About

Service Design 2016 Canberra was a 2 day event made up of a hands-on workshop presented by Jess McMullin, and a day of conference talks presented by local service designers.

Service Design 2016 was the fourth conference we've run on service design - the others were in March 20162011 & 2012.

The program

The conference program covered a wide range of topics needed for a service design project – strategy and scope, design research, designing end-to-end solutions, case studies about completed services, designing public services, communicating design, influencing related projects and implementing complex services. Although the conference was held in Canberra, it was not particular to service design in Government.

It’s a community conference

The conference focused on the Australian service design community, with presentations by local speakers and opportunities to share experiences with each other.

What is service design?

Service design is, as the title suggests, the design of services that are to be used by people.

Service design is a design practice focused on the design of the interactions people have with organisations – individually and as a system – to create a service. Services, and service design projects, will often incorporate some type of physical or digital product, but are broader than the product itself.

Service design may cover the design of the front-end service (what a potential customer sees) as well as some or all of the back-end processes needed to fully realise the service.

As a design discipline, many of the methods and approaches of service design are similar to those used in other design disciplines such as product design and user experience design, and will be familiar to people working in all areas of design. For example, service design projects all need to understand people and their context, describe the journey a customer may take, design a solution and document it, work with related projects, communicate design solutions and ultimately implement the solution (and manage the change).

The distinctive feature of service design is it’s focus on the holistic service.

Who was it for?

If you are in a role where your recommendations or decisions determine what service will be provided to people, or how they experience that service, this conference was for you. You might be called one of the following, or manage them:

  • Service designer
  • Service improvement specialist
  • Service strategist
  • User experience designer
  • Experience architect
  • Exhibition or event designer
  • Specialist in designing services for health care, education or retail

Or you may be a:

  • Product designer
  • Design manager
  • Service delivery manager
  • Change manager
  • Project manager (for services projects)
  • Implementation specialist
  • Product manager

Who’s responsible

Service Design 2016 Canberra was run by the team at UX Events.