Creative Digital Solutions in Service Design

In our "always-on" culture, it’s easy to think that life would be simpler if we didn’t have all these digital gadgets stealing our time, never allowing us to switch off and to just relax. Once we understand how digital detox affects our mental balance, we can more appreciate the advantages of smartphones and Co. In fact, our digital devices can be our best support for achieving our goals, whether it’s living healthier, buying the right hiking boots or reaching a new workplace. The prerequisite is that they feature creative solutions helping us to minimize our time spent on searching for these kinds of products and services. In the best sense, digital service design creates not only innovative and practical products. It rather provides platforms enabling people to maximize their precious time spent on the experiences that matters the most for them.

This year’s iF award-winning digital solutions in the discipline "Service Design" and "Professional Concept" master the challenge of combining all the service design needs in a digital sphere, including user experience, content strategy and web design to name just a few. They permeate every aspect of our personal and professional lives – from health and wellness to retail and sales to industry productivity and maintenance systems. And they exemplify the deep understanding of users accessing content and services, especially against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic, when people who usually use services in person are confronted with digital methods for the first time. 

For a more enjoyable experience, digital service design benefits from ever-evolving technological innovations in artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality. The advantage is obvious: With the help of this technology, users can save time and capacities on research while scrolling through digital documentation until they find the information they need. Among this year’s award-winning designs are some of the most exciting service design concepts to date. Take for example the gold-award winning app "ALINE". The driving principle behind this is to focuse on the environmental, social and governance factors of personal investment. Through its visually appealing and well-orchestrated design, ALINE's learnable modular app system opens up new ways of thinking about consuming and investing in the market.

Another way of mindset changing is presented in the app "Taking care of yourself". It helps you to improve, for example, your sleep quality, diet or sports performance. The app functions as a personal coach that creates an individual care plan by intelligently analyzing the user’s data. In the larger context of health monitoring, "CoreCare" is a patient engagement solution that facilitates the desired lifestyle after weight loss surgery, combining clinical and personal data for an even more holistic approach.

In retail and sales, "Ontact" provides a unique experience that blurs the lines between an offline and an online store. Accessing this platform, customers receive real-time information from offline stores and participate in events remotely via virtual reality technology. In mobility, “ALICE” is a state-of-the-art platform that uses augmented reality to navigate the world better. The concept "A Brief Speculation of Autonomous Healthcare" goes a step further by dealing with the future scenario of a world with infinite access to healthcare. There, an autonomous health hub could, for example, function as a part of your mobile healthcare plan monitoring blood-glucose levels and insulin dosage.

All of these intelligent systems use bleeding-edge technology to help us manage our daily lives – and in the process, continuously push the boundaries of what humanity once understood technology to be.