Service Innovation & Design

  • Tips on Unlocking Employee Excitement for Development Programs – Introducing Design Thinking! 

    Tips on Unlocking Employee Excitement for Development Programs – Introducing Design Thinking! 

    Employee development is the cornerstone of a thriving and innovative organization. As Tim Brown, the founder of the global design and innovation company IDEO, writes in his book Change by Design (2009), every company should have a design thinker in their corporate board, taking part in the company’s strategic marketing decisions and participating in their…

  • “Train Your Empathy Muscle”: A Crucial Skill in Service Design

    “Train Your Empathy Muscle”: A Crucial Skill in Service Design

    How often have you thought of empathy as a skill which can be trained? During the Design Thinking class, we found out that empathy is an important characteristic for a service designer to have, but it is also a quality and a tool which can be improved. Empathy is a prolific discussion point in Design…

  • Rethinking Problem Solving: The Power of Design Thinking

    By Julia Reinhard and Jasmin Tossavainen In our fast-evolving world, linear problem-solving methods fall short when dealing with the intricate challenges we encounter daily. The book and a majority of the articles we explored highlight the inadequacy of linear approaches in addressing today’s complex obstacles and opportunities. These are so-called “wicked” problems with no straightforward…

  • Empowering everyone to be creative with Design Thinking

    Unlock creativity with Design Thinking. Join us to solve real-world challenges, reshape products, and make a positive impact. It’s not just for designers; it’s a tool for all. Explore the human-centred approach, empathise, and channel creativity to find solutions. Embrace Design Thinking as a lighthouse of hope in our ever-changing world.

  • Designing thinking and change in practice

    by Carolina Faria & Irina Tikanvaara The teaching sessions with Daniela Marzavan, where we had two thought-provoking days and a hands-on workshop, provided a widening experience of the practical use of design thinking to solve a given task. The goal was to find the solutions for practical cases using design thinking, its methods and tools…

  • It’s time to play, seriously! – Using design thinking to solve today’s problems

    Remember when as a child you used to build stuff out of everyday things like sticks and sand? Maybe role play as a doctor or a parent? This all comes naturally for children but for some reason we stop playing as adults. It is time to bring those old skills back and put them to…

  • How Interdisciplinary teams are the catalyst to innovations 

    Imagine this: a group of experts in one specific field are working together on an incredibly challenging problem. They are intelligent, proficient, and polite. They ask reasonable questions, answer them and everyone agrees with each other. Perfect picture, isn’t it? Or not?   Picture: AI generated image that represents the homogeneous team.  According to Linda A.Hill…

  • ”It might be a gamechanger to step in the shoes of your customer.”

    The quote in the title was spoken out by our lecturer, Daniela Marzavan, on our first day of the Design Thinking-course (DT) in Laurea. Here, we learned how one could adopt the mind of a 5 year-old by asking numerous Why`s and deciding that a tape roll can be an airplane if it’s said to…

  • Empathy in action – how to protect toddler naps in extreme circumstances

    You know the Fazer chocolates, right? You have seen them at the airports at least.   Some years ago, a construction company called NCC in Finland had to renovate an office above a nursery at the Fazer chocolate factory. This created a challenge: how to keep the noisy construction from waking up the toddlers during their…

  • We all just love problems, don’t we?

    We all just love problems, don’t we?

    Today we have all kinds of complex problems that need holistic solutions. Sometimes we do not even know what the problem is – so how can we ideate solutions then? A non-linear and iterative approach, Design Thinking, has offered a choice for solving complex problems – and impacted extensively the modern world’s innovations in business…