Reading about Habermas, I’m finding language to express my dismay at recent developments in my field of service design — especially in his contrasting concepts of lifeworld and system.
Here is how these concepts are described in Habermas: A Very Short Introduction:
The lifeworld is a concept for the everyday world we share with others. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), the German philosopher who invented phenomenology and taught Martin Heidegger, first used this term in order to contrast the natural, pre-theoretical attitude of ordinary people to the world with the theoretical, objectifying, and mathematicizing perspective of natural science. Habermas does something similar. The lifeworld is his name for the informal and unmarketized domains of social life: family and household, culture, political life outside of organized parties, mass media, voluntary organizations, and so on.
These unregulated spheres of sociality provide a repository of shared meanings and understandings, and a social horizon for everyday encounters with other people. This horizon is the background against which communicative action takes place.
In contrast,
The system refers to sedimented structures and established patterns of instrumental action. It can be divided into two different sub-systems, money and power, according to which external aims it imposes on agents. Money and power form the respective ‘steering media’ (that is, the inherent directing and coordinating mechanisms) of the capitalist economy, on the one hand, and the state administration and related institutions such as the civil service and state-sanctioned political parties, on the other. According to Habermas, the systems of money and power cut deep channels into the surface of social life, with the result that agents fall naturally into pre-established patterns of instrumental behaviour. For example, anyone who works for a company, whether a top executive or lowly employee, will be guided by their role into patterns of action in pursuit of financial aims. Since the aims of instrumental action are determined antecedently and independently of reaching consensus, most of the ultimate goals to which the actions of those in the system are directed are pre-set, not chosen by them.
Moreover, they will not always be apparent to the agents who work to realize them. …
The chief function of the sub-systems of money and power is the material reproduction of society, that is, the production and circulation of goods and services. But they fulfil another very important function similar to that of the lifeworld, for they coordinate actions and have an integrating effect of their own.
Habermas calls this effect ‘system integration’, in contrast to the ‘social integration’ provided by the lifeworld. As societies become bigger and more complex in the wake of industrialization and modernization, and as people become more mobile, the task of social integration becomes increasingly difficult. Under these conditions, systems such as the economy and the state administration ease the burden that falls to communication and discourse; they help hold society together.
And this brings us to my criticism of what has happened to service design.
I think system logic has colonized service design itself and now dominates it as thoroughly as every other corporate function.
In our efforts to empathize, translate and earn a place at the strategy table, service design has lost contact with the reality, primacy and importance of the lifeworld.
The entire moral significance of service design — its very mission — is realigning system and lifeworld so the two can function together second-naturally, instead of clashing and creating that oppressive corporate artificiality that all people with intact souls despise.
But in its efforts to be considered worthy of serious consideration, little by little, service design has emphasized business considerations over human ones, prioritized constructed systems over intuited gestalts, reduced qualities into quantifications, engineering and operational considerations over experiential ones, and allowed objectivity to once again eclipse subjectivity.
The field of service design has become almost entirely alienated from designerly ways of experiencing the world, thinking about it and responding to it, and has devolved into a business consulting practice.
We are stuffed suits in creative’s clothing.
It’s not that we have no value. We do bring a more comprehensive and thoroughgoing systems-thinking approach to business strategy, but concern with human experiences has moved from the front seat to the back seat, and from the back seat to the trunk.
And our work itself is now systematized. Our work outputs are sprawling, incomprehensible visualizations of sprawling, incomprehensible data that paralyze intuition and feeling while serving the analytic mind.
Everything we do can be explained clearly and in ways entirely acceptable to the average manager. It could be argued that we have become better at explaining ourselves, or that the average manager has become more design literate — but we should at least entertain the possibility of a third explanation: that maybe we service designers have become average managers.
The strategic ex-designers talk tough. They sneer at any designer who questions the supremacy of business interests and strategic thought. They call it immature, idealistic, quixotic. But all this bluster and scorn is a smokescreen obscuring an obvious truth. They have sold their designer souls. They sold out to win a place, not at the strategic table, but at the strategic kiddy table. They are no longer designers, but they do enjoy second-class citizenship in the corporate world, while designers are worse off than ever, denied even the basic conditions required for craftwork.
We designers, if we are to be valuable and remain designers, must not succumb to the temptation to sell our designerly souls and become business consultants who traded in their suits, ties, bar graphs, flip charts and laser pointers for hipster clothing, post-its, sharpies and empathy maps. We don’t reject these things, but we have a function that transcends this sphere of abstraction, quantification, standardization and command and control.
Our job is to return to the concrete lifeworld of people whose everyday experiences, feelings, hopes, habits and choices generate all these metrics, and to really understand what is going on in their world.
This means using our senses, our intuition, our empathy, our interpersonal interactions, our rapport — our whole selves, including our heads, hearts, hands and feet — to get a real feel for the reality and to understand who and what populates their realities, occupies their minds, stirs their souls animates their actions — and what new designs they might welcome into their lives.
A lot of these understandings won’t first come to us in explicit language. Some of it will be a hunch or a sense of things that inspire at most cryptic poetry or strange analogies or hermetic diagrams. Or they might inspire crazy ideas or conceptual leaps. This is how designers work.
For whatever reason, we have a bad conscience around what is best about us. We are easily shamed into disbelieving anything that happens inside us unless we can immediate express it prosaically, justify it logically and obey what conventional wisdom views as rigor. We must bark anything we claim to know in the confident rhythms of boardroom objectivity, or accept that our “knowledge” is only the iffiest subjectivity.
Three times in my life I’ve seen design gain a moment of confidence in its own weird ways, only to collapse into respectability and disillusionment. I saw UCD have a moment in the late-90s and early 00s, only to implode with the New Economy. Then I saw its aftershock, the UX industry, which transformed the world beyond the New Economy’s wildest fever dream visions. Then, when misapplication of agile methods destroyed UX it resurfaced as Design Thinking, which, sadly, was much more Thinking (and talking, and writing, and 3-day intensive training programs) than it was Design. But it did manage to valorize design practices briefly. Sadly, adoption of these practices by non-designers failed to produce the promised miracles. It might be true that all people have the potential to become designers. But that potential is cannot be actualized through mastery of design lingo, memorization of techniques, or in three days of training, especially when the trainer is no more a designer than the students. Journalists clamored to be the first to declare Design Thinking dead, as if it ever was alive in the first place.
Around the same time Design Thinking was having its day, practicing UX and industrial designers who had been calling themselves user-centered designers began calling themselves Human-Centered Designers (HCD), which was basically Design Thinking for design actual practitioners. These were people who’d developed real hands-on design skills and sensibilities, and need ways to communicate to the uninitiated what they’re up to. And Design Thinking people were sort of able to understand, and mostly gave them space to work.
Service design arose around the time Design Thinking was both at its peak and being rolled into the morgue. And it seems HCD’s fate was linked, because it, too, was declining.
Service design, though, besides having a snazzy new name, both preserved much of HCD, while going beyond it in some important ways. Perhaps most crucially, it incorporated a bunch of operational and engineering activities required for implementation and management of services, which service designers performed out of necessity, because there was nobody there yet to do it.
It might be precisely these non-design activities that attracted so many non-designer system-builder types into the field of service design. Perhaps this is what allowed the field to shift emphasis to purely objective non-design service implementation and service management functions without even much noticing the loss — because most new service designers weren’t in it for the design.
Anyway, it seems the design part of service design is joining HCD, UX, Design Thinking, HCD in the mausoleum. I mourn them all, even dumb old Design Thinking. But as a disreputable philosopher once said “only where there are graves, are there resurrections.” So please take this eulogy as given — as a resurrection prayer. Amen?