What did we achieve as the leading Swiss community for Service Design?

In 2023 we relaunched the Swiss Service Design Network community. Here is what we achieved from February 2023 to December 2023.

A reminder of our vision

The Swiss Service Design community of the SDN wants to do two things:

  1. Put Service Design on the map of Switzerland
  2. Put Switzerland on the map of Switzerland


In 2023, we made some big steps on the second aspect. In 2024 we'll start working more strategically on the first element while keeping on pushing on the second one.


What we achieved as a community

Here are a few numbers of the successes we had this year as a community:



Where I failed

Not all went well, here are a few of the elements where I didn’t manage to turn the ideas, wishes or prototypes into something that is really working well. Each failed prototype is something that I, Daniele, take personal responsibility for as I lead these different initiatives.


  • Discussion Board
  • In between events community: 
  • Cohesive core team
  • Getting more volunteers engaged
  • Profiles of Swiss Service Designers
  • Collaboration with agencies

What’s happening next year

  • Study: We’re working on a study about the best services of Switzerland that should come out in the first quarter
  • Conference: We’re working on a half-day hybrid conference in Sierre with the HES-SO on June 1st to celebrate the international Service Design day.
  • Webinars: We’re gonna continue with the ryhtm of 1 event per month
  • Tool demos: We’re gonna try to have a few bonus events where we do tools demos as we did with Theydo as the community found that really useful and it’s the event that had the most registrations.

Thank you

Thanks to Sabine Junginger, Florian Egger,Biliana Vassileva for their trust and for making it possible to relaunch this community in 2023!


Thanks also to all of you who attended the events!


Thanks to all the guests who shared their knowledge, time and passion for our little community:


  • Thanks Joe Macleod 
  • Thanks Kevin Richard 
  • Thanks Krasi Bozhinkova 
  • Thanks Daiana Zavate 
  • Thanks Eliya Maria Pagelli 
  • Thanks David Haas 
  • Thanks Klaus Marek 
  • Thanks Romain Pittet 
  • Thanks Marc Fonteijn 
  • Thanks Emmanuel Fragnière 
  • Thanks Jochem van der Veer 
  • Thanks Pascal Wicht
  • Thanks Vanessa Monstein
  • Thanks Ana Lorena Lodeiros Velasquez
  • Thanks Karolina Pelaez 
  • Thanks Marc Stickdorn 


And thanks to all the volunteers who worked in the backstage on the reports, the event organization, the job tracking, etc. 


  • Thanks Marta Angelillis for the tracking of jobs
  • Thanks Marco Pizarro de Olazábal for the analysis of the report
  • Thanks Trixy Basu for the proofreading
  • Thanks Darija Catipovic for the social media posts
  • Thanks W Lincoln Neiger for the workshop facilitation


Thanks to Peter Horvath for helping and facilitating a smooth transition for the relaunch of the community.


A special thank you goes to:


Emmanuel Fragnière who during this journey boosted my enthusiasm through his leadership by excitement. You made a huge difference mate! 


Time invested to manage the community

In total, it took about 140 hours to run the Swiss SDN. Which is roughly 17.5 days of work with an 8-hour work day, or roughly a month of work for someone working full time on this.


All these hours were volunteer hours that are not paid and no partnerships, sponsoring or membership money helped fund this.

The times shown here are only those tracked by Daniele Catalanotto and don't take into account the time invested by all community members. 


These therefore show how much time it takes to run the operations for a local community like the Swiss Service Design Network and do not reflect the time invested by the community overall.

Where did the time go?

Most of the time invested to run this community went into the marketing side of things, meaning: making people aware of the events and materials created to serve the community.


As you can see there is still a big chunk under "Misc" as at the start of the year the tracking wasn't as clearly separated as it was at the end of the year.

Daniele Catalanotto
Daniele Catalanotto -

This review was written by Daniele who for the year 2023 took the role of the "mom" or "dad" for the community to push the operational work.

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