The International Service Design Institute, a professional development organization for service designers, was born out of the passions and interests of two service designers who wanted to develop a service design resource.
As a co-founder, my background, besides service design, is an insatiable curiosity in how services work along with writing and researching skills in business topics. Throughout my career, I would daydream about how businesses work and piece them apart by their components, even going to the lengths of researching the services and interviewing its leaders.
Naomi, in the meantime, is a black belt in developing course curriculum and in digital transformation. She has taught more than a hundred online classes and developed dozens of curriculum, and besides, is a whiz at building online platforms and systems.
Combining our skills and passions, including our desire to share our experiences and knowledge, led us to launch the International Service Design Institute, a central resource for service design education. Our mission is to offer some of the advantages of a professional association but without compulsory membership. Notably, we wanted the Institute to serve as a resource for professional development, providing credible information for service designers’ to use in practice, plus industry-specific news, events, and more.
ISDI Website
Our first challenge was developing the criteria of what we thought every service designer should know. That was closely coupled with developing an online presence and a learning platform. For our criteria, we continued to accumulate case studies, techniques, models, and templates.
With those accumulated, we also realized service designers are at different levels of experience and knowledge, and it made the most sense for us to divide them. We decided on a collection of three, which would become the Service Designers Handbook Series.
Service Designers Handbook Series
The Apprentice – Volume 1: A foundational reference intended for novice or junior service designers, or those simply curious about the field of service design. Learners, gain valuable problem-solving skills associated with developing new Lines of Service (LOS). Topics include deconstructing service experiences, initiating service concepts, leading service evaluations, defining ideal ‘users,’ along with techniques for developing service loyalists.
The Journeyman – Volume 2: For service designers looking for the fundamentals involved in building a service. Topics include ideation, journey maps, service blueprints, and touchpoints. While the thrust and approach of these techniques may be familiar, readers have access to sequential step-by-step guidance for applying them, including case studies, templates and diagrams.
The Master – Volume 3: Intended for accomplished service designers, those with experience designer services and leading teams of service designers, who are looking to take service design to a whole new level. Topics include prototyping services, diagnosing service failure, measuring user experiences, and developing service recovery plans.
Additionally, realizing that learners acquire knowledge in different ways and in timeframes and for needs, the three catalogs were developed into separate books and courses, and made available through our learning platform.
Service Design Courses at ISDI
With all of our materials published, distributed and circulating, we began getting requests from seasoned service designers for a condensed version of our most demanded techniques. We thought this new project would take us weeks, but weeks turned to months and finally we published Service Design Models, Tools and Templates, a compilation that took the same effort to write and compile as each of the other books. But Service Design Models, Tools & Templates became our most acquired book and I think of it as an extension of our commitment to providing credible learning resources for service designers.
Service Design Models, Tools & Templates
In our next and final installment, Part IV, we unveil future projects all to advance our mission of offering service designers materials for professional development and advancement.