Jamie Kwan…because when a team freezes, play becomes a serious design tool. Here, I reflect on six years of in-house service design and translate those learnings into four repeatable habits that use the mechanics of play to lead change from within.
Does this meme look familiar?
If you’re like me, the last few years of responding to fast-moving political, socio-cultural, and macroeconomic shifts can be distilled into this one image. It’s so relatable that this cartoon dog became shorthand across my peer network for a shared exhaustion.
When organisations are under pressure, the vibe can get very “this is fine”: everyone is busy, everyone is tired, and everyone quietly retreats into survival mode. Collaboration thins out. Experimentation feels risky. Work still gets done, but the spark, honesty, and shared sense of momentum can disappear.
My article, “Service Design Tools for Brave Play”, explores what service designers can do from inside that kind of environment. It introduces Brave Play as a lighter-weight way to lead change: small, repeatable interventions that use play mechanics to make discomfort easier to enter, name, and work through.
Rather than treating play as a novelty, the piece treats play as a practical design material. It connects ideas from adaptive leadership, emotional safety, and service design practice, then turns them into four simple “moves”: making the magic circle invisible, expecting the unexpected, rewarding continuous discovery, and returning to recess period. Each move is designed to lower the cost of honesty, keep teams in inquiry for longer, and help them take one meaningful next step together.
The article draws on my in-house service design practice across enterprise technology, financial services, and healthcare. At its heart is a simple question: when teams are stuck, afraid, or over-optimised, how might service designers use the tools we already have to help people play bravely again?
As part of this article, I built out two interactive websites (with the help of Claude!) that were designed to help ‘make the magic circle invisible’ — two tools that go hand-in-hand with one another, and can quickly be implemented in your next stand-up as a way to clear the air, and dare I say, use absurdity to make honesty a touch more accessible. Check out the Emoji Grid and Spark Cards and let me know what you think!
The article is part of Touchpoint Vol. 17 No. 2 — Emerging Service Design. Touchpoint, the Journal of Service Design, is published by the Service Design Network and is available here: Touchpoint Vol. 17 No. 2 — Emerging Service Design.
a quick bio...
💁♂️ Jamie Kwan is a Designer & Strategist working at the intersection of spatial, human, and digital experience design. Most recently, Jamie was a Lead Service Designer at Atlassian, working from within to scale, activate, and empower white-glove service experiences for Enterprise customers. Outside of work, Jamie is usually making sense of how people move through change. A recovering architect and creative-tech dabbling designer, Jamie blends research, participatory design, and strategic storytelling to turn messy human realities into direction teams can actually build from. The through-line is always the same: innovation starts with people, and the fastest route to meaningful progress is often a well-designed invitation to play, reflect, and try again. ✨ Through this work, Jamie is on a mission to bring the power of play, storytelling, and hero-centred experience design into how we envision the future. Selected clients include the Panama Canal Authority, CJ Group, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), AIRMILES, Canadian Tire Corporation, Cineplex Entertainment, and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC).