What Is Service Design?

Appendix A. The 12 Commandments of Service Design Doing

Sometimes it’s easiest to understand something in terms of the behaviors it engenders. So here are some rules that many service design practitioners find useful.

The 12 Commandments of Service Design Doing

1. Call it what you like

   Service design? Design thinking? Service design thinking? Customer-centric innovation? It doesn’t matter what you call it. It matters that you do it.¹

2. Make sh!tty first drafts

   Don’t waste time on making early versions beautiful. In the early parts of a project, you are going for quantity, not quality. Ideas don’t need to be complete, just good enough to be explored and thrown away. The more beautiful you make them, the harder they are to abandon. So be sh!tty, not pretty.²

3. You are a facilitator

   Your clients’ knowledge beats yours—so keeping a diverse team of employees, experts, and even customers working together is the best thing a service designer can do. Help them by embracing mind hacks. Shape customer data into personas; explain processes as stories; break complex ideation down to “How might we ...?” questions; build it, don’t describe it. Hack tasks into units you can deal with rationally and instinctively, but never forget the true complexities.³

4. Doing, not talking

   Opinions are great, and everyone always has at least one. But service design is based in reality. Instead of talking about something for a long time, build stuff, test it, understand what needs to be improved, build it again. ...