ServDes, The Conference on Service Design and Service Innovation, is the premier international research conference exploring service design and service innovation. Submitted contributions are subject to a double-blind peer-review process. Accepted contributions will be published electronically in the conference proceedings and selected best papers will be published within special issues on Service Design in The Design Journal (http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/journal/the-design-journal/) or the Managing Service Quality journal (http://www.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=msq).

Key dates:
31st October 2013: Deadline for all contributions
15th December 2013: Notification of acceptance with suggestions for revision
31st January 2014: Final submissions uploaded to website
9-11th April 2014: Conference in Lancaster

Theme: Service Futures
This conference aims to explore how Service Design is contributing to ‘Service Futures’ and, by doing so, to reflect on its directions as a design field. The concept and role of services in the economy and society have come a long way since its first definitions and studies. Services have moved from being a peripheral activity in a manufacturing centred economy, to become an engine for growth and society driven innovation. This transformation has been fully recognised with a flourishing of service innovation and service research studies aimed at deepening the understanding, and supporting the development of services both as a sector and as a concept.

Service Design has followed this dynamic transformation. Starting from its initial focus on service interactions and experiences, Service Design research and practice have entered more strategic and transformational roles, engaging with issues of organisational change, system design, sustainability and social change, among others. Increasingly, Design for Services is considering ways to integrate and collaborate with other service related disciplines. Questions are also emerging on the future of this field considering the growing areas of application and the expansion of the concept of service itself.

Contributions
We invite a wide range of contributions:
- Full-length research papers (max 10 pages including references which is about 5000 words)
- Shorter research papers or case studies (max 5 pages including references which is about 2500 words)
- Workshop proposals (max 2 pages including references which is about 1000 words)

This conference welcomes contributions that reflect on the ‘Service Futures’ theme and its implication for Service Design as a field of enquiry. Four topics with related sub-questions are suggested as a possible focus: service innovation, transformative services, service logic, and service science (please find more information about the conference theme here: http://www.servdes.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ServDes2014_Booklet_v01.pdf).

The core discipline of this conference is Design, but it is open to interdisciplinary and non-design specific contributions if they address the general aim of the conference.

Submission
Please use the suggested ServDes templates: the full-length and short research papers should use the same ‘ServDes 2014_paper’ template, while workshop proposals should use a different format which is ‘ServDes 2014_workshop’. You can download the templates from the conference website (www.servdes.org).

Short papers can be work-in-progress research or doctoral work that can use the conference as an opportunity to articulate intermediate results and receive feedback by reviewers and the audience. Short papers can also consist in a detailed description of a case study presented to document and reflect on recent innovations and developments in the field.

To submit your paper please register first to the Conference Management Tool at https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/SD2013/Public/SignUp.aspx

Once registered you can login here https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/SD2013 and then you can ‘create a new paper submission’ following the online instructions.

If you need further clarification, please write to info@servdes.org