Service Design and Improving the Lives of Millions INDEX: Design to Improve Life®’s Journey In order to truly grasp how service design has developed and where it may be headed, we must have a clear understanding of how societal changes inspire and influence the world of innovation. Kigge Mai Hvid is founding CEO of INDEX: Design to Improve Life®, a Danish NPO that brings design solutions to their full potential through facilitating partnerships with a range of business, educational and social resources. INDEX: Design to Improve Life® delivers the largest design award in the world, worth €500.000, and engages individuals, organisations, investors and governments into lasting collaborations.
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INDEX: Design to Improve Life® CEO, Kigge Hvid, shares her assessment of the service design movement and of how we may use the concept to address pressing global challenges. The Danish NPO's journey with service design began almost 15 years ago, when CEO Kigge Hvid was visiting San Francisco. She was in deep conversation with Arnold Wasserman, a pioneer in design and now a seasoned INDEX: Award jury member, when the term ‘service design’ was introduced. Wasserman explained the revolutionary idea, which was an incredibly confusing concept for Hvid. After all, design in Denmark – for decades and even centuries – was always about tangible goods, designed purely for function and embellishment. Hvid asked herself how could this possibly be designed? Service was something offered in a store, if you were lucky, or it was something taught in business or hospitality education. All those years ago, it was an idea that was difficult to understand and, today, still is for many people.
For INDEX: Design to Improve Life® to fully grasp the notion of service design, the organisation had to take a close look at the progression of world and how this acted as a catalyst for design movements. In industrial societies, multiple technological innovations replaced human labour with mechanical work. Plant sources of energy and materials like wood were replaced with mineral sources like coal and iron. Mechanical power was no longer tied to a running water source, and capitalist perspectives and practices were injected into our society. The world was all about the production of material goods and product design flourished. But, as technology, intelligence and communication progressed, the industrial society began to transform. The beginning of the knowledgebased society was enabled by the birth of the Internet, a tool that delivered a plethora of information and data at the click of a button. Slowly, we moved from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, transforming ourselves from passive into active agents by offering
