The Design Journal

An International Journal for All Aspects of Design

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Organizational Design Legacies and Service Design

Sabine Junginger

To cite this article: Sabine Junginger (2015) Organizational Design Legacies and Service Design,
The Design Journal, 18:2, 209-226, DOI: 10.2752/175630615X14212498964277

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Published online: 07 May 2015.

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Organizational
Design Legacies and
Service Design1
Sabine Junginger
Macromedia University of Applied Sciences,

The Design Journal  DOI: 10.2752/175630615X14212498964277

Berlin, Germany

Abstract  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,
209

it calls on service designers to initiate

 Sabine Junginger

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.

KEYWORDS: core organizational activities, design legacies, service

design, design conversations, conversation pieces

Introduction: Design in the Organizational DNA

+
We often talk about organizations as places void of design.
Service designers, too, can be easily misled to think that
they are the ones to bring design into the organizations
they are working with. Naturally, they are looking for forms and
practices of design they are familiar with. These include, for example,
design tools to trace customer journeys and user pathways or the
deliberate application of methods like co-designing, visualization
or prototyping. In the absence of such ‘design indicators’, profes-
sional designers often conclude that the organization lacks design.
Consequently, they view it as their task and responsibility to embed
design practices into the organization they work with. In doing so,
however, they overlook the many ways in which design is already
present in everyday organizational life. They fail to see that design is
part of the organizational DNA. Design literally shapes organizational
reality. Design principles, methods and practices find expression in
an organization’s day-to-day operations. The challenge for service
designers is not that organizations lack design. The challenge for
service designers is that organizations are full of design – full of
design thinking, full of design practices, full of design methods.
Few of these may be articulated, consciously applied or deliberately
pursued by the organization itself. And yet, there they are.
How can this be? It can be because all organizations struggle
with the same task: every organization, no matter if it serves public or
private interests, has to develop and deliver some kinds of product(s)
or service(s) in order to exist and to operate. Organizations engage
in design not by choice but by necessity: only when an organization
is able to offer something to someone, can an organization be ‘in
business’ and stay in business. When an organization fails to offer
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something that at least some people find meaningful and relevant,

useful and usable, the organization becomes irrelevant and eventu-
ally obsolete.
The forms organizational design outcomes take vary widely. One
organization may produce and deliver information, another con-
sumer goods. However, no matter the shape, size or purpose of
an organization, design is always present and always central to
210

organizational life: people in organizations are busy conceiving of

 Organizational Design Legacies and Service Design

structures, processes, procedures, products and services; they

plan, develop, realize, deliver and implement these on an ongo-
ing basis. They may design poorly; they may develop inadequate
outcomes; they may use inappropriate methods. And yet, there they
are, developing and delivering products, services, processes, proce-
dures, and doing the best they can long before any service designer
or other design professional cares to enter the scene.
Many people within organizations inadvertently find themselves
in the role of designer, regardless of how prepared they are for this
task. Herbert A. Simon’s statement that ‘anyone is a designer who
devices courses of action to turn an existing situation into a preferred
one’ (Simon, 1996[1969]: 104) reminds us that designing is a chal-
lenge taken on by many different people. Simon’s statement also
reminds us that whoever sets out to turn an existing situation into a
preferred one and ends up creating a worse situation (because he or
she is ill-equipped for the design task), still performs a designing role
and still engages in design work.
Another explanation for why designing is essential to organiza-
tions is to remember that organizations are living systems (De Geus,
1997). To be a living system means to keep changing and to keep
developing. Organizations may also be described as living systems
because they are systems in which living beings, humans, have a
major role (Churchman, 1968). This sets them apart from mechani-
cal systems (such as, for example, the inner workings of a clock).
Humans cope with changing environments through design and de-
signing. And through their designing, humans continuously change
their own environments. This, too, shows why designing is central to
organizational life – and why organizational life is central to design.
It means that designing, like changing, is a core organizational
activity within organizations. A core organizational activity is one
that is necessary for an organization to be alive and functioning.
Designing is one of four core activities an organization must engage
in. The other three core organizational activities are changing, orga-
nizing and managing. Without going into too much detail, I can briefly
illustrate what makes these four activities essential or, ‘core’ to the
organization and why they are interdependent and interconnected.
Anyone who designs anything (tangible or intangible) has to engage
in changing something (tangible and/or intangible). It is impossible
to design or redesign without making a single change. What form a
change takes, however, depends on the purpose of the design. A
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change can be as substantial as changing the way we think about

something (thought) or how we do something (action). Designing can
also involve a simple (material) change, for example when we alter
the colour and material form of a product (structure). In either case,
our abilities to design depend on our abilities to change something
or some ‘things’. Changes, in turn, cannot be realized without us or-
ganizing and reorganizing materials, structures, processes, thoughts
211

or actions. This need for organizing and reorganizing highlights the

 Sabine Junginger

relationship between designing and organizing. However, it is the

purpose of our doing that offers a frame for our design activities,
clarifies what needs to change and how and what we need to (re-)
organize. The role of managing, as a core organizational activity, is to
facilitate and enable the kinds of designing, changing and organiz-
ing activities that suit the organization and that allow it to fulfil its
purpose. Figure 1 shows the four core organizational activities and
their interdependencies.
My point is that design activities go on over time in organizations:
they continuously address issues of change and never end. As an
organization changes and reorganizes over time, it establishes its
own design history and its own design context that create organi-
zational ‘situations’ and organizational contexts. There are reasons
why certain structures are in place, why specific procedures have
been established; there are reasons why certain design practices are
being employed and not others. But these reasons are not always
obvious to us – or to the people that make up the organization.
Sometimes, these reasons may no longer be relevant for the organi-
zation today. Think, for example, of the US Postal Service, which es-
tablished its first rules and regulations around the Pony Express and
then later around the demands of the ‘iron horse’, the railroad. Few
of the original organizational structures, procedures and regulations,
if any, remain relevant in the age of digital communication. But while
horses and other technological advancements have been rendered
to the past, we typically find residues of ingrained organizational
design practices and design approaches that can be traced to an
organization’s historic development. For these reasons, we can say
that organizations are not free of design but full of it. We may even
go as far as concluding that their own design legacies are getting in
the way of innovation and transformation.

Figure 1
The four core
organizational activities
and their interdependent
relationships.
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212
 Organizational Design Legacies and Service Design

Organizational Design Legacies

The idea of a legacy is one of heritage, of something being passed
down from someone to someone else, often from one genera-
tion to another. Public organizations in their own right might be
described as legacies, as they are taken on from one generation of
civil servants and citizens to another. However, we can also think
of legacies of practices, more specifically as legacies of designing.
Oxforddictionaries.com alludes to this possible use of the word in
one of its example sentences that refers to ‘the legacy of colonial-
ism’, where colonialism is clearly indicating a practice (the coloniza-
tion of other countries).2
Pursuing this thought, organizational design legacies can be
described as practices people take on from previous generations.
Such practices are handed down from one employee to another,
from one management team to another, from one CEO to another.
As we have seen above, managing is connected to designing. It
is not surprising then that organizational design practices tend to
be shaped or influenced by specific management approaches.
Programs like Total Quality Management (TQM) and New Public
Management (NPM), for example, established specific criteria for
decision-making and thereby promoted different design criteria and
design outcomes. People employing TQM have described it as a
design approach focused on error reduction.3 NPM changed the
design parameters for public organizations when it introduced the
idea that citizens are customers who deserve and demand cus-
tomer services. It also marked a departure from considering citizens
as dependents with consequences for the design of interactions
between frontline workers and citizens.4 In its effort to overcome
traditional management concepts in the public sector, New Public
Governance (NPG) provides yet another kind of design framework,
one that emphasizes another kind of relationship between the state
and the citizen. Moving away from the logic of providing services
for citizens promoted by proponents of NPM, NPG pursues the
co-development of services with citizens (cf. Osborne, 2010). NPG
embraces methods of co-designing, co-creation and co-production,
which may offer many new opportunities for service design.
These different management approaches reinforce that: (a) orga-
nizations are concerned with design issues on a regular, if not daily
basis; (b) designing is a core organizational activity and (c) rather
than finding organizations void of any design thinking and design
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doing, service designers are bound to encounter many forms of

design legacies. It means that an organization’s everyday manage-
ment and operational practices are reflections of underlying design
principles, that is, they mirror previous design decisions and devel-
opment processes we may collectively refer to as design legacies.
Especially in organizations that have been in business for years or
even centuries (as is the case for some public organizations), the
213

challenge for service designers is therefore not to embed design

 Sabine Junginger

but to disentangle and to articulate existing design legacies and to

enable an organization to establish new relationships among its core
organizational activities managing, designing, changing and organiz-
ing. In order to do so, we need to take a look at some elements that
form (and inform) organizational design legacies.

Elements of organizational design legacies

We can distinguish three design elements that have a tradition
or a history within organizations: organizational design practices,
organizational design approaches and organizational purpose.
Organizational purpose refers to the rationale for why an organization
exists. What are its aims, its purpose and its vision? Organizational
design approaches indicate the values that drive an organization.5
Are these values in line with the organization’s purpose or vision?
Also of interest is who holds on to these values. Finally, organiza-
tional design practices address how designing actually takes place
within a given organization. Design practices concern the actual
methods people are familiar with and those they are employing in
their design work. It covers questions like: Who does or is allowed
to participate in a design development and when? In short, the ele-
ments of an organizational design legacy concern what, how and
why designing matters to an organization. I will look into each of
these elements now in more detail to indicate their implications for
design and designers.

Organizational purpose and vision: Why does an

organization exist?
Few aspects shape an organization as much as what its members
and management think its purpose is and why it exists. It is equally
important to understand what people outside of the organization
think the organization’s purpose is. Organizational purpose or vision
is an element in an organization’s design legacy because it encour-
ages certain actions and discourages others. Ideas that seem too far
away from the organization’s purpose or its vision will be dismissed.
Certain products and services will not be developed because they
are identified as misfits with the organizational purpose.6 It is there-
fore key for service and other designers to clarify what an organiza-
tion perceives as its purpose and vision in the context of the product
or service they are developing. Moreover, it may be necessary to
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shift, update or broaden an organization’s vision as part of an ongo-

ing transformational project. Ideally, an organization’s purpose and
vision are linked with that organization’s design approaches. But this
is not always the case, as we know, for example, from government
organizations. Although these have a general mandate to be human-
centred, they rarely follow this mandate. Chances are, they are more
concerned with executing political decisions than with the service
214

experiences of citizens. Still, the role of the service designer here can
 Organizational Design Legacies and Service Design

be one of connecting isolated design efforts and to align them with

the organization’s vision and purpose.

Organizational design approaches: What values drive an

organization?
We can think of an organizational design approach as one that is,
for example, human-centred, process-oriented, problem-solving or
cost-saving. In a human-centred design approach, the core focus
on the organization rests on identifying and developing products and
services that are meaningful to people and empower them in one
way or another. In a process-oriented design approach, products
and services first and foremost fit into existing structures and pro-
cesses of the organization, making use of current resources. This is
also sometimes referred to as ‘design for fit’. The problem-solving
approach is one that begins after a problem has been identified.
This approach tends to follow top-down, linear decision-making and
has a tendency to fragment otherwise connected design activities
(Junginger, 2014). In a cost-saving design approach, the design is
strictly guided by identifying and realizing cost-reducing opportuni-
ties. Most lean approaches fall in this category. Of course, organiza-
tions may also mix any of these design approaches and combine
cost-saving with problem-solving, for example. The challenge for
service designers is to show how a human-centred design approach
can integrate an organization and generate a ‘fit’ with existing sys-
tems while introducing new processes, generating new cost savings
and addressing lingering problems with novel solutions. To shift an
organization’s design approach demands from service designers
that they can articulate, visualize and communicate the strengths
and weaknesses of these (and other) different approaches. Each
of these design approaches has a rationale attached to it. One of
the complaints of senior civil servants concerned with public sector
innovation about service designers is that they can ‘very rarely’ ar-
ticulate beyond issues of service design and human-centred design.
In response to a draft of this paper, one of them asked: ‘is it even
part of their professional curriculum?’7 This points to a gap in design
education that requires urgent attention.

Organizational design practices: How does design take

place, what methods are being used and who participates?
Organizational design practices are part of the design legacy we
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find within an organization. It is important to identify and articulate

the kinds of design practices we find in organizations to understand
with what kind of design legacy we are dealing with and to develop
new design capabilities. We can identify design practices when we
look at who gets to design. In public organizations, for example, we
tend to find three basic groups of people who may get involved and
participate in product development. There are the internal members
215

of an organization. Members of an organization may be managers,

 Sabine Junginger

supervisors, front desk, administrative staff or all of the above. They

may or may not be aware of their design activities and may therefore
act as ‘silent designers’, first described by Gorb and Dumas (1987).
Steeped in and often hampered by organizational processes, struc-
tures and procedures, organizational members can easily overlook
their own role in giving shape and form to products and services.
External experts form a second, much larger and much more diverse
group. External experts who get involved in the design of public ser-
vices can range from professional consultants to academic research-
ers but would also include an organization’s external stakeholders.
For government agencies, the needs, demands and pressures of
external stakeholders, such as professional trade groups, lobbyists,
unions or other parts of government can pose enormous obstacles
to any change or transformation. External participants tend to be
more aware of their role as designers and shapers because they
either make a living of it (as design and management consultants
do), or they have a vested interest in the design outcome (as do
lobbyists, unions or industry associations). We can therefore refer
to external experts more generally as external design experts. The
third group of people that factors into organizational design practices
are the people an organization either aims to provide for or has a
mandate to serve. In business organizations, the term customer is
a catch-all term for this group of people. In public organizations, it
is the everyday citizen who may have a role in organizational design
practices. Everyday citizens are individuals who are already engaging
with an organization or who the organization would like to see en-
gage with (i.e. use) its services. How they are getting engaged in or-
ganizational design practices depends on the ability and willingness
of an organization to embrace participatory design approaches.

Implications for Service Design

Thinking of design as a core organizational activity and recognizing
organizational design legacies can help service designers in several
ways. Most importantly, understanding designing as a core organi-
zational activity means that design is essential and not something an
organization can avoid. Designing is no longer an activity ‘owned’
by a service or other design professional. A design problem is no
longer a problem of product or service design but a problem of
cross-organizational concern. This change in organizational percep-
tion prevents design from being viewed or treated as a foreign, alien
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element or factor that can be injected by external experts or expelled

by members of the organization. Rather than asking ‘should we do
design?’ the question shifts to ‘if we are doing it anyways, how can
we do it better?’ And also ‘how may service design help us here?’
For service designers, such a shift in thinking demands a shift
in actions, too. Instead of entering the organization to right the
wrong, designers need to find ways to connect their own design
216

work with the ongoing design activities of an organization. Instead

 Organizational Design Legacies and Service Design

of ­confronting people with a ‘design agenda’ (Cooper and Press,

1995), the concept of organizational design legacies encourages us
to respect the experiences, skills and knowledge of silent designers
(Gorb and Dumas, 1987). Rather than bringing design into an orga-
nization, service designers can support organizations in advancing
its very own design practices by exploring alternative design ap-
proaches and by developing a design attitude (Michlewski, 2008).
Doing so can open new paths for co-designing and for co-creation
across an organization and its members. It can also aid design
consultants and other external design experts to set realistic expec-
tations about what they can change and what they are prepared and
willing to engage with: the product (or service) in development or the
design practices and methods an organization knows and applies in
its task to develop and deliver products and services.
More than ever, service designers find themselves working in
environments where specific design legacies seemingly suffocate
and frustrate their attempts at innovation and change. These design
professionals find that the tools and methods useful in developing
specific services, however inspiring, are not suitable to produce the
kind of high-level transformational thinking in managers and others
in the organization that is necessary to tackle existing organizational
design practices and concepts. They sense that service design has
a role in transformation and change (cf. Junginger and Sangiorgi,
2009; Sangiorgi, 2011), yet they struggle to find ways into and
around organizational systems as they strive to create pathways into
organizational life for everyday people (Buchanan, 2004).
Considering the implications design legacies have for organiza-
tions and designers, it is surprising that research into design legacies
is rather undeveloped and has yet to capture the organizational side
of things. We do find references to legacies in the context of design
movements (i.e. Art Deco, the Bauhaus, the HfG Ulm)8 or in reference
to individual designers (the likes of Steve Jobs, Charles Eames, Alvar
Aalto or Dieter Rams).9 But we do not find a critical engagement
with design legacies and their implications for contemporary design
practices. This is remarkable because thinking of organizations as
places of design legacies that express organizational purpose, cur-
rent design practices and design approaches significantly changes
the role and place of design in the organization. It directly affects the
way professional designers can work today and in the future. It also
shapes people’s perceptions of what can be designed and what not.
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How to Work with Design Legacies

We can briefly summarize that the concept of organizational design
legacies is relevant to design practitioners because it recognizes on-
going design within an organization. Recognizing and acknowledging
organizational design legacies renders efforts at increasing or trac-
ing organizational absorption capacities for design futile (cf. Bailey,
217

2012). The presence of design legacies means that organizations

 Sabine Junginger

have fully ‘absorbed’ design, though perhaps not exactly the kind
that is best suited for their tasks and purpose. It is more important
therefore to remember that an organization and its members may
not be aware of how design legacies shape their current thinking
and doing, i.e., how their own design legacies work against them.
Legacies of practice that shape and inform our actions seem to
escape our minds quite easily. Hin Bredendieck, a former Bauhaus
student who later became a teacher and director himself, affirms
that even the Bauhaus educators and teachers got caught up in
their own thinking and doing. In his reflection on the legacy of the
Bauhaus (Bredendieck, 1962) he wonders why the Basic Workshop
course ‘made little or no adaptions and remained largely in its original
form’ while design practices and the demands on the designer in
the industries called for new approaches. In his view, a ‘number of
contributing factors can be named as responsible for the now inert
character of the approach’. However, he identifies as the biggest
flaw the fact that design practices did not align with the Bauhaus
design approach:

the approach itself was not guided by the same spirit which
it sought to instill and kindle in the student. While it strove to
develop creativity, initiative and resourcefulness, encouraging
the student to overcome prejudice and relentlessly to explore
new vistas, it failed to apply these very same concepts to the
approach itself.10

Bredendieck also hints at another problem of legacies: they are not

something we can grasp with our senses, touch, feel, smell or see.
What we can see are ‘the immediate results of the course’, that is
the products and services we develop. Yet, legacies of practice are
still present and influence our current thinking and doing. In light of
these issues, we have to question how much toolkits and meth-
ods useful to co-design, co-create or co-produce specific services
for ‘immediate results’ are useful to design on a more strategic
and organizational level. Card-Sorting, Sticky Notes and Customer
Journeys fail us when we seek to move managers from a decision-
making perspective to a design perspective. Here, we need different
ways to articulate and visualize, to invite, engage and enable people.
Before all else, we need to initiate a design conversation. It is through
design conversations that we can achieve ‘actual educational gains’
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that lead to new design practices, new design approaches and that
reflect on the purpose of an organization. This brings us back to
Figure 1.

Design Conversations and Conversation Pieces

There are several points to highlight about the diagram in Figure
1. Perhaps the most important one is that the diagram does not
218

present a ‘best’ or ‘optimal’ model, although people may use it for

 Organizational Design Legacies and Service Design

modelling. The diagram does not depict or imitate any ‘is-state’, nor
does it try to do so. Instead, the diagram invites a conversation. In
this conversation, different relationships can be explored, imagined
and played with to discover how the core organizational activities
may interact and what this means for designing. We can use the
diagram to enquire into different realities and envision a number of
future possibilities. We can arbitrarily start our exploration with the
activity of managing and think through the implications this has for
the other three activities (i.e. designing, changing and organizing) or
we may begin deliberately with any of the other three activities and
explore the implications this may have for managing.
The diagram facilitates enquiry and conversation because it does
not value one activity over another. Instead, it challenges people to
form their own connections between different organizational activi-
ties, some of which they may overlook in their daily work. It is not
uncommon for managers to think of design as something that can
be externalized or compartmentalized in their organizations. The
diagram challenges this notion and establishes a direct link with
managing practices. It is a reminder that designing is central to
organizational life and involves changing and managing, too. By
embracing all four core organizational activities (managing, design-
ing, organizing and changing), managers, staff and professional
designers can place themselves in the diagram somewhere – and
each of them can describe and explain their own experiences and
relationships through these different activities. It is in this sense that
the diagram stimulates and initiates a much-needed conversation
about the role and place of design in people’s own realm of practice
and experience.
The diagram avoids judgements and encourages people to dis-
cuss and explore design in the organization together. As such, the
diagram becomes a tool for engaging people with different experi-
ences, concepts and methods in a design conversation relevant to
their organization. It should be noted that such a design conversation
might take place anytime and anywhere, independent of a specific
design project or a specific design service. Already, this diagram
has demonstrated its value in facilitating design conversations with
distinct groups.11 More importantly, the diagram has allowed and
enabled these groups to reflect on their own design legacies. With
simple yet complex visualizations like the four core organizational
activities, designers can unlock design in the organization and move
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a design conversation from one centred on services and products

to one of organizational relevance. We might therefore describe this
diagram as a conversation piece: A way to invite, engage and enable
people to reflect on their own experiences and knowledge and to
think differently about organizational purpose, organizational design
approaches and organizational design practices.
The purpose of a conversation piece like the diagram in Figure 1
219

is to unlock our fixed notions about design and to generate a new

 Sabine Junginger

Figure 2
Organizational design
practices are part of the
design legacy we find in
organizations. This matrix
serves as a ‘conversation
piece’ to engage
organizational members
in a reflection on their
own design practices. Its
intent is to question and to
engage, not to provide an
answer.

landscape of design possibilities. Figure 2 shows another possible

design conversation piece. The left column of this ‘organizational
engagement matrix’ reflects on the involvement and responsibility
an organization and its staff may assume when facing a design
problem: an organization may delegate the design responsibility to
external design experts (designing for organizations); it may want
to take some responsibility and design with external design experts
(designing with organizations) or it may take on all of the design
responsibilities by designing themselves. In a similar fashion, we can
talk about the involvement and responsibilities citizens have in a pub-
lic design effort: citizens have no responsibility or involvement when
they are being designed for; but they may be included somewhat or
even given the full responsibility to design for themselves.
While the purpose of Figure 1 is to establish designing as an
intrinsic organizational activity, the main purpose of the matrix in
Figure 2 is to assist organizations and their managers in reflecting on
their own design engagements and their own design responsibilities
– that is their own stance towards design. The matrix seeks to invite,
engage and enable organizational staff to come to terms with their
actual design activities and design practices. Many organizational
design practices follow directly from an organization’s view of design-
ing as an activity done by a group to or for people, done by a group
The Design Journal

with a group of people, or done by a group of people. One of the

motivations to develop such a conversation piece for managers in
organizations was the recognition that organizational staff is seldom
conscious of their own actions and roles in ongoing design efforts.
They literally do not know their ‘place’. The matrix offers a landscape
of different organizational design possibilities. Within this landscape,
managers and designers can place themselves experimentally and
220

explore new orientations. First and foremost, however, the map

 Organizational Design Legacies and Service Design

initiates a conversation about the kinds of design engagements they

are pursuing in their projects and in their organization. Are these
deliberate forms of engagements or are these unreflected practices?
Are they aware of other design engagements? How to get there?
Why to pursue them? For what reason or purpose? This matrix, too,
remains non-judgemental. There is no best place, no worst place.
In the same fashion the four core organizational activities diagram in
Figure 1 explicitly serves to ask questions and to facilitate a conver-
sation, the matrix, too, does not provide answers. Both are tools for
enquiry into the design legacies people work with. If we seek to instil
sensible and lasting changes, organizational design practices have
to be questioned and organizational design methods scrutinized.12
For this we need enquiry. Conversation pieces are proving useful in
initiating the design conversations necessary to arrive at transforma-
tion and innovation.
The problem of enquiry presents another challenge for service
designers, for researchers and practitioners alike when it comes to
design legacies: too often, we think of our role as one of providing a
solution, as coming up with an answer for the organization we work
with. We promote design as ‘problem-solver’. We are trained to use
methods of enquiry to address specific design problems that lead
to ‘immediate results’. We seem to be less prepared or equipped
to enquire into design and its broader role in the organization. Few
practitioners arrive with a plan or tools for how to engage the organi-
zation in a conversation that considers current design practices, cur-
rent design approaches and their implications for the organization’s
ability to fulfil its vision or its purpose. Yet, this is what is needed.
Service designers and other design professionals have to embrace
organizational design legacies and come to terms with the design
work that is going on in everyday organizational life. In addition,
service designers need to connect more deeply with broader design
theoretical concepts and build on other kinds of design thinking. The
rewards for undertaking these extra efforts promise less alienation,
more respect and the prospect of actually being able to change an
organization’s design practices and design attitude.

Summary and Conclusion

I started this paper as a provocation for the ServDes 2014 confer-
ence, where I presented an early version under the title ‘Design
legacies: Why service designers cannot embed design in the orga-
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nization.’ In light of the many presentations and talks I had attended

where service designers were eager to share how they were bringing
design into an organization, I felt a need to call attention to the
design principles, methods and practices organizations work with
already. With this paper I have established that organizations are
‘full of design’. I have identified three elements of organizational
design legacies – organizational purpose, organizational design
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approaches and organizational design practices – and explained

 Sabine Junginger

organizational design practices in detail. I have introduced design

conversation pieces as a way to access and challenge organiza-
tional design legacies using the four core organizational activities
and the organizational design engagement matrix to exemplify how
design is already embedded in organizations and how we may
distinguish between different organizational design practices. At this
point, I have shared the diagram and the matrix with a government
policy-planning department; several public management scholars;
and several other practitioners and scholars working in and around
public sector innovation as well as with different groups of students.
In these contexts, both visuals served as conversation pieces for
reflection and understanding of current internal organizational design
approaches and practices.
At this point, I am not quite sure if it is necessary to delve into
the very last corner of design legacies to grasp their relevance
for design research and design practice. For most people within
organizations and for the majority of external design experts, it
may suffice to be aware that such design legacies exist; that there
are design practices that are being applied and that organizations
already have their own approaches to design products and services.
I suggest that design assumes a very different role and place in the
organization when we are aware of these design legacies and when
we embrace them. Doing so can open up new ways to collaborate
and engage with organizational staff. Instead of having to convince
managers, employees and the rest of the organization that design
is relevant, the point is already made and we can begin to focus on
changing design practices that do not lead the organization to the
desired outcomes.
If designing is a core organizational activity and if designing takes
place every day somehow somewhere within organizations, the
challenge for service designers is not to introduce and to embed de-
sign. Instead, they have to be able to connect their work to existing
design practices, design approaches and design methods, in short,
the organization’s design legacies. This presents new opportunities
for transformational changes but it also demands new thinking and
new ways of going about designing for design professionals.
I conclude this paper with the lessons I have learned from this
research:

1. Organizational design legacies exist.

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2. Because of their existence, we need to shift our own thinking and

design practices as professional designers when working with
organizations.
3. Design researchers can help to reposition design in the organiza-
tion by developing conversation pieces that invite, engage, and
enable organizational members to reflect on their organizational
purpose, their organizational design approaches and their orga-
222

nizational design practices.

 Organizational Design Legacies and Service Design

4. Design education has to prepare and equip young service

designers with the knowledge and skills to engage in organiza-
tional design conversations.

As one of the anonymous reviewers for this paper has pointed out,
the focus on design legacies may easily blur the fact that a designer
also encounters:

staff who occupy the entire spectrum of attachment to

those legacies, from staunch defenders of the status quo to
enthusiastic and early adopters of new approaches. Often
service design approaches engage with early adopters only to
see these initiatives founder when attempts are made to make
them mainstream.

In my view, knowledge about design legacies can help designers

identify and connect not only with early adopters but also with the
very staff that is more secure and more attached to the legacy con-
cepts and practices. Succeeding here means to gain an invaluable
collaborator from whom one can learn just as much as vice versa.
It is an exciting time to be a service designer. Numerous organiza-
tions are opening their doors to service designers and to methods
of service design. They are evidence of a new willingness – if not
an eagerness – for organizations to develop new design practices.
The core argument of this paper is that both the organization and
any involved designer will be more successful in achieving this when
they are prepared to recognize and deal with existing organizational
design legacies. There is no need to build up unnecessary frontiers
of ‘us designers’ versus ‘them, the people in the organization.’
Ignorance of organizational design legacies can quickly translate into
an unhealthy disrespect for existing systems and processes and for
those who manage them. Overcoming organizational design lega-
cies is a prerequisite for transformational thinking and for new action.

Notes
1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at ServDes 2014 in
Lancaster, UK.
2. Oxforddictionaries.com, search term legacy (accessed 8 January
2015).
3. Observation by a member of the Australian Tax Office who
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participated in the Australian TQM movement (personal interview,

2003).
4. Neither TQM nor NPM are as simplistic as I seemingly describe
them here. In fact, both management programs came in many
different variations. See, for example, Hood (1995)
5. I refer to ‘design approach’ and not to ‘design attitude’, a term
introduced by Boland and Collopy in their 2004 book Managing
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as Designing. The way Michlewski refers to design attitude the

 Sabine Junginger

term helps us understand how designers relate to their work. The

way I use design approach instead looks at how designers go
about their work (Michlewski, 2008: 273). Also see Michlewski
(forthcoming).
  6. This problem has become known as ‘the innovator’s dilemma’
and has been identified as one of the reasons for why some
private businesses that were once innovative and successful fall
behind. See Christensen (1997).
  7. September 2014.
  8. Examples include a one-day symposium held by the Museum of
Modern Art in New York on 22 January 2010: Before and After
1933: The International Legacy of the Bauhaus (http://www.
moma.org; accessed 10 January 2015); Vihma’s ‘The legacy
of the HfG Ulm’ (2005); or Hin Bredendieck’s ‘The legacy of the
Bauhaus’ (1962).
 9. Harvard Business Review has dedicated a whole website to the
legacy of Steve Jobs. See http://hbr.org/special-collections/
steve-jobs (accessed 10 January 2015). The ‘Legacy of Dieter
Rams’ is often linked to the ‘10 Design Principles’ he promoted.
For a list of these see http://www.thenewsgallery.com/2010/10/
legacy-of-dieter-rams-10-principles-of.html (accessed 10
January 2015).
10. See Hin Bredendieck’s ‘The legacy of the Bauhaus’ (1962).
11. Examples include: Professional Development Workshop at the
Academy of Management (Montreal, 2010); with MA students
in Design Management (at the Southern University of Denmark,
2012); with MA students working on Service Design (Tongji
University, Shanghai, 2013) but also with public managers
pursuing an Executive Master in Public Management (Hertie
School of Governance, Berlin, 2014) and with the Policy
Planning Department of the Israeli Prime Minister’s Offices in
Jerusalem (2014).
12. It has been pointed out to me that the organizational design
engagement matrix in Figure 2 shares some similarities with a
matrix by Boyle and Harris (2009), which they developed in the
context of co-production. However, their purpose and function
are completely different. Boyle and Harris use their matrix to
present a finding (i.e. conclusions) whereas the organizational
design engagement matrix neither presents any findings nor
refrains from optimization.
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of Design History, 15: 64–75.

Biography
Sabine Junginger, PhD, studies what and how human-centred
design can contribute to address problems of organizations, man-
agement and public policy. Her work links service design with or-
ganizational change and public sector innovation. She is Visiting
225

Professor at Macromedia University of Applied Sciences in Berlin,

 Sabine Junginger

Germany, and a Fellow at the Hertie School of Governance, also

Berlin.

Address for Correspondence

Email: s.junginger@macromedia.de
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226