Another task that Service Designers have to perform is Sense-Making. Once they have conducted substantial research to better understand their users, they need to make sense of all the data collected. In fact, usually after a research phase, the amount of information collected can be pretty overwhelming.

Thus, service designers use specific tools and methods to uncover the most important and strategic aspects of the research.

The sense-making task is one that consists of asking yourself the following: What does this mean for the project we are working on? What can we do with this? Why do people respond as they do?

The goal of the service designer when it comes to research and sense-making is a bit different than the one of an academic. Service designers don’t want to just understand the world around them or describe it accurately. They want to transform these learnings into concrete actions that help them in a given challenge.

Thus, often service designers try to simplify and summarize and condense the research into small actionable bits that they call learnings or insights.