with Jennifer Leonard

The online synopsis for this design event states that “all facets of the economy have a service component”…which we can look at in a variety of ways. While this is absolutely true, we must also understand that no single way of looking at service design is comprehensive in and of itself. The real value comes from looking at service design holistically.

I will share a famous legend that pointedly illustrates the confusion that results when we mistake a fragmented view for the whole picture.

I will also reveal insights gleaned from a motley crue of personal service experiences of late, which include taxi-hailing, car-towing, tattoo-acquiring and massage-getting. Four stories that run the gamut will flow into succinct insights, service typologies, and a single truism. Finally, I will find my way back from the nuances of service design to the core of my work, which is not about the world of design but the design of the world.

About Jennifer Leonard

Jennifer Leonard is a design researcher and writer at IDEO, in Palo Alto, California. Her craft is content creation; her art is “the interview” and her favorite tools include fine-tipped pens, hard-bound journals, her digital camera, her Sennheiser mic, a Marantz solid state recorder and Final Cut Pro. Prior to IDEO, Jennifer co-authored Massive Change, a book about the future of global design, and worked for several years as a print journalist, radio broadcaster and design critic. Her pieces have been published in Azure, Nylon, Saturday Night, Details, Form, Damn and Shift. She has spoken at design conferences around the world – Designmai (Berlin), World Design Congress (Copenhagen), Utrecht Manifest (Utrecht), IdcN (Nagoya), Luminous Green (Brussels), Designboost (Malmö) – and is a graduate of the inaugural year of the Institute without Boundaries, a design think-tank that once-upon-a-time lived inside the Bruce Mau Design studio in Toronto.

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and raised on the shores of Lake Huron, Jennifer now resides in a garden cottage in San Francisco.