I think I am making progress on developing simple ways to talk about service design beyond the service system engineering most service designs do.

Before I start, though, I want to clarify something: I’m not knocking service system engineering. It is hugely important, and this is why organizations buy it. An organization with broken touchpoints and unintegrated operations is going to be so nonfunctional it will be unable to do anything else. Broken touchpoints is pretty easy to do. Integrating operations to enable them to deliver adequate, seamless service is something service design is better at doing than any other profession. Solid service system engineering is a necessary condition for both adequate service and exceptional service. But service system engineering is only a sufficient condition for adequate service. For exceptional services that inspire personal loyalty from not only those who receive it, but also those who deliver and support it, design of value exchanges is needed. And the more exceptional and the more inspiring the service aspires to be the more it needs to get serious about personal meaning and motivation.

Scrap 1: Essential services and organizational “knitbones”

This sets the stage for the rhetoric I’m developing today. It all centers on a concept: essential service. Essential service is what separates a functional socially engineered adequate service from exceptional, inspired designed services.

A person’s essential service is that thing they do for others that gives their life purpose and meaning. Perhaps we all have an essential service, if we discover what it is and find an organization that allows us to provide it. But in reality only some lucky souls find such opportunities,

Let’s call such lucky souls a “knitbone” service actor, after the knitbone plant, also known as comfrey, a plant known for its soil enrichment capabilities. A knitbone plant has a deep taproot that extends to layers of earth inaccessible to other plants and draws nourishment up to the surface. Wherever knitbone is planted, neighboring plants flourish. This is why wise gardeners plant knitbone throughout their gardens.

Service design applies the same principle to organizations. Service design tries to strategically place knitbone service actors where they can infuse meaning into their organizations. If they are on the front lines, the service they provide is felt as genuine and valuable to those who receive the service. They make strong positive brand impressions, and cultivate external brand relationships. If they support the service at or behind the front lines, they generate a culture of meaning for other employees or partners responsible for delivering or supporting services.

A knitbone service actor is inwardly motivated to perform their essential service. The value of doing this service is intrinsic to its performance. A knitbone requires little to no external motivation. There is no need for carrots nor sticks nor monitoring. They only need opportunities to perform this service, which means 1) finding other people who need and value this service, and 2) receiving whatever supporting services from other people they need to perform their own essential service effectively.

Perhaps not everyone in an organization has an essential service. Some job roles might be intrinsically motivated by anyone. I think neither of these are true, but it doesn’t matter if you disagree with me. The goal is not to achieve some perfect utopia of an entirely inspired intrinsically motivated organization. The goal is to approach it and achieve it as much as possible.

And if the vision of this kind of organization is not intrinsically compelling, and you need external motivations to care about it, consider these:

• External motivations encourage artificial behaviors that leave neutral or negative impressions, and do not inspire loyalty. It all feels phony, empty and “corporate”.
• External motivations are expensive. If someone wants to do something anyway, you don’t have to pay them as much as you do to get someone to do something they loathe and resent being made to do.
• Systems designed for external motivation are expensive. The infrastructure required to monitor and enforce behavioral compliance cost a lot of money to establish, maintain and staff.
• Externally motivated organizations will struggle to retain precisely the most valuable talent (aka its knitbone employees) who will leave the minute they have an opportunity to find a more supportive and inspiring environment.

Wow, I am starting to seriously love my magical knitbone symbol.

Scrap 2: Start with service experiences, and operationalize backwards

Another point is equally important, and complementary to essential services and knitbone service actors.

It is simple: Services should begin with service experiences and develop systematized operational capabilities to support such experiences.

Fact is, the exact opposite happens.

The way most organizations evolve is function first. The organization is organized into units that develop and perform key organizational functions. The organization needs financial accounting and other money stuff to get taken care of? Establish a finance function to cover it. Computers are important? Establish an IT function. The organization needs to get the word out and persuade customers to buy their product? Marketing. If a need arises, and none of the existing units can do it, that means it’s time to form another functional unit.

Each of these units develops its capabilities mostly in isolation from one another. And with rare exceptions, the people who will use these capabilities are barely even considered, much less involved in the development.

At the tail end of this process comes a patching-together attempt, and it is usually only patched for the customers, not the hapless souls on the front line stuck with using them to try to deliver decent services to these customers. And those who try to support the front line in various ways also struggle with the sticked together pieces-parts frankenstein monster that is their organization.

Trying to reform the organization for service is an enormous task, which involves the deepest, most complicated and difficult organizational problems involving desirability, feasibility and viability imaginable. It is at minimum three highly demanding jobs.

Postscript: More whining about the missing two-thirds of the service trio

But service design is still an immature discipline that not only lacks a service system engineering role (equivalent to the software engineer role in the classic product trio) and a service manager role (equivalent to the product manager role) — it lacks awareness that this is a problem.

And because it is way, way, way too big a job for any one person, it succumbs to the managerial/technik habit of dropping Why, and focusing solely on What and How, and in effect reduces itself to service systems engineering, enhanced with amateurish attempts at business strategy. And the profession begins to attract service system technicians who don’t even miss the desirability part of the work. And the profession as a whole devolves into a dry flavor of management consulting increasingly incapable of delivering anything inspiring or meaningful.

I’m thinking through the relationship between the essential elements of a design discipline — those things that define any design discipline.

First, though, I want to define design in general against disciplines, with particular emphasis on engineering and art, two domains into which design often blurs. Of course, it is an obnoxious fool’s errand to insist on technical precision in everyday speech, so please take these definitions as intended, as artificial sharpening done for the sake of precise understanding.

Design is the development of systems in which free-willed people participate as essential parts of that system. By free-willed, I mean they can (to some degree) choose whether and how to participate. A designed system is not complete until free-willed people are participating in it. As I have said zillions of times before, this is why design research is part of all design work. A system without free-willed people participating in it is still only an engineered sub-component.

Engineering is the development of systems without free-willed participants. Whatever the materials used in the system, whether concrete or logic, the components behave choicelessly. Often we engineer when we should design. We use various governing techniques to remove choice, so people become engineerable components in our social engineering projects. Or we exclude people from our problem framing, and focus solely on whatever thing we are making, presumably for them, but not in reference to them. Or we make assumptions or speculations that people will behave as we expect and hope. But the engineered thing is viewed as separate from the people who will eventually come along (or not) and try it (or reject it) and adopt it (or abandon it). Design never considers its thing apart from the people interacting with it.

Art is the development of a thing primarily in relation to the artist, and only secondarily to other people. In design, the people for whom the thing is being designed are primary and the designer is present only as a semi-reliable proxy. Some art is more systematic than other art. The essential difference is that art can (and arguably should) be made without involvement of people who will eventually participate in it by experiencing it. Gadamer argues that an artwork is never complete without its audience (and that is where I picked up this line of thought). But while the artwork is being made, the artist is the audience who completes it. While a design is being made, only representative people for whom the designwork is being made are suitable.

The most important difference between design and both art and engineering is that the latter can be done without involvement of other people who might eventually encounter what is being made, where design cannot. Design succeeds or fails by the choices of the free-willed people who are intended to participate in it.

When design becomes stylistic self-expression, it slides into art. When design becomes systems-development and problem-solving and loses touch with the free volition of human participants experiencing these systems from inside, it slides into engineering.

Now, let us establish terms, grounded in some accessible examples. Material, medium, formation, object.

Water is a material that can become a medium for a wave. The wave formation moves through it, by it, as it. A wave can keep moving beyond water, as long as some other material serves as a medium. People playing on the shore can be that material, and this is what happens when we enjoy being tossed by waves. We become a wave medium. So the wave is not essentially water, but the essence of a wave necessarily involves some mediating material. When we look from a distance, at water being moved by a wave formation we see an object: water formed into a wave.

Now, let’s get flaky. Setting aside whether this is real or true, what is meant when someone claims to be a spirit medium? It means that they as a person has become a material (like the water) through which a spirit moves or acts or speaks. The spirit moves, acts or speaks through the medium, by the medium, as the medium (for as long as the medium is serving as a medium). But the spirit does not stop with the medium. It keeps moving. It moves, acts and speaks to the people who witness the mediation, and extend the spiritual motion if they are willing to be moved and perhaps reformed or transformed by what they witness.

Design involves a variety of materials, some physical, like water, and some mental (mind-like), like our spirit medium example. Some of the forms conveyed or transmitted through media is mechanical force of the kind engineers harness, and some of the forms are ideational, emotional, symbolic (like the forms inherent in television or social media content) and some is behavioral, a mixture of physical and mental, ranging from mostly physical, unconscious reflexes to fully deliberate volitions (imitation or fashion trends among people).

The most complex material designers have learned to shape is the densely hybrid material known as organization.

This is the material the discipline of service design shapes.

Of course, organizations can be decomposed into a vast variety of materials, but this only complicates and confuses matters.

A fanciful analogy: Imagine a choreographer, who works with the material of human bodies in motion, who decides to chart, not only the movements of his dancer’s limbs, but the entire physiology, internal and external, of each dancer. He is not wrong that these materials move with the body, but this additional data overwhelms and obscures his orchestrated bodies-in-motion problem without adding much or anything of value, and demonstrates not thoroughness but shallowness of understanding of the essence of the choreographer’s craft. Indeed, compulsive thoroughness is symptomatic of lack of depth of understanding, and is a kind of compensation. When the intellect cannot penetrate deeper or saturate into what it seeks to know, it splatters, spreads out or piles up upon the surface of the matter. Ironically, this dense breadth is misnomically called “going into depth” but depth is precisely what it lacks. Depth abstracts precisely the simple essence of a matter, and allows the concrete details around it to logically crystallize around it. A dancer’s internal organs will take care of themselves if the choreographer focuses on dance movements.

So, the material of service design is organizations.

What is its medium, and what forms are conveyed via this medium?

The medium is behaviors — more specifically interactions between service actors, some of which are human and many of which are not (thank you, Bruno Latour!), across interfaces of myriad types. Currently, service design is still drowning in philosophical debt from its origination in customer experience design (a customer-centered flavor of HCD) that it focuses its attention on customer touch-points, but this only a subset of the many interfaces by which a service is woven together. Service design is drowning in philosophical debt from building itself out from a CX philosophy, and endlessly hacking and patching its methods on this inadequate, monocentric philosophical platform. (And tragically, because service design is becoming a handmaiden to journey management, which is also customer-centered in its logic, and the technological platforms being used as journey management infrastructure follows this logic, it looks more likely that service design will regress than progress.)

Now we have the material of service design, which is organizations.

And we have the medium, which is interactions via interfaces.

What is the form conveyed through this medium? Value exchanges! Each interaction directly or indirectly moves value among actors. This movement is what animates services and organizations (in two senses of the word: setting them in motion and ensouling them).

And, finally, what is the object service design produces? A network of brand relationships, each a perception of the organization, experienced as a boundary object. Brands are so much more complex than most people have the philosophical capacity to understand.

Let’s try this framework out on UX for a moment. Material: digital technology. Medium: human-computer interactions. Form: experience (of momentary value exchange!). Object: Digital thing (product, app, website, game, etc.)

A managerial cannot distinguish the form (experience) from the object, because they are exclusively objective, meaning they have access only to one objectivity (aka subject). So when they say they are building an experience, they are referring to the artifact they are coding. And they can build it just fine without involvement of people. And if the experience they build has usability problems, no problem. The experience was “instrumented” and the problems can be caught and corrected. So the experience is always improving.

But the experience actual people have — the experience designers are concerned with — does not improve. Because when they open their app to use it, they never know what to expect. It is constantly changing. They are constantly required to relearn it. And half of what they use has not been properly tested. They themselves are the usability test. Which means they are constantly subjected to usability problems of various kinds.

If you look at it this way — again, the way designers see it — it is not hard to see that this is an atrocious experience, however much the product itself improves. But managerials don’t look at it this way. They see only things, not people experiencing things over time.

A service designer sees it even more clearly. Product managers are backstage actors who shape the delivery of a service, which is the management of an experience of a digital product over a long span of time. And these services are profoundly broken because on the whole the field of product management is oblivious to the fact they are not managing a product, but service actors — custodians of a long customer experience that needs even more management than their product does.

I do sometimes bridle at service designer games which reduce every product to services, but here it sheds very useful light on the true nature of product management.

And that light becomes glaring when we look at product managers the same way we look at frontline service actors, for example, call center agents. The worst customer experience problems we find in call centers often originate in poorly conceived scorecards, that put agents’ and customers’ goals at odds with one another. The agents are evaluated by how much they can upsell and cross sell, or how quickly they can resolve a call. They are misaligned with what customers need, which is focused help achieving their own goal of getting help, or buying something inexpensive that fits their modest needs. Likewise, product managers are often evaluated by their productivity, that is how frequently and how much they are able to improve (aka change) their products. But if users need a reliable, steady tool that they can learn once and keep using, these changes harm the experience of the product, which, to say it again, is not the awesomeness of the digital thing frozen at some point in its development. Far from it.

A few ideas that emerged organically in this post that I want to catalogue for future development.

The concept of philosophical debt. Think of this as the compounding accumulation of theories, practices and general praxis upon a misconceived point of departure, which requires eventual change of paradigm, and the discarding of many core tools and methods (redescription of Kuhn, for managerials)

The idea of nonhuman service actors as service actors, an idea lifted directly from Latour, who always saw social orders constituted of nonhuman actors as well as human ones. Service design will probably have to catch up with Latour now, with AI agents functioning more like human actors than tech platforms.

Design discipline defined by material, medium, form, object. It seems to me these have been smeared together, and it has caused quite a bit of methodological confusion. Most super-clever managerials are eager to avoid the inefficiency of involving service actors directly in design practices and lack philosophical capacity to grasp why this is disastrous.

“Managerials” as a pejorative, for managers of people, products, journeys who take engineering approaches to design problems. Because they are unable to understand pluralistically in a variety of first-person terms about human interactions with each other and with nonhuman actors — they think from the one first-person perspective that dominates corporate life, a technicic objectivity that renders everything an object that behaves in quantifiable ways, and may be made, through engineering approaches, to behave differently. Whatever a managerial touches becomes social engineering. I think James Burnham influenced this coinage.