Lucy Kimbell this week wrapped up her thoughts on where Service Design sits at the end of 2009 and looks ahead to 2010. It taps into something that I’ve been increasingly feeling for a little while…her mention of the need for Service Design to reflect more heavily on its politics, scope and knowledge are as challenging as they are important.
My own feeling, perhaps fuelled by what has been an incredibly busy end to the year, is that I can’t help but feel that some of the vanguard spirit has been exhausted within the Service Design Twitter and Blogger community. Maybe, trying to reflect on that sentiment more positively, the vanguard spirit has just been diluted by the huge surge in interest and comment on Service Design that I think is the resounding feature of 2009.
But that is a danger, if those voices once so regular and prominent in campaigning for the values and politics of Service Design have now retreated to ‘the coffee houses‘ instead of more publicly sharing their thinking, the Service Design community is the worse for it.
If nothing else, it prompts the question:
“Is the surge in interest and enthusiasm for Service Design and Service Design Thinking because of its novelty or because if its integrity?”
My background in studying history as seen me draw parallels between the evolution in Service Design and the Russian Revolution previously in response to articles by other Service Design ‘Thinkers’, Jaimes Nel and Nick Marsh. My concern back then, was that there appeared to be a schism emerging between Service Design practioners and Service Design academics. I tongue in cheek, compared this to the Red/White Russian Bolshevik split, the split between those that believed that their ‘democratic communist utopia’ had to be pragmatically (and by consequence brutally) enforced as opposed to those who believed that remaining true to the ideals of the ‘revolution’ would ultimately see it prosper and flourish. This philosophical stance appeared to be supplemented by Bill Hollins citing Marx and Engels in his presentation on Service Design at a British Standards Institute gig a few weeks ago.
Trotsky by Germeister from Flickr
In reality of course it is perhaps more likely that the Vanguard Reds (led by Lenin) just felt threatened by the intellectualism and ideas of Trotsky’s Whites and sought to establish control (and absolute power) rather than adhere to the values and ideals of revolution.
But what has this to do with Service Design I hear you ask? Well, I hope that the murmurs of discontent following the Service Design Network Conference about it being too academic are not the seeds of a wider and deeper disaffection that might lead to a purge of the intellectuals… Lucy’s response on Twitter on this topic was perhaps one of my favourite tweets of the year (regrettably no longer searchable) but her thinking can also be found in this post.
Personally, it is the politics, enthusiasm and equality of Service Design that attracted me to it in the first place. To continue to string out my metaphor, Industrial Design was the Tsarist Autocracy, ruled by and for the benefit of the elite, subjugating users to a largely passive role in the process of designing products, therefore creating services largely unintentionally and repressing the role of the majority of users in creating value. Irrespectively, taxing them for the use of inadequate public and private services. Service design, social design and the participatory methods that underpin them present a new vision or world order that is different to that.
Were the Trotsky-ist Whites in Russia naive to think that their revolution would occur and be sustainable without militant action, perhaps, but the truth is we will never really know. Am I naive to think that Service Design as a professional discipline might for those involved in it genuinely be about empowering users in the process of value creation, as opposed to the next masquerade of the design industry and corporate culture – perhaps, again, only time will tell.
The fact is that the ‘socialist’ experiment failed in Russia because economically it could not compete with the West, much of the recent 20-years-on reflection on the fall of the Berlin Wall reiterates such a view. Just as equally, Service Design as a philosophy could fail if its economic imperatives become too far divorced from it’s social, humanitarian and political responsibilities. If nothing else history tells us that quick opportunistic grabs of power and control don’t tend to be socially, economically or politically sustainable.
What do you think, does Service Design have enough integrity as a discipline?
As a discipline do you think Service Designers spend enough time reflecting on the politics, history and philosophy behind their processes?
How much can historical and philosophical reflection help simplify modern day complexity?
