Two project from service designer Mikko Koivisto–the winner of the Ornamo Award 2017
Service designer Mikko Koivisto has been selected as the winner of the Ornamo Award last year. Given by the Finnish Association of Designers (Ornamo), the award is a highly-regarded distinction for contemporary design scene in Finland, the history of which goes back to 1981. The finalists for the award also included design director Antti Olin of Isku Interior and designer Aamu Song of Company this year.
Koivisto, the Lead Service Designer of Hellon, is considered as a pioneer of service design practice and has been a major influence on the growth of this field in Finland. The recognition is timely, as service-related business already accounts for over 80% of GDP in the developed economies, such as that of Finland, USA, and UK.
One of the well-known projects of Koivisto was the service model, interior design and an extended product range for People’s Pharmacy (Yhteistyöapteekit, YTA hereafter), Finland’s largest pharmacy chain and a cooperative. The project aimed to enhance the holistic experience of visiting the pharmacy, as well as a specific goal to grow the total sales by engaging with customers at a deeper level.
Koivisto and designers at Hellon created a renewed service interior, catering for extended product and service offerings, complete with visual identity and signage concepts, and additional concepts. The design process included visits to pharmacies in Finland and abroad, in-depth interviews and participatory observations with customers, extensive testing in seven pharmacies for two weeks, workshops with pharmacy employees to smooth implementation.
As YTA is a cooperative chain joined by a large number of owner-pharmacists, the strict implementation of the new concept to each location was not a feasible direction, and therefore the team created a manual that is flexible to adapt to various needs and localities.
YTA renovated the Ympyrätalon Apteekki (Circle-House Pharmacy) in Helsinki as a pilot implementation to test the benefit of the project. The result was 27% increase in prescription sales and 21% increase in total sales. The project received many local and international design awards, including the 2015 The global Service Design Award in New York from the Service Design Network.
Another project Koivisto has been recently involved in was defining customer experience concept for the upcoming light rail transit system for Helsinki Regional Transport Authority (HSL). In Helsinki, the current modes of public transportation are tram, train, bus, and metro. As the city is rapidly expanding, HSL is developing a new mode of transit to grow its capacity to serve the growing urban population. The new light rail is a hybrid in-between tram (perhaps the slowest but flexible in terms of its route changes) and the train (perhaps the fastest but rigid). In essence, the new light rail system will run slowly in the city center moving people to different corners of the city, and will run faster and get people home quickly as it exits the central Helsinki.
With growing number of successful cases of light rail in Nordic European cities including Stockholm and Bergen, this new means of public transportation is expected to help solve growing demand for more sustainable mobility. In Helsinki, the light rail will extend the city’s public transportation to the west of greater Helsinki area (Westend, Espoo), as well as the Eastern Helsinki (Itäkeskus) through the newly developing town (Kruununvuori) providing wider options for busy commuters. The actual tram will be based on the recent Artic tram, with some adjustments, and the end result will be a tram with average speed of 25 km/h and maximum speed of 70 km/h with maximum capacity of 225 passengers.
What HSL wanted to make sure by commissioning this project to Hellon was to make sure the needs of various citizens are heard and to set out the criteria for successful implementation of these needs. Koivisto and his colleagues at Hellon started the projects by interviewing HSL’s specialists and stakeholders involved in the planning of the light rail and formed a preliminary vision. Then they envisioned the customer experience through benchmarking a successful case in Bergen, conducting participatory observations on the passengers using the current HSL’s tram and in a bus line that will be replaced with a light rail.
Based on these, the team created a preliminary customer experience journey that was further defined and developed in 11 co-design workshops, 5 with experts and 6 with customer focusing in one area in each one. Finally, the team gathered all the customer experience requirements into the area specific customer journeys. The outcome is a guideline that encompasses a customer promise for light rail transit, a general description of the customer journey, and area specific customer experience requirements. More than 400 unique requirements, and about 100 ideas related to possible solutions for the requirements were included.
The guideline provides HSL with requirements and recommendations at three different levels — functional, experiential, and value-driven. The functional level requirements will be strictly implemented and these include, among other things, child friendliness. For example, the light rail trains will have opening buttons on the door at a lower position. The experiential level recommendations give inspirations for designing the space, for example, how to provide a more relaxing atmosphere for those commuters on the way back home. The value driven ones include the ideas to consider to implement if possible, for example, to install racks on the train to carry bicycles.
With the help of Koivisto and the service designers at Hellon, now HSL can start designing the system with a clear vision and customer experience targets to meet with an aim to launch the new service between 2019 and 2020. The project is an important one for the service design scene in Finland, as it is the first time in the history of HSL to start a development project with customer experience goals as the principal guideline for designing a new public transit system.
In the next post, I sit down with Koivisto to discuss how his journey as one of the first service designers has unfolded in the past 10 years or so. Also, we talk about whether there have been some particular challenges in his career or in some discreet projects.
