For the design theorists out there, 1969 was a great year. Herbert Simon, a Professor of Psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University, wrote a book called “The Sciences of the Artificial”.

Let’s take one extract of the book that was hand-picked by Jo Szczepanska in his article “Design Thinking origin story plus some of the people who made it all happen”:

“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”

In a way, this short quote shows that the notion of the designer is not only limited to the profession of the designer but includes anyone who designs. Design is therefore an act that can be practiced by everyone; we often see this to be true also for Service Design.

It isn’t the Service Designer who designs alone in his room, inspired by the muses.

Everyone designs and often the best design solutions for Service Design do not come from the Service Designers but from the users who hack the services to make the services less frustrating. Or as Herbert says, “changing existing situations into preferred ones”.

A good example of such a user hack is the hashtag on the social media platform Twitter. Indeed hashtags were created organically by users in order to categorize their messages. It is only later that Twitter officially recognized the hack and transformed it in the feature we all know today.

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.