Skip to main content
⌛️ 1984: Birth of the Service Design Blueprint
Daniele Catalanotto avatar
Written by Daniele Catalanotto
Updated over a year ago

We are in 1984, Lynn Shostack, the mother of Service Design, whom we met before, talks about the Service Blueprint in an article in the Harvard Business Review.

The Service Blueprint may be the one tool that Service Designer can’t live without. A Service Blueprint sequentially describes how a service is experienced by users. It is not only focused on the user’s perspective as a User Journey but also shows what needs to be done technically for the experience to exist.

Below, you can see one of these early Service Blueprints as it was presented by Lynn in her article.

What I find interesting here is the notion of “Line of visibility”. In today’s blueprint, we often separate a blueprint into two separate horizontal categories. The front stage is what the customer experiences. The backstage is what is needed to create this experience, but which isn’t visible to the customer.

We could talk all day long about this article and the service blueprint, but let’s just remind ourselves once again that we are thankful to Lynn Shostack for being the mother of service design and for having given us fun tools like the service blueprint to play with.


Going further

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.

Did this answer your question?