While user-centric approaches to service innovation proved to be effective, innovators often omit that the focal user is not the only one influencing the decision for or against a new service. For example, when examining the introduction of social service robots in an elderly care setting, the final decision is influenced not only by the elderly (the focal actor), but also by family members, friends, GPs, nurses, and other professional service providers.

The North American service design context is facing a surge in demand from a diverse set of companies. Companies’ efforts towards fulfilling that demand are facing very interesting challenges.

For this issue of Touchpoint, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes caught up with Pete Fossick (Service Design Program Director, GTS Design), to learn about the opportunities afforded to him as a service designer working within global giant IBM, and to hear his thoughts on where service design education should be heading.

Service design has witnessed strong and steady growth in the last few years. It’s being applied in a broad range of settings and sectors, and it’s also making inroads in geographical regions where it was previously little-known. As it grows, it faces the challenge of meeting the even greater demand for it.

“Give me an example of a company that’s made a complete turnaround to embracing their customers.”

Service design professionals need to do more than create compelling blueprints and journeys to build actual services: They need to embed themselves into the detailed mechanics of operating and scaling a service experience in a nimble, fail-fast fashion.

On December 1, 2016, over 300 design practitioners, enthusiasts, students, and researchers made the trek to Toronto to take part in what we hope to be the first of many national conversations about the state of service design in the ‘great north’.

SDN Finland made a nice small profit from the Helsinki SDN national conference, held in September 2015. Early last year, it was time to make the money support the chapter objectives: promote the use of service design and support local organisations in creating human-centred services.

Each year during the much anticipated Award Ceremony at the Service Design Global Conference the Service Design Award winners are announced.

From November 30th to December 4th 2016, the World Industrial Design Conference took place in Liangzhu, China.

At the 2016 Service Design Global Conference in Amsterdam, Muna Al Dhabbah (Director of Government Service Development, Prime Minister’s Office, UAE) was joined on stage by Simone Carrier (Head of Service Design at FutureGov) to share their experiences in applying service design to improve citizen-government interactions within the UAE.

Organisational change is currently an intriguing topic in the field of service design. Effective change efforts help drive innovation and promote other positive cultural practices within organisations.

The speed of digital change means that multidisciplinary teams must be both innovative and reactive. How can teams with different ways of working and skills communicate well in order to collaborate effectively?

In recent years, design teams working both in-house and at consultancies are increasingly applying the service design mindset and methods across a wide variety of projects.

With the rise of user experience (UX) in the last years, traditional customer journey maps have been evolving into experience maps.

Jin Duo was frustrated. The waste-management company she had been running for more than a decade was successful, but facing challenges to keep growing.