Are you truly getting what you need?

Today, the phrase ‘service design’ is used to sell everything from advertising to software development. It strongly depends on the company providing service design what kinds of services it ‘designs’. If, for example, the company background is in software, it is certain that the comprehensive service being offered is based on digitalisation, whether it forms an essential part of your company’s service or not. When the used tool is a hammer, all solutions are always nails.

The current service design boom needs a new approach. Before service design, a strategy should be formulated: For which future challenges are we seeking solutions? What are correct solution options for the challenges that emerge? Could it be a screw instead of a nail?

The goal of ED’s strategic design is to recognise and anticipate future challenges and business opportunities as well as to produce creative, analytically validated and carefully documented solution options based on the user’s understanding to the right problem – solutions that are truly needed.

In strategic design, competence cannot be based on knowing one subject area. Extensive design competence, trend awareness and fine-tuned methods help to identify social, economic and technical factors that enable success stories. Empathy, the ability to empathise with others combined with solid user- and customer-orientation are key competence areas that, combined with years of experience and routines in different business activities, bring out the right options for design needs. This is ED at its best.

Strategic design is an unbiased operating method that guides the success of the customer. It does not offer just a nice ride together without anything concrete, nor does it offer the most recent technology as the solution just because it is exciting. All begins from the correct recognition of needs and solutions that can be discovered for those needs in an enlightened and open-minded manner.

With the help of strategic design, we want to offer our help in finding the right solution options. Only then is it time to list the most suitable service designers, industrial designers or other design partners.

Success comes by designing it together.