Summary of the video

• Service designers have a generalist role and can help with research, graphic design, and strategy, but not everything is their job

• One way to clarify what service designers do is by showing what they don’t do well

• A pre-mortem at the start of a project can reveal potential collisions between roles and help determine what is and isn't a service designer's job

Video transcript

This transcript was generated using Descript. So it might contain some creative mistakes.

How do you best communicate what's the role and what isn't the role of the service designer? Service designers can do a lot. We are this generalist role, so we can help in research, we can help in pure graphic design, we can help in strategy, we can do a lot, but not everything is obviously our job.

So how do we set a healthy limit in our projects and our One of the first tips that I would love to share with you comes from the book Service Design Principles. 101 to 200, and it goes like that. Show me what you want to do for me. The idea here is pretty simple. Sometimes it's easier to clarify what we really do by showing what we want to.

If I tell you, I'm a service designer in this project, but I will not create all the marketing machinery at the end. Oh, okay, that's interesting. Thank you. I thought, you have the word designer in your job title, so you could also do all the graphic design. Ah, the fact that you speak about what you don't do, and that you reveal it in advance, forces people to realize what you really do, and that's quite a useful technique.

So that's one technique. The other technique is to do a pre mortem. So at the start of your project, gather the team around, the client the team in your organization, and think about what will go wrong. in the end or later. And imagine in advance what will be the collisions between the roles. For example you could think about hey in the past on projects, we had a problem where the research team felt left behind because the service designers did all the work.

And so The research team says, Hey, next time we would like to get more involved. Okay, cool. So we can work on that and we can specify that this time it isn't the service designer job to prepare all the research, but maybe in that specific project to just receive the results. of the research. So a pre mortem on how the different roles could collide can be something interesting to reveal where does your job start, where does your job finish, and what are things that you don't do but someone else does.

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This question was asked by a community member for the third Service Design webinar. You can rewatch the full webinar for free with all the show notes and slides.

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✨ Made with assistance of AI.

The transcript of the video was made using Descript, and the summary was made by using Notion.ai and the automated transcript with the prompt: "Make a summary with bullet points"