The problem 

As any community, after a few years, the Swiss Service Design Network community went into a sort of hibernation mode. Surely, the pandemic didn’t help. So, the leadership team asked for a renewal of the team. That’s how I became the mom for the Swiss Service Design network in early 2023. 

Building on the existing vision 

Instead of starting from zero, it was important to me to reuse the good work done by the previous team. One of the pieces of work that was super valuable was the vision they defined for this community:

Putting Service Design on the map of Switzerland and putting Switzerland on the map of Service Design. 

I feel that it’s honoring the people who came before you to build on their work, plus it saves you a shit load of time. 

Starting with a routine 

I believe that a community needs some sort of routine. Church members meet every Sunday. Football club members might train twice a week together. 

To make it sustainable, I made the promise to myself that each month there would be an online event where all Swiss service design practitioners could meet. 

By being online, it makes it easy for people from all regions to meet without crazy train rides. And it makes it super easy to organize as there is nearly no logistics: no space to rent and no catering to organize. Plus, by being remote, we can even invite people from other countries, which helps us to put Switzerland on the map of Service Design. 

As I talked with Marc Fonteijn, who maintains the Circle community, a community of in-house service design practitioners, there was one idea that stuck with me about his approach to community building. He said that communities need to have a hearth beat. There are times you are within that community and moments when you are off. And this is especially important as making another Slack community with shallow posting is so easy. 

I believe that when you re start a community, you just need to bring the heartbeat back. It’s like when someone has a heart attack. You don’t focus on fixing their eating habits and lifestyle. You just bring the heartbeat back. 

So that’s what I’m focused on at the moment and will be focused on for the next few months. 

Co-creating the next steps 

Next summer, it will be a bit more than two years since we re launched the Swiss service design network community. I feel that the heartbeat is slowly stable and that now we can focus on thinking about a bigger, more profound strategy to reach the vision that was set. 

To do that, during the Swiss Service Design Day, we’ll do some co creative workshops with the community to:

• Clarify the needs 

• Design the 2026 calendar content 

• Create a plan on how to put Service Design on the map of Switzerland 

To enable the community to do so, I feel it’s important that the heartbeat of one event per month is managed so that we can reflect without the stress of organizing the next event.