Across the summer of 2025 I gave a series of talks for Service Design Drinks (SDD) in Milan, Berlin and Zurich.
The talks provided an overview on the last academic research that I've been part of called UnSee (Uncertainty in Services). The research set out to explore the evolution of service design as a practice towards systems and futures thinking, especially understanding how practitioners have been integrating these perspectives in their work. The talk adressed the early-stage changes of paradigm that UnSee uncovered, these require service designers to let go of linear processes, defined solutions, reductionism and short-termism.
I focused also on the emergent capabilities that, according to our research, will be required by service designers in the futures.
- The fist one connects with a stronger link between service design and futures studies, creating spaces that allow actors to understand what ideas of the future are embedded within the context and interventions - are those aligned? how many are there?.
- The second capability concerns the development of "directionality" a concept drawn from systemic design, that asks service designers to orchestrate processes that develop a common sense of direction for the systemic change to emerge- what is the long-term mission of your project? Is it shared by your system?
- The third one calls designers to work across levels, leveraging the long-term temporality and higher systems with short-term actions and niche-level interventions. We have found portfolios as a great example for how to maintain this dual perspective.
- The last capability conects with learning and adaptive processes especially how these two elements can fuel and coordinate design work between what is learned at the project, mission and strategy level.
Ultimately, an evolution of service design practice entails dealing with complex systems and long-term transitions, understanding the entagled nature of the design work and the wicked proplems it interacts with. Therefore I advocated for cultivating the appreciation for the entaglements of systems: this means (a) reconnecting with our context and recognizing its multiple scales, (b) build safe spaces to dream about radically different futures, and (c) daring to experiment with the power and responsibility one has.
