A good service designer should be an observant connoisseur of services. This is not easy. The best designed services are unobtrusive to the point of invisibility, appearing only at carefully choreographed moments of “service evidence”. The best part of a service goes entirely unnoticed and unappreciated.

Services are most noticeable when they break down — when they are not good.

This is why, when people ask me what service design is I answer with a question: “When is the last time you were truly infuriated with an organization?”

Everyone has a story. Five to five hundred minutes later, when the story subsides, I say: “My job is to prevent that from happening.”

Answering the question “When is the last time you received truly good invisible service from an organization?” is a question only true service designers can answer with the same energy.

It almost takes prolonged exposure to absence of a service to appreciate its invisible presence.

So many little things must go well to notice little infuriating things that don’t.

We live in blessed obliviousness to innumerable luxuries, noticing only the flaws.

Not to get political, but if we ever succeed in dismantling “the system”, we will discover innumerable services we never knew were sustaining our lives and our very selves, in ways we never detected or even suspected.