In November 2017, the global service design community will come together in Madrid for the annual SDN Global Conference. This year, the conference marks a significant milestone: It’s the tenth event that the SDN has hosted. In anticipation of the occasion, SDN President Birgit Mager, and Event Board principals Jamin Hegeman and Alex Nisbett looked back through the years at the milestones that have brought us to this point.

Since service design still may sound exotic, this article will help you explain what it is in a simple language.

Since 1995 Birgit Mager has held the first European professorship in service design at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, Germany, and since then has developed the field of service design constantly in theory, methodology and practice. Her numerous lectures, publications and projects have strongly supported the implementation of a new understanding of the economical, ecological and social function of the design in the domain of services.

When a project wins a Service Design Award there is certainly something to learn from it.