Building capacity for service design
What does effective introductory service design training look like?
The Challenge
Service design is a rapidly growing field, however access to quality training remains dispersed. We noticed a growing appetite and curiosity about service design as a practice, with the need for hands-on and practical learning.
Our Response
In collaboration with Spencer Beacock of October Systems, we developed ‘Getting Started with Service Design in Your Organization’ - a day long, interactive learning experience. One of the participants described it as ‘“the best workshop I have done in a long time … maybe ever”, and others ran the session back at their organization to share what they learned.
Client:
Sector:
Project Type:
Services:
Collaborators:
The Opportunity
It’s hard to find great training on service design, with many service designers being self taught or learning on the job. We saw an opportunity to create high quality training from practitioners in order to introduce people to the mindsets and tools of service design.
Our Approach
The day long training included service design theory and hands on experience of basic skills and methods, including facilitation, service mapping and opportunity framing. We designed the session to be highly actionable - containing a ‘workshop within a workshop’ that participants would be equipped to run at their organizations after the session. This plug-and-play workshop included facilitation guides and detailed instructions in order to give participants an easy jumping off point.
Project Outcomes
We have run the session multiple times to sold out groups of learners. Folks have joined us from Shopify, CAMH, the Government of Canada, Canada Post, RBC and many more organizations to learn about service design and bring tools back to their organizations.
Participants from Toronto Public Library went on to run activities in their organization based on the session for their Annual Planning Day.
