 In February 2020, I was invited to talk about the trends that are shaping service design today, and I talked about four patterns, trends, weak signals, whatever you want to call them, that I discovered through my chats and conversations with the people on the service design show. And I want to go over these four trends with you, and I'm curious what you think about them, if you recognize them, if you see any other trends. So the first trend, how could it be else, is the uprise of new technology. With the increasing demand for personalizing experiences, you see the organizations are using new technologies like, of course, AR, but also VR, and all those fancy hip terms to create more custom experiences. And this is, of course, impacting service design. What I find really interesting about this trend is that so far, we only primarily see new technologies like AR influencing service delivery. So the final service, like the chat bolts or the smart things. But what I'm interested in is how will new technologies impact the design process? How can we use new technologies to augment the design process? Can we use AI during research? Can we use it during ideation? Can we use a virtual reality in the prototyping stage? That's what I'm interested in. And I'm really curious how this trend will eventually play out. The second trend I talked about, I named it rethinking implementation. Service design isn't new anymore. It has been around for, well, depending on how long you go back. But let's say it's been well established for 15 years. And people have been practicing it for quite some time. In the early days, we were just happy to get a project and to get our hands dirty and work on something. But today, voices are being raised, critical voices are being raised about the actual impact that we're making. So it's nice to do a service design project. But if at the end, a customer, a patient, a student doesn't notice anything tangible, doesn't notice any change, or the employees don't notice any change, or the company doesn't notice any change, what are we here for? So what we're seeing is service design, nurse and service design teams moving more and more towards the operation stage of services, rather than maybe the innovation or the marketing or the sales. I see service design is getting more and more close to day-to-day operation to actually have an influence on how a service is delivered. So that was my second observation. The third one is I call it standardization and specialization, which might seem like a paradox. Because on the one hand, service design is standardizing, we're sort of trying to grasp and we're grasping quite well what defines service design in a quite general sense. There are courses, there are studies, there are books. So we can say that we've established a good baseline for service design. Now what you also see happening is that people who have been in the field for quite some time are asking themselves what is next. So you're seeing that people are specializing, we're getting people focused on specifically user research and service design, we're getting people who focus on facilitation, that design springs kind of things. So while everybody might have the same vocabulary about service design, people are specializing within it, which is quite interesting because service design on the one hand is becoming more accessible for newcomers, there's more literature, there are courses, but it's also sort of widening and specializing. I have a long, long ago history as a software engineer and I compare this sometimes to what happened to web design. In the early days, you had a unicorn web designer who did everything, like graphic design, he built a website, he built a backend system. But nowadays, think about it. If you want a website, there there's an interaction designer, there's a visual designer, there's somebody doing the front end, there's somebody doing the back end. So it's hard to talk about a web designer these days anymore. It's much more about a web design team. And I think we're heading towards the same way. I think it's an illusion to talk about the service designer, we should change our vocabulary to the service design team. So this trend standardization and specialization is something that has been definitely recognized by many people who I've talked to on the show. And you can also just see it on the job boards and job titles. So that was the third trend week signal. And the fourth and final one, which I talked about, is what I call design ethics. Now, design ethics might not be the most sexy topic, but it is definitely a topic which is really important. And it is the topic about, we as designers are quite positive. We tend to look at the positive outcomes of our work. And we sort of neglect or don't put a lot of emphasis on also considering the side effects of our work. So asking questions like, who will suffer from what I'm going to implement here? What are the consequences for nature, for the environment? A lot of questions regarding going beyond the human centered design process. So design ethics is going up. And it's about raising a new set of questions, being a responsible service designer. I think that's what's becoming more and more important. And how this plays out. And it's really one of the really simple things you're seeing happening is that, for instance, agencies are putting up manifestos on their website about who they are and what they want to contribute to this world. One last thing I want to say about this is, as designers, we haven't thought to be quite humble. We facilitate the process. We don't have an opinion. And that has brought us a long way. But now we're seeing that if you take a stance, if you say, this is what I want to contribute to the world, this is the world I want to help to design, it adds value to the design process. So I think we should be more outspoken about that. People think about your world that you want to contribute to and make that part of your ethical code. So to recap, I talked about emerging technologies. I talked about rethinking implementation, which is going to be one of the hottest topics in the coming two years, I expect. I talked about standardization and specialization within service design. And finally, I talked about design, ethics. All these topics, like I said, are related to one or more episodes on the service design show. And if you're interested to dig into these topics, I'll link to the relevant episodes down below in the show notes. So check that out if you want to learn more about them. I'm really curious, which trend do you see shaping service design in the coming two years? Which trend are you really excited about? Maybe also a bit worried about. Leave a comment down below. Let's continue the conversation there. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.