Introduction to
Service Design

The Capgemini Young Professionals onboarding program aims to not only welcome their new recruits into the organisation, but also expose them to a wide range of the different functions and capabilities the Capgemini Group is made of.

In my role as Lead Service Designer at frog, part of Capgemini Invent, I was invited to help the technology- and business-focused new recruits to grasp the breadth of what design methods can do and pave the way for collaboration with the group’s design teams.

The approach

The training format was a 3-hour workshop, held remotely in order to enable a larger number of the Young Professionals to attend. I used Miro for the workshop task canvases.

After engaging the team with an icebreaker introduction round, I talked briefly about the basics of Design Thinking and Service Design with light case studies to illustrate. But the majority of the session was spent on a hands-on workshop, giving them a chance to get a real feel for the introduced methods and concepts, and illustrate how you don’t have to be a designer to make use of many of them.

I like to shake up the team’s mindset and nudge them out of their comfort zone and ‘safe’ thinking, so the workshop’s brief was set in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse that wiped out half the population. I also purposely avoided a business driven scenario that might be too close to what they’ve so far got from many directions, and instead asked: How might we help public libraries continue to offer their services with partly destroyed infrastructure and the continued risk of new outbreaks?

I gave them a handful of assumptions to set the scene, and then we went on a whirlwind tour of all the phases of a design project. I walked them through some of the commonly used methods and tools for user research, ideation, prioritisation, concept creation, and service blueprint creation, showing them real examples along the way to help them see what it can all look like. I selected a variety of different kinds and sizes of projects for these examples to help them envision the possibilities for the projects they might encounter.

The training format was a 3-hour workshop, held remotely in order to enable a larger number of the Young Professionals to attend. I used Miro for the workshop task canvases.

IMPACT

The response

The objective wasn’t to make them capable Service Designers, but rather to introduce the basic concepts and the range of possibilities that Design Thinking methods can bring to any project. But their enthusiasm showed that they had opened their minds to the premise of design thinking approaches, which were largely a new concept to most of them.

I shared the session’s materials with the participants, so they also had access to the selection of templates and examples we went through together. This starter toolkit helped cement the training objectives into their freshly forming mindsets and routines and acted as a quick guide to working with design professionals on shared projects.

I received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the organiser of the onboarding activities, and participants described it as an inspiring and engaging experience that was both fun and highly informative.

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IMPACT

The response

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Introduction to
Service Design