Prototyping a service design book club
Happy New Year service design book worms! 2018 was a year packed with amazing growth for our community here in Toronto and across Canada. Some highlights (full disclosure, I may be biased): Service Design Canada (SDC) successfully hosted IMPACT, its 3rd annual conference in Montreal with a new two day format of workshops and talks offered in two languages (woah), Canada’s first ever industry benchmark survey was launched (get ready for some sweet sweet data), Service Design Toronto (SDTO) had a comeback with a talk from the kind folks at The Prosper Lab and added new events like our lovely book club. So much community ❤
If all of this is news to you, here is some background.
SDTO, is an organization co-founded in 2014 by Linn Vizard that works hard to foster the service design community here in Toronto. SDTO creates opportunities to explore, connect and satisfy service design curiosities and addictions. In addition to a revived bi-monthly speaker series, we have started a book club!
Our origin story goes like this:
- Arun J M dreamed of a way to share his love of reading and service design long before he moved to Toronto from Bangalore, India.
- Arun noticed that I was slack-ing (the tech platform, not lazing about here) frequently in the Canada channel of SDN’s network while I was repping Service Design Canada as the 2018 conference coordinator.
- A couple of coffees later, we joined forces with Linn and SDTO!
- With her support, we pitched the book club idea to the community at the Prosper Lab talk and circulated a mini survey which helped us start planning the first event.
Test early, test often.
Less than a week after the IMPACT conference in Nov. 2018, we hosted our first book club meet-up (which was crazy because most of us still hadn’t done our laundry or groceries since returning from Montreal). It was an intimate crew of 9 (both IRL and virtual) at the Toronto Reference Library, an appropriate inaugural venue for the book club!
We discussed the Prototyping chapter from This is Service Design Doing (TISDD), an appropriate reading to pilot for our first meet-up. We set the bar quite high with this first one having two guest speakers join us from Germany!!
Markus Edgar Hormeß, one of the actual-real-life co-authors of TISDD joined us from Berlin (midnight his time, thank you!) for a group Q&A. Having been a student of Markus’ during a TISDD bootcamp in Amsterdam, I knew we were in store for an in-depth (and generous) chat! Our club shared some questions with him in advance to help guide the conversation.
We asked: How do you go about handling the challenge of prototyping a service that takes place over a longer time span?
There are some nice variants of theatrical tools like investigative rehearsals you might want to look into here e.g. talk throughs. Desktop walkthroughs are also an option. Get inspiration from how movies show a storyline along an extended time frame. Of course, it always depends a bit on how your actual structure of the service is (e.g. many small interactions all the time, or, a few big ones every year). -Markus
Key take-aways from Markus:
- It’s normal to have a love/hate relationship with prototypes.
- Justify prototyping costs over the cost of staff developing the product without user feedback.
- Service design is a new language to the organization and should be reframed from an organizational perspective.
- Pay attention to the first question that colleagues ask when they see a prototype.
- Don’t attend meetings without a prototype!
Don’t forget to check out the #TISDD Method Library for free resources and templates!
Following our in-depth Q&A with Markus, Karen Detken joined us for a run down of storyboarding with SAP Scenes. She created SAP Scenes as a way for those who aren’t as comfortable with drawing to participate freely in storyboarding and desk top walk-throughs. They are a great way to put the focus back on what is happening, rather than drawing something perfect. You can download and print the open source library of elements for free! Thanks Karen!
Key take-aways from Karen:
- Before prototyping, start with a story and ideate.
- In the story, identify how a hero solves a problem.
- SAP Scenes is a storyboarding toolkit to quickly communicate a story rather than spending time creating characters.
Now, we wouldn’t be service designers if we didn’t put our words into action would we!? Check out this amazing scene created by some of our new book club pals! Can you guess what the service system was?
For our first time running the book club, I must say it was not such a sh*ty first draft!
We learned a lot just from hosting the event. Thanks to all of the attendees who were able to join us in the discussion and stick around for the activity. We welcome any feedback and input you may want to offer to help improve future events. If you took any notes and would like to contribute to this event summary please add a response!
What we think worked well:
- Leaders: We had two kick-a** service design leaders join us to share their work and discuss their perspectives and journey’s.
- Community: What a lovely intimate group discussion we had. It was amazing to meet some new community members and to see some friends come out.
- Food: Snacks, we had ‘em! Drinks, you bet! Brainstorming supplies, oh ya. Single-use plastic, nada! #BreakFreeFromPlastic
What we learned:
- Location: We need better way-finding… It turns out the basement room at the Toronto Reference Library is fairly hidden. Next time we will be sure that you have no troubles finding us, no matter where we meet.
- Agenda: Our first event was ambitious. We may have overbooked by having two speakers. However valuable their part was, it would have been nice not to rush either conversation and to give some more relaxed time for open discussion amongst ourselves.
That’s all for now folks! If you are interested in joining the book-club, simply follow us on Twitter and Eventbrite to keep an eye out for the next meet-up! We are aiming for the next one to be at the end of January and will announce the next reading #soon! If you would like to add suggestions to the reading list or browse it for some inspiration, please do!
