Welcome to autumn

We talk making the business case for design, new courses for 2025 and how to get into Service Design

Making the case for service design

In our last newsletter we talked about austerity. The impact of austerity in service design is often straightforward - making the case for radical, transformative service design harder. There is limited time, money and people and an ever-shortening horizon in which to make change.

So how do you make the case for service design when there might be a million other competing priorities or short-term decisions needed to invest in improving something? The answer is often making a financial case for the work we’re doing. Meeting budget constraint with business case.

We reflect on ways to get started on our blog

If you want to delve further, last chance to join our course on 5th November on Making the Case for Service Design

Getting into Service Design

In October we ran an event on Getting into Service Design.

We sold out in under a day and had a waiting list of over a 100 people. We recognise this is a huge area of interest for people.

The brilliant Stephen Mccarthy, Director of Product Design and User Research at Which? and Sophia Kakembo, User Experience (UX) Researcher at Atypon joined us to talk about their experience and expertise on getting into service design.

The recorded presentations from them will be available here shortly and there’s a run down of our tips for people looking to get into the discipline.

We received so many pre-event questions we are going to revisit these in a follow up event or written format. You can still submit those questions here

Last chance for 2024 courses

Finishing up our 2024, we have some last places available for our public courses

Writing business cases for Service Design, 5th November

Agile Service Design, 7th November (3 weeks)

Designing Good Services, 5th December

Episode 5 of our Dead Ends podcast on Austerity went live. We delved further into Austerity to talk about big society, the sharing economy, hope and designing for emergent futures.

Part One and Part Two are available now

We’ve had to delay our September and October podcast due to losing our voices. When there’s no voice, there’s no podcast. We’ll be back with our new episode on luxury in services shortly.

If you want to keep up with releases you can check them out on the School’s Website, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Podcasts or use our RSS feed. or if you have a suggestion for a topic, get in touch!

2025 course dates are LIVE!

In 2025 we’ll be launching some really exciting new courses alongside some tried and tested favourites. Here’s what is coming up…

Service Design Leadership

Our new course, Service Design Leadership course is now live.

Learn the skills and tools to lead transformative user-centric organisational change. In this two-day intensive masterclass split over two weeks, you’ll learn how to expand the scope of your impact, win buy-in for large-scale transformation and lead stakeholders and teams to deliver complex, organisational-level change.

It’s for designers, user-centred practitioners and change leaders looking to create the conditions for transformative change and lead good service design and delivery at scale.

5th June (BST)

20th November (GMT)

Designing Good Services

Understand what makes a good service for your users and identify key problems in your own service with Lou Downe, author of Good Services

25th February (GMT)

29th May (BST)

17th September (BST)

2nd December (GMT)

Making the Case for Service Design

Understand the costs and benefits of service design and build compelling cases for user-centred change

26th February (GMT)

10th June (BST)

7th October (BST)

Leading Stakeholders

Gain the skills you need to create effective stakeholder relationships in the most challenging environments and unlock user centred design

5th March (GMT)

17th June (BST)

1st October (BST)

Agile Service Design

Develop the skills for designing services in complex and live environments. From defining and naming your service to what to do to prepare your service to go live and test it throughout the process.

6th, 14th, 22nd March (GMT)

11th, 18th, 25th June (BST)

6th, 13th, 20th November (GMT)

Still to come…

We will be sharing 2025 dates for our Designing Sustainable Services course soon

In late Spring, we will be launching two new short courses; Prototyping Services and an introduction to Designing Inclusive Services

International Courses

In 2025 we are going on the road and delivering courses on different time zones, online and in person.

We are going to be on the East Coast of USA and Canada in early February.

At the end of March we will be in Japan.

We are currently plotting a trip to Australia, likely in April.

We are still planning so if you’re interested in booking a private course with us or delivering a talk, let us know and we can work it into our schedule.

Or if you’re looking for one of our public courses, please drop us a line on our international request form and we will take this onboard in our travel plans.

When we’ve finalised travel plans, we’ll publish our international course times.

What we’re reading and writing

What can Magic Teach Us about AI? (Video Link)

Ella Fitzsimmons cleverly draws parallels between AI and how magic has been used, portrayed and worked in medieval courts and beyond. A great creative take on talking about AI.

Dave Rogers on Toxic Technology

Software is growing in every sector, and within organisations large and small. Software is playing an increasing, vital economic and social role. But is it sustainable for software to keep eating the world? Do we have the resources to ensure all this software remains healthy, and effective?

User Facing Services vs Enabling Platforms

Kuba Bartwicki writes, “Government is a very complex system, with each part of it responsible for delivering a bunch of services to achieve the policy outcomes they care about.”

Time is a design material, too

Our friends at FF Studio deliver us timeless classics. “If we zoom out a bit: Most of the important problems the industry takes on are 20 year problems, whether they’re about technology, justice or anything else. We’ll need to repeatedly make a dent in them and keep going because it will take a long time to get to the final destination”

4 ideas for the digital centre of Government

DXW bring some hot takes on the future of the digital centre of Government.

“Digital procurement is becoming commoditised – move it to the digital centre. Existing commercial teams procure digital and tech skills as commodities. Bigger contracts are preferred, buying skills in bulk to drive savings.”