This is Service Design Thinking

Have you ever wondered why some experiences—like visiting your favorite café or checking into a boutique hotel—feel effortless and delightful, while others leave you anxious or irritated? This is Service Design Thinking by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider answers that question by showing that great services aren't accidents—they're intentionally designed human systems. The book argues that service design thinking is a collaborative, iterative, and deeply human-centered approach to improving how organizations serve people.

Rather than seeing design as merely the act of creating physical products or visual identities, Stickdorn and Schneider contend that everything about a service—from its digital interfaces to its face-to-face interactions—can be designed. This requires thinking beyond isolated touchpoints toward a holistic experience that respects customers’ real lives, emotions, and contexts. The authors build their case by combining insights from design, marketing, management, ethnography, and psychology, turning service design into an interdisciplinary language anyone can learn.

A Dynamic, Human-Centered Approach

At the heart of the book is a simple but radical notion: services are co-created between providers and customers. Unlike products, which can be built and sold as static objects, services only exist when delivered and experienced. You, as a customer, participate—when you order a coffee, fill out a form, or post feedback. The authors thus argue that service design must start by viewing every problem through the eyes of users and all other stakeholders such as employees, managers, and partners.

To do this, they outline five core principles: user-centeredness, co-creation, sequencing, evidencing, and holistic thinking. Each principle challenges traditional business silos. For example, user-centeredness encourages empathy for people’s real motivations, while sequencing reminds designers that services unfold over time like stories. Evidencing makes invisible processes tangible—turning backstage actions into visible signals of care. Holistic means never losing sight of the full environment, including sensory cues like sounds and smells that shape feelings. Each principle is illustrated through real-world cases—from hospitals redesigning their patient experience to banks simplifying their customer interfaces.

Designing with, Not for, People

Stickdorn and Schneider argue that service design thinking thrives when everyone involved becomes part of the creative process. They recount how teams at organizations like DesignThinkers, Carnegie Mellon University, and Funky Projects invite customers, front-line workers, and managers into design workshops. These co-creation sessions often rely on hands-on tools like service safaris (exploring other businesses’ services to gain inspiration), personas (fictional customer profiles based on research), and journey mapping (visualizing the customer experience step-by-step). Such participation not only generates ideas but builds ownership—an employee who helped prototype a new service is far more likely to champion it later.

Why It Matters Now

We live in an age where nearly every organization—from hospitals to startups—competes on experience rather than product alone. The book situates service design as essential for innovation, social improvement, and sustainable growth. It shows how designers are now tackling complex social challenges like unemployment, healthcare access, and environmental sustainability through “social design.” Projects like Simón Berry’s ColaLife initiative, which used Coca-Cola’s distribution network to deliver medicine in rural Africa, exemplify how service design thinking applies far beyond corporate bounds.

Ultimately, This is Service Design Thinking is both a tutorial and a manifesto. It teaches practical tools—interviews, prototyping, blueprinting, and iterative testing—but also challenges you to think philosophically about design’s role in changing society. Stickdorn and Schneider’s message is clear: if you want to design better services—or change the systems around you—you must learn to think like a service designer: empathetic, experimental, and deeply connected to human motivation.

Stickdorn distills the complex world of service design into five foundation stones—each one describing how services can become human-centered, emotionally engaging, and effective. These principles act as a lens to rethink how organizations interact with people.

1. User-Centered

Every great service begins with understanding its users. The book reminds you that statistics and target demographics are not enough. Instead, empathize deeply with customers’ motivations, habits, and emotions. Marc Stickdorn uses the humorous comparison of two people both born in 1948—Prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne—to show how demographic data can be misleading. True design insight comes only when you step into the shoes of individual customers to see how they live, think, and interact.

2. Co-Creative

Services are co-produced by many stakeholders. Co-creation means bringing them all—customers, managers, engineers, and designers—into the creative process. This inclusion creates ownership and ensures alignment between what the organization offers and what people actually need. Stakeholder mapping and collaborative workshops become key methods for collective insight.

3. Sequencing

A service, unlike a product, exists over time. Designing it requires rhythm, timing, and flow. Stickdorn likens it to making a movie—each moment builds upon the previous one, creating mood and pacing. A customer experience like visiting a hairdresser unfolds through a pre-service (making an appointment), service (receiving the haircut), and post-service (reflecting afterward). Mapping this sequence helps reveal pain points and opportunities for delight.

4. Evidencing

Services are intangible—but people need physical signs to remember or trust them. Evidencing makes invisible processes visible. Examples include hotel housekeeping “signatures” like folded toilet paper or souvenir shampoo bottles that remind customers of positive experiences. Other evidence, like feedback cards or thoughtful signage, allows unseen backstage processes to be appreciated, turning transparency into empathy.

5. Holistic

Finally, everything about a service—its environment, employees, culture, and technology—must align. Designing holistically means considering sensory details (lighting, sound, smell), customer feelings, and organizational values. Stickdorn cautions that total holism is an illusion, but striving for it ensures consistency and depth. The result is a unified experience where the internal corporate identity matches the external image perceived by users.

Unlike traditional design models that treat projects as linear, service design is inherently cyclical. Stickdorn outlines an iterative four-step process—exploration, creation, reflection, and implementation. Each stage connects to the next, but designers often loop backward, refining insights and learning from mistakes. It’s less a straight road and more an evolving spiral of understanding.

Exploration: Discovering the Problem

Every design process begins with curiosity. During exploration, designers immerse themselves in the organization’s culture and customers’ worlds. Instead of rushing toward solutions, they focus on identifying the true problem—often hidden behind surface symptoms. Ethnographic tools like contextual interviews, shadowing, and cultural probes reveal real behavior. For example, DesignThinkers’ Customer Journey LAB with NL Agency used emotional journey maps to uncover frustrations employees and clients never verbalized.

Creation: Developing Ideas

Creation translates insights into concepts. Here, sticky notes, sketches, and brainstorming sessions abound. Designers co-create prototypes and storyboards that visualize possible scenarios. Touchpoints are refined, and new experiences mapped. In this phase, the community collaborates—just as seen in Carnegie Mellon University’s clinic redesign, where medical staff and patients created experience cards together to imagine better waiting experiences.

Reflection: Testing and Prototyping

Instead of assuming ideas will work, teams simulate real-life experiences using tools like service staging and desktop walkthroughs. Stickdorn suggests prototyping services like theater—acting out how customers and employees interact. These low-cost experiments allow quick feedback and emotional engagement. The goal: make mistakes early, learn quickly, and iterate. Carnegie Mellon’s team, for instance, used role-playing in exam rooms to refine clinic concepts based on patient reactions.

Implementation: Making it Real

This final stage turns prototypes into action plans. It’s where change management comes in—communicating the concept clearly to staff and integrating it into organizational systems. Implementation must consider employee motivation, internal training, and the business model. Storytelling and blueprinting help visualize processes for company leaders. As in design thinking everywhere (compare with IDEO’s iterative approach), successful implementation relies on empathy, evidence, and adaptability.

Stickdorn and Schneider compile an extensive toolkit for service design thinking. Each tool helps you observe, create, reflect, or implement more effectively. These methods don’t prescribe a fixed manual—they invite creative experimentation. You mix and match based on context, team size, resources, and objectives.

Exploratory Tools

For discovery, ethnographic techniques shine. Service safaris send teams “into the wild” to observe real service experiences—both good and bad. Customer journey maps visualize touchpoints and emotions over time, revealing what frustrates or delights users. Expectation maps chart what people anticipate before interactions. Tools like personas and a day in the life synthesize insights into relatable characters and stories. Together, these allow teams to see services through customers’ eyes.

Creative and Reflective Tools

During creation and reflection, service designers go hands-on. Storyboards visualize new service scenarios; service prototypes and staging simulate real interactions. Co-creation workshops produce shared ideas, while “what-if” and design scenarios stretch imaginations toward future contexts. Agile development methods, borrowed from software design, enable constant testing and adaptation.

Implementation Tools

To translate ideas into organizational reality, the book introduces service blueprints—detailed maps connecting front-stage user experiences with backstage processes. Business model canvases clarify how new services fit strategic goals. Storytelling conveys emotional narratives to stakeholders, while roleplay and customer lifecycle maps help staff internalize empathy. These tools do more than visualize—they catalyze communication across departments, turning strategy into shared understanding.

Stickdorn reminds readers that success doesn’t arise from the tools themselves but from how teams use them iteratively and collaboratively. The service design toolkit, like a painter’s palette, enables creativity grounded in empathy and research.

Theory becomes tangible in five rich case studies: governmental, public, corporate, medical, and digital contexts. These stories show how service design transforms real organizations through empathy, collaboration, and iteration.

NL Agency: Building Conversations

In the Netherlands, NL Agency partnered with DesignThinkers to reinvent how a government body communicates with companies. Their Customer Journey LAB mapped emotional journeys, identified bottlenecks, and visualized issues in priority grids. Employees discovered non-customer-centric thinking, prompting organizational changes toward adaptability and trust.

Mypolice: Bridging the Public and Authority

British designers Sarah Drummond and Lauren Currie’s Mypolice created a web platform for public feedback to police forces. Facing mistrust after G20 protests, they designed prototypes through user interviews and paper mock-ups in cafés. By mapping stakeholder systems and developing online empathy tools, they made communication more transparent and collaborative—the hallmark of design-led social innovation.

Hello Change: Rethinking Recruitment

Funky Projects’ Hello Change disrupted hiring with empathy-focused design. Instead of CVs, they assessed creativity, attitude, and happiness at work. By integrating “web casting” and workshops, they co-created recruitment experiences that matched company spirit with personal purpose. The result became a startup validated through real implementation—proof that a service can design whole new businesses.

UPMC Carnegie Mellon Clinic: Humanizing Healthcare

At the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Carnegie Mellon students reimagined patient experiences plagued by long waits. Their research revealed that time spent waiting could be reframed as an opportunity for engagement. By observing surgeries and creating service blueprints, they improved workflows and patient empathy—even though not all changes were implemented, the process built cultural transformation.

SEB Bank and Transformator: Simplifying Finance

In Sweden, Transformator Design Group helped SEB package multiple banking services into a single offering. Using action research, they iterated through design loops—testing prototypes with customers at bank kiosks and refining messages to match user understanding. The outcome: clearer communication, higher sign-up rates, and a service perceived as mutually beneficial. Each case underscores how empathy transforms efficiency into trust.

Kate Andrews’ chapter explores how service design expands beyond profit toward social impact. She argues that design thinking’s evolution—from product aesthetics to societal innovation—has empowered designers to tackle sustainability, mental health, and poverty using the same creative processes that fuel business success.

The Rise of Social Design

The book traces the growing visibility of service design in shaping social good. Designers’ processes—identifying problems, researching, prototyping, testing—translate naturally to reforming systems that affect human lives. Andrews cites projects like ColaLife, where Simon Berry harnessed Coca-Cola’s global distribution to deliver medical kits in Africa. This example exemplifies how collaboration, transparency, and social media can connect diverse skills for common purpose.

Design Thinking as a Movement

Andrews references leading thinkers like Tim Brown (IDEO) and Roger Martin (Rotman School) who popularized “design thinking” as both philosophy and business strategy. Yet she warns against complacency: redefining design as social innovation must be sustained. True impact comes when designers form interdisciplinary networks and apply co-design to scalable, sustainable solutions.

Doing Better—Together

Social design, Andrews concludes, isn’t charity—it’s systemic creativity. By making processes visible and inviting participation, service designers reveal design’s role in fostering empathy and collective responsibility. The future, she insists, lies in co-creative methods accessible to all citizens. As she puts it, “This is Co-Creative”—a call for design as democratic collaboration across boundaries.

Fergus Bisset’s essay connects service design with motivational psychology, reminding designers that every service involves human behavior. Understanding motivation—what energizes, directs, and sustains action—lets designers create experiences that engage rather than manipulate.

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation

Building on psychologists Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, Bisset explains that people are intrinsically motivated when activities fulfill autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Good services—like learning apps or fitness communities—tap into these internal drives instead of relying on rewards or fear. Designers should visualize motivation just as they map emotions—using motivational journey maps alongside customer journey maps.

Designing for Flow and Empowerment

Borrowing concepts from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow,” Bisset encourages designers to create experiences that balance challenge and skill, keeping users engaged. He likens designers to coaches or directors guiding users to perform at their best. Tools like motivational personas combine behavioral psychology with design empathy, revealing how services can energize and empower human growth.

A Golden Age of Motivation

We live, Bisset writes, in a “golden age of motivation research.” Integrating psychology into design makes services more sustainable, democratic, and humane. The more designers understand users’ motives, the better they can transform complex social problems—not by controlling people’s behavior but by unlocking their potential.

In their final reflections, Johan Blomkvist, Stefan Holmlid, and Fabian Segelström trace service design’s academic evolution—from early theory to current practices and future challenges. What began as an intersection between interaction, product, and management design is now a thriving multidisciplinary field.

From Margins to Mainstream

Early research sought legitimacy—connecting design to marketing and operations. Live|work’s founding in 2001 marked the field’s commercial rise, while academics like Mager and Manzini articulated service design theory. The authors recount how blueprints, personas, and ethnography migrated into service contexts, forming the foundation of the field.

Integrating Other Disciplines

Recent research expands by integrating management, engineering, anthropology, and cognitive science. Concepts like Service-Dominant Logic (Vargo & Lusch) and Design Thinking inspire new debates about value co-creation and organizational change. The paper emphasizes the importance of methodological rigor and cumulative knowledge to make service design scientifically robust.

The Road Ahead

Service design now faces the challenge of educating future researchers through structured theory and practice. The authors predict an era of wider, deeper integration—where design bridges social sciences and technology to address complex systems from healthcare to environmental sustainability. The future, they declare, will depend on openness: sharing processes, case studies, and failures transparently so the discipline can evolve collectively.

Renato Troncon’s concluding meditation turns service design into philosophy. He invites you to imagine design not as creating objects but as nurturing life itself—a practice rooted in empathy and care, what he calls biophilia or “love of life.”

Beyond Things

Troncon critiques centuries of mechanical thinking that equated design with machines and physical artifacts. True design, he argues, is relational—it governs forces, emotions, and interactions. A window, for instance, isn’t just a mechanism; it creates spaces of light and warmth. Service design, therefore, must orchestrate experiences that respond organically to human contexts.

Toward a Living Aesthetic

Troncon proposes an aesthetic grounded not in useless beauty (as Kant described) but in usefulness that fosters vitality. Design, he writes, should study “vital centers”—patterns of living, gestures like reading or shaking hands—and craft environments that enrich these rituals. This perspective aligns with Christopher Alexander’s notion of “centers of life” in architecture and Edward O. Wilson’s biophilia in biology.

Service Design as Love for Life

For Troncon, designing services means designing care. It’s about responding responsibly to human variety—young and old, rich and poor, healthy and frail. When design is biophilic, it becomes philosophy in action: making space for life, embracing empathy, and empowering people. The ultimate goal, he concludes, is simple yet profound: to see design itself as an act of love for humanity.