Designing a Futures Workshop for Service Designers
I often ponder “What happens when our work goes into the wild?”
Once we hand that piece of work over, how much of this stays true to what we intended, and how much shifts beyond our reach? Firstly, I’m not a “futurist”, but someone who has often thought about the impact of their work beyond just the delivery and early monitoring stages.
When we help to shape and design services for our organisations we are rarely the handlers of the services themselves, just the person/facilitator/researcher/part of a team who helped shine a light to help colleagues to incorporate customer feedback and organisational handoffs/crossovers to be more defined and ultimately helpful at the moments it’s needed. Smoothing the process from interaction points to information retrieval, the policies that support the service, or success on completing the goal the service is intended to provide.
Once that work is out there, its future is not in our hands.
Later this year I am holding a workshop with fellow service designers who sit across vastly different industries. We have all discussed the many ways in which we attempt to “sell” or incorporate service design into the daily mindset of our organisation and teams. Our conversations in these times oscillate from successes to struggles.
Whilst we are trying to solve the problems of today to make it easier the next, our designers often see that the handoffs don’t always look further ahead than the planned recommendations and do not always address either systemic issues or incorporate the longer term future impact of the just delivered (or recommended) service inclusions or redesigns.
For this workshop I want our participants to think about not only what the future of the services they help to improve looks like, but also how the future of service design could evolve and what place we have in it. I want to explore what people might use in a future of service design role to complete their work, or help our organisations to become better service design oriented places.
To help with the inspiration of design this workshop I wanted to draw on “Designing Futures” by Eileen Mandir & Benedikt Groß and elements of the “Futures Bazaar” design jam created by Filippo Cuttica and Stuart Candy in conjunction with the team at BBC Global Experience Language (GEL) albeit attempting to translate this into an online experience for a global audience.
Make them think (pretty sure they always are)
“What are some things about service design now that may no longer be true in 10 years time?”
Like I said before, the service designers I catch up with know what their core role is to do at a particular point on an project and the more immediate problems they are trying to solve.
But how many times do we have long term recommendations that may not seem as important as the “do it now” implementations and get lost in future machinations of the business? Or parking lots in workshops? This is of course contextual to the organisations and whether or not they can bring speed, alignment, and support to deliver everything (or nearly everything).
I want our participants to think about the evolution of this role and practice holistically. I want them to have an image in their minds about what their thoughts of a future are.
A possibility I wanted to try here is using something like the Polak Game (example output below) to help participants generate their own images of the future.
A very simple explanation; Based on their positive or negative expectations of what the world may look like in the future (vertical axis), and then about the level of agency (horizontal axis) individuals can personally influence about the changes in the world participants would be in one of these four quadrants.
I am choosing this to get participants to think about the contexts they sit in, either in their professional or personal spaces and what their image of the future will look like, and how they feel about the agency or control they carry to affect or influence change in their own contexts.
Future Signals Gallery
A core part of design futuring is to look at the signals that are affecting not only our work directly, but the emerging trends within or adjacent to our industries, or even at societal, environmental, political, or economic shifts that have the potential to impact on our work or those who rely on our services in the future. But also conscious that not everything will have the greater potential to affect the work we do or the decisions our organisations make.
It may be easy for the participants to think about some of the impacts of Covid 19 on society today. If you were in countries that had lock downs and work from home orders we saw children of all ages kept at home not able to socialise with their peers and friends, people who could work from home and organisations adapting to new digital tools to collaborate and work. Impacts that occurred ranged from language development within children¹, social media use on mental health², the growth of digital adoption and tools for organisations³, or the continuation of working from home for workers⁴ who can work from home for their role.
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From this example I want my participants to extrapolate these signals and to start to consider anything they can think of that has the potential or possibility to impact our roles in the future.
No doubt AI be will thrown around as a strong signal.
But I want my peers to think what else are we seeing that is impacting the role as service designers; for better or worse.
Artefacts from the Future
During the final act of this session, I want our participants to spend a little time making some of there thoughts and imaginaries “real”, in a remote online workshop kind of way. I mentioned the Futures Bazaar concept before, but also wanted to consider using something like design fiction for the participants to imagine how the new things and artefacts we produce in the future will exist for us as service designers and in the future of service design more generally. I want to consider design fiction as it allows us to perceive “tangible prototypes from a near future to help discover and represent the consequence of decision making”.
Make stuff, that feels possible today, but shows an outcome of future choices.
During this section I want people to think of the impacts of social, technological, economic, environmental, and political (STEEP) aspects on service design and services we shape. I want to link this from our Future Signals Gallery and the emergences of opportunities explored through possible artefacts, the practices, and the role of a service designer:
- Creating a front page of a newsletter with some of the signals as actually coming to life
- Evolve the name and remit of a “service designer” for the future and create a position description
- An organisations transition to a fully “service led” organisation
- Design an interaction based on our signals; how, when, and where would these take place.
- How might new technologies allow different methods of data collection
- Incorporate how other living beings are part of the stakeholders in the work we do
But this is already presupposing that these are the outcomes people might think about and may not necessarily be the outcomes and images that people will produce.
I am still learning on how I can connect these practices and tools into my regular day to day work. I know all of the concepts here require more time and even more connection to ideas and developing them further.
My goal is that these activities will spark good conversations about how we perceive the practice of service design in the future and our ability to influence where we help progress to or navigate it.
References
¹ Giesbrecht, G. Lebel, C. and Tomfohr-Madsen L. (2025) ‘Pandemic babies’ turn 5: Here’s what research tells us about their development and remarkable resilience. The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/pandemic-babies-turn-5-heres-what-research-tells-us-about-their-development-and-remarkable-resilience-251507 (Retrieved 3 August 2026)
² Duerden, E.G. and Kent, M. (2024) Excessive social media use during the COVID‑19 pandemic exacerbated adolescent mental health challenges. The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/excessive-social-media-use-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-exacerbated-adolescent-mental-health-challenges-217986 (Retrieved 3 August 2026)
³Calvino, F. Criscuolo, C. and Ughi, A. (2024) Digital adoption during COVID-19: Cross-country evidence from microdata. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Available at: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2024/04/digital-adoption-during-covid-19_6b192cdc/f63ca261-en.pdf (Retrieved 3 August 2026)
⁴Adrjan, P. Ciminelli, G. Judes, A. Koelle, M. Schwellnus, C. and Sinclair, T.M. (2025) Working from home after COVID-19: Evidence from job postings in 20 countries. Labour Economics Vol.96, 2025 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537125000752 (Retrieved 3 August 2026)
