Photo: Thomas Schönweitz
Interview: Geke van Dijk and Bas Raijmakers In this issue, editor Jesse Grimes interviews Geke van Dijk and Bas Raijmakers and learns about their involvement in service design networks, their Anglo-dutch company STBY, and design research. Dr. Geke van Dijk is co-founder and Strategy Director of STBY in London and Amsterdam. She has a background in ethnographic research, usercentred design and services marketing. Geke is the initiator and co-founder of the Service Design Network Netherlands. She is also a co-founder and active member of the REACH Network for Global Design Research. Dr. Bas Raijmakers is co-founder and Creative Director of STBY in London and Amsterdam. He has a background in cultural studies, the internet industry, and interaction design. Bas cofounded the REACH Network for Global Design Research, and is also Reader in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven.
90
touchpoint 6-2
Back in 2008, you both took part in the the first of the SDN’s Global Conferences, in Amsterdam. That puts you in a good position to look back on the growth of service design in Holland in the years since then. What are the developments you’ve seen, and what challenges remain for Dutch service design practitioners? In 2008 only a relatively small group of people in The Netherlands were aware of service design. There has been a huge growth in the involvement of practitioners in this field since then. There has been an strong uptake in industry (among both agencies and client organisations) as well as in education
and government. By now service design has firmly spread across many different sectors, such as health care, utilities, transport, telecom, and hospitality. It has also been integrated in pioneering innovation programs between industry and academia, such as the CRISP programme (2011-2015) where 60 organisations from academia and industry collaborate to create knowledge about designing Product Service Systems. The main challenge at the moment in all these settings is to move from projects to partnerships. Projects simply don’t achieve enough lasting or systemic change and the issues that are addressed are often too big or ‘wicked’ to be
