Service design can be defined as a human-centred, collaborative and systemic practice for creating or improving how a service works and is experienced over time. It connects what people see and do, such as information, interactions, environments and digital touchpoints, with the backstage work that makes the service possible, including staff activity, processes, policies, data, technology and partnerships. Penin (2018) describes this as designing the invisible: much of what makes a service work well is never seen by the person using it.
Origins in services and operations
The discipline has roots in several fields. As service economies grew during the twentieth century, marketing and operations researchers began asking whether services could be developed as deliberately as physical products. Shostack (1984) argued that organisations needed to design the complete service rather than leave delivery to chance, and her service blueprint made the sequence of a service visible for the first time, including customer-facing actions, backstage work and possible failure points. This perspective treated a service as an operational system that could be specified, tested and managed like any other process.
Service design became more recognisable as a distinct design discipline during the 1990s. Birgit Mager began teaching service design at the Köln International School of Design in 1995, helping establish it as an academic and professional field in its own right (KISD, nd). During the 2000s, design thinking, participatory design and user-centred design brought a stronger focus on research, co-design, visualisation, prototyping and iteration. The Design Council’s Double Diamond, introduced in 2004, gave organisations a simple shared language for a design process built around four stages: discover, define, develop and deliver (Design Council, nd).
Two influential perspectives
Two ways of thinking about service design still shape practice today. The first can be described as designing services. It treats the service as something that can be mapped and improved directly, using blueprints, journey maps, standards and process measures to connect the frontstage experience with backstage delivery. Its strength is operational clarity: teams can locate hand-offs, duplication, delays, risks and unclear ownership. Its limitation is that an organisation may assume it can fully control an experience that users and staff actually interpret differently in practice.
The second perspective is designing for service. Kimbell (2011) argues that a service is not simply a finished object handed to a user; it emerges through relationships between people, organisations, technologies and resources. This aligns with service-dominant logic, which treats value as co-created through use rather than built into an offer in advance (Vargo and Lusch, 2004). Here, the designer’s job is to create conditions, platforms and proposals that enable better interactions, rather than to specify every detail. This view suits complex public, health, community and ecosystem challenges well, although boundaries, ownership and measures of success can be harder to define. Sangiorgi (2011) describes a related shift towards transformational service design, where design supports changes in organisational capabilities and relationships, not only individual touchpoints. Most experienced service designers now draw on both perspectives: the precision to improve a specific workflow, and the humility to recognise that outcomes emerge within a wider system.
Principles in current practice
Whichever perspective a designer leans on, a small set of connected principles runs through contemporary practice (Stickdorn et al., 2018):
- Human-centred: Research starts with people’s needs, contexts, capabilities and barriers.
- Collaborative: Users, frontline staff, specialists, decision makers and partners each contribute different knowledge.
- Iterative: Assumptions are tested, and learning is used to revise the service.
- Sequential: Experiences are understood across time, not as isolated contacts.
- Real: Research, ideas and prototypes are grounded in reality and made tangible.
- Holistic: Designers consider end-to-end journeys, frontstage and backstage delivery, and every relevant channel together.
These principles are what turn a definition into a working method. They explain why a service designer asks about the step before and after the one being described, why they want to talk to frontline staff as well as users, and why a single redesigned form is rarely treated as finished work on its own.
Action Point
Choose a service you know well and write a two-sentence definition of it: one sentence describing it as an operational process that could be mapped and improved, and one sentence describing it as something whose value depends on the relationships and interactions around it. Compare the two, note which perspective your organisation uses by default, and identify one principle from this document that is currently missing from how the service is being developed.