Beyond Services: Designing the Conditions for System Transformation

As organisations face increasingly systemic challenges, what does this demand from service design? Drawing on a people-powered transformation project of Catalonia’s health and care information systems, this talk explores how familiar service design practices can move beyond isolated methods to help people navigate complexity, build shared direction and create the conditions for system transformation.

Field

Format

Talk

Day

Thursday, Oct 15

Room

Aula M

Time

12:35 PM

Same tools, bigger purpose

The challenges we face are no longer isolated—they are increasingly interconnected, systemic, and constantly evolving. While service design has traditionally focused on improving individual services, these challenges call for an expanded role: repurposing our existing skills, tools, and ways of working to help systems collectively navigate complexity and transformation. Rather than proposing entirely new methods, this talk argues that the strength of service design lies in reimagining what our practice is for.

Why is this conversation important now?

Societies face challenges in systems that are increasingly complex (healthcare, climate, AI, democracy). The need is no longer just to design better services. This is a timely moment to rethink the role of service design and explore how our existing practice can contribute to the collective transformation these challenges demand.

Who is this session for?

This session is for service designers, design leaders, public sector practitioners and anyone working with organisational or systemic change who is interested in how design can evolve beyond service improvement to enable collective transformation.

Key takeaways

A new perspective on how the changing nature of today's challenges calls for an expanded role for service design and an invitation to rethink the future of service design as a practice that creates the conditions for collective transformation.
A practical reflection on how familiar service design skills and tools can be repurposed to support system transformation, not just service improvement, with concrete principles for using participation, sensemaking and collaboration to build shared direction and collective ownership of change.

Ada Maymó Costa

Ada Maymó Costa

Strategic and Service Designer @ The Care Lab

Ada is a Strategic and Service Designer at The Care Lab, passionate about the role of design in social and systemic change. She works at the intersection of service design, participation and systems thinking and is particularly interested in expanding the role of service design beyond improving services, seeing it as a practice that can create the conditions for system transformation—helping people make sense of complexity, envision and align around a shared, caring future and actively participate in shaping it.

Over the past years, she has worked across health and care, education, public services and social innovation, collaborating with public institutions, private organisations and mission-driven teams in Barcelona and London. Most recently, in her role at The Care Lab, she has led the participation and co-creation workstream of a people-powered care system transformation project supporting the future of Catalonia’s health and care information systems in collaboration with the Catalan Digital Health Strategy.