Service design has gained increasingly attention during the last years. It has been approached from the design, business, engineering and the computer science perspectives. Furthermore, service design has grown considerable as an economic activity. Through, conferences, new journals, and magazines about service design, the topic can be easily found. Albeit it is not fully defined, it has becoming an interesting area to explore. At the same time, service design programs have emerged into higher education, oriented to prepare future professionals with new competences. This includes skills to be capable to guide innovation by fostering the co-creation of value with users and to design the best experiences with customers alongside with generating a good return on their investment. If we take it for granted that service design faces challenges in moving forward as a discipline, we need to consider the contextual, social or technological perspective to understand it. The purpose of the paper is to explore how well the service design is embedded in the higher education. Covering Top 50 universities, in which 13 meet our selection criteria, offer 30 service design programs which have been explored to provide an international comparative study based on the type of the program and its curriculum content. The higher education focus is reflected, because we consider that those educated in service design are in future important actors to foster innovation in both private and public organizations.

The goal of this study was to investigate how service design can be utilised in the community centred design in Africa and what type of service design processes could benefit local communities when developing innovative services and applications? The paper argues that service design and community centred design have a similar ethos. Service design can be utilised to include community members and stakeholders in the community centred development process. This makes service design a practical and participatory development tool in the African context. The study was focused on the case studies of the User-centred design for Innovative Services and Applications (UFISA) project that was developed around an important multidisciplinary area of education, technical and societal development and user-centred design of information and communication services for the communities in Africa. The research data was collected during two UFISA intensive courses where service design methods were implemented. The two community development cases were in South Africa (2013) and Botswana (2014). The findings show that community centered design and service design can contribute to the empowerment and sustainable development of the local communities.