First Day with Engine

I just finished my first day of a 2-day “Service Design Workshop” run by Engine – a design group that focuses on service design. What is service design? It’s pretty much as simple as it sounds, design processes applied to designing services. Of course, there’s the challenge: services are complex by nature, involving “four P’s”: People, Places, Processes, and Products (not to be confused with the four P’s of marketing). And watch out for wicked problems.

I’m participating in this workshop to better understand the work EdLab can do to deliver amazing services throughout our organization. I’m joined by designers from large and small companies, across many industries. Today we learned about some very interesting methods and cases. For example: the double diamond design process. I’ve been reflecting on our own home-grown CSG processes, and how we modify them especially for service design.

There have been some interesting discussions of how to involve both key stakeholders and customers throughout various stages of a design process – and the challenges and opportunities at stake.