Last week I spent an enjoyable few days in the company of some of Northern Europe’s leading service design practitioners and researchers, the excuse, the ServDes Conference in Linkoping, Sweden which followed last year’s conference in Oslo, thoughts from which I blogged about here.
There are myriad possible forms a summarising post from these three days of structured and unstructured workshop and discussions on the practice and process of designing for services could take. Rather than attempt to cram too many thoughts and observations into one post I will structure my reflections across a few posts that I hope will do justice to the pertinent themes and challenges of last week.
I’ll aim to cover the unconference workshop that myself and George Julian ran for research in practice for adults (ripfa) on the first day of the conference, which sought to explore the role of evidence informed practice in the design of services, and without a focussed agenda, sought to reflect on the current approaches taken by service designers to evidence their thinking, processes and outcomes. The theme of this session sought also to generate insights that might inform the design of ripfa’s own products and services that support the use of evidence informed approaches, by frontline practitioners, in the provision of adult social care services in England.
This post will be followed by another containing some reflections on a number of the standout presentations from day one of ServDes, set within the context of a workshop run by Stefan Holmlid, Fabian Segelstrom and Johan Blomkvist that led discussions on the future of Service Design Research. I will conclude with a post later this week that reflects on a presentation by the Swedish design consultancy Doberman and Apoteket, a Swedish highstreet chemist who presented together towards the end of day two, on their service design work supporting health outcomes and behavioural change and which in turn specifically relates to my recent research on designing for motivation.
Initially however, and in the subsequent post, I wish to report on an event at London School of Economics yesterday, Tuesday 7th of December, from Dr Annette Boaz that discussed the role of Knowledge Transfer within environmental and social policy organisations. I set this thinking out initially as I believe it sets in context many of the discussions from last week both from our unconference session and from the ServDes Conference as a event for the transfer of knowledge related to the discipline of service design and as a conference with the theme ‘Exchanging Knowledge’.