A typical phenomenon for many rural villages in southwest China is that young adults have moved into town to seek higher income jobs, leaving their aged parents and children behind. This change in family structure has caused far-reaching effects to all aspects of village life.

We believe selling service design isn't about making service design sellable. Instead, successful sales are determined by adopting a mindset of ‘becoming buyable’. We believe that applying the methods and approach of service design to your sales process will help you become buyable.

As much as service design has evolved as a discipline to deliver better results and become more attractive to organisations, many business executives are not even aware of the importance of delivering great service experiences. So, in my upcoming book, I’m trying a new strategy: lower the volume on service design to first spread the word about the impact that great services can have on businesses.

From the front covers of the Harvard Business Review and Businessweek, it would appear that design has become a part of every facet of business. But, while Toronto is home to North America’s third-largest design workforce (1), service design remains a new phenomenon here, and across Canada.

As service design practitioners, we continually help our clients to better understand their customers: we help them find out how they can be more valuable to their clients, how they can make a difference or how they can persuade prospects with extraordinary services.

In life, we are constantly faced with the limited view: the office window that shows you a sliver of the outdoors; the car mirror that shows you most of the lane beside you; the porch light that helps you navigate half the staircase in the dark; and perhaps many of us experience a limited view when we are trying to figure out something about our own health or to help others with theirs.

Service designers truly help organisations innovate, if they manage to blend the two fundamentally different approaches of problem-solving and decision-making. We propose a three-step approach.

Executives are busy people. Daily, they struggle to rise above the mountains of emails, back-to-back meetings and the demands of managing staff to focus on and achieve the strategic and tactical responsibilities they hold.

During the past years, Hellon’s sales team has become very successful in selling service design. The yearly turnover has increased at an accelerating pace, reaching a total growth rate of 30% in 2015.

One company advancing the design of services is 7-Eleven, the convenience store chain, whose 56,000 stores across 16 countries explores designing diverse yet localised services.

In order to design services in a consumer-centred way, service designers often rely on reasoning through how a consumer would behave in certain situations. To do this, designers have developed tools and techniques such as personas and empathy.

Cambridge Consultants is a product development house based in the UK and US. The range of projects we undertake is broad: from revolutionary ‘round’ teabags that transformed a business, through inhalers with enhanced human factors and on to air traffic control radio systems used in airports around the world.

I’ve been a fan of service design since my introduction to it in grad school — and an active champion of the discipline since my initial involvement with the Service Design Network back in 2010.

Today, patients have more information than ever before about their diseases and treatment options. Think about the wealth of data on the online community PatientsLikeMe, where more than 220,000 patients share their stories about over 2,000 conditions and Patient.co.uk, which has 16 million visits each month.

The following should not be news to you, but it’s sometimes easy to forget: Patients aren’t just lines in a spreadsheet, records in a CRM system, or the list of ailments in their medical records. They are people.

Garden on the Go® is an obesity-prevention effort initiated by Indiana University Health. This year-round, mobile, produce-delivery program provides fresh, affordable vegetables and fruit to Indianapolis neighbourhoods in need.