Service Innovation & Design

  • Design Thinking as a Discursive Phenomenon 

    Design Thinking can be described as a discipline, a methodology or more broadly “a human-centered, creative, iterative, and practical approach that is used to find the best ideas and ultimate solutions” (1, 2), or simply a method for innovation, which requires creative thinking (3, 4). Creative thinking is the cognitive capacity of an individual or…

  • Empathy – a Core Competence for Design Thinkers

    The modern business world is fast-paced and highly competitive. Companies must stay innovative to answer the complex demands of the ever-changing market and business needs. Design thinking has found its’ way to larger organizations as an answer to simplifying the challenges of both modern business and technology. (Kolko 2015.)   For business success, an empathic approach of design…

  • One Thousand Experiments Club

    Mind shaking Our Design Thinking (DT) journey started with two days of mind-shaking by Katja Schimmel (Katja). Learning by doing was absolutely engaging. We warmed up with creative thinking skills exercises. While perceptive thinking felt like a hard nut, associative thinking felt familiar and easy to master. In a playful spirit, we got to explore…

  • Empathy is the superpower you need to design truly innovative services

    In today’s world of complex systems and processes, people seek simplicity and real value. At the same time, companies’ competition for people’s attention is fiercer than ever. They face the challenge to differentiate themselves from competitors to gain the loyalty of their customers. Design Thinking might be the way we can add real and lasting…

  • Reflections on Design Thinking: a conversation with Sheena OhUiginn and Anmol Kumar

    As budding Service Designers, coming together with this diverse group for three days of collaboration and problem solving was an incredible way to kick off our studies. After a few days of reading and reflecting, two of us sat down to discuss the experience and share our thoughts…  Anmol: What an amazing and intensive master…

  • Unleashing our inner creativity- the more we practice, the easier it gets 

    Anyone can be creative. That was the key thought gathered from the book Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelley. Too often creativity is associated with being artistic. In its’ essence, creativity is about finding solutions to open-ended problems – a natural part of us, that we must just learn to unblock. How does one…

  • Design for Humans

    Design is the transformation of existing conditions into preferred ones. – The Science of the Artificial, Herbert Simon We, humans, are surrounded by an endless number of obstacles. From our evolution, we are designing new tools to deal with such obstacles. We keep on designing and optimizing such tools. We design, test, and iterate every…

  • Who are you designing for?

    For yourself? For the leadership who asked you to drive a new project? Think again. One of the first phases of applying Design Thinking is understanding who your audience is by building a deeper understanding of who you are designing for. Steven Portigal shares a great reminder by saying; “You may be a user but…

  • Design Thinking and the Technology Industry: From principles to practice 

    Design transcended from aesthetic to using its principles for creating impact in organizations. Consequently, the term design thinking emerged.  There is no fit to every scenario definition of design innovation and design thinking available in the literature, nor a universal definition of it agreed upon by professionals and researchers working in design thinking. But according…

  • Unleashing your creativity – find your inner child

    The myth about creativity The common misconception about creativity is that only some people are (or can be) creative. This is a myth and simply not true; everybody can be creative. Look at children! They have endless creativity and fun, why don’t we as adults? So, the question is, how do we get it back? As…