Will Harmer
Service Designer at Livework
Designing in the Wild: Service Safari Workshop
What’s a service safari? Chances are you’ve already been on several today. From turning on the heating to running for the bus and reading the news on your smartphone on the commute, services are all around us.
The Service Safari is an exercise that helps you deeply understand how a service works and where it can be improved by either observing others or using it first-hand yourself. It’s a highly flexible, cost-saving tool that be used at any point in the design process.
The workshop will comprise:
- Intro: What a service safari is – why, how and when to do it.
- Safari! Dividing into small teams and going out into the field, visiting local attractions in Greenwich to experience and observe services in the flesh.
- Ideate/Imagine/Innovate: Re-grouping and sharing insights, and working together to generate ideas for improvements, innovations and a better world through design.
Our objectives will be to:
- Get our hands dirty - working quickly and collaboratively out in the field, gathering insights and information to better inform our design decisions later on.
- Communicate findings to each other and reflect on the insights gathered - to quickly define design drivers.
- Have fun, be open to new ways of thinking and hope we have nice weather!
About Will Harmer
Will is a service designer at Livework with a particular interest in and skill at designing for the space between consumers and businesses where digital plays a key role in service delivery. He has worked on many projects including Ford, Gucci and Fujitsu. He aims to augment service projects with digital methods and vice versa, believing that approaches from both disciplines can inform and improve each other.
He originally studied industrial design in Canada and was introduced to service design towards the tail end of his studies, and switched his focus from the form of things to how they’re experienced by the humans using them, moving to Finland to pursue a service design focused masters degree.
Whilst there he worked on a number of collaborative projects – from the design of healthcare intiatives to future concepts for public transport. What became evident was service design’s ability to move between the micro and macro scales within a project – able to both define the specifics of a given touchpoint while understanding the organisational logistics of the whole.