Touchpoint provides a window into the discussion of service design, facilitating a forum to debate, share and advance the field and its practices. In addition, it aims at engaging clients to listen in on the discussion, learn about the field, and become involved in the developmentand implementation of service design for their organisations. The three key audiences of the publication are:

• Service design practitioners
• Client organisations including businesses, non-profits, and public sector/government
• Academia

Touchpoint 17-2 Call for Papers: Emerging Service Design

Across the public and private sectors, organisations are confronting boundaries that are structural, cultural, technological and environmental. These are not boundaries that better ideation alone can dissolve. Overcoming them demands the sustained, collaborative, often painstaking work of turning insight into action, and action into lasting impact.

This upcoming issue of Touchpoint will be published to coincide with the Service Design Global Conference 2026 (SDGC26), held in the Frankfurt RheinMain region, as part of the World Design Capital 2026 programme under the theme ‘Atmospheres for a Better Life’. At the conference, we will look at how solutions are developed, implemented and scaled across organisational, cultural and societal boundaries. And we’d also like to do so in the pages of this issue of our journal.

In contrast to our most recent issue (Vol. 17 No. 2: ‘Emerging Service Design’), the theme of this upcoming issue is not about what service design might one day do. It is about what we are being asked to do right now: help organisations navigate transitions, build the conditions for genuine collaboration, embed responsible technologies and ensure that well-designed solutions endure beyond the pilot phase.

We are looking for articles, case studies and critical perspectives that engage with the following five themes. The questions within each are intended as provocations, rather than prescriptions.

Shaping everyday experiences that matter

Better futures are not abstract; they are experienced in daily interactions with services, systems and environments.

• How can service design ensure that strategic intent translates meaningfully to the point of delivery, where customers, citizens and employees actually experience it?
• What does it mean to design for ‘quality of life’, not just ‘quality of service’? How do we measure the difference?
• How can service design harness emerging technologies like agentic AI or mixed reality to enhance human experiences – without undermining trust, agency, or care?
• How can service designers work with (rather than around) the operational realities of large organisations: the systems, processes, routines and frictions that shape the experiences they deliver?

Enabling collaboration across sectors and systems

Complex challenges — climate resilience, healthcare access, urban mobility, social inclusion — don’t belong to a single organisation. Yet the conditions that make cross-sector collaboration genuinely effective are rarely designed for.

• What does it take to build and sustain meaningful partnerships across institutional and cultural boundaries? What is our distinct contribution to that process, as service designers?
• How can we help organisations move beyond performative collaboration toward shared accountability, shared decision-making and shared ownership of outcomes?
  What are the most significant barriers to cross-sector service innovation, and what examples can be cited of where they were successfully navigated?
• How can technology be used to support trust, shared understanding, and collective agency across partners – rather than reinforcing power imbalances, silos, or extractive forms of collaboration?

From insight to impact: Making change stick

Many promising service design initiatives fail not because the insight was wrong, but because the conditions for lasting change were never built. Pilots end. Champions move on. Momentum dissipates. This is one of our discipline's most persistent and under-examined challenges.

• How can service designers help generate the structures, leadership commitment and organisational capabilities that allow change to endure?
• How do we honestly evaluate the long-term impact of service design interventions, and what do we do when the evidence is inconclusive or uncomfortable?
• How do we justify investment in service design when the most meaningful outcomes are long‑term, systemic, and resistant to traditional proof?
• How does change survive once the designers, champions, and sponsors are gone?
• How can technology support organisational memory and stewardship – carrying intent, learning, and accountability forward as people, priorities, and structures change – without displacing human judgement or ownership?

Integrating intelligent and responsible technologies

AI, automation and data-driven systems are rapidly reshaping how services are conceived, delivered and experienced. Rather than being primarily technical, the design challenge has become organisational, ethical and human.

• How are service designers navigating the governance, ethical and trust dimensions of AI integration, and where are the critical gaps?
• How do we ensure that technological advancement genuinely strengthens human agency and inclusion, rather than simply serving as a means to optimise existing systems?

Designing for transitions and uncertainty: Navigating change

Organisations and communities are navigating profound and often simultaneous transitions: climate change, demographic shifts, digitalisation, regulatory upheaval and broader social transformation.

• How can service design better support organisations in building adaptive capacity: the ability to sense, respond and adjust direction as conditions change?
• What does resilience-oriented service design look like in practice? How is it different from conventional service design, and where does it require new methods, mindsets or skills?
• How do we design responsibly in conditions where the needs of tomorrow may differ significantly from the needs we are designing for today?
• What role should technology play in helping people and organisations stay adaptive and resilient when futures are unclear, assumptions are fragile, and change is non‑linear?