back from lovely San Francisco we can look back on a great Service Design Global Conference 2011. We hope you all enjoyed the inspiring talks, workshops, Pecha Kucha presentations as well as singing and acting performances throughout the two days! Thank you all for joining and making this event a great place to meet and share!

Of course there is a lot of people without this conference could not have happened.We want to thank all of you who made this years Service Design Global Conference 2011 such a great event! Thank you Jamin and Alex for putting so much enthusiasm and time into the careful planning of the conference! A big thank you to our Sponsors McDonalds, Salesforce, Adaptive Path, BT Finance and AIGA and to frog, DEGW and once more Adaptive Path for hosting our various events! And another big thank you to our volunteers, that surely helped a lot of people that came with questions to find help and made the conference days run so smoothly!

The conference theme “From Sketchbook to Spreadsheet” was explored in various ways by our speakers. We want to highlight and thank our keynote speakers Kerry Bodine, Richard Buchanan and Brandon Schauer for their inspiring and pioneering talks! You can find most of the presentations online here!

We hope you all enjoyed the days at the conference and in the city of San Francisco!Use the input and inspiration for your next challenges and jobs to create something valuable for the future and to share on the next years conference!

Hope to see you then!

Your SDN team!

Service Design Global Conference

The 4^th annual Service Design Conference crosses the Atlantic this year to San Francisco where we will meet to develop and strengthen the knowledge and expertise in the business, science and practice of the innovation and improvement of services. This global gathering will be an invaluable opportunity to meet your peers, expand your network and hear from those operating at the very heart of service design.

Right from our first conference in Amsterdam in 2008; new thinking has been debated, methods shared, great ideas and strategies developed and stories have been told. Invaluable connections have been forged between individuals, groups and organizations to help design and build internal capacity and teams, create new management capabilities, all ultimately generating value for service organizations and users alike.

So if the design and provision of services is on your agenda; whether you’re a practitioner, whether you’re in the business of managing and delivering services or you’re if studying, this conference is for you.

Here’s your chance to be a part of this year’s exciting experience; two full days of stimulating conversations, activities, keynote speeches, expert talks and more experimental formats and engagements.

To get an idea of what this year’s conference will be like, you can view presentations, pictures and videos of previous conferences.

The audience
Over the years our audience has naturally been made up of a nucleus of academics, service design practitioners, and those studying design, alongside a growing number representing service provider organizations.

We realize that in order to fully understand the potential, develop the practice and capitalize on the impact of service design and its place in the new economy, this years conference needs to welcome those individuals and organizations creating, developing and managing services but not necessarily calling themselves designers (after all, services have been created and provided for hundreds of years, designers have really only become involved in the last few decades).

This year’s theme
At this year’s conference we’ll be exploring what happens when service design meets business. We’ll look at how, where and when our two broad professions work together to generate value, what we can learn from each other and ask what the future of this relationship might be. The theme is:

“From sketchbook to spreadsheet”

We’re particularly interested in understanding the impact that service design is now making to organisations’ bottom lines and in hearing where the compelling stories of designing business strategies, monetising service propositions and cultural change are.

We will also be maintaining our focus on the practice and business of service design itself; new tools and methods yes, but also how to buy and sell service design, and what the design community can learn from business and vice-versa.

Why you should attend
We are expecting over 300 passionate participants from all over the globe to join us in two day of activities. It is an excellent opportunity to learn, to share and to be a part of the growing community that is the Service Design Network.