We have witnessed an increasing interest in service design in these past years, coming not only from correlated disciplines and contexts, but also from environments where the design language has probably never been spoken.
It seems like service design – the rather new kid of the design industry – has become a hot topic at the moment, overcoming the fields of agencies and consultancies in order to reach companies and individuals who want to discover more about it.
This discipline is evolving and the human-centered approach is going along the way with it. The need of such discipline and approach is not only linked with the development of new services, products or concepts. Nowadays it is largely employed in the management of complex processes and cultural transformations too.
This is the reason why we have witnessed the increasing of its reputation and the birth of more and more in-house service design teams within companies. Anyway as far as the design approach meets the business one, it could be possible that the two will not speak the same language.
To make an example, usually the idea of failure and criticism is not well perceived within corporate environments as it is -on the contrary – within the design field. “Critique is one of the pillars of a successful design team, it walks hand in hand with execution and craft, and it’s evidence of a high-performing team, because it externalizes one of the most important parts of creative execution: trust (“Want To Build A Culture Of Innovation? Master The Design Critique”, Jon Kolko, Fast Company, http://www.jonkolko.com/writingDesignCritique.php ).
According to Rachel Hinman – Product Design Manager at Stitch Fix – there is a need for a real cultural shift for in-house teams in order to bring this trust issue to an institutionalized level.
