The service design advent calendar unfolds… Day 1.

It’s coming up to the end of the year and the beginning of a new one, so Jason Mesut and I were pondering what do we want to share, what would we love to learn… and who do we think others could learn from.

In the spirit of the season we came up with the idea of a co-created service design advent calendar, an eclectic series of short snappy pieces broadly on service design, to be published daily in the run-up to Christmas.

The brief to our network was something interesting, whether small or big, ideally something people haven’t necessarily heard of before, not necessarily radically new to world, it could be a new take on an old topic, but beyond ‘hey in service design you do journey mapping’… something thought provoking for existing practitioners yet simple enough you might apply it somehow in the next month or so.

So we curated the contributors but not the content, a bit of an experiment in emergence as well. Hopefully you’ll find something useful (a core brand value of mine), and we’d love to hear your feedback.

First out is an old friend of mine Andy Polaine. We go way back to the good (and chaotic) days of Razorfish, a creative hothouse in the late nineties where we and others explored a digital scene that was young and so were the late nights we too often worked…

Andy shares a lovely metaphor on the seasons of design, he often uses the garden analogy as an expression of design as an ongoing never ending activity - as opposed to simply shipping products.

Check it out here and watch this space for what I can safely say will be somewhat eclectic meanderings.