The newly published Touchpoint Vol.10 No.1 represents a significant milestone! With this issue, Touchpoint enters its tenth year of publication, having first been published in early 2009.
Thanks to the tireless volunteer efforts of an ever-growing community of peer contributors and editors from around the world - supported by a small and dedicated production team - Touchpoint has moved from strength to strength.
While the general format has stayed the same, the level of discourse and the quality of insights it has helped disseminate throughout the community has grown alongside the discipline of service design itself.
While the first issue (Vol. 1 No. 1 “What is Service Design?”) really was about laying the groundwork for a discipline in its infancy, it’s interesting to see how some of the earliest issues were almost ahead of their time. Issues in September 2010 and September 2011 were already looking at the “Business Impact of Service Design” (Vol. 2 No. 2) and “Organisational Change” (Vol. 3 No. 2).
Both community input and careful trend observation stand behind the selection of themes for each issue. The latest issue (Vol. 10 No. 1 "From Design to Implementation") is dedicated to the challenges of implementing service design, a subject so worthy of attention it will also be the theme of this year’s Service Design Global Conference in Dublin. And I’m already looking forward to the next issue (Vol. 10 No. 2) which will look at the theme of “Designing the Future”, which has some fascinating contributions.
I’d like to thank all those that have played a vital role in contributing to, editing and producing Touchpoint since its launch. Despite a growing body of quality books, burgeoning offers of trainings and courses, and more and more academic programmes aimed at educating service designers, Touchpoint still occupies a unique and valuable role in further shaping the discourse and future of our discipline.
SDN Vice President
“Service Design at Scale” is a challenge that has arisen out of success, but has no simple answers. The increasingly large mandate, and set of responsibilities, enjoyed by service designers comes with new challenges. In this new issue of Touchpoint, we turn our focus to making our work grow beyond us; spreading the power and value of service design across entire organisations.
How can service design best measure the impact it achieves? In this issue of Touchpoint, we have tackled precisely this challenge as service design must become more mature in justifying itself to decision-makers, both before and after it is applied. We hope the insights and methods in this issue help you answer that question, when you next sit down to plan or review a service design project.
On May 20th 2026, we are holding a special event connected to the publication of the most recent issue of Touchpoint, the journal of service design: Touchpoint Vol.17 No. 1 | From AI to Synthetic Services.
AI continues to disrupt our work as service designers, fundamentally changing the way we design, deliver and analyse services. The advances are rapid as well, presenting new opportunities while at the same time forcing us to answer some challenging questions on where and how its capabilities are deployed. This issue of Touchpoint answers an ongoing need in our community to learn from each other - as well as those outside our field - to confidently apply AI, as well as know where it should be avoided.
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