Svenja Bickert-Appleby
She/her
CEO
New Order Design
Svenja Bickert-Appleby is a consultant, designer, and researcher based in Wiesbaden, Germany, and the founder of New Order Design (www.neworderdesign.de). She works at the intersection of design, governance, and social transformation, supporting organizations, institutions, and political bodies in understanding how design decisions shape society—and how they can be made more intentional, inclusive, and future-oriented.
She began her career in 2013 as a service designer in the UK public sector, building a strong foundation in working within complex systems and across institutional boundaries. Since then, she has been a strong advocate for and contributor to the development of service design in the German public sector, championing its role in addressing systemic challenges and improving public services.
Svenja’s work focuses on embedding strategic design into long-term structures, moving beyond isolated projects toward systemic change. Central to her approach is co-design as a form of collective decision-making. As part of her doctoral research, she explores co-design as a social and transformative practice—investigating how it can enable new forms of collaboration, redistribute power, and shape more resilient and meaningful futures.
In a context of increasing structural, cultural, and technological challenges, she helps organizations develop new ways of working, collaborating, and governing—fostering shared ownership and the capacity to act within complexity.
Svenja also serves on the Advisory Board of the Design Council Germany (DDC e.V.), contributing to the advancement of design in civic and public contexts.
Talk
The hidden truth about co-design - Why Service Design needs to look beyond participation
As organizations across sectors face increasing complexity, they are being pushed beyond structural, cultural, and technological boundaries to shape more resilient and meaningful futures. At the same time, artificial intelligence is rapidly automating traditional service design outputs—from research synthesis to journey maps and prototypes—challenging established assumptions about the role of service design.
This keynote argues that this moment is not a threat, but a clarification. If AI can generate solutions, the key question shifts: how do we enable people to decide which futures to pursue?
At the center of this shift is co-design as a social practice. Grounded in both practice and ongoing research, this work investigates how strategic collaborative design processes unfold in real organizational contexts—where they enable alignment, and where they break down. Service design is reframed as the orchestration of these processes across stakeholders in public and private sectors and communities.
While AI can analyze and generate, it cannot build trust, facilitate dialogue, or support collective sense-making. The future role of service designers lies in enabling these conditions: connecting perspectives, holding tensions, and guiding shared decisions.
In this sense, service design becomes a research-informed practice for shaping tomorrow—not by delivering solutions, but by enabling the social processes through which they emerge.