It’s Time to Talk About Service Design
An introduction to Ziba’s new magazine, “Design for the Service Economy.”
by Carl Alviani, Editor
There are a few things we know about the modern service economy, without a doubt. It’s enormous, currently constituting 86% of the US GDP, and employing six out of seven American workers. It’s growing, at a rate that’s been steadily displacing manufacturing, agriculture and resource extraction for decades, not just in America, but in nearly every industrialized country; even China’s behemoth manufacturing sector was matched in size last year by its service sector.
We also know that it’s changing, rapidly, as new formats like peer-to-peer marketplaces nudge their way into traditional commerce, and new services seek to take the place of everything from your car to your post office to the tools in your toolbox. What we don’t know—not really—is what makes some of those changes succeed while others fail.
Designers are partly to blame for this lack of understanding. There are clearly defined, well-established disciplines concerned with the design of buildings, public spaces, printed materials and manufactured products. More recently, the fields of interaction design and user experience design have made great strides to codify the elements that distinguish an intuitive, satisfying digital interaction from a frustrating one. Each of these creative disciplines acts in parallel with more tactical fields—engineering, print production, computer science and so on—to inform them and ensure they’re responding to human needs as well as technical ones.
But the idea that a service could benefit from focused design effort is still foreign to most of us. Service Design as a dedicated discipline is still in its infancy. At the moment, a handful of schools offer Service Design programs, primarily at the graduate level, and there’s a small but useful ecosystem of books, tools and digital communities to evangelize and support its practice. On its own, though, this level of discussion has never been enough for any design field.
Effective design practice is always, always a collaboration. Architects need engineers, contractors and clients to give substance to their carefully laid plans; the best interaction designers are just as good at communicating ideas to developers as envisioning them in the first place. This kind of collaboration needs a common language though. It has to start with clients and allies who understand on some level that there is good design and bad, and that the difference isn’t arbitrary. That’s why business magazines print articles about the principles espoused by Apple’s design chief, and why everyday users of mobile apps often have at least a passing familiarity with the tenets of good interface design.
In the service economy, that conversation has been almost entirely about execution, for decades if not centuries. When we talk about a great service experience, we tend to focus on the individual staff member or service rep who delivered it, not the principles and processes that put them in that position. This is akin to describing a successful building entirely in terms of its construction, not its design: both are crucial, and it’s impossible to optimize one while ignoring the other.
For these reasons, Ziba has chosen to take its first real step into digital publishing with a magazine about design’s role in the modern service economy. This decision is self-serving, in part. We’re a multi-disciplinary creative agency with a strong foundation in industrial and communications design, but every year we take on more and more projects that can only be solved with the tools of service design, and this often leads to difficult conversations. When the client expects a physical product or a piece of technology, but the best solution is a service, you have to do more than explain your approach. You have to justify its value, to both the business and the consumer. This magazine is intended to be a resource for such conversations, and a chronicle of what works and what doesn’t in planning out new service offerings.
Because the service economy is so large, subject matter will range widely. Effective service offerings can include digital and interactive elements, environmental and visual components, new products and technology, as well as new staff roles and training procedures—so we’ll be writing about all of them. Contributors from within Ziba include creative directors, researchers, and content strategists as well as interaction, communications and service designers. We’ll also look regularly to outside publications for examples of new offerings that are breaking ground, as well as those that face challenges.
Expect several new items each week, ranging from brief blog posts to longer pieces drawing from firsthand experience. Both of these streams, along with relevant content from around the web, will aggregate at our new Flipboard magazine, “Design for the Service Economy,” jointly edited by myself and by Cale Thompson, creative director and Ziba’s most senior expert on service design. Our hope is to provide an outlet for some of the thousands of ideas and observations that emerge as the 100+ of us pursue a better designed world, and if we’re diligent and lucky, to create something that’s of service to you as well.
Carl Alviani is a writer and editor at Ziba, working with the studio’s many designers to tell their stories to clients, publications and the global creative and business community. He brings 7 years of writing and 6 years of design experience to Ziba, having served as a contributing editor at design magazine Core77, and as a freelance writer and industrial designer. He earned his Masters in Industrial Design from the Pratt Institute in 2004, and has written or contributed to articles for Wired, Businessweek, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Forbes and Arquine.
