- SOLD OUT - (AI101) Designing With AI: Embracing an AI-First Approach in Service Design
Hosted by WorkPlayExperience, Slalom, and STBY
What if you turned the service design process upside down and let AI run it end-to-end? This hands-on workshop gives you that chance. Participants will take part in a full AI-first simulation of a service design project—from initial desk research and analysis through ideation, prototyping, and project scoping—using state-of-the-art AI tools and autonomous agents. The goal isn’t to deliver a polished project, but to experience what it feels like when AI is in the driver’s seat and designers shift into the roles of orchestrators, curators, and sense-makers.
Instead of asking what AI can or cannot do, the session explores the deeper question: What remains uniquely ours as service designers? By working through a brute-force AI-powered design cycle, participants gain a glimpse into a possible future of practice—one where AI takes on heavy-lift tasks, while humans provide direction, judgment, and values.
What makes this session unique? This isn’t about using AI as a tool for customer-facing services. It’s about treating AI as an actual co-designer embedded in the process itself. You’ll step into an experimental playground where AI does the research, the analysis, the ideation—and you and your team reflect critically on what that means for the future of service design.
You’ll learn how to:
Run a complete AI-first design cycle to simulate a real project from research to scoping
Explore what becomes possible when AI agents carry out deep desk research, automated analysis, and early ideation
Shift perspective from “AI as tool” to “AI as collaborator,” developing skills as orchestrators and curators of AI-driven work
Apply an AI-augmented reflection framework to identify what AI changes—and what still needs service designers at the center
Define your own next AI-first experiment and where to apply it in your practice
Whether you’re optimistic, skeptical, or cautious about AI, this session gives you a lived experience of teaming with AI and equips you to ask sharper questions about how it will transform the profession.
Preparation
For this workshop session, please come ready to explore with an AI chat tool such as
ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude on your laptop. While the free versions will work for some parts, the paid models are recommended because they provide faster responses, fewer usage limits, and smoother output. That said, we only need one device per team of 3–4 people to work
on. Not everyone needs their own account, so you can collaborate from a single device.
A few tips for the best experience:
Devices: Each team of 3 will be sharing at least one screen. Please bring a laptop or tablet. Mobile phones can work as a fallback, but for sharing the outputs, your team will definitely prefer a bigger display.
Test your access to the models beforehand to ensure your chosen AI tool is active.
We will provide power, but you are more flexible if you arrive fully charged (do not forget your charger, and you might want to bring a power bank).
Familiarize yourself with the voice input function, which can make group prompting easier.
Most importantly, bring your curiosity and willingness to experiment—we’ll guide you step by step.
Workshop location:
Slalom Office Located in: Lincoln Centre Address: 5430 Lyndon B Johnson Fwy # 1200, Dallas, TX 75240.
Workshop time: 9am-12pm
Please check that workshops you wish to book don't overlap, as some workshops are happening in parallel. Sign-up for workshops closes on Wednesday, October 1st.
Facilitator
Markus Edgar Hormess
Service Innovation Expert, Co-Initiator of the Global Service Jam, Co-host Teaming with A.I.
Markus Edgar Hormeß is a well-known consultant, practitioner and educator in the field of service design and design thinking. In his daily work, Markus helps organizations tackle complex business problems and make team cultures more agile and human-centered. The focal point of his work is strategic prototyping, where he constantly pushes the boundaries of what a dedicated team can achieve with limited resources.
Markus is a strong believer that we should break down the perceived boundaries between technology, design and business – and that cheap experiments and prototypes are efficient tools to move your company, your strategy, your team, or your project forward. Based on this mindset, he has shaped multi-year programmes to help multinationals shift towards a more hands-on, pragmatic and effective approach to customer experience and innovation.
Markus has a passion for good design, human technology, practical experiments, authentic services, and playfulness in all things. He is co-Founder of WorkPlayExperience, a service innovation consultancy which helps organizations worldwide change how their staff, partners, and customers work together – and – how they can strategically discover and create new products and services. His practice builds on his experience of service design and business consulting, and on his background in theoretical physics.
In 2010, Markus co-initiated the world’s biggest service innovation event: the award-winning Global Service Jam. This was soon followed by the Global Sustainability Jam and the Global GovJam, and Markus has been a leading figure in establishing the culture of experimentation and prototyping which Jammers worldwide call “DoingNotTalking”.
Markus co-wrote “This is Service Design Doing” and “This is Service Design Methods”, top-selling books which have become the standard reference books for many practitioners and academics. He teaches service design, innovation, and sustainability at various universities globally, and is adjunct professor for service design thinking at IE Business School in Madrid.
In 2023 he co-initiated the Teaming with AI conference and community. His growing interest centers on how AI influences our approach to teamwork and collaboration, as well as the broader impacts on innovation and the development of strategies that are resilient in the face of future challenges..
Markus is fluent in German and English.
Facilitator
Leighton Luckey
Experience Design Consultant
Slalom Consulting
Leighton Luckey, a life-long Texan, has a passion for figuring out how things work. His love for Service Design comes from a desire to unravel the difficult knots of people, business, and technologies and help companies operate more smoothly inside and out. As a consultant with Slalom, Leighton has had the opportunity to work with customers from a variety of industries spanning from healthcare to automotive to disaster management. The advent of GenAI has proved particularity exciting to him and enjoys spending time personally and professionally exploring new and creative ways to make use of GenAI. Outside of work, Leighton enjoys a multitude of hobbies from video games, to drawing comics, to gardening. He particularly likes spending time in nature and is currently attempting to visit all of the State Parks in Texas. He lives in McKinney, Texas with his wife, 2 year old daughter, and cat and dog.
