Tesani announces a new 2-day service design workshop

If you’re familiar with service design in North America, you know that there are limited options for training and education in this space.

There are some excellent events offered in San Francisco, some formal education provided by SCAD in Atlanta – but there really isn’t a hands-on workshop style offering that quickly gets you up and running with service design. This is certainly the case when it comes to service design in Canada.

We are happy to announce that Tesani will be regularly offering a two-day service design workshop in different locations throughout Canada. In this hands-on workshop, we will not only be sharing concepts and strategies related to service design, but we will also be actively learning and doing many of the key of the methods and tools utilized within he practice. This includes concepts such as journey maps, service blueprints, empathy mapping, personas, design research, design sprints, business model canvas development and more. Our intent is to allow participants to walk away from the workshop with the ability to start applying service design in their professional role the following day.

Our first event is scheduled for March in Regina, Saskatchewan. From there, we are currently planning events in Vancouver and Montreal.

Visit our Workshops page to learn more and to subscribe by email to receive updates about announcements for upcoming workshops.

We’re really excited to share our knowledge and experience with service design with those who can apply it in their work and we look forward to meeting champions of great experiences from all across the country.

– Jason

Tales from Canada’s first service design conference

On Thursday, December 1, I had the opportunity to speak at the very first service design conference in Canada. It was a fantastic event organized and hosted by the Canadian chapter of the Service Design Network and was held at the Rotman School of Management in downtown Toronto.

It was extremely impressive to see the strength of knowledge, experience and commitment to service design within the room. Attendees were varied in their application and role within the practice of service design. The event included speakers from newer startups such as Breather, the B.C. Department of Justice, Fidelity Labs, the City of Calgary, Bristol-Myers and a variety of agencies and consultancies.

Certainly a theme within the conference and and much of the dialogue surrounded ‘selling’ service design to leaders, decision makers, colleagues and other stakeholders. This is not surprising for a newer methodology such as service design that certainly disrupts the way organizations work and make decisions. In Canada, where the service design community isn’t as mature as other locations such as Europe, this is certainly a challenge we currently face.

The conference had two streams running, which included the larger theatre where attendees could hear talk and panels from a variety of practitioners as well as a workshop stream that allowed participants to take part in quick activities of just over an hour. The workshops were certainly popular and I expect will grow in size in future conferences.

My particular talk told the story about introducing service design in a corporate environment and provided tips on how others could successfully do the same. The response to my talk was very positive and found myself engaged with lots of people asking questions throughout the remainder of the day. Thankfully, my message and lessons learned seem to hit the mark for a lot of people.

It really was a world-class event and I was extremely impressed by the work by the SDN Canada chapter. At the end of the event, they’d mentioned that they would be taking the service design conference outside of Toronto and to a different location in Canada. I’m doubting it will find its way to Regina, but I look forward to the event as I’m sure they will ‘iterate’ from the ‘discovery’ of it’s inaugural event.