Service Design will make it all better (not)

 

This week I tweeted @everythingiknow:
"#ServiceDesign is often presented as the answer to everything. It should facilitate and compliment existing skills and practices."

This is kind of in response to the “Service Design has failed” feeling which is going around (as it does about every ‘new’ thing when it reaches a certain level of maturity.) 

I think there are two problems:
1. Service designers have oversold what their processes can do for business and public services. i.e. “We’ll look at the big picture, from the customers point of view and solve everything.”
2. We have not found appropriate ways to integrate what we do into the day to day running of businesses. Projects often come to a halt when things have to implemented.

I always try to emphasise to the client (even internal) that we’re doing this together, a stakeholder team, informed by customer insight.
But I still feel the occasions where the clients have taken the bull by the horns and used what service design can deliver to it’s best advantage are too few.

Often you meet one person in the business who really sees what could be done, but usually they are not in the position (senior enough) to make things happen.

We need to emphasis that what we do fits in with what they do (even if we don’t agree with how they do it) and that we're there to help them to do what they do already better.
We should agree up front where our role ends, and they take over the stuff that they do really well (implementation etc.) and how they can use our work to plan it.

Make sure they don’t think we have a magical cure-all sticking plaster (band-aid).

lastly, I often get asked: “why should designers be doing this?” (designing services)
My simple answer is usually two things:
1. “They can help you express to your business what you already think and what the customers think” -  I’ll strongly stand by the power of visualisation, it’s my no.1 most successful tool.
2. “No-one else was doing it” Ok maybe they we’re, but it was all done with mirrors, hidden, unexpressed.

p.s. thanks to @superpedro for pointing out the lovely font

Comments

[tomwm]

I agree almost wholeheartedly. I think that the problem of overselling is the problem of a young 'discipline'. More often than not there is a lack of clout to work as high up as needed to fully specify the boundaries of who does what, when and how. To do this well takes a longer term relationship where both parties 'understand' each other.

Unlike many other disciplines service designing does not take a cookie cutter approach (and arguably inherently should not) towards the wide variety and scale of projects and clients. So, in my experience, its possible to get quite far down the road with a client before the realisation that they cant or wont do the nessecary to take the work forward. The bigger or more complex the organisation the longer this takes.

Interestingly i think Service Design needs to be more more service, less design. Meaning, more ongoing servicing of clients (and their clients/customers) needs much like the ad world 'retainer' model, as opposed to the delivery of a 'design' as in the product/industrial design world.

[Natalie]

I love this post, it really expresses the way I have felt recently. It is so easy for people to get caught up in the magical "new thing" (and selling it to their clients) that it sometimes ends up overshadowing what is we are actually trying to do on a day-to-day basis! When things don't work out it is far too easy to blame this new unclear practice called 'Service Design'.