Service Design Workshop
This week I was back at General Assembly for their Service Design Workshop.
The three hour workshop on a Tuesday evening gave us a whistle stop tour of Service Design and some of the core principles and methods.
I already had a good idea about what Service Design is, but was interested in the sorts of methods used to create a useful service. Some of the other attendees though had less knowledge, so it was a good way to check if what I thought I knew was right or not.
Hannah Steele was our tutor and ran us though what Service Design is before setting us to work.
Using a bunch of different methods, some of which were familiar like 'jobs to be done', 'how might we' statements and 'red teaming', and others that I am less familiar with like 'co-design' and 'failure analysis', in groups we worked on thinking about the remote shopping service a supermarket might provide.
As always we all dived in to solution thinking first and I think we all found it hard to brainstorm round the problems instead.
What I found really interesting was the process around failure and how you can try and find the places where the service might fail, and how you can design for the failure so it does not become an issue.
Of course in three hours we barely scratched the surface of the service we were looking at, but each activity gave us a flavour of the different methods we would need to use to make a truly good service.
Thanks to South Western Trains I had to leave early to make sure I caught my train home, so I missed the last little bit. So the one question I had that I did not get answered was about how you can use these processes for a service which is already in place. Starting from scratch is one thing but getting people to think outside of the process that is already in place can be quite hard.
All in all it was a really interesting workshop, with lots of hands on practice which I hope I will be able to use on future projects.