Adaptive Path Blog

What impressed me the most about Emergence 2007 — Carnegie Mellon School of Design’s conference on service design — was the diversity of disciplines and industries that were represented among the speakers and the attendees. Social scientists, customer service managers, community planners and designers of every kind shared experiences ranging from humanizing customer service and call centers to turning a transportation payment system into a valuable, cross-platform service.

Now it’s not these disciplines or their problem-solving approaches that are new or emergent. In fact, the familiarity of methods demonstrated in many case studies seemed to provoke a discipline-defending reaction among attendees of, “But haven’t we [product designers/architects/customer service teams] already been doing this? How is this new?” Compounding this defensiveness was the ever-felt pressure to give service design a clear definition and boundaries, as if we need to separate it from “other” disciplines like product or experience design.

But what is emerging is not so much a new discipline, as it is a cross-disciplinary awareness that:

1. To make a significant impact, we must look at entire ecosystems vs. isolated problems.
2. The complexity of doing so requires not necessarily more “service designers” but rather a “service mindset” that unites practitioners across disciplines.

As participants in Oliver King’s audience-engaging panel described, “The world’s problems stretch across disciplines. Service design is about facilitating multi-disciplinary communication.” To do so, we must all learn to relinquish control, as Chris Downs from live|work emphasized. The flow of designs-as-concepts has increased, spurred by the ubiquity of creative tools, and the notion of authorship has become more nebulous as designers have been empowered and linked by the collaborative web, as Core77’s Allan Chochinov cited among other “disruptive” trends.

By the end of the conference, the push to define “service design” seemed increasingly meaningless. As CMU’s Richard Buchanan concluded in his powerful closing keynote, “Did anyone find a definition of service design? I didn’t find one, and I am not bothered by that. Defining disciplines lacks value. Instead, we should ask ourselves, ‘What is the RESULT of service design? What industries does it touch? What is its deeper purpose?”

Buchanan’s conclusion was that the ultimate purpose of service design is to give people the INFORMATION and TOOLS needed to ACT — to be free to live as one would choose. Collectively (as we played hot potato with the microphone during Oliver King’s facilitated discussion), we concluded that service design is about designing for the greater good — though what that means may be sometimes be debatable.

Perhaps the meaning of service design has less to do with “customer service” or “public services” than simply: Serving. Buchanan quoted George Nelson saying something to the effect of, “Design: Don’t get too pretentious. All we do is serve. We’re not that important.” Perhaps what service design really means is giving up our rights — to flashy job titles, authorship, even to “changing the world” — so that we can come together to improve people’s lives… one service at a time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 9:29 am and is filed under Conference commentary, Experience design, Interaction Design, Product Design, Service Design, The Big Picture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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