As the pace of technological innovation continues unbroken, the services we use in our day-to-day lives more and more resembles the stuff of science fiction films.

While walking across the Millennium Bridge in London earlier this year, I noticed a group of people standing around and looking down curiously at a man who was laying at their feet.

Pressures for efficiency and savings that drive digital innovation projects in the UK healthcare sector have created an increased focus on short-term goals and a fragmentation of services.

As we shift towards an AI world, service designers have an important role to play in designing a new relationship between humans and computers in the workplace.

The future of service design has become a trendy topic in the service design community worldwide. Recognising the scarcity of evidence-based analysis of this topic, we applied foresight tools to explore four alternative scenarios for the development of service design in the coming years.

Without good user-centred design approaches, AI technologies will most likely struggle to be integrated into complex service industries such as healthcare and travel. The challenge of the future will become how to design authentic experiences within these service contexts.

Designing for the future provides a chance to question the status quo and build a path towards equity. However, when we focus on solving problems within existing systems, it is difficult to challenge the system itself. Instead, what if we designed services for a future in which we believe differently?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has triggered many debates since its birth in the 1950s. From dystopian views to high praise, opinions about the effects and role of AI vary from one person to the next. In the field of service design, however, the topic of applying AI is still in its infancy.

More realistic and human-like technology presents unique challenges for service designers. In this brief essay, I will introduce some of these tough ethical challenges and explain why it is imperative that we design relationships with digital services that are constructive, non-deceptive and non-abusive.

Some of the Smart Service Artefacts (SSAs)1 that have not been able to establish emotional connections with users will continue to face an ongoing challenge of user drop-off.

One of the fundamental aspirations of service design is to attend to human needs and relations that are unique to service interactions. However, in our technology-laden world, the boundaries between a service and a product are blurring.

This article focuses on two practice-based experiments that tested the integration of speculative design and service design around the subject of the future of work.

Futures thinking is an important capability to support the sustainability of any kind of organisation. Examples of these techniques are technology roadmapping, a managerial practice used extensively in tech industries, and concept cars, a practice that has long been used by automakers as a design-led way to envisioning future products.

Design practices are becoming increasingly future-focussed, reflecting the complexities of the design challenges that we face. Futures thinking can offer us tools and methods to help with this, but more than that, it might offer us a new way of seeing the world that we design for.

Using immersive technologies gives service designers and clients the opportunity to research complex service ecosystems.

Imagine if you could have all your soaps, moisturisers and other daily skin care products produced instantly by a 3D printer in your bathroom...

Co-creating future visions in large organisations can be a daunting task, involving multiple stakeholders with diverse viewpoints, cultural backgrounds, levels of influence and commitment.

Traditionally, the concept of ‘Service Quality’ (SQ) is defined as the gap between expectation and perception (1). In this article, we present a customer experience-centric approach to service quality that focuses on the impact that service design processes have in delivering a strategically-defined experience proposition.

Information plays an integral role when it comes to both providing and consuming a service. Each interaction that takes place throughout the entire service journey requires certain information to be presented in an accessible format for the interaction to be successful.

A unique visualisation to deliver insights right from the start of a service design project.

This paper presents the results of intelligent technology research and case studies in a modern garment store in China.

Today, organisations are going through sporadic transformations of varying magnitudes, contexts and complexities.

For this issue of Touchpoint, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes met with service design pioneer and educator Lara Penin, who has recently made a great contribution to the service design literature, with her publication of 'An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible'.

Out of more than 80 agency, corporate and student submissions from all around the globe, 16 finalists were selected by an international jury of service design experts.