 There's just so much going on in our field right now, it's sometimes hard to keep up. But what are the real important trends that are shaping service design? What are the things that you should keep an eye on? Well that's exactly what I'm going to talk about in this Trend Report. So if you're interested to learn what these trends are and what they potentially could mean for you, keep watching. Hello fellow service designer, my name is Marc von Thijn and this is the fourth edition of the service design show Trend Report. You know, I just love doing these Trend Reports as they give me an excuse to take a step back, listen to what has been said by the guests on the show and look for those interesting patterns. Don't worry if you haven't seen all the previous episodes. This Trend Report will bring you up to speed. And one of the reasons why I started the show in the first place was because I believe that if we just listen carefully to some of the smartest people out there we'll be able to predict the direction our field is heading in. We'll be able to learn from the future so that we can make better decisions today. The three trends that we'll be taking a look at are the shift from process to outcome, escaping the service design bubble and undesigning services. Now let's go over these trends in more detail one by one. The first trend is called the shift from process to outcome. And this must have been the most prominent topic in the last 10 episodes. Over the years there has been a lot of focus within service design on explaining what we do and how we do it. That on the one hand service designers are really key for our features but there are two focus on explaining what they do, how they do it and the added value they can add. What we're seeing now is that the conversation is shifting. It's shifting towards putting more focus on the outcomes of our work. As service design is quickly growing up and being widely adopted more and more people are questioning what happens after they've invested in creating their first customer journey map or service concept. We know that service design doesn't stop there. Do you think the end of the delivering the outcomes of your project is the end? Do you think being there while it's being developed or implemented is there rolling out being there on a daily basis? I mean, that element I think it needs to be further discussed. So we need to reinforce our focus on the value we're delivering for clients and for their customers. It's our job to address the outcomes our clients want to achieve and take a shared responsibility in actually achieving them. If we don't, we run the risk that service design will eventually fade away again because it promised the world but wasn't able to deliver on it. So think about the recent conversations you had with clients. Where they focused on what you're going to do or rather what the outcomes of your work should be. I think you can really tell when you look at service design conferences how many people are actually showing real results and statistics of this change from this to this versus the number of people who show the process and some diagrams. I don't think that's good enough. The second trend is what I would call a service design bubble that we might have created for ourselves. As service designers we go to great lengths to empathize with end users in order to understand their needs and desires. While this is and will remain a cornerstone of service design we're seeing that we can't stop there if we want to create impact. We have to question if we understand the needs and desires of the people we're working for and with, well enough, our colleagues and our clients. I mean we think we need to build more engagement, etc. But we don't spend much time or efforts or we don't plan to that much more proactively. And I think it is simply the act of designing for the project lifecycle and the actual experience of your client as he goes throughout the process. This trend is driven by the fact that service design is being internalized by organizations and it needs to fit in with the other moving parts that are in place. What does this mean? Well, it could mean that we have to be even more open to learn from and collaborate with other disciplines. And we need to better understand our place in the bigger value chain and be able to point out the value we add. How well you're able to empathize with other stakeholders will increasingly determine how successful you can be as a service designer. We are, as designers and service designers, really keen on starting from observations. We're formulating the ecosystem of stakeholders in order to deliver much more added value as service designers at the end. But sometimes what we forget is that the first person we have to apply these kinds of methodologies are our first clients. The final trend that I spotted wasn't as prominent as the other two, but it might turn out to be a really interesting one. And to be honest, it's not really a new trend. It's been going on for quite some time. It's the strive towards simplicity and delivering more value by designing less. Progressive reduction, in my mind, is a kind of undesign. So rather than continuing to add more and more and more things at the rate that we're going, we need to consider how we take them away. The reason why I decided to include this trend is because up till now, it hasn't been getting a lot of attention in this service design practice. And that needs to change. As a skilled service designer, you should be able to cope with and eliminate complexity. But are we doing that enough? Are we taking enough time to think about and reflect if the things that we've designed in the past are still adding value today? Because if they aren't, we should remove them instead of piling solutions on top of each other. We have a moral obligation to be really mindful about how our designs consume scarce resources. And not just in terms of raw materials, but in the perspective of service design, the time our services demand from customers. So the big question is, can we undesign services? A good first step is to ask yourself how your service can help people to achieve their goal in less time and with less effort. If people would refuse to buy it because of certain things, that would be helpful. So I think if you speak of services and communication, you also have to look at what are people doing with it. All right, so these were the three trends. Everything that I've said is based on what I've spotted in the last 10 episodes of the show. But I'm sure you also spotted interesting trends happening around you. I would love to hear them. So leave a comment down below and let me know what you feel is shaping service design today. If you're a regular listener or viewer of the show, you might have spotted that I've been experimenting with some new things on the show. I've organized some webinars, which got quite a lot of attention to my very own surprise. And we started broadcasting live episodes on Facebook, which is really cool. But the biggest update to the show is definitely the university. The goal of the university is to really help you take your service design skills to the next level. We do that by offering in-depth courses by leading service design experts that dig deeper into the topics we talk about on the show. The first course that is out there right now is called selling service design with confidence. And it's really tied to the first trend we talked about. During this course, you'll learn how to get clients to buy in on the idea of service design by explaining what value it creates in a way that everybody understands. Service design occupies that territory of unpredictable complexity. When you try to design services into settings, but you cannot predict how human beings are going to behave, the best you can do is to try and understand what their needs and aspirations are. But, you know, and that is as variable as the number of human beings on the planet. So service design occupies this incredibly messy, difficult territory, and that's what makes it really, really fascinating. If you'd like to know more about the course, head over to learn.servicesignshow.com where you'll find all the information you need. And the links are also down below in the description. If you enjoyed this trend report, I would really appreciate it if you click that like button. And if this is your first time here, I would love to have you to subscribe to the channel so we can keep bringing you more interesting content like this in the future. That was it for me. Thanks for tuning in and I'll see you next time.