SDGC26 Pre-event: Workshop Series
This SDGC pre-conference webinar series includes 2 workshops that will build upon one another and will culminate with an in-person on-stage presentation on October 30 and a booth at the in-person event. You are welcome to attend both workshops if you are able. The scenarios will be updated between sessions.
Which Futures for Service Design? Challenge the Scenarios, Explore Your Role
Bas Raijmakers and Markus Edgar Hormess
Expect a highly interactive workshop: you’ll exchange perspectives, challenge ideas and work with others from the start. What if service design’s biggest opportunities challenge our own ideas of what service design is – and what service designers do?
As part of our ongoing Teaming with AI research into how we collaborate with AI, we asked: could letting AI go first help us explore futures we might hesitate to imagine for ourselves? After all, these scenarios concern our own roles, methods and livelihoods. Using in-depth automated research, we created a first set of scenarios for our community to challenge and develop, introduced in our Touchpoint article. Several scenarios explore what happens when service designers help shape those early decisions – taking on new roles and responsibilities, including some we might find uncomfortable today (see an overview and the link to the full AI generated draft below).
So, where could or should we take service design next? How might we prepare to take on responsibilities that currently lie with management or other roles?
Bring your experience, your counterexamples and the possibilities AI missed. Together, we’ll build a clearer understanding of what these futures could mean for our roles, decisions and skills—as a discipline, within our teams and in our individual practice. The workshop offers a starting point for your own reflections, conversations with your team and further explorations.
Event Schedule
11 Oct, 2026
07:00 PM - Which Futures for Service Design? Challenge the Scenarios, Explore Your Role
18 Oct, 2026
10:00 AM - Which Futures for Service Design? Challenge the Scenarios, Explore Your Role
Facilitators
Bas Raijmakers, Co-founder and Creative Director, STBY, London, England
Bas Raijmakers, co-founder Stby, a design and research agency in London and Amsterdam, part of Quicksand with 3 studios in India. Co-founder Reach Network for global human centred design in 22 countries on 6 continents. Global research partner Teaming with AI.
Markus Edgar Hormess, Co-founder & Partner, WorkPlayExperience, Nuremberg, Germany
Markus Edgar Hormess, co-founder and partner of WorkPlayExperience. Service innovator and organisational consultant. Co-author of Teaming with AI and facilitator of experimental workshops around this theme. Co-author of ‘This is Service Design Doing’, and facilitator of a regular course with the same name. Expert on Learning by Doing.