An Introduction to Service Design

In our work, we draw from various social scientific theories culled from books and journals and run them through the actual stories that are being uncovered in our field work. We ask ourselves, for example, “if stigma was the framework for understanding this story, what would it tell us, and what kinds of solutions would we develop with that framework in mind?” We do this with at least five or six different theories so that we’re generating a range of ideas based on all these different theoretical models. We then try and share that back visually in some way. I think reading things like long documents and academic articles and learning how to extract information from them is very generative and a source of creativity. You can see it as a kind of brainstorming tool.