Author:DTG Editorial

10.01.2019

How Coca-Cola used Service Design to take a human-centred approach to HR

By Michal Steckiw Project Manager, Customer Centric Services by Design, GBS HR Operations – The Coca-Cola Company

Service design has allowed us to achieve a structured understanding of how to ensure a desirable service experience.

What service design has done is allow us to achieve for the first time a structured understanding of how to ensure a desirable service experience. It helps us redesign our services based on customer journey maps, prototypes and service blueprints.

To do this we brought in a great service design agency, DesignThinkers Group based in Amsterdam, who worked closely with our HR team and employees from across the company. We also created two design councils – HR Design Council and Customer Voice Design Council – to gather essential insights and draw up a customer journey map for GBS services.

The result is a complete service experience that is intuitive and enjoyable, and incorporates mobile and digital technologies. To get there we needed to engage with stakeholders worldwide, working across the functional silos, to design a seamless end-to-end service.

To read the full article please follow this link

18.05.2017

Harvard Business Review Publication ‘Design Thinking Comes of Age’

By Jon Kolko, Harvard Business Review

A set of principles collectively known as Design Thinking is the best tool we have for creating those kinds of interactions and developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture.

There’s a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise. But the shift isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about applying the principles of design to the way people work.

This new approach is in large part a response to the increasing complexity of modern technology and modern business. That complexity takes many forms. Sometimes software is at the center of a product and needs to be integrated with hardware (itself a complex task) and made intuitive and simple from the user’s point of view (another difficult challenge). Sometimes the problem being tackled is itself multi-faceted: Think about how much tougher it is to reinvent a health care delivery system than to design a shoe. And sometimes the business environment is so volatile that a company must experiment with multiple paths in order to survive.

I could list a dozen other types of complexity that businesses grapple with every day. But here’s what they all have in common: People need help making sense of them. Specifically, people need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable.

To read the full article please follow this link

02.11.2018

Design Thinking Publication ‘Designing with Customer Journey Mapping’

By DesignThinkers Group Amsterdam, in collaboration with CDRI (Commerce Development Research Institute) – Research Think Tank of the Taiwanese Government

In the process of designing new and innovative services, the Customer Journey Mapping methodology builds a mirror and enables us to question why organisations and customers do the things they do.

In a highly competitive, complex and volatile marketplace, it is becoming more and more important for companies and organisations to focus on the experiences that customers have with their products and services.

To underpin its focus on helping the Taiwanese service industry become more innovative, CDRI has launched the CustomerJourney Mapping methodology in cooperation with DesignThinkers Group as a service to the market.

The Customer Journey Mapping methodology will help businesses in the service industry unleash collaborative creativity and come up with innovative new service concepts.

The service is delivered in a facilitative approach, where all stakeholders invest in an effort to define innovative service concepts, while also determining what it will take to implement these new collaborative co-creation methods within their organisation.

To read the full publication please follow this link

15.02.2019

Design Thinking Conference ‘Through Different Eyes’ – 10-11 OCTOBER 2019 AMSTERDAM

Conference bannerv3png

Through Different Eyes. We live in the same world, but not in the same reality.

The Design Thinking Conference is an interactive and high-energy gathering of experienced design thinking practitioners from around the world. We offer a platform to share knowledge and further your understanding of what is driving the changes we all experience in today’s world.

The Design Thinking Conference is not a traditional conference, but highly inspired by theatre. We have developed an experimental and exciting new format to challenge both the speakers (our actors) and the audience (supporting actors).

With this conference we aim to shake you up and enrich you with new insights, not just leave you comfortable and confirmed in your beliefs. No preaching to the converted, but experimenting, experiencing, having fun and being surprised.

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THEME

We’ve chosen the theme “Through Different Eyes” focusing on the importance of empathy and how we experience reality in different ways. This is a very topical theme, connecting to the discussion on our polarizing societies, and it also allows us to explore empathy, a key quality of the design thinking mindset. We have invited an amazing group of people, our members of the cast, to help us look for the boundaries of empathy and how they overcame them.

The exciting new format of the conference, inspired by theatre, will help both speakers and audiences be engaged and surprised. In the true spirit of design thinking we will question everything, so prepare to be challenged.

MISSION

We believe that new approaches are emerging because our world needs new solutions to solve the problems we are facing. Design thinking, and other human centric approaches, is emerging as a result. It is a symptom, not an end.

The mission of the Design Thinking Conference is to keep the conversation on design thinking moving forward and push the boundaries as far as we possibly can.

PARTNERS

The Design Thinking Conference is developed by DesignThinkers Academy in partnership with PARK.

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THE DESIGN THINKING CONFERENCE

Truly deep diving this awesome but somewhat adolescent topic…

For whom?

For design thinkers.
Professionals that do it.
In their own organizations or with other organizations.

Why?

Because these design thinkers are ready to take the next step.
It is time to truly deep dive design thinking.  

What?

Deep diving design thinking means critically looking at it.
Constructively discussing it.
Surprising ourselves with fresh perspectives.  

Can we please take our own medicine?
Let’s reframe.  Are we sure about the problems we’re solving?
Let’s truly discuss empathy. Can you actually be truly emphatic?
Let’s experiment. Can we test out new perspectives?
Let’s envision. How far can we bring it till it breaks?

How?

No definitions. We kind of know them by now.
No showcases. Seen them.
No tools. We know where to find these.
But inspirations to question oneself, through debates to get further, perspectives outside our comfort zones.
All in togetherness and positivism, and with a bit of lightness ;-).

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MORE INFORMATION

For details about location, speakers, calendar and workshops, visit our conference website!

11.12.2018

Publication Service Design in Practice ‘Insights from nine case studies’

DesignThinkers Group were part of the ‘Service Design in Practice Programme’ for three years, commissioned by the Task Force Innovation of the Dutch Government.

This is the definitive version of the report entitled ‘Innovation in Services – Service Design in Practice’, a collaborative program between eleven partners representing the business community and knowledge institutes.

This is the definitive version of the publication entitled ‘Innovation in Services – Service Design in Practice’, a collaborative program between eleven partners representing the business community and knowledge institutes.

This publication describes the working methods, the projects and the results of the programme. It contains a number of beautiful examples of the creative and innovative services presently available in the North Wing of the Randstad conurbation of the Netherlands. You can read about our approach, tools and methods we used as well as the deliverables and insights (starting page 89).

Have a preview underneath, or email us if you would like to receive the full PDF-version.

09.10.2018

IBM’s got a plan to bring Design Thinking to Big Business, published on WIRED

By Liz Stinson Copywriter – WIRED Design

We want to shift our culture towards a focus on users’ outcomes, according to Charlie Hill, chief technology officer of IBM Design.

IBM is not a design company. Of its nearly 400.000 employees, few could rightly be described as aesthetes; of its assorted products, many seem to be of the “function over form” variety. And yet, if you look past its pocket-protector reputation, there’s little doubt that IBM is angling—more aggressively than any corporation of its size—to become a leading design company in the most literal sense of the phrase.

Of course, IBM is far from the originator of the corporate trend in Design Thinking. The movement’s watershed moment, as a business methodology, came in the late 1980s, when David Kelley of Ideo popularized the idea of user-centered design.

Design Thinking is nothing if not a jumble of buzzwords artfully arranged into a business plan, and IBM has created its own glossary of terms for its scaled methodology. The company’s version of design thinking centers around something it calls “the loop.” Visualized, the loop is an infinity symbol punctuated with four dots—the yellow dot representing the user, the green dots representing the various actions of “observe,” “reflect,” and “make.”

To read the full article please follow this link

21.01.2019

Learn how SAP combines Design Thinking and Business Thinking

DesignThinkers Group is part of the SAP Design Thinking Team. We assist SAP to design and deliver Design Thinking trainings for Sales and Pre-sales SAP staff in Europe, Middle East, Africa and North America.
 

This 2-minute introduction to Design Thinking with SAP provides you with a background for what to expect in a Design Thinking engagement.


 
Learn how SAP combines Design Thinking and Business Thinking to drive value for your business. Design Thinking
is a unique approach to problem solving that brings in human meaning and empathy. SAP is engaging with you in a different way, by focusing on the jobs to be done for you and your customers.
 
DesignThinkers Group is part of the SAP Design Thinking Team. We assist SAP to design and deliver Design Thinking trainings for Sales and Pre-sales SAP staff in Europe, Middle East, Africa and North America.
 
To watch the full video please follow this link