Workshops
Workshops are sold out.
Workshops will be held during SDGC25 will be held on Wednesday, October 15, 2025.
Our workshops bring together practitioners and thought leaders to create spaces for learning, experimenting, and connecting. Whether you’re looking to sharpen skills, explore new tools, or collaborate with peers, each session offers a chance to dive deeper into service design and co-create with a global community.
Join our inspiring workshop facilitators for co-creation sessions held at various venues near the conference location and around the city.
Make sure the workshops you’d like to book don’t overlap, as some workshops are happening in parallel.
Sign-up for workshops closes on Wednesday, October 1st.
Oct 15, 9am-12pm
Slalom Office
- SOLD OUT - (SD101) Journey Management for Business Transformation: Aligning Agile Projects Through Customer-Centric Design
Slalom + Smaply
In times of rapid change, business transformation must be deliberate and human-centered.In this hands-on workshop, we’ll explore how Journey Management can act as a strategic information system that connects disparate initiatives under a unified customer and employee experience (CX/EX) vision. You'll learn how to move beyond using journey maps as one-off workshop artifacts to treating them as enduring frameworks for orchestrating transformation across your organization.
Target audience: Beginner/early career
Facilitators:
Marc Stickdorn, CEO and founder of Smaply.
Greg Lakloufi, Director of Global Design Strategy at Slalom
Oct 15, 1pm-4pm
Slalom Office
- SOLD OUT - (SD201) Journey Management as a Strategic Discipline: Designing Enterprise-Wide Transformation Through CX Alignment
Slalom + Smaply
How do we embed CX-centric thinking not just into teams and tools, but into the architecture of enterprise decision-making itself?
In this advanced workshop, we’ll elevate Journey Management into a strategic governance discipline, one that enables cross-functional alignment, transparent prioritization, and consistent experience delivery at scale. You’ll learn how to evolve journey maps from static visuals into a dynamic system of enterprise intelligence that guides transformation across silos.
Target audience: Advanced
This workshop is industry-agnostic, but it's designed for advanced service design professionals who aim to operationalize journey management within their organizations. The workshop is also ideal for consultants who accompany journey management processes.
Facilitators:
Marc Stickdorn, CEO and founder of Smaply.
Greg Lakloufi, Director of Global Design Strategy at Slalom
Oct 15, 9am-12pm
Marriott Dallas Las Colinas
- SOLD OUT - A matter of scale: navigating systemic challenges in practice
Harmonic Design
If you’re working at the intersection of design, strategy, and experience, this session is for you. Explore how to navigate complexity and identify opportunities for meaningful change across layers and time horizons.
Target audience: Anyone looking to bring more systemic and service-oriented approaches to complex problem spaces. Specifically:
Experienced and emerging designers seeking to incorporate more systems tools to work across functions and organizational levels
Strategists and innovation leaders interested in partnering with design to put more holistic and adaptive strategies into practice
Facilitators:
Meghana Srinivasan, Senior Service Designer at Harmonic Design
Parc Masterson, Lead Service Designer at Harmonic Design
Oct 15, 9am-12pm
Slalom Office
- SOLD OUT - (AI101) Designing With AI: Embracing an AI-First Approach in Service Design
WorkPlayExperience, Slalom, and STBY
In today’s digital projects, AI is increasingly used as a design material, e.g. to design automated customer services. But design teams themselves are often slow or reluctant to fully adopt AI in their own practice for a range of reasons from fear of job loss to being seen as cheating to being dismissive of the output quality. This workshop sets up a deliberate counterpoint: an AI-first playground that might feel extreme, but opens up the exploratory space our profession urgently needs. It’s about discovering what becomes possible when we stop treating AI as a tool and start treating it as a collaborator in experiments, to learn what we need to take into our practices.
Target Audience:
Whether you’re optimistic, skeptical, or cautious about AI, this session gives you a lived experience of teaming with AI and equips you to ask sharper questions about how it will transform the profession.
Facilitators:
Markus Edgar Hormess
Leighton Luckey
Oct 15, 1pm-4pm
Slalom Office
- SOLD OUT - (AI102) The Strategic Future of Service Design x AI – An Interactive Workshop
WorkPlayExperience, Slalom, and STBY
AI isn’t only changing how we run projects—it’s reshaping the future of service design and the organizations we work with. This half‑day session builds on the morning’s AI‑first simulation and asks: if AI can accelerate the ‘first loop’ of design, what does that mean for the structures around it—teams, collaboration, governance, and decision‑making? We’ll treat this as a big organizational shift and explore how service designers can help steward transformation with partners in organizational development and across the business—not alone, but as part of a broader coalition.
Target Audience:
Whether you’re optimistic, skeptical, or cautious about AI, this session gives you a lived experience of teaming with AI and equips you to ask sharper questions about how it will transform the profession.
Facilitators:
Markus Edgar Hormess
Leighton Luckey

