What happens 'beyond basics'?

„Beyond Basics“ was beyond expectations! This was possible because of the great speakers, workshop leaders, poster presenters, volunteers and of course: great participants. Thank you very much for making this happen! What is the „harvest“ of this conference? Of course that Service Design people are just great, open minded, connective, sharing, smart, innovative .... so there was a lot of mutual inspiration, sharing and connecting. And content-wise? „Beyond Basics“ was the title of the conference. What did we find beyond basics? Let me try to summerize some of the topics and challenges that I took home and that might give direction for the discussion about topics for next year. Service Design has many touchpoints to and overlaps with other fields of expertise: Interaction Design, Experience Design, Marketing, Organisational and Human Resources Development, Change Management – just to name a few. It will be interesting to develop a clearer positioning of the core of Service Design expertise that the members of the network can agree on. This would also influence the understanding of Service Design Qualification. Can everyone call himself a Service Designer? Even if he or she is not a Designer? What competencies are core competencies? And which are simply nice to have? How far does design take responsibilities for and influence strategies, structures, processes and qualification of service employees? Service Design has established a solid framework, good processes and a great set of methods. It is a clearly qualitative approach that works with small research samples. It trusts in observation and embraces intuition. Yet we have to face the fact that there is a need to talk about quantitative data, hard facts measures. I think this is true for our explorations and discovery phases but most importantly we need to give more insight into the impact of our work and that also involves “measures” of some kind. Many topics weren raised on the conference that we need to explore in more detail: the B2B topic is one that I really take with me and of course “How to sell Service Design”. But I think if we would go deeper into the two topics mentioned earlier, it would help to sell Service Design! What do you think? What is your “harvest” from the contents of the conference?