Service Design for crisis prevention

If there was ever a time to finally get around to writing this blog post, the time is now.

In December 2018, I was lucky enough to teach Service Design in Kerala, India as part of Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design summer school program. Teaching with ex-Ideo Aram and all round ‘Entrepreneur, Artist and Futurist’ (I stole that from your linkedin!) we wanted to see how service design methodologies could be used to prevent future disasters and in this case flooding in Kochi. Relying on the local expertise from the amazing class, we ended up with a full end-to-end service blueprint looking holistically across the before, during and after the flood, and how can we rely on the local communities and in particular sharing platforms across Kochi.

Running a course for 5 days trying to not only teach the basics of Service Design as a practice, but also to get some actionable things out of it, was a challenge. The brief to the class was co-creating resilient services able to adapt and evolve in a rapidly changing world (which as you can imagine is highly relevant at a time like COVID-19). We used our usual course structure that looked something like this: