Designing vs designers: How organizational design narratives shift the focus from designers to designing

Organizations host services. Organizations deliver services. Organizations depend on services to establish and maintain relationships with employees, customers, stakeholders and other people. This organizational entanglement has immediate and direct consequences for the research and the practice of service design. People concerned with designing services always work within an organizational context. Since every organization has its own design history, has developed its own practices for how to go about developing services over time, any new design efforts take place under a historic pre-text. This is something easily overlooked as many service designers are just now discovering the organization itself, its current operations and its current stakeholders as a con-text for their work. We can think of the organizational pre-text as the combined history of previous design efforts, historic design decision-making and earlier design approaches that have formed and still inform current design practices and current design thinking within a specific organization. Organizational design con-text, in contrast, describes the current design environment of an organization, not only its current purpose, mandate or vision but also the network of actors involved and effected by design processes and design decisions....