As I prepare to teach a service design studio course in the winter at a university, I must grapple with my own frustrations with the inadequacies of service design as a practice. Simply put, we’re not going to blueprint, journey map, or design our way out of intractable problems. It does not do any good to trace the steps of so-called “customer journeys” if we’re not prepared to actually do anything about solving them.

At its core, service design is a business practice. Its goal is to sell more widgets by making the experience of widget acquisition better. 

This does not presuppose that you might not need any more widgets because you bought some yesterday or that you should diversify your acquisitions of other things.

No, it does not care about this.

We’re meant to encapsulate regular people into personas, ignore the people we dislike or don’t envision as part of the journey and get onward with the business of selling more, buying more.

Professor Cameron Tonkinwise wrote back in March about the things that service blueprints conceal, and how service designers — even if they’re thinking about these things — are not really incentivized to solve for these inadequacies because they’re not being paid to do that. Frankly, the entire challenge of the adoption of service design as a practice in the United States is largely due to our antipathy for providing widespread access to public services, specifically for people whom we as a society find undesirable. Depending on where you find yourself in the country, this disaste manifests itself in different ways, but nonetheless, it’s ingrained in our cultural milieu.

Alas, when I give talks about service design in other countries, I have to always caveat that while my practical foundations for the discipline come largely from imbibing sources that aren’t US-based, my perspectives are shaped by living — being born and growing up — in a place where I’ve had many opportunities to deeply understand the flaws of service design, because I’ve experienced this growing up in a small urban minority-majority city, attending Title I schools, living in rural areas throughout the Midwest, South & Mountain West and seeing how it manifests in cities to this day.

Service design gaps aren’t a reason to throw it out. Lots of good work developed that can help us improve everyday systems, services & structures. We need to be more mindful of where we can improve things.