“A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

Soft skills and human relationships are critical to creating services in the real world. Behind every great service is a team of highly organised people working together towards a common goal.

Without a critical mass of cultural supports, even the most impressive service design outputs can end up dead before they make it to customers. As the practice of service design evolves, so does the need for a way to visualise and measure organisational cultures necessary to support it.

Service innovations are largely shaped by economic, behavioural and technological market forces. As service designers, we generally do a great job helping organisations understand how people create value and how organisations themselves must advance their technology to differentiate from competitors.

Design research has always been an integral part of service design practice. As the services we work with have added more digital touchpoints, it has become natural to perform increasing amounts of research in the digital domain.

As service designers, we could talk endlessly about the times our designs were foiled. Not by customers, but by the stakeholders needed to implement the service.

The service designer’s prototyping toolbox of role playing, mockups, paper or clickable prototypes offers great ways to model potential new realities.

In service design, the evaluation and selection of ideas can often be a painful, time-consuming process. We need tools to help designers and stakeholders confidently select concepts and prototypes worth developing.

Too many great service design concepts are dying unnecessarily. Reflecting on some personal failures to secure beloved concepts’ safe passage to implementation, Karin Lycke and David Griffith-Jones set out to understand whether this is due to deficiencies in how empathy is transferred during service design initiatives.

Customer journeys usually include several touchpoints at which the customer transacts with a business. Transactions occur when stakeholders exchange value, as in “I pay some money in exchange for your product”.

In his dual roles as Design Director and Business Director at London-based Uscreates, Robbie Bates juggles the challenges of addressing the evolving nature of service design, and of the service design agency itself.

Service Design Day 2018 was the biggest yet! It is great to see the service design community come together for Service Design Day. This day is all about celebrating the power and spirit of service design, as well as connecting our amazing international community.

The issue of Touchpoint you read on your screen represents a significant milestone. With this issue, Touchpoint enters its tenth year of publication, having first been published in early 2009.

SDN Finland hosted its second national conference in Helsinki on April 25, 2018. More than 300 participants and volunteers attended the one-day event, which focussed on the theme “The Evolving Role of Service Design”.

“I'm a conference junkie. I've been going for years and I really love the energy I get off of some… This one was so different... I learned something! Several things, in fact..."

With this issue of Touchpoint, we celebrate a milestone tenth year of publication. And rather than choosing a simple theme, we decided to tackle one of the trickiest problems of service design: How does service design continue delivering value through to implementation? In other words, what happens after that second diamond?