I’d like to welcome you to this issue by attempting a bit of mind-reading. Are you ready? I’m guessing that you’re a service designer working within an agency. Am I wrong? Perhaps a service designer in a large corporate? What about a public sector role?

With all the exciting service design projects our over 15,000-strong SDN members/community followers are actively working on – or have completed in the not-so-distant past – we are excited to introduce a new platform to showcase it to the rest of the community: the new SDN Case Study Library.

The SDN is pleased to have launched our new Case Study Library and, in turn, is on the hunt for a handful of dynamic service designers to support us in the shaping of the content we house there.

Service Design Day 2019 was the biggest yet! It was excellent to see the service design community come together. Each year, June 1st is all about celebrating the power and spirit of service design, as well as connecting our astonishing community.

What makes services so challenging to redesign? In a word: variability. There are often dozens of variables that change each time a customer experiences a service, making each experience a chance for things to go wrong!

How do corporate innovation teams de-risk projects across the innovation process in relation to service design? How does service design address high level early stage uncertainty for corporate start-up teams? Does service design function as an effective stand-alone discipline for corporate start-ups?

What if, instead of fads, buzzwords, and perfect pitches, start-ups and angel investors based their decisions on real business model validation? No matter how polished the presentation, it’s no match for proving the product can be sold to real, paying customers.

Companies that invest in design are more likely to invest in R&D. From those listed in the Fortune 500 to those with the largest market capitalisations, embracing design appears a proven route to success. When looking a little deeper however, we find huge discrepancies in the understanding and adoption of design in early start-ups.

Start-ups and innovation environments represent exciting, challenging and relatively-uncharted terrain for service design. Despite the fact that we as service designers are barely visible in the start-up world, and mostly unmentioned in their literature, my own experience as a service designer working with start-ups and innovation programmes has proven to me that we can add significant value in these settings.

Canvasses are a familiar format for start-ups – they are created collaboratively (ideally lead by a facilitator), trigger valuable discussions and decision-making, and remain visible on the wall as a shared reference. And because start-ups can benefit from a truly holistic, customer-centred design perspective as they set out, this canvas reinforces the importance of a service design perspective early on.

In large organisations, there are always people willing to adapt to a more customer-centric and value creation approach, but often they face many barriers in implementing the necessary practices to realise these ambitions. The obstacles vary, however, and they are usually associated with a lack of customer dialogue and a resistance to changing normal operations to enable collaboration and quick decision-making processes.

It is our role, as service designers, to help challenge the assumptions that companies, business managers and often product owners have at the start of a project. It is also our role to advocate for empathy and a deep understanding of users. However, we are not the only ones who know the way of getting there.

Innovation is a dominant buzzword within the corporate landscape, and it is nearly impossible to find a company that does not declare itself to be customer centric. However, regardless of the fact that innovation and customer centricity have been at the centre of attention for quite some time, few corporations have figured out how to pull them off successfully.

A quick Google search for ‘innovation’ pulls up thousands of results: leading edge technology, business school case studies, how-to guides for innovation in corporate environments, and more. ‘Innovation’ is a big, ambiguous term that often looks very different depending on where and how it is applied.

This article explores how start-ups can learn from small organisations’ curiosity for – and implementation of – service design as a mean for innovation. By translating learnings from SMEs, we propose how start-ups can successfully adopt and practice a decentralised, informal and flexible use of service design.

Technology advances at breath-taking speed. Developing new solutions – or improving existing ones – while at the same time keeping track of these advances and considering opportunities they introduce, becomes increasingly challenging for us service designers. Therefore, we need to find ways to understand their potential, while at the same time enabling stakeholders to have an informed role in the process.

Every day, we are confronted with the inevitability of an ecological apocalypse. “No one is coming to save us,” writes the Guardian newspaper in London. There’s no Planet B. Despite this, our day-to-day work in service design may not always consider its impact on society and the environment. Can design contribute towards sustainable futures?

A team of students within the service design Masters degree programme at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) were interested in the awareness and knowledge of service design amongst participants of a start-up competition and carried out research and identified potential areas of improvement.

Established in 2010, Livework’s São Paulo outpost is a service design pioneer in one of the world’s top-ten largest economies - Brazil. Since then, the team has worked with an enviable roster of clients, but also experienced the challenges of carrying out service design before it became widely recognised. In this edition of the Touchpoint Profile, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes speaks to Luis Alt, one of the studio’s founders.

The ‘Service Design Futures’ event took place from 23rd to 24th April in Shanghai Jing’an district, with more than 1,000 participants from across China and around the world. The two-day programme was filled with more than 30 presentations, the Successful Design Awards ceremony, and a trade show with sponsors and representatives making contact with the attendees, who included both seasoned professionals and service design newcomers.

We are proud to present the amazing work of our SDN chapters from around the world. This annual publication shares personal insights into the service design national conferences, events, meet-ups, publications and other innovative initiatives that chapters have organised throughout the past year. Download your free copy from the SDN website for the full story!