Mixing & mapping the 7 roles
Based on my consulting and teaching experience, service designers perform seven critical roles on complex, multi-faceted innovation projects: The Empathizer, The Sensemaker, The Creator, The Maker, The Navigator, The Storyteller, and The Servant Leader (Bau, 2013, 2020). A specific mix of roles is required for each phase of (or mode of activity in) the innovation process.
The core roles for explorative, generative, and evaluative research are The Empathizer, The Sensemaker, The Maker, and The Storyteller. In addition, The Navigator can help unpack complex ecosystems, organizational needs, and competitive landscapes. The Servant Leader might be needed for participatory design and co-creation/co-design in research endeavors (see, e.g., Sanders & Stappers, 2013).
The core roles for ideation, concepting, prototyping, and piloting are The Creator, The Maker, and The Storyteller. The Sensemaker updates and reframes insights, hypotheses, outcomes, futures, etc., based on feedback and learnings throughout the process. The Servant Leader is needed for participatory design and co-creation/co-design.
The core roles for strategy development, value case development, and implementation planning are The Navigator, The Servant Leader, and The Storyteller. The Servant Leader might also be needed for participatory design and co-creation/co-design.
Finally, The Servant Leader is ultimately responsible for project initiations, recruitment, onboarding, process coaching, project tracking, post-mortems, and the like.
We can easily map the seven roles to Kumar’s model of the design innovation process (2012), IDEO’s Hear-Create-Deliver process (2009), and Design Council UK’s framework for innovation (2019). These models and frameworks show that innovation projects jump back and forth between modes of activity in a non-linear and iterative fashion, and that the innovation team should constantly switch between thinking in abstract ways and making something concrete and tangible. See table 1 below.
Table 1. Mapping the 7 roles of service designers to three common models/frameworks of the innovation process.
References
Bau, R. (2013, October). What it takes to become a superb service designer. SX 2013 [Adaptive Path’s Service Experience conference], San Francisco, CA.
Bau, R. (2020). Service design to the rescue. The critical roles service designers play in organizational change. Touchpoint, 11(3), 74–79.
Design Council UK. (2019). What is the framework for innovation? Design Council’s evolved Double Diamond.
IDEO. (2009). Human Centered Design Toolkit.
Kumar, V. (2012). 101 design methods: A structured approach for driving innovation in your organization. Wiley.
Sanders, L. & Stappers, P.J. (2013). Convivial Toolbox: Generative research for the front-end of design. Laurence King Publishing.
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