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Service Design. This is the field I aspire to work in professionally in my future, and the reason why I moved to Finland to study CoID in the first place. Specifically the course Design for Services, taught by Núria Solsona Caba, Martina Čaić and Anna Viljakainen, represents the main curricular element offered for all students following the social and service design track within CoID. I was a little surprised to find that this course only becomes available in the second year of the master's, which meant that an entire year passed before I could truly dive into my focus of study. Nevertheless, after all the anticipation, I was very excited about the project-based collaboration with the City of Espoo! My team, consisting of Sushmita Charlu, Elli Mattila, Julia Steinebach and myself, got paired with a design brief from the Espoo Cultural Centre (ECC).

I would describe the course as a very fast-paced but rewarding journey. The seven-week project was structured into two main phases: a four-week research phase, focused on understanding the context and gathering insights, followed by a three-week proposal and deliverable development phase, where findings were translated into concrete concepts and outputs. Additionally, we had weekly meetings with our project Partner Anna Jaskiewicz from the ECC and weekly tutoring with course teachers to receive valuable guidance and insightful feedback throughout the project.

Our project explored ways to strengthen the internal culture and collaborative potential of the ECC and its diverse organisations that together form the Cultural Centre community: Tapiola Sinfonietta, Espoo Music Institute (EMO), Tapiola Library, Espoo Theatre and their supporting staff. It responded to the Centre´s ambition to move beyond co-existence toward a shared culture of collaboration, identity and belonging. The main fieldwork and co-creation activities involved different participatory methods, such as interviews with probes, observations, shadowing, a survey, and a collaborative workshop with staff from across all organisations.

We developed the Kultsa Co-Lab Program, which provides a framework for shaping future collaboration through shared principles, ownership, and experimentation. At its core, the Kultsa Co-Lab Program introduces three cross-organizational Labs, each focusing on a key area of the Cultural Centre’s development. These Labs bring together employees from different organizations to act as facilitators of change and to pilot new collaboration practices. To support the implementation, we created a six-step roadmap that guides the program from kickoff through to long-term rollout, and a canvas for each Lab working group to define the foundations they need to collaborate effectively

I appreciate that, even though this was a project course, it included such a rich theoretical component. I see this as crucial because the theory directly informed and strengthened our project work. Further, the readings combined with weekly reflection assignments and the course content in general shifted my mindset in many ways, particularly through the lens of the service-dominant logic! The service-dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2016) sees goods not as separate from services but rather as a means to deliver a service where value is co-created in use, in context and by multiple actors. Through the course, I gained an understanding of the different levels of a service, the interconnectedness of systems, new ways of thinking about design materials, and the importance and ways of demonstrating the impact of service design. Overall, DfS helped grasp the meaning and practice of service design. But it also made me realize that the field of service design is constantly evolving and repositioning itself. The role of a service designer is fluid and can sometimes feel undefined. But this fluidity also creates space to learn, adapt, and shape what design can become next! I am excited to contribute to that change and genuinely look forward to the future and the new directions it might take me.