Every year, service designers around the world gather to share ideas and best practices at the Service Design Global Conference. For the uninitiated, service design takes a human-centered and holistic approach to improving user and employee experiences, creating organizational structure and alignment to support the best experience possible. Since much of what we do at Fathom falls into these spaces — understanding customers and end-users, designing products and services, and aligning stakeholders and strategies — we were naturally excited to hear from others how they are approaching this work.
Since many of us could not make the trip to Helsinki to attend in-person, we invited folks to watch a few of the talks at Fathom to learn and share ideas — and even share a few drinks together! Here a few highlights:
Inclusion
We watched UX designer and accessibility expert Marie Van Driessche speak about inclusive design and her experience as a deaf user and designer. How many times have hearing designers created gloves to “translate” deaf users’ sign language for non-deaf listeners? Way too many, it turns out! We came out of this talk with a heightened appreciation of sign language as the “first language” of deaf users (subtitles aren’t as great as you think!), and a reinforced focus on designing with users, not for them.
Confidence+ Impact
Andy Polaine, a design leadership coach, shared thoughts on leadership in design — and one that stuck with us is the need for the right combination of “ego and humility.”If you’re creating a garden, he explained, you not only need to have the confidence to believe you can make a blank space into a garden, but also the humility to plan for the garden fulfilling its purpose after your lifetime.
Collaborative Culture
We also heard from Hanna Harris, chief design officer of the city of Helsinki, about the role design plays in the city and community. The biggest change design has brought, she said, has been a cultural shift from working in siloed departments to cross-functional collaboration and engaging users in the design and improvement of services.
What stood out to us about these talks is that we saw our own work reflected in them. At Fathom, we believe in doing work that fosters the greater good, which means taking seriously how we involve the people who will be affected and considering the impact of our work long after we are gone. Keeping people at the center of the work? Including them in the co-creation of solutions? Generating a shared understanding of the work and why it matters? Time and time again we have seen how these concepts help organizations work smarter and more effectively, and gives them confidence in the decisions they are making.
We loved bringing the design community together and hearing how these ideas connected with our collective work. With so much great work going on locally to improve experiences and lives, who needs to go to Helsinki to learn from each other? (Well, we wouldn’t mind still visiting … )
We’re looking forward to having more designers over for drinks and ideas again soon — and will be continuing the conference viewing on Nov. 13. Want to join us? Send us an email at dmorin@consultfathom.com.
