Seven-star service design Abstract: Together with the Prime Minister’s Office of the UAE, FutureGov supported public service professionals across the country to design public services in a more human-centred way. We’ll share how we created a program that enabled teams not only to learn and apply the service design process, but to deliver minimum viable services that made key life moments like ‘having a baby’ and ‘receiving pensions’ a better experience for citizens. We’ll explore the importance of being sensitive to the cultural context and how this should’t only apply to working with clients in the Middle East, but also to clients right at your doorstep. This session will be co-facilitated: a dialogue between designer and client. Together we’ll share what we learned, where we grew, and the biggest takeaways from our work. Innovation: Ambition: Some governments have realised that services are better and cheaper if designed around citizens – the UAE however, is the first country in the gulf region to increase the happiness of its citizens through human centred design. Content: Another innovative aspect lies in the challenges the participants worked on: a “Having a baby” service required the break down of internal silos and the design of cross departmental services. Process: To educate 80 Emirati public service professionals we considered them as users of our service. We observed cultural differences to understand how to align the program with their needs. The consultants partly had to swap roles and become the ones who learn new ways of doing things. The more we learned, the better we could iterate the program.