Published:

Apr 8, 2024

Is it possible to do business ethically? How can you give back as a small business without the resources of a larger company? What are some ways we can build in a 'triple bottom line' and have an impact in the communities we are part of?

Published:

Feb 26, 2024

Over my career, I’ve managed recruits for 100s of participants over the course of 65+ projects. In this post, I’m sharing four ways to find research participants, pros and cons, and my personal perspective on each.

Published:

Jan 19, 2024

2023 was an exciting year for us. We worked on 12 consulting projects, spanning sectors like early childhood education, healthcare, retail and more! Alongside this, we trained folks on using service design in their organization, wrote 9 editions of the ask a service design newsletter and donated 1% of total revenue to environmental non-profits. Thank you to all our clients and collaborators!

Published:

Dec 1, 2023

In 2014/15, Nick Crampton and I worked on a set of 10 service design heuristics, as part of our work at Usability Matters. We were inspired by the idea of usability heuristics, including the now classic Nielsen Norman set. We were curious about whether we could distill a set of principles that could be broadly applied to services as evaluative and generative tool.

Published:

Jul 31, 2023

You know the butterflies of trying to approach someone on the street, that sinking feeling as you get yet another rejection when you ask someone if they can give you five minutes for your research project, the challenge of trying to rally yourself to ask someone else. While approaching strangers is never going to be easy, we’ve learned some things that will help to take the edge off.

Published:

Jan 7, 2022

2021 was an exciting year for us. We worked on 10 consulting projects, spanning sectors like legal tech, fine jewellery, the justice system and more! Alongside this, we trained folks on design research and testing, wrote 9 editions of the ask a service design newsletter, spoke at 5 conferences and donated 1% of total revenue to environmental non-profits. Thank you to all our clients and collaborators!

Published:

Dec 9, 2020

“You know that thing you do with post-its… can you teach me please?” This was the text message I woke up to from my mother. Over the years, she has seen many photos of my post-it to-do lists, a post it Christmas kanban board, and various other designerly post-it-ing.

Published:

May 4, 2020

Recently I’ve been pondering the narratives and practices around ‘ideas’ and ‘ideation’ that I see playing out in service design. This is based on my own experiences over the last five years or so, as well as observations of the conversations and framing in broader design practice and organizations.

Published:

Jan 2, 2020

I wasn’t going to write a year in review post, but then I was pretty inspired by some great ones I read from Andrew Lovett-Baron, Whitney Hess and Brad Frost. My main goal in writing this is to do some personal reflection and have a record of what I got up to in 2019, mostly professionally. So here goes…

Published:

Nov 3, 2018

A lot of people reach out to me to ask questions about getting started in service design. Maybe you’re in an adjacent field like UX or design research. Maybe you’re studying and wondering what’s next for you. Or maybe you’ve come across the discipline and think it could be a good fit for your skills and interests.

Published:

Aug 26, 2018

Full house at a Service Design Toronto (SDTO) panel on the value of service design in November 2014.