We ran a workshop in collaboration with Design4Future, open to anyone in Athens interested in service design. The main aim of the workshop was to give an introduction to service design by displaying some of the key methodologies and tools utilised in the industry. It was a hands-on workshop enabling participants to utilise the tools presented, building confidence to use a service design approach in everyday life.

When did you last fill up your car?

After an introduction to service design, including showcasing the variety of industry areas that service design can be used in, we asked participants to get into pairs for a journey mapping exercise. One person in each pair described the experience of filling up their car [the narrator] while the other person was in charge of asking questions and taking notes [the discoverer]. During this interview, discoverers were meant to be curious and want to dig deeper – asking questions and prompting for details. In doing so, they had the role of capturing the narrator’s experience of filling up their car using a journey map tool and personas. Once positive and negative experiences were outlined, pairs explored areas of improvement to find out opportunities for new projects.

Design4Future – ServiceDesignDrinks #3 (2017) from Design4Future on Vimeo.

Improving experiences

By the end of the workshop, we had a room full of ideas on how to improve the current experience many of us have when filling up a car. These potential solutions were based on the pain points that were identified when journey mapping and designed to meet the needs of the personas that had been created in the workshop. This seemingly simple exercise was a quick way to get participants confident in using key tools of service design whilst having fun, and also showed that there’s more to filling up a car than we might think.