One year of now+next
now+next marks its first year of service design executive education. Anja Klüver and Clive Grinyer reflect on a busy 12 months of conferences and client work and how AI has become a powerful design tool.
It’s just over a year since Anja Klüver and Clive Grinyer decided to pool our experience of training and real-life experience of design practice in consultancy and the corporate world, to create a new type of executive education experience in service design with our company now+next.
It’s been a great success and we’ve been busy, but we thought it would be a good time to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve been doing and what we’ve learned over the last 12 months.
It’s been a year full of great rallying events, such as the DBA The Design Effect conference in October of last year and the Design Council's hosting of the World Design Congress in London earlier this month. It’s also been a transition period for design agencies and in-house teams with corporate giants cutting back, though balanced by some growth in areas such as service design.
It was a year when design thinking was once again declared dead by Fast Company magazine(1), which Clive was happy to rebut in an article for Design Week(2). We’ve spoken at conferences for fire and rescue services and accountants, and design in all its forms remains central to how they see progress.
For Anja and me, it’s been year of intense activity working with companies of all shapes and sizes to bring an understanding and application of service design to the heart of their businesses.
Following on from our Open Masterclass in January, Anja and I have been working with companies to grasp the opportunities and impact of AI, helping them understand their customers better and navigate through the rapids of organisational change. We’ve also worked with the training company ESTU Global(3) on the delivery of a number of groundbreaking apprenticeships and short courses in Customer Service Management and Commercial Innovation, and Creative Leadership – all with service design methods and approaches at the centre. It’s been a wonderful learning curve for us all, and these are some of the things we’ve discovered along the way.
AI is a powerful design tool.
This has been the year of AI, and no one has stopped talking about it. What will the impact on jobs be? Will it kill design and creativity, or depend on it? What will it look like and how will we use it? Is it just a chatbot?
With the announcement of the collaboration between Sam Altman and Sir Jony Ive, it is reassuring that there is a designer shaping the artefacts and interfaces that will drive the next generation of AI delivery, and we can’t wait to see them.
And it was a good moment when Anja spotted the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025(4) that placed Creative Thinking at number four of most desirable skills required by employers, below analytical thinking, resilience and leadership, but way ahead of AI and big data. And as we have become familiar with AI over the last year, with its weird colours, misspellings and the need to check carefully what it's telling us, we’ve realised it still has a way to go. Valuing our continuing ability to innovate and imagine new things will ensure creativity remains at the core of human activity.
In our training sessions, we have been able to play and position AI as a tremendously useful tool. A few examples:
Complimenting customer data:
We have seen many people have real epiphanies when they speak to their customers. Supporting customer research sessions, using AI to perfect interview questions and prompts, listening and transcribing their words and complementing the insights that they’ve heard, has been a powerful and speedy input of customer insight to directly influence design outputs. Research that was seen as expensive and requiring weeks can now be done in a few days. AI is rarely totally correct in its insights from transcripts, but it collates the evidence and, with the overview of humans, transforms our ability to listen to customers.
Prototyping:
Quickly creating prototypes throughout the design process has always been an essential part of our service design message. But what used to be prototyped with post-its, or in more detail with Figma, is now rapidly created with any of the AI engines. It takes a few goes to get the right prompt scripts, and outputs are not at all well designed, but as a tool to help people tell the story of their new feature, product or service, it’s life-changing. AI is rocket fuel for new ideas, helping them take shape and be communicated across an organisation.
Prototypes are a gateway to design; we don’t see the higher level of reality AI achieves as a threat to design, as it opens people’s minds to the possible and speeds up the process of innovation, whilst preparing the ground for fabulous design delivery.
Collaboration energises individuals and teams:
When we train organisations, we group them into teams. Learning how to collaborate, understand your colleagues and link across departments is a valuable by-product of training how to use the tools and skills of service design. Repeatedly, we’ve heard people understand their own role and value their colleagues as they gain insight and create new ideas for their businesses and customers. Purpose-driven, collaborative and happy employees stay and have a real impact on their organisation.
We’ve worked with some amazing people in our first year, and looking forward to some exciting sessions coming up where we are running development sprints and moving to support our clients beyond training workshops.
Whether curious or new to how design can help your business thrive, or looking to develop your people with new skills and customer centricity to prepare for future challenges, we’d love to hear from you and talk about how we can make your people passionate and impactful.