Karachi’s version of Global Service Jam 2019 — A photo essay
Its been a while since I had written, so thought I would use this opportunity to write about Karachi’s first Service Design Jam. Won’t keep it verbose and will let the images do the talking.
Whats’s this Global Service Jam you speak of?
You can read more here, but basically its a 2-day action packed workshop where participants from all across the globe get together come together and work on a secret theme, which isn’t revealed until the event day itself. With the theme in mind, participants split up in teams and walk through the principles of service design and create a service.
Just a week before this happened, I got to know about it and couldn’t miss this chance to work with a striving design fraternity here in Karachi! I hadn’t heard about such a thing before coming across the local event page, but when I read it up, it looked promising!
Event weekend
Early Saturday and Sunday morning, we got to know the other participants in not the usual way, and the icebreakers were pretty fun and refreshing!
The day then kicked off with a few introductory slide decks walking us through what was going to happen in the next 48 hours. This was followed by the grand reveal of this year’s theme, which took us all by surprise! I was personally expecting something slightly more defined like a global cause… but it was the word ‘BLUE’ , everything else was to our interpretation of the word.
Soon enough, we got moving. With a quick brainstorming session, we listed our brains out to post-its and voted towards the most like-able of the thoughts to create a service around. Eventually we sifted down to four key problems spaces to solve for: addiction, baby blue, depression and plastic waste. My preference lied with the depression theme, as it sounded the most unusual topic to work with.
As soon as the teams were formed, a lot of activities followed, where we expanded on our problem areas and got to work.
This included a few refreshers, with reference slides, research tips and pointers to keep in mind while conducting research.
Once we defined the problems we were attempting to solve with our propositions, we begun storyboarding of how the end result might look like. First individually, but then together as a team
We ended day one at a high and a retro of learning, and what to look forward the next day. I spent some time later in the day to view what was happening across the globe and it was fascinating to see so many people from different continents working around the same theme.
The next day to quickly get back to work, and move on to the crazy space, where we had to prototype.
Every got down to business, some chose cardboard, some chose paper, tape and markers.
Us? We chose to scavenge for the right selection of LEGOs to create our prototype.
What good is a prototype without testing, so the next step was to walk our concept through a few possible users, and spectators.
After getting feedback, we gathered our thoughts and iterated, which was soon followed by wrapping up our entries. This process basically included going through the community’s participant portal and upload our case study details and attachments. Once that was over, it was time for all of the teams to present their ideas to the audience and walk them through our journey.
The event concluded with a summary of what all of us accomplished in this short period of time. I personally interpreted this as a 4 or 5 day design sprint squeezed into 2 days of extremely fast paced service design exercises. A highly recommended event to participate in, regardless of your level of expertise.
Credit to Global Service Jam for initiating this movement. Special thanks to #Designist, #Oraan and the #Hive for executing and facilitating this event, and the great variety of picture to chose from to make this piece fun to scan through. Looking forward to next year’s jam!
