Prototyping an AI mentor to spark civic imagination in young people This article presents ‘Echo’, a student project developed within the Service Design and Strategic Innovation (SDSI) master programme in collaboration with the European Movement Latvia. It explores how we reframed youth civic disengagement as a challenge of personal relevance and prototyped an AI-assisted tool linking career aspirations with civic imagination.

Service design has matured beyond its origins to become a transformative force within organisations. As businesses and public institutions face complex challenges, service design offers a path toward sustainable, human-centred transformation.

We Were Never Just Mappers In the age of AI, strategy is no longer a static plan – it is a living, sensing system that learns, forecasts and adapts in real time. Traditional service design, once rooted in experience mapping and participatory workshops, is now evolving into the orchestration of intelligent infrastructures: systems that don’t just serve, but continuously evolve. AI, strategy is no longer a static plan – it is a living, sensing system that learns, forecasts and adapts in real time. Traditional service design, once rooted in experience mapping and participatory workshops, is now evolving into the orchestration of intelligent infrastructures: systems that don’t just serve, but continuously evolve.

Design plays a critical role in supporting organisations in regulated sectors, not just to meet cost, growth, and risk imperatives, but also to deliver outcomes that consider purpose, wellbeing, sustainability, and ultimately, a fair exchange of value for all stakeholders.

In the Midwest region of the USA, in a city known for its legacy of innovation and resilience, is a leading health system and one of the region’s largest employers. They are investing in a major facility expansion and transforming their workforce development strategy to meet future talent needs and empower the local community.

Switzerland's second-largest bank transformed its 200-year-old hiring process using service design to create a seamless, candidate-first experience. A cross-functional team overhauled digital interfaces, internal culture and recruitment processes by mapping pain points, creating unified service blueprints and measuring candidate satisfaction and team collaboration improvements. This case study provides a roadmap for organisations competing for talent in today's market.

The circular economy opens up major opportunities to drive efficiency, build resilience and unlock growth across organisations and sectors. As catalysts, connectors and curators, service designers can turn circular ambitions into lasting impact.

This article explores how service design can redefine the university experience and presents the case of Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (UAI) in Chile.

Jumbo and Santa Isabel are two Chilean supermarket chains belonging to the Cencosud group which, although sharing the same service vision, cater to different customer segments. Jumbo focuses on quality, variety and an extensive shopping experience, while Santa Isabel prioritises convenience, speed and competitive prices.

Service design has long focused on making sense of complexity – mostly through established qualitative methods. For decades, we have mapped customer journeys, visualised stakeholder relationships and built service blueprints to better understand human experiences.

Amid rising material excess, professional organisers (POs) offer more than tidy homes, they support emotional transformation. Empathetic, behaviour-led approach from PO offers valuable insights for service designers, revealing opportunities to create more sustainable, inclusive, and human-centred services that foster lasting change in people’s lives.

This article explores how service design can respond to one of the most persistent business challenges of our time: the high failure rate of transformation efforts. One of the biggest challenges that service designers face in transformation work is legitimacy – how do you influence change when you don’t control the levers of power?

Innovation has never mattered more. Service providers are squeezed between the push for operational excellence, the pull of rising customer expectations, the pressure of constant change and the promise of emerging technologies. In volatile times, leaders with carefully curated innovation portfolios lead with clarity and conviction.

In this interview, Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes speaks to the director of Service Works, a UK-based training and consultancy organisation which specialises in the public sector.

In this interview, Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes learns about how Nastasia Klen has focussed a broad range of efforts towards better-establishing service design in Ukraine.

What Museums Can Learn from the Swiss Events Industry As museums adapt to a digital age, optimising visitor touchpoints enhances accessibility, engagement and loyalty. Drawing on Swiss events industry practices, this article highlights strategies such as digital on-boarding, interactive in-visit tools and post-visit feedback, advocating for a holistic, lifecycle-oriented approach to inclusive museum experience design.