About a week ago I found myself half-awake in taxi headed from CPH to the Danish Architecture Center (DAC) and the Service Design Symposium hosted by CIID.

Upon arriving at the DAC, I was pleasantly surprised by the small venue and the robust turnout. In fact, this was the most frequent comment that I overheard, that the symposium and its venue were cozy and friendly. I’m told that the Danish word hygge is a better word choice as it expresses some nuance not easily translatable into English, but in any case this coziness directly resulted in an ease of interaction: instead of searching for familiar faces in a sea of strangers, everyone was approachable and enthusiastic, qualities which encouraged meeting new people and striking up conversation over coffee or lunch.

While the symposium had targeted mainly designers in Denmark, we saw representatives from business, the public sector, and academia amongst both the speakers and the audience, along with a number of international practitioners. It was encouraging to see such diversity in the audience, not only in nationality, but also in age and professional experience. I mention this last bit because I feel that although we can learn a lot from the early pioneers like Bill Hollins, Engine, and Live|Work, it is also very clear that the service design conversation is only just beginning and that anyone can contribute valuable insights, not just the veterans.

In addition to the lineup of speakers, we also had the opportunity to collaborate in small teams during the two service design workshops. These workshops were good fun, and their hands-on nature helped expose participants to service design in a tangible (and memorable) way. I doubt few will soon forget the Sharingtons…

As for my observations during the event, I was happy to see what I would consider an evolution from the kinds of presentations I saw during the Emergence 2006 conference held at CMU in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is not to pass judgement on either event (in fact I was quite impressed with Emergence 2006); rather, I think it is a natural progression as the service design discipline matures.

My sense was that most presentations then were spent introducing, explaining, defining, or making the case for service design. By comparison, I found that during the CIID symposium most presentations had moved on to making the business case for service design. Live|Work in particular now had many hard figures to offer in a triple-bottom-line format. This approach seems to fulfill Bill Hollins’ exhortation during his session that the success of a service should be measured financially.

This is not to say that services should be evaluated solely on their ability to make money. Rather, pragmatics dictate that a service must be economically self-sufficient before it can begin to address other concerns. I’m happy to see the conversation and the practice moving forward.

Overall, I was impressed by the consistently high quality of the speakers. My own informal gauge of quality at these types of events is the number of laptops open in the audience with people checking email. To that end, my observations during this symposium revealed that either nobody in the audience owned a laptop, or the speakers were just that good. (Hint: I think it was the latter.)

Most of all, I found the symposium inspiring. It is not every day that one can be present amongst the trail-blazers of an emerging discipline. As someone mentioned in their talk, we are not even 10% of the way towards understanding the full potential of service design. The willingness of symposium participants to share their knowledge and the camaraderie they displayed seems to indicate to me that the journey to discover the next 90% will be an enjoyable trip indeed.

Over the coming weeks, we will be posting content from each of the Symposium speakers. While nothing beats attending in person, these videos should give you some sense of the spirit and tone of the event along with some delicious morsels of service design content. Enjoy!