The previous post argued that service design faces an aesthetic deficit: a lack of vocabulary and theoretical apparatus for discussing how services structure experience across sensual, conceptual, and contextual registers. Folkmann's (2013) three-platform model provides a way of decomposing aesthetic experience in design, but it does not, on its own, address a question that becomes unavoidable once one takes aesthetics seriously in a service design context: whose experience is being structured, and on whose terms?
This is where the argument becomes political. The philosopher Jacques Rancière (2013) offers a conception of aesthetics that is, from the outset, concerned with precisely this question. For Rancière, aesthetics is not about beauty or taste; it is about the "distribution of the sensible" - the system of implicit rules and conventions that determines what is perceptible within a given social order, who has the capacity to perceive it, and what can be said about what is perceived. As Rancière (2013, p. 8) puts it, aesthetics concerns the "delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience".
This formulation is useful for service design because it reframes what service designers do. A service designer, with their journey maps and blueprints and touchpoint specifications, is engaged in exactly this kind of delimitation. Every service blueprint makes some experiences visible and others invisible; every journey map foregrounds certain actors and backgrounds others; every touchpoint specification determines what can be sensed by whom and under what conditions. These are not neutral representational choices; they are, in Rancière's terms, distributions of the sensible - acts that determine the boundaries of what is perceptible within the service encounter.
The allemannsrett as aesthetic distribution
To make this concrete, consider a case from outside the conventional territory of service design. Norway's allemannsrett - the right to roam - is a legal principle, codified in the friluftsloven (Outdoor Recreation Act), that grants everyone the right to access uncultivated land regardless of ownership. It is a piece of legislation, but it is also, in Rancière's terms, a distribution of the sensible: it determines who has access to the sensory experience of landscape, and on what terms. The allemannsrett literally redistributes what can be perceived - the mountain, the forest, the fjord - by detaching access to embodied experience from property ownership.
This might seem remote from service design, but the Norwegian outdoor recreation sector is also a thoroughly designed service ecology. The Den Norske Turistforening (DNT) maintains a network of mountain huts and marked trails; ski resorts groom pistes, operate lift systems, and construct the physical and commercial infrastructure of winter holidays; tourism operators package experiences that combine landscape, physical activity, accommodation, and cultural ritual into coherent service offerings. The aesthetic quality of these experiences - what makes a week's cross-country skiing in the Norwegian mountains feel like a particular kind of encounter with landscape - emerges at the intersection of natural environment, designed infrastructure, cultural practice, and legal framework.
Having worked in this sector for several years, I became attuned to the way these different registers interact. The experience of cross-country skiing, for instance, is not merely physical - the sensations of gliding, the rhythm of movement, the relationship between body and terrain. It is also deeply conceptual: shaped by cultural narratives about friluftsliv (outdoor life), by the Norwegian tradition of påskeferie (Easter holidays) with its distinctive aesthetic of woollen jumpers and kvikk lunsj in the snow, and by the mythology of cross-country skiing as an expression of national identity. And it is contextual in ways that are both obvious (weather, snow conditions, terrain) and less obvious (the allemannsrett that makes access possible, the investment decisions that determine which trails are groomed, the economic models that shape which experiences are commercially viable).
What struck me, moving from this context into service design practice, was how much of this multi-register aesthetic complexity is lost in the way we typically represent and discuss services. A journey map of the cross-country skiing experience would capture the sequence of touchpoints - booking, travel, arrival, equipment hire, skiing, meals, departure - but would struggle to represent the sensory quality of the skiing itself, the conceptual weight of the cultural traditions that give it meaning, or the political framework that makes access possible. The journey map, as a representation, performs its own distribution of the sensible: it makes certain aspects of the experience visible (functional interactions, temporal sequence, pain points) and renders others invisible (bodily sensation, cultural meaning, political infrastructure).
Service blueprints as political acts
McCarthy and Wright (2015) develop a related argument in their account of the politics and aesthetics of participation in experience-centred design. Drawing explicitly on Rancière, they argue that participatory design practices are never simply methods for involving users in design; they are aesthetic and political acts that determine who is visible, whose voice counts as speech (rather than noise), and what forms of experience are recognised as legitimate input to the design process. The question of who participates in service design, and in what capacity, is not a methodological question about research techniques; it is an aesthetic-political question about whose sensory, conceptual, and contextual experience is admitted to the domain of the designable.
Josina Vink (2019), in her doctoral work on service ecosystem design, extends this analysis by examining how service designers make things visible and invisible through their representational practices. Vink demonstrates that the maps, models, and visualisations service designers produce are not neutral descriptions of service realities but active constructions that shape what can be seen, discussed, and acted upon. The service designer, in Vink's account, operates as what Rancière would call a distributor of the sensible: someone who determines, through their representational choices, the boundaries of what is perceptible within the service system.
This framing recontextualises decisions that are routinely treated as methodological or practical. The choice to use a journey map rather than a system map, or to foreground user experience rather than provider constraints, or to represent a service as a linear sequence rather than a complex adaptive system - these are not merely analytical preferences. They are distributions of the sensible that determine whose experience counts, what aspects of that experience are visible, and what is available for redesign. As Saito (2007) argues, such apparently mundane aesthetic choices can lead to consequential moral, social, and political outcomes; what she terms "moral-aesthetic" judgements are aesthetic in their mode but political in their effects.
Participation and co-creation
The participatory tradition in Scandinavian design (Ehn, 1988; 1993; 2008; Bjögvinsson, Ehn and Hillgren, 2012) offers a partial response to this problem, insofar as it insists that those affected by design outcomes should have voice in the design process. But Rancière's framework suggests that participation itself is not a solution to the problem of aesthetic distribution; it is another site where the distribution occurs. Who is invited to participate? In what capacity? Whose forms of knowledge count as relevant input? What modes of expression are recognised as contributions to the design process?
Akama (2015) makes this point with precision, arguing that participation in service design involves a continuous reconfiguring of invisible social structures. The structures she identifies are not the formal governance arrangements but the aesthetic-political distributions that determine who is perceptible as a participant, whose experience is legible as relevant, and whose contributions register as design input rather than noise. A service co-design workshop that invites patients to share their experiences of a healthcare pathway has already made a distribution of the sensible: it has determined that patient experience counts as relevant input, that verbal testimony is a legitimate form of expression, and that the workshop format is an appropriate vehicle for this kind of knowledge. Other distributions were possible - and each would have produced a different account of the service, a different set of design possibilities, a different politics.
The literature on service co-creation and value co-creation (Vargo and Lusch, 2007; 2016; Blomberg and Darrah, 2015; Vink and Koskela-Huotari, 2021) has developed increasingly sophisticated accounts of how value emerges through the interactions between providers and users within complex service ecosystems. But this literature has largely operated within an economic and organisational frame rather than an aesthetic-political one. Rancière's contribution is to insist that the conditions under which co-creation occurs - what is perceptible, who can speak, what counts as a contribution - are not given but constituted, and that the constitution of these conditions is itself a political act with aesthetic dimensions.
Implications for practice
If service design is, at least in part, an aesthetic-political practice of distributing the sensible, then several things follow for how the practice is understood and conducted.
First, the representational tools of service design - journey maps, service blueprints, system maps, personas - are not merely analytical aids but aesthetic-political instruments. They deserve scrutiny not just for their analytical utility but for the distributions they perform: what do they make visible, what do they render invisible, whose experience do they foreground, and whose do they marginalise? This is not a call to abandon these tools but to use them with greater awareness of what they include and exclude - and, where possible, to use multiple representations that perform different distributions, so that what is invisible in one representation becomes visible in another.
Second, the designer's own aesthetic sensibility - their capacity to perceive what is happening across sensual, conceptual, and contextual registers - is not a supplement to their technical skill but a core professional capability. Folkmann's (2013) framework suggests that this sensibility operates across three distinct registers; Rancière's suggests that it is always already political, because what the designer can perceive determines the boundaries of what they can design. The development of aesthetic sensibility in service design is therefore not a matter of cultivating taste but of expanding the range of what is perceptible - of learning to sense registers of experience that the designer's training, cultural formation, and professional socialisation might otherwise render invisible.
Third, the political dimensions of service design are not confined to the content of what is designed (whose needs are met, what services are provided) but extend to the form of how it is designed (what is made perceptible, who participates, what counts as relevant knowledge). This is a point the design literature has increasingly recognised (Tonkinwise, 2019; Resnick, 2019; Bason, 2020), but Rancière's framework provides a more precise vocabulary for articulating it. The politics of service design is, at its foundation, an aesthetics: a question about the distribution of the sensible.
The next post will return to the embodied, sensual dimension of this argument - to the question of how, as design practice becomes more immaterial, the sensual qualities of what is being designed become simultaneously more important and harder to articulate.
References
Akama, Y. (2015). Continuous re-configuring of invisible social structures. In E. A. Bruni, L. L. Parolin, and C. Schubert (Eds.), Designing technology, work, organizations and vice versa (pp. 163-183). Vernon Press.
Bason, C. (2020). Design for Policy. Routledge.
Bjögvinsson, E., Ehn, P. and Hillgren, P. (2012). Design Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary Participatory Design Challenges. Design Issues, 28(3), 101-116.
Blomberg, J. and Darrah, C. (2015). An Anthropology of Services. Morgan and Claypool Publishers.
Ehn, P. (1988). Work-oriented Design of Computer Artifacts. Arbetslivscentrum.
Ehn, P. (1993). Scandinavian Design: On Participation and Skill. In D. Schuler and A. Namioka (Eds.), Participatory Design: Principles and Practices (pp. 41-77). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Ehn, P. (2008). Participation in Design Things. In Proceedings of the 10th Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design (pp. 92-101). ACM.
Folkmann, M. N. (2013). The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design. MIT Press.
McCarthy, J. and Wright, P. (2015). Taking [A]part: The Politics and Aesthetics of Participation in Experience-Centered Design. MIT Press.
Rancière, J. (2013). The Politics of Aesthetics. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Resnick, E. (Ed.). (2019). The Social Design Reader. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Saito, Y. (2007). Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford University Press.
Tonkinwise, C. (2019). Is social design a thing? In E. Resnick (Ed.), The Social Design Reader (pp. 9-16). Bloomsbury.
Vargo, S. L. and Lusch, R. F. (2007). Service-dominant Logic: Continuing the Evolution. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36(1), 1-10.
Vargo, S. L. and Lusch, R. F. (2016). Institutions and axioms: an extension and update of service-dominant logic. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 44(1), 5-23.
Vink, J. (2019). In/visible: Conceptualizing Service Ecosystem Design. Karlstad University.
Vink, J. and Koskela-Huotari, K. (2021). Social Structures as Service Design Materials. International Journal of Design, 15(3).