 I'm Jesse Grimes, and this is the Service Design Show. In this special episode of the Service Design Show, we're going to give you a taste of what to expect at the upcoming Service Design Conference that is taking place on October 27th and 28th of 2016 in Amsterdam. My guest in this episode is Jesse Grimes. Jesse is part of the conference organizing team, and he's been part of the Service Design Network for nine years. He's attended all the other conferences, minus one. And even though not being fully Dutch, he's Dutch enough that he learned to ride a bike and watch app at the same time. So, let's jump right in and ask Jesse to give us a preview of what to expect at the upcoming conference. Welcome to the show, Jesse. Thanks, Mark. Jesse, as being part of the core organizing team, please enlighten us. The theme, business as usual. What's that all about? Business as unusual. I think you fell for the trap. So what we try to do is recognize in the theme this year that service design is becoming more and more a role within business. The business as unusual part shows that businesses are taking on service design, often that it's becoming an in-house function, but service design remains something that's really a design practice. It is still unique, and that's the unusual aspect. So the conference as well as the SDN itself wants to always build the market for service design to make people who buy service design really aware of who we are as a discipline. So that's why we chose the name business as unusual. What other themes passed the list, which ones didn't make it? Do you remember one? No, that's actually, I gotta say, I can't remember looking back months when we were actually thinking what these themes were. We knew what we wanted to get across, and that was what I just talked about. I can't remember if we had any catchy slogans, but I'm happy with what we came up with. Business as unusual. That sounds intriguing, I'd say, and I would be really curious as a potential participant. What does a conference like this have to offer for me? What do you offer? Well, I think the short answer is 26 hours. I spent a little time before this to count through what was in our program. And it's quite simply a lot. There's not only presentations and workshops. There's the members' day and the day before the conference, the 26th of October for members of the SDN. The conference itself is two days, so presentations, workshops. We offer master classes on the pre-conference day. The service design award is also something that will be given out. It's the second time that we're doing this that the SDN gives the award out. That's occurring on the second day, I believe. And there's a networking breakfast. So I think it's simply quite a lot of content in whether you're someone who's interested in service design who's new to the field. You'll certainly find some interesting things. And if you're a seasoned service designer, there will be people that you recognize or that you'd like to see speak. And there will be some discussion where we are as a community maybe 10 years on since it's been King first to light in the SDN. Right, right. So that's a lot of content and a lot of diverse content. But I'm really curious is what can I learn from this conference? What is this conference for me? I hope it's for everyone. That's something that we really try to carefully look at when we consider it and put the program together. We recognize the people who put the program together are more experienced service designers. Some of us have been doing it for quite a long time. And we didn't want to create a program that was only for experts, of course, because as the community grows, as more and more people discover service design, there's a strong need to also have, let's say, introductory content for people who are new to the field. What is service design? What can it mean if you're a business who wants to buy a service design, if you're a designer who wants to transition into or start doing service design, if you're a student, what does service design mean and how can you get some hands-on experience doing it? So I think as a participant or as someone coming to the conference, no matter what your experience is with the field, I think there's a lot to offer. So a really diverse target group, right? I think so. I mean, we're hoping to have around 600, 650 people. So that's very big. And there is naturally a challenge to giving everyone of those people a good experience. But I think the amount of content we have, we'll let us do that. So, Jesse, I've told any introduction that you've been part of the SDN for nine years. You are most likely one of the few persons that have experienced the whole service design conference uprising thing. And now that there are more service design conferences coming up, I'm really curious, what is your observation? What has changed over time over these last nine years? Well, that's a nice question. I think if I look back, our first conference with the SDN was back in Amsterdam, and that was 2008. So in one sense, this conference is a homecoming for the SDN. We're coming back to where that first conference was. The first conference was really small. There was a very small members day. I think there was maybe 20 people or so, 30 people at members day. And the conference itself fit into a pretty small venue in the center of Amsterdam. We're actually coming back to that venue this year only for members day. So 200 people for members day will be filling the venue that we had for members day nine years ago. Wonderful conference, yeah. And over the years, the conference has obviously grown in size with more and more people generally every year. We've always moved around between North America and Europe, also trying to reflect where the interest in service design was, but also making it easy for people to attend. And I think thematically, if I think of what's happened, the feel of the conference every year, the early years were really about, who are we as service designers? What is service design? Why are we not UX design, for example? In the last years, that hasn't been an issue. I don't think there's any naval gazing, any question of whether the discipline deserves to exist, for example. I think it's much more about, OK, we see with proven the importance of service design is well-recognized. How do we answer these new challenges that we have as the discipline has some more weight on our shoulders, let's say. So it's more of maturing the field instead of establishing it? I think so. Indeed, yeah, it's not. There's no longer, and I promise it still won't be the case this coming conference, nobody's going to stand on the stage and say, this is what service design is, or should we be calling it service design? If there will be any discussions that will be much more on the kind of theoretical and critique side, it's no longer trying to tell people what this discipline is. If anything, what I'd like and what I'd hope to hear are people who question our relationship to business, for example, our relationship with consultancies, whether we can function in-house, for example. Those I find are the interesting questions. So, Jesse, I'm sure you're also aware that this year, I don't know, three or four other service design conferences have emerged. What is your take on that? Yeah, I think I only see that as something positive. I mean, when we started nine years ago, we were really the only service design conference out there. And we have happened every year since then. There have in the last years, of course, been other conferences coming up, either national conferences under the umbrella of the service design network. So ones that have been hosted by different chapters of the SDN around the world, but also completely independent conferences. There is the same month as our conference in Amsterdam. There's a conference in Barcelona aimed more at the buyers of service design, so more at the business side. There's conferences in Hong Kong taking place around our time. There's the service experience conference in California, also one in Chicago. I see that as all positive, actually. I don't think our event and the SDN, there's no wish to be a monopoly and being the only game out there. The fact that there are these other events shows simply that the field that we're in is getting more recognition, that there's more people out there, there's more people that see a need to share things and get people together. And I find that only really a benefit for our community. I guess it's a win for the service design network. I think so. I think so. And certainly, if you look at the Hong Kong conference, that's taking place just around the time we're speaking. If you're in that part of the world, it's a much bigger effort to come either to Europe for this conference or to travel to the US had we been in the US. So being able to go to a local conference without spending so much money and even perhaps language issues, for example, mean that the growth of service design can be spread locally and not require everyone to go to one or two conferences. Service design is democratizing. Yeah, I think that's right. Actually, I spoke at a conference earlier this year in China. And what was interesting to see was China is now, I think, really a frontier for service design. There's a lot of interest in it. And a lot of the audience who was in Shenzhen, where I was, could not have so easily brought themselves to Amsterdam compared to if you're living in Belgium or in London or in California. And that seeing that kind of grassroots appearance of other events is really good. Jesse, final question to wrap this up. I know that organizing conferences is a major task. And I'm really curious for you, after having worked on this months in advance, what is the thing that you are looking forward to the most? Yeah, that's also a good question. I think if we look back nine months ago, and I remember Mark, you were in these discussions too, we were considering whether we would hold a Dutch conference, a local conference, and we actually made this jump and took on this challenge of putting on a global conference. I think what I'm looking forward to most is seeing all the fruit of our efforts in the past eight or nine months come to fruition, that what we've been thinking about in terms of theme and in terms of choosing great speakers in terms of putting together a program. I think that's, yeah, I'm really proud and interested to see that all come together. And I think I'm happy that people get a chance to come to Amsterdam. It's not my hometown originally, but it's a place where I really like to live at the moment. And I think aside from the conference, it'll offer a lot to people. Awesome. Jesse, thanks for making the time. Really interested and really excited to be part of the conference. So again, thanks. Okay, yeah, you're welcome. I'll see you at the end of the month. If you enjoyed this episode with Jesse and like to see more interviews about the conference, be sure to check out some of the other episodes and subscribe to the channel. If you want to learn more about the conference, go to www.servicesdesign-conference.com. For now, thanks for watching and hopefully see you on Amsterdam.