A brief story of our creation, evolution, and finally succession all in the name of sustaining a meaningful space for the Service Design community in NYC

SDN New York Chapter kicked off 2022 with the first event titled Trauma-Responsive Design Research: A New Model for Change presented by Rachael Dietkus (she/her). She is a designer, licensed clinical social worker, and certified trauma professional dedicated to trauma-responsive practices in design. She is the founder and principal social worker of Social Workers Who Design and works with design teams worldwide.

On Tuesday, August 10th, the SDN New York Chapter was delighted to host service designer & researcher Nata Kostenko, design ethics enthusiast, former digital nomad, to talk about the exciting possibilities for a relatively new area in service design, Ethical Design.

In today’s talk for the Service Design Network New York Chapter, Agnes Kwek presented to us the challenges of implementing service design in government and gave us a framework of practices to overcome those challenges. If you missed the talk, you can still check out the contents of the discussion in the write up below.

A successful way to sell service design is to not mention service design at all.

Think back to your last memorable experience. Was it positive or negative? What stands out to you most? What happened in between? How did the experience start? How did it end?

The Service Design Network New York Chapter hosted speaker and facilitator Andre Plaut on Tuesday, February 9 for a virtual workshop entitled “Learning is Experience Design”.

“My successes are a result of my own skills and actions, not luck” — a resulting insight amongst participants during this session

An ad hoc series about how community members have discovered the SDN NYC, and why they continue to come back. Each person’s story is unique and we are excited, grateful and warmed by their continued engagement.

“Why would a designer want to work for a bank? Won’t your get bored?” Over the course of three years, not only has she never been bored, but she has learned important lessons about applying Service Design within a financial institution, an organization riddled with bureaucracy and red tape.

On October 13th, Natalie Kuhn did a talk for the Service Design Network New York Chapter and the community had A LOT of great questions, only some of which she could answer on their Zoom call. To do the rest of the questions justice, she sat with them and wrote out her responses here.

An ad hoc series about how community members have discovered the SDN NYC, and why they continue to come back. Each person’s story is unique and we are excited, grateful and warmed by their continued engagement.

“Governance is a response to the tension created by ambiguity. The need for a design governance increases as you scale and complexity grows.”

The Service Design Network New York Chapter hosted Alexandra Fiorillo for a (virtual) workshop entitled “Designing for Equity, Inclusion, and Impact.”

“For all the talk about being human-centered, one very human factor often gets overlooked — a basic understanding of how power operates in relationships between people.” — George Aye, “Design Education’s Big Gap: Understanding the Role of Power”

What is Service Design Day? SDD is a day dedicated to service design enthusiasts. It’s a world-wide event that launched in 2016 to bring together people from different backgrounds and disciplines across the globe to celebrate service design, raise awareness, and create impact in the world around us. This year SDN New York spotlit the Emergency Design Collective (EDC).