Sarah Drummond Sarah Drummond

Getting into Service Design

Last month, we ran a session called Getting into Service Design.

It sold out within a day, with a waitlist of over 100 people and 200+ submissions of questions for the session. There was a demand!

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Lou Downe Lou Downe

Making the case for service design

How do you make the case for service design when there might be a million other competing priorities or term decisions needed to invest in improving something? The answer is often making a financial case for the work we’re doing. Meeting budget constraint with business case.

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Sarah Drummond Sarah Drummond

Plotting international trips

We’re coming to the US/Australia/New Zealand/Canada!

Well, we’re plotting… and some other countries…

We have been receiving an increase in requests for training online and in person in different time zones. Particularly in the countries mentioned above.

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Lou Downe Lou Downe

Can we end austerity-era service design?

Since the dawn of the internet, amazon and cheap print, libraries have become a part of our civic infrastructure that we don't always quite know what to do with. No longer the primary source of books to the majority, they have become the overspill to services that we can't quite fit anywhere else.

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Sarah Drummond Sarah Drummond

Designing Sustainable Services

You might have heard that we’re running a new course called Designing Sustainable Services. We’re getting together with friends Ness Wright and Lucy Stewart to run a course that equips designers with the tools and questions to take action on climate change

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Lou Downe Lou Downe

Bad Services

We’re just back from a European trip talking at Service Design Network Global Conference and Servicios Digitales de Aragón’s Design and Citizenship conference.

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Sarah Drummond Sarah Drummond

Announcing our five free bursaries

We’ve opened a School of Good Services Bursary which gives 5 people an opportunity to attend courses for free at the school and have 1:1 coaching with our directors on a twice yearly basis.

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Sarah Drummond Sarah Drummond

Essential skills for service designers

A common question I’ve been asked throughout my career is ‘what makes a good service designer?’ There’s no one perfect ‘mould’ a service designer should be or fit, but when I’ve interviewed for the role, I’ve looked for several recurring skills and experiences.

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Lou Downe Lou Downe

Invisible services and how to fix them

To design something you have to - at a bare minimum - believe that it exists. And this is the problem we have with service design.

Services are invisible by they’re nature. They help our users to achieve an end goal, but they are more than the sum of their component parts. Services are also made of the connections between the products, systems and information we interact with

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Lou Downe Lou Downe

What makes a bad service?

The things our users need from our services aren’t unique, and the problems we have in delivering those services aren't either

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Lou Downe Lou Downe

What is a service designer?

Here at the School of Good Services, we get a lot of questions along the lines of “I’ve been doing X, am I a service designer?”

Here are five things that you don’t need to be a service designer, and two that you do

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Lou Downe Lou Downe

What is a service?

When designing a service, there are many questions we need to answer - who are our users? What do they need from us? What could we do to help them achieve their goal?

But there is one question we’re often afraid to ask. It’s by far the most common question that comes up in Good Services courses, and that’s ‘what is my service?’ 

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Lou Downe Lou Downe

Launching the School of Good Services!

After nearly 2 years of delivering training to over 5,000 people and hundreds of organisations in how to design services that work, Good Services is officially becoming a school, and with it, we’re changing our name to The School of Good Services.

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Lou Downe Lou Downe

Why we need service literacy

In the winter of 2019, Paris was much like any other large northern European city; messy, imperfect, and cold.

But like every other city, there was a more deliberate force behind some of the mess if you looked closely.

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