Today I attended a presentation at the Dutch Design Week by Marcel Zwiers from 31volts about Service Design. It’s a subject I’ve become more and more interested in over the last few months. If we take so much time designing products, what about services? And what value could it add? Especially for healthcare I suspect there might be significant gains in exploring the methods used. I will do a post on that later, first I’ll list my key take-aways about service design in general.

Don’t evolve. Design.

A service consists of technology + business + people. Service design focuses on the people. Important principles are design thinking, a holistic approach and people centeredness. So more buzzwords – what will that help us? It makes us think, that’s what I believe is most imporant. Evolving services is the normal route. If it’s not what or how the customer wants it – we’ll change it later. That’s a major FAIL.

Services are far too often becoming patchwork. While their are tools and techniques available that help to build a service that connects better to both the user and the provider. Service design as Marcel explained takes two important things at heart: create value (for the user) and use a design process.

It’s not what you think it is.

Service design is like solving crosswords. Or a visual illusion for that matter. It’s seeing one thing, but knowing that there’s something more – a deeper layer. Rijkswaterstaat is not about laying tarmac, it’s about  giving the people the opportunity to meet and connect. Staatsbosbeheer (Dutch Forest Reserves) looks like being about trees, but owns the countries’ largest fitness space. Think twice. What’s it you’re offering to your users? How can you do that? Take a look at the presentation below for an idea of what a service designer does.

Service designs need a business case.

When you have a company interested in doing a service design project you’re lucky (often heard response: “it’s always been okay, hasn’t it? why change it?”). But the key take away I got from the presentation – and some of the articles in SDN Touchpoint – is that these designs are in need of a good business case. There are different levels these ideas/designs need to be communicated and rightfully so someone is going to ask the question what value does it serve – is service going up, is it going to make more people use the service, will they light up green and do a happy dance? And you better have an answer, if you want to go beyond sketches, visualizations and ideas. That’s where designers and strategies can meet. There’s a good article about that in SDN Touchpoint issue, by James Moed (business strategist, IDEO) and Fran Samalionis (head of Service Design, IDEO).

Crippling?

Service design is no panacea in any form, but it gets a lot of things right. We must not let it cripple in what direction we can improve services, let alone saying that it is the way to go. @fackeldeyfinds stated that well in a Twitter discussion: let people think again. Service design can be one the ways we can help that along.

Oh and yes, we need to think about more titles like Chief Customer Officer. Or Chief Patient Officer :-)

I’ll write some more on this in future posts – I’d love to hear your thoughts! Thanks to @marcfonteijn for inviting me to attend the presentation!

Service Design door Marcel Zwiers – Dutch Design Week 2009 from 31Volts on Vimeo.

San Francisco. Feels a bit like being home (Amsterdam that is). You can just walk through the streets here and not have to take a cab for every place you want to go to. That’s nice! And in some ways it’s even better than Amsterdam: they have a a proper Apple Store :-)

Yesterday Jen and I had dinner round Fisherman’s Wharf after we arrived here in SF. Pretty weird eating seafood at 6.30am Amsterdam time… but it’s a nice place. Unfortunately it was too dark (and I was too jetlagged) to take a stroll around, but I will definitely do that the next few days.  Maybe the best part of the evening: the cab ride over to Fisherman’s Wharf from UN plaza. My! I know that San Francisco was a kind of a ‘hill city’ but it’s extreme! Walking in that part could easily be compared to mountain climbing (well in The Netherlands for sure, where we have like, no mountains. :-) The cabbie told us the breaks on the cabs get replaced every 10 days! Thankfully he just charged us for the ride and not a new set of breaks :-)

Today is pre-conference day packed with meetings and parties. There’s rehearsal stuff going on this morning and then lunch at Soluna cafe with more healthcare tweets. After that there’s the Health 2.0 accelerator meeting, more preparing/rehearsal at The Marriott and than the VIP party after that. Well yes it’s hard being in SF, no doubt :-)

I’m very much looking forward to meeting all the people coming over. Already on Twitter there’s lots of people are queuing up at airports or already in town (look for the tag #health2con). I’ll be volunteering at the conference but I’ll definitely try to cover it live where I can (on Twitter, on Nexthealth or here). There will be lots of demos and interesting apps being shown, but I’ll also be on the lookout for the larger scheme changes in healthcare, connecting online and offline and patient with professionals. I think there’s lots of inspiration here to do a followup on the Nexthealth paper: reaching consumer-centric care.

Let me know if you’re in town and like to meetup! Also for your European people: I’d love to talk with you about what we could use in Europe… Is there room/interest for a conference like Health2.0 (focusing on entrepreneurs) or are there different needs?  Speak out here or IRL at the conference!

I’ll do the shameless plug thing again and tell you that we’re presenting the Nexthealth model and research in CR2 at 1.30pm today. We’ve already put our presentation and paper online for you to view. Love to hear your comments (either on this site or after/during the presentation)

It’s day 2 of the conference and I must say it’s growing on me this conference-going thing :-) Love talking to so many inspirational and innovative people!

There are 180 people attending from 19 countries :-) Got an email from Rashmi Sinha (Slideshare CEO) asking for everyone presenting at Medicine 2.0 to put up their presentation on Slideshare and tag with medicine20.

Coming to you live from Medicine 2.0 at the MaRS centre in Toronto. Follow the discussion on Twitter. See the first photos on Flickr and wait for the first blogposts to appear – more to come soon :-)

UPDATE: I’ll try to add links to everyone liveblogging or reporting from the event. Let me know in the comments if you’re also liveblogging so I can include your site!

• Peter J Murray
• Berci Mesko (ScienceRoll)
• John W. Sharp
• Jen McCabe Gorman
• Neil Versel
• Rod Ward
• Kate Jongbloed

Tomorrow I’ll be flying out to Toronto for Medicine 2.0! I’m quite thrilled being able to go there and present the Nexthealth paper Jen McCabe Gorman and I wrote (originally for SWWS ‘08). You can check the conference proceedings for the paper. Also we’ll be presenting the Nexthealth model which Jen has been particulary busy with coordinating and building. We’re presenting at 1:30pm on Friday – come along for a not-so-regular interactive presentation and for the very least taste some original Dutch “drop” :-) That is of course if I can get it past customs…

I’ll try to report live from the conference, but am not sure how well all the internet connection stuff will be. If all works well I’ll be posting here and on Twitter. Ah well, we’ll have a blast anyway. It will be fun to meet all those with new insights on how to innovate healthcare (hi Berci :-)!

In the meantime I’ve packed all my gear and will try to do some thesis writing on the plane while probably listening to Harry Potter (read by Stephen Fry – great fun, I’ll probably have to do an extra post about good audiobooks another time) or Hans Zimmer’ soundtracks, also great :-)

See you in Toronto? Leave something in the comments if you’re also coming and would like to meet!

Eventually I managed. Juggling. I learned from a friend who’s to say the least, talented at it. It came after one or two days of picking up the balls, trying for an hour and then giving it a rest again and doing something else. I’m now looking at the set of juggling balls I learned that with in front of me. Realizing that I’ll probably have some similar experience with this blog and everything around it.

I’m good at doing several things at the same time. I’m not a one project guy. That’s fun – most of the time. It’s less so if you’re busy writing a thesis or actually having to focus at one thing thing now. Than your life becomes somewhat like a vicious cycle.

But for some funny reason I both like and dislike being scattered amongst all kinds of different projects and ideas at a certain time. Sure – it would be best to first finish that thesis (yes, yes, working on it… :-) but at the same time I probably couldn’t get it right if that would be the only thing on my mind.

So that’s why you’re viewing this :-) Procrastinating from thesis writing eventually gets the blog work done. Actually not bad timing so I can use it to report next week about my trip to Medicine 2.0 conference in Toronto (drop me a line if you’re also attending and would like to meet up!).

And after that? We’ll see I guess – hopefully the thesis will be done sometime soon so I can invite you all to hear my colloqium on “Rethinking the hospital: value of the business model theory”. And in-between you’ll probably hear some more on being involved in a healthcare tech start-up, event-engineering stories or gadget reviews. Or not – that probably means I’m juggling some other projects :-)

It’s a magical world. Let’s go exploring!