After completion of the course, you will:

1. Understand the development and contemporary state of the field of service design and play theory.
   
2. Comprehend the characteristics of the service/experience economy and the role and impact of services on society.
3. Recognize the specific characteristics of services/experiences and their significance as objects of design and study.
4. Be familiar with the available literature on the subject and the Service Design Studies Initiative (SDSI) reading list.
5. Be familiar with a range of multi-disciplinary play, and creative practice methods and articulate their value to design processes
6. Apply design methods and tools in a team environment and gain experience with working in multicultural and interdisciplinary teams.
7. Develop a thinking-by-doing mindset.

Lecturer: Kristofer Kelly-Frere (CA)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Understand the specific characteristics of services.
   
2. Understand the principles and processes of the human-centred service design approach, basic concepts and terminology.
3. Understand service design concepts and terminology.
4. Be familiar with the history and theory of the field of service design as well as trends and criticisms.
5. Apply service design theories, methods, and tools, including design research and prototyping methods.
6. Identify and empathise with key target groups and gather evidence to understand their needs, preferences, behaviours, and guiding values.
7. Map, define, and articulate complex problems based on a well-justified synthesis of the available information and research evidence.
8. Develop and communicate proposals for solutions and innovation.
9. Understand and navigate the designer’s role in meeting customer needs with business objectives.
10. Define research-based design principles and a design brief to guide idea and concept development processes and justify and rationalise design decisions.
11. Develop a thinking-by-doing mindset.
12. Apply design methods and tools in a team environment and gain experience with working in multicultural and interdisciplinary teams.

Lecturers: Sigrid Öhrling (FI), Stefan Moritz (DE), Kristaps Banga (LV)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Being familiar with theories on group functioning, small group dynamics, and facilitation.
   
2. Understand collaborative team relationships and the role of the facilitator.
3. Practise a range of facilitation styles and techniques.
4. Plan appropriate processes in order to facilitate creative collaboration within teams and with stakeholders.
5. Understand self-presentation and personal communication and facilitation styles.

Lecturer: Ilze Kundziņa (LV), Sigrid Öhrling (FI)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Understand the role and potential of new technologies in the services sector and the application of new technologies in the development of new services or transformation of existing services.
   
2. Understand the principles of sociotechnical systems, align these principles with prior skills, and design sociotechnical systems.
   
3. Prototyping skills for digital services and products in order to test ideas with customers and communicate with development teams.
   
4. Basic knowledge in hardware development (Arduino).
   
5. Being familiar with extended reality, including current devices, their limitations and potential applications for education, healthcare, entertainment, and marketing.
   
6. Experience with creating an extended reality application.
   
7. Basic knowledge in machine learning and neural networks.
   
8. Experience with creating an application that uses machine learning algorithms.
   

Lecturer: Krišjānis Určs (LV), Raitis Linde (LV)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Demonstrate the ability to design visually appealing PowerPoint presentations that effectively communicate your ideas, align with your intended message, and engage diverse audiences.
   
2. Develop and refine your public speaking skills, including clear articulation, confident body language, and effective use of tone and pace, to deliver persuasive and impactful presentations in various professional settings.
3. Construct a professional portfolio that showcases your service design projects, utilizing visual storytelling techniques, clear project narratives, and user-centered design principles to effectively communicate design processes and outcomes.
   
4. Apply techniques for analyzing and understanding the needs and expectations of different audiences, and tailor your communication strategies to engage and persuade these audiences effectively during presentations and pitches.
   
5. Master the ability to structure your messages clearly and logically, ensuring that key points are easily understood and retained by your audience, whether in written, visual, or oral communication.
   
6. Use storytelling techniques to create compelling narratives that connect with your audience emotionally and intellectually, particularly when presenting service design concepts and solutions.
   

Lecturer: Maija Rozenfelde (LV)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Knowledge of civil protection (in accordance with the Government of Latvia Regulation No. 716 of 5 December 2017).
   

Lecturer: Kristīne Kuzņecova (LV)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Share the vision of design as a horizontal discipline that can connect othercompetences.
   
2. Understand the lead competences in an organization, what a leadership team is andby whom this group is formed, what does it mean being a design leader
3. Understand and outline business strategy basics, how design influences strategy,acquire some key strategic frameworks
4. Identify the key elements of a market approach, how a strategic marketing plan isdesigned and in which activities design can be most effective
5. Know the history of design thinking, where it has born, how it was developed, fromwhat culture it was produced and how design frameworks can influence the practiceof designers.
6. Learn what is a value proposition and why it is designed, what represents, why designresearch is so important to produce successful businesses

Lecturer: Tommaso Cora (IT)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Being familiar with techniques for identifying, researching, and critiquing signals of change as potential trend indicators.
   
2. Practised capabilities in sensing and making sense of trends, signals and driving forces.
3. Apply design futures methods and approaches to concrete topics.
4. Experience using methods and frameworks for forecasting hypothetical conditions.
5. Lead scenario-planning exercises for community and companies, an opportunity to develop futures scenarios that can shape your project or company’s path forward

Lecturer: Liene Kupča (LV)

Learning outcomes:

1. Develop an entrepreneurial mindset and gain experience in entrepreneurial activity (as a career alternative to being employed).
   
2. Understand key concepts an apply techniques of the Lean Start-up methodology.
3. Design and validate a business model.
4. Gain experience in developing and launching a new service as a start-up.
5. Apply start-up practices to other working environments (thus learning how to fail less painfully).
6. Gain practical experience in project collaboration and teamwork.
7. Gain experience in competence-based peer-to-peer learning through teamwork.

Lecturer: Viesturs Sosārs (LV)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Understand the basic principles of technology adoption cycles.
   
2. Identify and critically analyse new technology drivers and potential impact to business.
3. Understand and apply basic principles of the Lean–Agile mindset.
4. Translate customer needs into business benefit hypothesis for technology solutions.
5. Understand how to deconstruct sizeable technology solutions into actionable roadmaps.

Lecturer: Kristaps Banga (LV)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Discuss the basic accounting vocabulary, accounting principles, and concepts.
   
2. Prepare an income statement and balance sheet of a company.
3. Discuss the interactions between the financial statements and the way they are used by the stakeholders.
4. Analyse the financial statements of a company.
5. Discuss the financial performance of a company by applying financial ratios.
6. Read the annual report of a company.
7. Apply the costing for a product or service.
8. Prepare a budget for a company.

Lecturer: Natalja Točelovska (LV)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Identify core strategic choices of an organisation.
   
2. Understand the main external drivers affecting an organisation.
   
3. Identify how strategic choices position an organisation in its industry/environment and create competitive advantage.
   
4. Apply the aforementioned when developing and implementing service design activities in particular organisation to facilitate more effective service design impact on reaching organisational goals.
   

Lecturer: Justinas Sukys (LT)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Explain key metaphors for thinking about organisations.
   
2. Demonstrate holistic understanding of the structure of organisational design and processes.
   
3. Demonstrate historically informed understanding of organisational structures.
   
4. Analyse complex/open cases and offer recommendations for organisational improvement.
   

Lecturer: Dmitrijs Kravčenko (LV)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Identify and understand HR processes and how they are linked to other business processes.
   
2. Propose theory-based and best practice-based solutions of how HR processes and approaches can be used, improved, and developed to create and implement service design initiatives (i.e. communication, team development, motivation, performance management).
   

Lecturer: Inga Gleizdāne (LV)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Apply insights from behavioural sciences to better understand the customer and better apply the insights within the organisation.
   
2. Apply behavioural insights in everyday work challenges, including critically assessing the processes currently in place as well as designing better, behaviourally informed interventions for behaviour change.
   

Lecturer: Heidi Reinson (EE)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Understand various information structures and their implications on design.
   
2. Organise and categorise content effectively to analyse various contexts and user needs.
   
3. Develop a heightened sensitivity to dynamic situations and their impact on information representation.
   
4. Establish clear hierarchies in information to aid user comprehension and navigation.
   
5. Utilise graphic tools and techniques to make complex information more accessible and user-friendly.
   
6. Recognise and incorporate the impact of time in the presentation and consumption of information.
   
7. Meet the "Hippocampus" standard in information design, ensuring that your designs resonate with human cognition and memory processes.
   

Lecturer: Martin Foessleitner (AT)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Being familiar with the main empirical social science methods, types of data, and techniques for collecting social science data.
   
2. Apply social science methods to the generation and analysis of data to inform policy, business, and service delivery decisions.
   
3. Knowledge of the specifics of social research and knowledge of various approaches to research and analysis as well as their application possibilities in the assessment of situations and decision-making processes.
   
4. Select and underpin research approaches for a particular situation.
   
5. Elaborate an appropriate research design in order to obtain the necessary empirical information.
   
6. Anticipate potential difficulties related to the study of the particular social issues.
   
7. Knowledge about the principles of elaboration and application in relation to social indicators as well as how these principles are informed by the content of main social indicators and how they critically evaluate validity of these indicators.
   
8. Knowledge about the main elements of social forecasting and skills to make use of appropriate methodological approaches.
   
9. Understand the application of different approaches, settings, and patterns that could be used as practical tools for identifying different challenges and evaluating possible solutions.
   

Lecturer: Iveta Cīrule (LV)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Understand and outline leadership against managerial roles, deferent leadership styles, and their situational appropriateness.
   
2. Understand and outline appropriate leadership practices (e.g. communication, motivation, decision-making, negotiation, emotional intelligence).
   
3. Understand and outline the roles of leaders in processes of change management and the factors that need to be considered.
   
4. Identify and outline and how various design approaches can be applied when leading transformative processes.
   
5. Assess opportunities, challenges, and limitations of external and internal environments in service design initiatives.
   
6. Understand, outline, and develop leadership practices (individually and in teams), such as facilitate, setting-up, initiate, and lead service design projects.
   

Lecturer: Jonathan Howard (UK)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Understand the phases of research, the construction of a research plan, methodological choices and the utilization of literary sources.
   
2. Understand the construction of a theoretical basis, the possibilities to combine the theoretical part and service design production/project, and the production of research results and conclusions.
3. Be familiar to deal with questions related to research reporting.

Lecturer: Krista Korpikoski (FI)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Identify the potential of digitalisation and its role in the development of services
   
2. Identify factors affecting the functionality and usability of digital services
3. Outline the principles of artificial intelligence solutions in digital services
4. Design digital services in a human-centred way using service design methods
5. Outline areas of expertise related to the development of digital services

Lecturer: Krista Korpikoski (FI) Kiwoong Nam (KR)

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Integrate service design into the strategic planning of an organisation and wider societal and cultural contexts
   
2. Manage an organisation’s service ecosystem
3. Identify the possibilities of service design in strategic planning
4. Evaluate services from a critical perspective
5. Analyse personal activities from the perspective of sustainable development and ethics

Lecturer: Krista Korpikoski (FI)

Elective courses can be selected among the courses available at the University of Lapland website. Elective courses take place on weekdays (Mon-Fri). Teaching language, qualifications and among of seats may limit the access to the courses. Representatives of the Ulapland will help with the selection of the elective studies on request.

Some examples of the elective studies:

• Survival Finnish (CEFR A1.2) 2 ETCS
  
• Finnish 1 (CEFR A1.2) 3 ETCS
• Finnish Culture 3 ETCS
• Introduction to Arctic Cultures 5 ETCS
• Arts-Based and Community-Based Participatory Research Approaches 3 ECTS
• Basic Course on Qualitative Research Methods 3-5 ECTS
• Quantitative Methods 5 ECTS
• Guide to IPR 5 ECTS

After completion of the course, you will:

1. Create an overview of existing canonical examples, best practices, and academic state of the art in a chosen subfield of service design.
   
2. Independently plan, execute, and (re-)frame design activities at an advanced level in a chosen subfield (individually or in teams) within the time and resources available.
3. Choose techniques suitable for an advanced-level design project and apply them appropriately.
   
4. Perform, document, and communicate design activities as part of knowledge production within the framework of service design research.
   
5. Communicate, present, and discuss a project verbally, in written form, and through other means appropriate for the chosen subfield and the nature of the project.
   
6. Critically reflect upon the design-based research methodology applied, including identification of the needs for further research and learning.
   
7. Assess an advanced-level design project.
   
8. Assess the professional and academic value of practice and knowledge contributions to service design research.
   
9. Become skilled in independent data acquisition, creative problem solving, scientific thinking, and in managing appropriate research methods.
   
10. Be familiar with the literature and research methods related to service design through your own research process.
    

Lecturer: Estonian Academy of Arts / University of Lapland.