The Design Research Society, founded in 1966, organized DRS 2012 conference in Bangkok, Chulalongkorn University last week. This was the first time for Southeast Asia to host international design research conference. The informal theme of the conference was: ReSearch: Uncertainty, Contradiction and Value, as the conference aimed to highlight the significance of design research for sustainable development and encourage a distinctly contemporary exploration of issues facing international design communities.

Essi from SINCO team had the possibility to go there and present joint article titled: Realizing design thinking through a service design process and an innovative prototyping laboratory – Introducing Service Innovation Corner (SINCO). This paper looks at the connection between service design process and design thinking and then discusses possibilities of prototyping in service design. The main focus of the paper is in representing the elements and methods of SINCO service prototyping laboratory and how these can benefit service development in different business cases. In our opinion service design process and our laboratory concept together provide a tool for realizing design thinking especially in multi-disciplinary teams.

Proceedings from the conference will be published digitally at conference website, but if you can’t wait you can start for example from this one: David Parkinson, Erik Bohemia, Joyce Yee and Neil Smith: Design Process and Organisational Strategy: A Storytelling Perspective. Next time this conference will be “next door” as the host for the Design Research Society 2014 conference is Umeå, Sweden.

SINCO blog will now have a short break, as all the team members are enjoying their well-earned summer holidays. Thank you for all our partners for the past spring, it has been a pleasure to work with you. Thanks also to our active students who have been involved in a variety of assignments! We’ll be back in autumn!