 Hi everyone, I'm Mark Vontijn and this is the third service design show trend report. If you want to know what the trends are that are shaping service design today, but you didn't have the time to watch all the previous service design show episodes, this trend report is just for you. Over the last few months, industry leaders like Cary Baudin, Doreen Lorenzo and Lisa Lindstrom have been on the show to share their perspective on service design. We talked about inspiring topics like gaining business fluency, measuring customer happiness and designing for different service rhythms. But some topics just kept coming back throughout all the different episodes. These topics give us a glimpse into the future by marking the trends that are shaping service design today. In this episode, we'll talk about these three trends. Unboxing design thinking, designing better design teams and culturalizing design methods. So let's take a closer look at these trends one by one. The first trend is called unboxing design thinking. My concern today is we've now made design almost a fad and I worry about that. I worry that it will become a fad. I worry about all the boot camps that people take in design thinking without really having the knowledge and the depth you need to make big changes. Because at the end of the day, design is about change. I couldn't ignore this trend. It has been clearly marked by a few guests and has to deal with the rapid adoption of the term design thinking in the business world. Often, the story told around design thinking doesn't paint a full picture of what design actually is. To deliver actual results and create impact, you need more than just the thinking part of design. But as businesses start to adopt design thinking, it's important that we also tell the story about what's beyond the surface or what's inside the box as you will. What are the skills that support the theory of user centeredness, prototyping and co-creation and actually make design produce valuable results? What's at stake here is a trust in the design process. We don't want people to disregard design as something that was a great promise but in the end never delivered on it. Just because the expectations weren't set right. Design thinking is still a great vehicle to share the values of design. We just have to make sure to clearly tell a story that shows the limits of what design thinking are and where the other parts of design come into play. Okay, so how much are we going to actually banter with the word design thinking? What is the limit? How far would we go in using that word? How should we move on? You know, how we become too enamored with that word as practitioners? I call the second trend, designing better design teams. Like this, we are not a department. It's really a community of volunteers and we set it up that way because we are approaching that vision to say, okay, at one time we don't need that much navigators and then they have all their, let's say, regular work. Creating better design teams is all about creating the conditions in which design teams can operate to their fullest potential. More and more organizations are embedding service design capabilities internally by setting up dedicated teams. These teams are often set up in a way that fits the current organizational structure, which might not always be the most effective way for service designers to create impact. So the focus is shifting towards the question, how organizations can facilitate these design teams to perform optimally. And this involves looking at the company's culture, the structure of the team and the physical work environment. So we always make sure there's a lot of feedback going on and creating the informal barriers because I think that's the main thing about a well-working team, getting them to feel that they actually have the mandate and power to go and talk to each other. So how can you act on this trend tomorrow? I'd say use the design approach. Invite your team to redesign the work environment and don't do this only on a very practical level but also on the system level. The third trend is called culturalizing design methods. This was an interesting trend that didn't get as much attention as the other two, but still holds great potential. It's all about adapting design methods to fit a specific cultural environment. Although we might not think about this every day, most of the things we know about our design methods primarily originate from a Western point of view. This becomes explicitly clear when we look at the friction that occurs when certain design methods are applied in China, for instance. Okay, for example, in a co-creation workshop, everybody has equal voice, right? Yeah. If you have a room full of executives and some are in management positions or who is the boss and some are in operations, the people in operations will tend to be very quiet or they do not want to say something that will get them fired. So we've kind of come up with a method called anonymous post-its, meaning we'll have all of them write it down, we'll mix them all up, we'll post it on the wall, nobody knows who said what, okay, yeah, and then we'll get people to randomly talk about instead of saying who said this thing or who said that thing. This example illustrates that we should be more sensitive to and recognize the limitations that our documented design methods have. But it's not only the differences between design on different continents, each organization has its own unique culture, and this possesses a huge opportunity to achieve better results by contextualizing design methods to fit within that culture. We should always treat design methods as a starting point, not as a fixed recipe that you clinically have to follow. We should always ask the question how a design method can be adapted to better fit the culture it will be used in. So what does this mean for you? Identify the things that make your culture unique and start building your own set of design methods. So that's it, these are the trends that are shaping service design at this moment based on what we've learned from the last 10 episodes of the show. But I would really like to know what you consider the most important trend in service design at this moment. Share your thoughts in the comments. I would advise you to teach your kids to experiment and experience more things and learn and fail and move ahead. We are very afraid to fail. You can catch a new episode of the show every two weeks on Thursday. So if you enjoyed this trend report, be sure to check out some of the best episodes and don't forget to subscribe to the channel. If you haven't seen the first two trend reports, check them out too. The links are in the description. Curious what trends the next 10 episodes will bring? Keep watching.