Service Design education at Haaga-Helia: a legacy of impact and innovation

In this article, we present a reflective examination of the Service Design course at Haaga-Helia, exploring its historical evolution, pedagogical approach, industry collaborations, and enduring impact. Drawing on constructivist experiential learning theory, situated knowledge, and human-centred design practices, the course has fostered a productive interplay between academic inquiry and applied innovation. As service design education increasingly engages with strategic futures, digital transformation, and sustainability challenges, we argue that the Haaga-Helia way offers valuable insights for cultivating socially responsive, practice-led design competences.

More than 15 years ago, Haaga-Helia and Laurea Universities of Applied Sciences initiated a pioneering joint master’s degree course in service design. Although this inter-institutional collaboration was short-lived, and ultimately dissolved due to strategic differences and institutional competition, the legacy of service design education has endured. At Haaga-Helia, service design has remained a pivotal 10 ECTS master level course, attracting hundreds of students seeking practical and future-oriented design competences.

As part of Haaga-Helia’s recent masters’ curricula reform, the course in its current format is undergoing re-evaluation. While it may be phased out, its core principles have been embedded into a range of other bachelor’s and master’s level courses. Both Haaga-Helia’s LAB8 – Service Experience Laboratory and this course have played a significant role in making service design known across Haaga-Helia. Although design is not yet fully employed as strategy, it is evident that the combined efforts of the course and LAB8 have contributed to positioning design as an integrated element within university’s development processes (Kretzschmar 2003).

The service design course’s collaboration with LAB8 catalysed the development of the LAB8 Toolkit 42, an openly accessible and comprehensive resource that consolidates dozens of service design methods and tools. Designed to support innovation in design practice and enhance student learning, this toolkit exemplifies the course’s pedagogical emphasis on applied knowledge.

Pedagogical approach and learning methods

Over the years, hundreds of students have enrolled in the course, drawn by its face-to-face learning mode, practical orientation, and relevance to professional contexts. Despite its demanding nature, students have consistently rated the course as one of the most meaningful in their degree programmes.

The course integrated experiential, participatory, reflective, interdisciplinary, and systemic learning situations. It encouraged students to act as active agents of design transformation rather than passive recipients of design knowledge. By embedding students in real-world contexts, fostering critical reflexivity, and supporting collective inquiry, this approach prepared them not only to design or re-design services but also to reimagine the very role of design in service businesses.

The integration of LAB8 into the course enabled the application of a ‘design studio’ pedagogical approach (Salama & Wilkinson 2007), which combined mentoring, iteration, and critique. This approach was further enriched through industry-based projects, in which students engaged with real clients (i.e., commissioners) under the supervision of Haaga-Helia facilitators.

Students were immersed in real-world contexts through collaborative service design challenges that foregrounded user experience and organisational complexity. Following their own structured service design process, they progressed through stages of empathy, inspiration, concrete experience, reflective observation, active experimentation, abstract conceptualisation and material manifestations.

These service design projects employed learning methods that encouraged students to approach service design as a relational, iterative, and exploratory practice. Students were equipped not only with tools and techniques, such as cultural probes, shadowing, empathy mapping, persona mapping, journey mapping, affinity mapping, LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, and World Café, but also with the mindsets, sensitivities, and critical faculties required to navigate uncertainty, co-create with diverse publics, and contribute to meaningful change.

Real-world relevance through industry collaborations

In the service design course, collaboration with local service businesses was not merely a pedagogical enhancement; it was a fundamental necessity. Such partnerships anchored learning in the complexities of real-world practice, exposed students to organisational ecosystems, and cultivated service design competences that are difficult to replicate through classroom-only environments or fictional case studies.

Throughout its existence, the course has actively engaged a diverse range of service businesses, with particular emphasis on the tourism and hospitality sectors. Project commissioners have included major hotel chains, forward-looking small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), public and not-for-profit organisations. Notably, alumni have played a pivotal role in sustaining these collaborations, often returning as clients to present authentic service design challenges from within their own professional contexts.

Key industry partners have included organisations such as Finavia, HOK-Elanto, Hotel Arthur, and Hotel Haaga Central Park. In its last implementation, the course was also integrated into the Finnish Hotel of Tomorrow (FHOT 2.0) project, which featured case collaborations with Comforta, Hilton Kalastajatorppa, The Maria Hotel and Linnanmäki Amusement Park. These partnerships resulted in strategically complex and ‘real-life’ service design challenges, with a particular emphasis on the development of physical-digital (phygital) service innovations.

A particularly illustrative example was the collaboration with Linnanmäki Amusement Park, where student teams were invited to reimagine future customer journeys that would enhance fun, joy and engagement, for both visitors and employees. In addition to external partnerships, internal units within Haaga-Helia have also served as clients, offering students opportunities to redesign institutional services such as library operations, student counselling processes, communication processes, and campus dining experiences. These internal challenges provided students with a chance to reflect critically on their own service environments while contributing to the improvement of everyday university life.

Tangible outcomes and design artefacts

Service design deliverables are not static products but discursive and generative artefacts. They enable collaboration across silos, interpretation of complexity, and imaginative reconfiguration of services. As such, in the course they were seen not only in terms of their form (e.g. maps, prototypes) but their function in enabling reflection, alignment, and change. Effective service design solutions resulted in both tangible artefacts and intangible shifts in mindset, culture, and operations or strategy.

The main deliverable from the course was a ‘service solution book’, which in most cases included user personas, user journey maps, value propositions, storyboards, service blueprints, mock-ups, wireframes, service interactions scripts, and service guarantees statements. Clients consistently appreciated the ethnographic rigor and exploratory ethos demonstrated by student teams. For example, participatory design workshops have brought together stakeholders to uncover latent needs and co-create new service visions.

In some cases, proposed service solutions, such as new service concepts, have informed real-world offerings, influencing operations, and internal communications. While full-scale implementation remains rare due to data access and strategic alignment challenges, the course has succeeded in producing high-fidelity design artefacts that inform organisational foresight and innovation efforts.

Beyond visual and material outputs, the course placed strong emphasis on narrative framing and knowledge translation. Students were encouraged to articulate the rationale behind their design decisions through reflective stories, and design tools rationales. These narrative components complemented visual artefacts and played a crucial role in bridging communication gaps between the various interveners in the service design project. By translating empathy insights into compelling service stories and future scenarios, students helped commissioners visualise the human implications and strategic relevance of proposed solutions.

Furthermore, the collaborative process itself often emerged as a form of deliverable. The facilitation of co-creation workshops, empathy-building exercises, and decision-making dialogues generated intangible yet powerful outcomes, such as mutual understanding, trust, and stakeholder buy-in. These social and relational achievements, although not easily measured, laid the groundwork for longer-term service development and culture change within organisations. In this way, the course not only generated service design project-based outputs but also contributed to building internal capacities for participatory innovation and human-centred transformation.

Critical reflections and new opportunities

It is noteworthy that the service design project challenges have consistently been intellectually demanding and conceptually rich. Senior and middle management representatives from client organisations have invested significant effort in articulating their organisational contexts and development challenges. These presentations have not only conveyed substantive content but have also served as effective promotional effort, enhancing the visibility and appeal of their organisations among emerging professionals. Notably, the more passionate, transparent, and engaging the presentations, the more likely students were to choose even the most complex and ambiguous challenges, those situated within their zone of optimal learning, where existing competencies are extended through guided challenge.

While the course has been widely successful, the implementation of students’ service solutions remained a key challenge. Constraints related to budget, timing, and limited organisational buy-in, particularly beyond middle management, often hindered the transition from concept to execution. Furthermore, a persistent tension emerged between the idealism and imaginative scope of student-generated solutions and the pragmatic realities, resource limitations, and operational constraints faced by client organisations.

Nevertheless, the idealism and imaginative scope of student solutions disrupted habitual thinking and expand organisational horizons. These aspirational proposals functioned as provocative artefacts, opening space for reflection, future development, and strategic dialogue. This aligns with Manzini’s (2015) perspective that design’s role is not only to solve problems but to seed alternative imaginaries.

Beyond the classroom, students are applying service design processes, principles and tools extensively in their theses, crafting human-centred solutions and developing innovative service concepts. Furthermore, the course has had a lasting impact on students’ professional development. Alumni often describe it as instrumental in shaping their service design mindset, empowering them to lead innovation initiatives within their organisations.

In conclusion, we argue the service design course exemplifies how pedagogically rich, industry-engaged education can catalyse service innovations and foster professional transformation. It stands as a model for institutions seeking to blend anthropological insight, strategic foresight, and design practice. As the curriculum evolves, the course’s legacy will endure through its alumni, pedagogical contributions, and sustained influence on futures-oriented, human-centred service ecologies.

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