In May we held a workshop at the RCA to flesh out the vision for the Service Design Fringe Festival together.
The festival is community-led, so it was essential to work out the overarching strategy collaboratively.
The workshop was focused around two key areas: relationships within the festival, and how the festival could contribute to the service design industry.
We gave a preview of our then-new website, and video, made by Emily and Sean respectively. Then we split out into two groups and had conversations about how the festival could contribute to industry and build critical practice.
The two conversations headed in different directions: one group shared their perspectives as attendees of the London Design Festival. This group felt that The Service Design Fringe Festival ought to strive to be a spectacular experience in order to appeal to the LDF audience (designers, buyers and the public), who are accustomed to the glitz of mainstream design.
The second group considered the theme of storytelling in depth. To explain the process of service design, we discussed supporting the festival hosts to construct their talks with characters, high and low points, touch points, and to skip mediocrity. We discussed potentially banning Powerpoint from the festival!
Both groups agreed that it would be important to map service design and related disciplines during the course of the festival. Service design is changing rapidly as a practice. The industry is likely to change dramatically year on year; recording the state of the industry now will become historically useful in the future in order to understand how the practice has developed.
Several other ideas came out of this workshop, including creating an awards system for the best hosts, creating a learning toolkit for guests, and collating definitions of service design from all hosts. We are looking for creative people to join our team to take these seeds of ideas on, and develop them in their own style to add to the experience of the festival.
We split into four teams to consider what each kind of stakeholder in the festival would want to give to the festival and to receive from the festival. After the workshop, Culainn and Lior considered all the information and weaved it together to create a relationship map, where everyone gives and receives what they need from each other.
We'd love your feedback on if this map. Does it express what you want to give and receive from the festival? Please tell us if there's something we haven't considered so that we can improve the experience for everyone involved.
