As service design matures and shoulders new responsibilities within larger organisations, it also finds itself facing new challenges. Demonstrating its value and applying it to organisational transformation has been addressed in these pages before. In this issue, we look at a new question: how to manage service design.

A joint team of public sector officials from the City of Long Beach, California, and graduate students from the Harvard Kennedy School worked on a semester-long project to understand the drivers of illegal dumping in the city. Harvesting the synergies from quantitative and qualitative analyses was a key to success.

There is a natural synergy between service design and design management, sharing as they do three principles fundamental to their success: user centredness, co-creation and a holistic perspective. How can this synergy be exploited to establish service design leadership in organisations, markets and service design teams, and advance the service design agenda?

For designers — especially those in large organisations — conventions, culture and language can create barriers to building trust and collaborating with business partners. In observing these dynamics at a large technology company, we found that business designer archetypes can help service designers better engage with their business peers and create greater impact.

How might we design for better client-agency relationships in strategic design, at the beginning of new projects? After interviewing a wide range of clients, agencies and experts, I proposed and tested a workshop called ‘Solution Mapping’, that helps co-create strategies for dealing with potential problems during a project in advance.

Service design applied to libraries makes perfect sense. Unlike industry institutions, libraries are so-called ‘third places’1 that act as binding agents for communities. Library stakeholders include community members who call a library their own. As such, managing library service design efforts is important and we have seen methods to infuse our institution with service design thinking.

This article describes the unique establishment of Service rePublic, a partnership between Cork County Council and Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) in Ireland. With this innovative approach, the collaboration of both practitioner and academic institution has allowed the rapid development of capacity and expertise within the Service rePublic unit.

Much of design management literature has ignored the existence of service design. That creates problems for service designers, because in addition to being product-oriented, design management is likelier to discuss how to convince management and potential clients about the value of design, than actual management. This will not be enough.

Motivated and engaged people within organisations are critical to creating successful services. To this end, Newcastle-based Orange Bus turned our process inward to unite coworkers around a new employee experience vision. Our methods not only improved our working environment but led to advances in how we deliver value to our clients.

Let’s face it, it’s hard to deliver meaningful customer experience (CX) changes. As the Service Design Lead at Capital One Canada, I’m constantly asking myself, “How is service design supported within the business, and how does service design support the business?”

Establishing partnerships and networks with a wide range of actors (going beyond users) from diverse disciplines is key to designing and launching good services. This article explores how service designers manage partnerships during a long-term project involving many different stakeholders to achieve the timely and effective implementation of the service developed.

India is often described as ‘complex’ due to its diverse cultural, economic and social structures that make it challenging for companies to penetrate or innovate. We sought to better understand this complexity and define how service designers can turn these complexities into opportunities.

When Mexico’s BBVA design team began to grow rapidly, from six to 120 designers in the space of two years, our biggest challenge was to establish and permeate the same design mindset, which had to have an optimal balance between putting processes in place and encouraging creative freedom.

Beautiful Dublin – the hometown of Guinness and U2, and a hub for Google, Facebook and Linkedin – played host to the 11th Service Design Global Conference (SDGC) in October 2018.

Designers increasingly find themselves thrust into leadership roles. Despite their passion for the work they do, they are not always prepared for these roles. In this article I share research insights about the leadership qualities that creative teams want from their leaders, and provide some tips on how you can develop these qualities if you want to become a better leader.

As service designers, we face many obstacles in maintaining service design’s relevance during the implementation phase of complex enterprise IT projects. Making service design the cornerstone of a fast-paced agile project requires a new approach, where service design spans from research through to delivery.

In the past years, many organisations have been working on pro­­jects to improve service experiences. Increasingly, large ­organisations have started to understand the value of service design. This has resulted in a growing desire amongst organi­sations that ‘understand’ service design to embed it into their companies.

As designers, we pride ourselves in our ability to think of innovation holistically by applying the three lenses of Desirability, Feasibility and Viability to our work. At Conic, we have iterated on the creation of Service Blueprints over the past few years to make the execution of new experiences more clearly actionable (Feasibility) and to better articulate their business value (Viability).

This article reports on the development of a new service design ideation method which may be used for creative problem-solving. This new matrix has undergone preliminary testing in a half-day workshop entitled HackCARE, that was planned and organised by the authors.

For this edition of the Touchpoint Profile, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes followed up with Anna-Sophie Oertzen after meeting at an event in Amsterdam, to learn more about how her research into the value of co-creation can enlighten service designers.

The Service Design Award 2018 ceremony took place on 11 October 2018, at the SDN’s Global Conference in Dublin. The Convention Centre Dublin was full with over 800 expectant attendees and sixteen shortlisted teams.

The SDN is a strong, international network, thanks to our amazing and motivated Chapters. Since 2008 we have grown from 1 to 42 Chapters in more than 30 countries and over five continents!

Over the past couple of years, the SDN has reached out to our members to understand what they value about their membership and how our organisation might ­improve the member experience.