In short: Building a niche service design community offers numerous benefits:

• Learning: It teaches you how to create and maintain a whole service and you'll learn a lot from the people you invite.

• Contribution: It helps the larger service design community grow.

• Focus: It helps people discover Service Design through another passion they might have.

• Networking: It positively forces you to connect with new people.

• Introvert push: It makes networking easier for introverts like me.

It Helps You Learn

Creating your own niche Service Design community teaches you a lot.

You get hands-on experience in building a new service from start to finish. Often, as Service Design practitioners, we only work on parts of a service. Here, you get to launch, create, and maintain an entire service. Even if it's a small one, it's still some nice learning.

There's also learning from what happens within the community. You'll invite people to speak and share insights.

It Helps the Larger Service Design Community

The more people who talk about and gather around Service Design, the better it is for the field as a whole. You have a specific group of friends and colleagues, and by building your own niche community you bring Service Design to them. Something that other communities might have a hard time doing.

It Brings Service Design with a Different Focus

I love that there are niche communities focused on specific topics within Service Design. For example, there are communities focus on Journey Management or one focused just on Books for Service Design practitioners. These super niche communities allow people to discover Service Design from different angles, through specific part of the processe, a specific tool, or way of thinking.

Imagine a niche community of Service Design practitioners using Notion in Switzerland. Would be fun, no?

It Forces You to Connect with Others

Building a niche community means you need participants and speakers.

This forces you to go beyond your usual circle of friends as once you've invited all your usual friends, you'll need to find other participants and others guests to keep things fresh.

It Makes Networking for Introverts Easier

As an introvert myself, leading a community makes networking much easier for me. Instead of approaching people just to meet them, I offer a service to the community and ask for their help. It feels to me that I'm connecting with new people not for myself but for the benefit of others, and somewhere in the middle of that I get to meet new people without it feeling weird to me. That's nice!

Written with AI help

This article is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand.