Category: Service Design
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Jazz consultancy
Recently I was talking with a colleague and I shared a thought that I’d been playing with for a while. Most of our work is a bit like playing in a Jazz group. I feel the need to immediately caveat that with the fact that I’m not an accomplished Jazz musician. I can play guitar,…
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Academic design research work I’ve found helpful
I’ve reflected a few times on the potential value of bridging the gap between academic and professional design research. Its worth being clear that this isn’t because I think is one is better/more high brow/more applicable than the other. I just like to have context and history of the development of design research theory and…
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Reflecting on research (part 2)
This is a follow up from part 1 (you’re shocked, I can tell). Read that for some more context. The fact that the research has lasted over nine years (2016-2025) has been tough, but its also had some benefits. being honest it makes me cringe thinking about how many commercial design research projects (and even…
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Reflecting on research (Part 1)
If you’ve been following along with my research work at all, you’ll know its been going a while. The final thing I needed to write up was a reflection on my experience. As someone who likes to get value out of things I write (and I actually have some time, because we’re away without the…
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Surviving meetings as a designer (or similar)
It can be tempting to wish that meetings weren’t a thing, or at least that all of them were expertly facilitated by someone who has put the time into preparation and the has the skills. Sadly this isn’t the case. You’re going to have to work out how to cope in meetings, and many of…
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Reflecting on the second half of 2024
I pondered this being a weeknote, but honestly I’m so far out of that routine that it didn’t make sense. I’m off work and we were meant to be going to see Wicked in the cinema for my wife’s birthday, but she’s got a throat infection after a week of the kids being ill as…
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Service design in the weeds
Lost in the maze of decisions? I can relate. Recent work things made me reflect (as they should do) about the need for shifting gears as a service designer. Or maybe its flight levels? Or maybe its zooming in and out? In effect, there are times in work where drawing out high level visualisations of…
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My adventures with print on demand
AKA how I made £2.46 in a week. I’m sure there’s a really long epic paragraph I should write here about my entrepreneurial spirit yadder yadder. Mostly I’ve had dumb ideas, bought domains and never got any closer to a ‘business model’ than that. I’ve seen people ‘building in the open’ and it some across…
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Seven things to think about when prototyping a service
A different way to think about fidelity when you’re planning service prototypes.
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Ai powered service design thinking
After a few discussions with the Co-op design team around how many people are already exploring using Ai as part of their creative process at work, and with an hour to play with whilst on my day off, I finally joined the hype train. I’ve been meaning to write something about the relationship between Service-dominant…
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Service Design Skills
The output from a service design community of practice session where I asked attendees “When I work with a service designer, the skills I need the, to bring are”. See what they said…
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What writing history essays taught me about service design
It can be very tempting to seek out the single root cause of problems or ‘pain points’ when it comes to finding opportunities for innovation. My (limited) experience at taking a look at hisory suggests that its often as important to find the ‘other supporting factors’ and make sure you don’t ignore them.
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Towards a new way of thinking about prototyping services
Services can be tricky to prototype, and designers have largely uncritically applied current prototyping practice to how we design services. What are the opportunities to develop a service specific approach to prototyping?
alistairuff 