Okay, this topic is definitely out of my league, so I’ll be forced to quote more in order to not say too many stupid things. But phenomenology, even if I don’t get it fully, seems to me to have an important place in this tiny history of Service Design.

So, what is phenomenology? Joe Kissell wrote a great article about it in simple terms. Here is what he says: “In a nutshell, phenomenology is an attempt to study experience itself objectively and scientifically.”

It is in 1913 that a German philosopher named Edmund Husserl seems to have coined the concept of phenomenology in his book “Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy”. Yeah, that’s a great title for a book! Of course, ideas on this topic already appear as early as René Descartes. But I will leave the details to the historians of philosophy.

Joe continues to explain the topic in his article in this way: “Husserl was looking for a rigorous method of describing experience that in fact did away with subjectivity. His motto was, ‘To the things themselves!’ By this he did not mean that he wanted to study things as they exist objectively out there in the world, but rather that he wanted to study the experience of things — as they present themselves to the observer — without any assumptions, predefinitions, interpretations, or prejudice as to why or how they exist (or even whether they ‘really’ exist at all).”

So why did I place phenomenology in my tiny history of Service Design? Because Service Design is focused on improving the experience of customers in their usage of services. Service Designers are interested in how users personally perceive an experience or a moment in a service. We don’t care if things are perfectly planned. We care if people feel they are perfectly planned. That’s why we differentiate between the front stage (how the user experiences a service) and the backstage (how the staff and other stakeholders experience the service and create it).

This focus on the experience is also how some scientists define the quality of a service. The quality depends on the personal perception or experience. More on that when we speak about SERVQUAL later in the booklet.

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.