"This is Service Design Doing" is a fully illustrated book that explains how to "do" service design. It was not written in the usual way, but developed in a co-creative, prototype-based process with the experience and contributions of more than 300 service design practitioners and their clients.

Besides explaining why organizations should use service design, the authors describe its practical steps. Supported by case studies and expert tips from all over the world, they outline the tools and methods within the core activities of research, ideation, prototyping, and implementation. Going beyond simple tool descriptions, they discuss how to facilitate service design workshops, plan sprints or complex projects, and embed this new way of working into an organization. This book helps readers move from theory to practice, connecting customer experience to operations and to business success, building a customer-centric culture in an organization.

The book was developed in a unique co-creative process through a series of prototypes. TiSDD started as a series of live events ("executive schools"), then became a co-creative online document which was made available to hundreds of school participants for commentary. This evolved, co-created text became the core of a book draft written by 4 main authors. The manuscript of the book was then opened for crowd commentary, with more than 200 volunteers helping openly rewrite and iterate much of the text. A further 96 invited co-authors provided case studies and expert tips.

"As an experience designer, I feel like I've been waiting for this book all my life. It's delightfully laid out, easy to read, and packed with helpful examples and methods for doing excellent work in service- and experience design. I've never seen a book with such thoughtful and inclusive collaboration from so many practicing experts. Reading it is like drinking from a firehose of wisdom." – Amazon review, 01/22/2018

200 extra pages of detailed tool descriptions are offered free online. While they are intended to accompany the book, anyone is welcome to download and use them.

Whether corporation, government, SME, non-profit or start-up, TiSDD was written for everyone interested in customer experience, innovation, and collaborative creation. Together with free online method library (tisdd.com), it helps readers to better understand their customers (or users, or citizens, or employees), and to create offerings that people will love to use and talk about. It illustrates how to connect operational silos and work together more smoothly, using a "language" and toolset that everyone in the organization can understand. For beginners new to the topic, the book offers a step-by-step route into practice. Experienced professional designers and consultants will find extensive knowledge resources and material to use in running projects and sessions.

INTRODUCTION

The book "This is Service Design Doing" is the latest iteration of a learning and change offering which has been through several prototypes and been co-created by around 500 people – 200 workshop participants, then 300 book authors, contributors and volunteer editors.

PRE-STAGE: (Book) This is Service Design Thinking

The seeds for this project lie in 2010's award-winning volume This is Service Design Thinking, written with the service design community. The book was seen as a service design project, and the lead authors Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider were supported by practitioners from around the world in creating the black volume. Some contributed texts and case studies, others voted on what should be included. The contributing authors included Adam Lawrence and Markus Hormess, initiators of the Global Service Jam. #TiSDT, sometimes called the "Bible" of service design, is still a bestseller and available in several languages.

STAGE 1: (Prototype in the form of a learning event) The Executive School

In 2013, Stickdorn, Hormess and Lawrence decided to launch an executive training offering based on the book This is Service Design Thinking, mixing it with the "doing not talking" approach of the Global Service Jam. The name "This is Service Design Doing" was an obvious choice, and the School was offered as a 3-day sprint and as a more common 5-day version.
Fourteen (so far) iterations of the school followed in Amsterdam, Atlanta, Barcelona, Berlin, Rio, Santiago, and Shanghai, with closely related events in Bangkok and Tampa. The hundreds of alumni include professors, CEOs, start-up owners, creative leads of leading agencies, senior service development managers of huge multinationals, top public service innovators and many UX, service design and design thinking professionals. That wealth of experience and insight needed an outlet.

STAGE 2: (Prototype in the form of a shared document) The Co-created Notes

Early in the development of the Executive School, it became clear that the usual training practice of providing static paper handouts did not fit the pace or style of the learning experience. The answer was to create an outline learning script for the week, and make it accessible online. Course participants were invited to contribute to the script – making challenges, adding notes and examples, posting questions and evolving the script both during and after the school.

STAGE 3: (A need) The Requests for a Sequel

As the authors of This is Service Design Thinking, Stickdorn and Schneider were often asked about a sequel to that classic volume – but the new book should be less a description of the discipline, and more of practical handbook in the form of a "how to guide". But who should write it? Who could decide what goes in, and what stays out? The answer was clear. It would need to be the whole community, and the TiSDD co-created notes could be the starting point. After talking to Lawrence and Hormess, the four authors approached several publishers and found one who was happy to embrace their co-creative philosophy – O'Reilly.

STAGE 4: (Prototype in the form of online manuscripts) The Sh!tty First Draft

The authors created a chapter plan based around the TiSDD School syllabus and the co-created notes. They started creating design templates and concentrated on writing, again in online documents. This form let them easily co-create, often writing simultaneously in the same chapter. At the same time, they issued a call for contributions, asking for case studies and expert texts from around the world. A manuscrit took form.

STAGE 5: (Co-creative open prototyping) The Crowd Edit

O'Reilly pre-released rough drafts of individual chapters to keen readers, bringing in valuable feedback. This process inspired the authors, and after a call for help on social media the online manuscripts were made available to around 200 volunteer editors. Each volunteer looked at between one and three chapters, and was invited to add comments, objections, critiques, examples and even counterexamples to the text. The main authors stayed away for a while, letting conversations develop between the volunteers, then took an active part in the discussions.
At the same time, experts on the various themes of the book were asked to make "expert tips" and "expert comments" on their specialist fields.

STAGE 6 (Final prototyping) The Clean Up and Split Up

Based on the feedback, the authors started adding, augmenting or even rewriting whole sections of the book in multiple iterations. But they also reduced and trimmed, striving for readability and clarity of voice.

It became clear that, for readability, a large part of the book would have to go online. After much deliberation, the authors decided to drastically trim the methods descriptions, reducing them to stubs while putting the full descriptions free online. Test readers agreed that this led to a clearer, cleaner book – and provided a useful online resource for readers and non-readers alike.

STAGE 7 (Implementation) The Final Cut and Polish

Chapters were cleaned, rewritten and cut, cut, cut. Graphics were created and photos sourced (many of them featuring School alumni or offered by volunteer editors). Case studies were chased, edited and often rewritten to sit better in the book context. A team of international experts were invited to read and review the entire book (leading to some more rewrites) and professional proofreaders corrected the final manuscript while the graphics team around Schneider worked like crazy to produce around 550 clear and gorgeous pages (as wall as 180 pages of online worksheets). And after four and a half years of development, This is Service Design Doing went to print, publishing on the first day of 2018.

RECEPTION

The book has become a top seller internationally, with sales already over 10,000 copies (as well as several thousand downloads of the online methods bundle). Some reviews:

"As an experience designer, I feel like I've been waiting for this book all my life. It's delightfully laid out, easy to read, and packed with helpful examples and methods for doing excellent work in service- and experience design. I've never seen a book with such thoughtful and inclusive collaboration from so many practicing experts. Reading it is like drinking from a firehose of wisdom." – Amazon review, 01/22/2018

"As a marketer, I found this book invaluable in its exposition of journey maps, stakeholder maps, service blueprints and service prototypes. Just making a product or service isn't enough: figure out what jobs your o ering performs for the user and all the touchpoints along the journey that will help determine success or failure."— Philip Kotler, S.C.Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

"Excellent! A very clear and engaging introduction to Service Design, combining in fine balance the Why, the What and the How, and always integrating the practitioners perspective. This book fills a gap – it is a must read for those who want to design services that create value!"— Birgit Mager, President Service Design Network / Professor for Service Design, Köln International School of Design, Germany

"A wonderful book! Since all experiences are built atop services, in This Is Service Design Doing you will learn ways to make experiences more engaging, more memorable, and more personal. So read, do, and repeat!"— B. Joseph Pine II, co-author, The Experience Economy