Desirable Traits: Educating for an Evolving Service Design Practice Design has become a collaborative and interdisciplinary practice as it aligns with an increasingly diverse range of private and public sector efforts. To train service designers to solve contemporary system problems, our educational institutions need to continuously invest in new forms of training and development. In this article, Naz Mirzaie is a Senior Service Designer at Essential with a background in design research, industrial design and sustainability, and a passion for social innovation. Her work focuses on information communication, behaviour change, and participatory design in sectors such as healthcare and social services.
focusing on the US, we build on other authors’ efforts to bridge the gap between academia and industry, offering a perspective on current recruiting expectations, and reflecting on personal experience working in the service design field. We outline four skill areas that should be a part of every service designer’s CV or resume, and highlight exciting new ways in which service design academia is retooling itself to train for the challenges of an evolving job market.
Chris Parlato is Principal of Innovation Strategy at Essential, with ten years of experience in product, service, and environmental design consulting. He trained as an architect at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Current service design programmes support students in some areas better than others – research and ideation, for example, tend to be favoured over implementation. According to the 2017 Design In Tech Report1, the top three skills demanded by today’s professional design practice are: 1) using research and analytics, 2) understanding business
1 Maeda, J. (2017). Design in Tech Report, [Online] Retrieved March 13, 2017, from https://designintechreport.wordpress.com
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and finance and 3) leadership and teamwork. The report further concluded that design education is more biased toward communication and empathy competencies. Glancing at the exhaustive lists of skill requirements sought by employers from new service design hires, the gap between academia and industry becomes even more stark. We believe that a concerted effort to strengthen training in four critical areas will provide students with a stronger foundation to enter the job market and
