With the growing importance of service design comes great responsibility. Our practice must once again remember its roots and find the courage to apply a truly holistic perspective. One that not only creates value for humans and their organisations, but the planet as a whole.

The Community Foodprint app, developed by Studio SHIFT, is a digital solution that helps track emissions along the food journey and measures the positive impact of food recovery practices that one can adopt as new habits. The project was created to address the challenge of reducing the food chain‘s impact for the Italian organisation PGS Frassati.

Designers are standing at a critical crossroads, compelled to reshape both their practices and mindsets. As we navigate an era riddled with unparalleled environmental and societal challenges, the call to expand our horizons and adopt a more holistic design approach grows increasingly urgent.

Philips believes that next to climate change, lack of access to affordable, quality care is the most pressing issue of our time. The company is committed to making a positive impact on people’s health and well-being. In order to do this, they transformed the way they innovate, promoting service design and empowering underserved communities, women and children.

I have often pondered the crucial question that should precede any design endeavour: Do we truly require what the design process may yield? Would we not be wiser to judiciously employ existing solutions? Shouldn’t we consider elimination not only as a means, but also an end for our design? Perhaps the starting point for our design activities should be the eradication of false needs. This is what’s known as ‘eliminative design’.

This article proposes ‘critical service design’ as an innovative and effective alternative approach for service designers who are actively seeking to support and facilitate sustainable and ethical place-based climate transitions.

In collaboration with Taipei’s Public Health Service Centre, this study employed a value-led participatory design approach to address nutritional well-being, loneliness and malnutrition in older adults, offering insights into policy-shaping and the challenges of ageing populations.

Service designers often oscillate between different spaces and zoom levels. This puts them in a unique position to bridge various institutional boundaries. Facilitating, nurturing and sustaining the relationships at these boundaries is not only emotionally and mentally cumbersome, but the impact of this work is also difficult to measure.

The effective use of metrics is an important and still underutilised way to elevate and clarify the role and ambitions of service design. If we want our work to make a difference, we need to make its impact on user experiences, business success and the environment tangible in a nuanced way

How can service designers create services that simultaneously address customer needs both today and in the future? Using a new method called ‘triangulated recursive mapping’ to combine futures research with human-centred research, we learn to create services that are responsive to rapidly evolving customer needs over time.

TP 14-2 From the editors

Employees are integral to service delivery, and the service design community has long recognised that employee experience is inherently interlinked with customer experience. But it’s not just the drive for happy customers that pushes organisations to focus on their employees; in the US alone, unemployment is hovering around its lowest level in 20 years, putting power in employees’ hands.

Service design maximises employee satisfaction and productivity by optimising every touchpoint within an organisation. It cultivates a workplace culture that prioritises employee well-being, happiness and success, making it a powerful approach for enhancing the employee experience.

Generative research tools are qualitative research methods that are not focused on a specific service or product, but more on end users’ lives, supporting the creation of wellrounded pictures of those users, including their aspirations, dreams and desires.

How can an organisation be designed so that individual motivation and ability links with team goals and organisational vision? Achieving this has a significant impact on the performance of the organisation. Can we create tools to help with this goal with a service design approach?

The future of work is a highly debated topic, and rightly so. Finding the best talent, dealing with their changing expectations towards employers, and the increasing (hopefully not yet exclusive) importance of technology for work mean that we need to focus on creating and actively shaping an optimal working environment. This is a challenge.