Conference Program

Are you getting paid fairly? And what’s the salary growth potential? These were some of the questions that inspired us to launch the global Service Design Salary(+) Report. Now heading into its fifth edition already, the report has helped over 20,000 people make smarter career decisions. In this session, we’re rolling up our sleeves and diving into the data of the upcoming 2025 edition of the report. You’ll get a first and exclusive preview, hot off the press – the survey closed just 3 days ago!

In response to the existing health equity gap for communities of color, which the pandemic exacerbated, this collaboration tackled the challenge of increasing COVID-19 vaccination rates and improving health equity among Latina/x/o individuals of childbearing age in southern Arizona. Partnering with the local health department and a diverse Community of Practice, our team employed a Human-Centered Design approach to co-create and pilot solutions that address critical health needs and strengthen patient-practitioner trust. Our year-long design process led to the successful implementation of a community and a clinical pilot that enhanced healthcare navigation and engagement for our primary users, with early outcomes showing positive impacts on the local healthcare system. This experience underscores the power of creating space for cross-disciplinary collaboration and offers valuable insights into integrating equity-focused practices within service design. Attendees will learn about the effectiveness of coalition-based approaches and strategies for broadening service design practices to address complex health equity issues affecting diverse, low income communities.

Fleeing the horrors of war, only to find yourself trapped in a system of inadequate services there to aid your survival as a refugee, often leaves vulnerable women and children in a paradox of despair. For South Sudanese and Congolese refugees in Uganda’s West Nile Region, this is a daily reality. This talk highlights the urgent need to redesign better support services in these camps and surrounding communities, challenging us as designers to advocate, through our practice, real change in a broken development sector.

Designing with rigid assumptions often means creating for a narrow set of “typical” users—people who look and think like us. But this mindset risks excluding real, diverse needs, especially those of people with disabilities, one of the fastest-growing population segments. In this talk, you’ll explore the hidden costs of designing systems for templated personas and learn why flexible, inclusive approaches are essential.

Moving beyond the service blueprint or user journey map, this case study explores some of the more non-traditional outputs and outcomes driven by service design, particularly through the lens of creating long-term transformational change. Stefanie will overview a variety of recipes for achieving transformative outcomes at three levels within government agencies: the product/service experience, program-wide or platform initiatives, and fundamental agency technology operations. The challenges for each layer are unique, but also offer different opportunities for where service designers can achieve sustainable, real impact. We’ll explore specific examples achieved by a breadth of designers, product managers, and engineers working within government before exploring how this model might be replicated across other partner government agencies to achieve our vision of making more government services become as simple, effective, and accessible as possible.

Cross-disciplinary collaboration is key to tackling large scale change in hypertension rates (Margins of Victory) in underserved communities (Innovation at the Margins). Low income minoritized populations have shown to have a high prevalence of hypertension but a low treatment rate . There are many factors that play a role in these statistics many of them which are historical and systemic. In order to design a hypertension study for these populations, co-design methods that emphasize collective good must be employed by a comprehensive team.

Our process to build this study focused on sharing power with members of the community to decentralize the designer and build design capability with the participants. We prioritized building relationships to combat mistrust of healthcare professionals and address difficult topics like social determinants of health (healthcare access, housing challenges, employment, etc) – both key factors in high hypertension rates.

This presentation will bring together the collaborative team that built the Pressure Check study. First, a Yale cardiologist who is an expert in this space and acknowledges the influence and perspective that the design process can provide. The second speaker is a design research and strategy professional who defined an inclusive and relational protocol that tapped into the deepest needs of the study community and translated them into the study materials. The third, is a visual designer who incorporated the learnings into patient education and study tools to overcome deeply ingrained perspectives on healthcare. This team and the outputs demonstrate how critical it is to have a team that brings in shared and lived experiences into service design.

Description to come.

While systems thinking is all hype, a superficial application may jeopardize the value of service design practice. This talk will highlight the hidden dangers of applying systems thinking, with examples of struggles from over a decade of practice experience. To support the ongoing evolution of service design, this talk will share strategies for adopting a systemic approach that amplifies, rather than erodes, the transformative potential of the practice.