Let’s now talk about the second word in the term Service Design. According to the contributors of Wikipedia, “design” connotes the following:

Design (as a verb: to design) is the intentional creation of a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process.

When used as a verb, “design” means that you plan how something works.

I like the Wikipedia definition since it definitively fixes a problem that people usually have with the word “design.” Often when we hear the word “design,” we think of a beautiful designer chair, a designer dress, or a designer car. We think in the form of objects. We often reduce design to the aesthetic part. If you took this common definition of design, then the field of Service Design would be about making services beautiful. However, this doesn’t define what Service Design achieves as a field.

In the field of Service Design, we consider design as the ability to conceive, create, construct, or plan.

We now know what the two words in the term “Service Design” connote. So, let’s bring them together to create a proper definition of this field.