Page 111 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 99
3.1. Introduction
On one Tuesday afternoon during fieldwork at a service design firm, a de- sign team gathered to talk about an upcoming design deliverable. In the meeting, a discussion emerged among team members about how work ought to be done:
Nadia: What is the essence of our work? For me, this is the flow of the app, not the flow of the experience. How do we show our expertise in here? An IT person at a technical level can make a flow. But the layer of service design is to show how that flow creates trust. These [points at sketches of digital infrastructure] are just logical technical steps anyone can do. Carrie: That is not true.
Nadia: Why? How is this a user experience?
Carrie: [Usually] You need to build the [digital infra]structures [of the proposed design solution] first, then the flow or actions. That helps me to identify and create a story around the customer experience.
Nadia: The way you visualize your idea is ok. I don’t disagree. But the user experience is on that level [points at a drawing]. It’s on the level of trust. We need to start from there and explain it. Create a story around it [in text]. Carrie: Let’s do it the ‘old’ way, the thing I am more comfortable with [re- ferring to first drawing digital infrastructures before developing a story]. I have low energy and low motivation now.
In the field, we witnessed numerous of such discussions emerging among designers ‘what service designers ought to do’. Service design is an emergent occupation that broadly refers to the design of an overall experience of a product or service for business, as well as the process and strategy to provide that service, with a human-centered approach (Mager 2004; Moritz 2005). We saw that the designers had numerous discussions with each other and also with their audiences about what service design is, what type of work is included in service design, and also, what is not. In particular, at first sight, the designers seemed to adhere to similar values (see also Fayard et al. 2017), but as our research progressed, we saw signifi- cant differences in how designers approached their work.