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Marc Stickdorn

Author of This is service design thinking

6 Works 343 Members 2 Reviews

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Works by Marc Stickdorn

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This is Service Design Thinking was designed to be a much needed textbook on the new interdisciplinary approach to designing services. If you work at all in in high tech you would be well served by reading this book--but service design touches almost any business.

The content is good--I especially enjoyed the middle sections that describe a number of methodologies for designing services. I've worked with a few myself including personas, idea generation (SWOT and mindmapping), agile development, storytelling, and my personal favorite--business model canvas. (Damn, I need to make sure all that is on my LinkedIn profile!) I also enjoyed some of the included in-depth articles on deep service design thinking. The essay on "Integrating Service Design Thinking and Motivational Psychology" by Fergus Bisset and "Service Design and Biophila" by Renato Troncon are worth the price of admission.

A shout-out now if you want to see world-class design affecting real people in action. Watch this video by Krista Donaldson and the folks at D-Rev.

So now what I didn't really like about this textbook... And mind you, I'm coming at this from an experienced book editor in high tech. The book was crowd-sourced but I think lacks a strong lead editor. It is a collection of material and I guess that is okay for a textbook like this, but I prefer having one expert guide me through the work of others than sifting through myself.

And the book was so over-designed as to be distracting. It has a number of bells and whistles--color-coded sections, ribbon bookmarks, a poster, pre-highlights and so many icons there is a map to the icons in the back. All of this is rather distracting. I hate having my books pre-highlighted for me. If I find it important, I will highlight it. I can do that. I kind of disagreed with whoever made some of the highlighting decisions.

I hope there will be a second edition because this is a good book, but it needs the hand of a firm editor to take it to the next level for me.

But I will keep the book on my shelf and will probably check out other titles that are referenced.

And if you work on services-- do take a look at the Business Model Canvas. If I were to pick one method over the others that would be it for me. I can learn so much about how a business works by taking it through the canvas just on my own.
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auldhouse | Sep 30, 2021 |

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Works
6
Members
343
Popularity
#69,543
Rating
4.0
Reviews
2
ISBNs
13
Languages
1

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