What is Service Design?

Context

“What something is (the totality of what it means) to someone corresponds to the sum total of its imaginable contexts” (Krippendorff).

In order to totally understand what “Service Design” is, its meaning, one must understand “Service Design” in different contexts, then can they triangulate its emergent meaning.

Literal

In the most literal context, “Service Design” is the “Design of Service”. Both “Design” and “Service” are actions, “Design” is defined as “to detach from the ordinary”, and “Service” refers to the application of knowledge and skills to help someone. “Service” is tangibly realized as a product-service system, which is a dynamic value co-creation configuration of resources (people, technology, organizations, and shared information). This is much different than the common understanding of “services” as intangible products or the “service industry”.

Theoretical

In the context of foundational theory, “Service Design” is the application of “Service Dominant (S-D) Logic” to “Design”, usually the design of businesses. S-D Logic is an alternative value framework that views “Service” as the fundamental basis of exchange and views all exchanges in terms of a Service-for-Service exchange. Design in this context, again, is crafting form whose meaning “detaches from the ordinary”.

Output

In the context of its output, “Service Design” is Meta-Design. “Meta-Design” meaning, designing the stage for value to be co-created between actors as they each design their own experience in context of their unique being, the other actors, and the ecosystem at large.

Process

In the context of process, Service Design has no rigid process, in fact, if an activity has a given process, given problem, or given solution then it is no longer design. That said, Service Designers do leverage theoretical models of processes as communication tools. Service Design is not Design Thinking, the latter treating process as a literal “recipe for success” for laymen to follow in lieu of a designerly mindset.

Addendum

Obviously there are additional contexts that inform the meaning of Service Design. But, the difference in meaning will decrease with each successive additional context that I introduce and this feels like a good place for now. Although, I am sure that I will create more versions of this document with additional contexts in the future.

Special thanks to Mauricio Manhaes for the feedback.