Service Design projects - 5th semester

1) Businnes as unusual

Design itself (including research, which we consider to be a subfield of design) does not exist in isolation. As designers, we cannot simply sit at our desks and create designs based on our own knowledge and beliefs.

We have to interact with different people as part of our work. These include users, customers, colleagues from development and marketing, and undoubtedly stakeholders too.

Lectors find out that designers often struggle to answer these questions. So the  goal for us is to become relevant and experienced partners in business debates.

2) Leadership

The Leadership course showed me that leading people is less about formal position and more about authority, ethics, and the ability to create a meaningful vision for a team and organisation. Through different styles of leadership, work with (non)formal authority and examples of inspiring and toxic leadership, I learned to better understand the role of a leader in complex services.

Reflective assignments, film analyses and applying leadership models to my own CX/UX team helped me test theory in real projects and digital service environments. The course directly developed my ability to lead multidisciplinary teams, create a safe space for collaboration and use leadership as a key tool in designing sustainable, user-centred services.

3) Learning Design

The Learning Experience course focuses on how people learn and how to intentionally design learning as a service – from understanding learner needs and defining learning goals to selecting suitable formats, channels and ways of measuring impact. It combines principles from service design, UX and pedagogy to create learning experiences that are clear, engaging and well integrated into the real context of learners, whether they are students, employees or customers. 

4) Elements of AI

5) Social Innovations for the society

The Social Innovation course explores how design can respond to complex social issues and the public interest, from social and wicked problems to ethics, unintended consequences and well-being in and at work. We gained insight into Czech and international practice of social innovation, funding opportunities, evaluation of these initiatives and selected design approaches they can build on, together with practical tools for ethical reflection and personal well-being as designers.

6) Philosophy

The Philosophy course introduces key philosophical questions and approaches and shows how they relate to contemporary society, technology and everyday decision-making. 

I explored major concepts such as ethics, responsibility, meaning, power and freedom, and learn to analyse arguments, question assumptions and reflect critically on their own values and professional practice, especially in the context of design and digital services.

7) Digital marketing and communication strategies

The Digital Marketing and Communication Strategies course focuses on how to plan and execute effective communication for products and services in digital environments with a strong customer-centric mindset.

I learned to define target audiences, work with brand positioning and value propositions, and design coherent communication across channels such as social media, web, email and messaging platforms. 

Emphasis is placed on measurable goals, basic analytics and iterative improvement, as well as on aligning tone of voice, content and campaigns with the overall service experience.

8) Cybersecurity as design process for intervention

The Cybersecurity course presents cybersecurity as a design space for interventions and leads students through a full human‑centred design process, from empathising with users and understanding their everyday "cyber" lives to defining challenges, ideating, prototyping and testing concrete interventions. 

Emphasis is placed on strong ethics, protection of privacy and dignity, awareness of unintended consequences and on creating interventions that are safe, context‑sensitive and practically helpful for specific communities and organisations, including the option to collaborate with local partners within the MU x Google.org project.