Service design is the shaping of service delivery systems with the intention of making participation worthwhile for every service actor.
This includes not only the recipient of the service, but also those who deliver it on the front lines and who support it behind the scenes.
Service design is what I call a polycentered design discipline. That is, it designs for multiple centers of experience, often interacting and experiencing one another.
Where UX generally focuses on experiences with one user, or CX on the journey of a single customer — service design focuses on social dynamics among multiple actors. Service design looks at the experiences one or more customers and one or more employees have of a single event involving all of them, but each experiencing it from a different perspective. Each actor responds to what they experience, and the responses converge to cocreate that moment of the service.
At the center of service design is agency. Service design coordinates agents and sets conditions optimal for the exchange of value.
Because service design has always designed agency, the discipline is well-positioned to help design AI agency into service systems — in ways that make life better for us humans.