 Hi guys, my name is Mark Vultijn and welcome to a very special episode of The Service Design Show. This episode is fully dedicated to the upcoming Design Thinking Conference that will take place on October 26th and 27th in Amsterdam. According to the website, the Design Thinking Conference is not a traditional conference, but is highly inspired by theater. They aim to shake you up and enrich you with new insights, not just leaving you uncomfortable and confirmed in your own beliefs. No preaching to the converted, but experiencing, experimenting, having fun and being surprised. I've invited a former guest and organizer of the conference, Arne van Oostrom, to tell us what we can expect at this upcoming conference. During this episode, Arne will announce the competition in which you can win a free ticket to the conference. So make sure you keep watching till the end. Welcome to the show, Arne. Yeah, nice to be back. You're back. You were one of the first episodes, so it's over a year ago that we actually spoke on the show. And you're on a new adventure and this adventure is called a conference. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah, absolutely. So exciting. So, you know, this October we're running the Design Thinking Conference, which is exciting. It's the first Design Thinking Conference in Amsterdam. And, you know, it's born out of a probably quite a personal frustration of being at conferences and thinking, you know, we could do so much better. It could be so much more experimental and exciting. And why are we still doing it this way? So that was sort of the first thought that came to mind. Like, let's why not do this? And the Design Thinking Conference, so being at conferences, talking about innovation and design thinking and surface design and what have you, but being in a very traditional, you know, organized conference, it didn't match in my head. So I thought if you do a Design Thinking Conference, you have to kind of, you know, turn things upside down a little bit. So that's our new exciting challenge. New exciting adventure. And I'm really curious, what's the theme of this Design Thinking Conference? Is there a tagline or subtitle? Yeah, so the tagline would be through different eyes, sort of hinting a little bit at empathy. You know, the word that we are using so much, how often design thinking and surface design, empathy, looking through the eyes of your end users or your stakeholders, you know, walking in their shoes, et cetera, et cetera. So we thought, you know, that's such a, you know, that's such an important word that we use all the time, whether we really understand what it means or not. So that's the theme of this year. And why did you pick that? Why did you choose empathy? Yeah, so it has two reasons. One, like I was saying, you know, in our profession, empathy is being used all the time. But I'm kind of thinking that it might not be as easy as we kind of think it is. So it's not just creating a persona and doing some user-inside research and then, you know, having this poster on your wall with your journey map. And then you have empathy. You can. So the idea of, can you actually really, you know, look through the eyes of someone else? Can you actually do this? Because I think that it might be more difficult. And I talked to some people who have, you know, some experience with this. I think it is actually very difficult to do so because you're full of biases, et cetera, et cetera. That's sort of one. So, you know, being this core thing that we're in our profession. So I want to go more in depth with this. And the other thing is that empathy, you know, in the world that we live in at the moment, you know, with this, I think all of us, we kind of, we feel that there's such a big divide and, you know, you're either for something or against something and there's just no middle ground anymore. And I think that listening to each other. So, you know, empathy starting to understand each other a little better. I think also in the world we live in today, I think that's an important theme. So I think, so for me personally, both of these kind of arguments were really important to choose the theme. Interesting. Anna, could you tell us a bit about the conference setup because you're aiming to do it differently? What can we expect from the conference? So, you know, it's a design thinking conference. So in my mind, it means that it has to be something very different than a conference. So my design challenge was, you know, being at a conference earlier, I thought, you know, really a conference is actually, it's just bad theater because it's theater. You know, as people are staged, you know, talking about something and actually it's really bad theater. What if a conference would be really good theater? So that was sort of the challenge. And, you know, the logic follows that then we have to use theater and everything. So we started working with a theater maker, for instance, as inspiration and thinking about how can we actually do this, how can we make that into one storyline instead of having all these different speakers, so to say, you know, having their own little stories but not being connected to each other. You're in a new Shakespeare. You're writing a play instead of doing a conference. So the idea would be that we're writing a play together. So both participants and the speakers which we call our main actors are all part of the play. So it's not theater in the sense that you will sit down and just consume. No, because also the logic was, no, we all should be part of it. So it's also very individual experience. So you're going to be part of this play. It's like immersive theater. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's amazing. You know, it's also very hip and happening at the moment, immersive theater. But that's sort of where we draw our experience from. So you can expect to be part of something and not just sitting there and consuming because the idea would be that you will exit the conference different than you entered. It will be an immersive experience. So if people respond to the word conference and they have the feeling that they can sit in a chair and lean back and watch presentations, they shouldn't buy a ticket, right? No, no, if you don't want to be, if you want to be really safe and in the back of a conference and, you know, nobody talking to you and, you know, no, don't come. Please don't come because this is going to be very scary and we're going to expect things from you as well. So it's going to be quite different in that sense. But I think that what's so important is that it's also the other thing that, you know, I think the one thing we will also offer besides being a very different kind of experience is that it's aimed at and, you know, people who are signing up already are professionals, are people who have experienced. So it's not for people who want to understand, you know, what is service and what is design thinking, you know, it's not about that. It's not about a case studies. We're not going to show any case studies. It's about people coming together, you know, sharing experience because they are experienced and people are beyond this and really want to go in depth of what are we actually doing and how do we actually apply all this. So could you just very briefly tell us a bit about what can people learn at this conference? What do you hope that they will take away? Yeah, so learning will be, so I think mostly it's about sharing between really experienced people, right? So I mean, basically that's what you do, right? So there's someone with lots of experience and we enable them to share this with you. So we will practice it. So it's not about listening only, it's about doing. So our main actors, so our speakers if you will, we also challenge them. So it's not only you as a participant, there's going to be a challenge. The speakers are going to be challenged because they are not allowed to do like PowerPoint presentations. They can tell stories, but they need to translate that into an experiment. How to make you feel what it is that they are telling you. And the speakers are extremely experienced people who have been, you know, especially in the context of empathy, have been trying things and working with their ideas and themes. For many, many years we have great authors, we have people who like Mita Patel, who used to be the Vice President, Global Vice President of Design Thinking at SAP. She's been one of the most experienced people in the world of design thinking that I know of. We have quite a famous philosopher who is a best-selling author as well who can share stuff. So from different angles, we have people who can really make your brain hurt. Because that's basically our aim, that we're going to make your brain hurt a lot. And maybe your arms and legs too, if I understand correctly. Yeah, so I think as a challenge to us ourselves and a challenge to the audience and our speakers, is that seriously, and for me it already happened because I'm kind of talking to all these speakers already. They are people who are, they're not just thinkers, they're doers. John Dielenberg, he loves experiments. And one of the things that was so interesting, because we were talking to our main actors and we said, we want to do a little bit more experimental stuff and we thought we were going to scare them off. But actually all of them said, oh yeah, we can do something. Well, I'm going to come up with something really weird to do. Before you know it, it's out of control, Anna. It's out of control. Yeah, I hope so, I hope so. That might be a good theme for next year. Anna, what is the thing that you're looking forward to the most yourself? So, like I said, it's a learning experience for all of us, for the people signing up, for the speakers, for the people who are organizing this. So, challenging ourselves, you know, practice what we preach basically. So, do the experiments, you know, really try it. So, the one thing I look forward to the most obviously is when everything comes together and everybody's there the first, sort of the first day. I think the excitement for us is to see it all kind of come. Now we're looking forward to, sort of, that moment where it all clicks. And so, you know, it's in October, right? So, we have a long way to go. But already we're seeing these, you know, we're bringing the speakers together. So, it's also not, you know, the speakers already, you know, they get together. We let them talk to each other, they get to know each other. And we have some amazing people. And I'm so excited to see, you know, to see them together. To have this group of people who didn't know each other and make these connections and then see new things happen. I don't know, I love that. So, that's one thing I am really looking forward to seeing more of that. I think a lot of people watching this video are already excited. So, help them out. How do we sign up? So, obviously, there's a website. It's designthinkingconference.com. It will also be in the description, yeah. So, if you go to the website, you can sign up. It's easy as that. And we also have, you have two tickets to give away. We're going to do a small competition, right? Yes, we're going to do a small competition. So, I prepared this question for the audience. Bring it on. There is a speaker at the conference called Susan Schaller. And she wrote an amazing book called A Man Without Words. And I recommend to all of you to read that. The Man Without Words. What is his real name? So, the main character in the book. What is his real name? So, we'll randomly pick two people from, you know, the right answers. People giving the right answer. We randomly pick two of them. And they'll get a free ticket and an invitation to the dinner, the pre-conference dinner. It's going to be quite exciting dinner with all the speakers. So, you're going to be invited to that and a free ticket. So, two tickets to the conference. And look up the question on just ask and leave your answer in the comments. So, leave the answer in the comments of this video. And in two or three weeks after this video, we'll pick two winners randomly. And maybe we'll announce them through another video or through our social media. Right? Yes, absolutely. Anna, thanks. I'm almost as excited as you for the conference. I'm looking forward to it. October 26th and 27th in Amsterdam, right? Absolutely. Make sure you'll be there. So, thanks, Anna. Thank you. If you want to learn more about this conference, check out the links that are in the description of this episode. And if you like this episode and want to see more interviews with services on pioneers, check out some of the best episodes and make sure you subscribe to the channel. I'll see you in a new episode and thanks for watching.