Service Design Books and Guides
In this page I share the books and guides I have written on the topic of Service Design over the years. There is stuff for the beginners, the curious ones and people lost with the Service Design jargon.
Service Design Books
Outside of the 500+ articles written on this magazine I have written also a few books on the topic of Service Design. Here is a collection of these books.
My latest book
If you have to read one Service Design book, read this one
So you are looking to read a book about service design or service design thinking. Cool. You don’t shit about it and don’t want to learn all the basics but would rather get all the juicy tips to improve the customer experience right now. Good. I have the book for you, it’s called Service Design Principles 1–100.
It is a very practical book that gives you tips, tricks, ideas and principles about how to make your customers hate you less, and hopefully sometimes love you.
This book takes the best articles I have published on this magazine. I have re-written every article and so that your service design loving eyes don’t bleed a proofreader spent a shitload of time correcting all my mistakes.
And as you might see from the name of the book, more of these principles will come in the next years.
Free books to discover service design
Don’t like to pay? But still want to learn something about Service Design? I’ve written two books that you might like, because they are free, and as always with me, about service design.
The first book gives you a broad overview of what service design is, what are the tools that service designer use, what’s the impact of the practice, etc.
The second book is a more philosophical book that shares the mindsets that make in my opinion a good service designer
If you are a service design nerd you’ll like this book
Oh and if you still want some Service Design books you can read this little, not too serious, history of Service Design. It’s a collection of dates, events, books and people who might have influenced what service design is today.
And here a little sneak peak of what you can find in the book from a presentation I did at the Global Service Design Conference in Canada:
Don’t like my books, read Service Design books from other authors
I write in a particular way, I write as I think and speak to my friends in a bar, so it’s simple and it has a lot of swear words. The benefit is that it’s pretty simple to understand. But some people don’t like that type of poetry, so if you are looking for more SFW variants there is an awesome website that collects all books that can be interesting about service design:
Service Design Guides
Outside of books and short articles I have also written a few long form guides. These are more collection of links, definitions and so on. If you have a collector mindset, you might like the feel of these guides.
A guide for curious beginners
Some people want to have all the resources and different ways to learn Service Design in one place. So I tried to do this. This guide is a list of 40+ resource to learn service design. You’ll find in it a selection of books, magazines, YouTube channels, podcasts, and so on.
A dictionary if you don’t understand the jargon
The service design, design and innovation jargon is pretty harsh when you start in the field. So I collected 400+ definitions of classical and fancy terms and put them in a little mobile web app that you can put in your pocket.
So next time a colleague speaks about something you don’t know about a service design project, say you need to go to the toilets and check out the dictionary on your phone. You’ll look less dumb once you’ll get out of the toilets.
Guides written for the Service Design Jobs website
In collaboration with my mate Marc I’ve authored a few guides for the Service Design Jobs website. These are guides focused more on finding your next career opportunity in the small and very niche service design world. You’ll find guides to find more job opportunities, places to grow your skills and even a list of companies that have hired service designers in the past.
More books and guides but this time about innovation
This magazine is really focused on Service Design, but if you are interested in the broader topic of innovation you can check out my other project called the Swiss Innovation Academy:
