Tag Archive | diagonal

Travellab: A Creative Concept for Developing Services at Helsinki Airport

Nov22
Helsinki Airport (picture from Finavia).

Helsinki Airport (picture from Finavia).

 

What could make airport service experience more pleasurable for transfer passengers? Well, you could get some ideas as Kirsikka Vaajakallio and Jaakko Wäänänen from Diagonal, as well as Juha Vasko from Finavia presented their Travellab project at Service Design Breakfast last week. Diagonal’s Travellab is also a candidate for Service Design Achievement 2015 in Finland.

 

 

What Travellab?

Diagonal created the Travellab concept, which is a model for testing ideas at the airport. More precisely it’s a model for rapid prototyping and idea ranking created for Finavia to improve the transfer experience at Helsinki Airport. It’s also a great example of using service design tools and design thinking in a creative way to develop services.

 

Diagonal and Finavia presenting Travellab.

Diagonal and Finavia presenting Travellab.

Background of the project

Starting point for the project was Finavia’s strategy to make the Helsinki airport the most desired transit travel airport and to support this goal the Travellab was created. The project started with a positive problem as Finavia had been gathering service ideas during the years and already had 200+ existing ideas for enhancing the customer experience at the airport. However, some help was needed and the brief for Diagonal was to design a model for Finavia for prototyping and validating ideas in a consistent way. It had to be taken into consideration that transfer passengers spend relatively short amount of time at the airport, approximately 1,5h.

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Service Design Achievement Award

Jan31

I participated in the first Service Design Achievement Award seminar on 22nd of January which was hosted by Katri Ojasalo from Laurea and Håkan Mitts from Aalto. The event took place at Aalto Design Factory. Five Finnish service design agencies participanted in the competition, and they had presented their best projects in the last fall’s Service Design Breakfast seminars. The agencies were Palmu, Reaktor, User Intelligence, N2 Nolla and Diagonal.

Of course the main thing in this event was the announcement of the winner of the Service Design Achievement of Year, but before that we got to enjoy some interesting presentations.

The theme for the day was designing and developing better services – a buyer’s guide. For me this was very interesting because we have just talked with our SID 2013 group about how to sell service design for our employers and for some of us for their clients, and on the other hand I was interested in the buyers view on behalf of my work.

Anton Schubert

Anton Schubert

One common topic for the discussion was that service design is not really anymore just design but it is combination of design, marketing, technical and business competences. Like Anton Schubert from Futurice introduced to us that in the future service design agencies should have competences from each of these areas in their teams to really create value for the end users. He also said that agencies will provide more “full house” services for their clients. Jasmin Honkanen from Turku School of Economics introduced her findings from her Master thesis with the topic “Why are companies buying service design?”, and also she had found out that it is really important to combine service design and business in the future.

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Diagonal – Designing Servicescapes for Optimal Healthcare Experiences

Dec3

Servicescape is the biggest differentiator in healthcare experience. Traditionally, it is designed to satisfy the needs of healthcare provider in terms of performance and efficiency. Starting from patient’s experience and applying service design methods combined with interior architecture, design agency Diagonal has created innovative healthcare experience providing benefits for both staff and patients.

Diagonal – designing servicescape for Fimlab

Diagonal – designing servicescape for Fimlab

Juha Kronkvist from Diagonal has presented the project, as the fifth and final case in the competition for Service Design Achievement of the Year in Finland 2013 in Service Design Breakfast event at Startup Sauna on November 27th. Juha is one of the leading service designers in the field of health care and well-being.

Healthcare design

Three main components of healthcare design are performance, process and experience. As Juha explains, focus is usually on performance and process, while experience is often overlooked. What this case shows is that by studding experience, performance can be increased and processes made more efficient.

According to Juha, one of the key starting points in service design is to find out how people assign the meaning and make sense of the environment. When those assigned meanings are aligned with organizational point of view, they should create positive customer experience. Servicescape is not only about physical things. It is about what those things communicate and what value they provide. Therefore, servicescape is critically influencing customer experience.

The Case

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