We said in the introduction of this chapter that rationalization was a significant trait for this time period. This event or movement is a particularly good example of this trend.

Between the 1880s and 1890s, a great guy named Frederick Winslow Taylor pioneered “scientific management”. The peek influence of this method happened around the 1910s. The central idea of what was later called Taylorism is that you can find an optimal way to perform a specific task. Through observation, Frederik could for example triple the amount of coal that workers shoveled. He did that by reducing the size and weight of the shovels until he found the best “shoveling rate”.

In a way, Frederick was like an ethnographer. He used observation to understand a particular group of people, here workers. But he took a more active role in wanting to fix the problems of these workers. The observation attitude is pretty close to how service designers work today. The main difference (at least I hope) is that service designers tend to have a less paternalistic approach and want to include the worker in the process. But more on that in the next chapter when we talk about the Scandinavian approach to design.

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.