As we look ahead to 2026, the global design community has an extraordinary lineup of conferences, workshops, and gatherings to look forward to. From cutting-edge explorations of AI in user experience to foundational conversations about accessibility, service design, and design leadership, there's never been a better time to invest in your professional development and connect with fellow practitioners.

For years now, I’ve been circling around an idea. A way of describing human-centred design that feels less like a process map and more like something lived — unpredictable, messy, but purposeful.That idea has now found its shape. I’m writing my first book. It’s called The Design Compass, and it will be published in 2026 by BIS Publishers in the Netherlands.

This is HCD, the leading global podcast and community for human-centred design, is proud to announce its role as Media Partner for the upcoming Service Design Global Conference 2025 (SDGC25).

Here’s a blog post draft titled “Smiley Faces and Service Design: Going Beyond HappyOrNot”. It explores how tools like HappyOrNot terminals can be useful in service design but also how they fall short unless paired with deeper analysis.

The field of Human Centered Design (HCD) has never been more essential—or more dispersed. Designers, researchers, strategists, and change-makers around the world are doing important work to create more inclusive, accessible, and effective services. Yet, despite this shared mission, many of us are still working in silos, disconnected from peers who face similar challenges, ask the same questions, and hold a shared sense of purpose.

At The Human Centered Design Network, we’ve been curating a set of 100 Principles of Human-Centered Design — a living collection of values and behaviours that underpin our work as designers, researchers, and changemakers.

Failure is inevitable, but some of the hardest lessons come from the harm we unknowingly cause ourselves. In human-centred design, where empathy and deep engagement are central, self-inflicted trauma through research practice is more common than we admit.

In human-centred design, we’re taught to listen—to users, stakeholders, and communities. But how often do we talk about listening to each other? One of the most underrated leadership skills isn’t knowing all the answers—it’s knowing when to truly listen.

No one builds a career in human-centered design alone. While the field is often framed around skills, frameworks, and methodologies, there’s an underappreciated force that sustains many of us: encouragement.

Staying ahead in the world of UX, design, and research means continuous learning, networking, and keeping up with the latest industry trends. One of the best ways to do this is by attending conferences—whether in person or virtually.

As an independent service designer, staying ahead of the curve means constantly refining workflows, embracing innovative tools, and adapting to a rapidly changing landscape. In this article, I’m sharing the top 10 tools I use daily to deliver value to my clients, streamline processes, and thrive as a service designer in 2025.Whether you’re just starting out or looking to sharpen your practice, these tools will help you save time, boost creativity, and enhance your outcomes. Let’s dive in!

Are you pioneering design efforts on your own within your organization? This scenario is quite common in early-stage startups where it's crucial to ensure that design plays a pivotal role. Join us for our course, Service Blueprint Essentials, on Monday, June 19th, 2024, from 09:30 - 11:00 (Dublin, London time), where we'll tackle effective strategies to enhance your influence and assert the importance of design.

Hey folks, I've got some absolutely amazing and exciting news, about a fantastic collaboration that I'm so excited to share with you right now.

I am so proud of the new Service Design course that I launched recently and wanted to share a little more information about it.

I have had several conversations recently (coaching and social connections) with people all over the world recently. What struck me is the underlying feeling that many of us are feeling. That feeling of being alone. Somewhat on the periphery within our organisations and work.

The term ‘persona’ does have different interpretations, so let’s ground ourselves with a sweeping statement. Generally speaking, personas are fictional, composite characters created by organisations to represent the ways someone might interact with their service, product, site, policy or even brand.

As a musician, I am no stranger to listening to music that ranges from pop to jazz to heavy metal.

What do you look for when you’re hiring human centred designers?

Gamification is defined as “The use of game mechanics and experience design to engage users to solve real world problems” (Oberprieler, 2017). A game mechanic is a component of a game, which could be points, badges, social challenges, rewards, unlocking content, and much more.

This is HCD are collaborating with human centred design experts from Google, Fjord, Airbnb and other leading design teams to answer your questions. You may be new to design, considering a career in design or a refined practitioner, let us know, via Slack or email, what you’d like to know and we’ll reach out to them for answers.

An intro to Social Design (or whatever it’s called)

Pentagram partner and award-winning designer Natasha Jen created quite a stir when she confidently announced to the world in June 2017 that ‘Design Thinking was Bullshit’.

If your child uses YouTube without supervision, they have probably watched an animated video with Peppa Pig weeping as a dentist shoves a needle into her mouth, and then screaming as he extracts her teeth.

As human-centred design grows and becomes ubiquitous in our workplaces, the need to design ethically has never been greater.

Here are seven end-of-the-decade speculations on the future of design.

What Service Design is or isn’t is not the purpose of this article. To each designer, their practice, and the work usually speaks for itself. This article aims to start a conversation. One not about services being seen as a discrete design outcome supplying a human need — i.e. public housing, or utilities such as energy and water — nor one about financially viable strategies satisfying both customers and staff requirements. Rather, one expressing that the design of services cannot be dissociated from the practice of making. A Latent version of Service Design, so to speak.

This is HCD are collaborating with human centered design experts from Google, Fjord, Airbnb and other leading design teams to answer your questions. You may be new to design, considering a career in design or a refined practitioner, let us know, via Slack or email, what you’d like to know and we’ll reach out to them for answers.

Simply, design research is research that informs the design process. In my opinion, it is an essential part of any design process, whether you are designing apps or apparel. Research contributes to all phases of designing from Inspiration to Ideation to Implementation (IDEO 2019), supporting both convergent and divergent thinking (see: the Double Diamond* above). In the context of human-centred design, research means understanding the humanswho you are designing for and involving them in every stage of the design process. This ensures that you better meet your customer’s (user’s, citizen’s, employee’s) needs, to create products and services with genuine value.

In the past years, many organisations have been working on projects to improve service experiences. Increasingly, large organisations have started to understand the value of service design.

Speaking at a recent event at the NSW Treasury in Sydney, Andrea Siodmak from the UK’s PolicyLab described how she admired Buckmaster Fuller’s analogy of design leadership to that of a ‘trim tab’. A trim tab is the small piece of a rudder that overcomes inertia by breaking a ship’s slipstream and which allows even an enormous oil tanker to turn with minimum effort.

For over 5-years we have been producing content with our previous podcast host in Australia. They have been absolutely brilliant to us, but over the last year or two we started to explore new ways to socialise our content. We had meetings with many of the top podcast providers around the world including Megaphone/Spotify.

Facilitating change in a business setting often involves different people, working at many levels, to interrogate a specific problem, together.

The year is 2020 and there are now 34 megacities in the world—metropoleis of more than 10 million residents. What’s more, recent projections show that global population growth combined with mass-urbanisation could add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 2050 (2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects).

Product design is more than the discipline of designing products like apps and websites (e.g. Uber, Spotify, and Airbnb). I associate it with a particular mindset, skillset, and way of working. If you connect with these, you’ll love the discipline!