Thinking
Where the practice thinks out loud: journals and research, practitioner writing, podcasts and newsletters worth subscribing to.
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A method for mapping a service end to end, showing what the user experiences alongside the frontstage and backstage work that makes it happen. Explained clearly by Nielsen Norman Group.
Nielsen Norman Group's short introduction to service design: what it is, how it relates to UX, and the core concepts of frontstage and backstage.
A meta-analysis in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes of how peaks, endings and duration relate to the way people evaluate experiences in retrospect.
Co-author of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, host of the Power of Ten podcast, and a writer on design at many scales.
A 2021 paper proposing a power literacy framework for service designers, covering privilege, access, goals, roles and rules. Open access copy from TU Delft.
An Ethics and Information Technology article examining dark patterns through four dimensions of autonomy: agency, freedom of choice, control and independence.
A Design Management Academy 2017 paper exploring cultural analysis and semiotics as ways to understand expectations, identity and symbolic meaning in services.
A CHI 2026 paper mapping dark patterns to deception, manipulation and the distortion or impairment of choice, and identifying the design factors involved.
The UK government's blog about design, written by the people doing it across departments. Honest accounts of what worked and what did not.
An edited academic collection on the theory and future of designing for services, bringing together researchers from the field's main university groups.
A Design and Culture article reviewing the concept of autonomy and exploring its use in service design through case studies of services for older people.
A Journal of Business Research article examining how first, peak and final impressions, and the delay before recall, relate to overall evaluations of a service, using hotel stays.
Ten principles for designing government services, starting with 'start with user needs'. Short enough to read in five minutes and widely borrowed outside government.
Nielsen Norman Group on what interviews can and cannot reveal, including fallible memory and rationalised accounts of past behaviour, and why they pair with observation.
Mapping what a person does, thinks and feels as they try to get something done across a service. Nielsen Norman Group's introduction covers the anatomy and the pitfalls.
A ServDes 2020 paper drawing together four different views of culture in service design and arguing for attention to cultural plurality rather than a single fixed understanding.
A team in the UK Cabinet Office that brings design, data and ethnography into policy making, and writes openly about how.
A ServDes 2025 paper introducing a project-centred template for examining how social, political and ecological forces enable or constrain design work. A proposed tool whose evaluation is ongoing.
A chapter in Doing Good Qualitative Research examining how power in the researcher and participant relationship shapes what is learned, and proposing a power-conscious approach.
Andy Polaine's podcast about design operating at many levels, from details to systems, with guests across service, strategic and systemic design.
The Service Design and Innovation conference, the main academic gathering for service design research, held every two years with open proceedings.
Marc Fonteijn's long-running video series and podcast of conversations with service design practitioners, aimed squarely at people doing the work.
Recordings of talks from the Service Lab London meetup on YouTube, going back several years. A good way to hear practitioners describe real work.
An occasional printed newspaper about service design, started by Martin Jordan in 2015, with short pieces from practitioners around the world. Most articles are also published online.
A ServDes 2018 paper and case study exploring stakeholder mapping as a way to talk about roles and the distribution of power in public service design.
Gerry Scullion's podcast network on human-centred design, with a dedicated strand of conversations about service design and public services.
The Service Design Network's journal, published since 2009. Each issue takes a theme and mixes practitioner and academic writing.
Daniela Sangiorgi's widely cited 2011 paper in the International Journal of Design on service design as a driver of organisational and social change.
A journal article examining the contextual and organisational factors that limit service designers' ability to address power dynamics in their work.