Without good user-centred design approaches, AI technologies will most likely struggle to be integrated into complex service industries such as healthcare and travel. The challenge of the future will become how to design authentic experiences within these service contexts.

Designing for the future provides a chance to question the status quo and build a path towards equity. However, when we focus on solving problems within existing systems, it is difficult to challenge the system itself. Instead, what if we designed services for a future in which we believe differently?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has triggered many debates since its birth in the 1950s. From dystopian views to high praise, opinions about the effects and role of AI vary from one person to the next. In the field of service design, however, the topic of applying AI is still in its infancy.

More realistic and human-like technology presents unique challenges for service designers. In this brief essay, I will introduce some of these tough ethical challenges and explain why it is imperative that we design relationships with digital services that are constructive, non-deceptive and non-abusive.

Some of the Smart Service Artefacts (SSAs)1 that have not been able to establish emotional connections with users will continue to face an ongoing challenge of user drop-off.

One of the fundamental aspirations of service design is to attend to human needs and relations that are unique to service interactions. However, in our technology-laden world, the boundaries between a service and a product are blurring.

The future of service design has become a trendy topic in the service design community worldwide. Recognising the scarcity of evidence-based analysis of this topic, we applied foresight tools to explore four alternative scenarios for the development of service design in the coming years.

As we shift towards an AI world, service designers have an important role to play in designing a new relationship between humans and computers in the workplace.

Pressures for efficiency and savings that drive digital innovation projects in the UK healthcare sector have created an increased focus on short-term goals and a fragmentation of services.

While walking across the Millennium Bridge in London earlier this year, I noticed a group of people standing around and looking down curiously at a man who was laying at their feet.

As the pace of technological innovation continues unbroken, the services we use in our day-to-day lives more and more resembles the stuff of science fiction films.

At the end of July 2018, a LinkedIn search revealed 1,248 people with “Journey Manager” in their current or previous titles. Not all of these people are managing the types of journeys that you’re probably thinking of.

The business field of service design is maturing, as more organisations have embraced the ideas and methods of design thinking and customer centricity as a way of improving customer experiences to drive profitability.

Over the last ten years or so, innovation labs, under a variety of names, have been the weapon of choice for a number of large organisations attempting to accelerate product innovation and change.

Designers today are increasingly accountable for the execution and scale of their projects. These conditions demand not only including the perspectives of human desirability, technological feasibility, and business viability (‘HBT’), but also organisational capability (‘O’), so their ideas can gather the support necessary to make it to market.

When we as service designers work with organisations with the objective of changing the services they provide, we often think of these organisations as ‘systems’ consisting of parts and processes that can be moved around.