Many small useful ideas grow from the local community. The local community is the first to notice and experience at the grassroots level what is needed.

One of such local initiatives advanced by the association of a Tallinn city district was setting up information and notice boards in the public space. The money for the production of the notice boards was available. There were also resourceful people present willing to deal with it. Yet, the red tape necessary for setting up 12 notice boards to..

Has the practice of developing public services changed? The experience of cities and countries shows that some shifts in practices can be observed. Until recently, public services have been developed predominantly according to the stay-in-your-box principle. This means that the prevailing practice of developing services in the public sector has every authority (office, department etc.) develop its services specifically from its own viewpoint, without considering its tie-in with other public se..

The blog about Life’s rankings – vol 1 showed that the creative jobs are still described as less favourable than „hard“ jobs in some rankings. Here we want to show that creative competences are the ones that make the future world go around. „Future Work Skills 2020“ as described by the Institute for the Future confirms that (service) designers are the personifiers of future practices. The report analyses the key drivers that will reshape the landscape of work and identifies 10 types of working ..

Service design is still a relatively unknown idea for Estonian (small) firms. Training events for start-up firms are based mainly on business plans logic for the time being. Yet it would be important if the beginning enterprises received some idea of the issue of service design and it would be the most efficient option if the beginning entrepreneur could try out service design methodologies in his/her own firm. There are two options: a) to teach these methodologies to business consultants, who..

Extensive impact of the IT sector

The service sector is largely affected by the continuing development in the IT sector as more and more new interfaces are emerging. They have not yet developed in a number of sectors, but we can say that there is a definite growth trend in that sphere. Banking will probably move over to the web, the number of offices will keep declining until there will be none left. A rapid development of online and mobile banking will occur. These services will be designed st..

The Forbes magazine recently published the rankings of the choice of profession. The ranking was based on the average rate of unemployment among recent graduates and the average annual salary. The TOP 10 of the least perspective specialities consisted of humanities professions with various creative specialities like the arts, music, cinema, as well as (graphic) design amounting to half of them. One of the explanations provided by the authors of the ranking was that the arts and social sciences..

The service sector in the world context – what kind of changes are taking place?

The export of services in the world has increased, grown several times in the past decade. Services are not that easy to export. The development services are usually close to the head office, they would not move that easily to Asia, for example. Besides other aspects, there is the fear of theft of intellectual property. I do not believe that the firms’ research and development services would all move to Asia; on th..

Service Design Magazine highlights fresh, global phenomena related to the outcomes of service design, city planning, drama and interaction studies, and futures research.

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Service Design: On the Evolution of Design Expertise describes the developments and changes in Estonian and Finnish design competences since the 1960s and analyses how service design has emerged as a field of its own. The book presents research results of ServiceD, a three-year servi..

The Club of Rome, a think-tank addressing global problems, published 40 years ago its famous report predicting that the world is approaching the limits of its ecological sustainability. The Club of Rome annual conference in Bucharest this October, dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the report, stated that the warning had not been heeded and the ecological footprint of humanity has become large enough to warrant an unequivocal admission: the limits of carrying capacity of the globe has been e..

Various service providers are increasingly linking their services with the mobile phone world. Quite soon a service provider’s mobile app would be considered “must be” just like a web page used to be some ten years ago. A firm without a proper web page cannot be considered a serious partner and pretty soon the same will apply to mobile apps.

One mobile application winning increasing popularity in Estonia is that of Solaris Cinema. This app was also awarded the Estonian Design Awards gold medal ..