 On October 13 and 14, 2022, a brand new edition of the Serb Design Global Conference is being organized by the Service Design Network. It's a fully hybrid conference which means that you can join in person, in Copenhagen or virtually from anywhere in the world. The theme of this year is courage to design for good and in this episode of the Serb Design Show you're going to get an exclusive preview from one of the speakers, Vinay Venkatraman of What's Coming Up. If you plan to attend the conference but haven't registered yet, hold on, because I've got some good news for you. I've managed to negotiate a discount for the Serb Design Show community, yes that's you, so if you use the code SDSHOW during checkout you'll get 20% off your ticket price and yes, that's both for the virtual conference and the in-person one. You can find the registration link to the conference in the show notes of this episode. Now without any further ado, let's jump into the conversation with Vinay and learn what the conference has in store this year for us. Let the show begin. Welcome to the show Vinay. Hey Mark, thank you for having me. Awesome to have you all excited to talk about what you're going to talk about during the Serb Design Global Conference 2022. I always like to start with a brief introduction. People can Google you and find a rich history of what you do but for the audience, listeners, viewers of the Serb Design Show who didn't get a chance to do that yet, could you give us a brief introduction of who you are and what you do these days? Yes, sure. My name is Vinay. I'm the founder and the CEO of a company called LeapCraft. We specialize in sort of delivering solutions for smart city and smart building applications. Funnily enough, I'm trained formally as a designer and I've dabbled with the service design industry for quite some years in my previous life where I co-founded a design institute in Denmark called CID. And nowadays I'm on the other end of the table, so to speak. And today I'm more of a spreadsheet jockey rather than a true designer. I manage a lot of systems, processes, trying to grow the company, trying to use service design in practice, so taking my own medicine, so to speak. Yeah, that's basically a quick summary of who I am. Yeah, awesome. And dabbled in Serb Design, I think you're being modest there and a spreadsheet junkie. It's interesting to see people with a design attitude or a design mindset using these sort of qualitative tools and business-oriented tools to their advantage. I think there's a lot to learn, explore and grow as a community. You're already sort of briefly hinted upon, I think, what you are going to share at the conference, but let's dig a bit deeper into that. What is the main topic of your presentation going to be? Sure. So in this audience, since I'm going to be preaching to the choir, I rather that I take a slightly different approach and share my personal experiences of bringing in Serb Design into an organization, especially a growth organization and trying to see how you can scale products and services using these principles. I'm going to share my personal experiences as the CEO of a company that's desperately trying to scale very rapidly. We have all the pressures and all the dangling swaths on top of our head in regards to how to balance financial expectations, user experience, product delivery, compliance, financial modeling. You can name all of it. We have extreme multitasking going on here and how Serb Design is actually a very, very important glue in this whole system to package the whole solution together. But it has a different meaning when you're seeing it from the other side of the table. And I'm going to share more of my personal experiences, what those specific goals and objectives are when adopting Serb Design into an organization. So it's the non-academic, low practical, simple to follow experience sharing. That's basically it. I think that would be a good practice for every Serb Design professional to consume Serb Design themselves. So out of all the topics that you potentially could have picked with the experience that you have, why do you feel that this is an important topic to share with this community? I think for me it's an interesting journey because for about eight to nine years I put my heart into designing and delivering services for other people, including tangible interactions, intangibles, service flows and experiences, preparing for all the classic theoretical frameworks around this. And then when I stepped out of that mode and I started building a company which was using service delivery as an essential ingredient inside the whole product package, I came to a strong realization that when you look at it from the service delivery side, the world looks very different. And I think the kinds of objectives and the kinds of processes that you need to think about goes beyond the classic design road. And we need this overlap and we need this sort of, you could say, acknowledgement and interaction beyond the design discipline in order to make services truly thrive. And the whole digitalization game and how technology is changing the landscape is pretty, pretty amazing, both in a good way and a bad way, in a good way that it is enhancing and be able to deliver some of these services in a whole new way. But it's also a little bit of the flip side of that story is that it's creating new types of complications in the market. So some of these I would love to share and like everything from small details like if you don't design the right type of LED feedback in your product, you might end up with a much larger cost on product service and returns guarantees and stuff like that much later, right? So there are all these kinds of nitbit details which actually make the whole thing flow together. And those experiences I think are meant to be shared in the open world so that people can do this better and faster. Now, this sounds super intriguing and interesting to always hear stories from people who are getting their hands dirty actually using service design and have seen it from both sides. Maybe one thing I'm curious about and we're not going to share your entire talk, of course, yet, but like what is the one thing you're going to share that you wish maybe you would have known like back in the days when you were delivering service design? Yeah, so let I'll just give you a small example, right? I wish like 15 years ago someone told me that when you design services, please make sure that you're able to account for all the man hours in billable costs. Simple fact, you know, it's so basic today from where I said it sounds like banal if you don't do it, right? But I wish someone had told me this a long time ago. Maybe the world has changed and I'm a little bit disconnected from that. That's called a classic design industry in the real sense. I hope there's a new level of acknowledgement and a new sort of practice in this space. And I'm really looking forward to that also to learn from others in the conference about where it has reached because I'm like almost a fresher back in that same scene. How do you think that would have helped you 50 years ago? You know, like when you're trying to convince your customer, which is typically a larger enterprise or sort of an organization who needs to consume your service design concepts. The first thing the CFO asks as a question is, OK, this is fantastic. This is great. What's the unit metrics? Show me the unit economics of this whole setup. And then you start breaking down the costs and then you suddenly come to a sort of a moment of epiphany. You could say that, oh, shit, this is actually going to cost significantly more than what we were imagining it would do. Or some surprises sometimes show up like, oh, this is going to save us tons of cash because we can, let's call it, convert some tangible interactions into intangibles or the other way around. Right. So it's, there are some unusual facets to this. It's what you're describing. And I'm sure you'll share other things as well. But this specific example, I think we always sort of praise the holy trinity of viability, feasibility and desirability. And often the, what is the Venn diagram looks awesome. But the feasibility part is something that is there, but it's not really taken into account in a lot of the service design processes. We do focus on the desirability aspect. But I think this is, this is a good reminder that we actually need to pay attention to the other two circles as well. Oh, yeah, for the most definitely. And even in the desirability realm, I think what does desirability mean is a very subjective thing and how to quantify that and how do we segment it and how to be clear about which user groups mean or which kind of desirability elements mean what to which user segment, you know, it's the same service could mean 10 different things to 10 different people. So how do we be crystal clear about who we are designing this for and who's the target audience itself goes a long way. It's, it does sound like you're going to take away a bit of the romance around the design process, which I think is a very healthy and good thing. And it's going to take our feel to to another level. I'm curious about the next thing. And that is while you were reflecting on this and going over your experiences and lessons learned, what, what was the biggest question that sort of emerged and that you maybe still have around this topic? I think the big paradigm shift is that service design 15 years ago, or at least when I started out, it sort of felt like a community of practice, right? People got together, they try to develop some common moment pleasure, a baseline of what is good service delivery, what is good service design, even though that paradigm existed way before in so many other realms of mind, they just don't call it service design, right? And now it is slowly crystallizing to be a true discipline. And I think it's, and I think that's the interesting sort of transition. But I think seeing it from a bird's eye view, I'm able to see that happening. And I think that's one of my biggest takeaways from this whole process is that the also the change, the rate of change is also exponential now. So the curve is like really shooting off. So we're at that tipping point where in the next five to seven years, I think the whole digital revolution is going to completely engulf this whole service design concept to a point where I think we will not be able to uncouple design of services from so many other aspects that needs to be done in the industry. So we have to get ready for deep integration. I think that's my biggest takeaway. Getting ready for deep integration, that sounds something that we always tend to preach, like being multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary. Now it's actually time to put that into practice. Or now it's it's we're going to be forced to put it into practice, I guess. Yeah, there's no way out seeing it from my position as it like if you really want to deliver really high quality services, you have to be not just multidisciplinary. You have to be deeply cross discipline because just knowing about different disciplines is not enough. You need to actually practice it and you need to reach out and to connect. And yeah, there is a there's a very deep need for that. So on one of the transitions that I see happening, and I think you're also touchable, touch them up on this is that we're moving away from the notion of a service designer into a service design practice service design field service design community with a lot of different disciplines inside who are working on designing services. I think that's that's the shift I'm seeing as well. Now, if people see you virtually or maybe in person at the conference and they walk out with one memory of your presentation, what are you hope it will be? It's a good question. I would say that I think one key takeaway at least should be, I hope it would be that at least I can show examples of how to scale services in real life, especially digital products and how to build powerful arguments that will enable your service design concepts to actually thrive inside organizations. Oh, I'm looking forward to that already. Now, if somebody is in person in Copenhagen and would love to have a chat with you, how will they recognize you at the venue? Oh, that's very easy. The most obnoxious person in the room. It's, no, it's just come reach out to me. You know how I look and where to find me. Look online, reach out. I'm very mature. I look forward to, I indirectly consider myself a small host, even though I'm not part of the organizing team. It's my home city, so come along and connect. And it'll be a great time. It will be a good time. October is a great month. It's not too cold. It's a fantastic time to be in Copenhagen. One final question with regards to the conference. We talked about your topic, the theme that you'll be addressing, but what is the thing that you are looking forward to the most with regards to the actual conference? I think for me, it's like a sort of walk down a memory path, because I haven't dealt with service design as a sort of service designer for a long time. And it's been nearly a decade, so I really look forward to reconnecting to that whole realm of people and amazing talent and know what's going on in the state of the art in that space. And as I said, a lot of my assumptions are now built out of being a sort of organization that's actually using service design rather than designing it. So I'm really looking forward to going back to the design phase and sort of the empathy and the humanistic angles as well as how that can be sort of delivered in a nice package so that it can be consumed in a really, really powerful and significant way inside organizations which are driven by hard metrics and KPIs and have clear goals when it comes to scalability in market and outreach and stuff like that. So I really, I'm hoping that I'll unlearn what I've learned in the last 10 years and go back to that, let's call it the, my original paradigm and maybe create a mishmash of it, some kind of a melting between the two worlds. So I really look forward to that. And then they'll need to invite you in another 10 years to see how that journey has progressed. Maybe I'll have other types of reflections by then. I hope you will. So thanks for sharing this. I'm looking forward to your chat. Definitely a topic that I'm interested in and I know a lot of people who are listening to the service design show as well. Yeah, so thanks for coming on and giving us a preview of what's coming ahead. Great. Thanks, Mark. Thanks for having me. Okay. Cheers. Of course, there's much more to be explored at this year's service design global conference. But I hope this chat with Vinay gave you an interesting preview. As a quick reminder, if you plan to register, make sure to use the code as the show during checkout to get 20% of your ticket price. And yes, that's both for the virtual tickets as the person wants. You can find the registration link in the show notes of this episode. My name is Mark Fontaine and I want to thank you for being part of the service design show community. Awesome that you tuned in to the service design show and I'll catch you very soon in the next episode.