Nobody Designed This. The Service Designer’s Role In Connected Care

Service designers are often described as people who connect the dots. We work across products, services, policies, teams and organisations. But what does that really mean in practice?

My perspective is that some of the most important problems sit between organisational boundaries. These spaces are often overlooked because no single team owns them, funds them or measures them. Yet they are often where people experience the greatest confusion, frustration and risk.

Using examples from public healthcare, I will explore what it means to design in these spaces.

One example is transfer of care. It is one of the clearest examples of connected care, where people, information, services and organisations all need to work together. When someone leaves hospital, they experience a single journey, not a collection of organisations, systems, standards and teams. Information, responsibility and trust need to move with them. Yet this experience is rarely designed as a whole. Instead, it emerges from many different decisions made by different teams, organisations and systems. 

This is where service designers can bring something unique. We help organisations understand experiences that cut across boundaries. We reveal relationships, dependencies and opportunities that are difficult to see. We make trust, handovers, responsibilities and decision-making visible enough for people to discuss, improve and build into the service design.

My contribution to Service Design Disrupted is a perspective on one of the biggest opportunities for our profession: helping organisations understand and improve what happens between systems rather than only within them.

AI is rapidly becoming part of how people access information, make decisions and interact with services. It has huge potential to improve healthcare and public services.

However, more technology does not automatically create better experiences.

In healthcare, clinicians often spend time checking digital records that already exists because they do not fully trust it. Patients increasingly use AI, online communities and digital tools alongside healthcare professionals. People receive information from multiple sources and must decide what to trust.

The challenge is no longer only about connecting technology or sharing data. It is also about trust, coordination, decision-making and responsibility.

This is where service design becomes increasingly important. Service designers help people understand how technologies, organisations, policies and human behaviour work together. We help teams see risks, opportunities and unintended consequences before they happen.

As services become more connected, automated and AI-enabled, the opportunity for service designers may be less about designing individual touchpoints and more about helping organisations understand and improve what happens between them.