- SOLD OUT - (AI102) The Strategic Future of Service Design x AI – An Interactive Workshop
Hosted by WorkPlayExperience, Slalom, and STBY
AI isn’t only changing how we run projects—it’s reshaping the future of service design and the organizations we work with. This half‑day session takes a different perspective than the morning’s AI‑first simulation and asks: if AI can accelerate the ‘first loop’ of design, what does that mean for the structures around it—teams, collaboration, governance, and decision‑making? We’ll treat this as a big organizational shift and explore how service designers can help steward transformation with partners in organizational development and across the business—not alone, but as part of a broader coalition.
Using the same experiment → reflect → adapt loop, we’ll apply AI to strategy and foresight: challenging current models, mapping new collaboration patterns, and co‑creating scenarios for how practices and client organizations may evolve—including the blurring of disciplines. The aim is to clarify where AI should do the heavy lifting and where human judgment, ethics, and facilitation remain decisive; to step into that responsibility; and to position service design as a strategic partner to leadership for responsible, value‑creating adoption.
What makes this session unique? This isn’t about using AI for one-off tasks. It’s about applying the same experiment–reflect–adapt loop from practice to strategy. We’ll explore the broader organizational and professional implications of AI—what it means for our role as service designers, for our clients, and for the design material of organizations themselves. The afternoon session offers a deeper dive into the strategic future of service design and AI, addressing questions about your practice, team, and client organization. While the hands-on experience from the morning's AI-first simulation provides a good foundation, prior attendance is not required, and new perspectives are highly valued.
You’ll learn how to:
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Apply AI-supported reflection and foresight practices to explore the profession’s future
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Anticipate how AI may shift collaboration, team setup, and co-creation practices
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Explore strategic scenarios for organizations as the design material of service designers
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Identify opportunities and risks for your own practice and client engagements
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Commit to concrete next steps for experimenting with AI in organizational and strategic contexts
Whether you’re excited, skeptical, or cautious, this workshop gives you a grounded, participatory way to make sense of AI’s implications for service design as a discipline and profession.
Workshop location:
Slalom Office Located in: Lincoln Centre Address: 5430 Lyndon B Johnson Fwy # 1200, Dallas, TX 75240.
Workshop time: 1pm-4pm
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.
