Conference Program

What if your next big innovation is waiting at the edges of your service? Many of the world’s most transformative ideas- fFrom the modern internet, to the billion dollar audiobook market emerged when designers looked beyond the “average” to solve real challenges for people often left out of traditional design thinking. By addressing these edge cases, they created solutions that were more flexible , adaptive and usable for everyone.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• Why inclusivity unlocks innovation in products and services
• The hidden ROI of inclusive design
• How to avoid the costly risks of designing only for the averages
• How to champion inclusive practices that make your services more resilient and future ready.

Service performance is never neutral: it encodes ideas about value, power, and whose knowledge counts. Drawing on 25+ years designing business models across equity research, venture capital, product & experience design, development finance, and impact investing, Jen van der Meer examines patterns of service performance operating globally, from platform models optimizing for capital accumulation to government programs measuring institutional delivery to community-led financing ecosystems centering self-determination and sustainable transitions.

This talk argues that systemic challenges are produced by the finance and business models we currently use. As AI reshapes service delivery at a geological scale, the question becomes even more urgent: whose theory of value gets encoded in technical systems? Addressing systemic challenges requires not better services within existing frameworks, but understanding business models as designed systems that encode power, determine what services can exist and for whom, and shape whose performance matters. Knowing how business models encode theories of value reveals both the constraints you’re operating within and the choices that remain avoidable, possible, plausible, and preferable

Service design isn’t just about designing services—it’s about shaping the conditions for services to evolve. At its best, it’s a systems-oriented practice: one that helps people make sense of complexity, see interdependencies, and take action in the face of uncertainty. This session explores how service design can build adaptive capacity across different organizational scales—team, program, and enterprise—through three real-world case studies:

Higher Ed Org (Team scale): A participatory strategy sprint helped a cross-functional team make sense of fast-changing learner expectations, tech disruptions, and institutional constraints. Rather than charting a five-year plan, we mapped current constraints, surfaced shared direction, and identified small, feasible actions they could take right away. Rather than chasing ideal outcomes, the focus was on regaining momentum and moving forward together.

Health org (Program scale): As CMS introduced the Health Equity Index, this org needed to understand how social risk factors were shaping dual-eligible member experiences and how to respond. We facilitated a “learn by doing” program combining qualitative research, service ecosystem and journey mapping, and narrative sense making. The team built new habits of reflection, systems thinking, and persuasive communication that connected policy decisions to lived experience.

Health org (Enterprise scale): Over six months, we led a program of deep-dive collaboration across the organization to align diverse stakeholders around quality performance and population health goals. These sessions surfaced enterprise-wide dependencies, built shared accountability, and helped teams connect day-to-day actions to strategic intent. The work highlighted how informal networks and emergent collaboration can strengthen adaptive performance in ways hierarchies alone cannot.

Across these three examples, service design was used not only to drive outcomes but to increase an organization’s ability to learn from its present, and act smartly in ways that shape what comes next. They span sectors, scopes, and constraints, but all point to the same shift: from orchestrating fixed plans to enabling ongoing learning.

– At the Higher Ed Org, the focus was momentum—moving from strategic inertia to small, feasible, coordinated action.
– At Health Org A, the focus was capability—developing the skills, tools, and confidence to sustain sensemaking and adaptation over time.
– At Health Org B, the focus was coherence—linking strategy and operations through participatory learning structures that built durable cross-functional alignment.

Together, these cases challenge dominant narratives of performance as something to engineer and optimize. Instead, they illustrate performance as an emergent property of learning systems, which service design is uniquely equipped to support when practiced with complexity in mind.

Media organizations face an existential performance crisis: they produce award-winning content that audiences increasingly ignore. Traditional metrics like reach and engagement mask a deeper failure, newsrooms don’t know if they’re actually helping anyone. This disconnect between organizational goals and audience needs creates unsustainable business models and erodes public trust. Meanwhile, threats and new competitors force them to reconsider their real value proposition.

We’re addressing this through the Audience Help Desk, a confidential advisory service that applies service design principles and education to transform how newsrooms operate. Working with information providers from community startups to global media organizations, we guide teams through systematic redesign of their operating models.

Our approach involves newsroom leaders, audience researchers, reporters, and product teams in collaborative sessions that shift focus from “”what stories should we tell?”” to “”what problems can we solve?”” Through structured consultations and practical frameworks like jobs-to-be-done analysis and service blueprinting, we help newsrooms identify where they’re losing audience value and implement concrete improvements.

We’re just getting started and seeing both opportunity and pushback from legacy and newer media organizations. Our approach begins with fundamental questions about journalism’s value, with the goal of redesigning processes that hold organizations accountable for delivering real solutions. In this session, we’ll share what’s worked in helping media organizations adopt service design principles so far and our roadmap for broader adoption.

Our goal was to introduce an AI-powered voice agent to help customers of a B2B building materials supplier manage their orders. But making it work meant looking beyond the tech and working through layers of complexity like siloed systems, long-established processes, and both staff and customers used to traditional, human-led interactions.

This case study shares how service design helped us make that shift by:

1. Helping front-line staff see AI as a collaborator
2. Preparing customers for a new kind of interaction at different stages of their customer journey by involving sales and customer service agents
3. A data driven approach to aligning internal processes, systems and workflows

Service designers, join us for an Ask Me Anything (AMA) with two of the authors of the recently released second edition of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation: Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason. Together, they will share their experiences in service design, how the field has changed since the first edition of the book was released more than ten years ago, and what’s in store for the future.

On paper, UX reviews are a no-brainer. Teams want feedback. Leaders want quality. Experts are willing to help. So why wasn’t it working?

What seemed like a simple ask—“let’s offer UX reviews to teams”—quickly exposed a mess of invisible complexity: unclear ownership, inconsistent experiences, too many ad hoc requests, and burned-out senior designers doing unrecognized labor. There was so much willingness to help and share knowledge, but not enough of a system or support to scale. So we decided to design it.

This is the case study of how we created an internal UX Review service, not just a process. Co-led by service design and design ops, we mapped the end-to-end journey—from request intake to reviewer matching to documentation and follow-up. We built shared definitions of success. We tackled coordination debt. And we designed for the system, not just the moment so we considered who participates, who decides, who benefits, and who sustains it.

The project became a love story between two disciplines (Service Design and DesignOps), between intention and implementation to navigate the ambiguous intersection of what the business needs, what designers say they want, and what actually helps everyone do better work. More than that, it challenged us to apply our design craft to ourselves. What does it mean to design services for designers? How do we balance flexibility and fairness in a knowledge org? And how do we turn a “nice to have” into a performance driver?

As service design takes center stage, organizations change how they work. Hidden frictions transform into shared challenges; cross-team tensions spark more agile ways of working; and service orientation emerges as a catalyst for measurable impact. Drawing from today’s case studies, our panelists will draw out lessons on how service designers can confront obstacles, forge new connections, and help design become an engine for sustained performance.

Whether you’re looking to expand your network, meet your next client or connect with collaborators, this is your opportunity to make it happen.

You’ll experience Cozy Juicy Real, a simple, effective board game that’s been played in 71 countries. It’s proven to create stronger team bonds at the world’s most successful organizations – including Google, Adobe and the UN.

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