Automated transcript 

## Introduction to Nils Solanki

Today we have Nils Solanki joining us from the Capital Bern. Nils Solanki is a breathwork specialist and Service Design educator working in Switzerland.

Nils Solanki blends Respiratory Therapy, which is not an easy word, and Service Design, which is another very difficult word. He blends these two skills in his practice and has supported small and large organizations in Switzerland, such as the Swiss Post.

Nils Solanki is also a Service Design educator who supports students at the FHGR Chur University of Applied Sciences and the HKB, University of the Arts in Bern.

Finally, Nils is a community lover, deeply involved in organizing the Swiss Service Design Conference 2025. 

The most important thing to know is that we're extremely grateful to Nils for coming today and for sharing a bit of his practice within the next hour. A big thank again to Nils Solanki for making this happen today. 

## Guided Embodiment Exercise

Fantastic. Thank you very much. So welcome to this session. So we've got people around the world, you've either had a very short day, a medium day, or a very long day already. And I'd like to invite you to forget the earlier part of your day and just,

So I'd like to invite you first to stand up for a moment. I'm standing here as well. Take a little stretch. Just listen to your body. What does your body need at the moment? Are there any parts that are slightly tense or tight or could just use a bit of motion and movement? And just let your breath flow freely at that moment.

Give your spine a bit of movement.

And engage those legs as well. They might have been sitting for a while now, so they can use a bit of movement. Stretch them out.

And then find a comfortable position to stand there for a moment or sit there for a moment. Just focus on your feet on the ground. If they're crossed over or they don't have any contact with the ground, try to bring them to the ground. Give them a little contact, a bit of earthing, take a few breaths,

and just feel the connection to the ground,

then move up to your hips and feel how your hips are carrying your torso at the moment, how your spine is carrying the weight of your torso and your head, and your arms,

and then extend. your awareness out to your skin and try to feel where is the boundary of my body towards the outside world. Where is my body at the moment and where does my body end?

Are there any parts that I can feel very clearly? Are there maybe parts that are not quite as clear?

Where does my sense of touch start and end at the moment? And

we can move on to the second sense. Take a moment and listen very intently out of this space. Are there any background noises at the moment? What can I hear with my ears?

Try to listen for the smallest of sounds.

And for those who've closed your eyes, you can slowly open your eyes again and gaze around into the room. Try to open your field of vision. Not to focus on one single point, but just try to see everything that's in front of you as a single image.

And then take another deep breath, and while you're inhaling, smell the smells that are surrounding you at the moment. It might be very soft smells or subtle smells, it might be stronger smells, just try to discover the smellscape that you're in at the moment.

And then the last sense that we have, go and see is there a taste or a aftertaste in your mouth at the moment, or a taste of the situation that you're in at the moment.

And this gives us a full tour of our five senses. in our body. Now I hope if you had a bit of a stressful day or a long day this helped you to come back into the present moment, get a stronger connection to your body, get more of a connection to the ground that you're standing on or sitting on at the moment.

And I think it's a much better definition of embodiment than if I gave you a long catalogue of things that embodiment is or isn't at the moment. Yeah. This is my definition of embodiment. I'm not even going to try to define what service design is. I think much greater minds have failed at that.

Instead, I'm going to give the word back to Daniele. Thank you so much. I love the calming quality of this introduction and and the very practical hands on aspect, even if we're doing that over Zoom. Thank you so much for leading us through that. As we are going into this first round, which is a bit of a Q& A, and you know that I'm slowly bringing down My tempo, usually I'm a bit more and a bit more of an upbeat guy, but just this calmed me down like quite a lot.

So thanks so much Nils again. 

## Q&A: Blending Service Design with Breathwork

So maybe one of my first questions to you is a very general one, is how the fuck do you mix service design with race work? Because it can feel, like things on very two, two different planets. But I think you don't see it like that. And could you tell us a little bit about, maybe a practical element of how you mix these elements together?

That's a great question. Years ago I was at one of the service experience conferences in Berlin, which was an bar camp conference where everybody could do a session. And I did a short session on breads and embodiment there. We had a lot of fun throughout the session. We did a lot of different exercises.

At the end, somebody asked, Oh, this is really nice, but how do you bring that into service design? And it just shut me up for a moment because I didn't really have an answer at the moment. But it was a question that continued to, to gnaw at me throughout the following years. And I found more and more ways to connect these different disciplines.

## Techniques for Service Design

And one way to look at it, I think is maybe just the very classical or one of the classical models of service design is the double diamond process. So we've got these four phases, discover, define, develop. And then each and every of these phases, we can use embodiment in a very concrete manner. So let's say if you go into a research phase, for example, you want to do a few methods.

You might want to do some interviews, some observations, maybe a bit of mystery shopping or service safaris. All of these are actually very embodied activities that we do. Even if you might not necessarily treat them in that way. 

## Active Listening and Therapeutic Techniques

So one thing that I really like, or sort of an exercise, and I often do that with my students and also in practical context, that's called Listening Like a Therapist.

Now you've all heard of active listening, probably that's the art of paying attention, of being present, of giving feedback to the listener, rephrasing questions and so on, which I think is very great and a very great foundation. We can take it like a little step further. So I don't know if anybody's ever been to a therapy session in here, but if you've got a good therapist, chances are very high they've got a base credo or base mindset that they use to work with you guys or work with anybody that comes to see them.

One of the basic fundamentals of therapeutic sessions is just a benevolent. Compassion towards the people that come in. So they come in with their topics and whatever they're going to tell you, try not to judge them. You try to see where they're coming from and you try to see through the outer appearances into who they really are in their core.

And that's one of the most valuable approaches. Then the second thing you definitely need before the session is a bit of anticipation. If you go in there and you're like, Ah, I've done this 200 times, I know how that works, I've done this for 10 years, I'm the expert, I'm going to nail this. It's probably going to be a really boring therapy session.

You always got to have that little bit of edge beforehand, a little bit of stage fright. That sort of tingling and nervousness that keeps you on your edge, that gives you more connection towards the outside world, and it makes you much more attentive and listening. Then there's a few physical components to the whole thing as well.

So one of them is how do I sit there or how do I stand there? I've got my feet as a connection to the ground. I've got my so called sitting bones. I don't know if you know them. They're nicely placed in your buttocks. If you move around in your chair a little bit, you can feel them pretty nicely. If you've got a hard chair, you're going to feel better.

If you've got a very soft chair, they're a bit harder to discern, but they're always there. They're the base foundation. Meaning if you hear heavy stuff coming from the other side, you can just let it sink in the literal sense, sink, let it sink down into your hips and digest the things that they're telling you.

You've got your spine, which erects you, which gives you a better way of connecting stability within yourself. And you've got your head, which is bobbing on the top of your spine. That's not quite as important as you might think in this process, actually. So these are the fundamental parts of listening.

And then there's one more element, which you already mentioned, Daniele, which I think is very important. And I think you're very fond of that as well. That's the element of silence.

So when you listen, make some time for pauses, let people finish their sentences and you Just wait, smile at them, be present, and see what comes out in the end. Of course, there's also, there's different kinds of therapists. There's also the very sympathetic therapists, which I wouldn't recommend as a research approach.

That's kind of people coming in and telling you, Oh, I had this terrible fight with my wife today. She's such a terrible person. And the therapist is going to be yeah, she's really terrible. I understand you, man. Yeah, I know where you're coming from. That's not what you want to do. You want to be compassionate but not too sympathetic with the topic.

You hear the whole thing, you let it touch you, but you don't really engage with it. Now just wondering, we could either jump into short exercise now again, or should we go on with the questions a little bit first? We can have a practice break. It's always good. Okay. Fantastic. Just outlined a bit of these principles.

So imagine you're about to go into an interview with a person you've never met before. You're going to ask them a question and it should feel a little bit like you're going on a first date. You're a little bit nervous. You're excited for the thing to happen, but you don't really know how it turns out.

Or you're going in a job interview. You want that job, but you don't really know how the talk's going to be. Trying to be on that feeling of having a little bit of an edge on the side out. 

## Breakout Session and Reflections

So maybe you can put the people in breakout rooms, Daniele. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to send you out for a little bit.

Should we do maybe four minutes? And I'm just going to give you one easy question to ask the other person. That is, how was your day today? Use two minutes to ask that question, to listen like a therapist and then switch roles. Very curious to see how that feels for you people.

​

You had the chance to have this little breakout session and slowly, but surely more people will be coming back to the main room. How was it for you? If somebody would like to share.

I'll go. I've got to meet the lovely Catherine. We're both moms. We both, cause it's morning, where I am right now. And we talked about just the importance of sleep and how nothing really prepares you for how jeopardized sleep can be with motherhood or parenthood in general.

So yeah, so we're both looks like on our path to really being intentional about getting sleep when we can. I can imagine. I hope this session is going to relax you a little bit, at least by the end of it. Thank you.

I think it was hard to, uh, Gerardo almost immediately said what he wanted to say and then went, and how about you? And so I had to ignore that comment and just be like, have a follow up. Yeah. So that was fun to realize, like in the moment he was like already switching it and I'm like no, I'm here to listen to you at least for 30 more seconds.

That's cool. Yeah. I think that's a good quality of a good therapist as well. Staying in charge of the conversation and making sure that the person on the other end actually gets to say everything that needs to be said. Thank you very much. I enjoyed the gift of active listening and attention to me.

Thank you. I think that's a wonderful gift that we can give many people throughout our everyday lives again and again. You put me and Mariam in one group and she's my, my friend from high school. And it is about two years that I haven't met her because she is in Netherlands.

It was very fun because we just talked together and laughing. But today was so stressful for me because I am going to think about Service Design Project, a new one that I don't know if even this employer needs a service designer or maybe he needs a manager. And this is a stress that comes at first to me.

I know that consists of through the project. So it has no end with it. I know that, okay, just maybe it will become so clear. So at the end of the day, I couldn't call myself more than morning. Just, I said that, okay, just your problem will be changed. Yeah. Yeah. But beautiful to see how the world is small.

It's definitely a beautiful thing and how friends can bring in a bit of calm. I asked him to, I asked her to, I invited her to this meeting because your final project is related to the subject. Wonderful. Very nice. Thank you. Beautiful. I have still a lot of questions for you, on that side from the double diamond. So I think you covered one, one, already one element. Are there other techniques that you feel service designers could use in other parts of that process? Definitely. 

## Sensory Elements in Service Design

When it goes to defining the problems, defining the target group, customer journey, stuff like that try to make it as sensual as possible, I don't mean sensual in any kind of erotic way, but more sensual as in relating to the five senses that we have.

So try to include visual information, try to include auditory information, try to include smell if you can. Now it's a bit hard to record, but maybe you can find something that smells similar that you can copy. Try to include textures and textile elements as well. Just came across this picture when preparing for this session.

I really liked it. Just going to share this real quick. So here we've got this collection of different wool garments and textures that are imitating moss. Typical design school stuff, but I really like it because it gives you a different dimension to service as well. And that applies to research.

In the same way, by the way, if you're gonna do mystery shopping, let's say you go to a supermarket, don't just look what and maybe what you hear, but go for the sense of smell, go for the sense of touch. How does it feel to, to go through the aisles and touch the fruit and vegetables to begin with?

Do I have a different connection to the supermarket market because I touched something in the beginning or, does it not really cha change much? How is it when I get to the fresh bread section and I smell this wonderful smell of freshly baked bread? Does it have an influence on my current state of being?

Things like that I think are very important to include. Absolutely. There, there is a, there is an image that comes to mind when you show me that picture, where, you know, we often. Finished, building, service blueprints, which often live in a digital form, and when I saw your picture, I was like, what if we had a physical service blueprint, with the breads, the textures, the things that you can smell, and that you can go through the journey and touch it, feel it, smell it.

And I, so this is a very interesting, thing of, we have this conversation a lot these days about sustainability, where we say, What if in your service blueprints, you had a lane, a line for nature and then we could bring also this question, for each sense, could we have a lane, in our blueprint, in our journey map, where we record those elements.

That will be a definitely a very rich thing to do. That's a fantastic idea. I usually just try to bring along one or two artifacts from the different touch points if they're physical, but like having a little different lane for every, Since that's even better, it's amazing. And are there other techniques, I want more, this is the classical Daniele, which is what else?

There's more there's a lot more. 

## Prototyping and Convincing Stakeholders

Prototyping is the absolute classical thing. The essential embodiment activity that there is, you're working with, especially physical prototyping. You're working with materials, you're working together with other people, you're engaged in this creative process.

And the people you're going to test these prototypes with, they're going to have essential experience. I don't know if you know the story of the Magic Band of Disney World. There's a whole long, wired article about the whole story, but the gist is They wanted to develop a Very seamless experience for people coming to Disney World because there was a lot of friction in the process back in the day and had this crazy vision that basically had this one wristband that you could use for everything.

Access to the theme park, paying for stuff, orienting yourself on the theme park and so on, finding your lost children, etc. Anyway, they have this grand vision, they want to get a lot of money for it, and the problem was the thing was going to cost about a billion US dollars, which was even more money back then, still a lot of money these days.

So they have to convince their stakeholders and that was not like your middle management or something, that was the CEO of Disney, I think it was Bob Iyer already back in the day. So they had to find a way to really explain the concept that, that worked for people and what it is that they had this huge hall that was empty at the very end of Disney World where nobody was really inside, just a bunch of boxes and stuff standing around and they built this huge physical prototype with door frames, with sensors and whatnot, and just a huge physical prototyping session with the whole management team.

Leading them through step through the whole journey of how families could experience this even later. And through that sensual experience, they won that 1 billion experience. The rest is history. That brings me to a lovely transition, which is to the question of For someone, who says, Oh, I, I feel that, using more the senses and more embodied experience mindset for service design could be something that is useful.

How do you convince people? How do you get the money for it? Because obviously there's always a question of money, time. Getting the permission, sometimes not asking the permission but how do you get started in a journey like that? For example, if you're in a big company or you're working with other people, how do you convince them, that smell is going to be important in this project, where it has to do with, about improving maybe an internal process, which is all about Excel spreadsheets.

How can we convince someone that, yeah, the perfume of Excel will definitely be something that we're going to consider in some way or another. The perfume of Excel might have a slight stench. I'm not sure. It's a very good question. I think you start with baby steps. So do very small steps, take somebody along and give them an interesting sensory experience to begin with.

If they're a more cerebral person who would like to have more facts about it, you can also talk about how the sense of smell is directly linked to the amygdala and has a direct link on your emotional response system in your brain. So contrary to all other senses, it gives you direct feedback. with the first whiff that you get into your nose, basically.

But to come back to your question, I think really starting with small steps, start incorporating stuff, which, which don't cost too much. You can also do it in workshops. That's the quote unquote easiest way to include embodiment. You can do it with warm ups and cool downs, with physical activities during the workshop, designing it in a way that you sit, stand, move along, where you have social activities.

Where maybe if it's appropriate in the setting where you even have touch involved which helps build a bond, if there's enough trust around, things like that, where you use imagination and sensory imagination as well, guided visualization exercises, for example, can be very useful and they cost you exactly zero dollars.

So it's a very good point to start. Absolutely. And there is a thing that works quite well from which you mentioned is, to understand, is this more, a cerebral person, or is it more someone, who needs a bit of a story, then you take the Disney story and that's good, and then you're good to go.

And for cerebral people, there is so much research about all of this stuff, especially when you go into workshops, there's a lot of research you can find, I think, in Harvard Business Review about, The use of mindfulness to improve the quality of of idea generation. And usually when I do this stuff with bankers, I first have the slides with the HR, Harvard Business Review logo.

The graph that says plus 15 percent better ideas, and then that's the technique that we're going to use. We want to know what, which one it is. Oh, yeah, for sure. It's mindfulness. And it's, ah, okay let's try it then. So definitely knowing the audience and then knowing which core to play with is a, is definitely a killer argument.

Do you have other kind of war stories like that? Like the Disney wars, the Disney stories, one that really comes to mind that, that helps to sell the idea. Do you have some other arguments like that, which people feel like, Oh, this is. Quite interesting. 

## The Power of Scent in Retail

Sense of smell is a huge topic, especially in sales.

So lots of retail companies use artificial smells these days, or very small amount of natural essential oils mixed with artificial smells to give this sort of nice and well rounded scent. Vanilla is a very popular choice, for example, which helps you feel very comfortable in a setting and has been proven to show that people buy more stuff.

She gives them this slight whiff of. Vanilla in the air when you sell things. I don't have any big stories to share, but just more to come back to what you were saying before with the Harvard Business Review and these people. 

## Engaging Different Types of Participants

One thing that I found really interesting is when you do these kinds of exercises with people, there's usually three groups of people that That kind of show out there's the ones that say, Oh yeah, cool.

I will, yes, finally, we're going to do something like that. Not sit around my, at my desk and moving and doing something that's good for my body. You can have a huge midsection, which is basically, Ah, yeah. Okay. Let's try it out. Why not? It's been a long day, but it's not going to hurt. And you've got this staunch opponents, small, smaller group of people, but they're really adamant about, they're like, fuck this shit.

I'm a professional. I'm not going to do that. Don't waste my time. I've been in this job for 20 years. I'm an executive manager, whatever the hell, I'm not going to do kindergarten exercises. And the funny thing is when you work with these people over a longer period of time they're really loaded in the beginning of it.

They might sabotage it try not to participate, whatever. You do that for a few months in workshop series, most of the people, not all of them, but most, most, most at some point usually come up to you and say, I really thought that was such a bloody piece of crap that you were proposing.

I really hated it in the beginning. But now I actually look forward to it. I have these long bloody meetings. And we have a session at the end of the day, just with you to our workshop. I know we're going to start off with this. And this is like a small highlight for me during the day. So people usually immensely appreciate it.

At some point anyway. 

## Handling Resistant Participants

And how do you manage, the I call them in workshops, the terrorists, the ones, that don't want to play along. And and that say, fuck this shit. We are here for making stuff happen, blah, blah, blah. How do you manage someone like that with an embodied approach?

Because obviously, but then, It's much easier if you come in a power and control mode, but modern must not work really well with that type of approach. So how do you bring these people also to, to play along in some way? I think it depends a little bit on the context of the role that the people have.

So if the person acting up as the CEO, it's a lot harder for of course you can't just go out and confront the guy because probably you're not going to come back. the next day again. Probably take him to the side, have a short conversation, maybe exclude him from the activity and just let it be.

If it's regular participants I think humor is a very good way of going about it. For the guys that fuck this shit, say, I love the energy, bring it to the exercise, something like that. A bit of wits and humor help goes a long way there.

And then maybe take them to the side so they don't feel completely blindsided afterwards. Just explain why you did it. So don't try to act up in future sessions again. Thanks so much. And we're gonna slowly go to the Q& A, but I have a last question before the Q& A, so that everybody can prepare for their questions already, because I'm sure there are a lot of questions.

## Resources for Embodied Service Design

My last question my last question for you would be this one. What are resources for people who are curious about Embodied service design, mindfulness, breathwork within maybe, the work setting that you would recommend, authors, people to follow, books do you have any recommendation?

Honestly, it's very funny. If you Google for embodied service design, you don't find that much material. So it's not like a term that's very strongly established at this point, but embodied facilitation is a treasure trove I find. So that's a very good Google search term. There's a few people I can mention out here.

One of them is Caterina DiMarco. I think she's Romanian, if I'm not mistaken. She does a lot of different things. There's this whole just got me on the spot. Gotta look this up real quick. This whole session going on at the moment called Body in Business, I think.

Where eight different people, bodies in business, I think is the word where eight different people are giving sessions every month, one session on their approach to more embodiment in a business context. But I think the expression embodied service design, we could probably patent it at this point.

And make a lot of money. That's good. Very good. Wonderful. Hey, thank you so much. 

## Q&A Session Begins

I would like to leave some space for your questions. This is a small group. Don't have to raise any hands, you just say something. If we are two speaking at the same time, humans are quite good at letting one speak and then the other comes later.

So just open the mic and ask questions directly to Nils or share a feeling, share whatever you want to share with your personal experience.

## Bridging Spatial Computing and Embodied Service Design

I actually do have a question on how do you bridge the gap between spatial computing and Embodied Service Design. I don't know if it's my personal perception, but I think that they're they're gonna meet up at some point in the near future. Just give me a quick definition of Spatial Computing so I'm sure that we're talking about the same thing.

Augmented reality or anything that has to do with the space. Great question. I think they're probably already meeting in certain parts. You definitely have services, which already include augmented reality, especially in the industrial world, I think, where they use AR glosses for different tasks or mixed reality glosses.

I think an embodied approach to developing these kinds of experience, it would be very helpful. These days it's mostly vision and sound, if I'm not mistaken, right? You don't have any smell. You might have a bit of touch with controllers and so on, or if you're interacting with physical materials, but choosing a more a more conscious approach to developing these things as four or five sensory.

Five is really hard because taste, you usually don't use it in services or in very rarely. But yeah, using a conscious approach where you include these senses in the research phase already and think about how to use them could be very interesting.

Not something I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about, to be honest, as you can probably see. But I think there's a lot of potential in there. And if you go down that road and explore that, I'd be very interested to hear more back from you. Actually, just as a follow up, I just recently learned that Osmo is

I've been trying to think of how that, what it means in service design at some point. 

## The Role of Smell in Service Design

Synthesizing smell. That's a really great question. Back in the early noughts, there was this thing coming up, people saying that we're going to build computers where you can transmit smell and some people would think, Oh, that's amazing.

You're going to send the smell of roses. Other people are going to send it, not quite as nice smells or maybe. So that was always a bit of a concern as well is it actually a good thing to have a digital sense of smell? But I think there's a lot of potential in there, especially for services.

Smells are a great way I don't know if anybody, if you've worked with essential oils before or perfumes, things like that, they're a great way to, to regulate the emotional well being of people to change their state of being. You can also use them in a slightly manipulatory way if you want to, which is not quite as nice, but I think in the whole, especially in intentioned settings can make a huge difference in a service experience if you can have a direct influence on the smell of people.

It can also help, for example, let's say you've had a terrible service experience, you've got to do a service recovery for some person. They might have missed their flight or something. If you have a special lounge where people can come in and there's a soothing smell in there which helps you calm down, it might take out the initial stress of, shit, I missed my flight, and this and that terrible thing is going to happen.

www. microsoft. com And how people just come down and face the facts of the matter and try to find a solution instead of having to go through the whole emotional turmoil of yeah, basically insulting and whatnot might ensue in such a situation. Thanks. Pleasure. 

## Ethical Considerations in Service Design

Definitely, it brings also this aspect of every time we come with an aspect that improves the experience of people comes also like your whole ethical question.

And I think here, obviously, we always have the same ethical question of, obviously, you want to create a space that is soothing and stuff. But we should let people know that the goal of this space is that and not just put them there and say, okay, we've made it all pink and with a water lemon smell so that they're all gonna feel like super calm and then we're gonna come in.

But having having that clarity, obviously in that ethical consideration is always a very important one. Definitely. Other questions from the group? I think Robert might have one as you've unmuted yourself,

or maybe not. Maybe it was not on purpose. Yeah did some work quite a while ago now in a program that was designed by Professor Richard Boyatis. Is that somebody who's known in the area? Did that you're working on now? It might be to be honest, I haven't heard the name before, but it's a huge field.

Lots of this work is also done more therapeutic and psychological field where there's lots of things which I've probably never come across so far. I'm just trying to put together what you were saying with some other things that I've experienced and to see if there was a link or not. Okay. No.

Oh. No problem. I recognize that there are a lot of people involved in, in, in doing research in this area and that's the amazing thing. The human body is such a most high fold form with all these different levels of complexity. So there's lots of different people involved at different levels.

They're very interesting to delve in, but I think one, not enough to comprehend it completely. What, one of the things that Boyat has was. What I was interested in is to look at the impact on the nerve, different nervous systems in the human body. The sorts of mindfulness, emotional states and, uh, use of the various senses in order to stay in touch with the world and people around us that was that physiological control.

understanding of what's going on was very interesting. Yeah, I can imagine. That would open a whole other treasure trove of topics. Nervous system regulation working with the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system in the body. That's definitely something that services already include to this day, but not necessarily in a conscious manner.

That's exactly the topic that he was talking about. Yeah. So there's many different ways to, to influence our perception of. I'd say being in a safe space, for example the lighting that you're in the way the space is set up, the size of the space, the way people are placed in the space, the way they interact with you or don't interact with you.

There's lots of different factors that you can use when designing a service that have a very direct impact on your perception of either this is a stressful situation or this is something very relaxing. If you think, for example, you sound like you're, are you from the U S or, pardon me? Are you from the U S or from the UK?

I'm from Switzerland. I'm so sorry, you've got really good English accent. Very embarrassing. Anyway, um,

Anyways, for those who've been to the US, I know the DMV, the department of motor vehicles has a terrible reputation in terms of service quality. Just the way that the space is set up. I just was just trying to find a nice segue to the DMV actually. So that's the negative example of how you can design a space for ease and well being.

Maybe you've been to, I don't know so they're really, where was that? Was that Singapore? Maybe I think that was Singapore airport, which has these amazing green spaces lounges to sit around and so on, which is definitely a space which has been designed with human wellbeing in mind. Very spacious, very green, very nice sensory information, very nice smell and so on.

So there's this huge way we can use space and people. to influence our well being. Absolutely. And there is a, for those who are very much interested in that focus of space and how it makes people feel, we have here in Switzerland, a bachelor's in Spatial Design, even led by a lovely guy called Klaus Malek and that's HSLU obviously doing some some publicity for friends of the same university.

But there are people who are really working on that and it's very interesting to see how they, they do that. And there is a very nice podcast that they host about that, where you can get all of the knowledge for free. So if this is always a good thing to know, obviously. Any other questions? I see we have, we still have a few minutes left, so if there's another question in the room, we would love to take the time to cover that.

Oh, sorry. I actually do have another one. 

## Validating Insights in Workshops

How, what techniques could we use to validate our insights in a workshop environment? Talking about this impact on the nervous system, or how do we validate something that's it could be personal or different for each participant. That's a great question.

So there's, there are a few indicators that you could use, for example, the heart rate variability is one of the metrics that you could use to see how relaxed a person is in a given moment. You could also measure the length of the inspiration versus the expiration. The longer the expiration is usually a good sign of a more relaxed state, more at ease state.

That's more on, on the quantitative side, but I think it's still a very qualitative dimension. And as you said, it's going to be very individual. Even if you measure it on 20 people who might still have somebody who had, I don't know, a traumatic experience with a certain smell, for example, who's going to be triggered by that, you can't completely eliminate that in the first place, but maybe just test with diverse groups, especially test with people who have higher sensibility and perception, who are sensitive to light, to smell, to sound and so on.

Also when developing a digital applications, you mentioned augmented reality before this. I forgot the name of the phenomenon. They're the motion sickness thing, right? Which impacts some people. I think just have a broad spectrum of people, especially with higher sensibility that you can test.

Maybe also somebody from from an autistic spectrum, for example who's not very good at filtering different signals coming in at the same time.

I have another question. I have a little bit about how you do this. 

## Preparing for High-Energy Sessions

Maybe at a meta level, you talked at the beginning you have to be there, you have to engage, you have to come with a little bit of I've done this a million times, but I'm going to learn something new. That's a lot of energy and self care and like your, you've slept eight hours or whatever hours makes you function.

How do you prep for those? Do you have a personal playbook where you're pre structured and actually that puts all the energy in the session? Or do you just have a luxurious schedule? Like, how do you? How do you put yourself in there? Cause it feels like in right now we're in a world where I keep getting asked to do more with less and you're saying, do more with more.

How are you doing that? I think it's more small factors to include. So it's not like you, you gotta take a service design project and turn it into rocket science. It's just trying to include more of yourself in the process basically. So it's not I'm trying to acquire more external resources to do more, but Bring more of yourself as a designer to the process to make, or to create a service that people can bring more of themselves into that service or service that speaks to more of different aspects of the people.

So for example, the nervousness beforehand, that's not a huge thing that I do. That's, that just happens naturally. I'd say I'm probably a person with a rather heightened level of sensitivity. So I know that feeling of of Somewhere between nervousness and trepidation. I think it's a little bit like walking in a line.

You don't want to drop off too much into, I've done this a million times, but you don't want to drop off too much into the other side of shit. Now I'm really scared because I know I actually know how to do this, but my nervous system is saying, shit, I can't actually do that sort of finding that middle line.

of nervousness. I don't know if you've done any theater, improv theater or been on stage for something or given lectures. It's that feeling of you've been preparing doing a rehearsal and so on. You've got your first show coming up. You're five minutes before you're going to be on stage.

You're backstage in the dark, getting ready. It's that moment, that feeling of nervousness. I'm going to be out there in a few seconds, in a few minutes, and I got to be ready. I don't know how it's going to be, but I'm just going to go there with everything I've got and see what's going to happen.

Yeah, okay. I can totally relate to that natural feeling happening. Maybe I'm like, I, that sometimes is me leaving my mural board a little less perfectly curated, but then my stakeholders are like, but what's the conversation going to be? And so I think, That's where I'm I'm like trying to balance that tension, where like they want to know exactly where that conversation is going and I'm like no, you got to leave some space, like what you're saying.

So that's hard to balance, but I hear what you're saying. Definitely. I think that's a bit of a trope, but the 80 20 principle of Burrito principle applies very well here. If you prepare 80% so that your stakeholders can sleep well at night and leave 20 percent open and tell them, that's where the magic actually happens, because if you're just going to structure 100%, it's going to be really boring session.

That's true for this session, by the way, as well. We did a bit of preparation, but we let a lot of it just happen in the moment. So it always needs that, that bit of creative tension for. Really interesting things to happen, whether it's a research session, whether it's a workshop, whether it's the prototyping session or something completely different.

I think that applies to pretty much any situation in life. So basically everything I do is what I do many times a day. You just go back to that moment of shit. I'm going to go into a new situation in a few minutes and I got to be ready, but not really ready. I know how to do it, but I don't really know how to do it.

And start over again. Thank you so much for the question. Maybe an additional little thought on that perception matters a lot, which means if you give the perception that it's all going to go well, look at this beautiful plan. 20 minutes for this big activity, 20 minutes for this big activity, 20 minutes for this big activity.

There will be always an introduction, an activity, and a follow up. Before we bring people in, the activity we will always ask is everybody. Okay, that's something that we're going to do. And at the end, we will always have a buffer time of about 20 minutes. So in case a conversation takes longer, we can manage it.

And we're going to have two breaks. One short, one long. One for just getting some fresh air. One that for just snacks. Could you please bring these snacks? Because we know that nuts and stuff works really well. Now I gave you a lot of security. But There is a lot of playroom between all of that.

And so it's always, for me, it's at least on my side, knowing from a kind of a Swiss culture, very, people being worried about meeting structure and having an Excel spreadsheet brain. Speaking in an Excel spreadsheet manner, but keeping some freedom in it. Helps people calm down and know, this is all going to go well, this guy is so prepared.

But, you've made, you've created a structure that then allows a bit of flow. But you reveal the structure, because there is structure in everything that we do. It's just that we have to reveal it more clearly and maybe have a bit of a conversation about the silly things that we planned. You're like, we've selected exactly 17 minutes of flow.

I've prayed that not 15, because we want two minutes more so that people, don't get issues with opening the toilet and stuff, say, Oh, this is very well prepared. So maybe that can help. It's like a opposite way of playing with the fear and just giving a lot of information sometimes just helps.

Wonderful. I see we are already at 18. 

## Concluding Remarks and Gratitude

00 and in true Swiss fashion we gonna end the session for now here, but we will have a bit of a hangout moment right after, but before we go there, I want to say once again, a big, huge thank you to Nils because you don't know that in the backstage, we had to reshuffle, rearrange a few things.

so much. And Nils really was super lovely and made things happen today so that we would have this lovely session. So a big thank you to Nils. Don't hesitate to say what is the loveliest thing, the smartest thing that happened today that you want to give back as a bit of a gratitude to Nils. And I'll leave to Nils.

the last word for concluding the official moment and then we'll stop the recording and transition to the hangout moment but once again a big thank you to all of you a big thank you especially to Nils a big thank you to all of you who asked questions and for showing up today and also being brave enough also to get guided a bit in something also that might be a bit unusual but that was deeply appreciated.

Now the last word for the session goes back to 

## Closing words

Thank you very much to all of you as well for participating, for jumping into this without really knowing what you're going to be expecting. You basically practiced what I preached today and I just want to say thank you, I really enjoyed that.

And especially to those of you who mentioned you're going to be working in this way or in this field a little bit, please do reach out on LinkedIn. I'd love to continue the conversation and see what you make out of this.