In early 2016, along with an enthusiastic group of fellow SDN Netherlands Chapter members, I set about to help plan the ninth annual Service Design Global Conference.

“Give me an example of a company that’s made a complete turnaround to embracing their customers.”

Faced with declining student enrolment, public vocational school BOS Schönbrunn in Landshut, Germany, decided to create a more competitive and student-centric service offering.

The growth of an in-house digital function from maverick startup to multiple product teams is a perilous time for the customer experience. Service designers can come to the rescue with the tools to make agile work at scale.

Too often, ambitious service design initiatives that require complex enterprises to change fall short of delivering on their intended outcomes.

What’s behind the ongoing trend of mergers and acquisitions in the world of service design? And what does it mean for the way our discipline is being practiced?

In this article we argue that in order to gain competitive advantage, companies need to provide superior employee experience, and we show how service design can help them succeed.

Japan is a consumerist, technology-loving manufacturing powerhouse. But relative to the size of the market and rate of technology adoption, many major organisations, public as well as private, are remarkably behind in terms of seamless service delivery.

To start our coverage of the SDN's Global Conference 2016, Touchpoint asked Dutch-based design consultant Dennis Hambeukers to recap his conference learnings in both written and visual form.

Over the years we’ve witnessed businesses work all the angles to gain commercial advantages. They’ve increased their investment in marketing across print, digital and broadcast media.

Humans have always made maps; to tell us where we are, to navigate the world around us, and to understand the bigger context.

Service design professionals need to do more than create compelling blueprints and journeys to build actual services: They need to embed themselves into the detailed mechanics of operating and scaling a service experience in a nimble, fail-fast fashion.

Jin Duo was frustrated. The waste-management company she had been running for more than a decade was successful, but facing challenges to keep growing.

With the rise of user experience (UX) in the last years, traditional customer journey maps have been evolving into experience maps.

In recent years, design teams working both in-house and at consultancies are increasingly applying the service design mindset and methods across a wide variety of projects.

The speed of digital change means that multidisciplinary teams must be both innovative and reactive. How can teams with different ways of working and skills communicate well in order to collaborate effectively?

Organisational change is currently an intriguing topic in the field of service design. Effective change efforts help drive innovation and promote other positive cultural practices within organisations.

At the 2016 Service Design Global Conference in Amsterdam, Muna Al Dhabbah (Director of Government Service Development, Prime Minister’s Office, UAE) was joined on stage by Simone Carrier (Head of Service Design at FutureGov) to share their experiences in applying service design to improve citizen-government interactions within the UAE.

From November 30th to December 4th 2016, the World Industrial Design Conference took place in Liangzhu, China.

Each year during the much anticipated Award Ceremony at the Service Design Global Conference the Service Design Award winners are announced.

SDN Finland made a nice small profit from the Helsinki SDN national conference, held in September 2015. Early last year, it was time to make the money support the chapter objectives: promote the use of service design and support local organisations in creating human-centred services.

On December 1, 2016, over 300 design practitioners, enthusiasts, students, and researchers made the trek to Toronto to take part in what we hope to be the first of many national conversations about the state of service design in the ‘great north’.