In the winter of 2019, Paris was much like any other large northern European city; messy, imperfect, and cold. But like every other city, there was a more deliberate force behind some of the mess if you looked closely. Paris was suffering the consequences of early 00s sharing-economy optimism; Its streets jammed with Ubers, snaking […]
I made a scale to measure the quality of services using the 15 principles of Good Service design. Here’s why. When I wrote Good Services I made a pledge – to write something useful, and above all simple. I deliberately didn’t include any kind of matrix, ‘canvas’ or score into the book because hell is […]
At long last, you can now buy posters and stickers with some of the best quotes from Good Services check out the shop here It’s been a strange few weeks, and in some ways it feels an odd time to be launching something new, but for the past few months I’ve been working hard to […]
Design is vital in a crisis, without it we make mistakes, risk lives, and ultimately, waste valuable time that we don’t have. But making the voice of design – and user needs – heard at a time when everyone around us is sacrificing speed for haste can be difficult. This year I published Good Services […]
This blog post was kindly translated into Spanish from the original by Beatriz Belmonte, Strategy and Service Design Lead at Madrid’s Public Tech Lab. Graciaz Beatriz! Good Services the book is out now ¿Qué es un buen servicio y por qué nos cuesta tanto hablar sobre ello? Últimamente he estado haciéndome esta pregunta muchas veces. Intentando […]
Just over a year ago I wrote a blog post about what we mean by a ‘good service’ and how strange it is that we don’t have a better understanding of this. The book is now finished (all 190 pages of it!) is available for preorder now You can sign up for the newsletter to […]
Today, I’m excited to announce that I’m going to be taking on a new role as Director of Design and Transformation for planning and land development for the UK government, based at Homes England. We have a housing crisis in the UK, but that problem doesn’t start with houses, it starts with land, and the […]
Yesturday morning a team of council maintenance workers moved into my community garden and destroyed it. I’m still in shock. Since drafting this post Hackney Council have just called to apologise, and have promised to help find another site, but this story says more about the failures of government to manage common land, than it […]
I’ve decided to write a book about good services. I’m not doing this because I have a burning ambition to write a book – but because I feel like this is a book that needs to exist. I wrote more about why here, but in a nutshell – after 15+ years of service design as […]
UPDATE: Good Services the book is out now What is a good service and why are we so afraid to talk about it? I’ve been asking myself this question a lot recently. In a bid to find out, I tweeted this a few weeks ago and – bar a couple of people also wondering the […]
Lou Downe 