Service design auditing to uncover fault lines and fail points

SDC_illustration_complexity
START DATE
March 24, 2025
DURATION
4 weeks
WORKLOAD
10 - 14 hours
LANGUAGE
English
PRICE
EUR 445.00 *

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

We think we know services — after all, we interact with them daily — but only when trying to improve their designs do we understand their true complexities. There is growing pressure for services of all kinds to not only provide expected outcomes, co-create value, and have lasting experiences but also be more sustainable. Stricter rules and regulations require us to show our designs are not careless or negligent, in terms of their adverse impacts on the planet and its people. But how many of our services meet these sustainability standards? And how to audit, review and evaluate them, let alone to make sure to improve and validate their compliance?

There are also social implications, as seen with the troubles of some well-known platform firms, facing regulatory action because of their negative impacts on for instance housing, traffic and labour markets. Good services, gone bad: If we define good in terms of 'working well’, ‘delivered seamlessly’, ‘personalised customer experience’ or ‘high growth and profit’, and bad in ‘not effective’, ‘costly’ or ‘inefficient’, then there is another side of the coin. In the coming years, every organisation will face pressure to sincerely focus on long-term value and positive impact—on not harming society and the planet.

This provides an enormous opportunity for anyone involved in service design and delivery with the use of 6 new skills this training focuses on:

  • analyse the quality of your service processes with sustainability criteria and metrics
  • deconstruct the design of your service for board-level discussions
  • reveal the ‘components’ that make or break your service; how they come together and why they fall apart
  • identify opportunities for improvement and building a case for redesign
  • propose changes that won’t create new problems
  • implement measurement frameworks that track and validate sustainability improvements 

You will learn: How to go beyond blueprints and journey maps to critically review and audit the design of a service with the use of specific building blocks. How to find gaps and conflicts in the designs that create unnecessary costs. How to identify the negative social and environmental impacts if such costs increase further. And you will learn it all in the language your (internal) stakeholders understand – the language of benefits, costs and risks. Because then, you can not only participate, but also lead or guide the type of discussions towards a more sustainable service design and delivery. That includes discussions on future-proofing services with climate resilience, leveraging new technologies to improve profitability and sustainability, and translating ‘good services’ into sustainable practice, leading to the kind of goodwill and trust that organisations will need in the years to come.

For whom?

  • UX/CX designers who are looking to deepen their understanding of services and service design and align their work with long-term service strategy.
  • Service designers who want to prove their value in being able to audit services and improve services to become truly robust and future-proof.
  • Product managers responsible for defining and overseeing the development of services who want to ensure their offerings are strategically aligned with business objectives.
  • Service providers, from lawyers to accountants, from policymakers to consultants, and anyone else who advises, assists, or works with customers, and likes to understand what services are all about.
  • Business strategists who aim to integrate service design thinking into their strategic planning processes.
  • Creative leaders leading innovation initiatives within organisations who want to ensure their services are designed with both users and business objectives in mind.

OUTCOMES

  • Define the strategic intent behind services and how it guides the design process.
    Find arguments far beyond the ‘good or bad services’ paradigm.
  • Analise and audit services in a comprehensive systematic way.
  • Explore how to align service design with organisational goals, ensuring that services deliver long-term value.
  • Gain insights into how to encode and express strategic knowledge in service design, making services more resilient and adaptable to change.
  • Understand how to design services that not only meet current user needs but also anticipate future challenges and opportunities.
  • Become a service auditor and introduce standardisation of the design audit process in your organisation.

FORMAT

You will receive a free ecopy of the book ‘Thinking in Services | Encoding and Expressing Strategy through Design’ which you will read during the course of the training. You will follow a series of four live sessions, each lasting 90 minutes, combining open discussion, debate, and lecture formats. You will have the opportunity to discuss, exchange feedback, and collaborate. Learning with and from your peers is one of the guiding principles of our learning activities.

All lessons are online, and live sessions will take place via Zoom.

Schedule live sessions
Session 1 - Tuesday March 25, 2025, 14:00 - 15:30 CEST
Session 2 - Tuesday April 1, 2025, 14:00 - 15:30 CEST
Session 3 - Tuesday April 8, 2025, 14:00 - 15:30 CEST
Session 4 - Tuesday April 15, 2025, 14:00 - 15:30 CEST

STUDY POINTS

This interactive training is worth 4 SDC study points.

KEYWORDS

Service design, strategic design, organisational design, futures thinking, social design, business design, design thinking

360° SERIES

SDC_illustration_360_degrees_series_explore_ability01_03_09_yellow


ABILITIES 01 , 03 & 09
level - exPLORe

360° SERIES

SDC_illustration_360_degrees_series_explore_ability01_03_09_yellow


ABILITIES 01, 03 & 09
level - exPLORe

START DATE
March 24, 2025
WORKLOAD
10 - 14 hours
PRICE
EUR 445.00 *
DURATION
4 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$ 465,00. This is an introductory price, the regular price is EUR 695,00 (US$ 725,00). Prices are exclusive of VAT. Non-EU citizens are exempt from VAT on e-services which includes online courses, workshops, training sessions and talks.

Meet the tutor

SDC_people_majid_iqbal

Majid Iqbal (United States) is the Managing Director of Structural, an agency pioneering innovative analysis and design approaches to improve infrastructure and service quality while minimizing negative impacts. He authored ‘Thinking in Services’, a groundbreaking book on strategy implementation through service design.

With a mission to bring clarity to the concept of services in implementing policy and strategy, Majid has spent decades working at the intersection of policy, strategy, and design. His career spans roles in consulting, teaching, sales, and product management at organisations such as PwC, Gartner, Carnegie Mellon University, and HP. He co-founded XLAB at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate to address societal transitions and develop methods for visualising complex systems and services. Majid’s work reflects his broader purpose: developing new thinking and tools to empower civil servants, scientists, and strategists to address challenges of unusual shape and size. He has taught graduate courses and shared his expertise as a visiting faculty member and guest lecturer at several universities.
SDC_people_ariel_guersenzvaig

Ariel Guersenzvaig (Argentina) is a design professor who engages with the ethical impact of machine intelligence on society as a teacher and researcher. He has published scholarly work on this subject on important journals and lectured at the European Design Awards, and design firms like Fjord and Designit.

He regularly delivers presentations on the topic at conferences and appear on the media, where he hes published several op-eds in leading newspapers. Ariel has a PhD in design theory from the University of Southampton, an MA in ethics and philosophy of religion from the University of Birmingham. Besides the ethics of technology, and, more specifically, AI ethics, he also works on the related topic of design professional ethics. His book 'The Goods of Design: Professional Ethics for Designers', was reviewed as "Essential" by Choice Magazine. He is a full professor at Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, where he's the chair of the MA in UX Design program. Ariel is also a member of the Research Ethics Board at the University of Vic, Spain.

Enroll as a team?

Get in touch with us for a quote!

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