This is a copy of the Service Design Newsletter I sent on August 13th 2023. You can join the Service Design newsletter here to get future updates directly in your inbox.

Hi lovely human 👋

This week I want to share with you:

A short reflection about a new type of Service Design professional I'm dreaming of.
3 answers to Service Design questions about in-house Service Design

Greetings from Switzlerland,

Daniele 🧔🏻

The Servicematician: a new sort of in-house Service Designer

Not every company needs a fully fledge IT team. But many companies could benefit from having IT support. But getting it from an outside provider often is super costly. And even if you get a great partner, they will never perfectly understand your needs as would an in-house guy.

In Switzerland, the IT professional field has understood that well and has created a new job that is the "mediamatician". Basically, it's a new job that mixes both skills from the IT field, the communication field and in general, all things technical.

Many mediamatician end up working part-time in small organisations where they handle both the IT infrastructure and parts of the communication.

I believe the same is true for Service Design.

A small hotel doesn't need a Service Design team or a Service Designer who just "designs" the service.

A small hotel needs someone who can both re-design a service, do customer support, do communication.

Meet the servicematician

What if we had a sort of "servicematician".

Where from what I've understood of etymology, this world would mean: the guy who works on all things service related.

It could be the person who:

does a bit of research to find pain points and solves them
does customer support by handling the email inbox of the company
is working at the reception

I believe many companies could benefit from someone like this and could hire someone like that part-time easily!

A shift from the expert to the getting shit done generalist

Maybe we need to get out of the idea of the "Service Designer" and get more into the idea of a all-rounder service guy who makes shit happen and delivers the service but also understands how to design them.

Maybe we need more servicematicians than service designers.

This little story is inspired by a conversation I had a few months ago with the lovely Emmanuel Fragnière (who I will interview next month about his own Service Design practice).

New Service Design Questions

I'm slowly building a library of answers to the most common questions about Service Design. Here are the new ones: