As my recent design work has been very service focused, I thought I’d break the blogging ice with a review of a classic book on the subject: ‘This is Service Design Thinking’ was once recommended to me as the best intro to the topic, and I would give it the same endorsement.
Back in 2008, when service design was really beginning to gather some momentum as a field, leading practitioners Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider set out to create a first ‘introduction, reference and case study book’ on the topic. Fittingly, they adopted a 'service design thinking' approach to its creation, crowdsourcing contributions from many other writers, gathering methods and tools from online communities and even running a variety of workshops to get input on what makes a good textbook. The fruits of this collaborative approach shine through the resulting volume in a number of ways.
The first part of the book is entitled ‘Basics’, and comprises a series of articles written by contributors from a range of backgrounds on how they ‘incorporate’ and ‘facilitate’ service design approaches in their work. We hear about the skills and perspectives that practitioners of other forms of design can bring, whether that be graphic, product, interaction, social design or design ethnography. But perhaps more crucially we also get the viewpoints of those coming from disciplines that are fundamental to successful services but whose approaches can sometimes seem at odds with the 'design' mindset: We are told that operations management tends to take a ‘production line approach to services’, focusing on technology, standardisation and ‘efficiency’, in contrast to design’s emphasis on human beings, variation and experience. At the same time, the article on strategic management describes that ‘none of the dominant management models…provide sufficient argument for a reasonable service design culture.'
These differing mindsets sound like a recipe for friction and misunderstanding, and so it can be. But while the articles serve as a useful reminder of the importance of understanding the perspectives and priorities of different stakeholders, and perhaps especially for what is to be gained by designers in ‘learning the language of business’, the book only offers a single page on how we might go about bridging divides; we are advised: ‘wherever possible, try to integrate service design logic into management models and management thinking.’ Which frankly sounds much easier said than done. A more detailed exploration would probably be beyond the scope of the book but the references section at the back can at least serve as a great starting point for those eager to learn more.
The second section of the book begins by defining a service design process, sketching out four stages inspired by the British Design Council’s double diamond model. The bulk of this section of the book though is formed of an introduction to service design methods, which range from service safaris to storyboards to stakeholder and expectation maps. Many of these methods are common and shared by other design disciplines like UX. However, there were some that I was interested to learn more about - for example ‘service staging’, which is the physical acting out of scenarios and interactions to bring ‘kinaesthetic learning and emotion into the design process’, as well as ‘service roleplaying’ which helps staff to empathise with customers or users.
The final third of the book is made up of five detailed and insightful case studies allowing the reader to follow the methods of service design in action. There is a good spread of clients here, ranging from governmental organisations to hospitals and a bank, and there was one in particular that caught my attention - the story of the ‘Mypolice’ website in the UK. The intention with the site was to create ‘a neutral space’ that could help the police to ‘join the conversation online’ by fostering ‘constructive and collaborative conversations’ with the public. The Snook design agency led the process, and to de-risk the project began with prototypes on the smallest scale, with paper installations in cafes for customers to record what they’d like to say to the police. In parallel, designers immersed themselves in ‘police culture’, going out on the beat with officers and attending conferences, as well as spending time with the victims of crime and the charities that support them. The real challenge of the project was balancing the needs of these different groups and also communicating how these might be catered for on the website - the marketing of it was considered in great detail, as the team worked on ‘a radio advertisement’s wording’ and ‘a poster on a charity’s wall’ as much as the site itself. With many insightful examples like these, the takeaways for those new to and more experienced with service design from this book are many.
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