About a year back I realised a career within industrial design wasn’t for me and since I’ve been searching for a fitting career path. Service Design for me was something I have always been aware of throughout my education but never considered it as a possible career choice. Though for the past 2 months now after some further research I’ve realised this is the field I was looking for, for reasons best described in the following quote;
What differentiates service design from all other forms of design is that primarily the design of people, rather than the design of things, environments or communications for people. - Lara Penin, > The politics and theatre of service design
What inspired this post was a recent blog item on the home page - A maniefesto for experience design by Ken Fry
I recommend you read if you haven’t so already.
Fry brings up a number of point that gets me thinking service designer.
Design beautiful experiences, not beautiful artifacts.
Stop asking “what” and start asking “why”.
Start with experience, end with experience.
Call yourself an experience designer.
Which goes on to remind me of a talk by Deiter Rams I was lucky enough to attend earlier this year in which he spent a large part of the talk speaking about the designer of tomorrow. Forgive the misquote, (I’ve misplaced my notebook), but Rams mentioned how he believed that designers of tomorrow should be focusing on systems, usings Apples iPod as an example, not the beauty of the hardware, but the whole system of iTunes, the Apple store, the Apple experience, the music service Apple provides…
For the few years I’ve visited these forums service design has been mentioned very little from what I recall. Which suprises me, more and more trained industrial designers are becoming designers of the intangible. So I thought I’d raise some questions and see what others think of the crossover between service design and ID.
Is industrial design evolving into something that can’t be defined by the physical?
Considering the amount of services compared to products and considering consumerisms role in the current climate - Should we not be training service designers that go on to be industrial designers?
Are we becoming the consumers of services, not consumers of products?
Why has service designs growth as a discipline been so much more succesful in Europe compared with the States?