The first Global Service Jam took place in March 2011, where more than 1200 participants in more than 50 cities created around 200 unique service designs around the Theme “(Super)HEROES”. A sister event, the Global Sustainability Jam, tool place in October 2011. Around 800 participants in more than 40 cities created over 100 services, products and initiatives around the theme “PLAYGROUNDS”. The Global Service Jam is a non-profit volunteer activity organized by an informal network of service design aficionados, who all share a common passion for growing the field of service design and customer experience. The Jam has a staff of none and a budget of nearly nothing.
Next Global Service Jam: last weekend in February 2016
In a past podcast, Adam St. John, one of the initiators of the Global Service Jam said:
We also do a thing called the Global Service Jam, which is an event which Marcus thought of, and I told the world about, which is when people come together for 48 hours during the weekend, and they spend 48 hours of mad super-fast working having a good time designing new services. The last one took place in about 90 cities worldwide of one weekend, and we got 300 designs out of it.
The people who come out of that say, “This is great. It was really cool to work with high energy, to work with short time frames, to have impossible deadlines and know they’re impossible but try and get them anyway, and to be playful, to be seriously playful while you’re doing this.” If you say how we work I’d say we work in a theatrical, high energy kind of way which often involves rubber chickens, but we can’t talk about that.
This comment was several years ago and the event has extended way beyond the comments above. Find out more by visiting
Global Service Jam 2016 and more about my discussion with Adam at Show Business in Service Design.