Do you remember Herbert? In his book “The Sciences of the Artificial”, he mentions that design is also a way of thinking. A similar idea appears a bit later in a 1973 book called “Experiences in Visual Thinking” by Robert H. McKim’s.

An article by the Interaction Design Foundation, which looks at the history of Design Thinking, dates the foundations of Design Thinking back to this time:

“Cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate for economics, Herbert Simon, has contributed many ideas that are now regarded as tenets of Design Thinking in the 1970s. He is noted to have spoken of rapid prototyping and testing through observation, concepts which form the core of many design and entrepreneurial processes right now. This also forms one of the major phases of the typical Design Thinking process. Simon touched on the subject of prototyping as early as 1969”.

The principles of rapid prototyping, testing, and observations also form the basis of Service Design. Indeed, a principle of Service Design that we teach is to try things out as cheaply as possible (prototyping) and bring them in the hands of the users as fast as possible (testing).

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.