I am in the midst of reading and working with Chris Risdon and Patrick Quattlebaum’s Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity.
This is a book for practitioners who want to understand key service design approaches and methods in greater depth. It offers workshop templates and copious visual examples of artifacts from Risdon and Quattlebaum’s past projects.
What is lacking for me so far is any mention of design for services theory or evidence-based insights. Andrea Resmini and David Benyon are doing remarkable research on mapping and blending cross-channel ecosystems, and scholars like Christopher Le Dantec are writing remarkable critical books on designing services for local communities, but Orchestrating Experiences, like Service Design for Business, is weakened, at least from my perspective, by the lack of engagement with insights from business and design academics and the overemphasis of an inside-out organizaitonal frame. My hopes are a bit higher for This is Service Design Doing because Marc Stickdorn and colleagues’ weighty tomb included a microscopic footnote to service-dominant logic within the first couple of pages of the book. But I will wait and see once I get to it.
Chapter 3 of Orchestrating Experiences, “Exploring Ecosystems” is a highlight because Risdon and Quattlebaum offer valuable details that I don’t recall reading in previous books like Polaine, Reason, and Lovlie’s Service Design. Specifically, Risdon and Quattlebaum emphasize the value of defining the different types of relationships between actors, artifacts, places in an ecosystem. And they encourage readers to model the ecosystem from multiple vantage points.
Something tells me I am going to have to wait for Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati to write a follow-up to their remarkable, rich and eclectic Pervasive Information Architecture or Lucy Kimbell and Daniela Sangiorgi to collaborate on a hybrid combining the theoretical robustness of Design for Services and Designing for Services with the practical brilliance of Kimbell’s Service Innovation Handbook to break the monotony of practical service design books.