Skills Eat Tools for Breakfast

I keep reading articles that tries to define the differences between Service Design and UX Design, and they are usually in defense of one or the other, discussing the tools and methods. In my opinion the discussions are not at the right level. I think in order to understand the core of this discussion, a small dive into the history is necessary.

33 Years ago, Don Norman coined “UX Design” in his book “The Design of Everyday Things”. Don invented it due to the fact that he thought the term human interface and usability were too narrow. He wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.

The term “service design” that was coined by Lynn Shostack in 1982, just a few years before Don Norman invented “UX Design”. Shostack proposed that organisations develop an understanding of how behind-the-scenes processes interact with each other because “leaving services to individual talent and managing the pieces rather than the whole make a company more vulnerable and creates a service that reacts slowly to market needs and opportunities.”

But, before we continue on this journey, why don’t we all ride the Delorean and visit the early 20th century for a brief moment?

History Repeats Itself

Don Norman and Lynn Shostock was not the first to realise that they didn’t really fit to the description of the titles they had been given. William Addison Dwiggins coined the term ‘graphic design’ in a 1922 Boston newspaper article to describe the wide range of jobs he personally tackled. Prior to this, ‘commercial artist’ was the accepted label for the inter-related acts of drawing, spec-ing, comping and laying out.

Dwiggins, however, was a jack-of-many-graphic-trades, including, but not exclusively, illustrating books; composing pages; designing typefaces (among them, Metro and Caledonia); producing calligraphic hand lettering and stencil ornament; designing books and jackets; devising advertising and journal formats, along with handbills, stationery, labels and signs; as well as writing critical essays, short stories and marionette plays.

In those days, there were craftsmen and strong guilds with very specific tasks such as the typographer, typesetter, repro artist, layout artist, colouring artist, illustrator, copy writer and many more. But as technology progressed, mastering these crafts became the job of the modern graphic designer. And I’m sure if you go back in time, the typographers and layout artists would have had heated discussions about this so-called graphic designer, a unicorn who thought he could do their job and to the same level of quality.

Fast forward a few decades. In the late 90s and the early 2000s, I witnessed that “traditional” graphic designers were struggling. And as Dwiggins realised in his time, there was complete shift in the role of the designer. Many design support services closed or converted to the digital technology. Designers were again forced to take on roles formerly not their responsibility, such as user interface design and coding. The designer’s thinking skills were surpassed by the need for digital expertise.

“The tools of the designer are often confused with the skills of the designer …” — Johanna Drucker

Designers saw the growing intersection of graphic design with time-based media, information design and associated disciplines such as writing and producing, as well as the blurring of boundaries between fine art and design, who and what they were(and ultimately wanted to be) became ever more complicated to define and, therefore, to name. And as design not being a licensed profession, they could invent fancy titles for themselves, maybe part from Doctor or Professor or something.

In the end of the 90s, when schools and design firms started affixing loftier titles to their degrees and business cards, the most common newbie was ‘communications design’, which, along with ‘graphic communications’ and ‘visual communications’ and ‘multimedia design’, seemed to address the transition from old to new media. Later Richard Saul Wurman (The founder of TEDtalks) gave us the quixotic ‘information architect’, which, as the Web became a dominant presence in design practice, gained popularity, along with ‘user-interface designer’, ‘human-centred interface designer’, ‘experiential interface designer’ and all sorts of in-your-face interface verbiage.

The Lines Are Blurring Again

Now back to the present, the lines are once again blurring. Due to the digitisation and transformation of entire industries, and the combinational matrix of technologies designers are now forced to navigate, a new generation of designers are merging disciplines; business, coding, research, writing, visual design, interaction design, information architecture, industrial design, service design and product design — resulting in that now designers are again facing a conundrum. How do they telegraph what they do?

Generally, the current perception of the role of UX designers isn’t at all what Don Norman originally intended. Today a UX Designers role in a project isn’t to step back and design an entire service. On the occasions that they do apply their skills to service-level problems, friction occurs between the two roles, and they are entering the “realms” of what is coined Service Design.

One reason that there is a blurred line between UX design and service design is that there is significant overlap in the purpose of their work: designing the best experience for a user.

There is also overlap in the methods they use to conduct research: interviewing people, observing users, identifying their needs, designing and prototyping touchpoints.

However, there are some tools that are more exclusive to service design. These tools reflect the fact that service design is interested not only in touchpoint-level UX, but also in the “big picture” of how the system functions holistically to deliver a service.

So, now that we’ve established that it’s the tools that are the difference, let me (finally) make my point; The difference is actually quite simple; it’s the nature of the design problem that they are trying to solve.

The difference of UX and Service design is actually quite simple, it’s the nature of the design problem that they are trying to solve.

It’s All About Experience

I struggle to see, why a skilled designer, should not be expected to, or aspire to cover the full spectrum of design! If you want to work deep, do it, and if you want to tackle the problem of solving a complex interaction, do it. And if you feel ready for a trip on Elons latest rocket and design the bigger picture from space, and you have the skills and tools lined up in your toolbox — then do it! And do so without feeling the need to affixing loftier titles to your business card.

I think we can agree that, you cannot NOT have an experience. And every experience will have to be designed one way or the other, intently or not — on the big picture and down to the nitty gritty pixels.

Being a design leader for years, I know that when designers mature and gain experience, a clear telltale sign is when they grow in their ability to zoom more and more out of their craft, and master several aspects of their trade and such gains the ability to zoom in and out as second nature from the detailed visual design all the way out to more strategic design, and dealing with business models and end to end customer journeys throughout every touchpoint, physical and non-physical. The way I see it, is that It’s more a matter of experience and the amount of skills you carry in your backpack.

So in my opinion, I don’t think we are in the need for another Dwiggins moment, but it’s time to discriminate the labels, and look more at the skills people have, and not just the tools they master!

Holding a problem oriented mindset and understanding technology and mastering empathy, critical thinking, and complex problem solving is key, and once you have these skills, you will eat tools for breakfast.

“Thinking is hard, typesetting is easy” — Steven Sagmeister