Tag: public services

  • Users as Co-designers in Public Services

    Too often the approach in the development of public services has been “This system has now been built for you, welcome, please use it”. Lately it has become obvious that to make services sustainable and attractive, this has to be changed. Hence, service design is increasingly applied also in the development of public services. In…

  • Wake up officer!

    A scene from a random municipal office somewhere in southern Finland. One lonely planning officer sits behind her table. She has a computer and a cup of cold coffee in front of her. Her task is to plan a new customer service process for this small municipality. There are many problems in existing process: customers…

  • A Library Paradigm Shift

    Someone says “library service design”, so obviously, I am interested. And what a fascinating project it was, as part of the Service Design Achievements: the turning of a university library into a learning center – for real, not just in name. The recently formed, but with old roots, Aalto University Library, is really re-inventing itself.…

  • Efficient Experiences

    With current trends for downsizing and automation, it is easy to see why customers would find services to be impersonal, maybe even unpleasant. Vantaa City Library decided to turn the trend to a different direction. By systematically using codesign, and by at the same time opening up its service processes, the library managed to significantly…

  • 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…

  • Benchmarking public service design and social innovations in Milan

    A group of representatives of the public sector, service designers and the University of Lapland visited Milan from 26 to 30 November 2013 in order to benchmark how service design and social innovations are used in public services renewal. Theoretical background: A meeting with Anna Meroni at the Politecnico di Milano Our trip started from…

  • The cooperative council in Lambeth, London

    Derrick Anderson, the Chief Executive of Lambeth Council, who was voted as a Public Leader of the Year in the Guardian Public Services Awards 2012, spoke in the 7th Quality Conference in Vilnius about how citizens should be focus of the service development and how civil servants and local politicians should support them and thus…