Skip to main content

Generational Handover

Every field is built on what gets passed between generations: the knowledge, the instincts, the hard-won lessons, and the things that get quietly lost in translation. Right now, that handover is breaking in a specific way. Organisations have largely stopped hiring junior designers because AI is doing the tasks juniors used to learn on. Design schools keep graduating people into a market that doesn’t have an entry point waiting for them. The learning path that built today’s senior practitioners is closing, and nobody has a clear answer for what replaces it.

This panel brings organisations, educators, junior designers, and students into the same conversation to look at that paradox from every side of it: what is actually being handed over, what spaces for practice still exist for the next generation, what is being kept back, and what the next generation is choosing to do differently. It is not a mentorship session. It is an honest exchange about continuity, change, and what the field owes to the people who are supposed to carry it forward — at the exact moment that path is narrowing.

Forces

Field

Self

Format

Panel

Day

Friday, Oct 16

Room

Auditorium

Time

03:00 PM

Who is this session for?

Organisations and hiring managers rethinking how, or whether, they bring junior designers in. Educators and programme directors watching graduates hit a market with no entry point. Junior designers and students trying to find a way in. Senior practitioners thinking about legacy, relevance, and what they owe the people coming up behind them.

Topics to explore

  • Why organisations have stopped hiring junior designers, and what AI automating entry-level tasks actually replaces versus what it doesn't
  • The paradox of design schools graduating more designers into a market with fewer places for them to start
  • What senior practitioners wish they had been told, and what they are choosing not to pass on
  • What younger designers and students are seeing that more experienced practitioners have stopped noticing
  • Whose responsibility it is to fix the broken entry point — organisations, educators, the field itself, or some combination
  • What a healthy generational relationship in a design community actually looks like, when the traditional entry path is gone

Moderated by

Jon Rodriguez is Global Customer Experience Lead at Roche Diagnostics, where he defines the global CX strategy and enables affiliates worldwide to increase their CX competence. He focuses on empowering teams across Roche to deliver exceptional patient- and customer-centric experiences by embedding CX capabilities into local practices while ensuring alignment with the global vision. His work centers on improving how healthcare professionals and laboratories interact with diagnostic solutions and services to better support clinical workflows and patient outcomes.

Previously, Jon was Service Design Director at Philips, leading a global, multidisciplinary team of service designers. His team supported Philips’ transformation toward integrated healthcare solutions by delivering customer- and market-driven offerings for healthcare institutions worldwide. He was responsible for scaling service design competence and partnering across the business to mature, standardize, and scale service offerings.

Based in Spain, Jon collaborates across clinical, medical, and commercial teams to drive CX

Panellists

Diana is an industrial design engineer (UPC) with a Master’s in Creative Sustainability from Aalto University, working across service design, systemic thinking, and sustainability assessments. Curious about exploring beyond design silos, her practice is closely tied to activism and local community organizing.

Currently, she does design research for public innovation at Coboi lab and sustainability audits for festivals with A Greener Future. On the side, she stays connected to the territory through local activism and projects like co-creating Retket (experimental forest walks and workshops), and running Lo Got, a small cultural space and restaurant in Pallars Sobirà.

Fer is a Mexican designer studying Design + Business at IED Barcelona, a double degree with the University of Westminster, who thinks a lot about the futures we haven’t built yet.
She’s spent the last few years at startups, listening closely to clients and designing creative responses to their context. Across Mexico, the US and Canada, Fer has worked with city governments, neighbourhood associations, public transit, universities, museums and cultural events, often bringing the digital and the street closer together.
Today she’s drawn to speculative design, futures thinking and design research. She’s happiest in front of a post-it wall, mixing references, places and people until a new idea clicks. She believes imagination is a tool and a form of resistance: if something isn’t kind, fair or just, it can be redesigned.
Her happy place is a Mexican market in the morning, learning from the hands that make artesanías. Think global, act local, and take your time

Alfonso is a designer who thrives on translating insights into service opportunities that enable organizations to address complex challenges. Drawing from his foundation in music, engineering, and industrial design (TU Delft), he has built a career in service design.

He has worked as a designer in the Netherlands, China, Spain, Latin America, and the Nordics across public and private organizations. His experience spans healthcare, finance, education, and retail, working both in-house and as a consultant. Presently, he crafts service propositions for Philips Healthcare, helping teams shape better care experiences.

His focus lies in shifting organizations toward more inclusive, socially minded practices, where commercial goals and societal value can coexist. In his work, he combines empathy, creativity, and strategic insight to cultivate practical change: services and systems that support people, strengthen collaboration, and create a more responsible future across healthcare ecosystems and the wider communities they serve.

David de Prado is a Design leader based in Madrid. Until recently he was Global Digital Design Manager at IKEA Marketplaces, where he led the Design teams that launched the second-hand and home services marketplaces in several European countries. Before IKEA, he led the Service Design discipline and the Design team in BBVA’s Enterprise Digital Transformation. Earlier, he was Managing Partner at Designit, growing the studio’s business in Brazil and Spain.

Across 20+ years on both sides of the table, consultancy and in-house, he has hired, mentored and grown designers at every stage of their careers. Having watched many people learn the craft through the tasks AI now automates, he wants to know what the next entry point into Design looks like, and what organisations owe the people coming up behind them.

Service Design Disrupted 26

 

DHub Barcelona
Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes, 38
08018 Barcelona, Spain

Stay Tuned

Join our mailing list to receive updates on speakers, schedules, and upcoming announcements for our conference.

© 2026, Service Design Disrupted

Terms of Service

Privacy Policy

Code of Conduct

Privacy Preference Center

Privacy Preferences