Editorial: Designing for complexity and regeneration: new perspectives in service design

Service marketing and management is undergoing a profound transformation. In a world where global systems are increasingly interdependent and fragile, organizations must not only improve existing services but fundamentally rethink how services are envisioned, delivered and sustained (Heinonen and Strandvik, 2021). Contemporary services are no longer confined to linear exchanges or isolated touchpoints – they are embedded within dynamic networks of actors, technologies and institutions, shaped by both everyday human experience and broader structural forces (e.g. Bolton et al., 2018; Joly et al., 2019; Karpen et al., 2017; Patrício et al., 2018; de Keyser et al., 2020; Vink et al., 2021). This shift exposes growing tensions between traditional models of service delivery and the realities of increasingly complex service ecosystems. Incremental improvements are no longer sufficient. What is needed is a deeper orientation toward relationality, reflexivity and systemic responsiveness (Vink and Koskela-Huotari, 2022; Vink et al., 2025) – qualities that are especially urgent as services are called upon to address multifaceted societal challenges ranging from sustainability and equity to digital transformation and public trust (Chandy et al., 2021).

This editorial aims to explore how service design is evolving to address these increasingly complex, uncertain, and interconnected service environments. Drawing on current debates in service research, design literature, and interdisciplinary sources, it synthesizes insights from four viewpoint articles that collectively mark a shift from transactional approaches toward more systemic, relational, and regenerative orientations in service design and innovation. Together, these contributions reveal a shared movement toward engaging with systemic conditions, long-term value creation, and the equitable implications of design practice, while emphasizing the need for reflexivity, adaptive capacity, and interdisciplinary integration to meet contemporary service challenges. By integrating service design and service marketing perspectives through relational and systemic lenses, this editorial proposes a conceptual reframing of human-centricity to better account for customers’ lifeworlds and situated value formation. It calls on practitioners to embrace reflective, strategic, and regenerative roles, developing evolving competencies, methods, and mindsets that enable service strategies to adapt to crises, align with societal shifts, and support organizational transformation. In doing so, service design is positioned to contribute to service systems that are more inclusive, adaptive, and aligned with human needs and societal relevance, highlighting its critical role in navigating interdependencies, constraints, and diverse stakeholder perspectives.

Service design, long known for its human-centered ethos and creative methodologies, is evolving in response to societal demands. No longer just a toolkit for front-end innovation, it is increasingly seen as a strategic and critical practice capable of interrogating and reconfiguring the very foundations of service systems (Sangiorgi and Prendiville, 2015; Wetter-Edman et al., 2014). As Siltaloppi et al. (2016) argue, service design now plays a role in shaping institutional logics and enabling system-level change. It operates at the intersection of customer experience, organizational transformation and societal impact. This broadened scope introduces new theoretical and practical challenges. Designers and service researchers must navigate layered forms of value, long-term innovation impacts and power dynamics within and beyond organizational boundaries (Sangiorgi and Prendiville, 2015; Siltaloppi et al., 2016). Concurrently, growing calls for responsible innovation, inclusion and regenerative approaches are pushing service design into new terrain – shifting focus from merely meeting user needs to engaging with ethical, ecological and systemic futures (Gallan et al., 2025; Sierra-Pérez et al., 2021).

Service design increasingly grapples with the inherent complexity of contemporary service ecosystems, which are characterized by multiple interconnected actors, dynamic feedback loops and evolving environmental and social contexts. This complexity necessitates a shift from traditional linear, efficiency-driven models toward approaches that prioritize systemic resilience and regeneration. Konietzko et al. (2023) emphasize this imperative in their discussion of regenerative business models, arguing that businesses must transition beyond sustainability – defined as minimizing harm – to actively restoring and enhancing natural and social systems. Such regenerative models require service design to consider how value creation aligns with ecological and societal well-being over the long term, thus embedding services within broader systems of life-supporting processes.

Complementing this, Blanco et al. (2021) introduce the concept of urban ecosystem-level biomimicry and regenerative design, which provides valuable insights for service design in urban and built environments. By linking ecosystem functioning principles to the design of human-made environments, biomimicry inspires service design to replicate nature’s adaptive, self-sustaining processes, fostering services that contribute to ecological health and resilience. This approach encourages service designers to move beyond isolated service touchpoints to consider their roles as part of a living system, where regeneration involves nurturing continuous cycles of renewal, resource flows and stakeholder interactions.

Gallan et al. (2025) further advance this discourse by upframing service ecosystems through biomimicry, illustrating how mimicking biological processes can deepen the understanding of service systems as complex, adaptive and regenerative networks. They propose that service design can benefit from principles such as diversity, modularity and co-evolution, which underpin resilience and regenerative capacity in natural ecosystems. Integrating biomimicry into service design pushes the field toward innovation that is not only human-centered but also ecosystem-aware, promoting sustainable and regenerative outcomes through systemic change.

Together, these perspectives suggest that service design’s future lies in embracing complexity and regeneration as foundational principles. This means designing services that are adaptive, contextually embedded and capable of fostering renewal within their social and ecological environments. Practitioners and researchers must therefore develop frameworks, methods and mindsets that transcend transactional and linear paradigms, engaging deeply with systemic interdependencies and regenerative potentials to create value that supports both human and planetary well-being.

Within this evolving landscape, service design is gaining visibility as a field of inquiry that bridges disciplinary boundaries – linking marketing, management, design and systems thinking. Several viewpoint articles in this issue ^[1] reflect and contribute to this shift by offering theoretical insights, empirical grounding and forward-looking propositions for navigating the complexity of contemporary service innovation. The four contributions grouped under the umbrella theme Designing for Complexity and Regeneration: New Perspectives in Service Design highlight how design practices and theories are being reconfigured to meet the demands of interconnected and dynamic service environments. Together, they illustrate service design’s expanding reach – transforming practice, rethinking theoretical foundations and bridging conceptual boundaries. While each contribution approaches service design from a different angle, they converge around a shared imperative: to move beyond designing services as fixed outputs toward designing for complexity, resilience and long-term societal relevance. This means acknowledging that services unfold over time, involve multiple actors and infrastructures and must continuously adapt. It also means emphasizing the ethical and societal dimensions of service innovation – and grounding design in the lived realities, aspirations and ecosystems of the people it seeks to serve.

The viewpoint article by Vink et al. (2025) introduces a relational perspective on service design. Shifting attention from isolated user experiences to the relationships and interactions that shape service ecosystems, the article deepens our understanding of service design as a socio-material and co-constructive process. It draws on the relational turn in sociology and anthropology, calling for a more nuanced view of interdependence among actors and the inclusion of externalities often overlooked in traditional design scopes. Value, it argues, is not created in isolation but emerges from dynamic, situated interactions that demand new theoretical tools and ethical considerations.

Čaić et al. (2025) provide a practice-based perspective, grounded in the everyday realities of service design work. Their article explores how service designers navigate tensions between ideal design processes and the constraints of organizational life – highlighting evolving roles, shifting competencies and changing organizational conditions. It reveals a broader shift toward a systemic, strategic and regenerative orientation in service design, where designers contribute not only as problem-solvers but as agents shaping long-term transformation. Reflective practice emerges as a key resource for driving innovation within broader organizational change efforts and ecosystem-level initiatives.

Dao et al. (2025) examine service design in times of crisis, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a context to explore how both consumer behavior and company responses changed. The article identifies distinct types of consumer behavior shifts and outlines how firms adapted their service design processes – spanning market intelligence, management workflows and design tools. The authors call for a more proactive stance on crisis-readiness in service design, emphasizing the importance of developing adaptive capabilities and embedding resilience into service systems in anticipation of future disruptions.

The fourth viewpoint article (Heinonen, 2025) advances a conceptual reframing of human-centricity for contemporary service innovation. By bridging theoretical developments in Service Design and Customer-Dominant Logic, it proposes a more integrated, life-oriented approach to value creation. The article emphasizes the importance of aligning service design with customers’ lived realities and systemic contexts, demonstrating how combining conceptual strands can support more meaningful, adaptive and inclusive innovation.

These contributions emphasize the importance of moving beyond narrow, transactional views of service toward approaches that are relational, systemic and attuned to long-term societal relevance. Whether through theoretical advancement, reflective practice or context-specific innovation, they signal a growing shift in the field – one that positions design not merely as a tool for improving services, but as a critical means of shaping more equitable, resilient and sustainable futures.