In summary

Is Service Design becoming a religion?

This is a question that got shared to me within a LinkedIn comment.

The very short answer to this is: Yes and No.

This is a very Swiss answer. In Switzerland, we even have a word that is a contraction of yes and no. In German, we have the Jein, which is yes and no put together because we often try to avoid to see things all black or all white.

And that's exactly what I will do here in comparing service design to religion.

So first let's explore the yes part. Yes, Service Design is becoming more like a religion.

And the thing here is that maybe that's not too bad.

Because religions are really good at community building.

I feel that over the years International and local associations have made a lot of progress in creating these communities.

Just like religions

Religions are also pretty good at bringing a lot of different people together with just a few core ideas. And yes, Service Design kind of does the same thing here.

There are big bank that are practicing service design. But on the other side, we have also little NGOs who are using it. And they kind of all agree that empathy is something very interesting.

They all agree that to create a great service in the front stage, what is visible to the people who use the service, it's important that we also take a look at the backstage, the part where the employees and the partners work and make the service happen.

So yes, it seems that there are a set of core values that bring a lot of different people and companies and organizations together under the same name, Service Design.

But remember, I'm Swiss, so I have to explore the no side of that question too.

So yes, Service Design is stealing some of the good qualities that religions have.

But I definitely think it's not a religion.

There is no God in Service Design and we are not worshipping the God of Service Design.

It doesn't come with a promise of what is happening after life.

Because Service Design is just a practice. So as someone who is married to a pastor and who observes every week people going to the Sunday service, I can tell you very clearly that this isn't a religion.

But it has some of the good qualities and it might be stealing some of the bad qualities of certain religious practices.

In fact, over the years, I've seen some individuals within the Service Design community become kind of zealous people.

Having a bit of a closed mindset. Where they say: if you do this, this is not service design. If you say this, this is going against the spirit of service design.

yes, in religions, we sometimes have also these types of individuals.

And we really see in the history of religions that these types of individuals are not bringing good stuff. They're bringing religious wars.

What's great is that we aren't there yet with service design.

But I feel that sometimes some individuals within the service design community are going towards this war of practices where they are becoming way too zealous, way too prescriptive.

So to me, there are two learnings that I see in this question:

Is Service Design becoming like a religion?

The first part is that Service Design has always stolen great ideas from many different places. And it could do the same with religions, for example, by being more community driven.

But, and that's the second point: We should be careful to not make the same mistakes that some of our elders did.

We should be careful to not be too zealous and too prescriptive in what we share.

And we should remind ourselves that the position we have about what is Service Design is different from what someone else has and that it still has value.