Summary

How has Service Design changed over the last years?

In this video, I'm going to share five things that I think have changed in how people perceive or practice Service Design.

Big change number one:Service Design is much more approachable.

It feels to me that back in the days, service design was taught a bit in a very academic and technical way.

This meant that the language that was used and the examples that were used were very hard to get for people who were new to it.

Today there is a lot more people sharing what they have learned in practicing service design in very simple and practical ways.

Junior service designers are sharing on LinkedIn and within their own tiny newsletters what they have learned in the past week.

It can be just a tiny productivity hack, which is good for service design or bigger complex things, but all explained in a simple and approachable language.

And that feels pretty new to me. I imagine that this comes because there are much more people practicing service design.

We have practitioners focused on tiny simple things and practitioners focused on very philosophical questions. And in the middle somewhere, we have people working on strategic stuff.

That group of people focused on more simple down to earth questions feels to me a bit new, especially because now they are sharing much more what they have learned and what they practice within service design.

And this makes service design much more approachable and easier to learn.

Big change number two: Service Design is both simpler and more complex.

More and more service design practitioners recognize that the projects that they are working on are much more strategic and complex.

And to work on these complex questions, you need to have more complex ways of thinking and tools.

That's why many service designers today get interested in things like behavioral psychology, sustainability, or system thinking.

In fact, service designers steal from the world of complexity in order to be able to tackle the challenges that they have within their work. And this is especially true for people working within very big organizations or in the public sector.

But at the same time, Service Design is also becoming simpler.

Because it also gets used in smaller services. Not just the big insurances and the big banks.

Maybe that's happening because Service Design gets taught in lower levels of education.

It's not anymore something that is just taught at a doctoral or master level, but it's something that is taught also in a bachelor level and even below, like in college.

Big change number three: Service Design has proven its impact on public services.

A lot of work has happened. And here the UK is exemplary. In many cities and public services within the UK, there are now Service Design teams embedded.

These individuals and teams have created some great guidelines and processes, just like the service standard that you can find on the gov. uk website.

Which is a 14 element checklist that helps teams to create and run great public services.

The public service design community and individuals like Lou Dowe have made huge progress there. They have proven that service design can be used in public services. Where it feels to me back in the days, service design was more used in the commercial sector.

What's beautiful is that now these efforts are copied by many countries around the world, just like Australia and New Zealand.

Big change number four: Service Design is now a job that is recognized by others.

When I came out of uni with my master's degree in service design, there were basically no service design jobs out there in Switzerland. When I searched for a service designer role within a job platform in Switzerland, there were no jobs.

Today, that's different. In fact, In cities like London, there are nearly five new Service Design jobs that come out every week.

In Switzerland, it's a bit different, but still, you find one new service design job per month at least.

And these are job positions that clearly state service design as one important skill to have, or service design as being the job title.

And that's a huge difference. This means that Service Design is not just an obscure skill, but something that gets recognized also in the job market.

Big change number five: Service Design is much more integrated with eco social questions.

It feels to me that the new generation of service designers and the way that they are taught makes it possible that The questions of inclusion, diversity, equality, sustainability are all asked at the start of a project and not at the end. And this is a huge shift.

It feels to me as if service design has a bit graduated.

We had to spend a lot of time convincing people that having a human centered approach was extremely important. it feels now that this is something that feels quite basic to people. Therefore we can ask now questions that are a bit bigger scale.

We can ask questions about society, about nature, about the world we live in.

And these for many Service Design practitioners are not afterthoughts, but questions that get asked at the start of a project.

These are just five things that I have seen change over the years. And obviously I'm very biased.

So I'm very curious to know what are your five things that you have seen change in the world of Service Design within the last years?