SDGC Sandbox
Co-Designing Tomorrow’s Society,
A Global Experiment
What if service design could help us redesign the ways a society participates, decides, collaborates, and cares?
As part of the Service Design Global Conference 2026, we are hosting SDGC Sandbox: Co-Designing Tomorrow's Society, a virtual design challenge open to the global service design community and beyond, welcoming anyone curious about reimagining how societies work.
Running Saturday, September 26 to Saturday, October 3, this is a virtual global design jam. Think hackathon, but instead of building a product, teams explore and design the systems that shape how a society works
Participants from around the world—including designers, students, researchers, and curious minds—will work in teams to imagine, prototype, and explore a Societal Operating System (SOS): the underlying ways a society enables participation, decision-making, conflict resolution, resource sharing, care, and learning.
Rather than redesigning today's governments, teams start from a blank slate and explore complex societal challenges by asking: what would we design if we could start from scratch?
Register as an individual or as a team. The event is open everyone. No conference ticket is required.
The Challenge?
Imagine a new country emerging, and you've been invited to help imagine how its society could work.
This is not about designing a nation-state or writing a constitution. It is about exploring the everyday systems that shape how people participate, make decisions, coordinate resources, care for one another, and interact with institutions and communities.
What would you design if you could start again from first principles?
A Multilingual Global Community
English will be the common language for global exchange, but teams can work in the language that best connects them to their context.
We believe different cultural, historical, and local perspectives open up different possibilities for how societies might work. Teams will draw on these perspectives to imagine new approaches and possibilities.
At the end of the challenge, teams will share their work in both their working language and English, connecting local perspectives with the global service design community.
What Will We Do?
Over the course of the challenge, teams will:
Explore
Understand how people participate, how decisions get made, how resources are shared, and how institutions and communities interact. Explore what a Societal Operating System could look like in practice.
Map
Make visible the people, relationships, structures, tensions, dependencies, and opportunities within the system.
Imagine
Generate alternative ways of participating, coordinating, deciding, and organizing.
Experiment
Develop concepts and prototypes to explore what these new ways of working could look and feel like in practice.
Share
Present your team's ideas, prototypes, and learning to mentors, practitioners, the wider global service design community, and beyond.
The emphasis is on learning through making. We don't expect teams to arrive with all the answers—the process itself is part of the experiment.
Why Participate?
The SDGC Sandbox is an opportunity to experiment, question, fail, learn, and imagine together. It's also a chance to meet new people, collaborate, explore, and add something new to your portfolio.
We're interested in what happens when we stop designing only individual services and start asking:
-
How might we design the ways decisions are made?
-
How might people participate differently?
-
How might institutions collaborate differently?
-
What could the systems we live by look like if we designed them together?
The Mentorship Circle
You don't need years of experience to take part.
Teams will have access to a Mentorship Circle of thinkers and practitioners from around the world, bringing perspectives from different sectors, cultures, disciplines, and worldviews. Mentors will offer consultation sessions during the week and close the Sandbox with feedback on the teams' work.
Ready to Enter the Sandbox?
Bring your curiosity.
Bring your context.
Bring your skills.
Bring your questions.
The systems we live by are not something we can design alone.
Let's experiment with them together.
We have a limited number of participant spaces available. Register now to reserve your space.