Tracing a greater purpose for Service Design (a list-post).

Please note these views are my own but with a strong intention and belief that they are in fact important points to be discussed within the wider service design community. The use of a list post allows for new points to be easily added, exchanged or removed. Consider this iteration 1.0.

• Looking at it’s roots the story of service design can be traced back to the late 19th century as we became to shift towards industrialization, manufacturing and division of labour.
• This approach was good at making things, particularly for a growing civilization built off the back of a WWII
• This also follows the evolution of design as a field, as modernism looked to leverage industrialization to scale design objects to the world (much to the opposition of the arts and crafts movement of the time)
• Industrial manufacturing and division of labor became how we organized our business. Extending itself past the factory floor to our offices.
• This industrial mindset got copied over to services, instead of exchanging of goods, we were delivering activities. People involved service delivery because treated as parts.
• This process was dubbed the ‘industrialization of service’ during the 1970’s. A way of efficiently scaling services in industries like government, healthcare, telecom.
• Even as our economy became more service-oriented, the way we delivered these services continued to model a delivery, factory mindset that treated services as a ‘good’.
• This model became predominant until today and leads scalable but frustrating experiences and outcomes. Ones that prioritize process (and profit) over people.
• However this frustration is only surface level , the underlying cause is an operating economic logic that is much broader than just a service interaction.
• This logic is called “goods dominate logic” where the value is in based on the exchange. This means the value of a car is in an organization’s ability to make it and ship it to you. Through a service lens the value of a hospital is in its ability to ‘deliver’ you a doctor’s time. Services as goods neglect the experience of the services in exchange for its delivery. In many cases, like in government services, failing at effectively doing both.
• A counter-response from more progressive organizations and governments like Patagonia, buurtzorg, MAYO Clinic and can be seen in historically as well with organizations such as Olivetti
• These organizations focus(ed) on not just the exchange of their goods or services but on the experience of their use. Understanding how their services were used, and the impact their services had as the central and most important aspect of the organization.
• This experience is just the tip. Underneath these organizations are values and investment in not just it’s capital infrastructure (goods) but in its social infrastructure (service)
• The need to switch logics has been seen again and again as large legacy organizations have had to find ways to differentiate. This is also seen in the public sector as pressure and greater access to technology has focused their role on delivering better public services.
• This new logic can be been framed as ‘service design logic (SDL)’, whereby the value is derived by use of the product or service itself.
• SDL claims we do not only gain value from having access to something, but from the actual use or experience of that thing we can now access.
• In the context of the product, this means buying headphones that work well, are comfortable, and easy to use.
• In the context of service, it means visiting a doctor and feel listened to and care for
• So the shift we have been seeing is from organizations recognizing the need to have a service-dominant approach in order to compete, but also to create more purpose-led organizations
• Service dominate logic also says the services are not unilaterally delivered but co-produced between the user and the organization.
• The service between a doctor and their patient is not just about delivering information but navigating a relationship (Recent studies have shown patients maintain the same doctor have stronger health outcomes)

So how we embed and create service dominate logic organizations?

• One possible answer is design.
• Because design has always operated through a ‘service dominate logic’ lens, focusing on the context, experience and meaning of the things they created. (Re: the canon of Massimo Vignelli)
• Good design is intentional, it creates for purpose, it looks at the wider context, it tries to make something that is relevant, and desirable.
• The boundless nature of the design also has the characteristic to be able to work through and address complex and fuzzy problems, often with ill-defined boundaries in of themselves.
• When defined — ‘design’ and ‘service’ have many similarities, and with that reason service design has emerged as the way of shaping organizations with a service dominate logic
• Not surprisingly many traditional organizations are looking at embedding design in order to try to shift towards this new logic.
• Many signals that point to this new logic, one of them is the shift towards faster more autonomous organizational structures, such as ‘Teal organizations’ or DP2 Democratic models.
• The signal we are interested in, however, is Service design as a concept emerged before SDL, however, SDL merely defined a set of principles that service design has alway operated by.
• Service design was first mentioned in 1982 from service marketing researcher Lynn Shostack as an approach to create more consistent services.
• Service design as we know it today emerged in the early 90s through a mix of interaction and participatory design principles
• Overtime management and the social sciences have added pieces to our understanding of how we can design services
• It has become an approach that has allowed designers to hold a more strategic role by helping design the relationship people have with an organization over time
• As this was a new design discipline we had to define our own ‘design language’ — an approach built on several pillars
• In order to understand the relationship people had with an organization we had appropriate ethnographic techniques from the human sciences to gain insights from the socio-cultural configuration of people’s lives.
• Services are intangible, and so to design for services meant utilizing visualization to embody this experience, using tools like journey maps, theatrical representations, storyboarding, personas, and new theoretical frameworks…
• The emergent nature of services meant having to develop and iterate upon many solutions and shaping them overtime through the context of the user’s experience.
• In the process this iteration and design would increasingly develop a service dominate organization, as staff absorbs this new way of working and thinking.
• However, for many organizations service design is still difficult because of the clash of these two logics…
• The reality is there is a macro battle between the social focus of a service dominant logic and the capital focus of goods dominate logic.
• The former enabling a more relational, team-focused, and learning and purpose-focused organizations. The latter more top-down, command-and-control, and execution and production-focused organizations.
• Good dominate logic promotes extrinsic incentives, division of labour, efficiency. Great when making cars, bad when considering patient-doctor interactions. And increasingly becoming a model of domination of workers, in an economy run by gig-platforms and logistics.
• Implementation of service design fails or is a neutered by having to squeeze a solution developed with a relational service dominate logic within a good dominate context.
• It is more likely to fail because the culture and practice of the two logics are often incompatible. The dynamics of wider goods dominate logic eventually taking over, and neutering or rejecting the service dominate logic.
• Designing a ‘user-centered’ telecom experience is impossible if a staff’s incentive structure is predicated on selling as much as possible, to fulfill a quota.
• We can avoid this if there is strong established leadership-function protecting its implementation, but it leaves the service vulnerable when that leadership function is removed.
• The story of what service design will become will be shaped by the individual organization’s (and overall market’s) willingness to change their industrially dominant logic. It will be shaped by an organization’s prioritization of people over profit, both in their espoused and acted values.
• There is a big interest in design, but that wide-scale change is rare to see and without this, a logic, service designers often will find themselves essentially just putting a shiny service layer on a poor culture. The organizational equivalent of “make it look pretty”.
• My biggest fear is that in reality design has not changed business, but that business has changed design.
• In a desire to play a strategic role within organizations, we have increasingly incorporated ‘business as usual’ within our approaches. Succumbing to its dynamics. We no longer challenge, but rather avoid conflict. The tension he introduced neutralized.
• These problems stretch deeper than better service experiences and business models. It’s tainted by logic and lack of acceptance to change it.
• It’s time service and strategic designers looked beyond a simplistic focus on methods or non-conflictual solutions and understood our role in helping fundamentally change the logic of how organizations, markets, and governments think and work in the 21st century.
• This isn’t something we can do alone. Change happens to work in a community with others who also want the change, and aren’t afraid to challenge to see it. There are many people asking for paradigm changes, and our capacities can be invaluable to shift these premises.
• Shifting this logic isn’t just about changing the “experience”, but fundamentally changing dominate business models, changing market structures, and changing the political scaffolding that supports them.
• Service design was and always will be deeply political. Creating this shifting logic will have impacts on our relationships, our workplaces, our unequal social structures, and our environment. All things negatively affected as a result of goods-dominate logic.
• We are at self-actualization moment of design. Let’s not miss it, by playing by the business as usual rules. Let's help shape new rules.
• You are worth so much more than a powerpoint presentation or journey map.