Service Design Masterclasses Series

We are pleased to announce the newest online course from the SDN Academy: The Service Design Masterclasses Series!

https://www.sdn-academy.org/service-design-masterclasses-sep-2024

Created for service designers with 2+ years’ experience, the 8-week, 8-module course offers you the chance to strengthen your core skills, expand your capabilities, and earn Professional Accreditation.

The course starts on 20 September 2024 and will be a mix of live sessions and self-study. It’s taught by seasoned experts: Chris Ferguson, Andy Polaine, Tina Weisser, and more. And it’s led by Jesse Grimes, co-founder of the SDN Academy and Touchpoint Editor-in-Chief.

COURSE MODULES

Strategy and Value Creation: Equip yourself designers with the knowledge and skills required to create value for your clients or your internal stakeholders. The course covers a range of topics that are essential for service designers to understand when it comes to business strategy.

Mastering Creative Facilitation: We will talk about different aspects of group dynamics and your own role as a service designer and how to handle the ‘urge’ you might feel to jump in and help the group come up with new ideas, while you should actually guide them in doing so themselves.

Designing Services with AI: As with other disciplines both within and outside the creative fields, AI is having a great impact on the practice of service design. In this module you'll learn some AI fundamentals, as well as advice for where AI should (and should not) be applied, both in the creation of services as well as their delivery.

Systems Thinking and Designing for Sustainability: Systems Thinking enables you to move beyond an event- or data-oriented approach to sustainability, to identifying trends and patterns of behaviour over time, and to surfacing the underlying structures that generate these events and patterns. As a result, you will be able to fine-tune and improve your mental models and design high-leverage policy interventions for sustainable design.

Designing Ventures: Innovation and Start-ups: Working with start-ups, or in contexts such as innovation labs, accelerator programmes, or incubators, offers a different set of challenges compared to the larger organisations in which service designers typically work. However, even new business initiatives within larger organisations can offer the same circumstances when they are positioned correctly.

Prototyping and Successful Implementation: Services present unique challenges for prototyping, given their multi-touchpoint nature and often the need for infrastructure. This course explores the development of service design concepts into prototypes, demos, and micropilots through a combination of lectures and activities. It starts with “sketching” service ecosystems using blueprints and diagrams, leading to low-fidelity prototypes with simple materials, mid-fidelity interactive prototypes using props, clickable demos, and role-play, through to video prototyping, service staging, and micropilots using real service actors.

Leading Teams and Organisational Change: In the dynamic world of service design, managing organisational change is crucial for driving innovation and achieving success. The "Leading Service Design and Organisational Change" module provides participants with the essential skills and knowledge to lead transformative projects within their organisations.

Pitching, Selling, and Getting Buy-In: Whether pitching a client or gaining buy-in from stakeholders, telling the story of your ideas and work and landing it with the audience is essential. This module draws upon the fundamentals of storytelling and shows how to use them to shape project proposals, presentations, and pitches that land with your intended audience.

Discover the detailed course curriculum here: https://www.sdn-academy.org/masterclasses-module-overview

COURSE DATES

The first edition of the course will begin on Friday, 20 September, and conclude with a closing and graduation ceremony on Tuesday, 26 November.

COURSE FEES

SDN Members: €2,990 Early Bird (until 5 August) and thereafter €3,340

Non-SDN Members: €3,190 Early Bird (until 5 August) and thereafter €3,490

Pursuing professional accreditation through the SDN typically costs €1,800. A two-year membership to the SDN costs €360. Both of those—a value of €2,160—are included in the course at no additional cost.

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER NOW

Based on our experience with our lower-level accreditation course, we expect that the course will sell out! 

https://www.sdn-academy.org/service-design-masterclasses-sep-2024