I have some big news to announce.
After six years teaching and researching service design at the Hochschule Luzern I will be leaving my post there at the end of August. It has been an informative and formative time for me.
Thanks to all my former students on whom I have inflicted my prototypes of how to teach service design. Also my colleagues who have put up with me complaining about our own, internal, services. They have all given me some great insights and experiences over the years.
The biggest part of my news is that my family and I will be returning to Sydney, Australia in early January 2016. My new position will be as a Service Design Director for Fjord’s Fjord’s Service Design Academy in their Sydney office. The Sydney office is headed up by Bronwyn van der Merwe — The Service Design Director there.
As well as working under Fjord’s Group Director of Organizational Evolution, Shelley Evenson, helping to shape and teach service design and innovation within the group in Australia and globally, I’ll also involved in providing strategic input, mentoring and guidance on client engagements. I really couldn’t ask for a more suitable job description to match my skills.
Since Fjord was acquired by Accenture Interactive almost two years ago, it opens up the challenges of working in such a large organisation, but also the opportunities of working at an enterprise scale with a level of access to top tier clients that few design agencies get the chance to do. I have a healthy mix of excitement and anxiety about the whole move and new position, but I’m really looking forward to doing some great work with talented colleagues. Feel the fear and do it anyway, as they say.
Obviously the excitement is tinged with sadness about leaving behind family, friends, cats and our lovely apartment that we renovated only 18 months ago. But we are compensated by reigniting our old friendships in Sydney, great working challenges, lifestyle, yoga, food, weather and beaches. Oh, and a Prime Minister with the rhetorical flair of a ten year-old bully, but incompetent politicians seem to be par for the course everywhere at the moment.
The other noticeable change from when we used to live in Australia is that smartphones and social media happened. Despite the time and attention sucking negatives of these, I feel somuch more connected to friends and family back in the UK and around the world than in the pre-2006 Dark Ages that I sometimes forget I haven’t actually seen these people for some time.
HSLU will be looking for a person or people to replace me before September, so if you are interested in a mix of teaching and research in Service Design and, ideally, speak German and English, let me know. There will obviously be an official process, but we want to put the feelers out already.
See you on the sunny side of the planet.
(P.S. That is not Fjord’s actual logo in the photo above. I walked past it the other day at Europa Park. It must be a sign.)
