My Service Design origin story

My background is more technical than what is traditionally considered “creative”, having received my B.S. in Electrical Engineering and spent the bulk of my career as an Army communications officer or a systems engineer designing comms and network systems. What you could call “old school high tech.” Most of my work was in text or technical system diagrams; the most visual aspect of my work and thought processes were expressed through mind maps. I had never heard of journey maps or service blueprints, but I have come to realize that I was using mind maps to serve a similar purpose.

I learned to program with FORTRAN (on punch cards no less) and learned HTML in the late ’90s, but didn’t get involved with modern software development until 2014 when I participated in the inaugural Launchcode class with my son, Zeke. Which led me into my first hackathon (which we won :-), then a couple of start up weekends and a couple more hackathons. All of which coincided with my introduction to service design.

It was the fall of 2014 when a friend sent me an invitation to attend the kick-off meeting of the St. Louis Chapter of the Service Design Network (aka SDN). I had never heard of “service design”, much less the SDN, but the invitation came from someone whom I knew would not send me something frivolous or not worth my time. So I checked it out.

My first reaction when I read the definition of Service Design on the SDN site was, “That’s what I do.” Or, a bit more accurately, “That’s how I work.” Needless to say I was intrigued and hooked. (Unfortunately that definition is no longer on the SDN site, and I don’t believe I have it written down anywhere – I’ll dig through my notebook archives later and see if I can find it.) I don’t know that I consciously realized it at the time, but as I read that description of Service Design I had alternating thoughts of “that’s how I work” and “that sounds a lot like making a movie”. Which very quickly led me to that understanding that, even though I don’t make movies, I have brought approach of a film production to just about every major thing I’ve done. End-to-end, top-to-bottom.

If you had asked the teenage me, “What do you want to do when you grow up,” the most likely answer you would have received would have been along the lines of, “Make movies.” That’s a whole ‘nother blog post in itself (several probably), the tl;dr being that my understanding of the film making process – from preproduction through production and on to postproduction – greatly influenced my approach to the various jobs I have had through the year.

So, at that kick-off meeting of SDNSTL, when Sean Walsh asked everyone to introduce themselves and their experience with Service Design, I basically told the assembled crowd the story I recounted above.

And what a great crowd it was. In addition to Dave Gray, who had invited me, it was at this kickoff event that I first met Sean Walsh, Martha Valenta, Nathan Lucy, and many more. All of these people have continued to influence my learning and enhance my understanding of Service Design, along with Human Centered Design and UX design in general. I have also become more involved with the SD and UX community here in St. Louis, where I have met many more incredible people and have the opportunity to participate in several different events and activities.

As I have been learning more of the language, tools, and methods of service design I have started sketching out some journey maps and service blueprints from some of my past projects. Partly as a way to gain more fluency with the language and artifacts of Service Design, and partly as a way to build a portfolio to go along with my more traditional resume. I am also starting to incorporate service design more explicitly into the work I do now, partly as a way to improve what I create but also to start spreading the word among my teammates and customers about the value of this approach to developing solutions.