Beyond Boundaries: Enabling Solutions That Shape Tomorrow
Beyond Boundaries explores how organizations in the private and public sectors and communities are enabled to move past today’s limits and shape more resilient and meaningful futures through service design.
Across sectors, organizations are facing boundaries that are structural, cultural, technological, and environmental. Overcoming them requires more than expertise in a single field—it calls for new ways of working, collaborating, and making sense of complexity.
Service design plays a key enabling role in this context. By bringing people together across disciplines, translating insight into action, and shaping solutions around real needs, service design helps organizations navigate transitions and create the conditions for lasting change.
Under the theme Enabling Solutions That Shape Tomorrow, SDGC26 brings together practitioners, leaders, educators, and change-makers to share how solutions are developed, implemented, and scaled—creating atmospheres for a better life.
World Design Capital Alignment
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.
Why this theme?
Addressing a Strategic Gap
Many service design conversations remain within design-centric circles, which limits the field’s reach and impact. This theme seeks to bridge the gap by encouraging dialogue between designers and organizational leaders, including those in strategy, operations, technology, and governance.
Relevance Across Sectors
While "business" has traditionally been the lens through which service design is discussed, the theme broadens its scope to include public sector, healthcare, education, and government organizations. This reflects service design’s capacity to solve complex problems across diverse contexts.
Transformation by Design
The SDGC25 theme’s dual meaning highlights two aspects of service design’s impact: intentional transformation by design, reflecting a strategic and purposeful approach to change, and business transformation by designers, celebrating their unique role in driving collaboration, co-creation, and innovation. Together, these interpretations showcase service design as both a mindset and a practice for sustainable change.
Service Design as a Strategic Driver
The conference will explore how service design operates across three levels within organizations—strategic, operational, and tactical—while demonstrating its value as a driver of transformation and innovation.
