 If the name Christian Bason sounds familiar to you, it could be because he's the CEO of the Danish Design Center or because he appeared on the service design show in episode 75. Well, Christian is back on the show and this time we're going to talk about the service design global conference, which is happening on October 13 and 14, 2020 to in Copenhagen. You can also join the conference virtually from anywhere in the world. This year's theme is courage to design for good. And in this conversation, you're going to get an exclusive preview from Christian of what's going to happen at this year's conference. If you are planning to attend but haven't registered yet, I've got good news for you. I've managed to negotiate a discount for the service design show audience. Yes, that's you. If you use the code SDSHOW during checkout, you get 20% off your ticket price. And that's both when you plan to attend in person in Copenhagen or virtually. You can find the registration link to the conference down below in the show notes. Now, without any further ado, let's jump into the conversation with Christian and hear what the conference has in store for us this year. Let the show begin. Welcome back to the show, Christian. Thank you so much, Mark. Do you remember which episode it was that featured you on the service design show? This is a quiz question. That's a very good question, because I'm aware that you've done so incredibly many episodes that has to be a really high number. But I don't remember. It was 75. So we're at over 150 now. Where are we at in the middle? Christian, we're going to talk this time about the service design global conference and about your presentation there, just giving a bit of a teaser, get people excited. But for the people who haven't seen episode 75 or googled you yet, could you give a brief introduction what you do these days first? Yeah, so currently I'm the CEO of the Danish Design Center and we are a non-profit foundation. We're co-funded by the government of Denmark and we're working really as an infrastructure for advancing the value of design, both in business and government at home and globally. You've been there for quite a while, right? Yeah, eight years here. Before that, I was director of MindLab, the Danish government's innovation team, also for eight years. And before that, again, I was a management consultant for nearly a decade. So it almost sounds like you're almost entering the next eight years. Curious where that will be, but... Then for another episode. Exactly, that's a topic for another episode. Christian, so you're one of the keynotes, not just one of the keynotes. You're the closing keynote at the conference. Let's talk a little bit about the theme that you are going to address without giving everything away. So what are you going to talk about? Well, we're going to talk about a very big idea. And the big idea is, of course, obvious to designers that as the world's problems and the challenges we face, both as leaders, as citizens, as customers, but also as humanity and as a planet, as those problems are expanding and changing, so must design. Design needs to keep up as a field, as a profession, with the character of the problems we're facing. Before we explore this a bit deeper, you wrote a book about this. Why is this such an important topic to you that you spent the grueling effort of sitting down and writing a book? Why does it... Why do you care? Well, I very much like writing books. And so, of course, it's been not just grueling as it is, but it's also been fun and interesting to write this as a co-author with my good friend Jens Martin Skipset. I also wrote it because I've been following and being part of the design field for about a decade and a half by now. And I've seen the field changing and evolving to a point where we are getting very, very good at some things. And what we're very, very good at is to apply design or design thinking to challenges and problems that are organizational in nature, service problems, of course, product problems, and we are very good at solving them. But where design needs to move now, as I see it, and through the work we're doing also at the Danish Design Center, is to a much more ambitious or systemic level where we're taking on the really long-term and complex challenges of our time. And that's where I've seen the need to write a new book that sort of takes us to that level, but also does it in a way that respects or that works with how technology is changing, how innovation is changing, what are the current examples we see where there's inspirational things happening. So it's a way of a big think book, almost a philosophical book, but it's also one that has dozens and dozens of case examples of what's going on in the world right now. So you mentioned to me that there are six sort of areas where you feel design needs to expand and move into the next phase. Can you sort of pick one that is maybe most there to your heart and give us an idea of what are we talking about here? Sure. The first theme in the book, which is also very close to my heart and something that we also work a lot with here, is that traditionally in design or in design thinking and human-centered design, we really don't have a very strong concept about time. Of course, we work with time as a timeline in the user journey, for example. We all know that. But when it comes to long-term thinking, long-term action, we have sort of an underdeveloped muscle around that in the design professions. I think. And that's a problem because the challenges we're facing as humanity, as a planet when it comes to the most sustainable ways of living are long-term challenges. They're not addressed either this year or next year, but they are generational challenges that they require a much longer-term view. And that means that as designers, our field has to look to other disciplines, look to science fiction, look to design fiction, look to foresight and scenario work, look into speculative design. I mean, we need to embrace other types of practices to look for the long-term. And we do see countries, we see companies talking about 100-year plans, 300-year strategies. We see a revitalization of foresight work for today's world. We see a rise of science fiction again. There was an article in Harvard Business Review a few years ago that said, why do managers need to read more science fiction? Because in a way, we need to stimulate our imagination and look to the future in ways where we also recognize that the future is uncertain. It's open. It can be different things. And all of that goes to bringing long-term thinking back into design. And focusing on this specific topic, I'm curious if you feel that is this an area that needs to be sort of pioneered and evangelized by the design community or is this something that I would say our clients, our stakeholders need to sort of ask. So is it more of a setting the agenda kind of thing or how do you see that? When I was a management consultant, I learned something interesting, which is that supply stimulates demand. So if you propose new terms in management thinking or in let's call it innovation thinking, if you do it well, you're actually able to create the demand for it. And of course, you can do that just to sell more consulting or sell more hours or whatever. But you could also do it because you think it's important and it's relevant. I think the design community needs to start proposing foresight, design scenarios, design fiction, more imaginative ways of working with the long-term futures as something that designers offer. Whether you're a designer internally in an organization or you are a advisor or a consultant or external agency. I think we need to add this to our vocabulary and to our ways of working. And just like designers proposing service design have been quite successful or humans in our design have been very successful in creating that need or that demand in business and in government. I think we need to stimulate that demand now because the world needs it. And I maybe and I'm hoping that this is one of those things that our clients do want and do need. They're just not able to articulate what it specifically is. And if we are able to present this in a clear, compelling, attractive way, then it might be a very natural fit and natural match. So it is. And because design, of course, fundamentally is futurist. It's all about building and proposing and creating and making something new. Of course, new can also be circular or reuse or it can be a combination, but still it's about the proposing something that does not exist already. So the design profession is future oriented. It's just interesting that only until recently are we beginning to see some really interesting mergers between the world of strategic planning and foresight and scenario work on the one side and then the sensibilities and the craftsmanship and the ability to give form to ideas in design. So what I see is really that we need to take the best from foresight and working with long-term futures and futurism, the best of design, which is the playfulness, the ability to work visually and creatively with artifacts and then also the storytelling and the narratives that we can be. We're good at in design, but can also draw in from science fiction, from literature. That combination is incredibly powerful. And the reason it's powerful is that traditionally, traditional foresight work is very analytical, it's very brain-y and it somehow never really or rarely creates action. But to designers, the way we create action or designers create action is through empathy, it's identification, it's remaking, it's making proposals that are concrete and visual. And if you bring that power together with foresight, suddenly you have something that can really mobilize people, motivate them, create empathy and so on. So there's something there in that intersection that's really, really powerful. That's super interesting. And in the book and in the conference, you're basically going to sort of address these six areas, for instance, time, and then say, we might need to start rethinking this and also give some examples or maybe direction where to start thinking. It's probably not a definitive list, but well, start looking into science fiction. That might be an interesting area to explore for design. And I can imagine you also do that for the other five. So we do that with all of them. And one other example that I think is really, really important and also a bit of a challenge to the design field is that we've gotten very, very good at human-centered design. And you could say that human-centeredness, understanding what makes a product or service attractive and drives demand, drives behavior, drives consumption, is what's gotten the planet into a very, very big mess. So in a way, it's a success of design. And I'm not the first one to say this. I'm aware of that. But it's successive designers that have really driven the consumption and the mass production we have in the world today, and which is not sustainable. So we need to make a shift. And again, we are not the only voices against Martin and me, but we make the argument in the book that we have to shift from human-centered to life-centered design and be aware of a much wider set of living things when we design. Even into service design, what about nature? What about other living species? What about the footprint in terms of biodiversity and environment and climate change as we go about doing our thing? And so that's just a second point from the book that I think is a challenge to the design community, but also an opportunity to shift towards a more holistic perspective on who are we designing for, and it has to be more than humans. Yeah. I would love to go into that, but maybe we need to schedule a service design show interview. We'll do that. Very briefly, what are the other four? So again, as a quick teaser. Right. So again, we have number one was time. Then we have life, as I mentioned. Then we have a third expansion, we call it, which is called proximity. And just very briefly, proximity is about closeness and empathy and asking questions about how do we generate a feeling of closeness to the problem and going, again, beyond the customer or the user to saying what are the other actors, including non-human ones, we need to feel close to feeling close to melting ice on the ice caps or feeling close to humans on the other side of our planets or feeling close to other species. Then we have something we call value and value is about what impact are we designing for? Are we designing only for economic or commercial impacts or for higher productivity or for environmental and social outcomes? And there's a huge shift happening in business right now that designers, I think, need to accelerate, which is putting environmental and social impacts as high or even higher than economic impact of our design. Then we have a fifth one called dimensions, which is about understanding and thinking about the scale at which we design, both small and large scale. How far do we go to design? Right now, there's a lot of experimentation with designing for other planets, moon, from Mars, but dimensions is also about the digital versus the physical dimension. How do we blend these dimensions in different ways and what's the future of AI and virtual reality when it comes to design? And then the last one, the sixth expansion we call sectors. And sectors doesn't sound so sexy, maybe, but it's really about how the public and private sectors are blending in different ways. And as we go about designing more systemic change, we need to think very creatively and differently about the roles we have in government and in the private sector because the idea, traditionally, the government is bureaucratic and insular and stable and conformist. And the private sector is agile and fast and innovative. It's increasingly coming under attack or being changed so that we see government can be quite innovative and forward-looking and businesses begin to actually take on public values like, for example, social and environmental impact. So sectors are blending and changing in different ways. We need to understand that as designers. So those are the six expansions in the book. Now, I'm looking forward to hearing the examples and getting some guidance and directions. There will be hundreds, maybe thousands of people listening to your story at the Services Hand Global Conference. If you could give them one question to think about related to your story, what would the question be? Well, the big question again in the book really is, as this problem is morphing and changing, how must our design practice change? How must design change? That's the big, huge question for the discipline, I think. On a more practical level, designers are good at stimulating their own imagination and creativity, but we still need to think more radically, I think, about how do we actually push our thinking in new directions. And that's the question we must ask. Cool. How do we think about design? I like that. That's a good question. Sort of wrapping up two final questions. This conference is in your hometown, Copenhagen. What are you most looking forward to? That was the thing I was going to ask. Well, it's really wonderful to have this Global Service Design Conference in Copenhagen right on our backyard. And we're also having an opening reception here at our space. Actually, in the space you see here, you can see all of it, but that's where we're going to have the opening reception at the DDC. I actually just look forward to reconnecting in person with the global community. It's been a long two years with the pandemic. It's been too many two-dimensional transactional Zoom calls, even though I'm happy to see you here, Marc. Just meeting the community and interacting with both old friends and the new ones I haven't met yet. I really look forward to that in person. And if somebody wants to connect with you and are physically in Copenhagen and maybe are just listening to the audio version of this video, how will they recognize you? They'll probably see someone pretty fast talking and gesticulating quite a lot and being engaged in a lot of conversation and maybe also running from one thing to the next. So if they see something that looks like that, that's probably me. All right. Sounds like an interesting description to be on the lookout for. Thanks so much, Christian, for getting on the show with me again and giving us a preview of what's coming up. Super interesting topic. I think a lot of people will walk away divergent thinking and coming up with new ideas. So yeah, have fun. Thanks so much, Marc. Thanks and pleasure to be on your show today. I hope that this conversation with Christian gave you a preview of what's coming up at this year's Serves Design Global Conference. Of course, there's much more and I hope you're curious to actually attend the conference. If you plan to register but haven't done so yet, remember to use the code sdshow to get 20% of your ticket price. And that's regardless if you are joining in person in Copenhagen or virtually from anywhere in the world. The link to get your tickets is down below in the show notes. My name is Marc Fontijn and I want to thank you for being part of this community. Awesome that you tuned in to the Serves Design Show and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.