 Hi guys, my name is Marc Fontein and welcome to a very special episode of the service design show. This episode is fully dedicated to the upcoming service design Hong Kong conference that will take place on October 19th and 20th in Hong Kong. I've invited the conference organizing team to tell us a little bit more about what we can expect at this year's conference. And at the end of the video, the team will announce a giveaway for a free ticket to the conference. So make sure you keep watching till the very end. Welcome to the show team. So super excited to have you on and to tell us a little bit more about what we can expect at this year's conference. And my first question is the theme. Is there a theme this year? What is it and why did you choose it? Yes, there's a theme. Our theme is change. So we were looking at technological change and we were we were originally thinking about working on technology. But as we looked at all of the problems and the things that people are encountering in their practice, we realized that a lot of it is about managing change inside of organizations. Services design creates a lot of change and it comes in the context of change. And so the theme of the conference is now change. And we have three different themes or three different tracks inside of that. Stirring change, how to create change in organizations that aren't quite ready for it or haven't done it yet. Scaling change. So moving from small actions to big actions and sustaining change. How do you maintain that over a long period of time? Cool change. Everything is changing and service design is all about change. I fully agree with that. What can we as visitors expect in terms of the conference experience? Okay, I'll answer that. So we have designed a really interesting and cool experience for our participants. We definitely took a lot of time viewing the feedback from last year and trying to see what worked and what didn't work, build on that experience. And what was really successful about last year was the fact that we split the conference into two days, one of which is more of a learning day. So this day everyone comes and networks first gets to know the people around them and gets to witness these great speeches and keynotes from a diverse panel of speakers. But the second day more importantly is all about application. We didn't want to give people this knowledge and ask them to walk away, but we wanted to give them a test, immediate test right after these speeches to apply their knowledge. And what often could be quite pressurizing situations. We've amplified the kind of pressure perhaps this year with some of the workshops, with some fun pressure because we have real clients coming and giving real problems for them to solve, which is a really, really exciting opportunity for these participants to actually get to meet the CEO of the hotel, which is part of the Hotel Jam. For another workshop we have a company that is presenting an actual problem and they've only got three hours to solve it. So we found that under these kind of situations people bring out the best not only within themselves, but also within each other. And so it's good experience to start kind of delving right into the knowledge. What is also interesting is we've tried to design some really interactive exercises, which we call conference challenges. They're not meant to be intimidating either, but we also really wanted to design something that would get people to meet as many people as they could. We know that this could be quite a challenging process, you know, being confronted with a lot of people. But we realized, okay, maybe there's certain steps that we can do to prompt people to meet each other. So for example, we want to reveal exactly what these exercises are. But the first exercise that people will do will get them acquainted with the people that are sitting next to them. And then the second exercise would be all about getting to know the people on the side of their room. So they get a chance to really meet, you know, people that might be sitting far away from them. And of course, naturally, you guessed it, the last one is getting to meet everyone in the room. And each of these challenges have a little fun takeaway as well that relates back to the conference. So that's a general gist of what participants can expect. Really cool to actually have that knowledge scene applied in the next day, because I think that's one of the biggest challenges with conference, like, you get inspired and then you go back to work and think, well, yeah. And now what? So that's really interesting. We talked about the theme. We talked about the experience. Could one of you elaborate a bit about what can people actually learn about the theme change? What kind of learning takeaways might we get from this conference? Yeah. One of the most important things that we learned from last year was that people learn when their heart is really connected to the experience. So just building on the experience that Clarence has just told us about. We've really tried to get an emotional center of gravity woven into a lot of the content here. So for example, that's that's to do with things like asking the speakers to rely less on PowerPoint presentations and more on telling us the story that they have to tell with their different topics. And then that extends through to day two, which is more the practical. So if you think about this as the sort of thinking and then the doing on day two, it really means that we get into a whole lot of different places in Hong Kong that are real businesses, really operating as businesses. We get to really see what customers are doing. We get to see how people are really working. And that really brings another another layer like I was saying, this emotional experience. And people get really excited about that. We know that from the feedback from last year that that was a highlight for them, particularly one we had last year with the social innovation stream, we visited a place where people with learning disabilities were actually serving staff, serving customers in this social enterprise. One of the problems they had was that whenever a customer comes in, they don't know that these people, their servers are experiencing some problems. So they as a result did not have much traffic or whatnot. But we had the whole workshop working through these problems and they were really energized by it all and just buzzing like the buzz levels just went right up. And so we really taken that learning from last year and applied it again this year and possibly we want to amplify that kind of learning experience. You're lucky because there are three of you in the room and you all get to share the answer to this question. And this question is, what is just that thing you're looking forward to the most yourself? So well we just talked about this yesterday so it's fresh in my mind but I'm really excited for the hotel jam that we're doing. I think it'll be a really interesting challenge that we're working on. This is a luxury hotel that wants to create a backpacker type hotel and they want us to play around with different ideas of how they can give a luxury backpacker experience. So I think that will feel very challenging but quite interesting to mess around with for the day. I'm personally really excited to see the diversity present at the conference and get a chance to really kind of prompt them to engage with one another. I think seeing the conversations that will happen between for example someone completely new to service design to a CEO who's thinking of implementing service design and fostering those types of conversations is definitely something I want to see and be part of as well and that's something that the challenges hope to do as well. And I'm looking forward to introducing our service design Hong Kong mascot to lots of new people from all over the world. She is very friendly and loves meeting lots of new people. She's quite popular, was popular in some of our pre-events leading up to the conference and so we're hoping to you know get her to meet some more people. Right guys sounds awesome. If people want to come how do they sign up? Yeah sign up on service design.com.hk tickets are available from the website. I'll add the link in the description of the video for sure so check out down below. Yeah and we actually have a giveaway. Patty will introduce the giveaway. Okay yeah so we would like to offer a free ticket to the conference for anyone who comments on the video here and just answers the question why would you like to come to service design Hong Kong. We will probably leave that open for two weeks and at the end we will randomly choose an answer. I don't know how we'll randomly choose it but I guess we'll come up with a system and then we look forward to announcing the winner. Awesome that's really cool. So oh the easiest chance to get your ticket to the conference just leave a comment saying why you're excited and we'll have it open for two weeks and after two weeks we'll draw a winner right. Yeah that sounds good. Super cool guys good luck with the final preparations I know how hard it is to organize conferences so don't forget to have some fun in the in the final period. Thanks very much Mark. Thanks guys. So if you are excited about the conference and you'd like to learn more head over to servicedesign.com.hk where you'll find the program and info on the ticket sales. If you'd like to enter the contest for that free ticket leave a comment on this video telling why you'd like to go to the conference and if you enjoyed this episode check out some of the past interviews and don't forget to subscribe to the channel. I'll see you in a brand new episode for now. Thanks for watching and I'll see you then.