As designers of products and services, people are always our main priority. We work with a human-centered design approach in order to shape solutions that improve people’s quality of life, while generating value for the organisations and companies that produce them. But… what if the perfect solution today wasn’t the ideal one for tomorrow?
We need to deal with the possible consequences of the services we are building and move towards a more responsible design practice. We should consider the ultimate impact of our design decisions on human behaviours, society and environment.
Behavioural change
How can service designers look at human behaviour in a more responsible way, taking into consideration not only the needs and experiences of the individuals nowadays but also the long-term effects of the design interventions?
Service designer should take into account the evolution of human behaviour over time, and look at behaviour change theories as something that can be incorporated in their design practices.
Service designers should always consider the long-term effects on human behaviours (and communities) services could generate, and not simply rely on human-centric activities as a way to expand the service’s attractiveness.
Tools
System thinking
How service designers could enlarge the perspective on the specific service system and ecosystem, to identify opportunities for higher sustainability and eventually embed principles of circularity in the services they design?
Service designers should take into account the reciprocity of any exchange and consider elements from other systems/ecosystems that could contribute to the creation of virtuous relationships, reducing the impact of the service itself on the environment and the broader society.
Service designer need to push the boundaries of how companies and organizations think of what they do and their role towards our economy, society and planet, in order to reflect on the broader concept of sustainability across the different moments of service delivery.
Tools
Future casting
How service designers can project themselves and the stakeholders they work with in the future, to find both information and inspirations that could lead to different considerations around what service companies are doing today, and help them better prepare for a future that is possible, probable or desirable?
Service designers need to consider how the broader context may evolve and work on anticipation and prevention, with a higher awareness on how we could affect/influence the system to evolve towards a future that we consider more desirable.
Service designers should encompass and encourage the use of future-casting elements to help companies and organisations making more conscious decisions, instead of focusing only on the optimisation of the service/business models based on the existing market.
Tools
Shaping AI-based services
How service designers can navigate the complexity of this rapidly developing technology and help to implement it in a meaningful and constructive way avoiding the hype inflation?
Service designers need to get informed about AI capabilities and help the organizations envision the impactful ways to apply them, spanning from the back-end operations improvements to the enhancement of the delivered experiences.
Service designers should be conscious of the risks and consequences of this technology application and start evaluating them from the beginning of the design process, putting in practice structured impact metrics.
Tools
Experiment with us
For years, we have been researching new methods of advancing design practice and adjusting the tools to the new challenges. Currently, we are testing the latest framework for the AI-based services. Contact us to learn about different formats in which we can bring this knowledge to your team or organization and apply it to the projects together.
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