This week, I saw a piece written by David Linthicum, titled “Cloud API and service designers, stop thinking small”. And while I always like to think big, I started to wonder what cloud APIs have to do with service design.

To be honest, I am still trying to figure out what service design really is. In part, my confusion stems from me not being a designer. So the first question I ask myself is: What is design?

I think of design as a set of methods that get applied to develop viable solutions to relevant problems. That’s more than just Photoshop. In fact, the Adobe Creative Suite might even not be involved at all.

While product design is a well-known discipline with a long history, service design is still kind of living in a niche. That is the case, despite the fact that we see a distinct trend from products to services, a shift from the industrial age to a service economy.

Service design always puts the user in the centre. The basic questions are:

• What does he want?
• What does he need?
• What would he like?
• And what should his experience be?

If we look more closely at services, we can do so from at least three different perspectives:

1. services for the consumer
2. services for other companies
3. services for machines

Software as a service falls into the first two categories, service-oriented architecture in the third. And maybe there are even more buzzwords I can’t think of right now.

Obviously, these are three very different animals. The average consumer does worry about other things than the average company. And the average machine doesn’t worry at all, but the average developer does.

In each case, there is a human being involved. He can be (1) a consumer, or (2) working for a company, or (3) be a developer, which is just a special case of (2) or even (1), if he develops for fun or his own business.

This clarifies things a bit. I’m still not sure if these IT-related buzzwords with “service” have anything to do with service design. But at least they could. A service-oriented architecture or software as a service could be developed using service design methods. And maybe they should.