Headline: Designing Change With, Not Just For, People
As a service designer, you know adoption isn’t automatic. It has to be earned. You can sketch the perfect customer journey, map the experience flows, run the usability tests—but if people don’t feel part of the change, it won’t stick.
In transformation programmes, we too often skip the “with” and jump straight to the “for.” We design for efficiency, for compliance, for stakeholders. And the result? Systems that technically work, but don’t feel right. That’s why adoption lags, satisfaction dips, and workarounds creep in.
Whatever Next? offers a reminder that belonging, belief, and trust aren’t “soft” concerns. They’re structural. The Reconnect lens in particular resonates with the service design mindset: slowing down to notice what’s unsaid, to pick up on the coffee-cooler chatter as much as the survey results, to design for how a human day really flows—not just for process compliance.
The other lenses help too. Reflect aligns with our curiosity, our instinct to start where people truly are, not where the strategy slide says they are. Reimagine sparks the collective visioning we use in co-creation. Reframe forces us to sharpen assumptions, prototype conversations, not just interfaces. And Rewire grounds us in the messy operating core where services actually live or die.
For service designers, this book isn’t a manual—it’s a set of provocations. It validates our intuition that transformation is a design problem at heart. And it challenges us to move beyond journeys and touchpoints into the wider enterprise fabric where those journeys either thrive or crumble.
Provocation: Are you prototyping for delivery—or are you truly prototyping for discovery?
If you believe that transformation is ultimately a design challenge, you’ll find language, stories, and provocations in Whatever Next? that connect directly to your practice. Dive into the five lenses and see how they can extend your service design mindset across the whole enterprise. Learn more at whatevernextbook.com
