Service Design Award Winners & Finalists

SERVICE DESIGN AWARD 2023

Great news, service designers - Service Design Award is back!

We are delighted to open a call for the Service Design Award 2023, the premier international award for Service Design.

The Award recognises work of an exceptional standard in the field of Service Design from the private and public sector, as well as academia. We are looking forward to receiving your best work!

Earlybird entry: February 28 - April 14, 2023

Regular entry:  April 15 - June 30, 2023

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The SDN is incredibly pleased to announce that Service Design Award 2022 finalists and winners have been selected by our international jury of service design experts.

Fifteen projects, which represent the global benchmark for a world-class service design, have been shortlisted in the three categories of Professional Commercial, Professional Non-profit/Public Sector, and Student. Because of their exceptional work and project contributions, we are taking our industry to new levels!

Our three winners have been announced at the Service Design Award Ceremony during the Service Design Global Conference 2022 in Copenhagen. Congratualations to our winners and finalists!

Special thanks to our jury, Birgit Mager (Head of Jury), Cathy Huang, Caterina Bellavite and Luis Alt and Service Design Award Project Lead - Sonja Jazic. 

Service Design Award 2022 Partners:

  • Main Service Design Award Sponsor - Maersk
  • Professional Commercial Category Sponsor - Accenture Song
Winner - Best Commercial Project

Winner - Best Commercial Project

Braver Training Grounds: Customer Experience Design & Social Housing Organizations

Company: J5 Design

Client: Red Deer Housing Authority

Country: Canada

Summary: The client is a small organization that supports affordable housing options in a small municipality. In 2021 they commissioned a human-centered design consultancy (consultant) to conduct an independent assessment of their current state customer experience and to offer recommendations about how to improve it. They came to the consultant with a desire to become more customer-driven, and to make meaningful connections between the diverse community of people they exist to serve.

The clinet, like so many similar organizations, had struggled to adapt and innovate in response to the housing crisis. They are limited by a strict regulatory structure, legacy and aging infrastructure, and a complex mandate with limited funding. At the same time, the client has a passionate and talented team of frontline staff who care about creating positive impacts, and a board and leadership team committed to empowering them.

Winner - Best Non-Profit Project

Winner - Best Non-Profit Project

Ensuring the sustainable future of public transportation through service

Company: Hellon Oy

Client: Helsinki Region Transport (HSL)

Country: Finland

Summary: Design agency Hellon and Helsinki public transport authority HSL have had a 6-year strategic service design partnership. The aim of the partnership has been to tackle strategic targets that could not have been tackled solely through a single project, but rather through long-term systematic customer-centric development done through nearly 50 service design projects over the 6-year partnership.

Designing for a service that offers 250 million rides annually to over 1,5 million people requires a structured process. A participatory service design approach has been used firstly, to ensure in-depth customer understanding and secondly, to ensure the engagement of various critical stakeholders, from organisations’ employees to local politicians and key customer groups to ensure accessibility.

Winner - Best Student Project

Winner - Best Student Project

Save - Shopping Sustainably for Groceries Made Easy with Save

Student: Chu-Yi Vuong

University: National College of Art and Design

Country: Ireland

Summary: Why should we care about sustainability? The increased number of natural disasters is a result of climate change that we are facing at the moment. As the food industry causes 1/3 of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, we need to make more sustainable choices, especially as consumers (Eaternity Institute, 2021). However, we are loaded with different information about sustainability which causes confusion and thus we care less. So, how might we encourage consumers to shop for groceries with sustainability in mind?

The solution I came up with is called “Save” which describes the idea of a collaborative service between the government, supermarket, and consumers. It has the potential to encourage consumers to pick fresh produce that caused little CO2 emissions in their production process and enable them to identify CO2-friendly produce in a simple way.

Professional Commercial Finalist

Professional Commercial Finalist

Atopic Dermatitis Is A Condition Beyond A Skin Disease

Company: Haptica

Client: Sanofi

Country: Colombia

Summary: Atopic dermatitis is one of the most common skin diseases. Up to 10% of adults and 20% of children are diagnosed with atopic dermatitis every year. Atopic dermatitis is a chronic condition which, particularly when it appears at a very early age, is difficult to diagnose and difficult to cope with at each stage of the patient's life due to its physical and
psychological implications throughout development. Dupixent is a drug developed by Sanofi that meets the medical characteristics to help patients cope with their moderate or severe disease.

To succeed in introducing it into the Colombian market, our challenge was to create a 360 impact strategy involving patients, supporting staff, physicians and caregivers in order to achieve adherence to the program and to the drug in a way that is much more relatable and relevant to all those involved throughout the experience.

Professional Commercial Finalist

Professional Commercial Finalist

Co-designing Futures with the Voluntary Sector

Company: Futurice

Client: Wales Council for Voluntary Action

Country: UK

Summary: In 2021 a design and innovation consultancy and a national membership body for the third sector in Wales co-led a nationwide, participatory futures and system change project with the whole of the voluntary and charitable sector in Wales.

This ambitious, cross-sector partnership included support and participation from another national representative body for county voluntary councils and the third sector, the Welsh Government and the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales. The client initiated the collaboration to identify how voluntary organisations in Wales can shape a resilient and thriving futures society beyond the COVID-19 recovery.

Professional Commercial Finalist

Professional Commercial Finalist

Decarbonising farming with a co-created circular service model

Company: Hellon

Client: Yara

Country: UK

Summary: Covering roughly half of the landmass of Europe, agriculture has a substantial impact on our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. While EU is targeting net-zero emissions by 2050, the demand for food and animal feed is projected to grow by 70% and farmers feel like they live in a paradox; they feel pride in feeding the planet but guilty of polluting it.

Our client, a global crop nutrition and agriculture solution provider, partnered with us, a service design consultancy, and a biofuel processor to develop and commercially validate a service that would support farmers and their businesses in reducing farming-related carbon footprint. The challenge sits in a context where farmers are often left to find effective solutions for their farms themselves whilst operating under heavy external pressure; emission measuring is in the early stages, limited public funding and incentivised solutions towards organic farming.

Professional Commercial Finalist

Professional Commercial Finalist

Journey Repository - Internal service design teams

Company: Knight Moves

Client: Acerta Sociaal Secretariaat

Country: Belgium

Summary: We are working with the largest HR service provider for starters, self-employed persons, employers and accountants in Belgium. For this project we’re focusing on their payroll services. Their one-size-fits-all approach did not measure up to the service needs of their 40.000+ clients with different size and maturity levels.

The challenge we faced was threefold: Firstly, the organization wanted to understand who their clients really are, learn their needs and their key moments-of-truth. Secondly, they wanted to zoom in on each of these moments in a visual and detailed manner. Thirdly, they asked our help in creating in-house customer-centric teams, training them to continue the service design journey, to create real and everlasting change towards a customer-centric mindset.

Professional Commercial Finalist

Professional Commercial Finalist

Design to reactivate the construction industry

Company: BBK Group

Client: Cámara Chilena de la Construcción

Country: Chile

Summary: In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, Chile’s construction union-labor association called “Cámara Chilena de la Construcción” (CChC), created and promoted an initiative called sanitary protocol during the years of 2020 and 2021. With this initiatives, construction sites could keep operating during quarantines, maintaining the industry and the related jobs active (even though construction is not considered as an essential industry in Chile).

The sanitary protocol is a program in which companies vow to protect and take care of their workers and communities health, due to the possibility of catching Covid-19. So the target market were all the companies associated with the sector, considering not only construction sites but also work centers, warehouses or offices (architects, suppliers, contractors, etc.).

Professional Non-Profit Finalist - Honourable Mention

Professional Non-Profit Finalist - Honourable Mention

ICO 'Children's Code' – Design Guidance Service

Company: Big Motive

Client: Information Commissioner's Office (ICO)

Country: UK

Summary: With the proliferation of apps, games and digital services targeted at children, tech companies can create apps for young users in an unregulated environment. In extreme cases, some organisations use a range of tactics to engage children and monetise their data with no restraint and little respect for their vulnerable status. The ICO is the UK’s independent authority that upholds information rights and data privacy for individuals.

In 2020, the ICO published a new policy to regulate the development of apps for young people. The Children’s code is a data protection code of practice for online services, apps, games and websites aimed at young users.

Professional Non-Profit Finalist

Professional Non-Profit Finalist

An Ambitious Vision for Men’s Health

Company: ThoughtForm

Client: University Hospitals Cutler Center for Men

Country: USA

Summary: Men in the U.S. want to be healthy, but good intentions aren’t enough. Generally, men view health and wellbeing as worries for another day—resulting in a shorter life expectancy than women, higher rates of cancer, behavioral health challenges, and more. The client in Cleveland, OH sought to reshape the way men engage with health by offering a
healthcare, wellbeing, and lifestyle experience tailored for men.

We led a co-design process that brought our team and client team together with patient and provider representatives for four sprints to set design direction and refine concepts. Each sprint focused on a different aspect of the experience: establishing guiding principles, defining an end-to-end member experience, building a staff interaction model, and designing the physical flagship space to enhance provider visits.

Professional Non-Profit Finalist

Professional Non-Profit Finalist

Improving Care and Reducing Waiting Time in the Public Health Sector

Company: Public Innovation Lab of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Client: Ministry of Health

Country: Chile

Summary: Ensuring timely care for patients is one of the main challenges faced by health systems around the world. Waiting times become more acute as the type of care needed becomes more specialized, and have become significantly longer due to the SARS-COVID-19 crisis.  Lengthy waiting times diminish the effectiveness of medical interventions and have negative impacts on patients' physical and psychological well being (Hirvonen, 2007).

In Chile, the UNDP (2017) identifies public health sector waiting times as one of the main causes of widespread dissatisfaction with the government and loss of confidence in the public sector. There are currently 1,707,184 people waiting to see a healthcare specialist for the first time, with an average waiting time of 504 days (MINSAL, 2022).

Professional Non-Profit Finalist

Professional Non-Profit Finalist

Improving The Transition Towards A Care Home

Company: Koos Service Design

Client: RAK Sigra

Country: Netherlands

Summary: Senior housing options are under a lot of pressure in the Netherlands, which harms the user experience in care homes: The demand is far greater than the supply. The rules and regulations of insurance and the government greatly influence the procedures. There is a care home staff shortage.

The Covid pandemic severely impacted the way of working in care homes. We embraced the challenge to provide a better experience for people who started rehabilitation and unexpectedly could not return home and had to move into a care home. 

Professional Non-Profit Finalist - Honourable Mention

Professional Non-Profit Finalist - Honourable Mention

CoronaCheck: Service Design In Times Of Crisis

Company: Koos Service Design

Client: Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport

Country: Netherlands

Summary: The global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic shook modern society like never before. While everyone was trying to grope and cope with this new unpredictable reality, governments had to take action to restore normality. Fast.

To combat this crisis at a national level, the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport assembled a multidisciplinary team to develop a solution to re-open society safely for 17 million inhabitants.

Student Finalist - Honourable Mention

Student Finalist - Honourable Mention

Collaborative Futures: Food Futures 2031

Student: Katie Upsdale

University: Glasgow School of Art

Client: Centre for Civic Innovation at Glasgow City Council

Country: UK

Summary: Tackling issues within the food system such as food poverty and scarcity will not be solved by the food industry alone. Innovative new approaches must be made within the private, public and third sectors to realise wider systemic change.

Over the course of fourteen weeks, this partnership project between the Centre for Civic Innovation (CCI) at Glasgow City Council (GCC) and The Glasgow School of Art explored Glasgow’s food systems to identify opportunities for social innovation to support systems change.

Student Finalist

Student Finalist

Shenzhen Guangming Jingkou Community “Homestay Breeze” Service Innovative Design

Student: Muzi Yang

University: Zhejiang University

Client: Guangdong Homestay Development Research Institute

Country: China

Summary: Service design of Homestay Breeze is based on the principle of "low cost and high value", using local feature and homestay unique positioning to break the traditional service script of homestay and create surprising services. Also by applying the research results and combining interdisciplinary knowledge, I designed a set of homestay service design toolkits.

Main Sponsor of the Service Design Award 2022
Main Sponsor of the Service Design Award 2022
Professional Commercial Category Sponosor of the Service Design Award 2022
Professional Commercial Category Sponosor of the Service Design Award 2022

Service Design Award Winners and Finalists

Service Design Award Winners and Finalists
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