Conferences are about people connecting, and yet a conference is made up of a crowd of strangers...

Richard Ekelman is a Service Designer at Chicago-based bswift, and cofounder of the annual Service Experience Chicago conference. In this interview, Richard talks to Touchpoint Project Manager Cristine Lanzoni and publisher Prof. Birgit Mager about his journey to become a service design evangelist and shares his thoughts about the current service design scene in Chicago and in the U.S.

The knowledge that collaboration and synergy fuel success is a cornerstone of service design. As practitioners, we have developed or applied many methods to break down silos and encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration. We do this in service to the organisation, to keep everyone’s eyes on understanding the customer and their needs. It is ironic that the field of Customer Experience (CX), whose success depends on deep understanding of customers, has not been one of our closest partners, at least not until now.

This year’s Front End of Innovation (FEI16) summit had a perfect theme: “Inspiration needs execution.” Innovation and Service Design are two adjacent areas tightly linked to each other. It was 3 days full of inspiration, innovation and design. It is hard to satisfy such a demanding and highly qualified audience. Here come some reflections from the FEI16.

Silicon Valley is the home of most of the world’s most influential tech companies. A focus on design and customer experience is everywhere, from the CEO down to the newly hired designer. Many tech companies that once dominated through features and functionality now compete almost solely on the customer experience. But today, competing on the customer experience of touchpoints isn’t enough.

I had the privilege of representing SDN in the last FEI conference series in Boston focused on building a culture of innovation in big organizations. Here's my take on the conference.

We welcome the Danish Design Center (DDC) as our new corporate members here at the Service Design Network. The DDC is an independent institution with the purpose of promoting the use of design in business and to brand Danish design nationally and internationally. Today we talk to the head of the DDC, Christian Bason, an expert in design for innovation, leadership and organizational change in business and government.

All too often service designers do not sufficiently emphasise, respectively convincingly showcase, the systemic connections of their strategy approaches to the most fundamental business questions of their clients. E.g. What is our market? Who is our customer? What business are we actually in? … to name but a few.

Yigit Kulabas has over 20 years of sales, marketing & business development experience in Information Technologies & Telecommunications market. He’s worked for global actors such as Ericsson, Microsoft and Turkcell. Today SDN welcome him as a new board member of the marketing, brand and media department, helping to build the new identity and marketing strategy of SDN.

Erik Flowers is a Principal Service Designer at Intuit, the powerhouse behind products such as QuickBooks, TurboTax, or Mint. He also maintains a highly informative and influential blog about his experience as a Service Designer as well as being one of the founders of practicalservicedesign.com

In this interview, the Sony in-house service design team shares an insightful look into their challenges and small victories within the global company, and reveals why service design is so important for their business.

Lucy Kimbell is a designer, researcher, consultant and educator. She is a principal research fellow at the University of Brighton. Since 2005 she has developed and taught an MBA elective on Designing Better Futures at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, where she is an associate fellow. Currently, she is a visiting Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) fellow at the UK-based Policy Lab.

In this interview, we talked to Liisa Vurma, the service design director, and Ashlee Riordan, the business designer, who, on behalf of the team (9 gals, 8 guys and 1 dog), talked about Thick’s design process and service design implementation.

This is a part of the interview with Birgit Mager, President of the Service Design Network, that was recently conducted due to a very special occasion that we will be celebrating this year. Curious? Then read on…

Let’s take a look in the beginnings and developments of one of the biggest design thinking and service design events in the world – the Global Service Jam. We are happy to be part of this amazing event through the active participation of some of our national chapters: San Francisco, New York City, Chile and Finland.