Service Design Podcast

Sophie Andersson is strategic designer at Transformator Design, a Stockholm based Service Design agency. At Transformator they design services based on customer needs and help organisations towards customer centricity. One of those organisations was the Swedish employment agency, together they won the service design award for systemic and cultural change in the public sector.    We were very pleased that we could involve Caroline Enevold, customer-driver business development manager at the employment agency in the interview as well. This shows what real service design is about, service designers working together with their clients as one team.

Gayle has recently completed a PhD at The Glasgow School of Art in which she responded as a researcher and a designer to difficulties young people who were leaving care and their workers experience when working together. For this work she was acknowledged with the first ever ‘service design award’ for best student project.    Gayle is a graphic designer by background, she got into Service design because of her interest in the impact she was creating with her graphic design work. She realised she had to better engage with people that would be using her designs to better understand their needs. That’s how she got into research but soon she realised she could not really use this in the commercial environments she was working in at that moment. Therefor she made the shift towards Service Design.

Kaarel Mikkin is de co-founder of service design & branding consultancy Brand Manual. An international agency establish in Tallinn and Stockholm that designs customer experiences. Brand Manual used to be a marketing company that saw the need to expand towards a service design agency.    “Service design is the new marketing”   Band manual won the service design award for best commercial project with their project That reinvented the bookstore for Apollo. They redesigned a bookstore into an inspiring entertainment environment, bringing books, music, a juice bar and even a cinema together under one brand. This resulted in a customer centric experience and increased the amount of customers with 200%.

Erika Flowers is Principal Service Experience Designer at Intuit, and Morgan Miller is Senior Service Designer for Stanford University’s central IT organisation. Together they are the founders of Practical Service Design. In this episode they explained the importance of the word “practical” in the service design community, and the need for a channel to get people who are new to service design on board. We also talked about the use of data and making something meaningful out of it, and they explained their approach to service design as building bridges between the different silos. They also shared their experience as in-house designers, and we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of this role as opposed to an outside consultant. I do think that if organisations want to make a lasting change and transformation they need to bring design in-house, but I also think we need that budget for the agency and the third party to come in, because when I’m in-house, I can’t do the radical shake up that an agency could do coming in. - Morgan Miller - People with a service design toolset in any company can build the bridges between the different silos, smooth out the internal scene, get the information flowing and have a higher-level view, like a bit higher altitude and watch what’s going on at multiple silos at once and coordinate between them. […] That’s why our logo for Practical Service Design is a hot air balloon.  - Erika Flowers -  

With our mobile podcast studio we walked around the Global Service Design Conference and bumped into some very inspirational people! We talked to speakers, volunteers, visitors, chapter builders and many more, all coming from different parts of the world from Japan to Sweden.  But one thing they all had in common; they were all passionate about service design! Relive the conference here!   INSPIRATIONAL PEOPLE YOU CAN LISTEN TO IN THIS PODCAST:   Sarah Schulman  Partner at Inwithforward - Speaker and nominee Erik Roscam Abbing Managing director at livework - Conference host Birgit Mager President of Global Service design network Katie Koch UX designer at Spotify - Speaker Kevin Fox Service design intern at Nile - Volunteer Jesse Grimes Management board member SDN Hatem Elnaggar  Service design director at Iwan designs - Visitor Cathy Huang Founder of ChinaBridge - Speaker Thomas Schönheit Managing partner at Whitespring Service Design Thinking - Visitor Sophie Knight Design Researcher at STBY - Visitor Kautsar Anggakara Design research lead at Pulse lab Jakarta - Speaker Maya Macbeth Glasgow School of Art graduate - Volunteer Jamin Hegemai Head of Service design Adaptive path - Visitor Simon David Chatworthy  Professor in Service Design - Visitor Alexander Koste  Service Designer at Screen Interaction - Visitor Diane Shen Reporter Taiwan SDN Chapter - Visitor   And if you're interested in Kingdom, you can find more information on

Simone Carrier in head of service design at FutureGov, that focusses on service design project for governments. Together we talked about what service design means to governments, what the differences are between government over the whole world and how service design will evolve in the future. Simone also gave some great insight tips on who they successfully run these project at FutureGov.  Discover more insights about this conversation   Our experiences are so shaped by services like Deliveroo, Uber, WhatsApp, snapchat, and Instagram. We are used to receiving really good services. But if you want a new passport or do your tax declaration it brings tears in my eyes because its so complicated - Simone carrier - Interesting links: Linkedin:  Twitter:  FutureGov website:

Jesse Grimes has been practicing service design from the very beginning of its existence. He’s a senior service designer at Informaat and plays an important role in the service design community as management board member of the Service design network and as Editor-in-Chief of Touchpoint.  Jesse explains how service design became a well established discipline in lots of different disciples around the whole globe, he shares his experience on visiting China. We also talked about the importance of building a netwerk around service that is broader then the practitioners itself but needs to contain buying for all different discplens as well.  Links: