 There's a brand new service design conference coming up in Mexico called Frontstage and in this episode we'll dig into what the conference is about, why it's being organized and of course if you should attend or not. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you do more work that makes you proud by designing delivering services that are good for people and business and in this episode we're going to talk about the frontstage conference that is being hosted on May 10th and 11th in Mexico and I'm really excited to have one of the conference organizers, Gabriela Salinas to explain to us what this conference is about, why is it being hosted in Mexico for the first time and of course like I said if this is something you should attend or not so without any further ado let's jump straight into the chat with Gabriela. Welcome to the show Gabriela. Thank you Mark. Awesome to have you here. I'm really interested in this new conference that will be happening in Mexico in just a few weeks. Can you tell us a little bit more about that because you're part of the organization team. Yeah, so I work for service design Mexico. This is a company that I built two years ago and so we teach courses and we also do some community events and we have been thinking like we should do a conference of service design in Mexico so we haven't had like a related event to service design before not like even strategic design for example so we have like very small community events and so this is what we're doing. This is the first service design conference in Mexico. It's going to happen in May the 10th and 11th here in Mexico City. Cool. Then the first sort of big service design conference in Mexico. The conference is called front stage right? Why did you pick that name? So okay that's like a very big deal. We thought about it a lot and so you know stage theory like it's a big thing in service design and you know we have the front stage the back stage and at some level I believe that we're also trying to make visible for students and for young professionals what happens in the world of service design of a service design professional so we are kind of trying to bring like the service design backstage to them. Putting that backstage of service design on the front stage that's cool. So you already explained that this is the first year and this is going to be sort of the start of a huge service design movement in Mexico. Who do your hope will attend the conference? Are you aiming for students for business? Who do you hope will be there? Yeah so we are expecting like two or three types of attendees. So the first is students from traditional design discipline so you know graphic design, industrial design, architecture. Since this is happening in Tec de Monterrey they have like these careers design careers and maybe like related degrees or majors. Some students in search of complementing their knowledge. So we are also expecting professionals who work in companies or consultancies in the design of services. So this could be like in close practices like strategic design, design thinking, user experience design and also we have a very big community growing here. We have a lot of ex alumni of service design Mexico's courses. So these will be professionals that have taken courses in service design before and they also seek to continue building these capacities. Okay so students, professionals, alumni, business. Makes sense. Now get me sold on this conference. Who is speaking? Tell us a little bit about the lineup. How is the what does the program look like because it's two days. Yeah get us excited about why we should it end. Yeah okay so we have four tracks of topics. First we have service design tools, service design skills and service design related with other disciplines because that's a question we get a lot like what's the relationship between you know service design, UX design and also service implementation. So what we've been thinking about these tracks is mainly how can we help design students that I was telling you about from these traditional design disciplines to understand the value of service design. So we're going to have a day of conferences and a second day of workshops in just talking about these topics like on a very grounded level like very practical very basic methodologies tools and just with the mindset you know to help them get a sense of how to start integrating this into their practice help them realize that maybe they are already doing service design on their day today and to help them just with very practical case studies and examples. And the last topic I was telling you is service implementation I think that's more aimed at design professionals. Yeah yeah so this is for people that have been working in related practices for a while you know usually product design here in Mexico and are looking for ways to complement it with a service mindset. So the questions we're trying to answer here are like how can they prove their stakeholders the value of service design? How can they measure the success of their projects? How can they evangelize others in their organization or deal with the complexities of these projects and maybe move the practice beyond the tools from the books because that's what we often get here you know there's like all the books that we have and then what really happens after you do the blueprint. So yeah so something that gets me really excited about this is that it's happening in Tec de Monterrey and it was so exciting about that yeah. They have this vibrant student culture and the space is really big it accommodates 300 attendees so first we are expecting to have great networking moments and so we have seven speakers on Friday on this very big room. Can you name a few who's coming who's speaking at the conference? Of course so for them are international that's what's getting me super excited so we have Alejandro Masperrer he created trigger cards and he will be speaking about that you know about facilitation brainstorming creativity. We have Richard Ekelman he he was the first accredited coach by DSDN so he's going to be talking about the value of service design through a business perspective so mainly making like this business case like very grounded very understandable about service design. We also have Majid Iqbal so he wrote the most recent book of service design thinking services last year and he will be talking about like in general the service mindset and he's also going to be doing a workshop um from a framework of his book called the Four Promises this is about value propositions and just like like the value of service design. All right so yeah okay so yeah yeah what else? The three of them are doing workshops as well on Saturday the 11th and the closing keynote is by Lara Penning who I admire a lot and she's the director of Transdisciplinary Design Graduate Program in Parsons and Desi's Lab so she's going to be talking about service design as a socio-material practice and this is something very aligned to her book and like just the whole social innovation impact related to service design so that's also I believe like a very new conversation here in Mexico. Lara Penning interesting name maybe we need to get her on the show as well who knows. Yeah she wrote a book also. Yeah yeah yeah yeah super interesting person um I don't want to give too much weight in this episode but what is the thing that you are looking forward to the most yourself? So um just in general like getting people together in this in this space and sharing knowledge and what I think is that for most people in Mexico it's very hard to attend a conference you know in service design all of them are mostly in Europe so traveling and all of that is very expensive and so just being able to bring them here in the most accessible price that we could it's great and I've been thinking about this phrase a lot I don't know if you use it but it's like if you can't go to the mountain then you must bring the mountain to you so we're bringing the service design mountain to Mexico. Well I think that will be the title of this video um you you said something about price I think when this video is out there are still a few days weeks before the event how can people still sign up and if so where should they look to get their tickets? Okay so um we have extended the early bird price to the 15th of April they can get the the ticket like a couple days before they don't have to worry if they want to come but like maybe they should hurry up so that's gonna be through our website that is frontstage.servicedesign.mx okay I'll link to it down below of course yeah so that's the website frontstage.servicedesign.mx and there you can find all the info you need for the conference I was checking the website and it was all Spanish now my Spanish is not that good will the conference be uh in Spanish or are you or will it be in English so um is it just for people from Latin America? It's gonna be mixed so you know the the people coming from abroad so Lara Penning Richard Keman and Majid are gonna be talking in English of course so we uh we're looking to have translation for the people that speak Spanish and we also have some I didn't mention like some several local and like Latin speakers they are going to be doing some talks and some workshops so we have and you're sick um Roberto and Jose from in situ um Claudias and Aldo Alvarez they all speak in Spanish so the the conference is gonna be you know mixed 50 yeah well not 50 50 but mixed um Gabriela um have fun good luck with the final preparations I know how it is to organize these events and it's exhausting but don't forget to enjoy yourself and let us know how it went and if you're going to the conference uh leave a comment because yeah I want to know how it was and how many people are going from the service design show community to the event would be really cool if you're there make sure to shake hands with uh Gabriela so thanks thanks for explaining thank you mark I think just one a little something that I left out is that we have an ongoing promotion on our website it's for some free tickets or discounts so if you go to the website yeah free tickets and discount how do we get the free ticket or discount so if you go to the website you're gonna see like this button in the bottom corner that says quiero boleto it's in Spanish it means I want the ticket and then you can just sign up there and we'll be doing some raffles so so there's even a chance to win a free ticket awesome yeah anything else meaning to say about the conference I think that's it again thanks Gabriela and have fun are you interested in the front stage conference and if so which speaker would you like to see check out the conference website at frontstage.servicedesign.mix to learn more about the conference the link is also of course down below in the show notes I hope you enjoyed this video and if you'd like to see more don't forget to subscribe because we bring new videos that help to level up your service design skills at least once a week so thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video