The design process embraces confusion. You’re often working to make sense of complex human emotions (both the stakeholder’s, and your own), trying to remove bias, and synthesizing patterns of behavior. This process creates more questions, which create more questions, which create more questions. Good design teams thrive in this grey area, using tools and methodologies that bring clarity to the complexity and crafting the right questions that guide the next step in the process.
There are many well-regarded tools and methodologies across disciplines, from UX design, to design thinking, to customer experience design, to business design, entrepreneurship, and product design. Each discipline has their own tools and processes, sacred roadmaps that differentiate each practice from another.
Service Design breaks through these barriers, pooling disciplines together under one human-centered umbrella. It taps into the entire design-led ecosystem, using tools and methods focused on solving the right problem for a customer or user. It’s this “patchwork background that makes service design so powerful”, says Stickdorn, Hormess, Lawrence, and Schneider in their seminal handbook This is Service Design: Doing. This process is not only useful for customer-specific value creation, but addresses the entire value chain and positions designers to create offerings that are B2B, B2C, venture based, or of public service (to name but a few areas of application). In other words, it’s multi-faceted.
Humans are similarly multi-faceted. As designers and strategists we all too often think of our users as simply users. We can forget that each person has a range of personalities, desires, and implicit biases that govern the way they see the world and interact in it. Design-led research, personas, and design-led mapping, does not dive deep enough to fully understand the complexities of the human experience, although they do provide some way to conceptualize it. Recently, the concept of “psychitecture” has grown in popularity and become somewhat of a fascination of mine. Coined by systems designer and thinker Ryan A. Bush, “psychitecture” posits that any person can design their own mind and radically shift their thinking through the continued use of specific tools and methodologies. This practice is a lifelong pursuit, bringing clarity to complexity on a personal level, helping one to face fear, anxiety, and negative thinking by altering the stories one tells oneself.
How does this relate to Service Design? At its core, Service Design is “psychitecture”. Through the use of “psychitectural” tools and methodologies we are able to deeply understand our own experience as human beings, giving greater insight to the complex range of emotions and stories customers, users, systems, and businesses, craft to exist in this world. Understanding our own biases and patterns of thinking gives insight to the confusion we face during the design process, helping one to be as objective as possible while researching and synthesizing the behaviors of a customer. Our work becomes more empathetic, poignant, and helpful.
Over the next few weeks I will analyze organizations through the lens of Service Design and “psychitecture”. I will attempt to position an argument on how these successful organizations understand the complexities of their customers, how to they address these complexities through design, and the results for both the customer and the organization.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you join me on this journey!