From the global Service Design Network:

Service Design Award 2017 call for earlybird entries

The Service Design Award 2017 is now open for entry! It is the premier international award for service design. The Award recognises work of an exceptional standard in the field of service design by both students and professionals.

Gain International Recognition

Are you proud of a service design project you or your team have implemented within the last few years? Enter the premier award for service design to share your work with the global service design community, win a reputation for excellence and international recognition.

The amazing benefits of winning include presenting to over 650 professionals from the industry during the Service Design Award Ceremony at the much anticipated 10th Service Design Global Conference in November 2017.

Highlight your Great Work

Highlight your exceptional projects by entering one of the three Award categories for students and profesionals:
• Commercial
• Non-profit / public sector
• Methodology

Submit work as an earlybird by March 31st and you will receive a discount on the entry fee. Keep in mind you can still edit your submission until the regular entry deadline of June 6th.

From our friends at UX Australia:

It’s that time of year! It’s time to collect proposals for UX Australia presentations (and workshops). We will be taking proposals until midnight 18 March 2016.

Main conference proposals

The main conference will be on 25 & 26 August 2016 in Melbourne. We are looking for presentations on a wide range of topics related to user experience. The conference runs for 2 days, and we’ll have at least 2 talks at a time, so there is plenty of room for variety.

We will be taking proposals for for long (45-minutes) and short presentations (20 minutes).

We genuinely aim for a diverse group of speakers from a wide range of backgrounds.

Read more about UX Australia presentation proposals

Workshop proposals

Hands-on workshops will be on 23 & 24 August 2016 (also in Melbourne). There will be around 4 workshops running at once, and attendees register and pay for each individual workshop.

We are looking for a range of workshops – for people new to UX (or people involved in UX but not doing it); for very experienced UX professionals; and new/emerging techniques.

Read more about UX Australia workshop proposals

Reviewing proposals

You can get involved in the UX Australia 2016 program selection!

Reviewers are a very important part of the process of selecting presentations for the conference – we use your input and comments to understand what you’re interested in, what you need, and what you’d most like to see.

Reviewing happens between 19 March & 8 April. We’ll ask you to look at 8-12 presentation proposals (the number depends on how many reviewers there are), rate them and provide comments. It takes around 3 hours.

We’d like to get a wide range of reviewers, representative of the audience – experienced, less experienced, and in roles tangential to UX.

Read more about reviewing UX Australia proposals.

Geographies

After a long maturation period, the discipline of Service Design is evolving in several directions and exploring new territories.

The discipline has been founded on the area of affluence of many knowledge streams, from service marketing and management to interaction design and product design. The ground knowledge from those disciplinary areas has been integrated through research and cases studies that have emphasised different and new aspects of service design, including user-participation and co-creation, user experience, systemic and social aspects, technological implications and strategic perspectives.

This relatively young area of design research is now exploring a wide landscape, that includes methodological contributions, practice-based research, concrete cases and prototypes, while new stakeholders are expressing interest in this discipline and promoting new cases and experiences.

The last few years have also seen an increasing number of public sector initiatives with the support of design agencies, foundations and research groups that are promoting novel approaches to public service innovation. This includes for example modes to capture and amplify signals of social innovation projects or the set up of innovation labs within Government offices. At the same time the private sector is exploring the potential of more collaborative approaches to service innovation that value users’ contribution and participation in the design process.

Furthermore new contextual conditions are changing the cardinal points in service innovation: e.g. the availability of large data sets create new grounds for a new generation of services, that enable citizens to navigate and connect with dispersed resources; social networking tools are creating new layers of interaction and collaborations among close and far off people, while amplifying human capability to elaborate existing information; finally broader social changes are changing the patterns of the demand for new services.

ServDes 2016 will explore this new landscape with the aim of generating new maps, new orientation tools and coordinates, to help interpreting and framing this evolving field.

Submission Guidelines

We are living in an interconnected world, where data and information flow abundantly, pervasively, and instantaneously. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) tools from the back-end to the front-end have been designed and developed to communicate with each other in order to carry out a multitude of tasks. The Internet of Things is no longer a future vision, but has become a present part of our everyday life.

Apart from machine-to-machine communication, the interaction between humans and technology is the most significant aspect of this information exchange. As designers, we need to understand how these technologies work, what challenges and benefits they pose, and what good and bad experiences can be created when humans interact with the technology. As users, we are expected to have an awareness of what works and does not work from our interactions with the technology, and use these reflections to inform designers.

The fields of HCI and UX, which started in Europe and North America, have also now become significant in the Asia Pacific region. Influenced by the richness of multicultural settings, and multi-levels of ICT literacy and access across Asia Pacific, the interactions between humans and technology become more complex and diverse. Multifaceted design requirements, technological compatibility matters, and social barriers are amongst the challenges faced by users and designers in the Asia Pacific region.

This symposium aims to bring forth issues related to HCI and UX in the Asia Pacific region. We are seeking perspectives from industry and academia to address the following questions:

What is level of awareness of HCI and UX in the Asia Pacific?
What are the design issues concerning ICT product and service development?
How do we apply HCI and UX in the design and development of ICT products and services for Asia Pacific markets?
How do we teach and learn HCI and UX in a relatively new but complex Asia Pacific context?
This one full-day symposium will consist of a keynote presentation, several position papers presentations, and an interactive workshop followed by a BYO networking dinner (optional).

Call for Position Papers

We invite contributions on all topics related to Human-Computer Interaction, User Experience, Interaction Design and the design of interactive technologies. Areas include practical, technical, empirical and theoretical aspects of HCI and UX in the Asia Pacific. We welcome submissions from design, architecture, engineering, planning, social science, creative industries, and other related disciplines.

Submissions will be accepted in the extended abstract category (2-4 pages). All submissions must be written in English and follow ACM formatting guidelines. All papers will undergo a double-blind review by an international panel and are evaluated on the basis of their significance, originality, and clarity of writing. Accepted papers will be published in the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series available from the ACM Digital Library (ISBN To be Confirmed).

Important Dates

• Paper Submission: 30 September 2015
• Notification of Acceptance: 15 October 2015
• Camera-ready Version Submission: 31 October 2015

From the global Service Design Network:

The Service Design Award is the premier award for service design. It is organised by the Service Design Network, the global organisation for service design professionals, academia and business. The Award will recognise outstanding work in the field of service design in both commercial, public and academic categories. It is open to any organisation or individual worldwide and the work will be judged by a jury of internationally recognised professionals.

The Service Design Award 2015 will be integrated into the 8th annual Service Design Global Conference program, which will take place 2-3 October, 2015 in New York City.

Shortlisted and awarded work will receive extensive coverage within the conference and subsequent publications. As the field of service design continues to grow and develop, and as the impact of services and customer experience is increasingly recognised on a global scale, a Service Design Award will showcase best practices to a worldwide audience. The award:

• Contributes towards the sharing of knowledge, experience and techniques throughout the service design community
• Helps to establish and apply criteria by which the successful application of service design can be judged
• Reinforces the value of service design within the world of business by showcasing innovative and successful projects
• Celebrates and rewards successful practitioners within our community