Category: SID degree programme

  • 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…

  • Starting the service innovation & design journey

    The classroom was filled with excitement on last Thursday, as the 4th SID Master’s group started to navigate their service innovation & design journey. Throughout orientation the 28 new students were completely submerged in the Laurea’s cocreative learning culture, which provides the foundation for success as they pursue the Master’s program together. Team-building exercises at…

  • Are visual design skills important for service designers?

    Figure 1: Blog post mind map. To understand and develop service design we need to combine knowledge from different areas, as business administration, publishing, marketing, psychology, journalism, design, mathematics, ethnography, among others. Every service solution will need a better understand of context, user needs and usage. The natural born service designer is beholder, curious, focused,…

  • Service design case study: how to turn customer challenges into new service offerings

    Author: Tuomas Suominen, tuomas.suominen@kaakelikeskus.fi In this blog post, I present how you can turn your customers challenges into new service offerings. The most crucial thing is to gather as much information as you can about your service users daily tasks. In this case study, this was done by interviewing clients. You can be surprised how…

  • Meet the guardian angels of the Service Innovation & Design (SID) Masters Programme

    The competence the students gain in Laurea’s international SID Masters Programme is  on a world class. The SID Masters Programme was launched in 2009 as the first SID Masters Programme in the world. This pioneering initiative has started very well. The programme has attracted highly motivated and talented students from all over the world. The…

  • Survival guide to Laurea Masters Program

    If you are reading this post as a new arrival to Laurea Masters Program, I salute you. Congratulations of getting in for this ride. It’s a ride where you get to meet awesome people and it will provide you in-depth knowledge about service design and all that it has to offer companies. I promise you…