Lou Downe
They/He
Founder and Director
The School of Good Services
Lou Downe is the author of Good Services, the bestselling book on how to design services that work and the founding director of the School of Good Services, an organisation that helps people to build the skills they need to design and scale great services.
They are the former Director of Design for the UK Government where they founded the discipline of service design, growing a 2000 strong team of designers into one of the largest, and most influential design teams in the UK - winning a Designs of the Year award and a D&AD lifetime achievement award.
Their new book, Bad Services, is out this June.
Talk
Bad services: how to fix services that don’t work
Every year we spend an estimated 15 billion hours in the UK ‘administering our personal lives’.
That’s roughly an hour per day, or just over a month per year resetting our passwords, finding customer numbers and requesting refunds. Why, despite advances in technology, does it feel like the services we use are getting worse?
The answer is simple, but the solution isn't.
In this talk, bestselling author, educator and service activist Lou Downe demystifies the reasons why, despite our best efforts, most organisations struggle with the same five problems that stop them from providing services that work, and what we can do about it.