How the International Service Design Institute Hopes to Be Part of Every Service Designer’s Professional Growth

Part I — Developing the Service Concept

Our story begins and ends with a passion to contribute to the emerging and evolving community of service designers. To that end, my partner Naomi Lantzman and I formed the International Service Design Institute https://internationalservicedesigninstitute.com/ with the purpose of bringing greater recognition to the field, not just in the U.S., but around the world.

Our original intention was to build a suite of materials that service designers could rely upon, so they could perform their best with a tool kit of consistent, reliable resources. However, before launching all in, we came to realize that our ideas for achieving greater recognition were merely a toe-hold to a much larger endeavor. In fact, the idea of greater recognition was amorphous, almost like trying to find Cleveland from a picture of earth taken from the moon.

To succeed with our purpose, we would have to spell out in more detail how we intended to reach our goal. In service design, defining an organization’s purpose is called a service concept. Service concepts often show up in taglines. One of my favorites is from Ikea: “We do our “bit,” you do your bit, and together we save money.”

The service concept for the International Service Design Institute would need to better define greater recognition in order to complete the picture. This would involve a re-examination of our purpose.

Our overriding purpose was to protect the field by ensuring its credibility. It was becoming to easy for others to pick up on the service design trend and claim to provide those services. Greater recognition of the field would help, we surmised, but that would require a set of techniques that were universally accepted. In our eyes, the International Service Design Institute could be a catalyst, serving as a resource or repository of verified, validated methods, techniques, models and tools, which service designers could rely upon. So, our service concept became The International Service Design’s desire to disseminate reliable, credible information so service designers could do their best work, thereby bringing greater recognition to the field.

Taking the Institute’s Service Concept to the Next Logical Service

Given the inevitable push-pull relationship between service designers and hiring managers, we could also fulfill our service concept by influencing hiring managers. When employers are satisfied with the work of service designers, their satisfaction transfers to credibility for service design.

As that logic went, we believed we could help employers by helping to identify good, skilled service designers. Most other fields have standards, which sometimes include steps toward achieving certain outcomes. The standards are often the basis of certification programs that measure the competency of practitioners.

As an example, the Program Management Institute is exemplary, which has a Program Management Book of Knowledge (PMBoK) and a certification program. Find out more: Program Management Institute (PMI) Guides and Standards.

Certifications are used by human resources to benchmark professionals by skills and levels, for establishing the criteria for advancement, and for setting pay bands. But certification programs are tricky to design and are resource-dependent, requiring significant investments in money and people. And to be reliable as independent measurements, certification programs should not be a quid pro quo for paying a fee and passing a test.

However, we reasoned, the Institute could develop reliable, credible materials, and by laying them out methodically, in progressive order, there would be a basis for learning how to be a service designer. As such, acquiring this learning could be how employers can differentiate among service designers.

Next Installment, Part II — How International Service Design Institute Built a Progressive, Sequential Guide to Service Design https://bit.ly/3bJbsKZ