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

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.

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.