stakeholders of up to 500 persons to the user research, including african health care providers and women themselves to define how to improve services. Codesign was also used. The result was a customer journey of a safe delivery of a baby, one significant outcome of the project being the involvement of men into the journey as fathers or partners.

Ending panel – takeaways 

The short panel in the end encouraged the designers to continue enabling transformation and to dure the struggles of the journey. Adapting slowly by making it work first in teams, then progressing into organization. What happened in Paris during the conference prompted one panelist to point out that development is cyclical in reality – sometimes it goes backwards but then at some point turns again to positive.Last takeaways in a nutshell…