Service Design Research UK (SDR UK) aims to create a UK research network in an emerging field in Design that is Service Design. This field has a recent history and a growing, but still small and dispersed, research community that strongly needs support and visibility to consolidate its knowledge background and enhance its potential impact. Services represent a significant part of the UK economy and can have a transformational role in our society, if we think of how they affect the way we organize, move, work, study or take care of our health and family. Design introduces a more people centred and creative approach to service innovation, which is critical to delivering more effective and novel solutions that have the potential to tackle contemporary challenges.

The research network will create the opportunities, for the SDR UK’s emerging research community, to converge around three thematic workshops that will bring together academics, designers, public and private sector organizations and relevant institutions to collect and map the research work done till now, discuss project exemplars, share experiences and identify research gaps and future research themes. The workshops outcomes will be made available on a dedicated on-line platform, where the emerged research questions will be used to inform an on-line forum.

SDR website will be linked with existing national and international initiatives and on-line communities related to the topics of service research and innovation. The international Service Design and Innovation conference ServDes to be held at Lancaster University in April 2014, will host a final public event to present SDR UK results and to organize discussion tables around the emerged research themes to springboard possible future research collaborations.

This project is linked to an existing work on Service Design Research.