Design Leads Us Where Exactly - Is 2009 The Year Service Design Emerges
Friday, December 18, 2009 at 01:00AM Lucy Kimbell is the Clark Fellow in Design Leadership at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford with a background in interaction design and visual/live arts. Her interest has been in the field of design thinking. This piece is from her recent blog and is an excellent summary of this emerging field. A Google search for “service design” is one way of indexing what is a growing field of practice and scholarly enquiry. On the basis of a search today (December 16, 2009), the term is resonant enough to have a long-ish entry in wikipedia (although it “provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject”). What comes next are links to two consultancies: Engine (based in London) and live|work (ditto). Practice leads theory, then. But although they are leading the field, they are extremely small – 20 people at the former, 13 people at the latter, according to their websites today. This was a year in which service design began to move away from being the province of designers educated and practicing in the art school tradition to an activity in which designers have something important to contribute, but which is not necessarily owned by Design.