What is Service Design designing?

Service design is usually described through the artefacts it creates in the pursuit of better services and experiences. But what if its most important work lies elsewhere? This session explores a different possibility—and a question that has quietly reshaped my own understanding of the discipline.

Field

Format

Talk

Day

Friday, Oct 16

Room

Aula K

Time

12:00 PM

Perhaps we have been describing the wrong object

Organisations are often understood through structures, processes, technologies, and strategies. Yet much of organisational life is held together through relations.

We often describe service design through the artefacts it produces or the experiences it improves. But what if those are not its deepest contribution?

Perhaps we have been describing the wrong object.

This session explores the possibility that journeys, blueprints, workshops, and governance are not simply methods or deliverables, but infrastructure for collective learning, better judgment, and stronger collaboration. In doing so, it asks what kinds of relations our practices make possible—and ultimately one deceptively simple question:

What is Service Design designing?

Why is this conversation important now?

As organisations become increasingly complex, more of our work happens in the messy middle: between teams, across organisational boundaries, and in situations where no one has the whole picture. Our work is shifting from designing isolated interactions to creating the conditions in which people coordinate across uncertainty, ambiguity, and difference. Yet we still tend to describe service design through its visible artefacts rather than the conditions those artefacts create.
Perhaps what needs to evolve is not only the practice itself, but the language we use to describe what it has been doing all along.

Who is this session for?

For service designers, design leaders, researchers, and transformation practitioners who find themselves drawn less to certainty and more to the messy middle of organisational life. Particularly for those interested in questioning not just how we practice service design, but what our practice might actually be bringing into being.

Key takeaways

Participants will leave with a different way of seeing.
A new lens through which familiar artefacts can be understood as infrastructure for collective learning, better judgment, and stronger collaboration.
And, hopefully, one question that lingers long after the session ends: What kinds of relations are we normalising through our work?

Himanshu Rohilla

Himanshu Rohilla

Strategic Service Designer @ CGI

Himanshu works with organisations navigating complexity through service design, systems thinking, and collaborative transformation. As a Service Design leader at CGI, he brings experience working with startups as well as global organizations like IKEA and Tetra Pak across digital, organisational, and sustainability transitions.

His work is built on understanding the conditions that enable people to learn, relate, and act together within organisations. He is particularly curious about how shared understanding emerges, how judgment develops under uncertainty, and how organisations create space for meaningful collaboration and collective action.

Alongside his practice, he has taught design at university level and continues to mentor, teach, and speak on design, transformation, and systems thinking. His work is guided by a belief that meaningful change depends not only on better solutions, but on cultivating better relationships between people, organisations, and the systems they inhabit.