My parents have a tray of colourful wooden blocks in various shapes and sizes. I played with them as a kid, my nieces and my son play with them. The standard game is to see how tall a tower you can make before the child knocks it over.
Since my son is less destructive these days, I’ve stopped making a tower to be destroyed, I just build something aesthetic. Something sculptural and visually pleasing. It’s a small pleasure to indulge that bit of my brain. Letting a sense of emotion and aesthetics guide me, deliberately avoiding efficiency. This feels like creativity to me. It doesn’t feel like design.
Design is a process – empathise, define, ideate, prototype and test. These steps don't need to be creative.
I’ve been a graphic designer and an interaction designer, I carry those skills with me. The idea of a designer makes sense to me when it's linked to a material or form. Writers use words, mathematicians use maths — an interaction designer uses code, visual language, words, to make a series of screens into a journey. When work doesn't have a material, is it design?
Service design doesn't have a material, so it doesn't feel like design. Or if it does have a material, those materials aren’t unique to service designers. Workshops, decks, conversations – things anyone in a meeting can do.
Service design is about creating shared understanding – mapping what exists now, prototyping what could. These days I plan and communicate. I’m not sure this makes me a designer. This isn’t semantics, but about how I think about my work. Making things makes me happy. Doing the work to do the work.