Service Design may not be a practice, but a mindset.
TLDR: If we consider Service Design as contextualisation for you to understand and connect products, people and systems (which it is), and a mindset to understand and grow on your career, improve yourself and where you stand at a company, you will notice that really everyone should be a Service Designer then, meaning that it beats the purpose of the field itself. Why should have a title about it then?
Fair to mention: I am open to discussion, because every opinion depends on context. But after some years into my role as a Service Designer, I have come to the conclusion that we might be looking at the job position from the wrong angle, why? because I don’t believe this should be a title even.
Context you say?
Service Design cannot live in isolation, and it is definitely not a source for standards that apply to all environments, neither as a general set of rules and practices that one goes to, implements seamlessly and fixes the political drama a company has, boom, done. Nope.
Every time that I have been in a new position, project or team, there are specific nuances, interactions, dependencies, history, people, attitudes, dreams, frustrations. So the more I grow on my career, the more I understand that whatever fancy canvas, trendy blueprint or popular standard service procedure I learned this year, might not be really using it the next one. Nothing really sticks, and what does, it is a malformed and less beautiful version of the original. I even started creating my own Frankensteins to accommodate the situation that I currently am in.
Don’t get me wrong, I love learning about new tools and ways to solve things, but I have found to be most successful at my work when I use them to understand my own thoughts and to communicate my ideas to others, and get to a common ground with stakeholders; and not as impositions of “this is how we always should work”.
Thing is that solving a problem requires you to understand the people around it and the medium it is living in, and with that, creating a clear way to implement the solution. Actually, that sounds like a senior-to-management mindset in Design fields.
So then Managers are Service Designers?
Maybe that is why people that come from other practices of design are better at contextualising and then implementing services than people purely trained in the field of Service Design. That’s when having a history of getting your hands dirty come in handy. And what if we used the mindset to measure career growth?
Using the mindset for growing in any career
Let’s think of a Junior UI Designer, they’re given their first task: make a button. They will do everything in their power to make the most beautiful and amazing button possible. But as they grow on their career, when they are provided with yet a new task that says “make a button”, they will start asking the following questions: “didn’t I designed this button before?” then “is this the same button that could be used elsewhere?” then “Is there another team making the same button?” then “I should talk to the others and maybe make one button together?” then “oh, they’re not only making the same button, they’re making the same app, maybe collaborate?” then “you know what stakeholders? we will save a lot of money and time if we make this into an ecosystem”. Boom, Design Lead. Give this person a medal.
This person is still a UI Designer, but it required them to have the context of UI Design to understand where they are, and how can they contribute. So if you sprinkle Service Design as a mindset, a way of thinking, you can clearly measure how can a person gain abilities to communicate problem-solving approaches, understand and have empathy for others and their contributions, align and lead projects where everybody can win.
So then if we think about it further, everybody could benefit from the Service Design mindset, even (and maybe specially) non-designers.
Where to start?
Good news is that you are probably already doing some kind of service design work now. But if you want to know more about real-deal mindset, I would recommend this good read.
Successfully Implementing Service Design Projects by Tina Weisser (SDN)
Specially in the Clarification stage: Tina made a small and very effective way to measure the successful-ness of any project with 6 direct questions any project lead should ask.
