6 Insights on the Service Design Future
How does the future of the service design industry look?
Last week I went to a conference on Service Design Futures by the Service Design Network. Experienced professionals from across the industry shared throughout the day their insights on where the industry is going and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
As a practising Service Designer at Spotless, I’ve reflected on the experiences shared during the conference and put together 6 key takeaways and learnings on how I believe the future of Service Design looks.
1. User needs are in constant flux
Real human lives are messy, complex and not always as rational as we’d like them to be. Our needs, drivers, pains and values are in constant flux as never before; markets are increasingly fluid and so are the consumers moving within. As designers we need to facilitate systems for these increasingly fluid consumer.
2. Design for real people
Design is inherently political. We need to take more responsibility and seed for inclusivity, and design systems that cater to real people.
As designers we have the ability to change the status quo; we might not always agree with stakeholders on where we’re going, but we all have a responsibility as future creators to develop and implement solutions that seed for a better tomorrow.
We enter the future by changing our remit: be an activist, take responsibility and innovate the status quo.
3. Design for slow thinking to seed for conscious decisions
Designing for real, messy everyday people means that we also have to allow our users to behave like real people do.
We need to allow our customers and users to think, reflect and even sometimes get bored within our service systems. We need to build space within our services, which seems to be a natural reaction to modern services’ fast pace. We need to embed reflective and slow thinking into our service systems in order to allow the user to make conscious decisions.
4. Create honest and transparent systems
Data in itself has no meaning; it is when we start utilising and identifying patterns that the data becomes valuable. An increasing focus on data security and privacy has made the user increasingly reluctant and hesitant.
At the conference Dr. Graham Hill from O2 argued how ‘privacy is dead’ — I disagree. If privacy was dead we wouldn’t experience the current fight for privacy movement that we are. Privacy is very much alive; the awareness of companies having compromised the data security and the user privacy have given rise to an increasing focus on how we handle, store and trade data. We need to build systems using honesty and transparency as fundamental bricks, instead of forcing these values into our systems afterwards.
5. We’re moving from Service Designers to Relationship Designers
Experienced service design practitioners often state how they had to convince stakeholders in the past of the value of their practice. Things have changed; today service design and design thinking are thriving and growing even from within large corporate entities. It was those early practitioners that seeded for this. However, as Gustavo Burnier, Managing Director at Designit, stated, “if we’re all service designers, there’ll be no need for service designers”.
It’s not enough to focus on your user: instead we need to work with stakeholders internally and externally, and be able to listen and seed for empathy. We’ll likely see a change from being design generalists to being increasingly specialised, e.g. Relationship Designers, Translators or perhaps Behaviour Designers. The future of service design lives within the team; the future is the people.
6. Service Design is Business Design
Business Design is one of the most important parts of service design’s future: A great service designer is a business designer.
Business objectives are often the driver for change and design; as John Oswald, from Futurice, put it, “the annual report is a massive source of inspiration”. We need to be articulate about the business criteria and objectives early on in a design process. Involving the business criteria and objectives increases the chances of creating feasible and viable systems with greater chance of implementation and user adoption.
Stating business objectives early on in the process furthermore provides us with a measurable parameter after implementing our service system; offering a way to prove the degree of success.
Thank you
SDN UK Chapter
University of the Arts London, London College of Communication
Liz LeBlanc, Associate Head of Design at Livework
Lauren Currie, Managing Director at NOBL Collective
Payal Wadhwa, Service Design Lead at Fjord
John Oswald, Global Principle at Futurice
Gustavo Burnier, Managing Director at Designit
J. Paul Neeley, Service Design Tutor at Royal College of Art
Clive Grinyer, Creative Director at Object Tech
Graham Hill, Interim Programme Director for Data Enablement at O2
