Joost Holthuis
When it comes to service design—what people nowadays call design thinking— Joost Holthuis is a true pioneer of service design in the Netherlands and co-founder of the Service Design Network Netherlands. He has been advocating for better user experiences, the importance of user research in product development and collective stakeholder management for over 25 years.
Joost has the gift of uniting everyone around the actual, proven needs of the users, from C-level stakeholders to technical-focused developers. With humor and wit, he rallies teams around the issues that make an actual difference instead of the oftentimes leading internal perspective. In doing this, he has saved his clients millions in wrongly allocated development budgets. Joost Holthuis has the amazing talent to work through complex data and distill it into the essence relevant to your stakeholders and your project. He is a brilliant facilitator and has proven to be able to make the impossible possible with stakeholder co-creation in complex, highly political environments.
Over the years Joost has worked on a great number of mobility, financial and data-oriented projects as a Managing Partner at Edenspiekermann, a global agency delivering service design and UX strategy. Today, as an independent consultant and thought leader, Joost focuses on three things:
- Solving highly complex situations in transportation, mobility and information-heavy sectors as a consultant or subject matter expert.
- Public speaking and coaching: his topics range from service design thinking and innovation to technology, interaction design and concept development, always using real-life examples and cases to provide a deep understanding.
- Facilitating workshops in which he explains how to apply Service Design Thinking in your business, engage with your user’s experience, and identify potential shortcomings with all relevant stakeholders. When Joost isn’t solving his clients’ issues, you can find him tinkering with physical things. Rebuilding his motorcycle, for instance.
Expertise:
Service design, innovation strategy, co-creation, stakeholder management, UX strategy
Three things Joost worked on:
- Introducing a truly passenger-centric user flow, both physical and digital at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol
- Leveraging information and technology to improve railway capacity at ProRail/Dutch Railways
- Redesigning Elsevier’s Service Platform for Scientific Publications
Other clients:
ING Bank, World Economic Forum, Berlin Brandenburg Airport, Swiss Railways, NN Group, TOTO
Side projects:
- Guest Lecturer, Delft University
- Co-host Glitch Podcast