Prototyping sits deep in the service designer’s DNA. Hypotheses, conjecture and assumptions are no match for seeing a real user or customer interact with a prototype, to determine what works well and what needs to be improved.

This year our Service Design Global Conference (SDGC) will once again bring the best of the best together to celebrate all that is new and noteworthy within the practice of service design.

The SDN Academy is a new global educational initiative recently launched by the Service Design Network in response to the industry’s growing demand for quality training for service design professionals at various stages of their careers.

I first learned about prototyping when I was a web designer back in the mid 1990s. Paper prototyping and, later, stubbed-out interfaces with little to no back-end functionality allowed user experience designers like me to figure out what worked (and what didn’t) before more costly development began.

In the rapidly-changing world of today’s academic library, perhaps nothing is evolving faster than the library service model itself. Students belonging to the so-called ‘Generation Z’ now enter university expecting its library to be a seamless provider of immediate information and assistance, in addition to serving as a central location for social interaction.

Compared to other research efforts carried out in innovation contexts, design research has a unique freedom to adapt methods, creatively interpret and project several years ahead. Exploratory innovation projects in particular need this subjectivity to maximise inspiration.

Prototyping complex service experiences that feel authentic when testing with real users is a perennial challenge for service designers. There is a case for making use of building blocks from real-world services, coupled with a human element, for creating experience prototypes to simulate complex, AI-enabled experiences.

Bodystorming enables healthcare teams to better understand and design for the medical staff and patients they serve. This role-playing methodology provides new perspectives on existing problems and constructs an ‘opportunity space’ to imagine novel, innovative solutions that healthcare so desperately needs.

Hospitals and emergency departments are complex, high-stakes environments with the potential for patient harm. This makes testing new service concepts challenging. Experience prototypes must be appropriate for clinical practice and situated in the real context of care (high fidelity), while minimising disruption using temporary processes and workflow supports (low burden).

When facing a challenge with many players, a physical space and a race against time, a board game can help designers and stakeholders illustrate and iterate on different collaboration models.

Indonesia has more than 250 million people, with half of them living on less than US$2.5 a day1, and approximately 66 percent ‘unbanked’2. Our client, one of the state-owned banks, wanted to help people save their money in the bank so they can have access to financial assistance. In this article, we will share lessons learned from experience prototyping the solution with the client to target this segment of the population.

Emotions have an important influence on how we think and behave. Incorporating emotion analytics in the video prototype evaluation process allows service designers to gather feedback from viewers based on moments of high emotional arousal in videos. This article explains how to incorporate emotion analytics into semistructured interviews when evaluating video prototypes.

Product designers Joydeep Sengupta and Adam Cochrane look into the issues of prototyping at scale, sharing insights on how fashion retailer Zalando is going about building a prototyping culture within a 14,000 person organisation.

Creating a structure for prototyping as a tool supports the acceptance and solidification of prototyping as a philosophy. Many companies buy into prototyping as a philosophy and a set of ideas and methodologies that help de-risk innovation projects. The institutionalised practice of prototyping, however, is rare.

With disruptive technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence), 5G and IoT (Internet of Things), it has become harder than ever before to imagine our future and the experiences it will contain. The future is moving towards an era of pervasive and complex interactions with intelligent agents that promises unpredictable experiences.

Experience prototyping can help designers understand existing experiences or explore and evaluate new design ideas.1 Insights from behavioural science suggest potential pitfalls of these activities, but also how to amplify their benefits.