”I’m always surprised by how nervous designers can be about demonstrating the ‘impact’ of design.

For years, the innovation and design community has used tools for visualising and evaluating physical products.

Service Design generates not only new service concepts, but also new knowledge about service production and consumption.

In Touchpoint Volume 1 No. 3, Tether and Stigliani raised fundamental questions about the future of Service Design: how to build legitimacy, how to control – or lose control of – a profession and how to coordinate efforts between its entrepreneurs, practitioners and academics.

Working in a relatively new and developing field, Service Design practitioners still have difficulties in communicating the value of their work in terms of measurability and business (1) impact.

When we, as designers, see that people enjoy the services we have created, we tend to accept this as proof of quality.

From handier tin openers to more intuitive interfaces, the ability of design to humanise ‘things’ is well known and understood.

Competition within the building materials sector is based mainly on the price of materials – the cheaper you can provide a material, the more competitive you will be.

Most Service Design models and definitions discuss the importance of creating mutual value for both provider and customer.

The Service Design community has grown enormously in the past few years.

These practitioners tend in their everyday practice to adopt product service system thinking and to build extended design offerings.

The city of Melbourne, Australia, has over 4 million citizens, and is growing, thanks to an influx of immigrants from all over the world. Because of its growing population, there has been a great demand for living space in and around Melbourne.