Service Design intro and readings
We start a new course, Service Design where we will work with Malmö libraries as a stakeholder to design for libraries during societal crisis. Good timing.
What is service design, and in particular in regards to libraries? It seems to be a bit of corporate buzzword bingo with a core of common sense that might not have been applied in most design projects. It feels like a response to the reductionist thinking where everything should be components and silos to be more resilient.
I can see similarities to web design where components are all the rage these days and a response to projects becoming more complex. It makes the overview of the project better as you know things won't affect other parts of the project. I think it also makes a holistic approach harder, not nesecarily hard but, when developers are only concerned with their own parts they can lose a sense for the whole. I think this is part of the frustration developers have with CSS, it is global and that can be hard. The problem I see is that this is reality, a component is nothing without the whole.
A problem I see in service design is that it seems to have different names and meanings to everyone. Everyone seems to have a set of rules that are all the right way to do it and there is a big dose of corporate self help gurus and buzzwords.