Berlin’s Global Service Jam — February 2016

Getting into the Global Service Jam on sheer unicorn glitter (I don’t own this Unicorn)

Is it possible to miss the cut off for the long awaited Global Service Jam and still get in?

What do you do when you realise you’ve missed the cut off for a conference or workshop you’d love to go to. Perhaps this is only something that happens in a #junior’s career. Perhaps this is something that senior designers don’t need to think about, because they are so organised (doubtful. Once disorganised, always disorganised, right?) However my audience on Medium is a crowd of designers, and as creative people, I assume we are all as disorganised as each other. So let’s continue.

This week, I realised that I didn’t sign up for this 2016’s Service Jam Berlin which is happening 2 weeks from now. After checking on the events page, I came to the realisation that there were absolutely 0 spots left which called for drastic measures, so yesterday I sent a little prototype to the organisers as a play on the suggestion from Helena Jaramillo over at Quora about personal projects, and showing-through-doing; Show you’re excited! It was something that was simple to make, and added humour to the whole situation. I also made it into an InVision prototype online to make it extra special.

The morning after sending the prototype, I got a wonderful email from the organisers over at Berlin’s Service Jam, saying a position had opened up, and I was more than welcome to grab a spot whilst it was still hot out of the oven.

#hardworkandpersistancepayoff. I guess being disorganised isn’t that bad after all. Let’s continue being creative then.

After attending the Jam itself, I was reminded to quickly prototype, take others ideas on board, and that design-on-the-weekend is just as fun as during the week! I met a tight set of peeps, the HoBros; Vieran and co.

It was great to get back into Service Design as a whole disciple, rather than focusing on a certain part of the process like idea generation, and work on a team with other like-minded designers who were all fresh-faces to me!

From Post-it note Ideas, to on-site User Research, to saying Hi to the other Jammers around the world…

and then back to creating a Business Model, and Concept Iteration!

The major learning over the weekend is much like the one I have been learning over the past few months with Pivotal — prototype early, and it’s never too often!

Ho Bros, I’m out for this article, you know I love you all!

Here is how Fjord wrote about it.

Design Shenanigans with the HoBros