Daniele Catalanotto
Author - Daniele Catalanotto

With all those fancy terminologies we are creating confusion for ourselves and our clients. Maybe things shouldn't be as complex as our little terminology war around what is Service Design and what it's not.

Is it that complex?
Is it that complex?
During the Service Design Conference in Amsterdam there is a conversation that pops-out again and again. “Do you consider yourself a Service Designer?” “Is Service Design the right term for what we are doing?” “How does agile and lean fit into Service Design?”. The more I hear those conversations the more I have the feeling that we create a little battle of religions.
 
I am the child of two pastors. So the christian religion and its different denomination is something that I know for a long time. “Are you Baptist?”, “No I’m an Anabaptist but my parents where Catholic”. That’s exactly the same kind of questions. Then people always went with big discussions on what makes you a “real” christian. Are you baptized? With water? With full immersion? Did a do it as a child or as a grown up? When you have an external look, the situation seems much simpler.
 
A religion war
At the end all denominations of this religion love god. At the end all these fields have a love for the end user. All these fields or terminology care about including the user. They try to understanding him. They just want to not make him crazy. That’s it. Sure, it’s important to name things right. But at the end of the day we shouldn’t lose the overview, the common ground we all share. If we can announce with pride our common ground, it would be easier for clients to navigate into the mess of terminologies that we created. And then we could tell them something like this.
 
What type of cheese do you like?
In a way, we are like different cheese sorts. There a lot of cheese sort you can buy. There is the one for dessert. The one to put on pasta. The one that you must be an expert to enjoy. But in the end these are all cheese sorts. The same goes with all these different focuses. At the end of the day we want to include the user more in the business, service, product world.
Daniele Catalanotto
Daniele Catalanotto - Design Strategist

Daniele Catalanotto is a Service Designer with the title of Design Strategist at Enigma. He doesn't care about his title. He thinks that being able to help others is just the nicest job in the univers.

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