The book is a collaboration between Andy Polaine and live|work founders, Ben Reason and Lavrans Løvlie. live|work are regarded as one of pioneers of Service Design as a discipline and one of the leading agencies working in service design and innovation. Their work and writing has been featured in numerous publications and books. Andy Polaine has many years' experience as an interaction designer and lecturer and now researches and teaches Service Design in Switzerland. He has also worked as a design journalist for over a decade.

Andy Polaine is Lecturer and Research Fellow in Service Design at Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences in Switzerland. In 1994, Andy co-founded the award-winning new-media collective Antirom in London and worked with clients such as the BBC, The Science Museum and Levis Strauss and Co. (for which they won a D&AD Silver Pencil) as well exhibiting several interactive installations and performances around the word.

Andy was also a producer at dotcom giant Razorfish in the UK before moving to Australia where he started the interactive department of visual effects company, Animal Logic. He was a Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media at the College of Fine Arts, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, and Head of the School of Media Arts and has been a Guest Professor at the Bauhaus University in Weimar.

Now living in Germany, he continues to work as an interaction designer, service design researcher and writer alongside his duties in Lucerne. He has recently completed his PhD exploring interactivity and play and has published over 160 articles and papers as a journalist and academic.

Ben Reason is a co-founder of live|work and over the past eight years has directed his passion for social impact projects into delivering successful change for the public sector. Ben graduated from Liverpool John Moores University in 1994 with a BA in Fine Arts, following this in 2000 with an MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice from the University of Bath. He has a background in design and innovation in network enabled services with Razorfish and Oyster partners working with Orange, Vodafone, Nokia, Sony, Experian and Oracle.

Ben has provided strategic guidance and project delivery management on a range of high profile public sector projects for organisations such as the NHS Innovation Institute, The Design Council, the BBC, the Home Office, Vodafone, Experian & RSA. He has written articles for the NHS 'In View' magazine and has been featured in the Independent Herald Tribune. In 2009 he was voted one of the Top 20 most influential designers in IKON magazine. His academic connections include SAID Business School Oxford, Cranfield Business School, Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Köln Institute of Design, Royal College of Art.

Lavrans Løvlie has worked as a design consultant since 1994. Before setting up live|work in London with Chris Downs and Ben Reason he worked as an Interaction Designer in Norway and Denmark. As a partner in live|work, Lavrans is has been lead designer on service innovation projects for Sony Ericsson, Sony, Aviva/Norwich Union, the BBC, airport operator BAA, the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for Health Services, the UK Design Council, Orange, Vodafone, Mustad, Fast, the Interactive Institute in Sweden as well as UK regional development agency ONE North East. Lavrans has also served on the committee responsible for the new British Standard for Service Design. During the last years, Lavrans has lectured and run seminars at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (Italy), Köln International School of Design (Germany), Oslo School of Architecture (Norway), University of Art and Design Helsinki (Finland), the Estonian Academy of Arts and Cranfield School of Management (UK).