Arne van Oosterom, Partner at DesignThinkers in Amsterdam and was a past guest on the Busines901 Podcast . His company, DesignThinkers, is a Strategic Design agency that specializes in social innovations, service innovations, customer centered design, marketing 2.0 and branding. They provide a bridge between business opportunities and creative solutions.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Design Thinking in A Service Design
I ask Arne to comment on what Service Design is and he responded:
Arne: What I do think is important is that Service Design is very new. Not so much designing service, there’s nothing new about that. Not the tools or the methods, that’s not a new thing. It’s the mindset. There is something in that that is quite new, and the people that are involved in Service Design are quite new to it, as well. For a lot of these people, it’s a new game. We have seen Service Design in Europe moving from designing touch points very much connected to user experience design to actually change management and changing company cultures.
Now, we are in this moment where we will see a school of thought that says that Service Design is about actually what I would call more the designing of the touch points. In a holistic way, everything is connected to everything, but it is more the outside.
There is Service Design, which is more connected to Service-Dominant Logic. That says, “No, actually you should change the company culture and the way it’s organized to be able to design and deliver the services.”
Maybe in the future, we will invent new names for them. But this adds to the confusion of Service Design; I think. But that’s because it is still very new, and it’s still being developed.
It is my hope that we will keep on having this conversation and discussions, and keep on changing it, because, at the very moment that I know exactly what Service Design is; I think it’s dead.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Design Thinking in A Service Design
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