In-house designer’s practice vs. agency designer’s

During the last 10-15 years there has been a lot of focus on the service designer as part of design agencies. Evidence of this can be found by looking at who is tweeting, who are active on linkedin groups, and the lineup of speakers at conferences for professionals. Not that there are no other roles and no other organisations that service designers are working in. Just as in any other design discipline there will of course be so called “in-house” service designers. Architects are working in building companies, interaction designers are working in public sector organisations, etc. In earlier work by Holmlid and Artman, focusing on procurement of well-designed IT-systems, we noted that there are strategic, managerial as well as design practice implications of an in-house position.

In an effort to understand the work and practice of in-house service designers, and how a visual language might suit the needs of these, we issued a “wanted” ad for in-house service designers earlier this year, and got a fair number of candidates. We wanted to know more about the work of these in-house designers, and performed a small set of interviews. We are now interested in getting in contact with more designers that are employed by service organisations, so if you know of any send an email to stefan.holmlid@liu.se.