Episode description

Erika Flowers is Principal Service Experience Designer at Intuit, and Morgan Miller is Senior Service Designer for Stanford University’s central IT organisation. Together they are the founders of Practical Service Design. In this episode they explained the importance of the word “practical” in the service design community, and the need for a channel to get people who are new to service design on board. We also talked about the use of data and making something meaningful out of it, and they explained their approach to service design as building bridges between the different silos. They also shared their experience as in-house designers, and we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of this role as opposed to an outside consultant. I do think that if organisations want to make a lasting change and transformation they need to bring design in-house, but I also think we need that budget for the agency and the third party to come in, because when I’m in-house, I can’t do the radical shake up that an agency could do coming in. - Morgan Miller - People with a service design toolset in any company can build the bridges between the different silos, smooth out the internal scene, get the information flowing and have a higher-level view, like a bit higher altitude and watch what’s going on at multiple silos at once and coordinate between them. […] That’s why our logo for Practical Service Design is a hot air balloon.  - Erika Flowers -