[TMA] The Increasing Importance of Service Design

But first, Fuck These Guys

The creation of a National Design Studio and establishing a Chief Design Officer is not, as some folks claim on LinkedIn, "good for Design." I value Design because it brings an uncommon humanist practice to technocratic organizations. The anti-intellectual authoritarian fascistic and ideologically White Christian Nationalist Trump Administration is anti-humanistic (and inhumane), and so its attempt to affiliate (and perhaps co-opt) is bad for design. Why would anyone believe this office, led by a Musk-olyte who eagerly joined DOGE, to be anything but a sham?

(And... "Studio"? I realized long ago that those who favor the language of 'studio' tend to favor matters of appearance over those of utility and value.)

I considered going on a longer diatribe, but realized that right now it's just too easy to tap into anger and frustration, which may provide momentary satisfaction, but does nothing to address my deeper mentality.

So, allow me to shift gears toward a positive trend I'm witnessing...

The Slow and Steady Rise of Service Design in the U.S.

Everything that follows will be anecdotal, drawn from my experience. I leave it to others to validate or verify with data.

My journey with service design began in 2005, when Dan Saffer joined Adaptive Path after receiving his masters from CMU (where he has returned as a professor). As he situated in our practice, he commented how what we were doing was pretty much "service design," a subject he'd learned from his advisor, Shelley Evenson. Particularly in how we always started with ethnography, the insights from which typically went beyond the screen, to multi-channel experiences.

From that time until I left at the end of 2011, we tried marketing service design as a service, but, with the rarest of exceptions, no one was buying. My observation was that the global regions which supported service design agencies were those where there was significant investment in well-designed public services (across Scandinavia, the UK, Australia). Such outlay just wasn't happening in the US at pretty much any level.

Leaving Adaptive Path, I became less directly connected with service design, both as a practice and a community. While I advocated organizing teams by customers and their journeys, and would say at conferences that "all design is service design," and would encourage the development of a "service design mindset," I didn't hire dedicated service designers, and rarely found myself in professional contexts with them.

About 5 years ago, that started to shift. Until then, service design had been at best a marginal role in any American company I supported. But when I supported JP Morgan Chase, I was surprised to find a team of dedicated service designers in the Corporate and Investment Bank, which ended up making sense when I learned they were mostly based out of London. And then, within the consumer bank I was directly supporting, managers started posting roles for Service Designer, and by the time I wrapped up my contract in 2024, Service Design had become an HR-recognized sub-function of User Experience.

And now, I'm supporting Humana, a health insurance company, which has a service design team (with an open role as of this writing), and I'm seeing how their efforts, operating at the intersection of member experience and business operations, are driving positive change. Other clients have begun hiring service designers, and what not long ago came across as a rarefied practice appears to be gaining broader acceptance.

As I reflect on this, I can identify a set of forces that have spurred this shift in the U.S.

Making sense of increasingly complicated multi-product experiences

Something that I heard directly from CEOs and other executives of software organizations is that as their offerings became more complex (e.g., going from the initial product to additional products; the integration of acquisitions) they saw Design as a means to bring coherence and understandability. While these executives didn't say "service design," savvy design leaders understood that this was a means to that end.

Global companies

As the JPMC example suggests, as American companies are increasingly integrated with global workforces, and practices from overseas become legitimized within the US.

The shortcomings of product management

For a while, an inhibiting force for service design was the function of product management, as it was supposed to be the strategic and integrated (business + users + technology) practice. Over time, it has become clear that product management lacks the tools, mindset, and, sadly, intellectual rigor or curiosity for shaping or nurturing the kind of complexity that overwhelm's a business' customers. Executives have had to look elsewhere, and service design has emerged as a partner that can orchestrate and coordinate the disparate pieces to operate as a cohesive whole.

18F and USDS

In 2014, both 18F and the USDS were established, with missions related to improving how the federal government deployed information technology, and each began with strong design and user experience functions, which over time evolved to include dedicated service designers. So, finally, here was public investment in service design, which has always been a precursor to serious private embrace.

(Oh, believe me, if I want to re-tap into the anger mentioned at the start of this newsletter, I can just think of how 18F was eliminated, and the USDS was re-made under DOGE, and then the temerity to create a National Design Studio as if there hadn't been significant effort, and progress, made in improving the citizen experinence of federal services. But who wants to dwell in anger?)

Gratitude

Though it may have taken longer than I would have expected back in 2005, I'm grateful to see how a thoughtful, integrative, human-centered approach appears to grow. As I said at the outset, what I've shared are suppositions, drawn from my limited observation and experience. I look forward to broadening my understanding at the Service Design Global Conference (Oct 16-17, Dallas, TX and online), where Jesse and I are giving the opening keynote, reflecting on what we've learned in producing the Finding Our Way podcast.