This post draws on a paper Ana Kustrak and I presented at the NORDES 2023 conference, exploring the metaphors through which the role of "service designer" is understood in Swedish public sector contexts. The argument connects to themes I've been developing throughout this series: that metaphors are constitutive of understanding, that different stakeholders may hold different metaphors for the same phenomenon, and that this creates implementation gaps where activity happens but intended outcomes don't materialise.
The core provocation is this: just as "AI" functions as an abstract signifier onto which varied and incompatible meanings are projected, so does "service designer". The term creates an illusion of shared meaning while different stakeholders construct fundamentally different realities about what the role involves, what it can deliver, and what counts as success. I observed precisely this dynamic with "data science" when mapping the technoimaginary at SCÖ - different stakeholders filled the same term with entirely different content, and the abstraction held the project together precisely because no one forced the question of what it meant concretely.
Service Design as Reified Metaphor
In my earlier post on organisational metaphors, I explored how different metaphors for understanding institutions generate different possibilities for action. The machine metaphor suggests efficiency interventions; the organism metaphor suggests adaptation; the psychic prison metaphor suggests examining the constraints we impose on ourselves.
But what happens when the metaphor itself becomes treated as a description? Alan Blackwell (2007) calls this "reification" - when a metaphor loses its productive ambiguity and becomes treated as a literal account of reality. The metaphor stops being a tool for thinking and becomes a taken-for-granted category.
I want to argue that "Service Design" in the Swedish public sector has become a reified metaphor. It's an amalgam of design tools and facilitation techniques that in practice often has little to do with either the design of services or design for service (to use Lucy Kimbell's distinction). The words "Service Design" are used; activities called "Service Design" are performed; but services - in any meaningful sense - are not designed.
There's a gap between Service Design as metaphor and service design as practice. And that gap is filled by different stakeholders projecting different generative metaphors onto the term, creating the appearance of shared understanding where none exists.
Ten Generative Metaphors
Drawing on my experiences at SCÖ and Experio Lab, and on the broader literature on design roles, Ana and I identified ten overlapping generative metaphors through which the service designer role is currently understood in Swedish public sector organisations. Each metaphor illuminates certain aspects of the role while obscuring others. Each generates different expectations about what the designer should do, what success looks like, and what counts as legitimate design work.
1. Healer and Integrator
This metaphor casts organisations as fragmented or discontiguous - the result of Taylorist and Fordist efficiency drives that optimised parts at the expense of wholes. Services are experienced as broken, disjointed, causing frustration for users who must navigate between disconnected departments and systems.
The service designer, in this frame, is the great unifier. They bring together different stakeholders, map and document disparate interactions, and rebrand them as coherent service experiences. Design is healing; the organisation is the patient; fragmentation is the disease.
This metaphor connects to Morgan's machine image - the organisation as assemblage of parts that need integration. It generates expectations that the designer will produce wholeness, alignment, seamlessness.
2. Plumber
Related to the healer metaphor but with a more technical flavour. Here the designer is a manipulator of flows - crafting collaboration between silos through skilled management of data, information, and people. Drawing on cybernetic notions of circularity and requisite variety, this metaphor sees the designer as someone who can identify imbalances in organisational systems and rebalance them.
The organisation is a system of pipes and channels; the designer ensures the right things flow to the right places. This generates expectations of technical competence in mapping exchanges, modelling flows, identifying blockages.
3. Teacher or Coach
The "human-centred turn" in design has evolved alongside humanistic and organismic systems thinking from the 1980s and 1990s management literature. The organisation is conceived as a brain or ecosystem; designers, with their apparent mastery of reflexivity, are cast as helpful in regulating such learning systems.
In this frame - especially when designers are situated in "Development Departments" or attached to HR functions - the service designer becomes a teacher, tutor, or coach. They build capability. They help the organisation learn. They transfer skills rather than doing design work themselves.
This generates expectations of pedagogy, patience, and ultimately self-effacement: the designer's success is measured by others' capability, not by designed outcomes.
4. Mechanic or Purveyor of Tools
Service Design has become highly codified. The Personas and Journey Maps, Blueprints and Canvases have created an image of Service Design as a tool-based discipline. Designers are stewards of a toolbox of "magic methods" - techniques that can be applied to any situation.
This metaphor reduces the designer to a technician who knows which tool to use when. It generates expectations that the designer will produce the right canvas, facilitate the right workshop, deploy the right method. Success is methodological fidelity, not outcome achievement.
The danger here is what Jon Kolko calls "cargo cult" design - imitating the forms of design practice without understanding the functions they serve.
5. Entertainer or Evangelist
This is perhaps the most troubling metaphor I encountered. It connects to trends in Human Resource Management focusing on employee engagement, particularly affective engagement with work.
In this frame, Service Designers are asked to lead workshops, conduct acts of public performance, perhaps with audience participation. Fuelled by the theatrical metaphor of "frontstage" and "backstage", and energised by designers who perhaps in their spare time are dancers and choir singers, the service designer is cast in an extrovert, performative role.
The Swedish phrase "roliga timme" - literally "fun hour" - captures this: design as a respite from the daily grind of public sector work, a novel or amusing sideshow that boosts morale without changing anything. The designer as entertainer, or as evangelical missionary trying to convert the heathens and re-engage bureaucrats with their working lives.
This metaphor generates expectations of energy, enthusiasm, and emotional labour. Success is measured by whether participants enjoyed themselves, not by whether services improved.
6. Democrat or Political Actor
Design in Scandinavia draws on the so-called "participatory tradition" - established in reaction to the digitisation of industrial production, and embracing democratic ideals of worker involvement and empowerment. This rhetoric blends social democratic values with neoliberal and New Public Management notions like competition, branding, and outsourcing.
In this frame, the designer is a political actor - facilitating participation, enabling voice, democratising decision-making. But the politics is often ambiguous. Is this genuine empowerment or legitimation theatre? Is participation an end in itself or a means to better outcomes?
7. Bureaucrat
The emergence of "Design for Policy" discourse has provided the idea of the public sector designer as legitimate bureaucrat - a cog in the machinery of government, integral or adjunct to policymaking processes.
This metaphor helps explain a tendency I've observed: designers refashioning their material as "policy" whether it is policy they're designing or not. Or refashioning their material as "service" whether it is a service they're designing or not. The bureaucrat metaphor legitimises design within governmental structures, but at the cost of subordinating design logic to administrative logic.
8. Visualiser and Materialiser
Many challenges the public sector faces are intangible - we can see the effects of homelessness but it's harder to observe the causes or trace causality. How do we solve complex problems if we can't see them?
This metaphor casts the designer as someone who makes the invisible visible, the intangible tangible. With tools for mapping causality and exploring unnavigated journeys between touchpoints, the designer visualises previously unseen patterns and synthesises previously unimagined solutions.
This connects directly to design's "making visible" orthodoxy that I've been examining critically. The assumption is that visualisation enables action - that once people can see a problem, they'll be able to solve it. My experience suggests this assumption is sometimes false.
9. Humaniser
Related to the visualiser metaphor: the designer as someone who introduces human perspectives into bureaucratic systems. Using personas, user stories, first-person narratives, the designer creates human representations that simplify and democratise complexity.
This is design as humanising practice - countering the abstraction and dehumanisation of administrative systems by putting faces to numbers, stories to statistics.
10. Sensemaker
Drawing on Weick's work on organisational sensemaking, and on embodied and somaesthetic interaction design, this metaphor casts design as a sensemaking practice. The designer helps organisations explore different modes of sensing and making sense.
It's not simply enough to humanise processes - we must help these inhuman systems feel what it is like to be human, and use this felt understanding for the purpose of designing better services.
The Implementation Gap
These ten metaphors don't coexist harmoniously. They generate different expectations, different success criteria, different practices. When a project manager expects a mechanic and gets an evangelist, or expects a bureaucrat and gets a political actor, frustration follows.
More fundamentally, most of these metaphors have little to do with actually designing services. A healer integrates existing fragments; they don't design new wholes. A teacher builds capability; they don't produce designed outcomes. An entertainer boosts morale; they don't change how services work. A visualiser makes things visible; but visibility doesn't automatically produce change.
The question Ana and I posed in the NORDES paper was blunt: "If something called Service Design happened here, what purpose did it serve and what in fact did we design?"
Often, the answer is: some form of discussion, collaboration, or consultation was performed using design methods. People sat in a room talking with post-its on a whiteboard, or on Zoom around a Miro board. But what is the difference between this and any other form of semi-competent facilitation?
If no services were designed, what needs were addressed? What transformation of the physical world occurred? And what form did it take?
The Meta-Problem
This brings me to a meta-problem that has been lurking throughout this series.
In my first post on metaphor, I argued that design can help develop shared mental models - co-producing genuine understanding where pseudo-understanding previously existed. By surfacing the generative metaphors in play, by making explicit the tacit frames through which problems are set, design might help stakeholders recognise when they're using the same words to mean different things.
In my post on AI metaphors, I explored how this might work for technology - noticing that "AI" is an abstract signifier, and that different stakeholders project different source domains onto it.
In my post on organisational metaphors, I explored how this might work for institutions - noticing that different stakeholders hold different images of what organisations are and can do.
But here's the meta-problem: if the metaphor for design itself is contested, how can design help others develop shared understanding?
If I think of myself as a visualiser and my stakeholder thinks of me as an entertainer, we will talk past each other. If the organisation expects a miracle worker and I offer methodological facilitation, disappointment is inevitable. If "service design" means ten different things to ten different people, then the practice that's supposed to clarify meaning is itself mired in confusion.
Design can't bootstrap shared understanding of other domains if there's no shared understanding of what design is.
What Might Help
I don't have a solution to this meta-problem, but I have some tentative thoughts.
Name the metaphors. Simply identifying the generative metaphors in play - asking "what do you expect service design to do here? what would success look like?" - might surface divergent expectations before they cause frustration. The metaphors listed above could serve as a diagnostic tool.
Refuse the miracle worker frame. When organisations project magical expectations onto design, the temptation is to accept them - they're flattering, and resisting them risks appearing negative. But accepting impossible expectations sets up inevitable failure. Better to name the expectation and negotiate something more realistic.
Focus on designed outcomes, not design activities. Many of these metaphors focus on what the designer does (facilitates, visualises, entertains) rather than what gets produced (services that work differently). Insisting on outcome language might help cut through the activity focus.
Accept that "Service Design" may be a lost term. If the gap between metaphor and practice is too wide, it may be better to abandon the term and describe what you actually do in more precise language. This is painful - there's institutional investment in "Service Design" as a brand - but it may be more honest.
Conclusion
The argument across this series has been that metaphors are not decorative but constitutive - they shape what we think is possible, what we see as problems, what solutions seem obvious. Different metaphors generate different realities. This parallels the argument I developed about sacred concepts - representations whose meaning derives from collective identity rather than empirical content. Like sacred concepts, reified metaphors resist challenge because they serve functions beyond description: they sustain collective commitments, organise identity, and produce the realities they appear merely to name.
For AI, this means recognising that stakeholders may be projecting incompatible meanings onto the term, creating pseudo-understanding where genuine understanding is needed.
For organisations, this means recognising that different images of institution generate different possibilities for action, and that conflicts between stakeholders may be conflicts between metaphors.
For design, it means recognising that the practice supposed to clarify understanding may itself be understood through multiple, conflicting metaphors - and that this creates implementation gaps where "Service Design" happens but services don't get designed.
If there's a way forward, it probably involves being more explicit about which metaphors are in play, more honest about what design can and cannot do, and more focused on outcomes than activities. But I'm not confident that explicitness, honesty, and outcome-focus are rewarded in the institutional contexts where service design is practised.
The miracle worker metaphor persists because it serves functions beyond understanding. It protects organisations from confronting structural constraints. It provides hope without requiring change. It allows activity to substitute for outcome - the performance-and-substance gap applied to design practice itself, where the performance of design (workshops, maps, canvases) substitutes for the substance of designed change.
Naming this doesn't make it go away. But it might help designers understand why their work feels caught between impossible expectations and invisible impact - and make more informed choices about what roles they're willing to play.
References
Bailey, J.A. (2021). Governmentality and power in 'design for government' in the UK, 2008-2017: an ethnography of an emerging field. University of Brighton.
Blackwell, A. (2007). The Reification of Metaphor as a Design Tool. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 13(4), 490-530.
Gibbs, R.W. (2008). The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge University Press.
Gulari, M.N. (2015). Metaphors In Design: How We Think Of Design Expertise. Journal of Research Practice.
Kimbell, L. (2011). Designing for service as one way of designing services. International Journal of Design, 5(2), 41-52.
Kolko, J. (2010). Abductive Thinking and Sensemaking: The Drivers of Design Synthesis. Design Issues, 26(1), 15-28.
Morgan, G. (2006). Images of Organization (Updated ed.). Sage Publications.
Murray-Rust, D., Nicenboim, I., & Lockton, D. (2022). Metaphors for designers working with AI. Proceedings of DRS2022.
Schön, D.A. (1993). Generative metaphor: A perspective on problem-setting in social policy. In A. Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought (2nd ed., pp. 137-163). Cambridge University Press.
Weick, K.E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage Publications.
Revision Note: This post is a public-facing version of the NORDES 2023 paper "Some Generative Metaphors for the Role of 'Service Designer' in the Public Sector in Sweden", co-authored with Ana Kustrak. The paper emerged from trying to make sense of the crossed expectations I'd experienced at SCÖ and Experio Lab - the feeling that different people wanted fundamentally different things from "the designer", without recognising that their expectations were incompatible.
The "meta-problem" section - asking how design can help others develop shared understanding when there's no shared understanding of design - became increasingly central to my thinking as the doctoral work developed. It connects directly to the "limits of making visible" theme: if design's mechanism for creating change (making things visible) depends on shared understanding of what design is, and that understanding is contested, then the mechanism is undermined from the start.
The ten metaphors listed here are not exhaustive - they emerged from Swedish public sector contexts and may not transfer to other settings. But the underlying point - that "service design" functions as an abstract signifier onto which incompatible meanings are projected - seems likely to generalise.
The connection to "cargo cult" design (performing the forms without understanding the functions) would prove important in later work, particularly in thinking about how design gets "captured" by institutional logics and repurposed for legitimation rather than transformation.