Building service design capacity within yourself and your organization takes seeing the bridge between current capacity and future possibilities. The future of service design lies in activating these core capabilities in staff across a variety of disciplines, both in an effort to train the next generation of service designers, and to also bring service design thinking to our organizations.
1. Empathy
Service design is in service to people. At the heart of service design as a practice, theory, and discipline is empathy and a desire to improve people’s lives.
In a service design context, you have to both empathize with the customer as well as empathize with your internal stakeholders.
2. Communication
Having communication and presentation skills is absolutely essential to building relationships, influencing others, and educating around service design efforts and vision.
You will often find yourself acting as a translation hub, communicating the customer’s experience to your varied set of stakeholders, and explaining how that experience is affected by the component parts of your organization.
3. Facilitation
Related to the cross-functional nature of service design in practice, facilitation skills are key to guiding diverse teams through a service design process, and leading initiatives that require engagement of a diverse group of stakeholders.
4. Systems Thinking
By nature, service design requires systems thinking to understand and analyze how all aspects of the service integrate and impact each other in the context of the larger service ecosystem.
When thinking on a systems level, you’re not only taking and end-to-end view, but also the surface-to-core view of what it is that makes the customer’s journey happen.
5. Synthesis
The ability to synthesize — forming theories, frameworks, and insights to guide service efforts. To take inputs of all kinds and turn this into a clear direction for the service.
The design of the customer’s experience is limited by the level of synthesis that happens within service design work.
6. Future Visioning
Envisioning future scenarios, and balancing those with business requirements, customer experiences, and other contextual factors, is a service design superpower.
The ability to synthesize the needs of the customer with the needs and current state of the business into potential futures, and articulate those futures is what will bring true change.
7. Storytelling
Storytelling is the best way to making ideas understandable, making the future more concrete, and the present more impactful. Storytelling takes the power of emotion and personal connection to make ideas stick.
8. Visualization
As one of our main goals is to communicate clearly the complex dimensions of service experience and delivery, we must be able to visualize this information in a variety of ways in order to reach each of our different stakeholders.
9. Making
Making artifacts to evidence service systems and experiences, making simulations or prototypes to test service concepts, or making toolkits and materials to facilitate service design efforts.
Conclusion
Develop these capabilities in yourself and others, to educate your organization and peers, and ultimately inspire others to change the way we work to be in better service of our customers and our communities.
Reflexive Analysis
There are a few fundamental building blocks of service design, and this blog interprets them as nine separate pillars. Should more conglomerates implement these principles, they may see dramatic shifts in employee and client relationships and experience. The post emphasizes the role of a designer being a translator, and how things like communication, facilitation, and visualization are imperative in order to deliver a satisfying product that fulfills all involved, from the self to the company to the client. Service design and the work behind it is a complicated journey that the layman may not fully grasp. The post also illuminates the importance of being genuine and human to those involved in the service design systems, highlighting the need for important aspects like empathy and storytelling into the work.
What aspects of service design result in the most responsive version of the client? How can we utilize these aspects to better understand and design for our client while simultaneously remaining accessible to them in a low-stakes yet productive environment?
Miller, Megan Erin. "Core Capabilities for Service Design." Medium, Practical by Design, 26 Jan. 2016, blog.practicalservicedesign.com/core-capabilities-of-service-design-55cb900ccd34. Accessed 13 Sept. 2022.
