Abstract
As emerging technologies, societal trends, and evolving customer needs continue to reshape industries, service design must cater to longer-term future-oriented challenges. Service design involves proposing desirable solutions, and depending on the timescale considered, this shares similarities with speculative design and futures studies. Designers still find it difficult to use such approaches, tending towards conventional design, further impeded by organizational resistance. The synergy between futures thinking and service design remains underexplored. As artificial intelligence (AI), and other transformative technologies evolve, there is a potential to support design practices that anticipate and address future challenges. This paper explores how principles of futures thinking can be meaningfully integrated into service design practice through a quasi-speculative approach informed by conventional futures studies methodologies. It is grounded in challenges observed in our service design practice, particularly two of our design cases that were future oriented. We expect this approach can support service designers and organizations overcome resistance to futures methods and enhance the relevance of service design in projects with extended time horizons.
Keywords
Service Design, Speculative Design, Futures Studies, Artificial Intelligence
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2025.88
Citation
Lobo, S., Ratkal, S., Das, B.,and Mahamuni, R.(2025) Congruence of Futures Thinking and Service Design Enabled by Artificial Intelligence, in Mahamuni, R., Onkar, P. (eds.), ServDes 2025: Empowering Diversity, Nurturing Lasting Impact, 6–10 October, Hyderabad, India. https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2025.88
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Congruence of Futures Thinking and Service Design Enabled by Artificial Intelligence
As emerging technologies, societal trends, and evolving customer needs continue to reshape industries, service design must cater to longer-term future-oriented challenges. Service design involves proposing desirable solutions, and depending on the timescale considered, this shares similarities with speculative design and futures studies. Designers still find it difficult to use such approaches, tending towards conventional design, further impeded by organizational resistance. The synergy between futures thinking and service design remains underexplored. As artificial intelligence (AI), and other transformative technologies evolve, there is a potential to support design practices that anticipate and address future challenges. This paper explores how principles of futures thinking can be meaningfully integrated into service design practice through a quasi-speculative approach informed by conventional futures studies methodologies. It is grounded in challenges observed in our service design practice, particularly two of our design cases that were future oriented. We expect this approach can support service designers and organizations overcome resistance to futures methods and enhance the relevance of service design in projects with extended time horizons.