Looking Ahead: Service Design Education

By Aviv Katz

A hundred and fifty years ago the first design schools were set up by the British government to supply the flourishing manufacturing industries with industrial artists, as designers were then known. Since then, design education has evolved as a fascinating reflection of social, cultural and economic trends, with a pedagogical agility very few subjects could have sustained within the confines of their discipline.

Service design education is now at the vanguard of change. Having crept in slowly over the last decade, mainly through progressive product design courses, the first service design courses and academic research projects are now taking off. Courses such as those at Glasgow School of Art, Northumbria University and Goldsmiths have been set up to supply a growing demand for designers who can think creatively and apply design skills on a variety of platforms (2D, 3D, 4D) and industries. They also reflect the shrinking demand for traditional product design graduates, brilliant at hand-rendering electronic gadgets and specifying injection moulding processes and tools but less suited to a knowledge-based, service economy.

This is all good news, but there are a few things to remember. The first is that as service design matures as a subject, it will require courses to commit to producing good service designers, not just good generalists, which is still often the case. The second is that many service design methodologies are transferable across a range of courses – mainly in design and business subjects. We are already seeing a growing number of positions in both public-sector and commercial organisations where understanding the value of service design methodologies is critical to the new ways in which these organisations engage with their customers. Careful attention to building a robust base of service design skills will lead to flourishing courses and happier customers.