About protopartners

Proto Partners is Australia's leading Service Design Consultancy having opened the first dedicated Service Design firm in 2008. We believe in challenging the view that outstanding service experiences can be designed without intimately involving customers. We believe that when everyone in a company truly understands their customers, they can act on opportunities more quickly.

Service Design Thinks & Drinks – Canberra : Stephen Collins

We are back and very excited to bring you a fantastic presentation.
Stephen Collins is going to present us some of the design principles he has experienced during his projects.

Service design doesn’t need to be ‘big’. Sometimes, it’s about thinking small, and narrow. About specialisation. About getting deep inside the heads of those you’re designing for.

Stephen will look briefly at three diverse projects he has worked on since the beginning of 2011 that have been focussed on building services and communities for deeply specialised groups. He’ll discuss some of the design principles that have been shared across those projects, as well as the points of differentiation in them.

Book your ticket here

Stephen Collins, often known as @trib, is an expe­ri­enced com­mu­ni­ca­tions strate­gist who under­stands peo­ple and busi­ness. He helps put the two together.

Whether it’s design­ing user expe­ri­ences, help­ing to under­stand change, work­ing on design­ing the deliv­ery of ser­vices or help­ing to under­stand col­lab­o­ra­tion and knowl­edge shar­ing in the con­text of 21st Cen­tury busi­ness, Stephen has proven exper­tise and
expe­ri­ence hav­ing worked with some of Australia’s largest cor­po­rate and gov­ern­ment organ­i­sa­tions on solv­ing these problems.

Stephen has been think­ing about and work­ing on prob­lems in his areas of exper­tise long enough that he knows there is no sim­ple answer. He knows it’s not about social media, or cam­paigns, strate­gies or tac­tics, but about under­stand­ing busi­ness goals and prob­lems, and under­stand­ing peo­ple inside and out­side the busi­ness and how they man­age change.

Stephen is the Cre­ative Cat­a­lyst behind TEDx­Can­berra. He is also an active (un)organiser of team at Bar­Camp Can­berra.

Recently, he was selected as one of the inter­na­tional panel of organ­i­sa­tional col­lab­o­ra­tion experts, The Thinkers, for the project The Future of the Col­lab­o­ra­tive Enter­prise.
His work on pub­lic sec­tor reform and open gov­ern­ment has been pub­lished by the Cen­tre for Pol­icy Devel­op­ment and in the book State of the eUnion: Gov­ern­ment 2.0 and Onwards, released in Novem­ber 2009. Stephen was also a key author and researcher for the Aus­tralian Government’s Gov­ern­ment 2.0 Primer.

Stephen is recog­nised inter­na­tion­ally as an inno­va­tor, com­mu­nity builder and engag­ing pub­lic speaker. His views are reg­u­larly sought in the media and at con­fer­ences and he has received exten­sive cov­er­age in many forums.

WORK + PLAY + EXPERIENCE workshop

EXCLUSIVE ! WorkPlayExperience (initiators of the Global Service Jam) is coming to Australia for the first time, and maybe the last ! DON’T MISS this occasion to attend their workshop on the 12 June 2012 in Sydney ! Limited number of tickets, be quick !

For the first time, Markus and Adam from WorkPlayExperience are coming to Australia in order to share their theatrical knowledge and practices with us ! On this occasion, Proto Partners is organising a workshop on Tuesday 12 June 2012 that will give you the opportunity to experience Markus and Adam’s theatrical approach and discover new valuable tools to apply in your organisation to improve customer experience and in designing services.

This is perfect for you if you are working with teams to create new ideas, develop innovative processes, or reflect on and improve the way you work. This workshop will give you powerful tools, showing you a quick, effective and relaxed way to understand, model and experiment with human interactions. This is a valuable workshop for Service designers and Experience Designers, but also for Agile coaches, Educators and anyone working as a Facilitator.

Book your ticket here, be quick !

Markus Hormeß and Adam Lawrence lead WorkPlayExperience, a German service innovation consultancy with a uniquely theatrical approach. With a joint resume which includes process design, rock musicals, psychology, theoretical physics, product development and stand-up comedy, their mission is to help companies ”put the rock and roll into their services”. Markus and Adam work internationally with major players in telecommunications, financial services and other fields. They are also the initiators of the Global Service Jam, the world’s biggest service design event (so far), and the owners of various rubber chickens.

What is this workshop about?

The WorkPlayExperience approach draws on theater and showbiz concepts to address the dramatic arcs of service experiences, uses theatrical concepts like subtext to examine emotion and motivation, and develop services using a fast, action-oriented method called ”investigative rehearsal”. The session in Sydney will be firmly under the motto of ”doing, not talking”.

Program of the day

Explore – using theatrical methods to generate holistic insights and concepts
• Investigative rehearsal – a new era in bodystorming; the fastest way to investigate and ideate interactions, spaces, processes and behaviours

• Subtext – create deep empathy and understanding of your customers
• Stakeholder constellations – a physical, more empathic exploration of stakeholder relationships and value networks as they evolve over time

Develop – scripting for service
• Boom-wow-wow-wow-BOOM! – Dramatic arcs and timing in service and business; a practical tool to create, manage and design for customer perceptions and expectations

• Service Writing – why a Service Blueprint is not enough to manage your customer experience
• Collaborative storytelling and Journey storming – faster ways to customer journeys

Test – cheap, rapid prototyping, testing, and refinement of your services
• Investigative rehearsal revisited – breaking and improving your ideas; introducing The Difficultator

Perform – implementation and training
• Using these tools in service implementation and training for rollout


Service Design thinks & Drinks, Sydney : “Behaviour Design” – Ash Donaldson (12 June 2012)

We are back and very excited to bring you a great presentation. Well worth coming out to have a few drinks and listen to a smart guy at the top of his game.

Ash Donaldson, will be talking about his research and learnings on Behaviour Design.

Behaviour Design is the process of creating systems that change behaviour. The field is built on research from the Stanford Persuasive Technologies Lab, which has provided a number of models and frameworks that effectively leverage technology – from mobile phones, to social networks – to impact behaviours. 

Ash will introduce the Fogg Behaviour Model and discuss ways in which it can provide insight to the design process.

You can book tickets here

 

In his former career as a commercial pilot, Ash Donaldson was introduced to human factors, the scientific discipline concerned with understanding and designing to accommodate human capabilities and limitations: physically, socially, and cognitively. After 15 years of designing products, services and environments, he still has an insatiable curiosity to explore how convincingly our minds deceive us in our everyday lives, and discover how behaviours can really be influenced.

Service Design Thinks & Drinks – Sydney : Video of “Sketching in Service Design” – Ben Crothers

Here is a short extract from Ben Crothers’ presentation at Service Design Thinks & Drinks Sydney, 3rd April 2012. Ben spoke about the importance of including sketching in the armoury of service design techniques, to help you, your clients and their customers think and communicate with each other. He’ll also demonstrated some old sketching techniques from his art school days that have helped him and his team in experience design projects. So listen in and have your sketchbook handy!

(Sorry it is a bit shaky, it was recorded from a hand-held camera – We weren’t originally publishing it but there was a lot of demand, so here it is!)

Service Design Thinks & Drinks – Canberra

Here are some pictures of last Service Design Thinks & Drinks in Canberra.

Mik made us participate in fun exercises !

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Thinks & Drinks / 3 – “Canberra Service Design Jam” – Mikaela Griffiths

On 24 February, 2012, people interested in service design and using design-based approaches to problem solving and creativity came together in cities all around the world as part of the 2012 Global Service Jam. In a spirit of experimentation, co-operation and friendly competition, teams had 48 hours to develop brand new services inspired by the secret shared theme – hidden treasure.

Mikaela Griffiths at the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education organised the Canberra Jam.
Come and join us to have a drink and listen to Mikaela that is going to share this experience with us and and how potentially this Service Jam could be extended to the Government.

Tickets here

Mikaela’s bio
Mikaela Griffiths worked for the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry from January 2008 until June 2010 and designed the $200 million Reef Rescue election commitment. Following that, until last year she worked on the Caring for our Country Review Taskforce reviewing Australia’s $2 billion natural resource management investment. She currently works as an innovation manager at the Department of Innovation in Canberra.

Service Design Thinks & Drinks – Sydney : “Sketching in Service Design” by Ben Crothers

We are back and very excited to bring you a great presentation. Well worth coming out to have a few drinks and listen to a smart guy at the top of his game.

Ben Crothers, will be talking about his research and learnings including sketching in Service Design.

Ben will talk about the importance of including sketching in your armoury of service design techniques, to help you, your clients and their customers think and communicate with each other. He’ll also demonstrate some old sketching techniques from his art school days that have helped him and his team in experience design projects. So bring your sketchbooks!

You can get tickets here 

Ben’s bio

Ben has been in the digital experience design space for nearly 15 years, and his passion for helping clients at a strategic level has naturally lead to involvement in service design thinking and practice. As a Design Strategist at Digital Eskimo, Ben leads a team of Experience Architects in a broad range of service design and user experience design techniques and activities. Recently, he’s been helping an up-and-coming water utility overhaul its customer experience strategy, and looking at new ways of visualising recycled water use.

Ben is passionate about involving clients in the creative process, and uses sketching techniques wherever he can to help designers, clients and customers alike think and communicate their ideas, experiences and solutions. When not dreaming up ways of using his kids’ toys as prototyping tools, he gets into home brewing, oil painting and drawing.