On the 29th of November 2009 a bunch of interesting people got together in the lovely Sense Loft to listen to talks and start conversations around the topic of Service Design at Scale.

We had three really different presentations from really different types of service designers. As with other events we had a mix of design-led people (in this case Julia) and some service designers who don't really identify their work with design practice (Steven and James).

We started with a bit of an intro around why we'd chosen the 'scale' theme. You can click through the slideshow below:

Following on from this, Steven Baker got up to tell us about his experiences of designing the wildly successful M-Pesa mobile banking service for Vodafone/Safaricom whilst working at Sagentia. It's a fascinating tale with some great insights into designing services with mass appeal.

The main message is around simplicity, and I love the elegance of the design, in particular the approach to customer acquisition - if someone sends you M-Pesa (mobile money) and you are not a member, in order to get the cash you need to go to an M-Pesa vendor with your mobile and your national ID card, which are the two things you need to sign up. Ace.

Following on from this, Julia Schaeper took the stand to tell us about her experiences as an Associate at the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. The NHS is a huge organisation (the 3rd largest employer in the world), and Julia is one of just a handful of people within it who is pushing design-led approaches to innovation.

In this presentation she shares her tips for amplifying the service design message and building support across different teams and practices through the design of processes, products and programmes:

Finally, James Gardner, previously head of Innovation at Lloyds Banking Group and now Chief Technology Officer at the Department for Work and Pensions gave us a presentation on his experience of creating an internal 'innovation market'.

The basic idea behind the market was to connect ideas for service innovation from the 'front line' of Lloyd's huge organisation to capital and capacity at the centre. In this presentation James shares some of the successes and failures of the market's design and operation:

All in all, a great evening with lots of inspiring stories. My thanks to all the speakers and to everyone who came along.