Service Design, Where art thou?

Why doesn’t service design exist in the USA?

Sorry, a bit off topic, and a bit late.

I recently saw a post on LinkedIn that spoke about a “new” concept called total experience. Let’s forget for a moment the word salad piece. Oy! So many words trying to describe the same things.

One of the concepts is that there are a lot of xXs at play:

• Customer Experience (aka marketing + quantitative user research + lean experimentation)

• Employee Experience (aka HR + design)

• User Experience (design + user research)

• Multi-Experience (previously known as Omnichannel)

But don’t all of these just fall under the umbrella of service design?

But that isn’t really my issue. The real issue is why is Service Design constantly cut out of conversation in almost all of US discourse of the design of complex systems in the United States?

Another example of this anti-“Service Design” is the recent uptick in jobs using the title, Journey Planners. These are a new class of product managers going by the job descriptions. Their jobs are to create (wait for it) journey maps based on the strategic needs of customers and end-users of product platforms. The idea is to help product organizations unlock their silos by looking at the total human experience across the company’s total line of products and services instead of looking at it business unit by business unit.

So my question is really, where did Service Design go wrong in the United States? Why doesn’t this language work with organizations? Why do other parts of the design and product management organization struggle to create service design practices while at the same time ignoring decades of knowledge and practice creation by the service design community of practice and relevant academic sources?

This hasn’t only happened to Service Design. There are other examples in user experience design, or just design itself, but Service Design here in the US seems to be hit the hardest right now.

What do you all think?