Service Design-in’

Three hypotheses about in-house Service Design

I am going to be upfront about this: this blog post could have been a Tweet, but I wanted to have an introductory post about why I created my new publication: Service Design-in’.

An in-house perspective on Service Design. It will host thoughts and interviews from Service Designers working within organisations.

I have been a consultant for the majority of my career, applying Design-Thinking and Service Design to all sorts of industries and problems. Recently I have moved in-house and my new title has ‘Service Design’ in it. I have been trying to find resources to inspire me, to learn what Service Design is when in-house. I struggled.

Service design happens all the time at every level. The problem is that when done unconsciously, it’s just not very good. Matt Edgar, 2015

I am deeply interested and invested in making Service Design thinking mainstream, acknowledging the fact that it’s impossible to design a product without actually designing a service.

There are three foundational hypotheses to this publication with related questions that I want to address:

• In-house Service Design is still quite niche. While Product Design, UX Design and UX Research have found their place in organisations, in particular in established ones, Service Design still struggles. Therefore I want to find the people who are doing it, whether it is in the job title or not, to talk more openly about it, to be ultimately able to influence future organisations ways of working and innovation models. If you want to be part of this, sharing your views as an in-house Service Designer, please drop me a line (you can find me on Linkedin and Twitter).
• In-house Service Design gets naked. It is less about frameworks and outputs and gets practical, very hands-on. Ultimately organisations that have a portfolio of services and products need to improve and evolve them over time. In -house Service Designers need to use their mindset to produce measurable impact. How do they do it? What kind of initiatives do they contribute to? How do they advocate for a Service Design mindset?
• In-house Service Design needs contextual tailoring. [I wonder if there is anything in life that doesn’t need tailoring, but let’s leave it for now]. Every context — a start-up, a scale-up, an enterprise, will have a different approach to innovation and a different design maturity. Each context will require a different setup to allow for Service Design to stick. How is Service Design different in every context? What are the strategies to make it work? What sticks and what doesn’t?

As with every hypothesis, I will learn more about them as I do research.

I am passionate about impact, innovation and change and I am very excited about learning and sharing my insights on Service Design-in’.