Conference article

Formalising the creative process is often wrought with good intentions and the necessity to quantify, package and sell time. When working in strategic and creative design fields, decisions are regularly made about the path to best deliver work that balances both quality and profitability. Is it fundamentally a question of standardisation? Do models that work for the production of more tangible goods work when approaching creative services? How can we develop a way to work that’s systematic and messy? To bring elements of standardisation in line with what’s best described as the messy parts of the creative process, we set off on an investigation into how we work. Starting with well-travelled roads in Agile and other project management methodologies, we began to incorporate broader ways of approaching work, leaning on more ethnographic and poetic approaches to gather insights into how our small studio might best deliver our services. Through interviews, mapping and group tool creation, we turned customer-centric service design methods on ourselves to create a framework of our process. Fundamentally, we used service design methods to begin answering who we are, what we’re doing, how we’re getting where we want to go and why any of us should care. Not all of the methods worked. Surprisingly, methods that failed provided greater insight than the methods that worked. However, we ended up with a personalised service framework, more robust vocabulary to describe our working methods and a set of tools that resonated with us because we made them – they are still helping us redefine how we work.

Service design methods, co-design, creative services, project delivery