Hello, I’m Nick Marsh, Sidekick Studio’s new (and first!) Service Design Director.

I’m joining Sidekick to build up our design-led consulting offering to clients across the UK and beyond. I’m really excited by Sidekick’s unique combination of design thinking, technology know-how and socially progressive agenda – It’s a great time to be joining a small company with such big ideas.

We all know that UK plc, and the public sector in particular, face major challenges over the next few years, as we all try to do more with less, and achieve best for least – the question is, how do we get there from where we are today?

Service design, or the application of design-thinking to services, provides a reliable toolkit for all types of service organisations and the people that work in them to innovate their services around the needs of the people that use and provide them.

Over the past six years I’ve helped service organisations from across the public and commercial sectors make the most out of design and design thinking to create useful, usable and desirable services that save money and make customers happy.

The common thread running through all successful projects I’ve been involved with has always been a combination of applied creativity and a clear focus on designing for and with the people who will actually be using and providing the services.

Putting people at the heart of service design and innovation has two simple, clear benefits – firstly it creates genuine opportunities to identify ways of doing things differently by stepping outside the service organisation’s world. Secondly, it de-risks the process of creating new offerings by checking utility, usability and desirability of new ideas with customers in small manageable stages.

Combining this user centred approach to service innovation with the scalability of the kinds of web based technology platforms that Sidekick is developing and deploying for clients today creates hugely exciting opportunities to magnify the impact of the service design approach. I don’t know any other studio that offers this combination of design-led creativity and technical expertise together. The fact that we are focussed on helping organisations that want to do better by society is the icing on the cake!

I can’t wait to get stuck into the many projects and problems that Sidekick is already tackling, and to start having new conversations with new people that think we could help them design better services – I’ll be sharing insights and stories from this work here, and on my personal blog so please get in touch with me at nick@sidekickstudios.net if you’d like to chat about service design, our projects, or working at Sidekick.