The road to design maturity gets longer
The inflation of design as a profession and why I no longer call myself a service designer
I love doing service design. I was so excited when I first heard — in 2005, I believe — that there is such a thing that offers a look at design from a system point of view in the form of university studies. I had always felt something was off with designing solutions in isolation — at the time, it mostly meant physical objects or parts of another big thing (think of a dashboard to a car, for example).
I was a student of Industrial Design at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics when I was approached by the dean — who knew that I spoke Italian — if I was interested in participating in a program between our school and the Politecnico di Milano doing a double degree. I loved the idea! When I looked up the available MSC programs, I was immediately drawn to Product Service System Design. It was unclear where this type of education would lead us, but I was very intrigued to study for a job that would allow me to look at problems holistically.
I believe the creators of the program were not aware of the magnitude of their creation, and they had a brilliant sense of tapping into what would become the next demand on the design market.
It turned out, I could not join the double-degree program for administrative reasons, but I was encouraged to apply directly to PoliMi. I did that, and I ended up being accepted to the program.
I arrived at Milano Bovisa in the fall of 2006 and began my journey with a group of fellow, a very international group of students. Despite not knowing where this path would lead us, the setup was very appealing: design students from various disciplines: graphic design, industrial design, IT, multimedia, and architecture came together. The majority of the curriculum was designed to be accommodating to this diversity: it was to be delivered in groups— allowing us to practice cross-functional teamwork early on.
After our 2-year experience was over, it was challenging to find a job that allowed me to practice what I was given tools for: applying systems thinking, and designing solutions from strategy to harmonious touchpoint experiences representing the customers’ perspective.
In retrospect, I believe it is not a job for a newbie. Working with strategy requires a level of understanding of various aspects of the system; one that one can hardly have fresh out of college. It takes time, and it takes experience. Working with service design requires you to understand a big variety of perspectives both in-house, that of the stakeholders, that of the business, and that of the customers. It takes years to be around these areas; to observe, to learn about their dynamics, and only then get to a point where one can be efficient at facilitating their collaboration and assist them co-create.
Aspects of service design also exist in separate design toolsets: design thinking, facilitation, design research, business design, and UX design. Some level of knowledge of these areas is necessary for a service design professional to do their job efficiently and to deliver value to the table.
In the past couple of years, a variety of design-discipline-related courses have sprung up including service design. Sizeable, established institutions like the D-School at Stanford University and long-standing design-history-making companies, like IDEO, shared their knowledge in this form, but newly founded agencies have also come up with courses establishing themselves as the local domain experts. Courses like these work as a wonderful form of marketing and extra income source as well as a way of HR tool for recruits. However, as they currently require no accreditation by no formal body they can come from anyone, regardless of their background.
Service Designer has become an easy title to earn, unlike other jobs where once someone earns a certificate you know they have a good base to start with. These courses may be the result of the belief that service design is merely a toolset and once one learns about the existence of these tools they are ready to serve by only applying them.
Doing service design right is a big undertaking. This field takes pride in helping navigate both business challenges and representing the customers’ side — assisting in building a bridge between the two. It is a complex role having to be the diplomat, the coach, the therapist, the engineer, the social worker, the architect, the creative, and the mediator all in one.
Service design aspirants with skillsets from outside of the design realm may be promising candidates, people from marketing, IT, or other disciplines can be great assets to the process — but they cannot avoid putting in the same time and effort that a designer does when acquiring their design skills. Design is a vast area, a mental model, the proficiency of which only comes with practice. Without the full picture, people coming from different professions will always have limited oversight of only part of the story. And with that, they will be only able to support that one part fully.
If anybody can offer a course and provide a certification that makes the barrier of entry low, which poses threats to the credibility of a yet-to-be-blooming field. Currently, anyone following 10–20 hours of service design course earns the right to call themselves a service designer — and they often do. With that, the market becomes saturated presenting a challenge for employers and for companies to find talent that truly can create value and help them make the most of this toolset.
Although quite trendy, service design is still a new field, and the market still needs time to fully adapt it to daily business. There has been an evolution in how design has found its way toward higher decision-making levels in business (eg. the trend of big consulting firms purchasing big design firms during the 2010s, with McKinsey’s purchase of Lunar, CapitalOne’s purchasing AdaptivePath, and recently Frog — for a detailed story on this check out this Wired article from 2015). Design maturity all of a sudden became a quality to be measured if companies wanted to stay at the forefront of innovation, or if simply wanted to stay relevant. Different models have been developed to do this (here is by the Nielsen-Norman group, and another one presented by Deloitte). Regardless of which model you study, the highest level is always when design practices are part of strategic decision-making.
Invision completed a design maturity research (their model is a 5-level one) worldwide in 2019 surveying 77 countries and 24 industries — Niwal Sheikh wrote a nice detailed article about it, read it if you are curious about the details.
This confirmed that the % of companies applying design to strategic decision-making is still small worldwide. So, how can they go from Level 1 to Level 5? Just by starting hiring this skillset? It won’t result in an automatic rise in design maturity. InVision’s research specifically points out that the quantity of a team did not equal its quality:
“Design team size isn’t always an indication of business impact or a company’s design maturity” (13).
There are large teams that measured low on design maturity, and small teams that ranked high. Larger organizations have a harder time finding design maturity — if you’re a larger organization, you have to be thoughtful and proactive in how you integrate design into the business, focusing on strategy, collaboration, experimentation, and quality (33).
Recently, the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest also published research on the matter with regards to the CEE region in 2022, and out of their 4 levels of design maturity, only 2% of companies sat on the highest level.
Their definition of Level 4 is:
“Companies at this level integrate design into their strategic decision-making processes to the core with building their vision and operations, not only their goods, in a design-driven manner. They look at the big picture and see the benefit of using not just quantitative data to define their future but follow a more holistic approach.”
While big firms have been integrating a design toolset into their service offerings since the mid-2010s, these researches show how far that integration stretches within the economy. There is room to grow.
How can other players in the market benefit from this knowledge, this toolset? How do they learn what they can gain from employing/hiring this knowledge, and when should they hire it?
Historically, consulting offers knowledge that those who run businesses already have encountered in school: economics, accounting, and management. Design skills are a different animal — only those who come from a design field may understand what to look for and what quality constitutes.
From all design disciplines service design has the tools to be successful at supporting business and be employed on the strategic level. Companies — as research clearly shows — do not have enough experience to be confident about hiring the right talent for this job. So, how do companies know they hire the right talent if they do not have prior experience in the field?
Courses that offer insight into these fields are wonderful gateways to cover this shortcoming. If people from different areas attend, it can be the beginning of planting the seeds of understanding what service design can do for companies. But if people graduating from these courses are hired as experts of service design — with little experience and only a glance at the toolset — that can backfire. It can simply fail to bring the benefits the company hopes from this field, consequently, it will have a lasting effect on how companies view what service design can do for them and what this profession can offer at best.
Companies have to pay forward to gain access to this area, the greater part of which is lending trust and their time over their money. If what they get does not match the promise, it can quickly drive them away from using design again and undermine the market value of the field.
This phenomenon influences the opportunities service designers with existing experience and toolsets get access to. It is hard to make a difference between an apple and another apple for someone who has never tasted apples: more people popping up stating they are service design experts with no actual knowledge creates noise and directly influences how one’s professional credibility is viewed.
The growing presence of such newcomers on the field represents a dilution of what this discipline originally offered. If that is where the field is heading, I am afraid it does not represent what I do and offer in my services anymore.
Make no mistake, there is a tremendous need for newcomers in service design. It is a highly potent area of change management and could do wonders in business — every business would benefit from having a service designer on board. But if we want to get there, either the framework of service design education has to change or professionals truly practicing this area need to find a new name (which is already underway in the chaotic naming traditions of design jobs). Those offering proper service design education have to distinguish themselves as the guardians of this title — like university education does that with educational programs. Alternative programs are welcome to stay, but they may be marketed more transparently as an insight into the field, rather than the false promise of creating experts. (I assume that offering insights into this field would be just as high of a pitch for companies: think of the challenges in recruitment and the % of design maturity to cover!)
It is time for service design to take itself seriously and consider establishing checks and balances to create quality control for those who may call themselves service designers. Creating this gate will define who may influence the future of how service design is spreading and with that the growth of design maturity in business.
In a recently launched podcast, Paths, Puddles, Products, Trails to Innovation: Wandering in Design, development & Business on Foot — we started a conversation about such trends with various industry players to create a genuine picture of what is going on behind the scenes on the field — come, listen in and let us know your opinion!
