Of course, the global Service Design community celebrates Christmas and New Year. However, on the 1st of June, we celebrate the power of Service Design! Last Thursday, the global SD community celebrated Service Design Day for the first time by bringing people together, sharing achievements and improve awareness.

As you might know already, Koos is all about Service Design and proud to share success stories about our field. Besides, we are always up for a good time, so this was the perfect excuse for a celebration and an introduction to the Service Design process.

In reference to this article Amsterdam: Anticipating The Future – we were inspired to make a start with forming a collective brain, open up dialogue and co-create online around the subject of mass-tourism.

Service Design helps to improve current services (incremental innovation) and to design complete new service propositions (radical innovation).

Service Design has become a hot topic within the Service Management Industry, but as the book This is service design thinking already mentioned: “if you ask ten people what Service Design is, you would end up with eleven different answers – at least.”  With this short video capture of our field research we like to show that raising the awareness about Service Design is still needed.

We decided to organise Service Design Day around the 5 phases of the Service Design process; Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. We asked people to follow us on Social Media and join voluntary to co-create and think with us; through a poll, sharing suggestions, ideas and even prototypes. The flexible setting allowed us to explore interesting findings about the Amsterdam experience. Check out the context interviews and find out the best and most annoying things about the city.

After gaining insights we decided, together with Prioticket, to step inside the beautiful Hotel L’Europe to ask if they could share their vision about the balance of livability and visitor experience.

Exceeding our expectations they were open for collaboration. We are grateful for their warm welcome and their valuable input in our rapid co-creation session, while using Visual Thinking and Lego Serious Play.

Of course we were not able to solve these wicked problems in one day. But in the end we are satisfied with the dialogue that opened up. We hope it will serve as a starting point to come up with various service innovations around how Amsterdam could take a pioneering role in mass-tourism and encourage better understanding between local and tourists.

We like to thank all who joined in our challenge, while celebrating, the first Service Design Day world wide.  Let’s take the Service Design Day to the next level in 2017!