Inspired by local challenges, this course equips you to design adaptive, sustainable, and impactful services. From research in real-world contexts to hands-on prototyping, you’ll learn to create outcomes that support people, environments, and resilient futures.
Services are complex ecosystems. They connect people, places, and digital systems across multiple touchpoints—print, online, physical spaces, and material products. Designing seamless, end-to-end experiences requires an understanding of how these layers come together in real contexts.
In this intensive, week-long workshop, participants will learn to design services that address real challenges grounded in the local context. By exploring issues relevant to communities, institutions, and everyday life, the course goes beyond abstract case studies and emphasizes service design as a tool for meaningful change.
Prerequisites
No prior design experience is required. Participants should bring curiosity and a willingness to engage with people—including those outside their own networks—as part of the research process.
How you’ll learn
Expect a hands-on week with lots of collaboration, experimentation, and results that are sure to be innovative and surprising. Over the course of the week, participants will work in small teams to design and prototype a service. Working together, teams will map service systems, co-create with customers and stakeholders, prototype service experiences, and experiment with storytelling to communicate their new service.
A series of guided exercises will introduce participants to user research techniques, research analysis and insight development, and service ideation. Participants will be tasked with turning their service ideas into real working prototypes, which they’ll use to test out their concepts with real users, refine and expand those concepts. Finally, all participants will present the results of their project to the class, resulting in communication skills that are transferable to almost any industry that involves user interaction.
What you’ll learn
What to bring
Simon Herzog is a strategist, service designer, and experience designer. He helps organizations and institutions make sense of complexity, whether through better services or better stories. Since 2017, he has led the Vienna-based consultancy Anglemap, working with clients like Novo Nordisk, Maersk, and the Red Cross to redesign systems with empathy and strategic clarity.
Simon also works as an experience designer on large-scale cultural and public projects, including World Expo pavilions and international exhibitions, where he helps shape the core narrative: what we want people to feel, understand, and remember. From research and facilitation to storytelling and strategic framing, his role often bridges the abstract and the tangible.
He holds degrees in sociology from Columbia University (cum laude) and interaction design from CIID (with honors). He thrives in contexts that involve human nuance, cultural sensitivity, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
