1) Can you explain what service design is? And how your company implements it / uses that field?

The design of a service is basically the definition of experiences that are embedded into a business model. It is a way to make an experience somewhat replicable and distributable and capture them despite their ephermal character. We use the word service to emphasize that it is an intangible product which we develop for the users to meet their needs and help them getting their jobs done. We implement service design together with design thinking as a package since for us they are inseperable.

 2) What do you believe is the greatest opportunity for your company using service design?

The greatest opportunity for us using service design is to drive cultural change and promote agile processes in a corporate environment in an organic way. The beauty of it is, that this approach is truly human centered and in this way much easier for people to understand, accept and adapt to than to other abstract and theoretical models. 

3) Can you share three tips for implementing service design in their own practice? 

1.  Start always there, where your user currently stands. Your starting point should not be current standards in the market but the current state of the people you do something for.
2.  It helps to think more about the processes than about the things that you need for it such as interfaces or products. Since the requirements of what you need are a result of the process that you design.
3.  You should be aware that it is ok to feel insecure about the process. It is a new mode of thinking and the experiences of the experts are not yet as widely spread as the methods and tricks in product development, which makes it much harder to compare your work to some sort of state of the art. Also, people still have to get used to losing grip in the haptic dimension in order to step foot into the digital world. It is scary to let go of the known in order to enter a whole new epoch of practice.