It’s pretty hard to say when the internet really started. You can say it dates back to the 1950s. In this tiny history, I will make it date back to the creation of the World Wide Web.

Maybe there is some nationalistic bias involved in this, since the World Wide Web was created in Switzerland, the country where I was born and spent most of my life. So, the World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. In 1990, he created the first web browser and then made it public to everyone in 1991.

Let’s be honest. We all know the huge impact that internet had not only on Service Design but also on our lives. This book wouldn’t exist without the internet. And many services today exist solely on the internet. The internet also brought with it a new set of frustrations. For example, now when I can open a bank account on the internet in 8 minutes, I start to ask myself why it takes a week in a physical bank?

As with any technology, there are also problems that we started to discover only much later — addiction to social networking sites, the problems of filter bubbles, and so on. But I think that if you have read this booklet up to this point, you already know that I try not to have an approach to history that only sees evolution or innovation through a technological point of view.

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.