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).
Generally speaking, service design teams will need to perform all seven roles throughout the innovation and design process in order to achieve desired outcomes. On an individual level, some service designers will want to ‘jump back and forth’ between multiple roles, and some may prefer to specialize in two or three. Few designers, if any, can arguably perform all seven roles to a high professional standard.
For the sake of brevity, each role will be explained with the help of three capabilities. For each capability, the service designer carries out specific activities, applies specific methods and tools, and produces specific deliverables/assets. For example, The Empathizer will use specific research tools, techniques and prompts to uncover the hidden motivations behind consumer behavior in a certain context.
We can easily map these 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.
The seven roles will be described in more detail in subsequent blog posts. In addition, I will compare and contrast my roles with similar descriptions in the innovation and design space.
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.
Kumar, V. (2012). 101 design methods: A structured approach for driving innovation in your organization. Wiley.
IDEO. (2009). Human-centered design toolkit. IDEO.
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