The last few years have challenged the world as never before, making us touch with our own hands what we previously had the chance to experience only through sci-fi movies; and disrupting, all of a sudden, our values, our habits, our vision of the future. But such turmoil has also proved that rapid, and sometimes even radical, innovation is possible, for both individuals and organizations. New standards of service are quickly taking over, paying attention to serious global-level problems, with more and more emphasis put on impacts they could generate on the planet in the long term.

In the wake of the acknowledgment received in the last decade, service design is going to be confirmed as the crucial discipline of our times, thanks to an approach that has improved and evolved following the challenges and the needs of the economy and the society. From design thinking to critical design, from a systemic to an ecosystemic perspective, from a human-centered point of view to behavioral transformation, a new service design era is arising, exploring new complexities and embedding into theory and practice further cross-disciplinary contaminations.