Newness in Scandinavia
This month we launched Savvy Design Collaborative in Stockholm, Sweden. Together with two colleagues from the now defunct Swedish service design pioneer Transformator Design, we’ve created a new entity that looks to build upon past successes while adding new and strategic initiatives.
All of sudden, there are service design firms everywhere. One big trend we see are that management consultant firms seem to have a never-ending appetite for purchasing design firms. And it’s not just the big elephants like McKinsey, Deloitte and Accenture; now even the middle tier of consultants has opened up their wallets and buying, so they don’t get left out. That’s what happened with Transformator.
In that world there are success stories and failures. The strategies used to integrate the design firms vary. In every case, like most mergers and acquisitions, the culture challenges are huge. And not always to the advantage of the design firms and its employees.
The other trend we see is that most, if not all, digital firms now say they are service design AND digital firms. As someone who spent years and years working in digital strategy and marketing, I think this is a logical step and one that should reflect what interactive media is all about. From experience, I find that it’s sexier to call the research and strategy part of digital “service design” instead. It’s great, but it’s still a small, thin layer on top of the real business, which is digital production.
It is Savvy’s intent to stay in-between these two trends: to keep as much independence and flexibility as we can, as an organization, in order to keep us agile in this ever-changing environment, and to push deeper into the huge opportunity and benefits of service design as a platform for change, innovation and humanity.
Our mission is succinct:
To help organizations creating meaningful and positive change in society and daily life through people-driven design.
And we’re focusing on three things:
- To help make things at organizations better through service design.
- To help organizations innovate and collaborate through service design.
- To help leaders transform their organizations through service design.
We’ve also added the word Collaborative to our name. Our intent is to partner with great groups of people who can build, create and guide. That could mean everything from digital and AI partners, to product and supply-chain designers, to organizational development and workplace designers. But the word “collaborate” also captures our approach to our work with each other, our clients and our partners.
One key element of our new firm is that we include capacity building in every single one of our jobs. It’s not enough for us, or other firms, to do great design work. If we really want to change the way the world runs, from a systems and process centric approach back to a people and human-centered approach, we need more people, groups and organizations using design to create and deliver, internally and externally. That means we have the hugely important task of guiding, educating, training and coaching others.
At the end of the day, our goal is to assist every single one of our clients to grow and develop their own culture of innovation, sustainability and evolution.
Right now, there are four of us at Savvy. In a month and a half, we’ll be six. By the end of the spring 2019, we’ll be ten to fifteen. Things are moving quickly and in the right direction. If you’re interested in learning more, collaborating, or working here please reach out.
More updates to come on this exciting ride.
