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🤔 ▶️ What are the different types of Service Design Libraries?
🤔 ▶️ What are the different types of Service Design Libraries?
Daniele Catalanotto avatar
Written by Daniele Catalanotto
Updated over a year ago

Summary of the video

  • Service design library can be built in three ways: principles library, questions library, or resources library.

  • A principles library is a place where tips for the future self are written based on inspiring experiences.

  • A questions library is useful for teams to have structured answers to frequently asked questions about service design.

  • A resources library is a simple way to gather articles and tools for active or future projects.

  • Building a service design library helps in organizing and accessing valuable information.

Video transcript

This transcript was generated using Descript. So it might contain some creative mistakes.

What are different types of service design library? So the way I build my service design library is a service design principles library and I make it with the books I publish and also with a little app that I have which is Notion. And a principle library, what is that? Basically, it's a place where you write tips for your future self, every time you go through an experience that you find inspiring, you say, what's the tip that I could extract from here for my future self that will help me in the future?

And that's it. That's a principles library. So it's maybe something that you learned today that is not useful yet, but that that in the future might be useful. That's one way to build a service design library. Another way to do it is to create a questions library. And that's something that is quite useful if you are in a team setting, or you are like me in a bit of a educator role.

What you will do here, you will write down answers to key questions. And why is that great for teams? So if you are working in a big organization and you are the guy, or the guys. doing service design, you might have to answer all the day to the same question. Basically, what is service design?

What's your process? How much does it cost? How long does it take? Why is it important? All of this stuff. Writing things down in a question library with the most frequently asked questions, so that the next time people, someone asks the questions, obviously, take the time to have a conversation with them and then leave them with a little link where they can go and see the structured answer to also as an archive of your conversation.

And that's very useful because then also when new people come in the team, they see, Oh, this is how our way of working. These are the questions that we had in the past and that's how we answered them. That's another way, which is very interesting, to create your own library of service design content.

And the final. A third way to do it is to create a resources library. What do I mean with that? That's maybe the simplest way to make it. Here the idea is just to have on your computer somewhere, it can be a notes app, it can just be in a folder, have a few folders, each one for each active project or future project that you might work on.

And in there, Every time you read an article that is interesting and say, you ask yourself, for which project will this be interesting? Okay, I'm gonna put it in that folder.

Every time you see a tool that is interesting, copy it, put it in that folder. And what will happen once the project will start, you can then review all the resources, the material, the articles, tools that you have already at your disposal to get started.

That's quite lovely. Or, in the middle of the project, when you're stuck, and say, Ah, we need something to get us stuck, you can then go and look at all the resources that you have collected and say, Hey, I read this article, which I found interesting, and now I see it again in the folder. Oh, there was this quote there that was so interesting.

Okay, that's going to help us get unstuck. But this is this kind of third way to do it. So in summary, there are three ways that I see for now on how you can build your own service design library. Build a resources library, build a questions library, or build a principles library.

Get started

To help you get started I created a free mini course with my favourite Service Design Principles and a list of 200 Service Design Principles, it's called the Service Design Principles Quickstart Guide.

I've also built a Notion Template that you can copy to create your own Service Design Principles Library.

A community question

This question was part of the third Service Design webinar. You can rewatch the full webinar for free with all the show notes and slides.

✨ Made with assistance of AI.

The transcript of the video was made using Descript, and the summary was made by using Notion.ai and the automated transcript with the prompt: "Make a summary with bullet points"

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