“Business as Unusual” was the theme of the ninth annual Service Design Global Conference held in Amsterdam and it forms the feature theme for this issue. In its play on words, it recognises that service design is more and more becoming an established way of ‘doing business’, whether in organisations, or in places such as the public sector.

From the early 1990s, Design Thinking has sought to shake up traditional ways of doing business, and foster innovation through creativity and applying a designer’s mindset to business challenges. Design Thinking shares quite a lot of DNA with service design. While their activities and approaches might differ in some respects, they share common goals, and are carried out in similar settings.

The wide umbrella of Design encompasses many disciplines: From long-established practices such as industrial and graphic design, to the relative newcomers of information architecture (IA), user experience design (UX) and service design. One thing that has become clear is that the new kids on the block are facing more challenges to their identity. And for service design specifically, one acronym has triggered more consternation than others: CX.

Despite the growth of service design as a discipline, it still faces a difficult challenge: How does one sell service design? It’s a so-called wicked problem, made of intertwining questions that often have no clear answers.

What happens to creativity and innovation once an agency stops functioning independently? And will independent agencies suffer if their work starts being done in-house by clients themselves?

Mit dem 20-jährigen Jubiläum von Service Design erscheint die erste Sonderausgabe des Magazins für den deutschsprachigen Raum. In dieser Touchpoint berichten wir von der großartigen Entwicklung von Service Design in Unternehmen, in Agenturen und an Hochschulen.

Service design has proven its value as a discipline when it comes to the creation of products and services. And that success has seen its application broadening, to include policy-making.

Service design has gained considerable recognition in recent years, and as a result, there is less “navel gazing” than in its formative years. When service designers cross paths with practices such as UX design, CX, Lean and Agile, each discipline is strengthened.

Today, wellbeing is one of the most important topics for society, businesses, families and individuals. Service design stands ready to provide well-thought-out and innovative improvements to processes, services and interactions.

In an organisational context, transformation is a process of profound and radical change. As service design gains traction within a larger range of industries and sectors the practice must keep pace with developments in the application of this.

Excessively business-minded and overly practical approaches to service design may well prove harmful to the whole field. Beauty is part of meaningful living. When one tries to ignore its delicate power, the aesthetic transcends towards the nondescript and unknown in-betweens.

Service design is increasingly playing a role in determining how government services are provided to citizens. Government services touch upon every aspect of daily life and the ‘users’ of these services are the widest target audience imaginable – citizens of any demographic description.

Facts and figures, performance statistics and KPIs – these are what managers want when they initiate a project. Most service designers, on the other hand, believe primarily in qualitative research. How to reconcile these two perspectives and the roles quantitative and qualitative research play in delivering successful projects?

Widespread changes to a service often entail equally broad changes within the organisation that provides it. Therefore, for better or worse, designers find themselves influencing or initiating change management activities in an organisation.

Services and performing arts have many things in common: both are ephemeral, made up of processes, depend on people to fulfil a variety of tasks which add up to a bigger picture, and both are planned with the help of tools such as storyboards, scenarios and customer journeys.

Take an in-depth look at service pioneers arenas in which service design is being practiced to fulfil the basic human needs of eating, sleeping and playing.

For service design to be successful, designers and business executives need to bridge the gap between the two practices. Designers need to be able to speak more to business needs, both to sell their services and also to ensure design solutions have clear business value and will be executed.

Service design encompasses all of the touchpoints that a customer might interact with, and also seeks to create or improve the complex systems – the business strategies, processes, technology, organisations, and cultures – that support experience delivery across channels. How can service design contribute to change within Organisations?

Education for service design is a challenge: not least due to the fact that the discipline itself is engaged in a continuous process of learning and growing, and thus we are facing a changing demand for the relevant skills that service designers need to bring to projects.

Dive into the topics and discussions of the annual Service Design Conference that took place in October 2010 in Berlin: Service Design specific theories, methods and perspectives, social innovation and user centred approach.

If we attempt to measure the impact Service Design has on the quality and innovation of service systems, we need to look at effects not only on the scale of entire economies, but also at medium and long term effects regarding service culture, learning systems, knowledge generation and transformation.

Although the relationship between design and behaviour is not obvious at first glance, design can, in many aspects, intentionally become the agent or tool that helps influencing the behaviour of people such as customers, employers and employees.

What service design basics mean? Process and methods? We have these. But simply executing them does not guarantee effective Service Design practice. As service design advances, we need to look more closely at the role of individual designers and the culture of design firms in producing successful solutions.

One of the most relevant topics of our time: Health. Explore the individual, social and economic relevance of health systems and the potential of Service Design to redesign and reinvent service offerings, service processes and service interactions.

The first issue of Touchpoint covers the basics of Service Design. What is it about? What needs does it fill? How does it work? We start by building the foundation. We invited practitioners, customers, and academics to contribute to this first mapping of the Service Design landscape.