Explore every episode of the podcast Service Design Podcast
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| #68 - Service design ninja in gov: Clementina Gentile | 14 Jul 2026 | 00:54:52 | |
We talk with service design ninja Clementina Gentile about proactive public services and building a community of practice across government agencies. How do you design for 100% of citizens, build an architecture of trust, and break down bureaucratic silos? | |||
| #67 - Going punk on human-centred design with Gerry Scullion | 22 Jun 2026 | 00:47:22 | |
What if going punk is the most human-centered thing you can do right now? 🤘 We sat down with Gerry Scullion to talk HCD, AI, and why discomfort might actually mean you're on the right track. Did we make you curious? | |||
| #66 - Meet our new host: Eva Faes | 08 Jun 2026 | 00:05:37 | |
A new voice, same Service Design Podcast! Laurens Somers is passing the mic to Eva Faes, service and social designer at Knight Moves. | |||
| #65 - Modernising digital services at scale with Hefen Wong | 14 Apr 2026 | 00:55:56 | |
What does it take to modernise a live government system? Hefen Wong from Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower shares how an 18-year-old Employment Pass platform was transformed into a user-centred digital service: through prioritising user value, smart use of research, and agile ways of working. | |||
| #64 - Building customer experience with Sheila Kesselaers and Tomas De Preter | 09 Mar 2026 | 00:47:15 | |
We visit Sheila Kesselaers and Tomas De Preter at Reynaers Group HQ: how do they grow the shift to a Customer Experience mindset at a systems company in the world of building elements? | |||
| #63 - Service Design for NORCS with Mia Mo, Robyn Carino, and Samiha Essakhi | 02 Feb 2026 | 00:49:53 | |
We talk with Mia Mo, Robyn Carino, and Samiha Essakhi as they take us through the innovative model they co-created to integrate health, social, and physical supports directly within Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCS). | |||
| #62 - Making waves with Maarten Raemdonck and Lien Dewitte | 17 Nov 2025 | 01:00:01 | |
We talk with Maarten Raemdonck, Head of Innovation at Aquafin, and Lien Dewitte from Leap Forward, about how innovation takes root in a large, technical organisation. From bold early experiments to building lasting change, they share honest lessons from Aquafin’s journey to make innovation part of everyday work in a company that treats the waste water of 5 million people daily. | |||
| #61 - Innovating healthcare with Brian Desplinter and Jurgen De Klerck | 17 Sep 2025 | 00:54:06 | |
In this episode, we visit AZ Groeninge in Kortrijk to meet Brian Desplinter and Jurgen De Klerck, the duo behind a unique collaboration between healthcare and telecom. From private 5G networks to co-designed care services, we explore how design thinking is driving real change in a clinical setting. | |||
| #60 - Digitizing Buildings with Sun Ah Hwang | 03 Jun 2025 | 01:11:26 | |
What if your home had a memory? In this episode, PhD researcher Sun Ah Hwang joins us to explore Digital Building Logbooks — the “health cards” of buildings. From DIY dreams to data-driven renovation advice, we discuss how DBLs are reshaping our approach to sustainability, ownership, and building design across Europe. | |||
| #59 - Prototyping for the planet with Dr. Samuel Huber | 15 Jan 2025 | 00:59:16 | |
Dr. Samuel Huber shares his takes on how to design better futures from a planetary perspective. Being both a design entrepreneur and researcher, he utilises his academic side for real-life prototyping of strategies. | |||
| #58 - Building strong local communities with Djoera Eerland | 23 Dec 2024 | 01:08:42 | |
How do you engage active neighbours in saving energy together with the rest of their neighbourhood? How can you improve social cohesion in local communities? Djoera Eerland shares the challenges and learnings of kickstarting neighbourhood collectives at scale, with Buurkracht. | |||
| #57 - Regenerating the future with Coral Michelin | 12 Nov 2024 | 00:46:14 | |
“All of Latin America is on fire at the moment. We’re losing thousands of hectares of ecosystems…” This is how Coral brings us to Brazil at the start of our conversation. She is currently working for re.green, an organisation that restores tropical forests at scale, and she recently published her book on Ecosystemic Design. | |||
| #56 - Experiments for inclusion with Tom Van Hoey and Yalenka Mariën | 09 Aug 2024 | 00:55:02 | |
How to make your services more inclusive and accessible? Tom Van Hoey from District09 and Yalenka Mariën from Knight Moves share insights from Flanders' City Deal 'E-inclusion by Design,' where they focus on crafting accessible digital tools for 13 Flemish cities. Together, we discuss the importance of small-scale experimentation, encouraging city officials to adopt user-centred approaches, and using storytelling for sustainable collaboration. | |||
| #55 - Finding Nemo: transforming Finland’s maritime logistics with Sanna Vainionpää | 24 Jun 2024 | 00:49:56 | |
How can service design revolutionise maritime logistics? Sanna Vainionpää gladly answers that question as she shares how their 10 years vision concept for Finnish Maritime “Single Window” - named NEMO - enhances efficiency, reduces environmental impact, and optimises port operations. Don’t hesitate to dive into this engaging discussion on the power of service design in the maritime industry. A lot of opportunities lie ahead! | |||
| #54 - Save Time, Save Lives with Ashleen Nee And Linda Klotzbach | 21 Mar 2024 | 00:51:37 | |
In this episode, we have a thoughtful conversation with Ashleen Nee and Linda Klotzbach going int-depth into their project “Save Time, Save Lives”, winner the 2023 Service Design Awards for Best Student Project executed together with YuYu Sun. | |||
| #53 - Designing rituals with Adam B Cochrane | 26 Dec 2023 | 00:51:08 | |
Adam B Cochrane is a Senior strategic designer at Lufthansa Innovation hub where he facilitates meaning, purpose and future visions through service design. Throughout his career - with previous employers such as Zalando, Taxfix, IXDS and Telekom - he developed a keen interested in ritual design and guiding new business ventures. Now, he ‘s also the co-director for the 2024 Service Design Global Conference in Helsinki - having been already a driving force for the 2023 conference in Berlin. | |||
| #52 - Imagining collective futures with Khushboo Balwani | 23 Nov 2023 | 00:46:24 | |
Khushboo Balwani is a designer, creative researcher, and futurist active in Brussels through her socio-artistic citizen lab BrusselAVenir. Enjoy this hopeful and inspiring conversation about Khushboo’s work, her approach for understanding and visualising future needs and the power of collective future building. | |||
| #51 - Do No Harm with Giulia Bazoli and Pardis Shafafi | 24 Oct 2023 | 00:36:16 | |
As designers, we assume a lot of responsibility when it comes to involving users. How can we do better, and how can we stay kind to ourselves? Giulia and Pardis share good laughs and serious answers on using the Do No Harm Framework in their daily practice at Designit. | |||
| #50 - Transforming healthcare with Jiri Vermeulen en Lola Bladt from Minze Health | 28 Aug 2023 | 00:50:02 | |
Join us as we dive into the wonderful world of healthcare innovation with Jiri Vermeulen and Lola Bladt from Minze Health. Jiri and Lola share their personal experiences as entrepreneurial designers, narrating the transformation of a visionary idea in 2015 into an established digital healthcare company today with multiple products in the global market. Enjoy this honest and fun conversation about transforming healthcare through design. | |||
| #49 - Innovating public transport with Lotta Julkunen | 20 Jul 2023 | 00:49:49 | |
Finnish strategic and service design agency Hellon has been working together with the Helsinki Regional Transport Authority (HSL) for the past 6 years to ensure the sustainable future of Helsinki’s public transport. For their productive partnership, they received the Service Design Award 2022 Best Non-Profit project! We speak with Lotta Julkunen - design director and partner at Hellon - to discuss their well earned award, the philosophy of their partnership with HSL and many more interesting elements for doing successful service design at scale. | |||
| #48 - Designing for trust with Sarah Drummond | 07 Jun 2023 | 01:05:41 | |
Leading up to her captivating talk at Knight Moves' Arena last month about ‘Trust Falls: catching users when they fall', we welcomed design strategist Sarah Drummond in our studio in Ghent. We talk about how to build trust in the design process, innovation vs. familiarity and the value of predictable actions for users in order to trust the systems they use. Get immersed in this fascinating topic and learn how to design for trust. | |||
| #47 - Empowering Empathy with Sydney Johnson and Kristofer Kelly-Frere from J5 Design | 17 Apr 2023 | 00:49:14 | |
We welcome Sydney Johnson and Kristofer Kelly-Frere from Canada-based studio J5 Design. They shared their experience working on the project ‘Braver Training Grounds: Customer Experience Design & Social Housing Organizations’ which earned them the global service design award best commercial project 2022. | |||
| #46 - Nudging Sustainability with Chu-Yi Vuong | 13 Mar 2023 | 00:47:10 | |
Chu-Yi Vuong — winner of the Service Design Award 2022 for Best Student Project — came up with a service to nudge sustainable choices to consumers. We welcome her in our studio in Ghent to talk about her thesis, her journey into the world of service design and her job as a service designer at IBM iX. Learn how her innovative solution, "Save," can make it easier for consumers to shop for groceries with sustainability in mind. | |||
| #45 - Activating agency with Leyla Acaroglu | 07 Nov 2022 | 00:35:58 | |
We continue the keynote talk of Dr. Leyla Acaroglu backstage at the Service Design Global Conference in Copenhagen. We discuss sustainability, systemic change and most of all, actionable steps for us, service designers and humans to make a difference. Take in her inspiration for activating your agency. | |||
| #44 - Courage to design for good with Christina Melander and Peter Nørregård | 03 Oct 2022 | 00:39:19 | |
In this episode, we share a heartfelt chat with two amazing people from the organising team of the Service Design Global Conference: Peter Nørregård from Playful Innovations and Christina Melander from the Danish Design Center. Tune in to discover what designing for good means for them, and why having courage as a designer is so important—now maybe more than ever. | |||
| #43 - Time for a change with David Morgan and Stina Vanhoof | 26 Sep 2022 | 00:46:55 | |
Tune in to this special episode where Stina and David pass the torch to Laurens and Jeroen and welcome them as new hosts of the Service Design Podcast. Listen to them reflecting on how Service Design has changed since the beginning of the podcast. We also talk about the change in hosts and what challenges Stina and David are taking on instead! | |||
| Service Design Global Conference 2021 coming soon | 15 Oct 2021 | 00:35:17 | |
Next week the Service Design Global Conference 2021 will take place with again a great line-up! This years’ theme is ‘taking a stand’, we talked about the theme and other exciting stuff with two great people from the organising team: Ullah Jones and Agusta Callaway. Get excited about the conference and listen to the episode! Or let us convince you to still buy a ticket with a 25% discount (code: SDGC21_attendee_25%off) | |||
| EPISODE 41 Service Design Award Winner 2019 Best Non-Profit | 03 Jun 2020 | 00:45:00 | |
Twisted studio won the ‘professional non-profit’ service design award for their lean approach to service design and prototyping. The project they won the award for is called LaMA, short for Laboratoria Mobiele Alternatieven. A co-creative design process developed to find creative and simple solutions with great impact on mobility issues in small cities. We spoke with the two founders of Twisted studio; Marlies Deforche & Elisabeth Verhetsel. Because they are our Belgian colleagues, we invited them to our studio! Read the whole story here: https://www.service-design-network.org/community-knowledge/lama-laboratoria-mobiele-alternatieven Twisted studio website: http://twistedstudio.be | |||
| EPISODE 40: Tom Szaky at the Global Service Design Conference | 10 Mar 2020 | 00:26:02 | |
Tom Szaky is CEO at Terracycle, a social enterprise on a mission to eliminate the idea of waste. Recently he founded a new company Loop, a global circular shopping platform that brings multi-use packaging into our daily shopping. Tom closed the Global Service Design Conference in Toronto with his talk ‘Loop: Solving for Disposability While Maintaining Its Virtues’. We managed to sneak in a 25 minute interview with him right before his talk! | |||
| EPISODE 39: JOHN POWELL - We Have Met The Enemy and They Are Us | 17 Feb 2020 | 00:42:58 | |
John Powell is design director at an agency focussed on Artificial intelligence for leading global enterprises and governments. John’s talk was titled ‘We Have Met The Enemy and They Are Us. He talked about the social challenges humans created over the years and how it is time for designers to take responsibility!! | |||
| EPISODE 38: Steph Hay on designing for trust | 23 Jan 2020 | 00:32:35 | |
Steph Hay is VP design at Capital One an American bank. She opened the second day with her talk ‘Designing for Trust. Steph talked about the example of sesame street. In order for children to learn, they need to trust the person or puppet that thought them new stuff. Discover what Sesame Street and and the ‘I love you’ metric can teach you! | |||
| EPISODE 37: RELIVE THE TORONTO GLOBAL SERVICE DESIGN CONFERENC | 27 Nov 2019 | 01:15:34 | |
Waw! What a great edition this year's conference! It was great to meet the familiar faces again, but also many new inspiring people. We walked around with our microphones again and bumped into many interesting designers from all over the world. We talked to the organisators of this year conference and the organisers of the 2020 edition in Copenhagen. We already had a quick chat with some of the service design award winners. Off course we will invite them for a longer interview again later this year! We talked to many speakers, fellow podcasters, volunteers, etc. We hope you enjoy this episode and relive the conference! | |||
| MINI EPISODE - SDGC19 CHRIS FERGUSON | 23 Sep 2019 | 00:31:10 | |
You heard Chris Ferguson (Founder of service design agency Bridgeable) on this podcast before. We spoke to him as a visitor of the Service Design Global Conference, as a regular guest, as a winnen of and SD award and now as an organiser of the conference in Toronto. As always, Chris has many valuable insights to share and will get you excited for this year’s edition of the conference. | |||
| Mini episode - Anticipation for #SDGC19 | 06 Sep 2019 | 00:20:51 | |
In anticipation of the in Oktober we spoke to , one of the local organisers of the conference. Shannon is Senior Manager, Experience Design at and was Principle, Design and Research Director at . Listen to find out about the theme of the conference, what to look forward to and where to visit in Toronto. | |||
| EPISODE 35: PLAYMOBIL PRO WITH VICTORIA DOBBIE | 30 Jul 2019 | 00:30:01 | |
A couple of months ago, we noticed an interesting video on Linkedin. In this video Playmobil announced their new toolkit for professionals. We spoke with Victoria Dobbie, project manager at sub-brand Playmobil Pro. She introduced us to the tool and the process of designing and bringing it into the market. | |||
| EPISODE 34: ARENA LIVE - THE FUTURE OF WORK | 26 Jun 2019 | 01:11:42 | |
Increasing automation in our workplaces, demographic shifts and a customer-based economy are drastically changing the way we work. In order for people to keep up we will need a very different set of skills, particularly those that are unique to humans: imagination, creativity, curiosity, emotions and social relationships. How will we bring this skills transition into our jobs, and which implications will this have for employees, employers and organisations? In our 34th episode of our podcast you can listen to the round table discussion, i.e. an interview with the speakers of the evening and questions from the audience. | |||
| EPISODE 33: Award winner - Tesco Bank & Modern Human | 03 May 2019 | 00:52:00 | |
Tesco Bank and Modern human won the ‘best in private sector’ service design award for their project Phoenix. We spoke with Amjid Rasool, head of service design at Tesco Bank and Paul-Jervis Heath from the Service Design agency Modern human. Together with their whole team they redesigned the customer complaint experience of Tesco Bank clients. | |||
| EPISODE 32: Award winner - Fjord & the West Midland Police | 18 Mar 2019 | 00:42:10 | |
Fjord en West Midland Police won the award best in public sector for their project ‘Developing a police force’s digital experience for citizens’. We spoke with Giulio Fagiolini, who is visual design at Fjord and Kostja Paschalidis who was senior service design at Fjord and is now working as a freelancer. | |||
| EPISODE 31: Award winner public sector - Innovationguiden | 12 Feb 2019 | 00:37:34 | |
Innovationsguiden won the Professional Non-Profit/Public Sector award. Innovationguiden is an ongoing project that aims to support and reinvigorate the Swedish public sector in collaboration with citizens through service design. This was done by providing various forms of support to municipalities, county councils and regions to work with user-driven innovation in their development work. | |||
| EPISODE 30: Transforming Cork County Council with Julianne Coughlan | 22 Jan 2019 | 00:39:38 | |
Cork County Council is the second largest local authority in Ireland. They offer over 600 services to the civilians of Cork. This means they have an all-time challenge to deliver the best possible services for their customers. A few years ago, they came across Service Design, and started experimenting. They formed the Service rePublic team, and never looked back since. | |||
| EPISODE 29: ARENA LIVE - HUMAN CENTRED ORGANISATIONS | 20 Dec 2018 | 00:26:41 | |
As we shifted from a product-based economy into a service-based economy, customers are more and more pampered with good services. To be successful, companies more than ever need to offer services that exceed the expectations of people. So in order to offer the best services, companies can do two things. On the one hand they can work closely together with external professionals. On the other hand, they can expand their in-house expertise by training their own employees to think more human centred. To introduce and present both ways of working, we invited two international speakers who shared their knowledge. | |||
| EPISODE 28: DESIGNING TO DELIVER - A CONFERENCE RECAP | 29 Nov 2018 | 00:57:58 | |
We went to the Service Design Global Conference in Dublin where we attended lots of inspiring talks and hands-on workshops. Again, it was a truly amazing edition! It’s surprising how this conference manages to touch new topics & give new inspiration every year. Hats off to the organisation! We also really enjoyed the social aspects of this conference. Since this wasn’t our first SDGC, we saw a lot of familiar faces and like every year we had the chance to get to know many new people. During these moments we got the opportunity to interview some service design ‘rockstars’. You can find a compilation of these interviews here. | |||
| EPISODE 27: MARC STICKDORN - TOOLS AND WAYS ON HOW TO IMPLEMENT SERVICE DESIGN IN LARGE ORGANISATIONS | 20 Aug 2018 | 00:50:41 | |
Marc Stickdorn is a well-known person in the Service Design world. That’s understandable for many reasons! He is one of the writers on the ‘Service Design Thinking’ and the ‘Service Design doing’ book. Since this week also the ‘Service Design Methods’ book. Besides that he is co-founder and CEO of ‘More than Metrics’, a company that offers tools and stuff for customer experience and service designers: Smaply, Experiencefellow and Mr. Thinker. Marc speaks about Service Design at many conferences around the world. Great to have him at the podcast! | |||
| EPISODE 26: Arena Live Service design and education | 03 Jul 2018 | 01:35:25 | |
New technologies, a continuously changing lifestyle and new jobs and disciplines present serious challenges in the field of education. Old education methods and skills are challenged in a society where personalisation, collaboration, information and e-learning are taking over. Professionals have to re-educate themselves and schools need new tools and solutions to be able to innovate and make these changes manageable. How can Service Design help education deal with these challenges and inspire people to solve problems in a creative way? | |||
| EPISODE 25: Looking back and forward | 14 May 2018 | 00:23:26 | |
We can’t believe its already our 25th episode! In september 2016 we published the first episode. Not sure where this adventure would lead us we decided to just give it a try! Since then we have been speaking with inspiring people from al over the world. In this 25th episode we reflect on the conversations we had, we’ll let you know which episodes were our favourite ones and what we have learned from experts in the field. One of the highlights of hosting this podcast is meeting our guests and listeners at conferences or online. We would love to interact more with our listeners and know who you are. Therefore we launched a newsletter where we will publish new episodes but also ask questions to the community. GIVEAWAY!! When you you have a chance to win this with some of our favourite Service Design tools! A Neuland workshop case that we use for all our workshops. The Service Design Award Annual A Moleskin sketch book to note down all your great ideas. A Kingdom card game to boost all your workshops And more ... Check out the THANKS, THANKS, THANKS! Thanks to all the guests that have been on the show! Thanks to for partnering up! Thanks to for giving us time to do the podcast. And of course thanks to all of you who have been listening to the podcast! Here's to another 25 episodes to come! 🍾 David & Stina | |||
| EPISODE 24: WINNER FOR ORGANISATIONAL IMPACT IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR | 19 Apr 2018 | 00:36:29 | |
Together with the city of Rotterdam, service design agency Muzus won the award for organisational impact in the public sector. The city of Rotterdam is offering a mobility service to people with special needs to make sure they get to the where they want. They realised, however, they did not know the people they were offering the service to. Muzus conducted qualitative research in various ways to give the city of Rotterdam insights in these users. These insights were used in various ways to offer the best service possible. | |||
| EPISODE 23: Student winner for business innovation in the private sector | 06 Apr 2018 | 00:35:59 | |
In this episode we speak to Hyunyim Park who won together with her team the student award for business innovation in the private sector. Together with Jaehyun Park and Culainn Boland Shanaha they designed the Smart Black Taxi Service Flo to tackle London’s air quality. Their service offers real-time time data about slow traffic, road works, busy spots where people look for taxi’s, etc. By offering this data the taxi drivers will be able to make better choices and reduce their driving time without passengers. | |||
| EPISODE 22: Award winner for best commercial project: Redefining the TELUS Renewals Experience | 22 Mar 2018 | 01:01:45 | |
In this episode we speak to the Service Design award winners for the best commercial project. Judy Mellett is director Service Design, Innovation and Strategy at Telus and Chris Ferguson is founder and CEO of Service Design agency Bridgeable. Together they won the award for redefining the TELUS Renewals experience. | |||
| EPISODE 21: Awards winners - Ella Walding | 04 Feb 2018 | 00:43:02 | |
Ella Walding won the Service Design student award for her graduation project at the Royal Collage of Art in Londen. Together with the government of Malta she developed a set of Service Design tools aimed to create change in the organisation. These tools can be found at servizz.gov.mt After her studies Ella started working as a service designer at innovation unit. | |||
| EPISODE 20: Awards winners - Design in Schools | 04 Feb 2018 | 00:49:04 | |
This year Service Design award for systemic change in education went to ‘Design Managers Australia (DMA)’ and Macquarie Primary School. We had the great opportunity to have both Mel Edwards, co-principal at DMA and Wendy Cave, principal at the Macquarie Primary school together on the show. | |||