Smart Service Design The Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design (PolyU Design)

Award	Attendance	Study	Duration	Start	Domestic fees	International fees
MDes	On-Campus	Full-time, Part-time	1 - 3 years	September	$240120.00 total per	$240120.00 total per

Course fee notes

The programme tuition fees (1 year, 3 trimesters) for local and non-local students for the academic year 2026-2027 are HK$266,400.

Course overview

The Master of Design (Smart Service Design) (SSD) is an interdisciplinary specialism focusing on designing at the intersection of business, technology, and human ingenuity to create meaningful service interventions for broader societal and business challenges. This specialism expands the scope of design beyond the current commercialised and compartmentalised professional practices by orienting it towards the ‘socio-technical dimension of design’, taking a critical, systemic and human-centred perspective within the context of service design.

The specialism is designed to nurture and develop students’ theoretical and practical knowledge of service design. SSD fosters the extension of students’ abilities through a deep understanding of the technological, commercial, societal and organisational contexts of service design, and demonstrates the transformation of design opportunities into new and sustainable service experiences.

The aims of this specialism are:

to deepen the understanding of end-to-end service journeys and design service ecosystems across multiple services;
to identify how the centrality of users’ needs and the interests of different groups of stakeholders in the human-centred design process are complemented in businesses and organisations in the broader service industry, and apply the same in practice;
to develop and apply service design to a range of business, societal and environmental challenges through studios, collaboration with stakeholders, partners and experts across multiple disciplines, and to use service design at a strategic, operational and systems level; and
to accelerate new service design practices and systems thinking methods to advance students’ development of the skill sets and practices required for service innovation.