Sign up by December 7th
Training on December 8th 14:00 – 17:00 EET

What?

Service design is the application of the design thinking process to the design of services. Services are anything that help someone do something. This means that anyone who works at a university is a creator of services. People who work in any administrative position is creating services for staff, students, and/or external partners or stakeholders. Academic staff are designing courses that the students will take. They are supporting students to get their degrees. All of these are considered services by service design.

To be able to create these services in a sustainable (socially, economically, inclusively, etc) and impactful manner, understanding how to use service design is important. When designing any kind of service without the participation and knowledge of who the services are for, means that services get created through guessing. Using one perspective (primarily your own), is not the way to make something that has wide applicability. This can easily lead to service failure which is costly in many ways.

Service design is also about fixing services that are not fit for purpose. Either through original design or the ever-changing environment in which they exist. Effective problem-solving is the central purpose of service design through the use of the design thinking process.

Learning outcomes:

Participants will:

• be able to articulate what service design is, why it matters, and how it applies to both administrative and academic roles.
• be able to evaluate a current university service and pinpoint elements that contribute to service failure or inefficiency.
• demonstrate how involving diverse users and stakeholders leads to more equitable, effective, and adaptable services.
• be able to explain how the design thinking process enhances problem-solving by enabling deeper understanding of user needs and generating more effective service solutions.

Topics:

• Introduction to Design Thinking process
• Why Service Design?
• The importance of Customer Research
• How to Ideate
• Prototyping and Testing Ideas
• Bonus: How to assess services- using Lou Downs book “Good Services”*

Audience:

• Academic staff
• Non-Academic staff

Pre-course Actions:

• Readings sent by email
• Bring to the course a service that struggles in your unit or a problem that you struggle with.

Trainer:

Pamela Spokes

Pamela Spokes, MBA Service Innovation & Design, has extensive experience in higher education and entrepreneurial ecosystems and delivering service design education. She has led the development and delivery of multiple service design training programmes, including MOOCs and innovation sprint-based courses, making her deeply familiar with both the pedagogy and real-world application of service design. Pamela works in the Metropolia UAS Emerging Technologies and Entrepreneurship team.