The latest issue of Service Design Network’s Touchpoint – ‘Energing Service Design’ – asks where service design is going, not what it’s currently doing.
My piece, The end of experience, argues that as various AI agents and platform intermediaries insert themselves between organisations and customers, the experience layer is quietly dissolving – and that service designers need to reposition around operational and systemic work rather than wait for touchpoints that may never come back.
Touchpoint’s Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes quoted the piece in his introduction to the issue, and it made the cover. Somehow that feels better than being on a Forbes 99Under99 list or something (not that I would know).
Three articles resonated particularly strongly with my own:
- Madison Karas and Patrick Boehler first made me panic (are they writing about the same stuff I did?), but it turned out to be the best real-world illustration of AI intermediation straight from the newsroom.
- Palak Agrawal also proposes a mediation layer as an extension to the service blueprint, and I’m already inspired by her concept of Enablers, Translators and Supporters bridging gaps within a service.
- Emma Blackwell notes that “discourse around agentic design remains largely conceptual”, so she proposes a framework of cognitive-behavioural responsibilities and design patterns for human–AI interactions. It feels like something I’d like to test myself.
My other top picks:
- Anke Holst on collaboration architecture, which is especially close to my heart. I also come from industrial organisations and recognise some of the same problems. The Timber-Frame Diagnostic is gold.
- Megan Gileza brings business capabilities and operational realities into focus. Her levels of fidelity for process mapping and scoring rubric for identifying high-impact moments within a process can support service designers and business architects alike.
- Sujeet Kumar’s take on the porosity of service design in practice is spot on. His objection to the self-constraining tendencies of service design beautifully summarises the whole issue.
SDN members can download the full issue PDF.