Service design thinking
Looking beyond isolated touchpoints and considering the broader experience ecosystem.
Kolab Foundation cover
Kolab Foundation
Service design and UX for social-impact and innovation projects.
Overview
The work with Kolab Foundation focused on projects operating in the area of social innovation and collaborative problem solving. These initiatives involved multiple stakeholders, unclear starting points, and problems bigger than any single product. My role was to get those groups to a shared problem definition before anyone designed anything.
Goals
Interfaces were rarely the bottleneck. The work was getting multiple stakeholders to agree on what problem they were solving, and only then designing anything.
Facilitation and collaboration
Helping stakeholders align around shared understanding and direction.
Research and synthesis
Identifying patterns, blockers, and opportunities across complex contexts.
Strategic framing
Turning a vague brief into a problem definition people can act on.
Social innovation context
Social innovation context
The work often required moving between stakeholder conversations, systems thinking, journey analysis, and solution framing.
Alignment before deliverables
Alignment before deliverables
Alignment before deliverables
In social-impact projects the scarce resource is rarely design capacity. It's a shared definition of the problem. I ran workshops and used service design methods to get stakeholders to that definition first, because a deliverable built on a disagreement nobody voiced gets quietly abandoned later.
Case study gallery
Case study gallery
Case study gallery
Outcome
The outcome in this kind of work is rarely a screen. It's a group of stakeholders who agree on what the problem is, in writing, for the first time. The interfaces and services come easier after that.