Grace Turtle, MashUp’s Customer Experience Designer, has had a busy start to the year. She attended a DesignThinkers Bootcamp in Amsterdam, spoke at Link Festival in Melbourne and also at The Future Laboratory’s Sydney Trends Briefing.

In a series of posts, Grace will share her observations and insights from each of these events and the people driving and implementing change.

At the DesignThinkers Bootcamp, 30 people from 13 countries, used a ‘Learning by Doing’ approach to explore customer journey mapping, business modelling and other service design thinking and tools.

Global service design experts including David Kester (former Chief Executive of the UK Design Council and D&AD), Arnoud Koning (set-up global Design Thinking program within Procter & Gamble) and Marc Stickdorn, (editor and co-author of the award-winning ‘This is Service Design Thinking’ book) coached and facilitated the bootcamp.

Grace’s 5 observations from the bootcamp on the big trends shaping change globally and in Australia are:

1. As a process, service design thinking has filtered down to transformation and innovation strategy. Creation is happening outside of a vacuum. Product or physical innovation cannot work in isolation without taking into account service design.
2. Design’s function and importance is increasingly used in framing policy – from how people experience hospitals and public transportation to social issues. It is permeating the every fabric of our society and will become more synergistic with everything we do.
3. Progressive markets and brands are employing people or working with consultancies in customer experience and service design roles that sit above brand, marketing and customer service teams. As the industry develops, organisational structures are evolving to keep up.
4. Following the previous point, innovative retail strategy cannot be delivered without some level of organisational change. Current structures are just not capable of adapting to the new way of thinking and experiencing.
5. At the outset, service design has to allow for speed of transformation. Models and toolkits developed have to be evolutionary, agile and iterative to fit around a dynamic world and rapidly changing needs of customers.