A diary study is a form of human behaviour research that relies on users documenting personal experiences over a prolonged period  of  time.  Diary  studies  have  been  used  in  multiple scenarios within  service design and are typically known to be physical toolkits.

She looks at me, emotionless, and flatly says, “Be well.” These are strange parting words from an employee manning the register at a busy New York City pharmacy.

BBVA´s move to its emblematic new Madrid headquarters, designed by the Pritzker price-winning Swiss architectural duo of Herzog and De Meuron, implied not only a change of space but a change of culture, too.

Whilst a broad service design process is the ideal approach for any service organisation, the reality is that many organisations opt only to design for a given channel or touchpoint. A traditional UX approach serves you well when designing the best-possible experience for a given touchpoint.

Service design is commonly perceived as service interfaces designed for intangible products that are, from the customer’s point of view, useful, profitable and desirable, while they are effective, efficient and different for the provider.

When I learned about the field of user experience in the mid 1990s, its primary objective – making technology easy to use – was easy for me to grasp. My education in cognitive science, psychology, and computer science gave me tools and frameworks that I could immediately apply.

The Designing Relationships project shows how design thinking made a real difference to a group of physically and mentally challenged residents at a Danish municipal care home

Both service design and agile are processes that uncover insights and initiate conversations, whether internally or externally, in order to identify what is most valuable to the user and then proceed to design and deliver it.

As it continues to grow and mature, the discipline of service design is facing the challenges that confront teenagers everywhere. Who am I? Where do I belong? Whom are my schoolyard friends? (And – perhaps – whom are the bullies that are best avoided?)

In this issue’s prTouchpoint editor Jesse Grimes speaks with Lia Patrício, Assistant Professor at the University of Porto. She is one of the leading members of the Marie Curie Service Design for Innovation - Innovative Training Network (SDIN-ITN), which falls under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 framework.

The growing interest in service design calls for specific education programs, at a moment in which the framework for the discipline itself is still under construction.

You can find a home for service design in existing research in health, if you know where to look.

For most organisations, designing touchpoint experiences that resonate with customers and communicate their brand is a costly endeavour. Yet, differentiation does not necessarily have to be expensive.

“The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it” — Maimonides (12th century scholar and physician)

In this issue, editor Jesse Grimes interviews Geke van Dijk and Bas Rainmakers and learns about their involvement in service design networks, their Anglo-dutch company STBY, and design research.

Public health service is a complex and highly specialised discipline, which has made it a tough nut to crack in terms of effective service design.