Mastering service design

SDC_illustration_mastering
START DATE
March 17, 2025
DURATION
12 weeks
WORKLOAD
5 - 8 hours per week
LANGUAGE
English
PRICE
EUR 895.00 *

If you are not yet a member of our online campus, this link will take you to the registration page. Membership is free but required to sign up for activities.

DESCRIPTION

In the past decades, there has been a transition from an inside-out focus on product-orientation and optimisation to an outside-in approach; centred on understanding why customers make use of a particular solution and aimed at serving them the best way possible. That is why for organisations, service design has grown in importance and has become a crucial capability to stay relevant in this service- and experience-dominant economy.

Service design is all about the design of these services, inherently looking at the customer's experience, and enabling organisations to deliver. By combining the service's frontstage and backstage, service design offers a holistic view of the organisation's interactions and their unique contexts, processes, systems, metrics, people, and tools involved. This process ensures cohesiveness and enables engagement with the organisation over time. Hence, service design increases the capacity to improve not only service experiences but also organisational design.

The course focuses on services as ecosystems for value generation in which value is co-created by all actors and stakeholders involved, not only customer-facing staff and customers but also other organisations who serve the customer as well. The course takes a systems approach to the design of services, looking at the relationships between individual elements and at the service as a whole. To help you gain this all-encompassing perspective, fields like social science, organisational design/design operations and business design are included in different lessons throughout the course.

Students will combine theory with practice during the course, including exercises and a real-world case.

OUTCOMES

  • Understand what services and servitisation are all about
  • Build a vision on the strategic value of service design
  • Get to know (and practice) what specific skills and tools service designers can bring to the table
  • Build confidence and increase your ability to manage service design projects
  • Widen your horizon and get ready to face future challenges by mastering a real-world project and designing a service for a well-known organisation
  • Pitch the service to the client and learn how to question and visualise your service design standpoints enabling others to understand your vision

FORMAT

You will follow a series of lessons bundled in 8 chapters. Each Monday, the lessons for that week are unlocked. Study the content, watch the videos, and do the exercises at your own pace. Because you start at the same time as your fellow participants, you will be able to discuss, exchange feedback, and work on exercises together. Learning with and from your peers is one of the guiding principles of our courses.

You also will work in small groups on a unique brief set with a client, an organisation that introduces you to a real-world case; their challenge to be solved. You will be guided by a team of tutors; seasoned design experts from fields like social design, design research, experience design, and of course, service design.

All lessons are online, and live sessions will take place via ZoomEach group will receive expert tutoring in 6 live session. The 1-hour sessions include expert tutoring plus team collaboration and are offered in 2 time slots (morning and afternoon CET) on the following days:

Friday, March 28, 2025 - Session 1
Friday, March 4, 2025 - Session 2
Friday, March 18, 2025 - Session 3
Friday, March 25, 2025 - Session 4
Friday May 2, 2025 - Session 5
Friday May 9, 2025 - Session 6
Friday May 23, 2025 - Pitching session

STUDY POINTS

This course is worth 40 SDC study points. You will receive a certificate of completion.

KEYWORDS

Service design, business design, strategic design, futures thinking, systems thinking

COURSE SYLLABUS

Download (pdf)

360° SERIES

SDC_illustration_360_degrees_series_all_abilities_exercise_magenta

ALL ABILITIES
LEVEL - EXERCISE

360° SERIES

SDC_illustration_360_degrees_series_all_abilities_exercise_magenta

ALL ABILITIES
LEVEL - EXERCISE

START DATE
March 17, 2025
WORKLOAD
5 - 8 hours per week
PRICE
EUR 895.00 *
DURATION
12 weeks
LANGUAGE
English

If you are not yet a member of our online campus, this link will take you to the registration page. Membership is free but required to sign up for activities.

* US$945,00. Prices are exclusive of VAT. Non-EU citizens are exempt from VAT on e-services which includes online courses, workshops and talks.

Meet the tutors & teachers

SDC_people_diana_seaver

Diane Seaver (United States) is a Senior Service Design and Experience Lead at Philips working on service innovation projects specialising in business model innovation and go-to-market implementation.

She has been the lead designer on several first of kind propositions launches that are now being scaled global. Prior to Philips, Dee held a similar position at the YMCA of USA, supporting development of service programs for the more than 2,700 branches throughout the United States.
SDC_people_ariel_guersenzvaig

Ariel Guersenzvaig (Argentina) teaches and writes about the philosophy and ethics of design and technology.  He is professor of design theory at ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, where he also heads the MA in User Experience.

He's the author of the book 'The Goods of Design: Professional Ethics for Designers'. His areas of inquiry is the ethical impact of machine intelligence on society, with a focus on autonomous weapons, health, and algorithmic justice. As a design consultant, he has led projects in service design, innovation, and ethical digital transformation for non-profit and for-profit organisations.
SDC_people_bassam_jabry

Bassam Jabry (UK) is a seasoned designer, systems thinker, and managing director of Chemistry, an independent strategic design consultancy, that helps organisations deliver human-centred solutions that drive positive change.

He is passionate about uncovering what makes people tick and using design as a strategic problem solving tool. He has had the privilege of consulting across a wide range of industries such as healthcare, hospitality, fintech and public sector. His favourite topics are circularity and humanising tech.
SDC_people_noortje_kuppers

Noortje Küppers (The Netherlands) is a service design consultant at Livework studio, where she focuses on bridging urban design and service design. Her key driver is to design for wellbeing and a sustainable future.

Noortje has a background in industrial design engineering and design for interaction at TU Delft and has demonstrable experience in the media industry, developing digital products. However, her strength and interest lie in design research, deep-diving into the lives of the people to be served.
SDC_people_inge_keizer

Inge Keizer (the Netherlands) is a senior service design consultant specialised in business design, strategic innovation, customer experience and entrepreneurship with 20 years of experience.

She is a conceptual thinker, and an experienced design researcher. In 2015 she co-founded the Service Design Days and later the Service Design College; growing a global service design network and supporting organisations, teams and individuals in becoming human-centric, with a primary focus on designing valuable and relevant services based on qualitative insights and successful business models.
SDC_people_maja_grakalic

Maja Grakalić (Croatia) is an independent foresight strategist, service designer and PhD candidate at Central Saint Martins in London. Her work merges strategic foresight with the human-centred collaborative approach.

Her academic work explores omitted histories of speculative and critical design. She believes design fiction can help us challenge the status quo and build desirable futures together. She worked at the BBC and co-facilitated the BBC’s Future Casting workshops with the aim to teach ethical innovation through speculative futures thinking. As a teaching assistant at MA Material Futures and MA Narrative Environments, she mentors students about future-facing design approaches.
SDC_people_itziar_pobes

Itziar Pobes (Spain) is strategic designer and researcher, specialised in service design and innovation with 20+ years of experience in interdisciplinary design, creativity, design research and cultural studies.

She is passionate about understanding people and organisations, supporting them when services, products or policies need re-steering, exploring a variety of opportunities and uncovering hidden aspects that need to be questioned and designed. Former co-founder of service design agency We Question Our Project and coordinator of the Master in Service Design at IED.
SDC_people_ariel_guersenzvaig

Ariel Guersenzvaig (Argentina) teaches and writes about the philosophy and ethics of design and technology.  He is professor of design theory at ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, where he also heads the MA in User Experience.

He's the author of the book 'The Goods of Design: Professional Ethics for Designers'. His areas of inquiry is the ethical impact of machine intelligence on society, with a focus on autonomous weapons, health, and algorithmic justice. As a design consultant, he has led projects in service design, innovation, and ethical digital transformation for non-profit and for-profit organisations.
SDC_people_itziar_pobes

Itziar Pobes (Spain) is strategic designer and researcher, specialised in service design and innovation with 20+ years of experience in interdisciplinary design, creativity, design research and cultural studies.

She is passionate about understanding people and organisations, supporting them when services, products or policies need re-steering, exploring a variety of opportunities and uncovering hidden aspects that need to be questioned and designed. Former co-founder of service design agency We Question Our Project and coordinator of the Master in Service Design at IED.

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