Matthew Marino is a Franco-American service designer and co-founder of USER STUDIO, France’s pioneer service innovation and design consultancy. Having advised Orange, EDF, Lyonnaise des Eaux and the 27th Region, a public innovation lab for the 26 French regions, Matthew focuses on how a design-led approach can inform strategy for companies and regional governments.

Working for organisations that have no prior experience using design-led approaches to develop their services can present a challenge for service design practitioners. Of the four steps commonly used in a service design approach — discovery, ideation, prototyping, implementation — the first two, discovery and ideation, are often abstract for the client organisation until initial results emerge. Using the example of Service Lab, a design framework created by USER STUDIO for local governments, this talk, based on an article written for Touchpoint’s second issue in 2011, aims to explain how creating a sector-specific framework can acclimate client organisations that are unfamiliar with user-centered innovation methods.