What If Your Design Skills Could Transform How Millions Experience Life?

A reflection on a workshop about designing public services at the Swiss Service Design Day with Barbara van Duin from in-Novation — and why public services need you as a designer more than ever.

Barbara van Duin · in-Novation · June 2026. Lucerne Switzerland

„Your skills could launch a product or a commercial service. Or they could transform how millions of people experience life.“

That was my challenge to the workshop participants at the Swiss Service Design Day at Hochschule Lucerne on 1 June. The participants came from very different worlds: service designers, consultants, psychologists, IT professionals and government employees — from Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and across Switzerland.

Good discussions amongst the participants of the workshop

Participants with different backgrounds and different realities

The workshop was part of World Service Design Day, organised by the Service Design Network Switzerland. What made the session particularly valuable was the diversity of perspectives in the room.

We had participants from a government undergoing transformation in Hungary. Swiss federal and cantonal organisations feel uncomfortable with the debate around a potential population cap of 10 million people. Representatives from the City of Zurich. Participants from Italy with different administrative traditions and realities. And colleagues from the Dutch public sector.

Different countries. Different contexts. Different challenges. But also similarities.

Why is it not clear that we also need experts to design public services?

The level of expertise in the room was impressive. Participants understood public services in their broadest sense — from taxation and community building to quality of life, digital transformation, inclusion and sustainability.

One observation stayed with me throughout the day. A participant wrote:

„Why is it clear to everyone that a city needs experts for buildings — architects — but it is not clear that we also need experts to design our services?“

For those of us who work in design, it feels like a simple question. Yet it touches the heart of why service design in government is still fighting for its seat at the table.

The questions that followed were equally sharp:

Can government truly segment its audiences in the way commercial organisations do? Is segmentation even appropriate when you are designing for everyone? Is co-creation a genuine goal in public services, or does it remain an aspiration that struggles to survive political reality? How do siloed departments collaborate effectively? And how do you measure success when outcomes may only become visible years later?

Starting with a brainstorm: three fundamental dilemmas

To warm things up, I asked participants what comes to mind when they think about public services and service design. What emerged was not a list of tools or methods, but three fundamental dilemmas that sit at the heart of designing for government.

Dilemma 1: Designed for everyone — which means, in design terms, no one

Public services must be universally accessible. That is both their greatest strength and their greatest design challenge.

In commercial service design, we identify target groups, develop personas and make deliberate choices about who we are designing for. In public services, that luxury largely disappears. Services must work for the elderly person with limited digital skills, the newcomer who speaks little German, the entrepreneur in a hurry and the vulnerable family navigating a crisis — often all at the same time.

The risk is that, in trying to serve everyone equally, we end up creating services that feel generic, impersonal and designed for nobody in particular.

Dilemma 2: „I am a citizen, so why should I go talk to other citizens?“

This assumption seems to runs deep in government.
Because public servants are themselves citizens — they pay taxes, use schools and travel on public transport — there is often an implicit belief that they already understand the user.

Most government professionals have higher education, digital confidence and institutional knowledge. Whereas many people who depend most on well-designed public services do not match this profile. Without design research; interviews, observation and journey mapping, the gap between the designer’s world and the citizen’s reality remains invisible.

And invisible gaps often become design failures.

Dilemma 3: Big, complex, societal problems – but politics won’t let us break it down

Service designers are trained to deal with complexity. Our approach is to break complex problems into smaller pieces and from a human point of view: a pain point, a moment in a journey, a specific interaction, a moment of truth.

In public services, that approach often collides with political reality.
Policies are broad. Mandates are ambitious. Decision-makers are frequently more comfortable discussing vision than testing incremental improvements.

The challenge for service designers is learning how to respect political realities while continuing to make problems concrete, tangible and testable.

Inspiration from the Netherlands and Switzerland

Before the group exercises, I gave a short introduction to the differences between Dutch and Swiss public services — two systems I know well and two countries with very different structures, cultures and approaches to design.

The Netherlands is increasingly embedding human-centred design into governmental services. I am currently involved in the national Customer Journey Training Programme for the Dutch Ministry of the Interior.

Switzerland follows its own path, shaped by its federal structure, political culture and unique relationship between citizens and government.

Understanding these differences is essential — not to copy one another, but to understand which approaches and tools can successfully translate across contexts.

Group 1: Designing for the 10 million cap on Switzerland

The first group tackled one of the most politically sensitive topics in Switzerland today: the SVP initiative to cap the Swiss population at 10 million inhabitants.

The design challenge was simple:

If Swiss citizens vote yes, how do you design public services that implement such a decision in a way that is fair, humane and practical?

This is exactly the kind of brief that initially makes service designers uncomfortable. The political decision itself is not ours to make. Our task is to design the best possible experience around whatever democratic decision is taken.

The group generated several striking ideas, including one deliberately provocative concept: making Switzerland slightly less attractive to discourage immigration. The idea was not intended as a serious proposal, but to look at it from a different angle. To identify possible options to further explore.

Their alternative vision was more constructive: help other countries become more like Switzerland. Export successful models, strengthen neighbouring regions and create opportunities elsewhere.

Counterintuitive, perhaps. But also, thought-provoking.

Group 2: Swiss Gov Goes Crazy for Design

The second group explored a different question:

What would happen if the Swiss government truly embraced design?

Their vision was a dedicated government design agency, bringing together UX, Human-Centred Design, Service Design, Customer Experience and Research.
Their goal was clear: create faster, simpler and more human-centred public services.

The group proposed responsible AI grounded in Swiss values, more integrated systems, talent development programmes and stronger cross-department collaboration to reduce fragmentation.

What struck me most was the balance between ambition and practicality.
They were not imagining a perfect government.
They were sketching a credible first step.

The room was buzzing — and that was the point

Across both groups, the discussions revolved around the tensions that make public sector service design so fascinating: the gap between what is politically possible and what people actually need, the challenge of defining the user, and the difficulty of changing systems that were never designed to change.

Participants from Hungary brought experience from a government in transition. Colleagues from Italy and the Netherlands contributed with different perspectives. Swiss participants from federal organisations and the City of Zurich brought local knowledge and real-world constraints. What nobody in the room lacked was commitment.