SDN Global Global Conference is Coming to Canada
As noted on the SDN website, #SDGC19 will be taking place October 10-11, 2019 in Toronto, with pre-conference activities taking place October 9.
This is significant to service design and design thinking professionals because the vast majority of Service Design Network events take place overseas, where the practice is more popular and common.
Toronto has developed a strong community in service design with the first national conference ‘InFlux’ held at the Rotman School of Design in 2016, where I had the opportunity to be a presenter. It was an excellent event followed by the ‘Impact’ conference in Montreal last year. This will be the first SDN Global Conference to come to the city.
Details of the Global Conference have not been released yet besides the dates, but early-bird ticket sales are expected to be announced soon. Be sure to mark your calendars.
If you are interested to stay up to date on SDN Canada updates, we recommend following a number of their social accounts, including Instagram and Twitter.
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.