It's a choose-your-own user experience adventure! (well, sort of...)
Are you tired of expensive training courses that just regurgitate generic corporate playbooks in dull conference centres and set meaningless tasks with no clear outputs?
Adventures in Service Design is different: How many workshops have you taken recently where you got to define user profiles in a fairytale castle, assess risk for a dinosaur safari park or map complex integrated services in a space station...?
Are you ready to take the first step on your own quest for holistic user-centred products and services?
Read on, brave traveller...
Adventures in Service Design (ASD) is a whole new way to learn user-centred design methods and systems-thinking approaches in a format that is genuinely entertaining and engaging. In each workshop we dive into Fantasy Land to learn and practice new service design skills in a choice of alternate realities, each populated with a array of characters (i.e. users)
Your Gamesmaster will be there to guide you through a series of tasks and techniques, all curated over 10+ years of industry experience, but ultimately it's YOU who makes the real magic happen!
Forget "Death by PowerPoint": these workshops are all about diving in, getting involved and practicing new practical skills from Day 1. So let's make your own user-centred, data-driven fairytale come true!
Team up to level up!
Unlock your creativity with unique workshop scenarios. Work and learn in teams to apply tried-and-tested techniques in a way that is genuinely fun and entertaining.
The journey continues...
Receive learning materials to take away with you that will help you to apply everything you've learned in Fantasy Land to the real world and take your own Adventure in Service Design even further.
Gain new superpowers
Learn human-centred design principles and service design methodologies that are proven to work and are widely used in both public and private sectors.
Why take an ASD workshop?
When we're facing complex real-world problems with high stakes involved, it's easy and perfectly human to get "analysis paralysis" - it can be hard to know what to focus on. This course will give you some practical tools to help break big, complex systems and challenges down into manageable parts.
By stepping momentarily out of reality into a world that is safe to experiment in, we can learn those new skills and apply them in a free environment. It's as if finally, we can "see the enchanted wood for the talking trees", if you will.
We are actively encouraged to learn through play in our early years, but at a very young age, that is suddenly shut down by the education system, which treats play as antithetical to learning. This is horribly, tragically WRONG.
By stepping out of the norm and into Fantasy Land, students can leave all their preconceptions behind them (about how things should work and how they're supposed to tackle a problem) and focus purely on the methods and the outputs. Educators call this "Intentional play" - the act of having fun, but with purpose (as opposed to "organised fun", which normally involves shoe-horning some abstracted lessons into a team Away Day that no one actually enjoys)
Learning through play is a powerful methodology and there is a body of research that shows that new ideas and skills are learned and embedded much more easily when we enjoy learning them.
How many times are we told to "think outside the box"? But often that can be difficult to translate in practical terms. Well, in a "choose your own user experience adventure" YOU design the box - it can be whatever size and shape you want it to be. This takes out-of-the-box thinking to a whole new level.
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Any form of group learning (be it in-person or online) can be a bit daunting and stressful, especially in a group of strangers and/or colleagues we feel we need to impress. Removing ourselves temporarily from everyday life into a make-believe world helps to cut through the ice, remove any vestiges of seniority/pay grade and encourages students to relax and enjoy the learning experience in an environment where it's perfectly safe to fail.
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I enjoyed how it brought out all the engagement from the team - the fantasy/sci-fi examples really helped people share/chat and not feel like they could get an answer wrong - but still helped us explore the techniques
Genuinely the most enjoyable 'training session' i've done in a long time - and memorable which is even more important :) Thanks again Al!
Sam, 2025
my cheeks hurt from laughing so much - such a fun session, thanks Al!
Erin, 2025
most fun risk planning I've ever done!
Katia, 2025
Was a great way to go through something potentially quite dry in a genuinely fun and lighthearted way
Charlie, 2025
Loved that the scenarios were so outside the box - helped me get out of the daily grind mindset! It made the workshop really fun overall, coming up with risks related to dragons instead of legislation.
Pippa, 2025