 In this video, you'll learn everything about the Latin America Service Design Festival that is taking place between September 23rd and 27th in Santiago de Chile. And I've invited Rodrigo Gonzalez, one of the conference organizers to tell us everything about this unique event. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design and deliver services that are good for people and business. And a great way to learn how to actually do that is by learning from other people who do the same. Learn from their best practices, learn from their challenges, and just make the community grow. And the Latin America Service Design Festival will be a unique event where you can actually do that. So Rodrigo Gonzalez, one of the conference, yeah, festival, it's not a conference, festival organizers, is here in this episode to help you make a better decision if this is an event you should attend or not. So without any further ado, let's jump straight into the talk with Rodrigo. Welcome to the show, Rodrigo. Hey Marc, very nice to see you there. Thank you very much for inviting me. Of course, my pleasure. You're going to do something amazing and unique in Latin America, so I had to have you on the show. Rodrigo, you're going to organize a service design festival in Latin America. Why are you doing that and why now? Why not like last year? Well now I think our country and our region is getting the maturity to start doing things like this. I already did something similar, but not as big as the one that I am organizing this time. When I brought Marc Stickton and Adam Lawrence on 2017 with their these essentials to Chile that was a very big event, very interesting, crowded, many people wanted to participate. So this time I think that we have an evolution. Chile is growing, the region is growing, and also we are trying to develop ourselves in the new way of thinking and doing. So the main idea behind this festival is to promote service design as a strategic discipline, as the way that people should create value besides if you are part of the public sector, the academia, or the private sector. So that sounds really amazing. Adam and Marc are always good for attracting crowds, I know that for sure. So is there like a main theme in their festival or are there just many different things to do? What's the concept? The concept is that we really want to show service design as something helpful for different industries, different sectors of the economy, not just for private companies. So we have three themes that will be part of the festival. The first one is customer experience, something that maybe is already known. Most of the people are already talking about that. Employee experience that is growing quite a lot. I have seen a lot of interest selling this festival to many companies about this new way of treating your people and citizen experience, which means that this is, again, we can be seen as consumers, but we are citizen. We move around the city and we need to have better services to do what we want to do. And especially for people that have particular problems maybe with how to handle with public things or how to handle with the streets, how we can help them to do it in a much easier way and also connect it to all the city itself. So this will be the three main thematics, but there will be a common factor which is technology applied to service design. How technology facilitates your work and how technology today is helping to solve challenges that different companies or organizations have. And let's say that we are starting with artificial intelligence in Chile. We are starting with digitalization. We are starting with Internet of Things, big data. So I need to make to put all these technologies as something easy in the same language that common people like me, they are not a techie person, but people understand and understand that it's not always a NASA project. It can be very easy to start with and also to implement in your company. So how can technology facilitate and enable a good customer experience, a good employee experience and a good citizen experience. That's it. I know you also told me before we started recording that you're trying to actually make the festival into an experience itself so people actually experience the experience. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What's the idea behind that? Yeah, if we are talking about experiences, we have a big challenge in front of us. We have to make an experience. I think the best way to show things are doing things. So the festival is designed as different journeys for different audiences according to the different thematics that I told you already. So we will have a mix of content, which is the key part of what we are working on, but also the social events and also the networking and also to have a culture and music. We have a few parties even in this place. So I think that this mix and the way you design it will also make people understand that you can design experiences, it's something that appear, you can design it. So it's definitely not just another conference that people might think, right? Yeah, I am not the people that organize events so I couldn't do something that is just to make a follow-up of something that was already happening. We have worked very hard to make it something different and something very experiential. Who are you hoping that will attend? So who is the ideal audience? Who should visit? We have targeted that to maybe to people that take decisions in companies or organization and people that implement that too. I have seen a very lack of knowledge and of service design in the people that has to make the work already, the job every day because most of the people that have a strategic position in Chile, they already know that they travel around the world, they can see that, they check different videos and maybe they participate in different congress or conferences, but people that are in the middle of the company and need to do the day-to-day work, many times they don't understand why they have to do this. We need to make these people make sense of what they are doing. So there will be people in the strategic position, people in the implementing positions of the different companies, but also in a wide range of sectors. There will be the public sector here, will be the academia, will be the private sector too. So all of them mix together. The idea is that they understand that these are not tools just to make companies wealthier, but is to make people happier. And that's the common thing that all these people will have together, to share these methodologies, to share this knowledge, to share this networking, to try to push the service design in the field that they think is interesting for their organization. So a lot of things going on in this festival, a lot of people coming together, a lot of different backgrounds, citizen experience, employee experience, customer experience, decision makers, people who have to implement, it sounds like a real festival already. From all these things that you've just shared with us, what is the thing that you are looking forward to yourself the most? I truly believe in the service design and all what is behind that or in parallel or however you want to call it, all what is the base of innovation, we did the same thing in doing. I think it's the way we need to do things. I think that if we want to make value, to create value, we need to really understand how, what the other people are trying to get from what I am offering in order to make this a win-win for both sides. So my intention with that is to put the service design as a strategic discipline or a strategic field for large and medium and size companies in the different sectors that I mentioned. I don't want that service design to become just a trend. I don't want the service design to be seen as something that is a protocol, how to serve coffee. Even if it could be important that, my way of seeing that is that this has to be anchored to the decision makers and the people that are moving organizations to the future. Now imagine that the festival has ended. It's a week later, it's two weeks later and you're thinking about the festival and you're thinking, wow, this has been a huge success. This has been a much bigger success than I expected. What has happened at the festival that made this into such a success? It's a good question. I want to see people talking. I want to see people sharing knowledge. I want to see people sharing experiences. I want to see people laughing. I want that by the end, our moods are different as they were at the beginning of the festival. And I want to see, because we also have some good media partners, and I want to see more and more information about that in different platforms. Talking about this and the importance of this service design discipline for the future of our country and our region. That's what will make me feel happy again. I can imagine. Now, let's do the sales pitch, because I'm sure that people who are watching this will be excited and thinking, I want to come there, can they still sign up? And if so, how do they sign up? Yeah, they can still do this. They can go through our platform, this set.cl. I think it's somewhere around there. Yeah, I'll link to it down below. Yeah, so you can already buy the tickets for the teas, the DC service design doing essentials. And in the next two weeks, you will be able to buy the tickets also for the festival. We have already done a pre-sale, and the pre-sale is doing quite well, just for companies that had told us that they wanted to be part of it. So we saw a few tickets, but they say they open tickets for public tickets, for everybody, we'll start in the next two weeks. And for the teas, whenever you want, you just go into the DC.cl and you can check and you can buy it. You should do it, because we have just 10 tickets in Early Bird and we have already sold half of them, even if our communication plan is not already up. Probably by the time this video is online, all the Early Bird tickets will be gone, but make sure you check that. And if not, after this video, I'm sure all the Early Birds tickets will be gone for sure. That would be great. I can guarantee that this is what the service design show does. Roger, go have a lot of fun. Don't forget to make a lot of fun. You're doing a great job there, stimulating and pioneering and sort of I'm looking for the word, evangelizing this thinking and creating a more human-centered world, a world that is about people, not processes. So I wish you all the best and who knows, maybe we'll meet each other soon. No, that would be great, Marc. I would like to thank you for the time giving me and I really invite everybody. I think that for sure you will have you will have something new to get to bring back home. And for sure, you will have a lot of fun with people from all around the world. Very interesting people and also very nice people to talk with and to share a nice beer too. Why not? So if you're interested in attending the Festival, check out the website that is down below in the description of this video to see if there are any tickets left. If you enjoyed this video and make sure to subscribe if you haven't done so already because I'll be covering all the major service design conferences that will be happening this year. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.