Ecosystems, Blueprints and Journeys – Oh My! Toward a practice-oriented typology of service design metaphors Communicating the value of service design to those who are unfamiliar with our tools and processes can be a challenge. This creates problems for designers as well as the organisations and communities we hope to serve. Perhaps our use (and misuse) of metaphor to describe our work contributes to the confusion. Joan Ball is an Associate Professor of Marketing at St. John's University in New York City and founder of WOMB Service Design Lab located at the Centre for Social Innovation in New York City. Her research and practice centres on understanding how transformative services influence individual, organi sational and community resilience. She is particularly interested in the influence of changing culture, tech nology and social structures on human wellbeing. ballj@stjohns.edu
The use of metaphor in service: A brief overview Metaphor has been used in service literature since its earliest days.1 From service ecosystems and blueprints to customer journey maps and servicescapes, service designers use a variety of metaphors to describe service concepts, tools and spaces. This is not surprising, because conceptual metaphors underlie how people understand and experience the world around them.2 But do the metaphors we use to describe service design activities enhance our ability to clearly communicate the value of service design to our clients and customers? Might the mixing of metaphors in particular provide a clue to the
1 Goodwin, C., Grove, S. J., & Fisk, R. P. (1996). Collaring the Cheshire Cat’: Studying Customers' Services Experience through Metaphor. Service Industries Journal, 16(4), 421-442. 2 Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
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disconnection between service designers, organisational stakeholders and potential partners? These questions prompted me to examine research in some key service and marketing journals to identify how the use of metaphor has shaped service design and the design of services. It is my hope that this preliminary report of findings from the academic literature will prompt a broader conversation among service design practitioners and academics about how the language we use influences the way we understand and practice service design. No singular metaphor is likely to describe the complexity that exists within and among service offerings. That may be why researchers and practitioners tend to describe service concepts, processes, design elements and roles using multiple or mixed metaphors. The following examples illustrate how this might cause confusion for people who are new to service design.
