POST DIPLOMA

Journey of Fanny Giordano, a service & graphic designer based in Copenhagen.

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FOLLOW ME ON INSTA

Dear visitors,  I opened an Instagram account so you can get more everyday insights about my work. So no cappuccino or sunset on this account, only service design ;)  I might keep this tumblr to sometimes write longer reflections. 

See you on insta!  fanny__giordano

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1ST DESIGN CONFERENCE

I got accepted to my first design conference! From the 30th of May to the 2nd of June I’ll be part of the PhD Consortium of the REDO biannual Cumulus 2017 conference in Kolding, Denmark. I can’t wait to present and discuss with other PhD and experienced researchers the initial direction of my research which deals with the following question [formulated in the conference style]:

How do we* REDO public services?

* we = citizens, public service managers and designers. I’ll update my Research Gate profile soon so you can read the position paper if you like ;) 

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WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF DESIGN EDUCATION? 

Thursday the 27th of April, on behalf of the Service Systems Design Master AAU, I was invited to talk and debate at a panel discussion about Design Education. Together with Helena Levison, Tim Allison and Ather Nawaz we discussed our point of views on questions like the following: 

What is the role of design education today? 

How do you determine what to teach students in such an evolving industry where many trends can lead to skills that become obsolete?

Can two years of work experience replace a Master degree? 

What is the designer’s role in the future?

One of the most interesting point discussed was about the relation between

studying, 

self-learning,

learning on the job.

One could argue that there is no need to make a choice between these 3 modes of learning. Most probably the best designers smartly combined all three. While school can give you a deep understanding of Design, designer’s role and equip you with methodologies and ways of thinking, self-learning can supplement / personalize your curriculum and be a way to keep yourself updated with the coolest tools of the moment. Finally nothing can replace learning by doing. Work experiences are what will develop the most your ability to collaborate and deal with business and time constraints. 

Good news, design educations are actually starting to bridge these different ways of learning. At Aalborg University for example they do that by:

Having both theory and practice in the educational programs. 

Make students work in multidisciplinary teams to develop their soft skills.

Creating partnerships with external organizations / companies for semester projects.

Dedicating one semester to do a project with a company.

Inviting guest lecturers to keep track on trends. 

Encouraging students to participate in external workshops / events. 

Many thanks to Martin Sandholt, Dovile Janule and Nikola Nikolov who hosted this event. 

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HOW TO ILLUSTRATE A SERVICE DESIGN EDUCATION?

There are tonnes of ways for sure! But today I had to decide on one picture to put as cover of the fb page of the Master in Service Design at Aalborg University. I chose to draw a boat because it seems to me that studying service design at AAU is about learning how to work in team with people very different from yourself and navigating together with them in a brand-new territory. 

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WHAT’S THE DIFF BTW UX & SERVICE DESIGN?

To me, it’s mostly a matter of point of view on the design of a service. While a User Experience Designer would look specifically at the experience of the user [one or several touchpoints - very often digital these days] and go very much into the details, a Service Designer would also see the broader picture of the service with a more holistic point of view. A Service Designer not only takes care of the visible parts of a service [front stage] but also the invisible parts [back stage]. For instance, the people, the technical processes, the business aspects around the service [see the theatre metaphor by Megan Miller]. But is this a shared opinion among people in Copenhagen?   My service design mate Maria Angelica and I wanted to verify. So for the 3rd Service Design Conversation we decided to confront the perspectives of students/professionals in UX and Service Design in order to discuss:

The definitions and values of UX and SD

Where do these disciplines overlap?

What are the specific methods and tools used?

How to turn a UX job position into a Service Design one? 

To facilitate this conversation, we started by drawing two overlapping circles on the floor of the room and asked our 30 participants to seat according to where they define themselves as. Interesting fact: lots of them would have liked to seat in the middle space. This fact as well as the stories told demonstrated how unclear the limit between UX and SD still is. 

Watch the video to hear the different points of views of the participants. 

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SERVICE DESIGN TOUR IN BERLIN

It was a lot of fun to participate in the 4th edition of Service Design Tour, this time in Berlin together with students / alumni from Politecnico di Milano. During 2 days, we opened the doors of 7 design / innovation agencies, the kind that service designers could dream of:  IXDS, Fuxblau, Futurice, Fjord, Mandalah, Service Innovation Labs, Boana

Overall all of these agencies share 3 things:

The same mission: to help service based businesses to innovate and to be / stay ahead in the market. 

The same process: despite their different ways of wording their design process, they all go from research, ideation to design, prototype and testing. They use [service] design thinking, try to involve users, do workshops and come up with innovative proposals. 

The same clients: in majority big players from the private sector. The co-founder of Boana even said they don’t see each other so much as competitors but happily do business together. 

So what makes them different from one another? Below are some of the characteristics that seem to me to position them differently on the spectrum. Local VS Global  The scale of the agency can varie from few people who transformed an apartment into an office [Fuxblau] to hundreds of employees in many offices around the world [Fjord counts 23 offices]. There is also the case where the agency has a lot of employees but only a couple of offices located in the same country [IXDS]. Or on the opposite, small amount of employees in a couple of offices in different countries [Boana]. This can have an impact on the kind of role and work you will get. 

Prototyping VS Strategic Design  Some will want you [designer] to be great at coding [Futurice] when others will want you to nail business modeling [Fjord]. This reflects where do they put most focus on and the kind of outputs the agency will produce. There is also the diffenciation: All digital [Futurice] VS Back to hardware [IXDS]. Consumer VS People This could be seen as just a question of vocabulary but it actually says a lot about the approach of the agency. Either For profit / Commercial or more Humanistic / Social. People from Mandalah were the ones putting the most emphasize on the purpose and impact of their work.  Client VS Partner Consultancy work has limits. All these design agencies struggle with the implementation phase. Several told us about their frustrations of working a lot on a project which ended up in a drawer. There are multiple reasons for that but some understood that building long term partnership with their clients could increase the chances to see their designed solutions coming to life. 

Playful small dog VS White fluffy dog It was very interesting to see how much effort they all put into developing their working culture. It almost felt like there is a battle going on on who has the best office dog and the coolest work package to offer [designed space, comfy couches, personal desk you can move around, flexible working hours, time for personal project, credit card...]. Service Innovation Labs even chose to focus their presentation only on this aspect. They welcomed us with refreshments, then taught us one of their typical team building exercise and continued with a deep explanation of their way of governing / managing the agency [principles of Holacracy].  To conclude, this tour showed me again that it is extremely important to see what’s behind the flashy friendly websites before applying straight to a design agency. Meeting the people and feeling the vibe in the working space can really help defining wether this is a place made for you or not. If you want to see pics of the tour or feel like reading more about the learnings, see the article written by Kevin Fox, service designer and co-organiser of this edition. 

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JUMPING INTO A PHD

Lucky me, I have been given the opportunity to do a research in Service Design!! The theme deals exactly with what I am most passionate about within the field of Design: 

Participation & Co-Design in Public Services

For the next 3 years, I’ll be digging into participatory methods, mechanisms to implement and scale up social innovation solutions, trying to consolidate them through a design reflective practice. The goal being to make Public Services better for us, citizens. 

Today, 1st of February 2017, is the first official day of this Phd in Service Design [offered by Aalborg University Copenhagen]. I’m very excited to get started, travel around, meet brilliant people and explore deeply this subject. I’ll try my best from now on to keep you updated [in a comprehensible, non academic style] on what’s going on during my research. Your contributions, comments, contacts, questions are more than welcomed :) 

Thank you! Tchin! Tchin! 

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DRAW & DISCUSS YOUR EMOTIONS

Something I love to do is to design and facilitate workshops, especially for the first year students of the Service Systems Design Master. The start of the second semester was a good opportunity to do so. 

The goal of this workshop was to make the students reflect upon what they experienced during the 1st semester so they could eventually learn something from it and apply their learnings during the 2nd semester. 

First I asked them to draw individually their emotional line on the "Student journey" template. Then to share it with their table and finally to discuss it with the whole class using the bigger version of the "Student journey". 

This exercise was also helpful for us [teaching team] to understand better where are the biggest ups and downs as well as their causes. 

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PERSONAS FOR THE SHARING ECONOMY 

In my free time, I have been volunteering for the start-up Green Tech Challenge for a couple of months now. So far, it's been great learnings in entrepreneurship / business and lots of fun to work closely with other Service Designers [Andreas Jonsson and Gonçalo Nunes]. Today I would like to high-light one particular experience:  During the week of the challenge in November, I had the chance to prepare and facilitate a workshop for 3 promising start-ups within the sharing economy : Spaceflex, YoooWe and Closay. Although their focus are diverse [spaces, gears, dresses], they are all aiming at reducing the pollution related to the production of new items by making the existing ones, that we don't use on a daily basis, accessible to the many. My role during this 2h workshop was to make these young entrepreneurs gain a better understanding of their users. I did that by teaching them how to use a powerful service design tool called Personas.  Structure of the workshop:

10 min presentation about Service Design, Personas, why and how to use it.

1h30 to help the participants to create 1 persona each. Use of white boards. Balancing silent brainstorm and cross-group discussions.

10 min for the participants to digitalize their personas in a prepared template in google drive [share with colleagues].

10 min for conclusion and reflections.

A big thank you to the three crazy minds [Frederik van Deurs, Martin A. Petersen, Joachim Almdal] who funded Green Tech Challenge and gave me this opportunity! 

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THEY HACKED INTEGRATION

It has been a really challenging, fun and awesomely rich weekend! Lots of great ideas emerged during this 3 days hackathon in Copenhagen. Being a facilitator, I particularly enjoyed helping out this team [from left to right: Jurģis Megnis, Judith Hunzinker, Jasmine, Juliano Lorenzino, Norbu Losang] who designed the following concept: Sport Bridge, a multilingual platform where newcomers can create networks and friendships with like-minded locals through sports. The app/platform shows activities as a list and also in a map. The app uses open data in showing the location of public sports halls and playgrounds, as well as events that are happening.

They received very positive feedback and the concept was judged as most promising by Francesco Molinari, independent researcher and Rikke Ulk, CEO of Antropologerne.

The whole experience was also very encouraging and gave great inputs for the Welcome project that Judith and I work on :) 

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ANIMATE ME A REFUGEE JOURNEY

“ — Hey Fanny! Could you do a short animation to explain the theme of the hackathon? To be published in 2 weeks.  — Hmmm… Sure! “

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THIS IS A HOSPITAL

I had the chance to go to a quite unique hospital today. Not because I was sick, but because there was an opening and tribute to the gigantic and colorful work of Poul Gernes. The event was held in this conference room of Herlev Hospital, the so to say hearth of the hospital. The idea that colors can significantly affect positively our health is very interesting to me. 

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SERVICE DESIGN CONVERSATIONS

Together with Andreas Jonsson, friend and fellow service designer, we started organizing and hosting a new kind of event called Service Design Conversations.

The idea is to gather once a month people who work with service design or study the discipline to have very nerdy conversations about service design practices, basic terminologies, etc. Sort of lively, informal exploration of a topic at hand.

The first event explored the post-service phase. The second is happening today and focuses on pretotyping.

Contact me if you’re interested in joining the Service Design Conversation!

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BUGS BAPTISM

Yes! I did eat bugs! And I must say, it tasted ok. Especially the fat white ones. Taste like meat.. I did it because I was in a special context. Illutron [a floating culture house in Copenhagen] screened the documentary Bugs and invited a Thai chef so we could try out these strange delicacies. 

I was initially not so excited to watch this movie as I was expecting to hear all the good things about bugs and how it could be the new thing to feed the world.. My belief being that we don’t need to produce more but better and with more simplicity [following the principals of permaculture for instance]. But instead, I was positively surprised by the journey and experimentations of the Nordic Food Lab. They bring a fresh and critical perspective to this issue. For that reason I do recommend the movie to you. And to try out bugs ;) 

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LET’S SPREAD THE LOVE!

The 1000 postcards for the event Hack integration have just arrived from the printer! They will be distributed at the largest integration event of Denmark Velkomsfesten as well as in Aalborg University Copenhagen, IT University, Trampoline House, etc..

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EACH PARTICIPANT ITS SYMBOL

After many iterations, here there are, the final posters for the first weekend long Open4Citizens’s hackathon in Copenhagen! The event is called Hack integration as a call for action to create new possibilities for newcomers to Denmark and local citizens to live together in peace. Ideally, we would like to form teams of new comers, activists, designers, programmers and representatives of relevant companies. That is why I ended up designing a serie of symbols [representing what each type of participant could bring to the table]. Promises to be fun to play with!

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ORGANIC USER JOURNEY

One of my first missions at my new job at Aalborg University is to map how the Service System Design Master education is structured. Showing in a clear way to the students what they will be going through during the next two years. The classic exercise of user journey making.

The thing is, there are many different ways to visualise a user journey. However we can find a lot of examples where the graphics tend to be very rigid and linear. In my case, the actions within the journey of a student do not necessary happen distincly one after the other. Some are overlapping, some are happening in parallele, some spread during several weeks, other last for only few hours and most importantly some might be different from one student to another.  

With this in mind, I have been trying to experiment with visual styles that could signify these subtle characteristics. Here I was inspired by the work of the Swiss service design Daniele Catalanotto and used the brush tool in Illustrator to give it a hand-drawn easthetic but still rather clean [and very quick & easy to execute]. 

Another aspect that is very important for this work is the “level of openess” of these drawings. Meaning that not only a user journey - or a stakeholder map, service blueprint, etc.- has to be informative but also inspiring and engage the students to put some adds-on, to make the document evolve. It should be and stay a “living document”. To do so, I made the layout quite “airy” so there is space for other interventions. Then I printed a giant [A0] version and pinned it on a moving wall in the student’s studio. Hopefully it will get dirty in the coming months..