Meet the service designer(s): 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.

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 a 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 di˜erent 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 solved in a single project. When you aim to change how governments engage with citizens and other stakeholders in policy development, or if you want to develop a service in a traditional product-oriented company, organisational change is needed and that won’t be achieved with a single project. It needs longer partnerships that result in change on an organisational level.

There has been the (independent) ‘Service Design Netwerk Nederland’ established for many years. Who makes up that group, and what activities have you carried out?

In the summer of 2008 we initiated the Dutch service design network as a result of an inspiring meet up between the four agencies who were at that time pionering under the banner of service design. The initial meet up was actually triggered by clients who told us that it was crazy that we did not know each other yet. So we had a drink and decided to organise shared activities for a wider community. One of our first activities was to support SDN with organising the international service design conference in Amsterdam. Since then we have organised more than 50 local events, such as talks, discussions, workshops, drinks, etc.

After a few years of happily co-existing next to the international SDN, we discussed this year to maybe to transform the Dutch network into a chapter within the international network. It makes more sense now the field is growing so much and also consolidating internationally. We have now extended the core group of organisers with extra people for industry and academia. It is a nice mix of enthusiast professionals.

STBY operates both in the UK and Holland, two countries where service design is at its most established. How do you handle this way of working, and what prompted this expansion?

When we founded STBY 10 years ago, we immediately started in both London and Amsterdam. So there was never an expansion from one country to the other, STBY is a truly Anglo-dutch company. We saw equal opportunities in in both countries, and were already spending much of our time in London, so for us as directors it really made sense to establish ourselves in both countries. The two studios virtually operate as one, with projects sometimes happening across the two locations. As the directors, we spend about 50% of our time in each studio, and the rest of the team also has a lot of contact with each other, to share knowledge and sometimes o˜er a di˜erent perspective. These di˜erent perspectives come naturally with the two locations we work in, but also the multinational and multicultural team we have, with currently five nationalities. Our perspectives and local knowledge are even much more diverse with Reach, STBY’s partner network for global design research currently comprising 11 companies around the globe. For global companies we do design research in several countries simultaneously, always with locally based teams.

Design research is your area of expertise, and it’s an area that I believe is sometimes overlooked by service design practitioners. What recommendations would you make to Touchpoint readers on how to incorporate research into their projects, especially if they face time or budget limitations?

The most important advice is to not see design research as separate from service design. It is an integral part and cannot be separated from the rest. It does not make sense to do one without the other. To do proper service design you need to do proper design research. This way of thinking and doing also removes the time and budget limitations: if you have little time and budget for a service design project, you have to be modest with your ambitions for the service you are creating, and not just modest with your research ambitions.

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.