Okay, these are pretty old days. A core notion of Service Design is the notion of the customer. Without the customer, there can be no service.

It seems that around 10,000 BC, Agriculture started to be pretty successful; so, people were not only able to harvest food for themselves but also produced a surplus of certain vegetables. And when you have too much carrot and have eaten carrots till you don’t want to see another carrot, the potato produced by the guy next to you looks absolutely delicious. So, you think of starting to trade. And now, you have the first customer.

But, more importantly, with agriculture came the first priest. Indeed “according to the trifunctional hypothesis of prehistoric Proto-Indo-European society, priests and priestesses have existed since the earliest of times and in the simplest societies, most likely as a result of agricultural surplus and consequent social stratification”. Okay, why do I talk about priests?

In some way, priests were the first service providers who existed in history. They offered something intangible in exchange of tangible goods. Basically, they sold experiences, not products, which basically is the definition of services. So, priests are in some way the first service creators of history — or maybe even the first service designers, if they were really conscious about their own practice.

This article is part of the book "A Tiny History of Service Design, " a tiny two-hour read that goes through the historical events that created what Service Design is today.