We select the themes for each issue of Touchpoint by periodically taking the pulse of our community, and interest in this topic has always been high. So we are pleased to be able to bring you a collection of articles from not just established service designers, but also leaders in the fields of systems thinking and systemic design.

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.

As service design practice continues to tackle more and more complex problems, it becomes critical for us to understand the nature of the complex systems that we are, as a discipline, operating within. We must also contemplate how this new understanding of complex systems might change service design practice, and what new kinds of value might be created in the world as a result.

During the COVID-19 crisis, the Innovation team at University Hospitals of Cleveland worked with caregivers to design a touchless patient experience. Four strategies were used to deconstruct and reconstruct the conventional elements of the service blueprint framework in order to make them useful and appropriate for pandemic response and recovery.

In the 1950s, Walt Disney recognised the potential of building organisational ecosystems and extending his brand into other industries. How did he identify opportunities? How did he decide which ones to take advantage of and which trade-offs to make?

In this article, we discuss the advantages of systems intelligence (SI) for organisational service design, and how to apply its principles. Systems intelligence is a combination of systems thinking and pragmatic approaches, implemented together with a philosophy of life.

The Systemic Design Toolkit provides the only complete systems methodology for designers, with over 30 system modelling canvasses designed for participatory workshops. Validated through dozens of applications, academic training and workshops, the Toolkit bridges systems thinking, human-centred design and service design approaches to address complex systems contexts.

Service design is currently dominated by a focus on the user journey, and therefore is not sufficient in itself for highly complex public challenges which across agencies and sectors. To tackle complex public sector issues, the integration of systemic design capacity and a cross-disciplinary approach is crucial.

Existing approaches employed in service design are primarily anchored in establishing linear ‘cause and effect relationships’. This article highlights the dangers of utilising linear thinking to address the complexities of service design and provides insights into how non-linear systems thinking could result in far more adaptive, meaningful and comprehensive services.

Most service designers, when working with large organisations, have been confronted with the seemingly incomprehensible dynamics that come with complex systems. As service design matures, we get to see more and more of the ‘belly of the beast’, confronting us with a complexity and interconnectedness that is challenging, but also very interesting to work on.

As a design community, we have developed certain paradigms over the past decades which have provided us with guidance in our daily work. In an increasingly complex world, we are now challenged to reconsider all of them, and adapt a more holistic perspective.

As service design continues to develop, work from other disciplines may help provide ways to broaden our practice and provide increased value for our stakeholders, both internal and external. This article looks at two emergent disciplines – improvement science and implementation science – to see how to integrate aspects of these disciplines within our existing service design practice.

Service designers often need to navigate complex ecosystems of services in order to understand the interactions amongst actors and to understand how value is being co-created. The advancement of emerging technologies has introduced additional complexity to the existing service systems which are foundational to the connected service economy.

A journey map is a useful and widely-applied tool in service design that implicitly assumes the journey to be linear in structure. However, some episodes of a journey may repeat, forming loops, such as patients receiving treatments that must be administered several times.

This article shows how a systemic design approach was used to support the implementation of a policy direction that touches multiple services and organisations. It discusses how a team of designers and policy makers mobilised services to action through breaking silos, building empathy and developing a community of practice.

In this issue's Profile, Natalie Kuhn chats with Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes about her roles and ambitions.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) can only genuinely come to life when they permeate all systems within an organisation

The Service Design Award, curated by the Service Design Network, is the first international service design award to recognise the service design community’s achievements in both the public and private sectors.

The world is a rapidly-evolving landscape. Organisational complexity is growing, user expectations are intensifying and the digital landscape's on-going evolution finds service designers squarely faced with the challenges and opportunities that come with the next wave of change.

The SDN Accreditation Programme, initiated in 2017, is continuously developing to meet our growing community's needs and expectations, and we are pleased to share with you our latest developments:

The SDN Academy recognises that sometimes attending our live, online courses does not necessarily fit into our students’ hectic schedules, or their time zones. That is why we are (quietly) debuting a new on-demand platform to support those of you who require online learning opportunities outside of a fixed schedule.