Service design at a scale where it actually works.

Convivial is a service design cooperative based in Raleigh, North Carolina. We help small businesses optimize how they serve their customers - not through frameworks borrowed from corporate consulting, but through direct partnership with the people closest to the work.

We believe that the most important design decisions are often about scale: how big a service should be, how a business owner balances growth with the ability to genuinely serve their customers, and whether the work leaves a community more capable or more dependent. These are questions the service design field has largely avoided. We are trying to answer them.

Jonathan Kalinowski

I founded Convivial after more than a decade practicing service design across industries and scales - from Fortune 500 corporations and global management consultancies to financial services, insurance, and local credit unions. I hold an MFA in Service Design from Savannah College of Art and Design.

That range of experience taught me something the field does not talk about enough: the principles of service design behave differently depending on the size of the organization applying them. At the largest companies I worked for, promising research was routinely shelved, co-creation was performed rather than practiced, and journey maps became artifacts that no one revisited. At smaller organizations, the same principles held naturally - because the people designing the service were close enough to the people using it to feel the consequences of their work.