As it continues to grow and mature, the discipline of service design is facing the challenges that confront teenagers everywhere. Who am I? Where do I belong? Whom are my schoolyard friends? (And – perhaps – whom are the bullies that are best avoided?)

When I learned about the field of user experience in the mid 1990s, its primary objective – making technology easy to use – was easy for me to grasp. My education in cognitive science, psychology, and computer science gave me tools and frameworks that I could immediately apply.

Service design defines the why and the what of software, Scrum suggests how to implement and refine it.

BBVA´s move to its emblematic new Madrid headquarters, designed by the Pritzker price-winning Swiss architectural duo of Herzog and De Meuron, implied not only a change of space but a change of culture, too.

Both service design and agile are processes that uncover insights and initiate conversations, whether internally or externally, in order to identify what is most valuable to the user and then proceed to design and deliver it.

This article addresses how service design benefits from synergies of overlapping domains which have like-minded focus on value creation and optimisation, to help service designers deliver experiences at system, process and product level.

Service design (SD) and user experience (UX) are intimately related. This relationship is symbiotic – one practice often reveals the need for the other – and, when executed together, the potential for rich, valuable interactions between an organisation and its audience increases.

The Designing Relationships project shows how design thinking made a real difference to a group of physically and mentally challenged residents at a Danish municipal care home

Whilst a broad service design process is the ideal approach for any service organisation, the reality is that many organisations opt only to design for a given channel or touchpoint. A traditional UX approach serves you well when designing the best-possible experience for a given touchpoint.

While service design continues to mature as a distinct standalone design practice, its greatest value moving forward may be as a supra-practice, an integrating agent that is powered by designers additionally educated and experienced in other design disciplines.

From the big picture down to the smallest detail, service design and user experience may appear to come from opposing ends of the design spectrum.

Following on from MoDAL Meetups and associated discussions, our goal is to stimulate discussion about how these three disciplines can best work together.

Transformation of enterprise ecosystems has been a major topic in conferences and publications related to the service design community. Designers recognise that keeping up to the promise of delivering great service experiences requires adoption and transformation.

The speed of disruption requires organisations to continually define their future by building it today, discovering new paths forward as close to the market as possible.

Service design is the design discipline most dependent on true collaboration across practice lines. Service design has three collaborative layers: people, activation and execution.

Service design is still a rather young discipline. As it matures, it evolves, diversifies and expands. In this article, we propose one possible direction this expansion can take: the integration of service design and brand communication.

A diary study is a form of human behaviour research that relies on users documenting personal experiences over a prolonged period  of  time.  Diary  studies  have  been  used  in  multiple scenarios within  service design and are typically known to be physical toolkits.

The National Design Program, NDP, as part of the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism of Colombia, promotes :

She looks at me, emotionless, and flatly says, “Be well.” These are strange parting words from an employee manning the register at a busy New York City pharmacy.

Service design is commonly perceived as service interfaces designed for intangible products that are, from the customer’s point of view, useful, profitable and desirable, while they are effective, efficient and different for the provider.

In this issue’s prTouchpoint editor Jesse Grimes speaks with Lia Patrício, Assistant Professor at the University of Porto. She is one of the leading members of the Marie Curie Service Design for Innovation - Innovative Training Network (SDIN-ITN), which falls under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 framework.