This Is Service Design Doing

Hello There! Preface

Where we come from: This book’s predecessor

Back in 2010, our book This is Service Design Thinking captured the state of the art. Marc was looking for a comprehensive resource to teach service design to his students, but could only give them URLs and articles spread around the web. So he teamed up with Jakob to create the resource himself. At the very start, it wasn’t even clear that the result would become a book, but it was clear that the project should be based on a real service design process – we wanted to practice what we preached.

So, we invited 23 co-authors and over 150 online contributors to create the most complete collection of basics, tools, and case studies possible. It soon became clear that only printed matter could inspire the perception of a standard reference. Even more importantly, it would be a snapshot, as we openly acknowledged that service design was and is an evolving field.

No one expected the book to become a best seller, but to our surprise it went on to be translated into multiple languages and even won several design awards. From the moment the book was printed, we received thousands of comments. The community responded to the book in an overwhelmingly positive way, but of course had plenty of fair criticism. To sum it up in three points: too fragmented, too academic, too theoretical.

Why this book is necessary

We heard you. It took us some years out in the field to finally produce the book’s sequel. More importantly, we were ...