The mission of the global Service Design Network (SDN) is to continuously push the boundaries of the practice of service design by expanding awareness of its value and the application of its mindset across multiple domains. Service design is uniquely equipped to positively impact the challenges of today and tomorrow. Through community-building, events, and knowledge-sharing, the Service Design Network supports and grows the global community, enabling it to positively impact our society as well as our planet.

The SDN invests in activities supporting the SDN mission: conferences, like the Service Design Global Conference or the Next Gen Conference; service design courses at our very own SDN Academy; Touchpoint—the Service Design Journal; the Service Design Award; Accreditation programmes; and community building. And we invest intensely in social media communication to create more awareness for service design in new communities in order to grow the outreach of the service design practice.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

We have a strong focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and we have implemented the world bank tiers for financial inclusion in our organisation.

Volunteer-Driven Organisation

The SDN is a volunteer-driven organisation. The leadership team, the young talent board,the conference team, the academy advisory boards, the accreditation committee, the case study editors, the Touchpoint editors, the chapter board, the chapter representatives, and the chapter members—hundreds of service design aficionados—are driving this organisation and making it what it is—an open-minded, innovative, and very connected community! 

Besides all the volunteers who are driving our initiatives, we have a headquarters with around 9 employees, some part-time and some full-time, who are building the amazing backbone of all of our activities.

The revenue of the SDN is shared between HQ personnel costs (50%), direct costs such as publishing costs for our journal, trainer costs for our trainings, speaker honorariums, and venue/catering costs for our global conference (25%), indirect costs like IT infrastructure and accounting (15%), and investments in our digital future (10%).

The non-profit status of the SDN is based on German law and tax regulations.

Any questions? Contact us at info@service-design-network.org.