When you write a tiny history about your beloved topic, you soon discover that history seems to repeat itself. You notice that history isn’t a suite of revolutions which change everything. No, it looks to you more like a suite of small updates from one theory or movement to the other. It sometimes becomes difficult to even see the differences between one field, practice, or idea and others. Contextual Design is, for me, one of these smooth updates that happened in the history of Service Design.

Contextual Design is a User Centered Design process created by two nice people, Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt (yes, in this book everyone is nice, crazy [in a good way], nerdy or beautiful, especially when I don’t know them personally).

Wikipedia contributors describe this practice as follows: “It incorporates ethnographic methods for gathering data relevant to the product via field studies, rationalizing workflows, and designing human-computer interfaces. In practice, this means that researchers aggregate data from customers in the field where people are living and applying these findings into a final product.”

I must admit here that this doesn’t seem so different than other user-centered approaches in the design world that we have already mentioned earlier. But it is nice to see that so many people update the same ideas, as service designers do today.

We basically all have a focus on the human, we try to have deep empathy for them, so we need to understand them. So, we go into the field and meet them.

This makes me think of a debate that happened in the Service Design Conference in 2016, in Amsterdam. I was invited there as a content contributor and therefore tried to follow as many debates and presentations as possible. There was one debate that I must admit I found profoundly stupid and boring. But I wanted to honor my job of being a content contributor. So, I kept listening to the debate. The debate was about if we should call our practice Service Design or Experience Design or whatever other funny titles like UX, CX, or Design Thinking. My reaction to this debate was to create this little comic strip:

In the article that accompanied the little drawing, I wrote this: “At the end all these fields have a love for the end user.

All these fields or terminology care about including the user. They try to understand him. They just want to not make him crazy. That’s it. Sure, it’s important to name things right. But at the end of the day we shouldn’t lose the overview, the common ground we all share.”

So, I’m very happy that Contextual Design exists; it reassures me because it basically uses the same tools as many other fields and many tools we also use as Service Designers. I’m happy that Contextual Design exists, but I won’t get into an argument about whether it’s better or worse than any other field.

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.