Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes recently sat down with Marc Fonteijn, who has convened ‘Circle’, a community of in-house service designers, to learn insights he has gleaned from conversations amongst this growing cohort within the service design profession.

Is using artificial intelligence for human-centered design sacrilegious, or a ‘deus ex machina’? Is web3 – defined below – the future of service, or will it go the way of the dodo bird? We explore the service ecosystems of web3, experiments in technologically augmented design methods, and conclude with a dare for practitioners.

In this decade, design will have to keep pace with AI and machine learning. This raises many pressing ethical issues, including those around data, privacy and bias. In addition, the topics of regulatory non-compliance, legal liability and covert user manipulation need to be addressed. So how can we capture the opportunities of advancing AI technologies while simultaneously addressing the ethical risks and regulatory considerations they pose? By updating our methods to incorporate ethical investigations early on.

Generative AI allows the creation of any image based simply on text input. For this issue of Touchpoint, students from the Köln International School of Design created alternative covers using several models and methods. The text-to-image model is a machine learning model. It uses two neural networks: one creates the image, and the other evaluates, based on real examples of the target image, how close it is to the real image. After estimating the accuracy of the image, it sends that information back to the system and shows it to the user. On the these pages you can see examples of Touchpoint covers created using three distinct methods:

We believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineers and service designers should collaborate to create solutions that are human-centred, ethical and have a positive impact. In this article, we propose a six-step approach that integrates the strengths of both disciplines.

What is the relationship like between design and AI within your organisation? Are they parents that don't talk, separated by complex data algorithms and machine learning jargon? Are they distant relatives, reuniting briefly at the bottom of the service blueprint every so often? Or is there no relationship at all? Are they simply two ships passing late in the night? This article explores not only how AI can help us design better services, but also how design can help build better AI. The relationship is symbiotic.

Imagine if your refrigerator did the weekly grocery shopping for your household. Imagine that it knew which brands you all preferred, which products you all liked best. Imagine it could look at your calendars and have a chat with your smart watch. It would know that you were trying to eat healthily, that your partner was a couscous rejector, that your kids wouldn’t eat spinach but loved broccoli.

Service design has enabled the visualisation of organisational experience through mapping interactions between people, processes and technology1. Service blueprints highlight opportunity areas for innovation as well as points that are repetitive or tedious for service optimisation. Although service design acknowledges behaviour, blueprints rarely account for its context.

AI technologies manifest themselves through services that are quite familiar in everyday life, such as digital assistants or e-commerce recommendation engines. Less obvious is the ripple effect they have on firms’ ecosystems and processes. Service designers can play a key role in building the new systems needed for the ‘intelligent economy’.

Much of this issue of Touchpoint is focused on the intersection of service design and AI. And, as always, each article is written by practitioners, for practitioners. However, it has not escaped our attention that the generative powers of today’s AI means that we can also turn to the massive language models accumulated by ChatGPT, to see what new insights we can gain on this topic. In this brief interview, Touchpoint publisher Prof. Birgit Mager interrogates OpenAI’s ChatGPT on questions both fundamental and new to our discipline. We hope you find the conversation as insightful and enjoyable as we did.

Digital technologies can drastically improve the way services are provided when done correctly. However, for this to happen, there is a need for customer-centric leadership, especially in the public sector, in which the meaning of ‘customer’ is less clear. So, what is customer-centric leadership and how does an organisation develop it?

We live and work in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world. The pace of change and increasing frequency of destabilising events mean that, within many sectors, there is increasing interest in developing more long-term, adaptive strategic visions that will better equip organisations for this VUCA world.

Strategy-oriented design has gained traction in Brazil over the last 20 years. In the wake of the Design Thinking movement, companies are hiring service design specialists as consultants or creating dedicated service design teams within their organisations. This article presents a case study focusing on the implementation of a service design innovation centre at a large international digital payments technology organisation, IDPTO (pseudonym).

Through our work as a consultancy at the cross-section of design and business, PARK has met and worked with hundreds of design and business leaders. Through many engagements, we have come to recognise the characteristics that guide design leaders in making the ever-maturing role of design successful.

As service design has become increasingly established, it has presented persistent challenges to service design managers and design leadership in general. The demand for service designers often outstrips supply, and building a diverse team capable of handling the breadth of service design work is easier said than done.

Nick de Leon is a pioneer in service design education in the UK, having established an academic programme at the Royal College of Art. In this interview with Touchpoint publisher Prof. Birgit Mager, he shares the path he's taken until today and talks about ways of ensuring that service design activities and outputs find real traction within the business world.