Vincenzo Di Maria is a service designer currently working across Europe. His work focuses on socially responsive design and innovation ranging from products to services and experiences. His approach to design is holistic, playful and people-centered. In 2008 Vincenzo co-founded commonground, the place where design meets positive social change. commonground works with socially minded organizations to deliver service innovation and user-driven experiences. 
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Vincenzo Di Maria: It’s really entrusting the different entry points to service design, because I’ve seen people coming from very different professional backgrounds. First of all, there are the people actually delivering services out there. They’re not designers, but they are actually doing it. Most of them are actually creating services and delivering it.
I’m talking about the people working, maybe, in the health system or the post office that they need to come up every day with this sort of silent design. They basically do design services, but they don’t really know how to do it properly. On the other hand, I’ve seen, of course, the big influence in the user experience, or what you would call multi?channeled user experience, service design as a definition is quite complicated.
It’s still a bit fluid. It’s not really a design discipline. It’s incorporating a lot from what you UX-?designers have been doing in the past 10 years; I would say. Then there are people, like myself or like others, that come from slightly out there, more traditional design disciplines, such as graphic design, information design, or even industrial design, but realizing that there is very little of industrial design in our modern economy. Everything is turning toward services and experiences, especially here in Europe, where we’ve got about 70 percent of our economy is based on services.
So we’re trying to understand how to transfer these creative skills, creative problem?solving approach, which we call design, is an iterative and creative way of solving problems, moving towards the slightly less tangible aspects, which is the service environment. I see lots of very different languages, as well. You may come from the UX sort of perspective or whether you come from the physical design perspective. If you have furniture designers stepping into service design that is going to make a bit of a difference.
Joe Dager: Welcome, everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of the Business901 podcast. With me today is Vincenzo Di Maria. He is a service designer and co?founder of Common Ground, currently working across Europe. His work focuses on socially responsive design and innovation, ranging from products to services and experiences.
He trained as a designer at Central St. Martin’s College of Art Design in London, where he’ll be running the service design summer course the first two weeks of August this year. I would like to welcome you, and would you introduce yourself and give a little background?
Vincenzo: Sure. Hi, Joe and thank you for having me here. Thank you for inviting me to this great opportunity. I actually love your blog and read…actually; I’ve been listening to some of your podcasts before. OK, something a bit about myself.
I’m Italian. I’ve been training as an industrial designer in Italy, London, and Portugal, where I’m living at the moment. Actually, I’m talking from Lisbon at the moment.
After my training in industrial design, I started working in innovation at the University of the Arts, London, which the department was called Designed Against Crime. Design was used to respond to slightly more socially relevant challenges, rather than just looking at what the market needs.
We’ve been delivering multi?stakeholder projects, working with the local sector, working with the police, working with not just one client, but a whole bunch of stakeholders. It’s been really interesting to look at the diverging, conflicting agenda and trying to find not always a product sort of solution, but even a service or system based solution that could respond to their needs.
Developing from that sort of experience, working in research and innovation and development, I met my colleague, Bruno Taylor, who is a British designer who studied with me at Central St. Martin’s, and we set up a new company, which is an organization called Common Ground. From that on, we then started developing lots of service design projects, although we tend to work more in the public and third sector.
With an opportunity, as by given our collaboration with the University of the Arts, London, at Central St. Martin, to actually initiate and propose a short course in service design.
Joe: Well, it’s not so much of a short course; it’s two weeks long. It’s pretty in-depth, isn’t it?
Vincenzo: It is. It is very intense, though, because it is a 10-day course, full time, about 50 hours, plus the extra, which you should always consider. Yeah, I mean, it’s a great opportunity, of course, to get a first taste of what is this discipline of service design. We don’t pretend people coming to this course and coming out, claiming themselves to be service designers, because there are lots of experiences, and a lot of the things that we’ll experience during the course, actually; you need to learn over years, as you will do to be a doctor, actually.
Joe: What type of person is going to attend? Are they most students types or do you get a pretty cross discipline of some business people that are really going to take two weeks out and attend the course?
Vincenzo: Yes. That’s why the course is called short course. First of all, this is the second year; we’ve run the course, and it is an improved version of the prototype we did last year in summer 2011; in that occasion, with 20 students, 20 participants in the course, and this very inter?disciplinary sort of mix of people. Some of them were actually practitioners, design practitioners, that, after five or ten years’ experience, they want to just have an update and check out what’s happening at the moment.
Some of them, they were teachers. Some of them, they were coming straight from the public sector, from the sort of service provision perspective, people that actually do deliver services. They’re called the silent design community. Not even being service designers, they actually make services up and deliver most of them, as we know them.
We had, as well, some activists coming along, and UX designers, people coming from the visual information design field. Very cross?disciplinarily, but as well, I will say, different levels of experiences, with people aged 20, as we had people aged 40, with very different cultural backgrounds.
Joe: It’s someone who really just wants to take that next step, as you’ve said, or the review process of service design, is going to attend?
Vincenzo: I think service design is a bit of a buzzword, which has been creating a lot of curiosities around it, and there’re lots of people driven at the moment by lots of events connected to service design, whether it is our global service jams happening over weekends all over the world, where there are service design drinks, which are very informal events happening in pubs around cities in Europe, where people meet up just to talk about service design, to learn more about service design.
On the other hand, probably it’s just a rebranding of what many user experience, UX designers, have been claiming to be doing in the past 10 years, which is this multi?channeled user experience and trying to map out what is the experience of the customer, of the user of this service and trying to point out what are all the touch points or the components, the elements, that make a service.
Now all these components, they are not just web or digital. I know there is a tendency to associate service design with something completely digital. Well, I will argue that most of the services that we’ve got out there, they’re actually offline.
And the real touch point sometimes is face to face or is physical interaction with a machine at the airport that actually doesn’t work, or doesn’t print our boarding pass, and we are about to miss the plane. Those are the sorts of services we’re talking about as well, in our course.
Joe: Well, can you give a general outline of the course? Do you take prototyping for one day, how do you go about it? How much is class room, and how much is getting out of the classroom and going and visiting someone? Can you give me a general description of it?
Vincenzo: Sure. We’ve got actually a very detailed structure of the course that we are sharing in these days and will be available to the people there that will be interested in taking part of the course. I remember we got about 20 places available, and I think about 18 of them; they are already taken. We are, like, a few numbers away from being fully booked.
I’ll tell you about the course. The course is two weeks full time, so we go five days, Monday through Friday on the first week and again Monday through Friday, on the second week. During the first week, I will say there are 80 percent theory and 20 percent practice, in a way that we’re going to take apart what is the design methodology, or the design mindset, the creative mindset, hidden behind this process of designing a service.
So we’ll be talking about introducing service design but moving from what is the bubble of service design into designing services. We’ve run some activities, which are called service autopsy, where we take a service apart and let the students rebuild it and try to understand how that service was designed.
We will get them through this sort of design process or design methodology of understanding and visualizing what is the creative process? Is this sort of squiggled and I might understand how it works, or is it actually slightly more structured? We’ve been talking about diverging and converging moments. We’ll take, actually, as a reference point, something called the double diamond, which is something developed by the British design council in 2005.
It was observing some design practices, going through their design process. It’s basically in four stages, the discovery stage, the defining stage; the develop stage, and the believer stages, which are, again, diverging, converging, diverging, converging, defining this double diamond. What we do there, is we’ll get the students to map out this road map of the creative process using all the tools and methods useful.
Everybody’s talking about within the service design fields; you know; we’re talking about user journey mapping. We’re talking about different ways of gathering insights and doing design research. We’re talking about service safaris. We’re talking about service blueprints. How do you present a service?
How do you present a service to the people that won’t want to use the service and, therefore, may have a slightly more appealing way of selling a service? And how do you present the service to the people that need to deliver the service, which is the sort of back stage, how are the people, there’re still people there. They need to deliver the service.
We get through this week, which are introductions to methods and tools and sort of creative processes. We’ve got two important moments, as well, during the first week, which is one is a workshop in collaboration with some of our associates and partners. One of our partners, which is Aldo de Jong, from Barcelona, will come to London to deliver a workshop on participative service networks, which is how to design services bottom?up, starting from communities, and how this is changing our economy.
On the last day of the first week, which will be the Friday afternoon, we also open up a debate. We are inviting some service design practitioners. We will add Nick Marsh, which is currently the head of designing innovation at Sidekick Studios in London, who has been working previously on engine service design, design council, and is also proposing was one of the initiators of the movement called service design dreams.
And we will have also Professor JoAnn Bechard, who is the head of design research at the Helen Hamlyn Center at the Royal College of Art. Those are moments where we actually tend to open up the debate with the students, participating to the course, and give a chance to actually talk about service design in broader terms.
For example, Common Ground, myself and my colleague, we talk about service design as a way of entrepreneurship sort of project. How to start up new enterprise by doing service design? This goes slightly away from the traditional service design concept. This is week one, where we talk a bit more about theory.
We introduce all these tools, all these methods, all these processes, and we do a bit of practice by delivering practical exercises. Week two, everything changes. We’re talking about 80 percent practice, and just 20 percent theory. We’re inviting three different clients; I’m not going to name them, but they’re quite interesting clients this year. These are real-life clients.
What we want to do is give a safe ground for students to learn, but give at the same time, some real-life context to challenge them, working with real client briefs. We tend to have usually three different categories or typologies of clients. One coming from the private sector; it will be a slightly more commercial service proposal.
One will come from the public sector, which will be local authorities in London. Another one will come from the third sector or sort of a charity sector.
Those are the three, because we believe that service design can really go across sector and in Europe, it’s been proven many times that people in Copenhagen, there is a service design agency that works for the government called Mind Lab. That has proved in many different occasions.
On the Monday morning, we’ll be presenting these three different briefs, different challenges. We’ll have the clients come to the college of service mart in London presenting their brief. Over the next five days, basically there will be some sort of real action, and that will be repeating all the things that have been learned during week one into researching, generating ideas, prototyping and testing, defining the user experience, visualizing it, creating a blueprint, and get ready by Friday afternoon. Which is the last day of the course on Friday, 10th of August, to actually pitch straight to the clients what they’ve been creating.
Of course, they will be working in teams. Last year there were about four teams. We’re thinking about teams between three and five people. Interdisciplinary collaboration is also another essential part in the service design. That’s a bit of a challenge, to have just five days to generate a service proposal.
Joe: Is there an outline for the entire course on what they have to accomplish and is there like milestones created or is it…
Vincenzo: Sure, we are. I mean, what we are interested in, and that probably may be relevant to you as well in the research you’re doing on these models, are we pay attention to the sort of learning outcomes. Out of each activity, we want, really, the students or the participants of the course to take something away.
What we are really interested in is because some of them, they may not just be service designers, or they may not become service designers, but they’re just interested in learning about this different way of looking at problem solving. Therefore, the relevance to their own professional practice is the feedback we get during the course.
Yeah, understanding what is a service and what service design is; develop their own creative methodology, and creating some of their own tools. The ability to generate and visualize outputs, which makes service tangible for our clients to understand. Those are the things we’re going to be paying attention to.
However, we also hope that we’ll get a lot of creative people able to suggest different ways of going around. We’re not going to limit them a lot. During the second week, where they’re doing their real client briefs, we will have three afternoons with mentorship opportunities. We’re inviting some of our colleagues, service design practitioners in London, to come along in the afternoon and just hang around with the students.
If any further feedback or any specific question about one aspect of the service they are designing, there will be people prepared to respond to their needs. Again, as you’re saying, the takeaway of the course, or what are learning outcomes, that’s really important. That’s why we don’t want to focus too much on the project.
I mean, for example, last year we had a slightly different structure, and the sort of client briefs went through the full two weeks. We realized that people were too focused on the final project output, and they were not paying attention enough to their actual learning. I think that’s really important because this is a course within a university. We’re talking about a safe learning environment with real-life experience, but again, it’s all about the learning that people take away from the course.
Joe: So you want failure there, so that they can learn from it, correct?
Vincenzo: I hope so. That’s something we all need to learn about, and it’s very interesting to see the different cultural approaches. I’m Italian myself. I’m living in Portugal. Failure is a difficult word around here. It’s a difficult concept, as well. While in the UK, as in the States, the right recipe is probably, actually, is the right ingredients to succeed, but that’s why we prototype our services. That’s why we expose them, to get out and fail sooner to succeed earlier.
That’s the point that we’re trying to make as well, all throughout the course. What we realize that some of the failures sometimes is not due to the creative process, but it’s due to the ability of the different people, generally, working together. The collaboration dynamic sometimes is what kills ideas, even if ideas are great, the inability of working together.
Joe: I think of service design, and I think of the different people attending, a marketing person, and a UX designer, a programmer? What’s the type of person that gets the most out of a service design course?
Vincenzo: As I was saying before, lots of different people take away different parts of the design process. For example, if you’re a designer; if you’re somehow involved with creating not just service proposals. Whether you are a web developer; where you are graphic designers, whether you are an exhibition designer, you want to design and experience going to a museum, you take away probably the slightly more creative part, which is the capacity of brainstorming, generating ideas, prototyping, and those.
While if you come from a slightly more business, marketing?oriented perspective, you may take completely different aspects away from the course, which is the ability of selling a service, not just from a market perspective, but as well, from a user experience perspective, paying attention to the people using the service.
We’re talking about a human?centered, user?centered approach, again paying attention to the people delivering the service. It’s that ability of having a holistic approach and realizing the services are not just coming up together automatically, but there are people working within the process. I think it’s a much more human way of marketing a service and selling its value, as well.
What is the value of service design? If that is the question, there are so many different answers to that. The danger of ending up, what I was trying to say before as well, the people realize they’re using services when something goes wrong. When you meet a machine in the airport, and it’s out of service, and you can’t print your boarding pass, and you lose the plane, and something goes wrong, then you realize that you’re using services.
If services do not work, or they’re out of service, as the world says, that’s when you start losing clients. You start losing reputation, credibility, and its own market value, especially today when anybody, from car companies to airline companies, everybody’s trying to communicate, not on the product offer, but on the service experience offer, and what you can offer to your users, to your clients, to your customers. That’s where service design can make a stronger case for business and marketing.
Joe: Do you make people take other roles than what they are? You don’t leave the marketing person play the marketing role of service design; you move him out of there and make him do something a bit different, don’t you?
Vincenzo: Yes, definitely. That’s part of the challenge. Actually, it’s the most fun bit to watch because we’ve seen very square?minded people to deal with brainstorming and prototyping capacity, and we told them to look, use post-it-notes and this sort of visual canvas to prototype a business model, and they get frozen for the first few minutes.
That’s where, I think, some of the other events within the service design fields, I was mentioning before, global service jam, which is a place where you go for a weekend in a very intense dynamic. You may wear a funny hat and trying to prototype a customer experience within a retail environment by using a rubber chicken. That’s really, take off a bit of the rational, left?brained sort of attitude and get people to be creative and to start experimenting, creating, prototyping, and not being too afraid of that.
On the other hand, though, what I’ve been noticing is that it’s much easier to get the business and the creative guys, the banker, let’s say, into a sort of creative, fun mindset, and it gets them to come out with ideas because it’s quite liberating for them. It’s difficult doing the opposite, which is getting the creative people; the sort of…well, Edward Bono thinking about six theories. We’ll call that the people who are always in brainstorming mode or the very positive, constructive people, to start thinking business, to start thinking strategy.
That is much harder. So getting a designer or illustrator to start thinking look, you want to design services. It’s not just about drawing the storyboard. You also need to make a business argument for it. That’s why I say that there are three basic ingredients, in my opinion, to be a service designer. It’s the capacity of having creativity; I think, is the design base needs to be there. If something is not creative, innovative, or there is an aspect that is actually genius, you know. It’s something that you’ve been testing a lot.
If you haven’t got the creativity base, it’s very difficult to design anything. Then there is the strategy base, on the other hand, which is the capacity to make sense or making blueprints or communicating things that are intangible, being able to sell intangible outputs is very difficult. You’re trying to sell air. You’re selling experience. You need to visualize services. You need to make it tangible, to some extent.
Then there is the bit in between, which I call empathy, or is the capacity of understanding people, and as we are all user experiences ourselves, and potentially service users, so it’s good to understand the people motivation, because all service experiences are around users. When I service that is started being designed on the computer or in the digital environment before being taken to people, I think it’s going to fail very soon.
That is my approach. I think a common ground would look a lot like the people?centered design approach more than in other fields.
Joe: I’m seeing that type of approach more and more. I mean whether we call it service design, design thinking; we’re seeing more and more of that hands?on, even though we live in this vast world of social media, and that seems to be where we’re all headed. The designers are saying back up. We have to create this social aspect offline before we can create it online.
Vincenzo: Well, I think that things go together. I mean, a leading development approach, or I will suggest to start prototyping, so the sort of doing, not talking, put things out there, then they will adjust themselves because people will contribute, then we start making up. That’s what clever partner is going to be talking about, talking about participative service network.
How those services are created by the users, actually, so there is this sort of co?design or even co?production, where users are not just consumers, but they are consumers. They are producers and consumers of their own services. We’re still designing services for big corporations, or for companies, and they follow the more traditional sort of top?down approach. So that’s where service designers or creative people, strategy people, need to bring a bit of their fresh way of thinking.
They need to be able, as well, to sell this new service proposition. I don’t think there is a right approach. I think that you can go from the on-line to the offline to the offline to the on-line. What I just criticize is when people get too excited about this sort of whole social media, or digital environments, and they forget, first of all, that we’re not talking to our users, because not everybody’s goal is my grandma as my phone.
She still goes to the post office to get her pension, her retirement money. So that person is not going to use any sort of cash point machine with any sort of physical, digital interaction, definitely is not going to have a smartphone with any app or these things, definitely is not going to use the Internet. These people are a lot. I mean, we’re talking about a big demographic, in other words.
We’re designing services also for those people, so we need to balance that off, and we can’t get too excited about something and forget about people.
Joe: You talked about problem solving within service design. Is that any different than, really, the typical problem?solving that we’d find in, let’s say, Lean or one of the other process methodologies? What’s different about problem solving within the service design?
Vincenzo: I will say the design bit. Maybe the simple answer, but I deeply believe the design process itself is a creative, iterative, problem?solving process, so the amount of creativity that goes into it and the sort of way of visualizing those aspects, is that will probably serve designers.
I mean, when you talk about Lean and all the other stuff, you’re still talking about complex environments where there are very different users, and you may have different clients, on the other hand, with different diverging or conflicting agendas. That’s very difficult to provide a solution that makes everybody happy, the final user, the clients, and the people providing service.
That’s what we shall try to attempt. Just in that, within the service design fields, we’ve been experimenting with a lot of creative tools and methods. There’s been an argument around; service design is not just about tools and methods. That’s true, while creating a mindset. If I give you the tools to repair a car, and I show you how to repair a car; you may not be able to repair another car. If you get experience and you get the right mindset, you start understanding services, or cars.
What I am saying here that there’re so many different tools that we’re borrowing from other design disciplines, traditional design disciplines, such as the capacity of visualizing user experience, which sounds like such a simple thing, or not just doing a color map, actually visualizing in a different way. That’s our thing, is that creative aspect, the design aspect, the ads to serve as design, compared to some of the other very similar fields which, on the other hand, they’re all overlapping.
Service design is a bit of a container. You know, embrace…according to whatever the touch points are; it can embrace interaction, design. It can be a business startup. It can be actually a physical environment. It can be a product. And all those things, of course, start coming together into a service, which I call this service ecology. It’s very difficult to define. That’s why it’s a very interdisciplinary field.
Joe: You talked about service design as being very fluid, but it’s not really a catch?all thing. It’s more than we’re not sitting there defining boundaries to it right now; we’re leaving it kind of grow on its own. It’s kind of like water, trying to seek its own level.
Vincenzo: I don’t see a serious danger in that. I see a series of creative methodologies to be shared across disciplines. Whether we’re calling it service design, which is a definition not set in stone, and the definition itself is more fluid, why is it fluid? It’s fluid because it’s made of two worlds, which are fluid in their own rights.
What is design? And what is a service? If we ask people in the street, that’s very often; they don’t know how to answer. It’s very interesting to do this exercise because you may get completely different answers. People, or even clients sometimes, do not understand services. They’re invisible. They’re intangible, but that’s what we use most of the time, even if we don’t realize.
The time this morning I woke up, and I went and ate my breakfast and took out some money, and I did a phone call. I had already used 50 services probably by then without realizing it. That’s the problem. The word service and the word design are fluid concepts still for the majority of people.
We can get quite technical and debating. I can have my own view of service design from a design point of view. I can talk to you from a business marketing perspective, and you can tell me that service design is completely something else. I think that’s fine. It just enriches the debate around it. Again, I don’t see any specific danger in transferring some of the learning from one field to another.
As you say, the only danger is the boundaries are a bit blurring, again; that may just raise confusion in trying to sell service design to clients. How do you get clients to buy into something that is so not defined? Lots of people are doing it in Europe. Lots of people start doing that in the States, as well. I think there is a market, and soon as people start grasping the idea, the service design adds value to their user experience, and that is what they value the most. That’s what they’re going to be investing in.
Joe: I think that was very well said. Is there something you would like to add to this conversation, either about the classes that you’re putting on or commonground that I didn’t ask?
Vincenzo: Yes. I’ll probably just say that, well, commonground. We don’t define ourselves as a service design agency. Again, we are a metric based organization. We operate across the UK and Lisbon. We’ve been delivering a project in Italy at the moment, in April. What we do is using design methods, creative approach, addressing social issues.
When I’m talking about social issues, I’ll talk about the rise of socializing older people, our communities, I’m talking about youth employment; we call needs, young people, not in employment, vocation, or training, or talking about environmental sustainability but try to get them together first and draw experience.
In Naples, we’ve been doing something completely different, which is trying to help voluntary organizations. They do social theater, to develop a social enterprise model. What you call this design, that’s our question. And we don’t really care. Common ground is the place where design makes positive social change. We work with very different people.
We work with anthropologists, ethnographers, criminologists, and whoever is needed to solve a problem. We really take problem?solving not caring too much about the final output. The final output may be an experience, an exhibition, a service, a system of things, or a new enterprise. We use a lot of service design tools, methods, and mindsets, I will say. That’s why we’re really happy to share them.
We’re doing this through the course in London, but we’re doing that through other opportunities. For example, we’ve been delivering some master classes in Madrid. We’ve been mentoring and coaching in some startup weekends across Europe. We are always part of this global service giant more than any other service design events happening across.
For example, I was San Francisco last October for the global service design network conference. It’s important to be there to be part of a community, which even if it’s a small community, is really creating a lot of material, lots of talking, and a lot of debate. There is a growing interest around it. I’m not too precious about it. I’m up to share. I believe that the future of our economy is sharing.
I know we need to change a lot of things in our business models if we want to make that true, if we believe in this new collaborative consumption sort of economy. That’s where I think, as well; services are changing and transforming our economy.
Joe: Now, you did mention that there are some changes going on with the jam or something about that earlier? What are they?
Vincenzo: Well, what are they? The jams are improving. The jam, just to say what it is, is an initiative started by some of my colleagues in Germany about two years ago, who want to launch on the model of some Gamification or Hack Days weekend or startup weekends, which is basically the marathon. It’s a format where people come together for free over a weekend. They come in Friday; they discuss an idea. A theme gets announced, and they work, using all the tools, they bring to the jam. I mean; you have to think of the jam as a music jam.
You don’t go out to the music jam to make a record, but you go there with your music instrument to actually try out something new. After you’re jamming with new people you never were before, you go back home and say wow that was great. How can I use that? A service jam is the same.
There are people coming together at the same time in over sixteen places over the world. They all work intensively over a weekend to develop new service proposals that, in this case, they’re going to be saving, or at least changing a bit in our world.
What is happening now, that, after the first three sessions that have been happening over the past year and a half, there were two global service jams and one specific global service jam about sustainability. New models are happening.
For example, this week, my colleagues were delivering the first Gov. Jam, which is the first global service jam for local governments. That is quite interesting. How can you bring this very creative methodology within a government, local government setting, or central government setting?
And that’s why a couple of weeks ago; we were in Nuremberg for the jam, which is some sort of metaphysical experience over a weekend. All the organizers of the different jams across the world, ranging from Shanghai to Bangalore in India to Australia, Moscow, and many other localities across Europe came together.
They met up in Nuremberg to jam about how to design the next jam… What are we going to do? What are we learning? How do we get people to get more out of it?
That’s what is changing. The jam is improving, and it’s getting more personal, and it’s getting closer. It’s very local; I will say, initiative, because it’s got a global network with a global community, a global platform, a global way of thinking about service design.
Then it’s finding their own local application, thanks to the work of the hosts or the people giving up their weekend for three days, working for free, and to do very challenging, high technical, and very creative stuff that maybe they don’t have the chance to do during the week, during their work.
They’re willing to do so. If there is this energy, something will happen very soon; I guess. The way of learning is very interesting because it’s a faster way of learning, doing not talking, not thinking too much, just actually go out and try to do things and reflect afterward. It’s a very interesting thing.
I mean, we’ve been using theatrical rehearsing way, just to try prototype services, because when you go on prototype experience, that’s something new, as well, for many designers, because they are not performers. It’s the only way to prototype a service sometimes. That’s a different way of learning, the global service jam. If you want to have something more structured, come to our course in London.
We’ll be touching on some of the exercises that we usually do at the jams, but it will be one part of it. There will be also the time to think, reflect, and learn in a more traditional way about it.
Joe: What’s the best way to get a hold of you?
Vincenzo: Well, the best way to get a hold me is to probably go to our website, which is gotocommonground.com, and the go to is part of the URL, so gotocommonground.com. You can follow us as well on Twitter, which we’ve got a hash tag. I can probably give my own, which is #VDMDesign, are my initials, Vincenzo Di Maria, so VDMDesign.
You can also send us an email at [email protected]. On our website, actually, on the blog you can find more information about the course, as you can find on the Centre de Martin web page, more information about our course, and as well, the registration page. So that’s it. We’ve got a hash tag we’ve created for the past course, and we’re using for this course, which is basically the branding of the course is service design summer, so it’s #SDS2012.
It’s just a hash tag. If you want to follow our updates during the first weeks of August, we’ll be tweeting using that hash tag, #SDS2012.
Joe: I would like to thank you very much. I appreciate it. This podcast will be available on the Business901 blog site and the Business901 iTunes store.
Vincenzo: Thank you for the opportunity.
Lean Service Design Trilogy: Bring this Workshop on-site!