Thinking in Services

We think we know services — not a day goes by without using them — until we have to design them. It is then that their realities confront us, teasing us sometimes. While services have always been ‘designed’, the qualities of their designs are more important than ever, given how much more we depend on them. Thus the need for deepening our understanding of what services are, what they can be, and why they fail — often in unexpected ways. This book reveals the surprising design of services — their internal structure or ‘DNA’ — through simple diagrams. It introduces a language and format for describing the concept of a service with clarity and depth. And, it provides the principles for implementing strategy through design.

Author
Majid Iqbal is an expert on policy, strategy, and design. As an advisor at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate he co-founded a special unit called XLAB; developing new approaches to complex problems and methods for visualizing systems, services, and transitions. He cut his teeth in sales and product management, before moving to teaching, consulting, and design. Since after Carnegie Mellon, Gartner, and PwC, he has been on a mission to bring more clarity to the concept of a service, as it relates to implementing policy or strategy. His other voyage of discovery is about cooking and patterns in food across cuisines and cultures.