Before I became a service designer, I spent several years working as a ski instructor in Norway. The transition from teaching people to ski to designing public services might appear to be a categorical shift - from physical, embodied, sensory work to the abstracted world of journey maps, service blueprints, and stakeholder workshops. But as Folkmann (2013) argues, all design practice involves the structuring of experience, and experience is always simultaneously sensual, conceptual, and contextual. The distance between these two professional domains is shorter than their surface descriptions suggest; both involve shaping other people's experience, both require a sensitivity to what people are encountering that extends beyond what documentation can capture, and both demand aesthetic judgement that the professional vocabularies available in each domain struggle to articulate.
When you teach someone to ski, you are shaping their sensory encounter with a landscape - the feel of snow under their feet, the way weight shifts through a turn, the relationship between speed, gradient, and confidence. You are simultaneously shaping how they understand what they are doing: the mental models they construct, the metaphors that help or hinder their learning, the way they interpret their own bodily sensations.
And you are doing all of this within a context that is at once natural (the mountain, the weather, the snow conditions) and thoroughly designed (the groomed pistes, the lift system, the resort infrastructure, the booking process that brought them there). The aesthetic quality of the experience - what makes it feel right, or wrong, or transformative, or merely adequate - emerges from all three dimensions at once, and the instructor's skill lies in attending to all three simultaneously.
Service design, as a professional practice, faces a structurally similar challenge but with considerably less vocabulary for discussing it. When I design a public service, I am shaping people's experience of interacting with an institution; this experience has sensory dimensions (what the interface looks like, how the physical environment feels, whether the letter is comprehensible), conceptual dimensions (how the service constructs the user's situation, what categories it imposes, what assumptions it makes about their needs), and contextual dimensions (the policy environment, the institutional constraints, the wider system within which the service operates). Yet the professional discourse of service design tends to collapse these into a single, undifferentiated notion of "user experience" or "service quality" that obscures the distinct registers through which experience is structured.
Folkmann's three platforms
Mads Nygaard Folkmann's (2013) The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design provides a framework that helps articulate what is at stake. Folkmann argues that aesthetics is not a decorative supplement to design but a central entry point for understanding how design mediates and conditions experience. He proposes three "platforms" through which design structures experience: the sensual-phenomenal, the conceptual-hermeneutical, and the contextual-discursive.
The sensual-phenomenal platform concerns how designed objects and environments engage the senses - what they look, feel, sound, and smell like, and how these sensory qualities shape the character of an experience. This is the most immediately recognisable dimension of aesthetics, and the one that design discourse tends to default to when it discusses aesthetics at all; it is where discussions of "look and feel", visual design, and interaction design typically operate. But Folkmann's (2013) point is that sensual experience in design is never merely sensory; it is always already shaped by conceptual and contextual factors that determine what is sensed and how it is interpreted.
The conceptual-hermeneutical platform concerns the meanings that designed objects carry and generate. As Folkmann (2016, p. 2) puts it in a later paper, design connects "sensual material with concepts and frames our experience through this relationship". A service blueprint, for instance, is not merely a visual artefact; it embodies particular ways of understanding what a service is, who participates in it, and what matters about it. The choice to represent a service as a linear journey rather than a network of relationships, or to foreground certain touchpoints while backgrounding others, is a conceptual choice with aesthetic consequences - it shapes what the service means, to designers and users alike.
The contextual-discursive platform concerns the wider social, cultural, and institutional contexts within which designed objects operate and are understood. A healthcare service, for example, operates within contexts shaped by professional norms, regulatory frameworks, cultural expectations about care, and political decisions about resource allocation. These contextual factors are not external to the aesthetic experience of the service; they constitute part of it. As Folkmann (2013) argues, the contextual platform frames what kinds of sensory and conceptual experiences are possible in the first place.
The aesthetic deficit in service design
What Folkmann's framework makes visible is a structural deficit in how service design currently attends to the aesthetic dimensions of its work. The sensual-phenomenal dimension is addressed, to some extent, through interaction design, visual design, and the increasing attention to "service environments" in the design of physical spaces. But it is addressed piecemeal, as a property of individual touchpoints rather than as a quality of the service as a whole. The conceptual-hermeneutical dimension is addressed implicitly through the choice of design representations - journey maps, blueprints, personas, concept models - but rarely made explicit as an aesthetic choice. And the contextual-discursive dimension is typically treated as a constraint to be navigated rather than as an aesthetic material to be shaped.
This deficit matters because, as Yuriko Saito (2007) argues, the aesthetic judgements we make in everyday encounters with designed environments are not trivial. They are what Saito calls "moral-aesthetic" judgements: responses that are aesthetic insofar as they derive from perceptual experience but which have implications that extend well beyond the moment of perception. The way a benefits application form looks and feels shapes how the applicant understands their relationship with the state. The conceptual structure of a healthcare pathway shapes which experiences of illness are recognised and which are rendered invisible. The contextual framing of a digital platform shapes whose participation is invited and whose is foreclosed. These are aesthetic choices with moral and political consequences, and service design currently lacks the theoretical apparatus to discuss them as such.
Jane Forsey (2013) makes a related argument in her account of design aesthetics, distinguishing between the "fine art" conception of aesthetics (concerned with beauty, contemplation, and disinterested judgement) and what she terms a "functional" aesthetics appropriate to designed objects. Designed objects, Forsey argues, are encountered in use rather than in contemplation; their aesthetic qualities are inseparable from their practical functions; and aesthetic judgement in design is always situated, contextual, and bound up with the purposes the object serves. This functional account of aesthetics aligns well with the experience of service design: the aesthetic quality of a service is not something apprehended in contemplation but something encountered in the midst of use, shaped by needs, expectations, and the practical circumstances of the encounter.
Why this matters for practice
The previous post explored Folkmann's dichotomies - material and immaterial, actual and possible, known and unknown - as a way of understanding what kind of thing designers work with. The aesthetic question extends this: not just what kind of material design works with, but how design shapes the quality of experience that its materials produce. As Schön (1983) established, practitioners in design-oriented professions rely heavily on tacit, situated judgement - a "feel for" the material that resists full articulation. The most consequential design decisions, in both ski instruction and service design, are often aesthetic ones - decisions about what feels right, what communicates clearly, what respects the dignity of the person encountering the service - and these decisions operate largely through such tacit judgement rather than through explicit frameworks.
The ski instructor has, in this respect, an advantage over the service designer. The feedback loops are immediate and embodied: you can see whether the student is balanced, feel whether the turn is flowing, sense the moment when comprehension shifts from intellectual to physical. The material is tangible even when the skill being developed is not. Service design, by contrast, operates at a distance from the sensory experience it shapes; the designer rarely encounters the service in the way the user does, and the feedback loops that would support aesthetic refinement are attenuated by organisational complexity, institutional intermediation, and the temporal distribution of service encounters across days, weeks, or months.
Developing a more articulate account of aesthetics in service design - one that takes seriously the sensual, the conceptual, and the contextual as distinct but interrelated dimensions of designed experience - is therefore not an academic exercise but a practical one. It is an attempt to build vocabulary for something that practitioners already do, imperfectly and largely without theoretical support, and to make visible the aesthetic dimensions of decisions that are currently discussed in other terms: "usability", "accessibility", "user satisfaction", "service quality". Each of these terms captures part of the aesthetic picture, but none captures the whole, and the absence of an integrating framework means that the aesthetic dimensions of service design remain fragmented across different professional discourses, each of which attends to one register while neglecting the others.
The next post will take this argument in a more explicitly political direction, drawing on Jacques Rancière's conception of aesthetics as the "distribution of the sensible" to argue that the aesthetic choices service designers make are simultaneously political choices about whose experiences are recognised and whose are rendered invisible.
References
Folkmann, M. N. (2013). The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design. MIT Press.
Folkmann, M. N. (2016). The Role of Aesthetics for Design Phenomenology: The Sensual, Conceptual, and Contextual Framing of Experience by Design. Proceedings of the 11th EAD Conference. Sheffield Hallam University.
Forsey, J. (2013). The Aesthetics of Design. Oxford University Press.
Saito, Y. (2007). Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford University Press.
Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.