How Designists Are Taking Over The World? In-house Service Design Takes Centre Stage in Helsinki

A purely personal reflection on the Service Design Global Conference 2024

A Watershed Moment?
With the biggest, global service design conference just passed, it’s a good time to take a step back and see where we’re at in this important field of design. Having watched for many years the Service Design Network grow from the fringes to international dominance, and in turn, becoming the primary touchpoint into the discipline, I was curious to know about the kind of energy, the sort of ideas, the type of community and the positioning of this SDN signature event: The Service Design Global Conference 2024 in Helsinki.

As the first SDN event I’ve attended, I was not disappointed. Over a couple of days, I got a strong sense of where the discipline is at as well as bucketloads of inspiration and some practical hacks. The conference was a tour de force in creative conference organisation no less, and a timely torchlight on what’s hot and what’s not in everything related to service from as comprehensive a cohort as you’d want. As a snapshot into this vital design profession, the event was everything I needed and gave me so much more in marking a crucial shift in the discipline from what’s been in the thinking and doing so far to the emergence of in-house service design, the crucible of innovation in the field now.

Same Old?
At the same time as being inspired and energised by the event, it was surprising to see endemic challenges enduring and slow progress in tackling some key opportunities and challenges in the service design community. The survey of service design practice, I conducted in 2016 gives us a good benchmark to see what’s been fixed and what’s on the to-do list. Perhaps unfortunately, dear reader, my hyperbolic style of writing hasn’t changed much in the intervening years and freed of academic rigour I continue to push the envelope here :). Some years later, I also survey service design theory and practice in my doctoral dissertation finding these four issues remain topics of current discussions in the field:

1. Delivery — Getting Out of The Abstraction Business
Waterfall working that doesn’t meld well with agile or reuse

2. Operations — Tweaking Ops More Than Utopian Dreaming
Focus on future visioning vs. present-day continuous delivery and service data

3. Innovation — Mind The Service Gap
More focus on leveraging technological innovation in the back end

4. FLOW Methodology — Modality Agnostic Aligned HCD/HCI Methods
Better integration of development and design methods beyond the visual plane

Gladly, most of the issues noted 8 years ago have lessened and many of the positive opportunities clearly progressing including design breaking out of the metropolitan centres and becoming more open, diverse, inclusive and global. As the conference theme was on impact, the success of globalising the practice cannot be understated. Likewise, the important marker of maturity — in-house adoption was strikingly clear.

Helsinki Calling…
I linked into the conference from the Welsh borders, a relatively rural area with more sows than saunas and more farm hands than facilitators. Joining online from October 2nd to 4th, I was immediately hit by the impressive numbers, (over 1000 delegates is massive for any conference in any field inc’ CHI?) the slick operation and the awe-inspiring and eclectic programme of talks, keynotes, workshops and panels.

Somewhat like dropping into a Eurovision final, the sets were spectacular, even the sound design was well, sound and the hosts, Adam Cochrane and Satu Samira Hamed smashed it with their chutzpah, wit and irresistible charm. This was not just showbiz but setting the tone for the whole event as an experience that was accessible, fun and for those in the know.

This kind of engaging staging is remiss in most (ahem) design conferences I’ve been to. Too dry, too cliquey, too distant from the real world? This conference turned all the bad habits of design events on their head. Yes, there was strong academic work, yes there were real-world case studies — all the bases were covered and importantly the mix of early and late-career practitioners was spot on. The balance of in-house and consulting was just right and interestingly pretty much without exception the former were streets ahead in terms of impact, integration and innovation.

The attention to detail and confidence of all involved reflects the vibrancy of the international scene as well as tapping into the particular Nordic vibe of the host capital, sitting pretty in the happiest country in the World with design deeply embedded in the culture and everyday life of the Finns. It might seem crazy but the hosts’ focus on happy was neither contrived nor artificial. Tapping into happiness helped align the widest variety of content that followed back to a central guiding and non-exclusive paradigm connecting people, itself a cornerstone of Finnish culture in harnessing tech to enable the most taciturn to talk is the truth.

Off stage, however, this smoothly operated event was less about Rock Stars riffing out the classics, although the back catalogues were aired, but rather it was some kind of a Woodstock moment of coming together to know, inspire and celebrate. Maybe my mind was tuned in to hear it but I was far more engaged by the practitioner’s tales than the leaders or consultants. It’s a tribute to SDN, which has carefully nurtured an active and self-sustaining community that is greater than the sum of its parts.

I was particularly taken by the shift from advocacy to action that ran through the conference. Most powerful in staging this agenda, was Josina Vink quoting Kimbell and Bailey as the need for countering the ‘perpetuating the dominance of certain logics over others.’ This talk was particularly strong on its basis of proper top-class academic stuff and turning in a practical outcome. The contribution in this peerless piece of work is an approach that aided in uncovering insights and helped with explicating and then also ‘amplifying the (un)logics’ encountered in environments.

The strong link between theory and practice also connected other inspiring and useful talks including the shifting of the product systems thinking presentation by Alessandra Molderings-Enriconi and many others that are worth watching on the conference reruns you can get on the conference website.

Not everything laid such solid foundations, however and alongside the obligatory spectre of AI, a couple of talks could have dialled up the practical contributions and a tad more innovation perhaps. But maybe I’m not the core audience here, and maybe the organisers were cannily balancing out the inspirational with the informative and nurturing the next generation? Fortunately, the multitrack format meant that it was easy to pick out a path to the most relevant sessions, although I did find that accidentally going off track often led to some valuable nuggets that you might otherwise miss. Again, great curation and organisation were on display.

Designist Remedy
At a time of much soul searching the wider design community, this outward looking community of conference goers and contributors countered the gloom of disempowerment among the leady and moans of technological positivism heeded by the worthy with the clarion call that ‘It’s Time for a Revolution in Boldness (Kristofer Kelly-Frere & Stephen Wood). Done with finding seats at tables and levelling up these bolshy designists*, with the Finland Station just a couple of stops away, have traction, a mission and are getting on with changing the world without a consultant or leader putting them right in sight. It’s interesting that this creative worker/activist stance is mostly, that there’s still some legacy leadership focus, ground up and while unstated more reform from inside than revolutionary coup. Perhaps this turn to practice so notably in the conference reflects the growth of in-house and the differing challenges and opportunities that brings compared to external practice.

There was a great panel on Finnish Design that reflected on the recent report by Ornamo. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the list of panel member but check the replay on the conference website for more. The locals certainly impressed, with a crucial keynote by Hanna Harris showcasing her phenomenal work as Chief Design Office at the City of Helsinki. The work here exemplified the design doing ethos of the conference and nailed the theme of making an impact — in doing such good work the Finnish designers demonstrated the value of ground-up design work representing and making a shift from establishment to community as the touchpoint of design.

Similarly, Satu Miettinen was inspiring in showing the practical use of design fiction in the service domain, something that again demonstrates the conference’s lodestone in authentically turning theory into practice. The diamonds on show here were not theoretical nor icons to worship and the impressive results were the stronger for that. And this is no mean feat, too many design conference presentations seem to pluck a theory out of the ether and then loosely attribute a practice to it a priori, like a post-rationalisation of what we do every day.

Host, Adam Cochrane picked up on this shift from thinking about service design to practising what we preach ‘through the integrity of design’ and co-host, Satu Samira Hamed reiterated the conference theme Designing for Impact Strategic Leadership with Service Design. It’s worth unpacking that theme as it was clearly carefully crafted and framed all of the content that followed and, in many ways, gives us practitioners a guiding principle and tactical framework to achieve progress — that’s what we’re all doing right? The impactful core of impact was subcategorised into:

Elevating Impact
Elevating the impact of service design as a transformative discipline

Impact Beyond Design
Drawing inspiration from diverse disciplines beyond service design

Theory of Impact
Investigating and dissecting new frameworks, mindsets and theories of service design to deliver great impact

Changing impact
Showcasing how service design responds to the needs of the economy, culture and emerging tech trends.

* I think the term came up in one of the panels with Ave Habakuk?

The Finland Station
The two outstanding talks for me were Anna Kholina on Design and Capitalism and the topper most highlight was Nina Hirvonen on Design Maturity. In both cases, the talks’ titles were a tad dryer than the top-notch content, in fact I only listened in to both kind of by accident and what a lucky chance that was as both highlighted Hidden Design Superpowers, authentically turned theory into practice and embodied the conference themes perfectly in terms of impact.

Kholina took us through the history, yes the whole capitalist context and via Marx and Lefebvre in a kind of Grundrisse of the practical design domain of physical, latterly digital space — concluding that we ought to give and make space that is not merely functional in the context of economic exchange but is meta-functional — open to citizens to make their own and designs’ opportunity to do this kind of social good at the level of the service experience — I paraphrase but what a tour de force to do the heavy lifting and conclude with novel and practical design trick. My note to self was ‘build user agency and non-financial gains into services’.

Nina Hirvonen did a similar amazing trick of virtuosity by taking that old, dry concept of design maturity and turning it into a living thing, the life force of organisations innovation endeavours embodied through the work itself — and the design work was the work as much as the product or service, aligning very much with my own research and ahem Engels rather than Marx?

What I particularly liked in this talk was that it disposed hifalutin jargon and how might we possibilities in favour of practical and principled practices that didn’t preach but produced positive impact and this involved the designers changing as much as the organisation and no seats at tables, just doing the work and making it better.

That many of the slides in this talk used the organisation’s vision statement and other collateral was strong evidence of successful integration. I particularly like to positioning of design (I termed this Design Intermediaries in my dissertation) and the non-exclusive messaging in slides, slightly paraphrasing here:

· Experience belongs to everyone

· Experience competency building is for everyone

· Designers contribute everywhere

Uncannily, every point in Hirvonen’s pitch aligned to the Foundation Practice in Resistant and Remediating Design and I made a note to self that success, as evidenced by this talk was predicated on ‘working the quadrant — strategy, delivery, collaboration and innovation’.

Where next…
There was little methodological innovation elsewhere — and that’s not maybe such a bad thing and maybe indicates the maturity of the field rather than stasis although the handful of presentations on method and measurements merely reflected the often rather siloed development of methods in service design in contrast to reusing the analytical tools in HCI that are so much needed to close the implementation gap.

So, what of the future? There were glimpses but little to suggest the revolution is permanent beyond the quietly, confidently and just craftily subversive cases that demonstrated impact as a sustainable and ongoing operation within all facets of an organisation rather than the big bang reveals of the design aristocracy. Indeed, the final panel session brought the focus back delivering progress, but not quite as we know it. No metrics or methods but practically how design powers up organisations through enabling people to do good stuff together.

While there is still some work to do the insightful practical challenges practitioners face and solve (including Alan Colville and Jennifer Briselli) were thrashed out in the same distinctive can-do designist way that typified the conference content. What Is To Be Done and indeed The Question of Organization kept springing to mind on how might we make this more real as I grasped the significance to the presenters as a whole.

Hei! Hei! Suomi…
I was not expecting to find a distinctive Finnish Service Design culture, but I did and, the energy and passion of the Finns that packed into Paasitorni in the Kallio neighbourhood in Helsinki kept me engaged over the three days. It left me with so much respect for the hardy practitioners and fair to say that all the most impactful and well, important content for me came from locals working on the inside of organisations. Maybe it is something in the Kaisaniemi Bay water?

Of course, The Finns played a starring role in proceedings as they rightly should, geographically and importantly in their distinctive and crucial contribution which had Nordic can-do social democracy and stoic work ethic running right through it like a stick of (granite) rock. And there was no shortage of Finnish exceptions to the rule, glad handing and design method acting at the zenith of extroversion that tore asunder all stereotypes. The ubiquitous mispronunciation of sauna by the non-Finns and even the few glitches (a fire alarm at a conference is a first for me) didn’t Faze(r) the locals either.

With my time in Helsinki over and my Doctoral Studies in Service Design at Aalto University ending, it was a fitting farewell from the city that felt like home for the last thirteen years. Remotely, I could only imagine the early Autumn chill starting and the light flurries stirring in the evening sky over Sibelius Park, I reflected on the conference’s theme resonating so strongly with my later work, Resistant and Remediating Design and indeed waxing lyrically in Let it Flow: Making Generative Service Design Work.

As my first piece of writing since those publications, I reflected on how far we’ve come in service design and how the conference set in stone that designist intention and impact:

1. A Shift from Advocacy to Action
Doing the work is where the action is rather than handwringing to get a seat at the table or talking about what might be

2. Growing Ground-up Design Work

In-house is where the innovation is and where practitioners are making sustainable and continuous positive change vs. the traditional agency and consulting models that lack implementation chops.

3. Hidden Design Superpowers
Service design work helps teams, individuals and organisations in the broadest sense, do good work and make the work they do rewarding, including remediating agile and supercharging customer centricity and collaborative innovation. Of course, and as many conference contributors acknowledged, design is not the only seat at the table to do this kind of good stuff.

4. Impact Beyond Metrics
The lack of holistic service flow measurement cases diminishes impact assessment of service design in general which in turn privileges financial or non-financial uplift and weakens the integrity of great service experiences.

5. Service Design Innovation
There was little on the methodological innovation horizon, which given the headline-grabbing profile of AI is surprising. The need for formal method invention and application of structured frameworks such as UML and open reusable patterns of service blueprinting and deliverables, for example, hinders progress of the field project level ad-hoc reinvention

Kiitos!
Having been swept away by the classy operation, inspiring and practical content and the engaging staging I will certainly be following and dipping into SDN again. With the next conference hosted in the US, it will be interesting to see how service design crosses the waters. Perhaps a more technologically entrenched culture will expect different things from service design, certainly enabling deeper collaboration with development peers and taking opportunities in conversational services through the FLOW methodology might help unify the key innovation practices of our time — service design and agile delivery.

I’m incredibly grateful to be given the opportunity to attend this conference by Lloyds Bank. The ideas in this post are my own and are not reflective of my employer, any organisation or other person. I should also here give my infinite gratitude to Aalto University in giving me the opportunity and support to conclude my Doctorate in Service Design practice. Kittos!

© John Knight 2024