Organizational Design Legacies and Service Design

This paper suggests that service designers need to worry less about embedding design in the organization and pay more attention to organizational design legacies that are already in place - those design principles, methods and practices that are already deeply embedded in organizational life. These design legacies, however flawed and poorly suited, need to be articulated, visualized and engaged with to effect real change in real organizations. Accordingly, this paper explains why and how design is part of the organizational DNA. It then introduces the concept of organizational design legacies and explains three of its elements: organizational purpose, organizational design approaches and organizational design practices. Finally, it calls on service designers to initiate design conversations and provides two examples of design conversation pieces to illustrate how this may be done. The purpose of the paper is to show how service designers may engage organizations they work with in high-level transformational thinking around their own design activities.