In May this year I will have the honour of presenting alongside Kitty Rahilly and Mariesa Nicholas of the Inspire Foundation at the Service Design Conference 2012 in Melbourne. Our presentation, Communicating, prototyping and adopting ReachOut.com’s future service strategy focuses on the development of a new service strategy for the Inspire Foundations flagship program ReachOut.
The service strategy was collaboratively developed as a result of an extensive participatory research and evaluation phase headed by Kitty and Mim. In addition to helping develop codesign activities that enabled young people to participate in the strategy development process, my role included working with internal stakeholders to design and facilitate a series of Service Strategy workshops. These workshops assisted the Inspire team to draw together their extensive body of research into a cohesive strategy, as well as communicate, share and prototype the future service.
In this session Kitty, Mim and I will share the activities and tools that were developed and used in these service strategy workshops. As this project is now in build and implementation stage we will also be able to reflect on the success of these tools and activities to date in supporting and enabling implementation. (See the full abstract for more info).
In contrast to Europe there are not (yet) many forums that focus on Service Design in this part of the world so its great to be part of this conversation. The organisers Donna Spencer and Steve Baty have put together a diverse program covering a range of service related topics from working with blended design teams to service enactments and value networks which should demonstrate something of the breadth of this growing field. My only complaint is that it is just one day so quite brief! Included in the line up is fellow NZ’er Trent Mankelow, co-founder and CEO of NZ-based consultancy Optimal Usability as well as many of my favourite Aussie’s. If you can’t make the conference itself it will be well tweeted and I am sure all presentations will be audio recorded and available post the conference.
