For years, AI seemed to me like a storm cloud approaching on the horizon. It was as a distant rumble that was growing louder, but the signs of its arrival were hard to spot. A mobile phone I purchased in 2021 promised built-in AI, and my bank assured me that it was spotting fraud thanks to similar wizardry. But despite knowing it was the ‘next big thing’, I couldn’t easily point to its tangible presence in my daily life. That all changed in late 2022, when Lensa pushed its way into my Instagram feed. The AI-generated avatars of friends left me slack-jawed, making AI’s capabilities suddenly very real. ChatGPT hit my consciousness around the same time, serving up uncannily-lifelike conversations that drew on vast stores of knowledge.

The past years have seen plenty of discussion around the terms ‘service design thinking’ and ‘service design doing’. In this issue, we feel it’s time to get a better understanding of ‘service design leading’. After all, that is how much of the thinking and doing gets done. The growth of service design teams – whether in an

“You cannot manage what you cannot measure... and what gets measured gets done.” So goes the old adage attributed in different forms to several management gurus. And it’s one that presents a perennial challenge for service designers; how does one really measure something as amorphous as ‘experience’?

As this issue of Touchpoint goes to press, COP26 is just a few weeks away. This will be the 26th edition of the UN’s climate change summit, and it comes with an urgent burden: It is seen as “… the world’s best last chance to get runaway climate change under control.”

There is a transition underway in service design that is challenging traditional ways of working. As the scope of service design projects continues to expand, service designers are increasingly confronted by the immense complexity of overlapping service systems. The articles in this issue offer powerful provocations and hopeful, practical examples on how to integrate systems thinking into service design.

It goes without saying that 2020 has been a tumultuous year so far. And to pick out the most consequential of changes, the impact of an invisible virus on just about every aspect of our lives has been unprecedented. It has forced each and every one of us to adapt to new ways of working, and new ways of living. Under the theme of 'Embracing Change’, this digital-only and special issue of Touchpoint brings a unique curation of articles that resonate with the here and now.

Delivering new services into the market, or improving existing ones, often means fundamental changes within the service provider itself. As the organisation grows larger – or the service more complex – more and more roles are touched by our work. For those seeking to understand how to bring about the required change in an organisation, and feel adrift beyond the second diamond, we hope you find new inspiration, techniques and avenues of exploration in the pages of this issue.

Prototyping sits deep in the service designer’s DNA. Hypotheses, conjecture and assumptions are no match for seeing a real user or customer interact with a prototype, to determine what works well and what needs to be improved. And prototyping sits firmly within the ‘service design doing’ realm - as opposed to the ‘service design thinking’ one - because it’s the moment where we make our concepts tangible.

A service designer’s skills and mindset are applicable to many of the challenges faced by start-ups, and even more of them once you add in business design. We design based on research-driven insights and have a holistic perspective on customer experience. Yet we’re largely an unknown quantity amongst start-ups.The start-up scene grows and gets more attention by the day, and there’s a good chance your city hosts a start-up ecosystem you’re unaware of. Start-ups represent an exciting challenge for service design - a new frontier, if you will; and that’s the topic of this issue of Touchpoint.

As service design matures and shoulders new responsibilities within larger organisations, it also finds itself facing new challenges. In this issue, we look at a new question: how to manage service design. Design management is an area from where service designers can take inspiration when addressing challenges such as creating a consistency of output amongst distributed service designers, establishing representation and champions at the top echelons of the organisation, and moving from hands-on work to managerial work.

This issue of Touchpoint applies a unique and future-focussed perspective on our discipline and focusses on what our practice will look like - or should look like - as it moves into the world of tomorrow. From discussions on how artificial intelligence can best be harnessed to improve service experiences to projects aimed at exploiting the power of augmented reality to improve in-store experiences.

With this issue of Touchpoint, we celebrate a milestone tenth year of publication. And rather than choosing a simple theme, we decided to tackle one of the trickiest problems of service design: How does service design continue delivering value through to implementation? In other words, what happens after that second diamond?

Service designers today find themselves grappling with questions of scale: “How can I train teams of people across an organisation to carry out this work independently, going forward?” “How can the organisation itself modify and adapt in the ways that are necessary to deliver these service improvements?” In this 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.

As service design grows, it faces the challenge of meeting the even greater demand for it. How can the seeds of service design be sown in tomorrow’s designers and business people? How can our techniques be introduced across entire organisations - to be applied by non-designers - to improve their services? And what frameworks can be proposed to categorise (blossoming) service designers according to traits and areas of expertise?

“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.