What is service design in EGGS?

We believe that service design is the discipline that is responsible for grasping the big picture.

Service design grasps the big picture

Service design in EGGS Design is a discipline that takes on the big-picture challenges. A creative discipline that is human-centric at the core fuels design-driven innovation. In EGGS, our workdays vary. One day can be about helping hospitals transform how they are patient-centric. The next day can be focusing on technology-oriented start-ups who want to help people live smarter and more sustainable everyday lives. A third project can be about supporting a large global brand that goes through a radical transformation to keep up with current changes. It must be greener, it must be more human-centric, and we need to unleash the innovation potential in ourselves and all the people we work with.

In EGGS, service design is the discipline that most efficiently bridges the gap between the user-need, strategic direction and turning it into more hands-on design and technology projects.

Cross-disciplinarity ensures impact

Service design in EGGS works alongside digital design, product design, brand design, business design, and creative tech to realize more of this potential. By working in parallel and cross-disciplines, we can significantly impact the service design work we do. It allows us to follow the topic at hand - from fuzzy frontend to new value propositions in service-ecosystems that did not exist when we started.

Service design works with the wicked problems by us wrapping our heads around and mapping out system dynamics, making sense and building bridges between other experts that we work with. Meanwhile, we always keep the user-needs close at heart as our guiding star.

As Service Designers we prototype the difference to test and learn. We are designers, in both the design thinking and the craftsmanship- tradition of the word.

What does a service designer do in EGGS?

A service designer in EGGS works with design research and insight, pattern recognition and system-oriented mappings and conceptual development of new value propositions. They also excel at formulating service strategies and idea- development for total service ecosystems. It often includes service identity, tone of voice, look&feel, and dynamics of a service. It involves service prototyping and tests at every stage. And in EGGS, we take great pride in the visual quality of our work. Because if you can see it, you are more likely to believe it. The pandemic showed us that many of our service designers have the drawing capacity of professional illustrators.

We co-create with the end-users and the clients, and closely follow the hand-over of the project to the client. Precisely what this means depends on the development of the project. It can mean that the client has co-created the solutions with us. We develop training material, capacity building-programs, and organisational transformation to increase the readiness to deliver on the new value propositions. Or, it can mean that the project through our service design concepts turns into the design of a new product, a new digital service, or concrete organisational interventions.

We have built our culture on trust and loyalty

I do not know a single designer, inside or outside of EGGS, who doesn't want their work to make a real impact on the world. We all want our work to contribute to making a positive difference. To be able to do this, we have certain principles for our design work in EGGS. We organise our teams and processes to ensure that our designers are close to our collaborators/clients/users. There is no administrative layer between us and the world. The consequence is that the responsibility for each of us can be intense. The responsibility can be challenging when you also want to bring radically new and innovative ideas to the world, as innovation takes both bravery, vulnerability and courage.

We're well aware of this, and we live with the paradoxes this implies every day. That's why our culture is so important to us - we strive to be the world's best workplace for creatives. To ensure this, we always have each other's back. We can rely on each other so that when one has jumped in at the deep end, there are plenty of others who swim. When we have a safe platform to stand on together, this keeps us stable enough to be daring, both individually and collectively.

We believe that the services we design should be felt and intuitively loved, just like an extraordinary experience.

A design field under constant development

Service Design is a relatively new design discipline. In Norway, EGGS were among the actors that initiated the practice field. Being pioneers is a responsibility we do not take lightly. Therefore, we always keep learning, developing our methods and our practice. Lately that has pushed us to constantly perfect our capacity to create visual deliverables, in every stage of the process. It leads us to build experience- principles and storytelling- dramaturgy into the journeys. And it challenges us to find ways to prototype services today, that we did not think of yesterday.

Deepening our insight practice

We are also deepening our insight practices to cater for more angles than the qualitative user-perspective. This means that we are working more consciously with the cross-disciplinarity in our projects and draw upon other sources of knowledge. All this to future-proof and make our service propositions sustainable. We are also aware of the pitfalls of being consultants. As design consultants, we facilitate co-creation with clients on so many levels, but we do leave. That's why we keep expanding that repertoire with organisation design, social psychology and systemic intervention knowledge.

For service design, we believe that there will never be one set methodology or process to follow. Simply because meeting the user and connecting with the client organisation is essential to us, we need to tailor-make it every time.

Every moment is new. Your experience of the world will always be unique to us, and that keeps us curious and humble in this volatile, rapidly changing world.