Intro Jams Dear Jammers! It‘s a great pleasure to be here. It‘s a great pleasure having been invited to this fantastic event by the ubiquitous Martin Jordan.

So my sincere thank goes to him as well as to his fellow organizers Olga and Manuel… …and of course to our generous host Fjord, for being so kind to allow us occupy this extraordinary space for next 48 hrs…

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This is meant - I suppose - as an introductory talk. So I have collected a bunch of snippets from here and here across the web, presented in no particular order.

On perspective The point, I suppose, that I would start with, is one that is borrowed from Charles Leadbeater. And what it is really, is just that: “Where you stand will determine what you see.” Quite simple on the face of it…… But really, often when we are involved in any kind of innovation we choose to stand in places without thinking about where we stand. And so obviously, if where you stand determines what you see, then we often tend to stand just in the place that we happen to be in, AND we don’t think about where we should stand in order to see things in a different way, or a more interesting way.

On Questions And then, also Leadbeater: The question you ask will determine the answer that you get, really. So if you want to ask: “How do we improve our performance in math at the age of 15?” Then the answer you will get is probably : “Better way to teach mathematics in schools to 13 and 14 year olds.” If you want to ask: “How do we get better outcomes form our education system?” Then that’s a completely different question. And if you want to ask: “What is a good outcome for young people?” That’s an even bigger question….

On Questions So we tend to ask questions in ways that are predestined to make us comfortable. We ask the question in a way that means that we are likely to know the answer. And professions have a sort of vested interest, really, in making sure that they perpetuate (or maintain) the problem to which they are the answer. •Doctors persuade us that they are the key to future health •Teachers persuade us that they are the key to better learning •The police persuade us that they are the key for better safety. And in each and every of those cases, they persuade us that the vantage point form which they see the world is the vantage point that we should adopt to understand how the word should be. And they identify their profession with the outcome that we seek...

On Questions ...And in many ways this is, of course, also true for designers. (Who, sometimes, have tendency to see their profession, in a very odd way, as the answer to virtually everything - really.) And so vantage point matters: And many of the most important design decisions are often those where you choose the perspective from which you are going to look at a problem and how you frame it, eventually. And so, much of the user-centred design stuff and the methods that you’ve just learned about (or that you are going to learn about in a minute) are, at their core, just about that, really: Helping us to tilt our perspective/vantage points into directions that might be unlikely at first but, at the same time, yield better outcomes in the long run. So, I am very confident that you are well covered on that side.___________________

The second thing is, totally unrelated: But he next two days might be best described by picturing ourselves as a collective - as brothers in arms - who engage in a kind of massive, global brainstorming session. However: Every proper brainstorm has, of course, a set of rules attached to it. So, I thought this might be a good place to re-iterate the most important (brainstorming) rule of them all:

Do not judge! Why is this important?: Because for trying to create a kind of creative momentum during a brainstorm – a flow that encourages wild ideas and allows people to build on the ideas of others – it’s absolutely imperative to segregate time and place of idea generation from the time and place of ideas evaluation. Evaluating Ideas at the site of their creation will take out the steam of any brainstorming attempt. That is because it discourages people from thinking wild and out of the box. So, jumping to early into the evaluation process of should be avoided wherever possible. This is really important because archiving it is a lot easier said than done – Especially within a very condensed setting, such as ours. Beyond core, there are, of course, some other basic rules to brainstorming, which I am sure you are all familiar with: Encourage wild ideas, Build on the ideas of other, Stay focused on the topic, One conversation at a time, Be visual, Go for quantity...

...The third thing, is on a slightly more hands-on and practical note:

Quite some time ago I attended a very interesting workshop led by Richard Eisermann and Anja Klüver, in which they laid out a framework that I found really, really useful in the context of service design.

Their framework basically provides a way of organizing all the constituting elements of a service experience, in a sequential kind of way.

And the best thing about it is that it applies to virtually any service that comes to mind:

For example, taking a train or going to the dentist.

Service components (“Dentist)

So, I had to go to the dentist the other week and I was soo glad; and slightly amazed that I could simply phone up a dentist and go. And a guy would spend 45 minutes working on my teeth. And I would leave > repaired. I mean that’s a fairly extraordinary thing, that you can just assume that that will happen. So, for the sake of the argument, lets stick with the example and think about: What are the constituting elements of going to the dentist – in terms of a service experience I mean? [pose the question to the crowd, wait for answers to drop in, which gonna be like, find the dentist, make appointment, have you teeth worked, go home, brush harder…]

Service components

So this is the way Anja and Richard organized the elements that constitute a service experience:

The User experience is a continuum here. It begins with enticement.

Service components

Entice – How can you get your butter to look better? What are you going to do to set it apart from the competition?

Decide – How does someone decide what college is right for him or her? What process do they go through? What value does can you provide to be chosen over the competition?

Use – How do people actually use a service? Try to consider which touchpoints have the greatest impact.

Support – How can you support people once they’ve opened the box and loaded the software onto their computer? How can a dentist support it’s costumers in maintaining better oral health?

End & extend - How can you keep your customers flying to your airport? How can a dentist make sure that people are coming back to him with joy...

... I kind of like to think about it like a date. •You want to make a good first impression. • Each subsequent impression will reinforce that first one. •Do things right, and …then hopefully - if the service was any

good - start the circle all over again. “The basic rule that , along the journey, to look at the service through the customers’ eyes. Put yourself in the customers’ shoes. Wear your customers’ hat. Get as close as you can to them.”

Service components

But there is also another dimension to it:

The notion of it all happening in a kind of orchestrated and intentional way - almost like a play at the theatre. So if you were asked to put on a play - right here, right now. What are the things to make it happen? What are the elements you need to source in order set up a proper theatre? [posing this question to the crowd, answers might include: actors, props, stage, script etc.]

Service infrastructure/Resources So, the main and most important, elements here are of course: A stage - The physical evidence of your service, your “stuff” Audience - Your customers and their actions Actors - Your employees and their actions Script - Your plan for what should happen, where and when Backstage -What you need to make everything “work”

Service Blueprint 1 As we’ve seen, the basic customer journey has five steps. If we take the user experience circle and straighten it out, we end up with the x axis of a diagram.

Service Blueprint 2 When combining this with all the infrastructure elements of a service: we end up with some kind of matrix or a so-called service blueprint matrix.

Service Blueprint for train journey What you see here, is a fancy, executive, version of a service blueprint for a train journey. Think of a service experience that has been particularly good: and consider the service journey that you went on to. And try to imagine the individual aspects of that experience and how they might fit on that matrix.

Detailed Blueprint And this is the technical version of the blueprint for the same journey. More geared towards technical implementation.

This is the description and plan of how all the individual element fit together on a service blueprint… (think it was Amtrak)

However, I am not suggesting that his is the only way, or the best way of how to think about a service experiences. But I have grown to like this way of organizing the individual components of a service and often refer to every now and then, when actually having to put something like this together So in case you think this might be of help for you at some stage within the next 48 hours, I am sure the is a way print out a copy for you.

John Thackara I am sure that by the end of today you will have immersed yourselves with all kinds of user-centred design methods and theory.

And most of this stuff will, without a doubt, involve excessive use of post it notes. Or, “Post-it-porn”, as I like to call it. So, in conclusion, I would like to end this by asking you to: Please don’t fool yourselves into believing that, you will have to create something that is robust and going to last forever, during the next 48 hours.

Thackara is right: These things are like butterflies, and they often do have only a short life-span, sadly… So, instead, please focus on the things that really matter in live:

•getting to know, new and interesting people; •having a jolly good fun together; • and (maybe) learn one or two new things along the way...

Thanks Okay, not much left to say, except maybe: “May the Force be with you, my dear Jammers!” Thank you for listening.