Service design goes mainstream
Reading with interest an unfolding flameup at Design for Service caused by Jeff Howard’s post entitled UX Rockstars need not apply. The gist of the conversation is a few folk getting all hot under the collar about disciplines and domains. Especially the emerging challenges in the US by this new fangled idea of ‘Service Design‘ and it seems to be freaking people out. Which is a good thing in my book. The argument was instigated by sweeping statement from an interview with Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path, that went like this..
JJG: I think any distinction that you could draw between service design and user experience is purely academic. In practical terms, the overlap in the problems being solved, the methods applied to solving them, and the philosophy of practice is so huge that anything you could say was purely a service design issue or purely a user experience design issue would be an extreme edge-case. They may persist as separate areas of intellectual inquiry, but as fields of practice I think they’ll inevitably converge. So in that sense, SD vs. UX is the new IA vs. IxD.
I’ve worked in SD for a while now and some things have always interested me:
- Why is it so hard to describe?
- Why has it taken so long to be taken seriously?
- Is it really a discipline?
Service design is going mainstream, hence SDN funding a Guardian supplement (which is nice in pdf form too). To me this nascent gold rush is really exciting since the service design domain has felt bottled up in a slightly rarified world of semi-academia for a while. As a result we have a very cool set of methodologies, tools and values that for me blow away a lot of more established thinking (people & insights not humans & factors). However as a practice it will be exposed to a more aggressive commercial space long inhabited by seasoned heavy weight Product Design. This process is going to shake it up and as with all niches that bob up into the mainstream SD will be carved up and re-purposed according to the usual forces ($£).
SD will, I hope, retain many key subsets like sustainability, social good, social innovation, but the result of the land grab will mean it’s no longer a niche exercise for small organisations selling it as a boutique erm.. service. With dilution comes inevitable blurring of boundaries and misunderstanding. At SXSWi, I met a guy who claimed all his agency did was service design and then claimed that you can’t do it out of marketing budgets. Isn’t that a weird way of deciding what’s in and what’s out?
Is it a panacea? Probably not. But it’s definitely a key part of the new-new economy – the one at Made by Many we seem to spending a lot of time working with. SD delivers a way of thinking that can handle clients whose business models imploded and no longer fit with how people want to use/consume things. SD gives us processes and thinking that’s flexible enough to give designers opportunities for innovation that haven’t existed before and go way beyond the UX.
This model works both upstream to client's businesses and downstream into the organisations working with them.
Claiming User Experience is identical and eventually will merge with SD feels like a mistake since it devalues a principle that could provide immense opportunity. This is the nub. I don’t believe saying ‘SD vs. UX is the new IA vs. IxD’ makes sense. What’s the point in taking such a divisive view? The key thing is surely that it’s not discipline specific, it enables many different practices to work together within a platform that is service design. It’s precisely SD’s lack of an exact definition that enables a space for UX, Business Analysts, Anthropologists, Interaction Designers, Technologists, Inventors, Entrepreneurs to collaborate so easily. Surely this way everyone can be a ‘Rock Star‘.
The next frontier is to experiment with mixing these principles with Agile processes. For me this feels like the way to a fully weaponised Service Design (but that’s another post).
I’d like to finish with an entertaining comment by Dave Malouf left on Jeff’s original post..
c) components vs. systems or forests from trees. service designers are the opposite of user-centered designers b/c UCDs for the most part come from the world of either artifact design or engineering. Both of these worlds design trees which at best are put together to build forests. Service Designers imagine the forest first, and then through deconstruction and abduction grow (not build) the right trees, and more importantly lay the foundational labor that affords the possibility if not probability that the desired trees WILL grow in this new environment.
Sounds like they are smoking forests too.
Thanks to Justin Baum for pointing this story out.
19 comments
I love that with so many disparate disciplines converging/overlapping/’emerging from or to’ service design that people get so fired up about definitional semantics. Same thing happens with ‘design thinking’. So love Paul’s perspective that the ‘lack of definition’ is what makes it great.
And for the record, I’ve worked with lots of designers, UI experts, UX guns, IA’s etc… and while they’re got awesome tools/expertise, their competencies come absolutely nowhere near the (hard to define) perspective that someone with a ‘true’ service design philosophy brings to the table. This is partly because they’re locked within a digital mindset which is incredibly limiting when you’re thinking about real human behaviour.
So while they’re ‘converging’, they’re still worlds apart. You only need to talk to a guy like Paul for about 30 seconds for that gap to appear.
Let the flameup continue…
Service design vs. media design
“Don’t really know where I’m going with this, but it struck me there’s something different about the all-touchpoint top down traditional service design approach (that I find breaks down in any large company due to a lack of unified front), to just making small things and see if they work. Also I just wanted to be the first to use the term spimordial soup.” – antimega
http://www.flickr.com/photos/antimega/4459817988/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/antimega/4459817988/
Hey Paul, nice summary of the various arguments. Having worked in Service Design and UX agencies I see very clear differences between almost all parts of the various practices – from the basic intent, through the methods and tools and most importantly the types of people involved.
Both disciplines can learn from each other, and of course the many other approaches to designing services that have been around for, um, ever which is what we’re trying to highlight/explore with our Service Design Thinks events.
I’m with you on the fully weaponised agile service design approach too, its something I’ve been stewing over too – I think we’ve had similar experiences of going from very ‘design process’ focussed SD studios to more agile UX/SD/Digital environments. Fancy a coffee to discuss? Nick (@choosenick)
Hiya, So you made a comment about my quote above about forest & trees and I don’t understand your assertion about “smoking”.
Are you saying the metahor fails? The attempt useless.
I work next to a professor teaching service design and we talk all the time. I teach IxD. I have to say that to this day having just come out of a discussion about our two programs that I’m still not completely sure I understand what SD is.
I’d love to work with service designers. I just don’t know what it is they do. Everything I read of case studies sounds interesting and all, but everyone I talk to codifies it differently and so there is nothing consistent. I have even taken what I thought was word for word what my colleague has said and using that as “practice” to discuss SD and people who claim to be SDs seem confused.
I don’t care about ownership and agree that the “vs.” rhetoric is probably not the best, as I usually believe everything is continuums at best. But the reality is here, I don’t even understand the continuums. My attempt above w/ forest and trees is to do just that. So far from what I’ve read and seen is that a primary difference btw. IxD and SD is one of components vs. systems.
I’m also growingly noticing that it is hard to understand all this w/o diving in to become steeped in history of economics and business b/c it seems that it is here where the semantics seem to be rooted. This makes it really hard if those talking assume that everyone has done this work, or even worse, haven’t done it themselves.
So while I wish I was smokin’ something. It was really attempt to put a story around my best understanding of the moment.
– dave
Hi Dave
Thanks for the comment. I think you hit the point perfectly both in your comment (i cheekily referred to) and your response here. I completely agree that it’s a strange field and although not new it’s always seemed slow in adoption because of this very problem. For me it’s about 2 things – being able to go upstream into the big idea or downstream into the small moments/interactions/touchpoints – these can then influence the activity upstream (as excellently pointed out in zeroinfluencer’s comment – the linked diagram is great and worth looking at). This is what I think you were alluding to in your comment on Jeff’s post.
The reason I cited your comment was now SD is gaining traction it’s also generating friction within design communities that appeared to ‘have it all figured out thank you very much’ and the urge to make SD a thing.
As for the eternal ‘What is service design?’ I would recommend reading an piece by live|work in this book http://bit.ly/dkrrdt. They make service design sound a bit more user friendly. (But I am biased i used to work with them)
http://bit.ly/dkrrdt
_p
Nice work Paul!
I like the forrest analogy. Sounds meaningful.
Interesting that the UX folks almost don’t see the advantage in talking about services rather than experiences or interactions. for me it is the simple thing that services are what organisations actually provide for people. Imagine going to the city or the government to talk about you UX.
Benny
@Ben
I just had this thought. We often talk about when you have a hammer everything is a nail, right? What if it is When people always ask you to hammer something, all you can do is hammer something?
This is my way (if you haven’t noticed I love metaphors) of saying that UXers and IxDs probably are limited by the type of work they are asked to do. Few move beyond. The same can be true for industrial designers, architects and graphic designers. We are all a victim of societal myopia, no?
– dave
I’m tired of printing new business cards every year; I’m shortening my title to “Designer”.
Paul thanks for answering my tweet with more than 140 characters.. ha!
Disclosure: I come at this discussion from the perspective of a person who was never formally trained in HCI/IxD/SD etc. Nor have I ever work at a place that has chiseled design dogma into stone in the form of books or whitepapers. I am just a spongey creature trying to soak up the best of what each camp has to offer without getting sucked into the semantic vortex (easier said than done!).
I think all the head butting is a product of people who faithfully subscribe to one camp or the other (remind you of anything else in this world? ). At the end of the day these are just tools for getting the job done. But I will say the picture you paint of service design is a CONTEXT that all of us, no matter which camp’s flag we fly, would love to operate in. Working in a vacuum, looking at a single touch-point, or just being a widget designer is not how big tings’ are gwan happen in the future.
Here is what I have noticed since SD has entered my radar…
Stateside, the thought leaders in UX/IxD see SD as an analog to the evolution of their practice. I have been following Adaptive Path for a while now. I go to their conferences. I eat their delicious catering. In terms of the big picture these guys are saying the same things. I recently attended their Managing Experiences conference before SXSW where I met the MxM crew. The Adaptive Path conference was focused on people involved in leading multi-touchpoint customer experience work. Brandon Schauer, AP’s director of experience strategy closed the conference by saying “Customer Experience will trump User Experience in the near future.” Yes, customer experience, the stateside analog to service design, will trump UX. This from Adaptive Path, the supposed enemy of SD. Hehe. So in terms of “heading upstream,” to use your language Paul, they are right there with you. AP also has been chest pounding about the importance developing empathy and understanding of users/customers/humans beyond their digital interactions for ages. Granted, AP is the exception, but they have a lot of followers and a lot of influence. For them, Experience Strategists = Service Designers. Its semantic bingo, but notice they drop the word “user.” Your ven diagram is something I guarantee they align with.
I am unqualified to asses the specific differences between customer experience design and service design. But I think I have made up my mind that at the methodology level this is all the same shit. Taking a que from Jared Spools anti dogma/methodology perspective – I think we are all better off sharing the tricks, techniques, and tools we use that lay bellow the academic / methodological facades.
So I am going to eat my own dog food and zap the the book you recommended to my kindle and start reading up on SD techniques and tools. Call it my P.W.S. – personal weaponization strategy. :-P
Paul,
Dave Malouf’s comment, and your comment on it, loaded a mental image of him typing away from the command pod of an industrial grow operation.
I love the diagram, and I’m thinking and learning a lot from this debate.
I’m a massive fan of keeping some things ambiguous and open – especially definitions, and especially when these are still emerging quite fast: Justin’s ‘semantic vortex’ is a waste of time at this stage.
Is there an online a collection of ‘forest-quality’ stories/analogies and diagrams about the way the disciplines of HCI, IxD, Service Design and Experience Strategy relate to each other and are evolving? It would rock.
This has opened a really interesting debate for me too. Some insights i have garnered..
Ben’s ‘Imagine going to the city or the government to talk about you UX.’ Is an elegant argument worth a post or essay on it’s own. Ben?
Bryan def change your business cards to ‘designer’ (so long as they don’t have ‘chiropodist’ or something on them at the moment). Made by Many recently had a debate about the complexities of job titles in a room full of people who can do lots different of things. It relates to Justin Baum’s point ‘I am just a spongey creature trying to soak up the best of what each camp has to offer’.. totally agree – use the stuff that fits the purpose.
Tim’s idea for a library of ideas that could support the whole SD/UX etc community is a great one.
Dave’s analogies are brilliant and helped me formulate an idea that (probably for the next 10 minutes at least) feels relevant..
>> Service design is an OS. UX etc is software.
But I think we are still looking for those WMDs.. right?
What I find interesting is how the same words mean such different things to different type of design practitioners. I’ve been working with my Service Design counter part and she’s about to strangle me soon b/c I keep coming up with questions like these.
For example, the term touchpoint is something very common to both UX practitioners, especially experience planners. But this seems to be very different from what service designers mean by touch point.
Here’s my latest understanding:
UX means touchpoint as a moment of interfacing, that the focus is to create an experience for some end-users.
SD means touchpoint as an arena where the stakeholders themselves (not just end-users) create an experience as not just a reaction to formed modules, but to the cultural realities that the formed modules are but a small part of. In this interaction, the stakeholders involved in “the touchpoint” are co-creating the experience.
This of course brings up the classic semantic issue of what is the difference between “co-create”, “co-design” and “participatory design”. I’m just learning the subtleties here, but it is clear to me that the 3 are distinct (and none is a hierarchical parent or child of the other).
- dave
Coming from the UX/IxD side and practicing for almost decade and a half, I’d say the debate is confusing- meaning, why is there one? This reminds me of the whole mythical chasm b/n Devs vs. Designers except that this is not so much about domain knowledge and differences in mindset- it’s territorialism.
@Justin – Are you suggesting that the digital space inhibits a UX/IxD persons’ ability work in SD?
The line between digital and analog is blurred. I’m a digital product strategist and designer, but I cannot tell you how many times my expertise here has served me in the ability to analyze, critique, and propose enhancements to service experiences.
If there is true, oppositional differences, I’m kinda on Malouf with this one in the sense that the vocabulary seems to be missing. Also, what are the tools on your bench? Does SD not map out or script narratives of interaction touchpoints? What about creating customer archetypes of some sort? Seems testing out prototypical and implemented ideas would be another implement of SD, right?
However to the point of “forest building,” I’d disagree with “components versus systems.” Experienced UX practioners take a holistic view and create products and services that adapt over time- that would be planning for organization change (the way the trees grow and share space with each other), economic change (how much sun and rain comes), cultural shifts- both internal and external (how all the animals in the forest grow and interact with the trees), etc. etc. Consideration for these points are essential when designing good, adaptive products in this digital age.
There are artifacts (as I’m sure there are with SD), but that is far from the focus of the end goal. @Paul, UX/IxD has purview in multiple directions as well, but maybe it’s a function of growth in our career and the actual paths of study we take to get to our respective positions.
There is no doubt a difference in output b/n the disciplines, but my understanding from an interactions perspective, we stride for the same end goal: positive customer experiences. So, we would greatly benefit learning from each other by sharing our practices over superfluous debate of who owns what.
@chris
“positive customer experiences” … Ah! but you hit the nail on the head right there. My understanding is that “postive customer experiences” is NOT the end goal of service design practices. Service design is not centered on that goal. Should that be an outcome, yes. But it sees that outcome in a broader context that effects elements that UX designers never touch from logistics/supply chain management through to waste control systems, HR policies, etc. This is what I mean by “touchpoints” not really being the point (despite it being SDNs magazine title). I too have been doing UX for some 16+ years now and I have to say that UXers only design artifacts that customers (or end-users) touch. For example, In a retail setting, a UX designer would not design how merchandise is loaded and unloaded off of trucks. But this is exactly part of the larger system that an SD would look at.
I think one of the biggest issues with SD is that use of the term “service”. It seems to me to be the convergence of design thinking applied to system thinking and pragmatics (see semiotics) and is not really about customer experience except where the CE is a part of that larger system.
– dave
The difference to me is that the concept or the term of service design is one that clients can more easily understand. For many, experience design seems esoteric. Service? We have all experienced it. It does not take much from that to explain that those services can be designed.
I am not going to try and add any sort of definitive statement here, as there are far more experienced people commenting on this thread, that would do a much more adequately.
But what really stands out for me is that the focus of UX seems start a lot closer to the point of interaction than service design. That is not to say one is more comprehensive than the other, but the initial start point (components or systems), provide a natural point of departure for disciplines that may end up at the same place in the end.
This is where the “forest and trees” analogy seems to work well, as it illustrates that difference quite clearly. However, in terms of project results (the actual doing of the theory) there may be no difference at all, and choosing between approaches and techniques that may be considered service design or UX, may be principally driven by how you can work best with the client.
In trying to understand service design, I found this book (from the University of Art and Design Helsinki) very useful:
http://www.taik.fi/kirjakauppa/product_info.php?products_id=134&language=en
http://www.taik.fi/kirjakauppa/product_info.php?products_id=134&language=en
There’s a bit of theory in there, but also case studies, which helped me understand service design as it might be practiced. There are a few elements that seem common to service design methods, but I’m in the midst of making sense of it all. I would agree with an earlier comment that the term service design may be easier to understand conceptually than experience design (what constitutes an experience may be harder to define than what constitutes a service).
Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability and The IA polar bear book ways in on the subject… fantastic post.
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000633.php
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000633.php
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