Chapter 2. What is Service Design?

Setting out the basics: what service designers do, and what they don’t.

Expert comments by: Arne van Oosterom | Birgit Mager | Jeff McGrath | Mauricio Manhães

  1. 2.1 Defining service design

  2. 2.2 Different views

    1. 2.2.1 Service design as a mindset

    2. 2.2.2 Service design as a process

    3. 2.2.3 Service design as a toolset

    4. 2.2.4 Service design as a cross-disciplinary language

    5. 2.2.5 Service design as a management approach

  3. 2.3 Origins and progress

  4. 2.4 What service design isn’t

    1. 2.4.1 It is not simply aesthetics or “putting lipstick on a pig”

    2. 2.4.2 It is not simply “customer service”

    3. 2.4.3 It is not simply “service recovery”

  5. 2.5 The principles of service design, revisited

    1. 2.5.1 The original

    2. 2.5.2 The new

  1. This chapter also includes

    1. Service design and service-dominant logic

    2. The 12 Commandments of Service Design Doing

Defining Service Design

Service design can help solve some important challenges faced by organizations. You hold a book in your hand which tells you how to do service design. But what does that term mean? It is something about customer experience, and innovation, and collaboration – but does it include everything related to those concepts, or is it just part of those worlds? Is every activity concerned with creating, planning, fixing, and shaping services part of “service design”? Do service designers even agree on what they do? Some people like to start with a definition, so in mid-2016 we asked 150 service designers to share and vote on ...

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