The short answer: No. There just good scopes and bad scopes for a topic. The topic isn’t what’s important.

In the early months of the Master Service Design of the HSLU, some students come to me and ask: Daniele do you think this is a good topic? What do you think of it?

My answer is usually this:

There is no good or bad topic. There are just good or bad ways of scoping your project. If your topic is too broad and general it will be very hard to make something tangible.

Instead when you start with a really focused topic you can always later make it a bit broader once you’ve explored all the details of that initial focus.

It’s much easy to add more to a topic than in the middle of your project have to refocus it more.

A good scope to me is one that helps you to know:

• who you need to interview

• Where you can do some tests

• What the problems are

For many topics adding a location or an existing service does the trick. For example:

• I want to improve the patient experience for radiology patients within my local hospital

• I want to help fight world hunger by helping this local association that works in this specific region

• Etc.

The ugly truth to me is that for most people the topic doesn’t matter that much. Why? Because most Service Design practitioners won’t find a job in the same topic area or industry. But they’ll be able to reuse the skills they learned when they worked on that topic.

So to me, a good topic is one that enables Service Design learners to practice the craft and skills they’ll reuse later in their career.