Service design

The question I keep asking of service design is how it moves from repeatedly identifying problems toward eliminating their causes. Blueprints and journey maps are good at finding pain. The work is treating the system itself as the object of design: the eligibility logic, the staffing policy, the caseworker’s workaround, and not only the interface layer.

In public-sector work I don’t think of the public as customers. The forms someone fills out and the steps they have to complete are political decisions, and the frontline worker who has kept a system alive for 10 years knows more about delivery than any research readout. I build with that knowledge, and I stay long enough to see whether the fix holds.