For this issue of Touchpoint, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes met with service design pioneer and educator Lara Penin, who has recently made a great contribution to the service design literature, with her publication of An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible.

A unique visualisation to deliver insights right from the start of a service design project.

Design practices are becoming increasingly future-focussed, reflecting the complexities of the design challenges that we face. Futures thinking can offer us tools and methods to help with this, but more than that, it might offer us a new way of seeing the world that we design for.

The best business opportunity is starting with purpose —focusing on the unique needs of the different players involved and leveraging their advantages of location, knowledge and connection.

What is involved in achieving customer-centricity and how do you move your organisation from where you are to where you want to be?

How can we successfully coordinate service design and delivery, and solve the puzzle of delivering a minimum viable service?

Innovation work is hard. Given the pace of change in business, the complexity of company environments, and the diversity of teams, we need new ways of working. Futurice provides two tools to tackle that challenge.

Customer journeys usually include several touchpoints at which the customer transacts with a business. Transactions occur when stakeholders exchange value, as in “I pay some money in exchange for your product”. There is usually a request from one stakeholder and a response from the other.

In his dual roles as Design Director and Business Director at London-based Uscreates, Robbie Bates juggles the challenges of addressing the evolving nature of service design, and of the service design agency itself.

As service designers, we could talk endlessly about the times our designs were foiled. Not by customers, but by the stakeholders needed to implement the service.

You read that right. This recipe is will help you get something going in an organization that is ignorant of service design. But, it has to be on the down-low. Blatantly. That means you have to be a gangster. You have to move in plain sight and be subtle because otherwise, people will start asking what the heck your wasting company time for.

What does it mean to ‘design at scale’ in a 132,000-employee organisation? Two years ago, BBVA, one of the world’s oldest and largest banks, launched a grand experiment to find the answer.

Business Origami is a particularly useful tool for designing new services and for exploring new opportunities to extend existing services in complex systems that involve multiple organisations and multiple stakeholders.

Relevant content is a critical element across all channels of a service. That is why a good content strategy is of crucial importance. At Informaat, service design and content strategy go hand-in-hand.

Meet Simone Cicero, creator of Platform Design Toolkit, and managing partner at Boundaryless, a company that helps organisations create platform strategies to mobilise ecosystems for growth, impact and evolution.

Evenson and Mager reflected on their work with the SDN and the way the field of service design in general has grown since its early days in 2003. Article by Andrea Fineman and Thomas Brandenburg

Interview with Shelley Evenson and Birgit Mager just prior to the first SDN US National Conference, 2017. By Andrea Fineman and Thomas Brandenburg

Rich Ekelman is a Chicago Service Designer, Founder of SERV/, the world's first service design B-Corp, and SDN Accredited Master Trainer, shares his experience and the fundamentals of service design.

We live and breathe it – but what is service design exactly? We’ve listed some have to sees and –reads, which easily explain what service design is and what it does.

Interview with Leah Cabrera, Service Designer in Design and Innovation Group at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Article by Thomas Brandenburg and Twisha Shah-Brandenburg.

Interview with Jennifer Bagehorn, Service Designer at Livework Studio; Article by Thomas Brandenburg

Interview with Aileen Heinberg, Behavioral Scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; Article by Thomas Brandenburg

Interviews with Boris Divjak, Strategic Designer at Unboxed; Dennis Hambeukers, Strategic Design Consultant at Zuiderlicht; Marc Stickdorn,Co-Founder & CEO of More Than Metrics; Jamin Hegeman, VP, Head of Design, Financial Services at Capital One; Timo Patiala, Commercial Director and Partner at Hellon London; Article by Thomas Brandenburg

Interview with Jeff Melton, Partner at Bain & Company Melbourne Article by Thomas Brandenburg