ABOUT SERVDES

ServDes is the premier research conference for exchanging knowledge within service design and service innovation studies. It brings together researchers, practitioners, and educators to discuss, share, and advance a discipline that sits at the intersection of design research and real-world service transformation.

The conference was born on a bridge in Pittsburgh during the Emergence 2007 Service Design Conference at Carnegie Mellon University servdes, where a small group of Nordic academics saw the need for a dedicated scientific home for service design research. The founding members: AHO, Laurea UAS, Linköping University, and Aalborg University held the first conference in Oslo in 2009, with over 50 international research papers accepted. 

Born as a yearly Nordic conference, ServDes has since grown into a bi-annual international event servdes, rotating across continents and reflecting the genuinely global reach of the service design community. Previous editions have been held in Oslo, Linköping, Helsinki, Lancaster, Copenhagen, Milano, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro, and most recently Hyderabad in 2025. servdes Each edition has been shaped by a distinct theme, from Geographies (Copenhagen, 2016) to Entanglements and Flows (Rio de Janeiro, 2023) to Empowering Diversity, Nurturing Lasting Impact (Hyderabad, 2025).

Papers are peer-reviewed through a double-blind review process and published in open-access conference proceedings on the DRS Digital Library, ensuring both academic rigour and broad accessibility. The conference welcomes contributions from academics, practitioners, and companies, and is designed to be a space where research and practice remain in productive conversation.

ServDes 2027 comes to Newcastle upon Tyne, hosted by Northumbria University, the first time the conference returns to the UK since Lancaster in 2014. Under the theme Designing in the Shadows: Places and Practices of Service Design in a Polarised World, it continues ServDes’s commitment to situating service design within the pressing social and political conditions of its time.

For the full conference archive, visit servdes.org.