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:
