Category: SID degree programme

  • Design Thinking, the secret of business innovation

    Remember that feeling of inadequacy in art class at school for ‘not being creative enough’? I do. To this day I’ve thought that I’m simply not cut out for being creative. And then, about a month ago while attending Katja Tschimmel and Mariana Valenca’s course, I finally realised I too can be creative. That’s when…

  • Design Thinking helps you to move better when creating something new

    We had two great mind shaking days on September when Katja Tschimmel introduced us to Design Thinking (DT), the concept and toolkit for creative processes. You can call DT also a mindset: “the way of thinking and doing”. It is meant also for organisations and businesses outside design field. We had a concrete case and went through DT process…

  • Young designer from Norway, experiments with using visualization tools and methods from service design thinking, to enhance engagement of previous prisoners and troubled youth

    Young designer from Norway, experiments with using visualization tools and methods from service design thinking, to enhance engagement of previous prisoners and troubled youth

    Caroline Chaffin, a Norwegian student who is about to graduate with an MBA degree in Service Innovation and Design, wanted to do something different for her Master thesis. With a previous background from Healthcare and Social entrepreneurship, she wanted to find a case company with a social purpose, which allowed her to work close with…

  • Designing is about doing, not talking!

    “Design is all about action, and business too often gets stuck at the talking stage. Uncertainty comes with the territory when business objective is growth. But that doesn’t mean that you are powerless to do anything about it. You can’t make it go away, but you can manage it rather than allow it to manage…

  • Designers: Think BIG! … but also BEYOND and GLOCAL

    Designers: Think BIG! … but also BEYOND and GLOCAL

    Tim Brown, in his book Change by Design (100% recommended), urges a global change by what he calls Design Thinking. Tim proposes to the world a new way to face the upcoming challenges, the small but also the big ones. A new way of redesigning the world. He offers a tool usable for every person…

  • The power of design thinking

    We are honored to have contact lessons with Dr. Katja Tschimmel, Design Professor at ESAD Portugal, and Gijs van Wulfen, Innovation Consultant about design thinking. I work in a design organization surrounded by designers; I always wanted to know how design thinking can be used by anyone as a toolkit. This course gives me the…

  • Learning in Action – How We Won the Second Place in a Service Design Competition

    ”Could you send a female inspector?” This is how Jaakko started our pitch at Sitras’s Service Design competition on March 3, 2014. The competition was part of Sitra’s new security forum, and it intended to test how service design could help to improve public services and make them more user-centric. The actual design goal set…

  • Culture & Service Design

    Service design is allegedly a human-centered method for developing new services. A great effort is made for capturing users’ needs, mental models, experiences, desired outcomes… —you name it! Although this is done specifically borrowing techniques from ethnography, there’s barely no mention to cultural differences! With increasingly global companies, rising migration rates or whole sectors —such…

  • Do Your Service Speak Different Cultures ?

    Figure 1 – Multicultural faces, source: http://geoffallan.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html   Hello, Culture! The cross-cultural issues in service was my first elective course with in my Service Innovation & Design MBA study; with the expectations set to provide a better understanding to cross cultural aspects of service design, and I wasn’t mistaken at all! Coming from an background…

  • Wrapping up the “New Service Development and innovative service systems” course

    During this fall, we have been introduced to various business related topics. In the “New Service Development and innovative services systems” course, we have learned the basics of blueprinting and how to create a business model canvas. Course objectives include; students can create a plan for developing a service concept and also evaluate and improve…