 I'm Holger Hamf and this is the Service Design Show. I'm Marc Frontijn and welcome to the Service Design Show. Today we have a special episode as we're here live at the Service Design Conference in Amsterdam that is taking place on October 27th and 28th. I have a special guest, one of the keynotes, actually the first keynotes on the opening day, Holger Hamf. Welcome to the show. Glad to be here. Holger, you work at BMW, could you tell the people a bit, what do you do at BMW and why the Service Design Conference? Yeah, I work at BMW in Munich and I work for the design division of BMW, so that's the design department out of Munich. Adrian van Hoidong, the head of BMW Group, has a team of people around him that are responsible for the brands. Mini, Rolls Royce, BMW, obviously, and Motorrad. And I'm responsible for the development of the user interface and the digital experience in the car across brands. So, what brought me to the Service Design Show? Well, originally an invitation from Eric. Who was one of the previous guests also on the show? Yes, exactly. We started to talk and he found obviously a great interest in mobility and the automotive industry, so I agreed to open the show yesterday. Holger, mobility and car manufacturers maybe aren't the first companies that people think about when they think of Service Design. I'm really curious, can you remember your very first encounter with the term Service Design, with the profession Service Design? When did you hear about it? Well, I would say that was long before I joined BMW as the car division of BMW. I was at Design Works in the USA and we've had multiple clients besides BMW as our core client. One of the clients we built a very strong relationship with was Hewlett Packard, HP. And HP back then was in the business of producing printers, for example. Hardware, inkjet printers you have at your home during the business. But they themselves started to have a line under their email saying like, please consider printing this email and that was the end of it pretty much. So we've talked a lot about Service Design and how you can provide printing services, for example. That was some 12 years ago. Yeah, and I guess a lot has happened since then, right, in the terms of Service Design. How is Service Design now related in your profession because you said you're into the user interface, the department user experience. How do people talk within your department about Service Design? Is it a topic that is on the table? I would still say that the term Service Design is not yet established in the way that I experienced it here at the conference. However, we talk about it every day. We talk about how we can improve or actually get to a level of service quality in the same way that we reach with our product. Right, because that was one of the highlights for me during your presentation. You of course have a premium brand and you have craftsmanship in making fantastic cars. It's the same ambition towards creating the same level of services. That's interesting. How does a BMW service look like and feel like? It must be an interesting time within a car manufacturer. Well, it is very interesting. It is not only because of the introduction of Service Design but it is also just because of many changes happening around us in the terms of individual mobility, for example. I've heard some other people already say that the car industry will change more drastically in the next 10 years than it has changed in the last 100 years. So basically we have to be very open to take a look at these changes and see how much they can influence us or will influence us. Yeah, and they will influence us, like you already said. Olga, as part of the Service Design show we're going to do the format that we do in every episode and that is that you have a bunch of question starters and I have a few topics that you suggested we should talk about. So let's just start and I'll pick one of your topics and invite you to pick a question starter that goes along with that and then we'll see what kind of conversation we have from that. Very well. Alright, interesting. Let me start with one that puzzles me the most and this is the one I'll show to the audience and if you can pick a paper, a question starter that goes along with that one so I've picked a topic of freedom. Which question starter goes along with that one? So much. Let's start with an easy one, why? So alright, why freedom? And what do you mean? That's maybe the first question. Well, I think the word freedom seemed interesting to me to talk about because it is kind of an intrinsic human value. We want to feel free in our lives and I think applied to the automotive field, the car always symbolized freedom to us. I think it allowed us to go wherever we wanted to go. To go to places we cannot reach by public transportation or by bike or by foot. The car in and of itself in my garage was always kind of also a product of achievement in a certain way and provided freedom. When it comes to today's context I think the freedom is sometimes limited, more limited because of things happening around us let's think about traffic and think about urbanization, growing population and so on and the car is not necessarily always only the element of freedom. So my question or the question I was asking myself is kind of how can we extend the feeling of freedom also potentially through services? So that's maybe your biggest design challenge at this moment. How do we design for freedom? Is that a question that... Yeah, for people to feel free and to feel independent I think that's very important. And a car can be a tool or utility that provides freedom, right? Correct. So what are the questions you have around this topic? So what keeps you awake when you think about freedom? Well, I work daily with digital experiences, user interfaces, also complex applications that allow you to do things faster, more efficiently and hopefully also with more fun. Think about a navigation system, think about accessing music in the car. But on the other hand I also think that we are currently in a time where technology is sometimes providing more of a burden than it actually delivers freedom. The mobile phone. Correct. Yeah, some people say we're tethered to this thing. We're babysitting the phone in our pockets. And yeah, I want to kind of see how we can overcome this perception of burden and where it would really start that technology enables us to do things again and really kind of sets us free from babysitting a device. Yeah, where does it get in the way, the technology? Exactly. And I think it's in the way too much at this moment, right? And we see already, I think, a tiredness with people. People are starting to delete apps from their phones and I think some people at the conference talked about filling the gaps and I'm doubtful that we want to fill more gaps but maybe kind of look at the core experiences and make them better and deliver. Maybe technology should be more and more in the background instead of in our face, right? Absolutely. And I can imagine that if you're working daily with cars and interfaces, it's very tempting to put technology on the front stage to put it in your face to show that technology is there. Correct, yeah. And I think to be somewhat self-critical, we have put technology in the car for the sake of technology and not necessarily only to help the user, the customer to use the product more efficiently or better. And I think we're now at that point where technology is potentially or could potentially move more into the background and become an enabling thing rather than something that asks me to update every 10 minutes. Technology should be much more humble, I guess. I think so too, yeah. Let's move on to the second topic, Holger, because time is flying by and we have much more interesting things to talk about. This is a topic called integration. Integration. Integration. Which question starter goes along with the topic of integration? How much? How much? Well, the answer is easy. Conversation can be short, 100%. And what do you mean with integration? With integration and this is also related to the conference and the keynotes we've listened to for the last two days, we have a room full of service designers and on the other hand, I'm working with product designers every day with automotive, with transportation designers and there's also the discipline of brand marketing and brand definition. And I very strongly believe that all three disciplines have to work very closely together and integrate to achieve an ultimate experience. So it's product design, service design and marketing? Yeah, marketing, branding, brand strategy, correct. And what are you finding so far? Is that the thing that happens naturally or is it hard work to get them to work together? It's hard work. It's happening, it's happening at BMW. We're talking to each other. However, you need to ensure that everyone's expectations and desires are addressed in this collaboration. And I think at the end, I'm talking very often about harmonization and we all know that on a customer journey you have multiple touch points and if one is a really bad experience it has an effect on everything else on the entire journey. So by picking these points that are either brand strategy or brand positioning that are kind of how the product feels and also how you design a service, you have to make sure that all of them are at an equal level of quality, very high. What's needed to get them to be on the same page? Well, it needs, first of all, each of the disciplines delivers a very high level of quality in and of itself. And again, with BMW you see that the products they deliver already. I think we've reached a point where kind of the car might be perfect as a product, as it is. With electrification it might be more perfect. But I think each of these things have reached, these disciplines have reached a high level of quality. Now it is about kind of linking them together and making them work together as a system. Naively as I would say, these people have designed mindset already in them. It should be pretty easy to get them to work along and achieve the same goals, it's more tough in real life. Well, I think again we're at an interesting point in time where when you look at service design we're just about to really understand how to put the customer or the user at the center of our thinking. Again, it's almost this process of moving from a product centric to a customer centric type of work or kind of way to work, so to say. We ourselves are very often surprised by witnessing what people actually do in a car. Not only driving, I tell you that. So service design, a user centric approach can help us to better understand what people really do. We observe people, qualitative research tells us how we can design our product even better to address these different use cases. It's maybe design research and qualitative research a key element into getting everyone aligned because I can imagine once you have insights from real users it's become so obvious that you need to work on this together. Yeah, absolutely. It's giving us a much greater degree of insight and we all know coming from a time of, let's say, online surveys or filling boxes you don't really get this kind of deep insight and witnessing people observing, doing drive-alongs, for example, tells us much more how people actually interact with the product, use it and so on. How it fits in their daily life. Take the example of a cell phone. That's always out. People are texting while they drive. People are using navigation systems on top of their built-in navigation systems. So what do we have to do to prevent also scenarios that are quite unsafe because that's important in the automotive context. Yeah, yeah, unsafe scenarios. Okay, let's do the third topic, Holger. Sure. And it's a fun topic because it's a topic of joy. You've chosen some surprising topics. How can we... How can we? And how can we... How can we what? How can we achieve joyful experiences, maybe? And, yeah, again, I chose this word because joy is at the center of our set of brand attributes. We have at BMW several brand attributes like sportiness, dynamic and joy is at the center of it. And I think, you know, if you look at the BMW subline, Sheer driving pleasure in English. We always try to deliver a joyful experience with our products. If it's no fun to drive a car, then, yeah, okay, that's not ours. It's just a utility. Yeah, it's just the utility. So while I think utility, there's nothing wrong with it, we always want to combine it with a joyful experience. And obviously one of the things that also keeps me busy is how to translate a joyful driving experience to a joyful digital experience, for example. Why digital? You know, I think part of the reason why we continue to kind of use our mobile devices, because there are actually, they deliver a certain type of joy. I'm thinking a lot about Apple products and how fun it is to take photos, to share photos and other things. And Apple continuously drives this notion of fun in using these applications. And if it's no fun, you know, toss them. In automotive, I think it's similar. I think many of the systems have been initially designed to fulfill a purpose and they're good. Again, getting from A to B quicker is an important moment or task, but I'm also looking in how far a user interface or an interaction with the car can deliver joy. Can put a smile on your face, really. I can imagine that that's really changing, as in, if I look at myself, how I perceive a car. It's not per se, when I look at the car, it's not per se a joyful memory that comes to mind, but it's more of the utilitarian thing there. Maybe it's just me or generation, but do you see a shift in there that you need to really adapt and change things? I wouldn't talk about a shift, but I find it, and I talked in my keynote yesterday morning about opportunities in the future, and I've named a couple yesterday. One is autonomous driving, the self-driving car, and the other one is electromobility. And I think both can deliver new joyful experiences. I think, for example, driving a small electric car like the i3 is a lot of fun, and it is a completely different experience from driving a combustion engine. I showed a video yesterday, and you'll literally see in the people's faces how much fun it is to drive quietly zero emission in an urban environment, and how to extend that into other experiences around peripheral experiences is super interesting. Yeah, because that's what puzzles me, because right now, as BMW, you have the option to move beyond the car, I guess. You have the metal box, and then you have maybe things on your phone or I don't know what kind of stuff you develop more, but there's a whole new playing field that's opening up. Yeah, we're starting to talk more about mobility needs and desires in a larger kind of context than just the time you spend in the car. I think we all have our calendars organized and we know where we have to be during the day, and maybe a small portion of that day you also spend in the car. But how the system all works together and how you organize your day with transportation and with moving around, that's very interesting. What does that do with the capabilities that are inside the organization? It means also expansion, it means you need to look at your competencies, you have in-house, you need to partner more. I think there are definitely things that we are not set up to do perfectly, but others are. So where can we partner, where can we talk to people that are already pros in this game? Interesting, Holger, we finish the show always with two questions that are not on paper and the first one is when people are approaching and I'm curious if they do and they say, Holger, I want to get better at service design or maybe in your case user experience design, what is your ultimate tip? What do you say to them? Well, number one, I think since we've talked about integration I think it is a lot about developing a kind of a sensibility for the other disciplines, especially in our case the product in of itself, kind of how can you connect to that? How can you create meaningful services potentially around the object, peripheral to the object? So I think being anticipatory and being sensible towards other things that play a role in this larger system is very important. Don't look at service design through kind of a very narrow viewing, number one, yeah. Well, an important thing because being here in Amsterdam and being surrounded with service design is really easy to be live in the bubble, I guess, right? And think that the whole world looks like this. Making the bridges, that's what you're basically saying, right? Creating bridges. Making the bridge and also maybe not always, I was very taken by the fact of new work processes in service design. I think service design is suggesting new ways of collaborating, new ways of exchanging data with each other and knowledge with each other. And here's obviously something to learn for us. I think there's a certain openness and kind of a certain openness to share things, which I haven't so far felt in product design. Well, that's a good thing, I'd say. We need to keep that as a community. Holger, to wrap this up, you've gave a lot of insights, but you must have big questions. You must walk out the door here, be on the plane, back to Munich and think, how am I going to do this? And what is the question that's currently on your mind? Well, I mean, one question is how can we better integrate service design and continue on this path of kind of a approaching mobility as a system, individual mobility. How can we do that and still continue on our path of delivering joyful experiences? So I think it is about picking the right building blocks for the system, and obviously I'm thinking a lot about which are the blocks that I need. Interesting, and if people have ideas about that, feel free to comment on the episode. Holger, thanks for being part of the show. Before you leave, we have a small gift that we've been handing out to some of the guests who were on the previous episodes, and you've seen it already. It's a unique example, and I want to hand over your... This is the other one? Yeah, that's one with my name on it. You get a personalized example of the service design helmet, and like I've told the other people who've been on the episode, use it however you want it to be used, but wear it with pride. Okay, so I'll show up at work then next week with this helmet. People won't confuse you as the creative designer, but we'll see you as a hard worker. Thank you very much, it's wonderful, nice color. Thank you, Holger.