Service Design Toolkits
We’re building a list of toolkits and resources relevant to Service Designers, Experience Designers, Social Innovators and Human-centered Designers in general. If you’d know of something that could be added please get in touch.
AC4D Design Library
A library of practical resources to support the process of design. Austin Center for Design is an educational institution in Austin, Texas, teaching Interaction Design and Social Entrepreneurship.
Business Model Canvas / Value Proposition Canvas
A couple of resources from Strategizer, who also publish books on the subject:
The Business Model Canvas, is a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool. It allows you to describe, design, challenge, invent, and pivot your business model. The Value Proposition Canvas makes explicit how you are creating value for your customers. It helps you to design products and services your customers want.
DIY Toolkit
The DIY Toolkit has been especially designed for development practitioners to invent, adopt or adapt ideas that can deliver better results:
This is a toolkit on how to invent, adopt or adapt ideas that can deliver better results. It’s quick to use, simple to apply, and designed to help busy people working in development.
The tools are not coming out of thin air. It draws on a study of many hundreds of tools currently being used – here we have included only the ones which practitioners found most useful. Many of them are well documented and have been widely used in other sectors. In that sense this toolkit is standing on the shoulders of giants, and we are happy to acknowledge that. All the tool descriptions include a key reference, so it is easy to trace back their origins and dive deeper into other publications about their application.
Hyper Island Toolbox
This is a toolbox for anyone who wants to do things more creatively and collaboratively in their team or organization. It’s a collection of methods and activities, based on Hyper Island’s methodology, that you can start using today.
Hyper Island is a creative business school which also offers consulting services. Since 1996, Hyper Island has been helping individuals and organizations seize their potential, develop and be leaders in a world of constant change.
IDEO Design Kit
A step-by-step guide to the elements of human-centered design, specifically adapted for NGOs and social enterprises working with low-income communities around the globe. Through a series of methods, activities, and resources, the toolkit can empower individuals and organizations to become designers themselves and enable change in their own communities:
Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving and the backbone of our work at IDEO.org. It’s a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor made to suit their needs. Human-centered design is all about building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for; generating tons of ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for; and eventually putting your innovative new solution out in the world.
The Service Design Toolkit
The Service Design Toolkit is an introduction to the methodology of service design. The toolkit is the outcome of a partnership between Namahn and Design Flanders:
This toolkit holds a number of tools which you can use in your own workshop. For each technique you can find material to help you. The workshop materials can be found under downloads. Also included are a series of portraits that can be used throughout the development process.
The Social Design Methods Menu
A Social Design Methods Menu (4.1mb PDF) in “perpetual beta” by Lucy Kimbell and Joe Julier:
This document summarises the main approaches and methods developed over several years through teaching and supporting managers and entrepreneurs. It is something to read and something to use.
It provides an introduction and manual for those looking for a new way to tackle social and policy issues, such as caring for the elderly or reducing worklessness among young people.
What we call this, whether it is “social design”, “service design” or “human-centred design” isn’t that important – the approach and methods are. But, if you want a definition of social design, the one we offer is this: A practical learning journey taken by people including managers and entrepreneurs, to create useful, usable and meaningful ventures, services and products that combine resources efficiently and effectively, to work towards achieving desired outcomes and impacts on society in ways that are open to contestation and dialogue.
Tags: Austin Center for Design, Business Model Canvas, DIY Toolkit, Hyper Island, IDEO, IDEO Design Kit, Service Design Toolkit, Toolkit, Value Proposition Canvas
