Established in 2010, Livework’s São Paulo outpost is a service design pioneer in one of the world’s top-ten largest economies - Brazil. Since then, the team has worked with an enviable roster of clients, but also experienced the challenges of carrying out service design before it became widely recognised. In this edition of the Touchpoint Profile, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes speaks to Luis Alt, one of the studio’s founders.

During the IxDA Education Summit 2019 held in Seattle (WA, USA), IxDA, SDN, and CUMULUS got together to start a conversation about harnessing potential synergies. This is the report about the session.

Cuando el equipo de diseño de BBVA Bancomer empezó a crecer de forma acelerada, pasando de 6 a 120 diseñadores en el lapso de 2 años, el mayor reto fue establecer y permear un mismo mindset de diseño.

In the past years, many organisations have been working on pro­­jects to improve service experiences. Increasingly, large ­organisations have started to understand the value of service design. This has resulted in a growing desire amongst organi­sations that ‘understand’ service design to embed it into their companies.

India is often described as ‘complex’ due to its diverse cultural, economic and social structures that make it challenging for companies to penetrate or innovate. We sought to better understand this complexity and define how service designers can turn these complexities into opportunities.

Anna-Sophie Oertzen is a PhD Candidate exploring how co-creation with different actors may be used to design and deliver profitable, user-centric services. For that, Anna-Sophie uses her business background specialised in marketing, strategy and innovation, her experience in conducting user research, and her practical service design knowledge.

Article published by Nicholas de Leon, Birgit Mager and Judah Armani in the IRISH PROBATION JOURNAL Volume 15, October 2018

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.

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.