OUR NEWS
Service Design Futures was an evening curated by the Service Design Innovation students at London College of Communication (LCC). The theme of the night called for guests to consider the prospect of future scenarios, speculative design and how service design might address those new concerns, all the while thinking about how service design as a practice might evolve over time.
Following the biggest Service Design Fringe Festival to date, we're sharing the highlights of our talks and workshops with the global community, so everybody can join in discussions around our industry. In the first of a series of short stories, STBY, an agency specialising in design research, write about this year's festival workshop, learning how to use film and photography to document the user journey.
What a festival we’ve had. The expectations we had back in March have been left in the dust. We have the entire service design community to thank for making this festival happen.
We’d like to say a special thank you to all our sponsors who without, the festival would have been nowhere near the size and fun it was.
In no particular order thanks to...
LCC for hooking us up with the most enthusiastic and energetic volunteers possible.
Design Week and Plan for helping us get the word out.
Rainmaker for funding the festival team and materials. The scale of the festival this year is thanks to them.
DesignersBlock for providing the space and atmosphere for the festival.
FutureHeads for sponsoring our opening night with food and drinks and for live streaming a number of our events.
Geovation for providing us with an amazing working space in the run up to the festival.
Pop chips, Sugru, Vita Coco, and Alchemy coffee for making out tote bags worth toting around.
Portobello Brewing Co and Boutinot for providing us with beer and wine to help get the conversation flowing.
All those cafes, shops and museums who allowed us to put out maps to tell people about the festival.
Thank you all for making this year's festival the best yet.
With love,
The Service Design Fringe Festival team
The Service Design Fringe Festival kicked off on Thursday with Kartik and Rosie from Wolff Olins and service designer Jess Leitch inspiring the audience to think about how to design a service and what exactly is a service designer?
Our conclusions from Wolff Olins was that if you’re going to build a teleportation device, you should probably have a bare hug at the end to make you feel safe in your new destination. Jess’s discussion taught us that service design is not just the final service, the process is just as important.
On Friday we had a whole host of industry professionals taking part in LCC’s service design futures event. The afternoon started with Phillippa Rose from LCC giving a warm thank you to all the students from the Service Experience Design and Innovation course for making the event possible. She then introduced the three speakers from Fjord, Deloitte Digital and We Question.
Celia from Fjord taught us a valuable lesson in looking to inspiration from history, listening carefully and speaking up when we should. Steve from Deloitte Digital gave us a glimpse into the world of transport services, and helped us ask bigger questions like ‘If we have self driving cars, what does that mean for insurance?’ Finally Itziar from We Question taught not to take everything at face value, we should be looking for ‘black swans’, which will be defining our future.
The speakers were then followed by a workshop hosted by the LCC students, where the audience were split into teams and asked to design the worst service possible. Each team had to then improve another teams service. Let’s just say AI dogs and on demand support for vulnerable adults could be a couple of services we see on transport routes in the near future.
The Service Design Fringe Festival continues till the 25th September with events throughout London. There’s still time to register to get tickets. Just follow this link: http://www.sd-ldf.com/events
The Service Design Fringe Festival turns three this year and we’re expecting the biggest and best birthday surprise...
To see you and everyone in London who’s interested in service design, at the Service Design Fringe Festival from the 15th - 25th September.
Stellar line up
We’re expecting well over 1000 people this year and have a stellar line up to make it happen.
From Government to brand consultancies, we’re sure there’s a thing or two we can all learn from each other.
Whether you’re a student, director or a PA; the festivals talks, workshops and discussions will immerse you in the game changing discipline of service design.
Don't just take it from us - find out what international online design magazine Design Week has to say about us.
We need your support
The festival has 24 events and counting, and we need to let the world know so that we can all take full advantage of these inspirational, educational and game changing speakers and hosts.
We're a community of service designers making this festival happen. With your help we can make it the best yet.
Whether you’re on Twitter, Facebook or in a trendy café, please do tell people know about the festival.
Also make sure you sign up for the events you want to attend as spaces are limited and we want to see you there. Click through individual event listings to the Eventbrites to reserve your free place.
Much love,
The Service Design Fringe Festival Team.
In May we held a workshop at the RCA to flesh out the vision for the Service Design Fringe Festival together.
The festival is community-led, so it was essential to work out the overarching strategy collaboratively.
The workshop was focused around two key areas: relationships within the festival, and how the festival could contribute to the service design industry.
We gave a preview of our then-new website, and video, made by Emily and Sean respectively. Then we split out into two groups and had conversations about how the festival could contribute to industry and build critical practice.
The two conversations headed in different directions: one group shared their perspectives as attendees of the London Design Festival. This group felt that The Service Design Fringe Festival ought to strive to be a spectacular experience in order to appeal to the LDF audience (designers, buyers and the public), who are accustomed to the glitz of mainstream design.
The second group considered the theme of storytelling in depth. To explain the process of service design, we discussed supporting the festival hosts to construct their talks with characters, high and low points, touch points, and to skip mediocrity. We discussed potentially banning Powerpoint from the festival!
Both groups agreed that it would be important to map service design and related disciplines during the course of the festival. Service design is changing rapidly as a practice. The industry is likely to change dramatically year on year; recording the state of the industry now will become historically useful in the future in order to understand how the practice has developed.
Several other ideas came out of this workshop, including creating an awards system for the best hosts, creating a learning toolkit for guests, and collating definitions of service design from all hosts. We are looking for creative people to join our team to take these seeds of ideas on, and develop them in their own style to add to the experience of the festival.
We split into four teams to consider what each kind of stakeholder in the festival would want to give to the festival and to receive from the festival. After the workshop, Culainn and Lior considered all the information and weaved it together to create a relationship map, where everyone gives and receives what they need from each other.
We'd love your feedback on if this map. Does it express what you want to give and receive from the festival? Please tell us if there's something we haven't considered so that we can improve the experience for everyone involved.
The Service design fringe festival is a celebration of all things service design. It takes place along side the London Design Festival 15th – 25th September, and is based in the OXO tower, with other events throughout the city.
We bring together service design businesses; practitioners, students and anyone else interested in this game changing discipline; to host workshops, talks and discussions. Our aim is to provide a stage to all those involved in service design and bring the discipline into the mainstream.
Follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com/SD_LDF and Facebook www.facebook.com/ServiceDesignLondon to keep up to date with festival listings and surprises!
We believe that service design is pushing the boundaries of what design means, and is creating new roles and contexts for designers to explore. We also believe the service design industry improves customer experiences. By holding a festival we hope to support the potential of service design to positively affect everyone’s service experiences.
If you practice service design and would like to take part in the festival either by doing a talk or hosting a workshop, please drop Lior an email today at liorsmith@gmail.com. If you’re not sure of what you could do, then come along to our collaborator event on 10th August near Holborn in central London, where we’ll provide ideas and potential partnerships. Click here to find out more: buff.ly/2ahaPdl
Maybe you’re new to service design and would like to take part in another way? We'd love to have you as a Festival Ambassador, to help us spread the word and get all those interested in Service Design to come along to the festival. Drop a line to liorsmith@gmail.com and we’ll get back to you very soon.
The festival started back in 2013 to support those doing service design, to meet others and grow the industry. Now in its third year, the festival has continued to grow beyond expectation and we’re sure this year will be the best yet. Check out our highlights from last year in the video below.
Get a flavour of the 2015 Service Design Fringe Festival at the old website.
With many thanks to Emily Cheng for building this beautiful website in time for the 2016 festival submissions.
