Prototyping sits deep in the service designer’s DNA. Hypotheses, conjecture and assumptions are no match for seeing a real user or customer interact with a prototype, to determine what works well and what needs to be improved.

This year our Service Design Global Conference (SDGC) will once again bring the best of the best together to celebrate all that is new and noteworthy within the practice of service design.

The SDN Academy is a new global educational initiative recently launched by the Service Design Network in response to the industry’s growing demand for quality training for service design professionals at various stages of their careers.

I first learned about prototyping when I was a web designer back in the mid 1990s. Paper prototyping and, later, stubbed-out interfaces with little to no back-end functionality allowed user experience designers like me to figure out what worked (and what didn’t) before more costly development began.

In the rapidly-changing world of today’s academic library, perhaps nothing is evolving faster than the library service model itself. Students belonging to the so-called ‘Generation Z’ now enter university expecting its library to be a seamless provider of immediate information and assistance, in addition to serving as a central location for social interaction.

Compared to other research efforts carried out in innovation contexts, design research has a unique freedom to adapt methods, creatively interpret and project several years ahead. Exploratory innovation projects in particular need this subjectivity to maximise inspiration.

Prototyping complex service experiences that feel authentic when testing with real users is a perennial challenge for service designers. There is a case for making use of building blocks from real-world services, coupled with a human element, for creating experience prototypes to simulate complex, AI-enabled experiences.

Bodystorming enables healthcare teams to better understand and design for the medical staff and patients they serve. This role-playing methodology provides new perspectives on existing problems and constructs an ‘opportunity space’ to imagine novel, innovative solutions that healthcare so desperately needs.

Hospitals and emergency departments are complex, high-stakes environments with the potential for patient harm. This makes testing new service concepts challenging. Experience prototypes must be appropriate for clinical practice and situated in the real context of care (high fidelity), while minimising disruption using temporary processes and workflow supports (low burden).

When facing a challenge with many players, a physical space and a race against time, a board game can help designers and stakeholders illustrate and iterate on different collaboration models.

Indonesia has more than 250 million people, with half of them living on less than US$2.5 a day1, and approximately 66 percent ‘unbanked’2. Our client, one of the state-owned banks, wanted to help people save their money in the bank so they can have access to financial assistance. In this article, we will share lessons learned from experience prototyping the solution with the client to target this segment of the population.

Emotions have an important influence on how we think and behave. Incorporating emotion analytics in the video prototype evaluation process allows service designers to gather feedback from viewers based on moments of high emotional arousal in videos. This article explains how to incorporate emotion analytics into semistructured interviews when evaluating video prototypes.

Product designers Joydeep Sengupta and Adam Cochrane look into the issues of prototyping at scale, sharing insights on how fashion retailer Zalando is going about building a prototyping culture within a 14,000 person organisation.

Creating a structure for prototyping as a tool supports the acceptance and solidification of prototyping as a philosophy. Many companies buy into prototyping as a philosophy and a set of ideas and methodologies that help de-risk innovation projects. The institutionalised practice of prototyping, however, is rare.

With disruptive technologies such as AI (Artificial Intelligence), 5G and IoT (Internet of Things), it has become harder than ever before to imagine our future and the experiences it will contain. The future is moving towards an era of pervasive and complex interactions with intelligent agents that promises unpredictable experiences.

Experience prototyping can help designers understand existing experiences or explore and evaluate new design ideas.1 Insights from behavioural science suggest potential pitfalls of these activities, but also how to amplify their benefits.

It is believed that a prototype of a service will never match an actual, real-world scenario. The breakdown of service prototyping into prototypes, experiments, tests and pilots as phases can be a solution to provide more clarity and commitment during a service design project.

The bank branch needs to adapt. In early 2017, Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) had a challenge to overcome: What does the bank branch of the future look like?

Service designers have long recognised the opportunities that behavioural science offers to their discipline. However, the result is often single, ad-hoc interventions that fail to meet desired business objectives. In this article, we offer some reflections and a case study demonstrating a ‘reverse design’ approach.

LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) enables end users to work directly with service designers in a collaborative process. LSP can be used to prototype during the speculative design phase, it can involve end users in the development phase and it can be used with experience prototyping to align strategic direction across all functions.

In ‘manytyping’, techniques such as desktop walkthroughs, paper prototyping, investigative rehearsal and 2D or 3D mock-ups are used together. By switching seamlessly between techniques during one prototyping instance – or using parallel techniques – complex experiential prototypes are possible very early in a project. It’s low-tech, fast, immersive and surprisingly easy.

I joined Lloyds Banking Group in November 2017 as the first fulltime service design trainer, specifically to support group-wide transformation efforts. This article outlines how I built a training infrastructure, and what I learned from carrying out service design training in an in-house setting.

Communicating the value of service design to those who are unfamiliar with our tools and processes can be a challenge. This creates problems for designers as well as the organisations and communities we hope to serve. Perhaps our use (and misuse) of metaphor to describe our work contributes to the confusion.

Eleonora Carnasa is a Bulgaria-based service designer and founder of Fabrica 360, a design and innovation agency. In this profile, she had a chat with Jesse Grimes, Touchpoint’s Editor-in-Chief, about her efforts to grow service design in Eastern Europe, and how she overcomes the associated challenges.

The SDN is incredibly pleased to announce that this year's Service Design Award finalists have been selected by our international jury of service design experts!

SDN chapters are the essence of our global network. While chapters are growing in number and maturity, the Global Chapter Team is continuously looking for new opportunities to support our various chapters' needs.

For a second time already, Creative Space LOFT33 hosted the launch of the latest publication of Touchpoint – The Journal of Service Design, Vol.11 No.1 – Service Design for Innovation and Start-ups, published on July 2019.