Clients & Projects: Service Design
Service design concerns the need for organisations and companies to apply continuous attention to their relationship with audience or customers, and the importance of placing digital technology in a holistic context. It takes on a many shapes, but features such constants as consultation with internal stakeholders from as wide a spectrum as possible, user research and competitor analysis. Here are some clients we have recently helped in this area.
City of London
Service Design for Web Presence
We were engaged by COL in the summer of 2008 to provide an honest appraisal of their current website and to make some attendant recommendations, at the core of which was a radical vision for how the organisation could best talk about its complete - and bewilderingly diverse - range of activity. Our work has grown from there. On the one hand, our recommendations now form a central part of COL's communications strategy and its internal structure. On the other, we have led the specification and tendering for the creation of a new website (now in development). And we continue to facilitate the process of establishing new structure and workflow to support this strategy in the organisation.
Heart n Soul
Service Design
Working with Unthinkable on our communications strategy has been incredibly helpful. Together we have explored and discovered new ideas, fresh thinking, innovative approaches and then been given the tools and confidence to make them happen – brilliant! The input from Justin on our global digital music project has been invaluable – really accessible, intelligent and thoughtful advice and support – opening up some big possibilities and concepts – and finding a clear and simple route through – fantastic!
— Mark Williams MBE, Artistic Director / Chief Executive, Heart n Soul
Heart n Soul, a creative arts organisation who work with people with learning difficulties, commissioned us last year to work with them delivering a communications strategy and scoping the rebuild of their website. We have also created a template and a series of tools to enable Heart n Soul to refresh their communications strategy on an ongoing basis. This approach is central to the way we consider service design. A well crafted strategy should provide a strong framework for a period of time, but strategies inevitably age and go out of date. We work closely with clients like Heart n Soul, building capacity to refresh their strategy after our work for them has finished. As with much of our work, this project involves a combination of our own research with workshopping and conversation to reach our conclusions in partnership with the client. We're delighted that Heart n Soul's fabulous work has recently been recognised by the award of a double MBE to founder/director Mark Williams and founder artist Pino Frumiento, and feel hugely privileged to be part of the next stage of their development.
Find out more about our working process with Heart n Soul.
Save the Children
Service Design on Global Digital Campaign
We were brought in by STC UK in the spring of 2009 to do some initial strategy facilitation with the web team, but our work quickly expanded from there.
Our main contribution has been the development of a detailed strategy for the online component of EVERY ONE, the organisation's five-year programme to reduce child and infant mortality. We set out specifically to design a project which would help bring some of the difficult debate around the subject squarely into STC's own website.
Through extensive internal consultation, we developed and scoped out the everyone.org website, were jointly responsible for appointing the agency to build the site, and were the liaison point throughout the build phase. Additionally we scoped out a mobile SMS pilot scheme for STC in Nigeria and planned the scaled-up Phase 2 of the EVERY ONE digital campaign.
