The Idea Lab
The Idea Lab is an information resource for service designers, where we share knowledge, including models and tools. By helping to grow and nurture service design through ideas, we hope to bolster the field of service design and careers of service designers.
Ask a Question
Post Your Idea
Newsletter Archives
Service Design News and Ideas
What Service Designers Can Do to Design Better Services
Service experiences typically involve multiple services that make up an entire, complete service. One way to think about this concept: services are a sum of its parts. And, complex services are a sum of distinct services. Others would describe it as a service system...
Newly Released Service Design Book – The Master
The Third in a Trilogy of Service Design Handbooks Published by the International Service Design Institute (Tampa, Fl., March 25, 2020) — The International Service Design Institute has released The Master, the third in a trilogy of handbooks for service designers....
The Good News: Disruptive Innovative Services Will Bring Markets Back
Stock markets as of late have taken dives and jumps due to fears around the Coronavirus epidemic, along with accompanied labor uncertainty. Yet in time, the markets will stabilize, and we’ll be just fine. That’s because we have a robust service sector, which is...
The Failure of New Coke
An Excerpt from The Master: A Handbook for Service Designers. (Available soon.) Anyone with a memory of the summer of 1985 will most likely remember the disastrous launch of New Coke, a reformulated recipe of the old standard. It was 1985 when the company suddenly...
Tufte’s 6 Principles for Graphical Integrity (Adopted for Service Design)
An Excerpt from The Master: A Handbook for Service Designers. (Available soon.) Numeric or quantitative results are opportunities to tell powerful narratives, foremost expert on visualizing information Edward Tufte, says. Tufte, a statistician and artist, has written,...
ISDI Re-Launches The Apprentice, The World’s First Service Designer’s Handbook
The Handbook is a step-by-step reference book for Service Designers and others for building and improving Services The International Service Design Institute (ISDI) has re-launched The Apprentice, a knowledge resource for building and improving services. The...
A Service Designer Could Have Prevented the Fiasco in Iowa (as featured in UX Collective)
The Iowa Democratic Party botched reporting the state’s caucus voting results this past Monday, the first barometer for voter’s preference in the U.S. presidential election, all because leaders there failed to prototype the process with a smartphone app, according to...
NPS Remains Useful – But a Useful Tool is Not Always the Correct Tool
It is easy to get caught up using one tool only to find it doesn’t get to the intended results. Take the NPS (Net Promoter Score), a topic that was featured on UX Collective, January 20, “Is it time we move beyond the NPS to measure user experience?” We think the...
International Service Design Institute Launches the First Sequential Online Course The Apprentice
The Apprentice course is the first installment culminating a three-year effort to catalogue the sequential steps to designing and building a service.
To Know User Centricity is to Understand Service Design
In 2017, Chicago-based aviation security officers forcibly dragged David Dao Duy Anh from his seat, injuring his face on an armrest and then proceeding to drag him up the aisle, an incident that caused the Vietnamese-American to lose consciousness. That episode seemed...
Setting Up Organizations to Succeed – Service Concepts
Wendy Stephens’ young daughter left her teddy bear at one of the parks or at their hotel inside Disney World Resort in Florida. This can spoil a memory of a Disney experience for a young one, including this seven-year-old. When they realized the precious stuffed...
On Gathering User Feedback: Feedback Plans
Sometimes service designers poke at new ideas by asking user groups about their lifestyles, beliefs and trends. These can turn out well, but there are other sources for ideas. Yet when it comes to finding out how users are getting along with a service experience,...
