Introduction
3. What do Service Designers do?
You have just finished the second chapter and should now know better from where Service Design originated.
What you’ll learn
In this third chapter, we will get very practical. You will learn the different tasks that a service designer has to perform. You’ll see that every service designer performs at least four same tasks:
- Research: service designers try to understand what people want or need
- Sense-Making: they summarize what they have learned in a research phase and turn these learnings into something actionable
- Ideation: they come up with several possible solutions to a given problem or challenge
- Prototyping and Testing: they build new solutions and try them out with people who will likely benefit from the service
Before we get into it, I want to share with you a little side note. The four tasks I highlight here are common activities of service designers around the world. But these activities are not the model or process of how service design works. There exists some technical debate, which would need an explanation about the iterative aspect of any design project and other philosophical aspects of design which go beyond what I want to achieve in this course.
What I want to share with you here is not an academic model of how service designers work, but to show you the typical tasks of service designers in their everyday job.