Are you looking for ways to transform your organisation, to co-create value, and stay relevant for your customers? The Service Design Days offer you the opportunity to learn from strategic design thinkers and doers. And to follow successful innovations of design-led, human-centric teams and organisations.

What makes us unique?

The Service Design Days are transdisciplinary conferences for changemakers, influencers, and decision makers at small and large organisations, involved in product and service innovation, organisation transformation, and value creation through design.

The Service Design Days are lively gatherings that bring together creative thinkers; ethnographers, designers, innovators, entrepreneurs and creators, to learn, share and co-create together, through live- and online sessions.

They bring together different fields and disciplines, such as service design, foresight, systemic design, ethnography, social design, anthropology and business design. At our events you will be challenged to use your creativity and responsiveness to understand tomorrow’s challenges. You will discuss, ideate, and learn about new, successful tools how to stay relevant and valuable and create social impact, positive change and sustainable services. Besides that, entrepreneurial brands will share their learnings on how to transform and innovate in a design-led way.

What's the story behind?

Today’s businesses and organisations are heavily challenged by complex, systemic problems, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, persisting poverty, social inequality, migration and homelessness. On top of that, highly connected, critical customers with constantly changing lifestyle and needs, disrupt existing business models and force organisations to reinvent their core business. Our complex world is going through disruptive and unprecedented change. It’s time that organisations make a greater contribution to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and work towards a more sustainable future. Today more than ever organisations need to adapt their services to create positive impact.

To adapt to this new reality, organisations need to innovate continuously. For successful innovation insight in customers’ needs is key. Although big data is easy to get, the real challenge is to put yourself in the mind of the customer. A nice-looking app developed without the users’ needs in mind is a useless app. A stylish fashion shop is unattractive if shoppers cannot find their desired products. A last-mile delivery service that leads to congested streets and higher carbon production is polluting the city and damaging the planet.

A growing number of organisations invite designers to help them with these major challenges. To focus on solving problems for real people, society and the planet. More than ever before, designers are entering boardrooms to stimulate creativity and fuel imagination so that new service concepts and innovation arise. Combining these concepts with realtime experiences and data, they design successful organi​sational strategies.

This new reality has given rise to the organisation of the Service Design Days. The idea behind it originated in 2010, when two like-minded creative professionals shared their visions about the new continuum: the changing society, and how companies can stay relevant and connected in a fierce business landscape. These two creatives are Inge Keizer, co-founder of the Service Design College and Ariel Guersenzvaig, strategic designer and senior lecturer at Elisava - Barcelona School of Design and Engineering. Together with Asier Perez, strategic designer and professor at the University of Deusto and UAI, Maria Santolaria, client relationship lead at IDEO and former head of venture design at InnoCells (by Banco Sabadell) and Erik Roscam Abbing, Group Director Design & Innovation at Livework, they formed the first Conference Committee.

Why attend?

The Service Design Days focus on service design for decision makers. It aims to connect strategic designers with business and vice versa.

Our events are intimate and highly interactive. They are THE opportunity to find out how to put design at the heart of your organisation. They provide you with a range of proven concepts and useful service and business design tools to guide your teams in a customer-centric transition. They offer you insights and solutions for your strategic challenges. They also give you the opportunity to meet creative and critical thinkers from other industries and learn from other companies’ successes and failures.

Be inspired by the expertise of our speakers and learn from our workshop leaders. Combine theory with practical tools and tactics. Find out where you are today on your transition journey and how you can stay relevant and valuable, and ahead of customers’ trends in a challenging environment. Participate in interactive sessions with other creative minds from inside and outside your industry. Using methods and tools from areas such as service design, design thinking, business design, lean startup, participatory design and experience design. With a strategic, new and fresh perspective, you will find the arguments and tools you need to push your organisation and teams forward.