Beyond Boundaries: Enabling Solutions That Shape Tomorrow
Beyond Boundaries zeigt, wie Organisationen im öffentlichen und privaten Sektor in kollaborativen und interdisziplinären Herangehensweisen die heutigen Grenzen überwinden können. Service Design unterstützt sie dabei, eine resilientere und sinnvolle Zukunft zu gestalten.
Organisationen stehen branchenübergreifend vor strukturellen, kulturellen, technologischen und ökologischen Herausforderungen. Um diese zu meistern, reicht Expertise in einem einzelnen Feld nicht aus. Es braucht neue Formen der Zusammenarbeit – und ein gemeinsames Verständnis von Komplexität über Disziplinen hinweg.
Service Design spielt dabei eine zentrale Rolle. Es bringt Menschen zusammen, übersetzt Erkenntnisse in konkrete Maßnahmen und entwickelt Lösungen entlang realer Bedürfnisse. So hilft Service Design Organisationen, Übergänge aktiv zu gestalten und nachhaltige Veränderungen zu ermöglichen.
Unter dem Motto „Beyond Boundaries: Enabling Solutions That Shape Tomorrow“ bringt SDGC26 Praktiker:innen, Führungskräfte, Pädagog:innen und Change-Maker:innen zusammen. Zum Austausch darüber, wie Lösungen entwickelt, umgesetzt und skaliert werden – und wie so „Atmospheres for a Better Life” entstehen.
Ausrichtung der World Design Capital
World Design Capital’s theme, “Atmospheres for a Better Life”, highlights how environments, systems, and interactions influence the quality of our everyday lives. It
calls for approaches that are holistic, human-centered, and capable of addressing complexity across sectors and scales.
SDGC26 aligns with this ambition by focusing on how solutions are enabled across boundaries—organizational, cultural, technological, and societal. Rather than positioning design as an end in itself, the conference foregrounds how collaborative, service-oriented approaches help partners and communities create the conditions for better lives.
Service design contributes to this by shaping the invisible infrastructures of everyday experience: how services are conceived, delivered, and evolved over time; how stakeholders collaborate; and how transitions are navigated responsibly. In this sense, service design supports the creation of atmospheres—not only physical or emotional, but systemic—within which people can thrive.
As part of World Design Capital, SDGC26 offers an international platform to explore how solutions are developed and implemented in practice, how they scale across contexts, and how they contribute to more inclusive, resilient, and life-enhancing futures.
Book your conference ticket today and be part of the conversation.
Hier ↘ erfahren Sie mehr über das World Design Capital.
Theme perspectives
The conference theme can be interpreted in many ways. The five perspectives below offer possible lenses through which to explore it—inviting further interpretations, expansions, and debate.
Shaping Everyday Experiences That Matter
Better futures are experienced in everyday interactions with services, systems, and environments. This perspective explores how solutions are enabled by grounding decisions in lived experience—strengthening frontline delivery and shaping meaningful customer and citizen experiences that respond to real needs.
By focusing on the quality of interactions at the point of delivery, it examines how structures, metrics, and routines translate into tangible experiences—ensuring services are not only well-designed in principle, but effective, fair, and humane in execution. In this way, everyday encounters shape how life feels, not just how it functions.
Enabling Collaboration Across Sectors and Systems
Complex challenges rarely belong to a single organization, sector, or discipline. This perspective explores how solutions are enabled when public, private, and civic actors collaborate across institutional and cultural boundaries.
It highlights partnership models, data-sharing, incentives, accountability, and trust as critical enablers of collaboration, alongside practices that create shared understanding, align incentives, and support collective action—shaping systemic “atmospheres” where cooperation becomes possible and sustainable.
Integrating Intelligent and Responsible Technologies
Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are reshaping how services are conceived, delivered, and experienced. This perspective explores how organizations enable the responsible integration of AI, automation, and data-driven systems—ensuring that technological advancement strengthens trust, inclusion, and human agency.
Rather than focusing on tools alone, it examines the organizational capabilities, governance models, and ethical considerations required to support and sustain confidence, fairness, and meaningful human participation. In doing so, it connects directly to the creation of “atmospheres for a better life,” recognizing that intelligent technologies increasingly form part of the environments people navigate daily.
From Insight to Impact: Making Change Stick
Many promising ideas fail not because they lack insight, but because they struggle to become embedded in everyday practice. This perspective focuses on how change becomes institutionalized—through governance structures, funding mechanisms, incentives, capabilities, metrics, and leadership commitment.
Rather than emphasizing inspiration or experimentation, it examines the hard work of aligning organizational culture, decision-making processes, and accountability systems so that new approaches endure beyond pilots and projects. It connects to the conference theme by exploring how enabling conditions are deliberately built to anchor meaningful change and support its scaling over time.
Designing for Transitions and Uncertainty: Navigating Change
Organizations and communities are navigating profound transitions driven by climate change, digitalization, demographic shifts, regulatory shifts, and broader social transformation. This perspective focuses on how solutions are enabled in conditions of uncertainty—where risks are evolving, scenarios are multiple, and the path forward cannot be fully predetermined.
It highlights practices of sensemaking, risk awareness, adaptive strategy, resilience-building, and learning loops that help actors adjust direction, respond to emerging signals, and shifting frameworks. It frames atmospheres for a better life as evolving conditions that help people and systems navigate change responsibly.