By Ninja Fedy

Photo: Silviu Guiman

The topic of the fifth Service Experience Camp was “Crafting delight, delivering value” and it was organised in Berlin on November 2-3, 2018. The concept of this two-day event is a so-called unconference: a highly interactive event where service design professionals from all around the world gather together and learn from each other. This year’s camp offered a lot of interesting but relatively short key talks as well as peer-to-peer open sessions that were organised by the participants more or less spontaneously, on the spot.

The first day of the camp started off with an introduction by the organisers Katrin Dribbisch, Mauro Rego, Martin Jordan, Manuel Grossmann and Olga Scupin (photo below, from left) – a lovely bunch of people behind service design initiatives such as the Service Design Berlin community and a print publication, the Service Gazette.

Photo: Silviu Guiman

The agendas of the two days looked like this before the camp started and the empty slots got filled by the open sessions:

   

Key talk by Maria Lumiaho

Maria Lumiaho, Design Director at the Finnish airline company Finnair, was the first guest on stage. Her talk was mainly about how they built up design capabilities and an in-house design team of 90 designers in just a few years and shared some personal experiences like how she as a new employee had asked for a slackbot being created to translate all the acronyms that were used in the airline business.

Photo: Silviu Guiman

Finnair has to constantly be on top of different cultures and cultural changes all over the world as the company is targeting so many markets with Helsinki as a connection point between the East and the West. She encouraged all of us to start reading Chinese newspapers and reminded us how customer insights come from “all corners of the organisation”, not just designers.

Slides from the talk can be found at:

https://www.slideshare.net/ServiceExperienceCamp/creating-next-level-flight-experiences-maria-lumiaho (video of the talk will follow).

 

Open Sessions

The first key talk was followed by a call-to-action for the open sessions. Anyone in the audience could come up to the stage and pitch their idea about a 1-hour session on any topic. These session topics were then divided into smaller spaces at the event location, Kalkscheune in Berlin, and participants could freely choose the ones they were interested in. The format of the session was free: open discussion, workshop, lecture or a mix of these.

I will share my insight from a few sessions in a separate blog post.

 

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Photos: Silviu Guiman

Other key talks

More key talks were given throughout the camp days by:

• Karolina Kohler from Kaiser X Labs – Designing for future life events – insurance and pension services: https://www.slideshare.net/ServiceExperienceCamp/designing-for-future-life-events-karolina-kohler (video of the talk will follow)

 

• Temi Adeniyi from Blinkist – Data driven intuition and taking hunches seriously (video of the talk will follow)

 

• Hanna Kops from Transport of London – Future-proof design for urban mobility in growing cities: https://www.slideshare.net/ServiceExperienceCamp/futureproof-design-for-urban-mobility-in-growing-cities-hanna-kops (video of the talk will follow)

 

• Frankie Abralind from Sibley Hospital Washington D.C. – On designing healthcare from within: https://www.slideshare.net/ServiceExperienceCamp/design-for-implementation-frankie-abralind (video of the talk will follow)

 

• Jay Kaufmann from Zalando – Reimagining fashion and designing at scale (video of the talk will follow)

 

• Alistair Duggins from UK Government Digital Service – How making services accessible benefits for all users: https://www.slideshare.net/ServiceExperienceCamp/how-making-services-accessible-benefits-all-users-alistair-duggin (video of the talk will follow)

 

Panel discussion

The camp ended with a panel discussion and a wrap-up where the keynote speakers shared their thoughts on current topics in service design. What stuck for me was Hanna Kops’ comment on how important it is to give designers space to do their work. I personally see lack of “empty space” to allow for creativity to flourish as something that is often missing in design projects.

The panelists also pointed out the importance of storytelling: telling about the value you are creating so that users understand it and business people can tell it on when you are not there to justify the design decisions that were based on real user needs.

Photo: Silviu Guiman

Wrap-up

The Service Experience Camp 2018 was wrapped up by the hosts with distribution of prizes and a short introduction to what each of them will be doing in the near future as this event was sadly the last Service Experience Camp.

All the key talks are likely to be shared on Service Design Berlin’s social media accounts so keeping an eye on those will pay off if you are keen to learn more. Most of the slides from the key talks and open sessions can already be found at:

https://www.slideshare.net/ServiceExperienceCamp (including slides from this and previous years’ camps)

and the official photos at:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/servicedesignberlin/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2142090329169408

Thanks for reading! Next up will be part 3 of my series “Designers share”.