If service design becomes alienated from the pluralism at the root of all design praxis, it devolves into social engineering — the construction of systems assembled from nonhuman and dehumanized, choiceless human components.
Service design is only design to the degree that it maintains awareness of the humanity and freedom of the service actors who participate in the social systems we develop, and serves precisely this humanity, this freedom in participation.
Designers are designers only when they are tacking between multiple first-person perspectives:
- Their own first-person design perspective which combines pluralism and craft
- The perspectives of their clients and stakeholders
- The perspectives of the service actors who will eventually participate in the service system they are designing
The tricky part of this is that client and stakeholder perspectives are rarely pluralistic, and these are the people with whom service designers collaborate. Paradoxically, if designers empathize too strongly and for too long with their client collaborators, and become too fluent in their language and too reliant on their key concepts, they can lose touch with their design perspective.
They can “go native” in the corporate world, and adopt as their own primary perspective that of management, technology and technocrats. And from that perspective, the perspectives and experiences of service actors will lose importance, and become secondary to behaviors.
This is the first factor in service design’s collective alienation from design.
A second factor compounds the first: where services are seriously broken at a fundamental, functional level, functional fixes are sufficient. A service designer can employ the engineering aspects of our discipline and dispense with the design part, and just by fixing the most egregious malfunction, still provide enormous value.
Service design is one of the few fields that approach organizational operations comprehensively and systematically. We have methods in our toolbox that can effectively fix this kind of breakdown. Service designers are a pretty good fit for solving operation systems problems.
But a more mature service systems field would, like every other mature design discipline, provide designers with an engineering counterpart. This kind of system repair work would be done by a “service systems engineer”.
It is only because this role does not yet exist that service designers do it. But this work can be done perfectly well by non-designers with sufficient training. Identifying operational malfunctions (“pain points”), assessing the behavioral responses to the pain, estimating the business impact of these behaviors, helping organizations prioritize and sequence a repair backlog, and establishing long-term detection-and-repair practices — these are all management and/or system engineering functions. They are colossally important. But they are not design. Calling them “design” just because designers are currently doing it suggests someone might have already fully lost touch with what design essentially is and does.
But there is a third factor, that compounds the already-compounded problem.
Most of the demand for “service design” right now is precisely service systems engineering work.
Service design is still relatively new, and has not yet had time to impact the general quality level of services, like, for instance UX has. Atrocious services are still pretty common, and in some fields where service matters most — healthcare, insurance, telecoms all come to mind — atrocious service is the norm.
It is precisely these fields which hire service designers. They’re all in various stages of emergency. Their roofs are caving in and their toilets are geysering. They’re the ones who call service designers, because they’re the ones with the tools needed to repair these problems.
In deeply broken industries, the advantage goes to the least broken organization. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Competition is relative function versus malfunction.
It is comparable in some ways to the early days of computers, when people got the best functioning one, or the cheapest one, and had no expectations that a computer might be delightful to use, reflect their sensibilities, become something a normal (non-engineer) person could become attached to. At that point in the evolution of the computer industry design was secondary, especially the design of what was on the computer screens.
It is only when functionality becomes table stakes that design comes into its own as design. Everything can be assumed to work, so which option resonates with me as a person. What strikes me as compelling, meaningful and represents or expresses in some unsayable way, who I am and what I care about?
It’s sort of a Maslow’s hierarchy sort of thing:
- Does anyone have a use for it?
- Does it work at all?
- Does it work well? Is it reliable and efficient?
- Can people figure out how to use it?
- Can people use it easily?
- Do people who need it, like it enough to choose it over alternatives?
- Do people feel emotionally compelled by it?
- Do people value it and want it to be a part of their life?
Design only becomes important somewhere between 4 and 5, and grows more and more indispensable from there.
But service design still operates mainly in the 1-4 range.
Meanwhile, the service designers who excel in the engineering aspects of the discipline are dominating the field and gradually turning it into an engineering consulting profession.
Designers who care about human perspectives, experiences, motivations — what makes people care about things and connect with them — are far less valuable, and will remain so until the field grows up more and the field of competition advances beyond “are we pissing people off?”
But (at least from where I’m standing) the field of service design appears to be optimizing for its engineering and management functions and allowing design to atrophy. The field might even be selecting for non-designers. Indeed, I see vanishingly few virtues of design in the work done by service designers. Outputs are extraordinarily complex and lack all simple, let alone meaningful or inspiring gestalt. They are oriented far more around elimination of flaws and gaps than the presence of positive connection. The whole discipline is dry and technical. The only remaining trace of design left in any of it is better visual production and decoration of deliverables.