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Bad services waste our time every single day, but what if we could finally fix what’s broken? Join us on 18 June for an energising SDN Global Café with Lou Downe and discover how we can design services that actually work.

Dear SDN Members,

Join us for the upcoming SDN Global Café on Thursday, 18 June, 2026, where we will welcome Lou Downe.

Every year we spend an estimated 15 billion hours in the UK ‘administering our personal lives’. That’s roughly an hour per day, or just over a month per year resetting passwords, finding customer numbers, and requesting refunds. So why, despite advances in technology, does it feel like the services we use are getting worse?

In this session, Lou explores a simple truth behind bad services — and why fixing them is anything but simple.

Drawing from their latest book Bad Services, Lou will unpack the five common problems that prevent organisations from delivering services that actually work. More importantly, they will share practical ways we can begin to address them.

Expect a candid, thought-provoking conversation on what’s really going wrong and what it takes to design services that people can rely on.

Join us on 18 June to connect with the global SDN community, exchange perspectives, and be part of the conversation shaping better services!

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EVENT DETAILS

Date: Thursday, 18 June, 2026
Time: 4:00 PM CEST
Location: Zoom
(The link is available on your Member Dashboard)

HOSTED BY

Birgit Mager, President, Service Design Network
Brian Gillespie, Service Design Network Leadership Team

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Lou Downe
Lou Downe - Author

Lou Downe is the author of Good Services, the bestselling book on how to design services that work and the founding director of the School of Good Services, an organisation that helps people to build the skills they need to design and scale great services. They are the former Director of Design for the UK Government where they founded the discipline of service design, growing a 2000 strong team of designers into one of the largest, and most influential design teams in the UK - winning a Designs of the Year award and a D&AD lifetime achievement award. Their new book, Bad Services, is out this June.

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