 Hi, this is Jamie Ferguson 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 Jamie Ferguson. Jamie is the design and foresight strategist at Idea Couture and she told me she loves rooftop gardens and risotto in no particular order. So let's jump right in and ask Jamie to give us a preview of her talk. Welcome to the show, Jamie. Thank you. Glad to be here. Can you enlighten us? What is the theme that you'll be talking about? Sure, sure. Sure, our workshop is called Living Prototypes and essentially it's really to engage exploratory thinking, visioning and prototyping for service and experience design up front in the design process and also for use later on in order to work back from. So the workshop is really a method that borrows thinking strategies from art and design for their multi-sensory and experiential qualities. So this is about prototyping, it's about narratives, any necessary objects that can bring us closer to engaging with complex, maybe conflicting ideas, all of the many possible scenarios that can exist and overlap as we begin to implement those into the process, into the design and the experience. We're so often focused on the current state when we're exploring what the design might be and while we certainly require those constraints, complimenting this with a very widely scoped insights and generative work up front that can actually be refined later can be very fruitful. So we think this generates a very rich and empathetic and more intuitive visions of what the future state will look like that we can work back from. So doing this from a very multi-perspective and collaborative process can really bring us the rich material that we're going to go through in the workshop. Right, okay, so that's an interesting pitch but if I summarize this, this is basically learning people how to experience something that isn't there by prototyping. Exactly, what are the strategies that we can use to engage with that kind of material for things that don't exist yet? Yeah, and especially services because we know a lot about product prototyping, product experiences and I guess services are quite different. Exactly, so we want to be able to pull from all of those things, like I said, it could be narratives, it could be headlines from the future, it could be acting out a scene or something. There's a lot of things that we can do but doing this together is important. What do you hope people will know or have learned after doing your workshop? I want to encourage people, my clients, my peers, our colleagues with a different perspective that just really allows them to test out ideas that might initially seem counter-intuitive to business as usual. I know futures has been sort of the buzzword for a while now but our institution's status quo hasn't really caught up with ways in which we can grapple with that, that we can really tangibly kind of wrangle that and hash that out and look at all the possibilities. Changes is happening so quickly, so giving people ways to communicate that together from different perspectives, especially again around situations that are unknown to us. I'm sure you do have some personal motivation or drive to address specifically this topic. Yeah well this topic and especially at this conference, I think it's important, incredibly important right now for people to think about the potential in the unusual. Things that are astonishing that seem very different initially. They can make us feel uncomfortable and that's actually probably a prerequisite for such things. It should be challenging. I think we can learn so much with what's out there already. There are so many great ideas. It's about looking at them collectively. It's about repurposing them, reusing them, comparing them, transposing them, looking at them in different ways. I think this can be incredibly fruitful. Is it still uncomfortable for you sometimes? Absolutely. I mean that's what I love about my work that every day it's a different subject. We get to talk with great experts, but I get to be an expert in being a generalist I guess. So I'm sure you're going to share a lot of knowledge and insight that you've gained in the past years on prototyping experiences, but I'm also sure you must have a big question around this topic. Is there one? Yeah. Again, I guess it has to do with complexity. What's going to be so great about being at the conference is of course hearing this, how other people, my colleagues and peers, from their perspective in their different circumstances, how they've been able to or in what ways they've used similar tactics or very different ones to do similar or dissimilar things. I think my main motivation is really figuring out ways that we can really connect these disparate, seemingly disparate and siloed ways of thinking to do something really great. I think all the materials there, it's really, it's just latent, it's sort of waiting to be activated in the right way, so for me it will be as much of a learning experience what I can gain from my colleagues. And is there a certain, like I said, question you have, you hope to find answers to, clues to, how to connect? Yeah, how to connect. Giving people that ability or asking ourselves how we can kind of stretch that creative muscle in terms of generating and prototyping experiences in advance of like fully constructing them. So what are the strategies from other disciplines that we can leverage to do so? All right. Final question, Jamie, you're going to Amsterdam, the most wonderful city in the world. What is the thing you're looking forward to the most? Well, I am certainly looking forward to being in your beautiful city. Like I said, no shortage of great ideas, I'm sure are going to come out of this conference. Being able to actually speak with colleagues in person, face to face and have those conversations. Good stuff always comes from these kinds of trips, so I'm looking forward to it. And plus the week's vacation that will follow. Don't put that in the video. We don't cut anything out, but it's okay. Jamie, thanks for making the time. I'm really looking forward to meeting you in Amsterdam and looking forward to a great workshop. Yes, I'm looking forward as well. Thanks for today. Thanks. If you enjoyed this interview with Jamie, I'd like to see more interviews. Be sure to check out some of the past episodes and subscribe to the channel. If you want to learn more about the conference, go to www.service-design-conference.com. For now, thanks for watching and hopefully see you in Amsterdam.