My parents have a tray of colourful wooden blocks in various shapes and sizes. I played with them as a kid, my nieces played with them when they were little, my son plays with them now. The game is usually 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 try to 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. It’s often logic and application of patterns. Find a proven solution and adapt it.
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 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. Or if it does, those materials aren’t unique to service designers. Research, mapping, 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.
I’ve done a few getting to know the team sessions since starting a new role this year. I find myself saying “I like making things”. Taking pride in execution. Communicating with precision. I think this sometimes makes me quite annoying to work with.