Anne Stenros Meet the service designer
Last year the SDN launched the first Service Design Impact Report dedicated to the topic of the public sector. Due to its success and enthusiastic reception, the next two editions are already in the making. The next one will focus on the health sector, and will be published to coincide with the SDN’s Global Conference 2018, in Dr. Anne Stenros CDO is a thought leader on strategic design and creative leadership, speaking and lecturing around the world. Since September 2016 she is the Chief Design Officer (CDO) of the city of Helsinki. She has been rewarded with the Gold Estlander Medal (2015) and the Gold Medal of the City of Helsinki (2013). She is a founding member of Women in Tech Finland.
Madrid. Aline Alonso, the manager of the SDN Impact Report series, and Zeynep von Flittner, an Impact Report collaborator, had the opportunity to interview Anne Stenros, the Chief Design Officer (CDO) of Helsinki, about her vision of the design impact in the city of Helsinki. Anne sees the city as an organisation and her objective is to to utilise design knowledge and enforce an experimentation culture among the city leaders. Aline Alonso and Zeynep von Flittner: The city of Helsinki is undergoing a lot of changes. What is the role and the value of design in these transformations?
Anne Stenros: The city of Helsinki wants to renew the working culture and the leadership in the city. As a CDO, I have introduced something like a ‘Service Experience Camp’ to the top leaders of the city. They have really enjoyed the idea of small, agile, fast-speed workshops with templates that they can fill in by themselves or as a group. These have been very valuable tools to spark strategic discussions. 78 Touchpoint 9-2
I believe one very important tool of design is to make futures visible. From my experience, if we only use numbers or text, the discussions tend to be very abstract and 'un-emotional'. However, if we use any type of visualisation, for instance scenarios and personas, it enables the people present in those meetings to use their empathic skills too. In order to understand better how the future is going to be. This way we will not be talking only about hard numbers but values too; ‘what kind of future we would like to see?’
