DRAW THE LINE - When good design means setting boundaries
Service designers are trained to create possibilities: remove barriers, reduce friction, connect systems and design new solutions. But what if responsible design sometimes requires us to do the opposite?
In this interactive workshop, we explore boundaries not as obstacles to overcome, but as something we can deliberately design. Where should a service stop? When should technology deliberately not intervene?
Which responsibilities should remain with people, organisations or algorithms? And which boundaries might be necessary to protect autonomy, trust, human capabilities or public values?
The workshop builds on Peter-Paul Verbeek's theory of technological mediation: technology is not neutral, but actively helps shape how people experience the world, make decisions and act. Designers therefore do not merely design products and services; they also shape behaviours, dependencies and possibilities for action. Responsible design asks us to anticipate these effects and deliberately consider which relationships, behaviours and forms of agency our designs should enable.
Participants will work in small groups on provocative future scenarios in the public domain. First, they will design desirable future services. Then we turn the perspective around: what new dependencies, power relations and unintended effects might their solution create?
Who gained agency, who lost it, and which human or societal capabilities might disappear?
Using a Boundary Canvas, participants make these effects visible, formulate a concrete design boundary, and redesign their service with that boundary in place. Not to stop innovation, but to consciously decide where a service should stop, slow down, hand back control, impose a limit, or deliberately remain absent.
In doing so, the workshop offers a different and provocative perspective on the conference’s theme Beyond Boundaries. We offer a concrete approach to building resilient futures from the designers’ shared responsibility by deliberately designing boundaries.
Core workshop output
Each team leaves with one future service concept, one mapped set of
agency/dependency/power/capability effects, one clearly worded design boundary, and one redesigned service that makes that boundary tangible.
Date and time: Wednesday, October 28, 2026. 13:00-16:00
Venue: display room, Berliner Straße 60, Frankfurt am Main
Note, workshops are not included in the conference ticket price.
Facilitator
Tessa Griffioen
Service design manager
nlmtd
Tessa is an experienced service designer and design strategist at nlmtd, where she works on complex service and transformation challenges across the public and private sectors. Her practice focuses on understanding the dynamics between people, organisations and the wider systems they operate in. She has developed and applied a framework around people’s capacity to act, exploring how service design can better support different human capabilities and enable people to successfully navigate complex services. Furthermore, she leads nlmtd's service design domain.
Facilitator
Juliette Alberga
Service Designer, UX Consultant and Researcher
Julia Alberga works as a service designer, UX consultant and researcher in Amsterdam, where she founded Alberga Consultancy in 2017 and Radical Research in 2021. She helps companies, mainly within the public sector, to create services that evolve around citizens and not the other way around, in order to help shape the future where we all have to live in. Besides doing tailored research and service design projects, Julia gives workshops and seminars on those subjects, helping others to adopt the human-centered design mindset by giving them facilitation and co-creation tools. In doing so she hopes that the companies and individuals she works with are inspired and motivated to take it to the next step and continue the change that she helped create.
