How service design was used to create a new kind of coding school in Helsinki and radically change people's perception of computer programming.

Heart Failure (HF), the inability of the heart to effectively pump blood around the body, takes a serious toll on a person’s life. For people living with HF, walking up a few stairs leaves their heart pounding, lying down makes it hard to breathe, and their lives are instantly turned upside down by a prognosis of only a few years left to live.

This case is an illustration proving how machine learning models can seamlessly support the work of service designers and successfully forecast the business impact of specific design efforts. This understanding can be used when making decisions on where to invest.

How service design plays a vital role in the transformation journey of a Brazilian insurance provider: from a brick-and-mortar business into a health-insure-tech.

The project was initiated to help the charity achieve its vision is to create a society where those affected by dementia are supported and able to live without prejudice.

LaMA is short for Laboratoria Mobiele Alternatieven. It is a co-creative design process developed to find cheap and simple solutions with great impact on local mobility issues.

After almost a century, and several failed attempts to establish a coherent rural land identification and registration system across the whole of Portugal; a cooperative initiative between different Government sectors was created in 2017. This initiative had one goal: to finally understand who owns what, and where.

Compensation Funds are private non-profit organizations of the Chilean Social Security System. Its purpose is to deliver benefits in the form of social benefits, financial products, deals related to health and education, and to manage state legal benefits. Companies join them free of charge, and their collaborators become affiliates who have access to the benefits offered. This project was developed with Chile’s most prominent company in the industry, which serves more than 4 million affiliates.

Start-ups and innovation environments represent exciting, challenging and relatively-uncharted terrain for service design. Despite the fact that we as service designers are barely visible in the start-up world, and mostly unmentioned in their literature, my own experience as a service designer working with start-ups and innovation programmes has proven to me that we can add significant value in these settings.

A quick Google search for ‘innovation’ pulls up thousands of results: leading edge technology, business school case studies, how-to guides for innovation in corporate environments, and more. ‘Innovation’ is a big, ambiguous term that often looks very different depending on where and how it is applied.

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.

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.

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.