The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it
- Marcus Aureilius

I watched an interview with a biologist in which he made a radical insight: we’re leaving the era of the mean and moving into the era of the standard deviation. Meaning the world is becoming highly volatile and unpredictable, and we should instead prepare for fluctuations rather than averages. We can all see it — new record-breaking temperatures, once-in-a-century storms becoming the norm, a new virus mutation; the list goes on.

Outside of ecology, I’ve seen this in organizations. As service designers, we are hired to craft the future, be it North Star visions, future-state journeys, and transformation roadmaps. We identify and imagine where an organization needs to go, then work backward to determine how to get there. And increasingly, that future doesn’t hold still long enough for the plan to catch up. New technology changes customer expectations and organizations’ priorities. A disruption exposes a weakness in the system we didn’t know existed. A regulatory shift changes the rules. A climate event turns into a recurring condition. This isn’t just a hypothetical list; it’shappened with the last few projects I have worked on. What happens next? Five-year plans get thrown aside to focus on a new disruption or risk, and organizations apply quick fixes, layer on band-aids, and let tech and experience debt accumulate.

I have written this blog three times over because every angle comes back to this: optimization isn’t everything. Our work in service design focuses heavily on optimizing for the future, streamlining processes for customers and employees, and creating new efficiencies. But if an organization becomes extremely optimized around the mean, around what usually happens, it can actually become brittle and less resilient when there are fluctuations. If you optimize out slack, redundancy, discretion, and human judgment because, under average conditions, those things look inefficient. But those are often exactly what allows a system to absorb a shock.

And on a personal note, if you’re continuously optimizing for the future, do you even enjoy your present? I know I have to keep this work-related, but I want to take a moment to say overnight oats are not the efficiency hack I want in my life!

Nature Didn’t Get the Memo About the Happy Path

Ecosystems don’t survive because they’re optimized for the average conditions. They survive through species biodiversity, redundancy in essential tasks, and the ability to respond differently when conditions change: outbreaks of new diseases, extreme weather, invasive species, increased human activity, and pollution, to name a few. Some species are having to adapt quickly, so much so that scientists coined a new term for this in 1999: contemporary evolution. Contemporary evolution is turbocharged genetic change that can occur within years, decades, or centuries, rather than millions of years. Not every organism responds to a changing environment by waiting for conditions to return to normal or through hyper adaptations. Some can change their behavior or characteristics in response to the conditions around them.

Biologists call this plasticity: an organism’s ability to change its characteristics or behavior in response to its environment. It can be behavioral, physiological, or physical.

One example is the raccoon, particularly those that dwell in city habitats. Raccoons that live in urban environments show high physical and behavioral plasticity, with recent adaptations such as shorter snouts, smaller teeth, and calmer responses to urban stimuli that help them fit into a dense, human-driven environment.

While I am not suggesting you or your organization should get really good and finding trash, there’s something to be said by how resilient these animals are. A system can survive changing conditions not because it perfectly anticipated them, but because it has the capacity to change in response to them.

Design for Change, Not Certainty

We don’t need to predict every exception or fluctuation the future might hold. We need to design systems that can respond when fluctuations happen. Designing for the edge case can be a seemingly endless task that can lead to more swirl. But some edge cases may be telling us something about where the system is changing. They may signal the ecotones in our services: places where different expectations, systems, and realities collide, a subject my colleague Darwin Muljono has written about.

The goal, then, isn’t to anticipate every possible scenario. It’s to build the capacity to respond when the scenario changes. This is where modern service design has to evolve. At Harmonic, when we help teams design services, we’ve shifted from asking ‘What is the ideal static journey?’ to ‘Where does this system need room to flex? Taking a cue from nature, we can focus less on designing for every exception and more on designing systems with the capacity to adapt:

1. Keep some slack
   Capacity that looks “unused” under normal conditions can become critical when demand spikes.
2. Give decision-making authority
   Give people closest to the situation enough authority to respond without waiting for the new plan.
3. Design principles, not just procedures
   When you can’t anticipate every situation, clear principles can help people make decisions without requiring a rule for every exception.
4. Build feedback into the system
   Shorter learning loops make it possible to notice changing conditions and respond before yesterday’s solution becomes tomorrow’s problem.
5. Design for recovery and change
   Don’t only ask, “How do we prevent failure?” Ask, “How can this system recover, learn, and become something different?”

Designing for Plasticity in the Real World

Shifting away from rigid, hyper-optimized future states doesn’t mean abandoning strategy, it just means being honest about how work actually happens. When we work with teams at Harmonic, we don’t drop in with a cookie-cutter framework and tell everyone to start over. We have to meet people where they’re actually at, mapping where their current systems are brittle, discovering tensions and competing priorities, finding where frontline teams are already quietly adapting to survive, and helping build the slack and permission needed to let that responsiveness scale.

In the Age of Exceptions, Be the Raccoon

If we’re entering an age where exceptions arrive more frequently, plasticity may become more valuable than optimization. Perhaps that’s a more useful way to think about the future of service design. Our job isn’t always to create the perfect future state. Sometimes it’s to create services and organizations that can keep becoming something else as the world around them changes.

The Dark Side of Servitization: 5 Questions Designers Can Ask to Create Value, Not Extract It — Harmonic Design

By Becky Scheel, Lead Designer, Creative and Community

I’m at a certain age where I have replatformed my music four times (I’m still stubbornly holding on to my analog music collection). The latest replatforming trades physical objects for access to a massive streaming platform promising to introduce me to new music, but nothing seems to top the sad songs and bops from 2008. This platform of seemingly endless musical choices is part of a broader shift in how we buy, use, and experience products and services: subscriptions, accounts, apps, software updates, and proprietary repairs. There’s a name for this shift: servitization -turning a physical product into an ongoing service or experience.

When done well, servitization can create real value. It can reduce the burdens of ownership, make services more accessible, distribute resources more efficiently, and can even be easier on the planet’s resources. The Dutch have embraced this model wholeheartedly, with successful subscription services for everything from bicycles and modular phones to large home appliances, supported by both policy and culture.

But lately I’ve been wondering: When does servitization stop creating value and start creating lock-in?

John Oliver’s recent Last Week Tonight episode on subscriptions and “dark UX” got me thinking about the bigger picture: ubiquitous subscriptions, toasters that absolutely do not need to be “smart,” the right to repair, and the hidden value of our personal data. These might seem like separate problems. I think they’re connected.

https://youtu.be/Wko-2c7lZL8?si=CDFTH7lqGs7kKwgj

They’re all examples of what happens when the value a business can extract from a customer starts to outweigh the value the service provides.

So, what can we do about it? As designers, we have more agency than we sometimes realize. I don’t have a magical framework to correct the wrongs of dark UX and extractive services. There’s no quadruple diamond for this! But here are a few questions I’m trying to ask more intentionally to help ensure the services we design create net positive value for customers.

1. The “Free” Service: What Are You Actually Paying With?

A free service rarely means there is no exchange of value. You’ve probably heard the phrase: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” I certainly had, but I had no idea it was attributed to Richard Serra until I started researching this piece.

Art history side note that you can use at your next cocktail party: Richard Serra! Yes, the famous artist whose sculptures will literally have you lost in a wondrous maze of massive steel. Apparently, he was also musing about television, advertising, and the commodification of audiences back in 1973.

Free trials expire. Free tiers are limited. And my personal favorite: your free email is at storage capacity, yet again! Get off my back, Google! Increasingly, the service itself may be subsidized by access to something else: your data.

The exchange can look something like: Free service → access to your data → value extracted from that data.

And we’re not just talking about the information we knowingly provide. Our behavior can be used to infer things about us that we never explicitly shared.

Even more troubling, privacy itself is increasingly something you can pay more to protect. That raises a question that feels especially uncomfortable in a K-shaped economy: If privacy is something you can buy, who gets to have it?

A designer should ask:

→ What is the actual value exchange?
Map it. Who gives what? Who gets what? What happens to the information along the way?

→ Do we need to collect data?
Be a good data steward. Compliance (hello GDPR) is the floor, not the goal.

2. The Subscription: Is It Easy to Get In and Impossible to Get Out?

Subscriptions can be genuinely useful. They can make services more flexible, affordable, and convenient.

But we’ve all encountered the other version: the service that’s easy to start and difficult to cancel, the subscription you forgot about, or the cancellation flow that makes leaving feel like you’re reliving your Catholic guilt upbringing all over again. It makes you want to spend all your money to go buy back your tape collection! In 2026, the average adult in the U.S. spends $111 a month on subscriptions, with roughly 19% of that being on unused subscriptions.

This reveals a more sinister part of design: dark ux patterns such as flipped primary and secondary buttons, confusing copy and flows, and baroque instructions. The experience is intentionally designed to undermine a customer’s ability to choose.

A designer should ask:

→ Are we designing offboarding with the same care as onboarding?
Remember the peak-end rule: the ending is part of the experience too.

→ Where are we using friction to support the customer, and where are we using it to trap them?

3. The “Smart” Product: Does It Need to Be a Service at All?

Not everything needs to be connected.

A lightbulb doesn’t necessarily need an account. A physical product shouldn’t automatically become an excuse to create an ongoing revenue stream. And for the love of all things holy, I do not want to download an app to use my toaster! The Internet of Things (IoT) promises more flexibility and accessibility. By being “smart,” these products and services can adjust to your patterns, find efficiencies, and provide remote access. But with that comes a cost.

TVs, doorbell cameras, thermostats, speakers, and even refrigerators labeled smart devices are all tracking, collecting, connecting, and brokering your data. The same things that make them smart also make them susceptible to misuse in the form of surveillance, harassment, and hacking.

A designer should ask:

→ Does it create meaningful customer value, or simply create another reason to keep charging?

→ What happens to the product if the service disappears?

4. The Right to Repair: Who Really Owns the Product?

I remember going to a talk at SXSW more than a decade ago about how John Deere’s software was making farmers dependent on the manufacturer to repair equipment they already owned.

That talk has stuck with me. If I buy something (and granted, commercial tractors start around $200,000), but only the manufacturer can diagnose, repair, or update it, how much ownership do I really have? More than ten years later, the FTC is taking action to give farmers greater access to repair tools.

This isn’t just a technology or a business decision. The service ecosystem surrounding a product can determine who has power long after the transaction is over.

A designer should ask:

→ Who has the power in this service relationship?

→ Are we designing for continued value or continued dependence?

→ Can we design products and services to be modular, repairable, and sustainable?

🔸Annotate that service blueprint. Look beyond the happy path. Defy enshittification!

5. The Bigger Question: What If We Anchored to Value Instead?

To Mr. Oliver’s point 🍸, what if we focused more energy on making valuable services and products and less on finding increasingly sneaky ways to extract money, data, attention, and dependence?

The issue arises when the value exchange becomes unbalanced, and design fails to address that imbalance or, worse, is used to obscure it. Before we launch the next subscription service, connected product, or loyalty program, we should ask ourselves: Are we designing services that genuinely create value, or simply creating new ways to extract money, data, attention, or dependence?

A service is a relationship, and design has a role in determining whether that relationship creates mutual value or becomes extractive. Our job as designers is to make the value exchange visible and make sure it benefits everyone involved.

Originally published at https://thisisharmonic.com on September 1, 2026.

When everything works, but nothing connects.

By Parc Masterson, Service Design Lead

Design is strategy made manifest

Not interpreted or layered on. Not executed downstream after decisions get made — but integrating and informing what decisions are made and why. This is strategy realized: making it tangible, testable, and true. And design, fundamentally, is about fit.

Fit top to bottom, end to end, and outside-in — spanning mental models to business models. The kind of fit that determines whether an organization works across people and teams, features and functions, moments and journeys. Everything, everywhere, all at once.

This is radical holism. Most organizations are built to optimize fit across a handful of high-visibility levels or mission-critical elements. When fit is accomplished, the win is short-lived, and it often triggers a subtle systemic breakdown of several others simultaneously. Product ships against a roadmap intended to answer the objectives leadership declared in a deck. Time keeps on ticking, and customers get to experience the gaps between all three.

The gaps are where all the action is, and nobody tends to own them. They’re nebulous and amorphous. They don’t close through formal authority, executive mandate, or any single vantage point. So organizations reach for a reorg, declare a new operating model, or commission a better strategy. The diagnosis feels right. Meanwhile, affected employees at every level do what they can to make do — or worse, subvert the change. The remedy doesn’t take hold. Classic systems rejection.

• Product shifts strategy after adopting Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) and journeys. The organization structure never shifts to support it, and operations scramble to fix ineffective processes.
• Executive leadership invests in cloud infrastructure capabilities. Legacy on-premise systems remain core to operations, and teams manage both.
• The organization reorganizes around customer experience. Employee incentive structures still reward individual efficiency over cross-functional outcomes.

These aren’t failures of strategy. They’re failures to design across the full scale of the challenge.

Fixing it requires leaders who can hold that scale without being overwhelmed. Leaders who work across functions without needing to own them. Who zoom between altitudes — strategic and operational — without losing the thread of either. Who create value by reconciling the fit between organizational identity, operational architecture, and human experience. Who translate between the language of business, product, and customer.

That’s not a generalist. It’s not a consultant delivering best practice. It’s a specific kind of leader doing a specific kind of work — the kind most organizations don’t have. The ones that do tend to notice the difference. Fit stops being something that happens to them and starts being something intended from the onset. Something designed.

From building features to building a movement.

This kind of fit isn’t achieved with a transformation program. It doesn’t start with a listening tour or a discovery phase either. Organizations are complex adaptive systems — more akin to the Swiss Alps than a Swiss watch. Think clouds, not clocks. No amount of careful study reveals how they’ll react to change. They’re best understood by moving through them and paying attention to what gets absorbed or rejected. Probe, sense, respond. Start somewhere real, learn what the system reveals, let that inform what comes next.

And there is always a next or a series of nexts. Change at the scope and scale required to achieve fit comes through a concerted series of campaigns sufficient to create a movement. Movements need scaffolding — just enough structure to shape, guide, and support a latticework of tactics. A way to make progress visible, keep people oriented, and give change somewhere to take root against the inevitable gravity of “the way we’ve always done it.”

Once you learn to notice the gaps, it’s hard not to. Yet, the chasm between seeing fit across organizational identity, operational architecture, and human experience and building the capacity to sustain it across shifting priorities, competing voices, and the gravity of organizational culture is vast. Over years of working inside large matrixed enterprises and small innovation teams alike, patterns emerged. The organizations that were able to make progress and sustained change weren’t honed by bleeding-edge technologies, Big 4 strategies, or bolder bets. They were the ones who’d invested in creating the conditions for common purpose, understanding, and action. From top to bottom, end to end, and outside-in. Three interlocking practices were key to creating the scaffolding necessary to steward a movement. Together, they form an operating system for designing for fit that I call the Relationship ARC.

Stewarding a Movement: Artifacts, Rituals, Commitments

The Relationship ARC creates the conditions where fit stops being accidental and becomes intentional. Not through a rigid sequence or a transformation playbook. Through a menu of reinforcing practices applied based on where the gaps actually are, what experiments reveal, and what the organization will tolerate.

Artifacts are how design makes the abstract concrete and the implied explicit. In design practice, these are boundary objects — things people can point to, react to, and build shared language around. An ecosystem map. A service blueprint. A capability model. These artifacts aren’t an output but a means to an outcome. They’re an interface to bridge perspectives across teams and functions that would otherwise be optimizing against different versions of reality. Alignment becomes possible where assumption once lived.

Rituals are the structured rhythms that let teams go deep into their own domain and come back together as shared owners of fit. Not a meeting cadence or an operating rhythm — a designed relationship between ownership and cooperation. Current norms and structures are optimized for focus and must be balanced with a reason and space for coordination. Effective rituals do both without feeling like overhead. They feel like how the work actually moves.

Commitments are how organizations wayfind under constant change. At the micro level, these are working agreements that codify the needs we’re solving for, the value we must create, and how we intend to do so. At the macro level, they become shared visions, shared purposes, and shared principles that shape action and ultimately how an organization governs itself. Not irrevocable contracts, but orientation points. Stable enough to navigate by, flexible enough to adapt as fit is achieved.

Artifacts create shared language. Rituals build the muscle of working across boundaries. Commitments hold the direction while everything else shifts. That’s the practice, the way of being, of leaders who don’t just see the gaps but know how to close them. Together, they form a virtuous circle: understanding shapes how teams coordinate, coordination reveals what commitments need tightening, clearer commitments create space for new understanding to emerge.

None of this is simple. The gaps are real, the scale is intimidating, and the grooves defining the way things are done are carved deep. Yet fit doesn’t need a perfect plan or a transformation budget or executive permission. It just requires a spark. A start. One experiment, one campaign, one relationship strengthened. Movements, by their nature, are incremental. The only question is who’s going to lead yours?

Originally published at https://thisisharmonic.com on June 5, 2026.

By: Mariah Mills, Lead Service Designer

Many organizations have mature product development practices but immature CX and journey management capabilities. This can lead to faster feature optimization while unintentionally degrading end-to-end experiences. I recently explored how journey management, service design, and product management can work together to support continuous product improvement. Here, I’ll build on that thinking and focus specifically on how CX teams can add value to new product development, leveraging journey frameworks. Specifically, seeding journey management in the new product development process shifts the role of CX from reporting on outcomes to shaping upstream decisions about what should be built and measured.

Product organizations may collect data to measure a variety of business outcomes, such as Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), as well as experience outcomes such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). However, these metrics alone don’t always explain why outcomes are trending in a certain direction. This is where product teams can collaborate with CX to leverage journey management.

Looking Beyond Product-Level Metrics

One way this comes to life is through how teams interpret and act on customer journeys across products. For existing solutions, CX can map customer journeys across products or services that combine multiple individual products to help build alignment across product teams, moment by moment, around the outcomes they hope to achieve. From a single product lens, it may appear advantageous to streamline the customer’s journey from awareness to purchase as much as possible (measurable in time-to-purchase), however, from a multi-product journey lens, it may be more advantageous for customers to take their time considering how a custom suite of products may best fit their needs (measurable in total spend, loyalty, or Customer Lifetime Value).

Navigating Tensions Between Efficiency and Experience

This tension between efficiency and experience shows up in other areas as well: reducing call volume to customer assistance may lower costs for the business, but what results do those cost-reduction solutions have on strengthening customer relationships? Depending on the business goal at that moment, a different measurement tactic can indicate not only where changes are needed but also which kinds of changes are most advantageous. If a product team is only measuring customer service costs without accounting for churn-related costs associated with key customer experience pitfalls at specific points in the journey, they may miss an opportunity to improve the product and address both.

Bringing Journey Management Into New Product Development

While these challenges are often addressed in existing products, they become even more critical in new product development, where there is a great opportunity to address these kinds of decisions before launch to create a more intentional customer experience from the start. CX teams can start working with product teams in the product design phase to define the desired customer journey and identify outcomes that signal the success of features and experiences. They can examine how new products fit into existing customer journeys and add to the overall ecosystem strategy. This helps product teams align on the overall desired customer experience, in addition to the product’s vision, plan intentional data collection, and decide how they will use the results. This enhances the customer experience from the start and increases decision-making speed throughout post-release improvement phases. Examples of candidate metrics collected across phases of a generic journey can help illustrate how measurement strategies shift over time.

In summary, journey management reframes CX’s role: from tracking performance to actively informing what gets built and how value is measured. This shift enables product teams to ground decisions in a deep understanding of the end-to-end customer experience and design more sustainable and human solutions.

Originally published at https://thisisharmonic.com on May 26, 2026.

A mandate is not a strategy.

By: Patrick Quattlebaum, Harmonic Design co-founder and CEO

AI has supercharged executives’ relentless desire to accelerate. Leadership says use AI, teams scramble to find applications, and suddenly, you’ve got solutions looking for problems. When organizations treat AI adoption as a checkbox and pair it with moving fast and breaking things, two questions get lost in the seductive race for speed: Is this solution worth building at all? And even if it is, does it cohere with everything else we’re building?

These technology-first approaches have always created experiential fragmentation, operational waste, and lower adoption. The stakes with AI are more consequential. At best, organizations risk confusing pure speed with real value. At worst, they break people and cause irreversible damage.

This dynamic demands slowing down enough to ensure solutions have a purpose, clear value, and take human needs and impact into account. In this piece, I offer a reminder of how history rhymes even when it does not repeat, a review of the design fundamentals for this moment, and a practical framework for ensuring value and coherence get delivered when AI-first drives the agenda.

The Fragmentation Risk

Let’s look at a historical analogue to this moment: the rise of the commercial web and the microsite. In the first decade of this century, as the web was between Web 1.0 and the social media age, it became easier to deploy websites without as much IT support. One result: marketing departments engaged external agencies to build an ocean of microsites. Each touchpoint solved a local problem based on a siloed sub-brand brief, often at the expense of its fit with people, the brand, technology, and other systems. When you zoomed out, fragmentation, incoherence, and poor outcomes became clearly visible.

I continue to have flashbacks to that era. I saw the waste of time, talent, and money. I felt, at times, hopeless about stopping the proliferation of touchpoints, even as I was hired to bring coherence to it. As a designer, I worked hard to return the focus to value and experience, not aggressive building or activity over outcomes. As an employee and customer myself, I experienced the same fragmentation. It was frustrating.

The rush to deploy AI across as many solutions follows this “we can build it” and ‘it must be fast” mentality. Not only is the value of each new solution questionable, but the sheer volume of change also deepens experiential and operational discord (and requires a lot of tokens to boot). This isn’t just a customer experience problem; it’s an organizational coherence problem. Product, CX, technology, and brand all have stakes in where AI goes. When those functions aren’t aligned around a shared understanding of what a solution is trying to do and for whom, the result is a landscape of point solutions that contradict each other, confuse customers and employees, and erode the relationships organizations are trying to build.

Poorly framed mandates drive technology-first action. Strategic mandates center on value and consider how solutions fit into or change the contexts in which businesses and people operate.

Returning to Fundamentals

A service design mindset and practice can help avoid deficiencies in value and coherence. Our methods support moving up and down scales of a system, identifying where local solutions create incoherent experiences when linked together in an actual customer journey, where interactions that seem good in the moment reveal gaps, inconsistencies, and broken promises across time and space. A little service design goes a long way.

Three principles stand out to ensure greater value and coherent services front and backstage while leveraging and embracing new capabilities, including technology, as they emerge.

Shape the Material to People, Not the Other Way Around

In the 1950s, Henry Dreyfuss argued that “for the industrial designer, the job is already assigned; to fit the new machines and materials…to people.” His point of view was partly pragmatic-it’s easier to change technology than people. With the new material of AI, the stakes are far greater, but the designer’s job remains the same. We don’t bend people to fit the technology. We shape the technology to serve people’s actual needs, behaviors, and contexts. When organizations lead with AI as the solution, they’re doing the opposite. They’re asking people to adapt to the technology rather than asking what the technology should do for the people it’s meant to serve.

Zoom Out and See the Larger Context

In 1968, Charles and Ray Eames made a short film for IBM called Powers of Ten. It starts with a couple on a picnic blanket in Chicago and zooms out-one power of ten every ten seconds-all the way to the edge of the known universe. Then it zooms back in. The point wasn’t just about scale. It was about context. What you see depends entirely on where you’re standing. When someone brings you an AI solution, zoom out one X. Where does this actually sit in the customer’s journey? What larger moments does it touch? What brand principles does it need to honor? What systems does it interact with? A solution that makes perfect sense in isolation often creates friction or contradiction when you zoom out and see it in context.

Center the Value Exchange

The success of any service depends upon a healthy value exchange. The service provider seeks viability in the short and long term based on its objectives, profit, or mission. The customer seeks something in return, such as functionality, insight, efficiency, or peace of mind. These value exchanges occur in small and large interactions over time (see Fig. 1).

Regardless of whether the interface to the service is digital or human, the real design work never wavers from crafting these explicit exchanges. While people are learning to design with AI material, this principle should remain the highest priority. But too many AI-driven implementations focus on the how of the build versus the why and the what of the service. It’s critical to focus on value exchanges and shape AI to create them, versus letting AI shape the service.

Embracing these principles-shape technology to people, zoom out to see context, and center on the value exchange-allows you to be “yes, and” to AI while staying focused on serving people and creating real value.

The Intelligent Experience Canvas

Here’s what leveraging these principles looks like in practice. My colleagues and I have developed the Intelligent Experience Framework (Fig. 2). Deceptively simple, this framework addresses the tendency to run with AI solutions quickly, only to find they create an underwhelming or damaging impact once built. Given people’s mental models of AI are still forming and AI solutions can be costly to maintain, this framework does the hard work of nudging the enthusiasm for AI towards an intentional focus on value and experience. One form of this framework is a canvas designed to support a conversation that moves from how to use AI to why to use AI, and how an AI solution fits into the broader experience of customers and employees.

The value exchange sits at the heart of the canvas. It foregrounds the relationship between the service and the customer. On the service side, what’s the idea we’re starting with? How does it connect to strategic objectives? What service is being provided? On the customer side, which customers and problems does the service address?

The middle represents the exchange of value between the service and the customer. What does the service give to the customer? What does the customer give back-time, attention, data, trust, money? What value is created for both? Building anything valuable depends on getting this exchange right.

The areas above the value exchange represent the larger context in which this moment or offering will live in your experiential system. In the upper right, you capture the brand or experience principles that should guide the service design. A strong experiential system ensures each service reflects how your brand wants to show up and incorporates your best practices for fitting solutions into your larger customer experience. On the left, you note the moments that matter-the journeys or other frameworks that situate the service in the larger customer experience. This helps you determine which other touchpoints or moments the service should align with, thus avoiding becoming an isolated point solution and reducing fragmentation.

Below the value exchange are two equally critical areas. Feedback loops: What does the service need to collect to improve? How do we know it’s working? What are we trying to learn? With AI, special care is required. You need to know whether the service is delivering value, creating unintended consequences, and whether people trust it. The role of AI: What jobs is AI taking on to create that value? Is it needed? What is frontstage-visible to the customer-and what is backstage, working behind the scenes to orchestrate the experience?

This works best as a cross-functional conversation. Product, CX, brand, design, and technology each have a stake in different sections of the canvas. Everyone leaves the room knowing what you’re trying to solve for, what value you’re creating, how it fits within your larger experience and brand, what you’re measuring and learning, and what role AI plays.

If you already have AI implementations in flight, the canvas can also serve as a diagnostic tool. Mapping what you’ve already built against these questions often reveals gaps and what needs to be addressed before you add more.

Are you starting with AI, or starting with value?

Are your AI point solutions shaping your customer journeys, or are you doing the work to keep coherence in your system?

Try returning (or adopting) the design fundamentals and inviting your peers to slow down a moment and have the right conversations using the canvas. I’d love to hear what this does for you and your team.

Originally published at https://thisisharmonic.com on May 21, 2026.

By: Shreya Dhawan, Service Design Lead

I’ve had a version of the same conversation more times than I can count. A product leader-smart, experienced, running a well-functioning team-is frustrated: retention is flat. The roadmap is full, but nothing’s moving the needle. There’s plenty of data, and everyone agrees on the direction. However, the growth they anticipated from all that effort is simply not materializing.

The problem is rarely execution quality or speed. The teams I’ve worked with are good. They have outcome frameworks, OKRs, and strong intuitions about their users. The issue is that they’re doing the right things in isolation. They are optimizing their corner of the product without a clear line of sight as to what’s happening before or after that moment in the customer’s experience. Growth doesn’t live inside a single feature. It happens across moments: onboarding, activation, issue resolution, renewal, to name a few. When those transitions are fragmented, the cost is real: churn nobody wants to own, support volume that keeps increasing despite product improvements, roadmaps where each team delivers but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

What’s worth saying before anything else: most organizations are already managing their journeys in some shape or form. They have KPIs, they track drop-off, and they hold reviews on a regular cadence. They’re just doing it without a shared frame, which means the same friction is rediscovered by different teams, fixes are made in isolation, in one part of the experience, and the end-to-end picture never quite comes into focus. Managing journeys is not starting over; it’s making what is already happening more intentional.

Journey management can address this problem very well; while you seem to be doing everything right by the book, yet the needle still doesn’t move on real, meaningful impact. The real value of journey management isn’t another process or a workshop methodology, but a way of building shared visibility into how the full lifecycle is performing and using that to make sharper decisions about where to focus next.

Why It Makes Financial Sense to Invest in Orchestrating Journeys

The business case is more concrete than most people expect. Journey management exposes inefficiencies that hide beneath functional KPIs (redundant handovers, unresolved friction, avoidable support volume). When product teams fix those moments, the savings land in cost-to-serve: fewer inbound contacts, shorter resolution cycles, lower support cost per user. Our team saw this dynamic clearly in a project with Cox Communications. Moving homes is one of the moments when customers naturally reconsider their service providers, making it both a churn risk and an opportunity. At Cox, the teams responsible for digital transfers, call centers, retail, and installation were each performing well individually, but the experience across those moments was fragmented. Customers often had to repeat steps between channels just to transfer or confirm their service. When the organization stepped back and examined the full moving journey end-to-end, the opportunity became clear.

By aligning teams around that journey and redesigning key moments across channels, Cox saw significant reductions in post-move churn, higher mover flow share, and the highest NPS scores for that transaction type in the company. That’s one of the most defensible ROI arguments you can put in front of a finance leader, because it’s measurable and it connects directly to the lifecycle moments your team already owns.

The data backs it up. Forrester’s Buyer’s Guide for Customer Journey Management (CJM) Platforms, based on interviews with 30 buyers across industries and maturity levels, found that organizations integrating CJM platforms with operational KPIs and financial metrics reported clearer prioritization, faster decision-making, and measurable impacts on cost, effort, and customer and company value, while those without connected data and metrics found ROI remained anecdotal and journey management stayed vulnerable in budgeting cycles. In another client collaboration, we identified one single point in the end-to-end customer journey, one small change in how they run their business that would lead to over $4M of annual savings. The fix here wasn’t complicated, but it could only be seen by taking an end-to-end view of the journey.

You Made the Business Case. Now What?

A practical note before you start building the internal case: get aligned on what you mean by journey management. The term is used in very different ways; sometimes it refers to managing CX data within a journey map tool, and sometimes it means a company-wide operating framework for decision-making. Both are legitimate, but they require different investments and different conversations. The business case you’re building needs to reflect which version you’re actually proposing, or the conversation will stall on scope before it gets to showing real value.

My advice: don’t frame this as a transformation program. Pick one journey with clear business visibility, create a baseline for its current performance, identify the cost of friction or pain at each stage, and translate that output into financial language. Reduced handling time. Lower first-year churn. Increased revenue. That proof of concept is what gets the next conversation funded, and it sidesteps the most common objection- that you need new infrastructure to get started. You usually don’t. The issue is rarely a lack of data; it’s a lack of a shared frame for reading it end-to-end.

One more thing worth saying explicitly: don’t start by mapping all your journeys or by evaluating tools. Both feel like progress, but neither is. A full mapping exercise before you have a clear business question tends to produce beautiful artifacts that don’t change any decisions. And buying a platform before you’ve established what you’re trying to manage creates a solution looking for a problem. It gives skeptics exactly the ammunition they need to dismiss the whole effort as overhead. Start with the business question. The maps and the tooling follow from that, not the other way around.

To wrap it up, remember that effective journey management starts with a clear business focus and understanding of your goals. Focus on a single journey to demonstrate value, and don’t get sidetracked by mapping everything or jumping into tool evaluations prematurely. If you’re eager to discuss this further or explore your organization’s readiness for journey management, I’m here to help. Let’s connect!

Sources:

Buyer’s Guide: Customer Journey Management Platforms, 2026 (Forrester)

Originally published at https://thisisharmonic.com on May 1, 2026.

By: Patrick Quattlebaum, Harmonic Design co-founder and CEO

AI assistants and agents have joined us as active participants. From relatively simple support chatbots to more autonomous agents running full workflows, these systems will greatly reshape product and service experiences. We are now designing who these systems are, not just what they do. How we work this new material will shape the stories people tell about every service they encounter.

The Core Tension in Designing for Humans vs. AI

When designing for humans, we embrace variability. We accept the messiness of people and the many roles they inhabit in their lives. The design problem isn’t to reduce that variability; it is to build systems that can meet people where they are.

For AI assistants and agents, the challenge is constancy. Despite the underlying probabilistic technology, we must increase the likelihood that an agent will behave appropriately in the overall designed service system. This tension increases as these agents move from responding to our requests to executing work on our behalf. These are not just different design problems. They point in opposite directions.

Designers and organizations already feel the need for consistency in this domain. In an April 2026 Medium post, Gianluca Brugnoli identifies this tension as a central challenge, arguing that agents must offer a stable, recognizable pattern of behavior that users can build a mental model of. The question is: what gives us the tools to achieve it?

The instinct has been to reach for familiar tools, applying the term persona to AI assistants and agents. In the HCI tradition, personas flatten human complexity into useful models. Many designers have stopped using them in favor of other models, and a skin-deep riff on personas won’t close the gap between the agent’s relationship to people and the technical specifications that bring it to life. This gap creates real risk for delivering the right experiences to people and for the ethical use of AI.

Richly developed characters give us the best chance.

I am not referring to AI “characters” in entertainment, digital avatars, or roleplay bots. I am speaking of character in the literary sense. Just as a playwright defines a character to ensure they act consistently across every scene, we must define the assistant’s or agent’s internal logic to ensure it acts dependably across every interaction. The playwright does not go on stage. Their work is entirely in the preparation.

AI Actors: Where Story Meets System

The craft required to define an agent’s character lives in traditions most technology organizations don’t typically draw from: dramaturgy, literature, and screenwriting.

My design master’s thesis was a prototype for studying film by adding metadata-filmic techniques, genre, auteur, studio system, star system-at the shot level to John Ford’s Stagecoach. By applying that same framework to other films, I was able to surface connections that made film technique more learnable and teachable. I chose Stagecoach because it is the archetypal western, and its genre archetypes-the Reluctant Hero, the Loyal Sidekick-signal familiar character behaviors without exposition. When a filmmaker breaks those conventions intentionally, the viewer’s reaction is subjective. Intentionally here is key. In a designed service system, unintended behavior is not subjective entertainment; it’s objective experiential dissonance.

My undergraduate thesis was on Samuel Beckett. What drew me to his work was Beckett’s characters. As Martin Esslin observed, they are non-traditional, appearing on stage with no exposition, little psychological depth, and tightly constrained by their context. 1In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon stem from the archetype of the vaudeville double act. What makes them feel specific is the precise nature of their relationship to one another. In a designed service system, an AI assistant or agent requires exactly that kind of definition: clarity of purpose, constraint, and consistent disposition toward the people it serves.

The craft of strong storytelling provides concepts and tools for designing AI assistants and agents. While the context and stakes differ, stealing from these centuries-old techniques can aid in designing for comprehension, interaction, and trust.

From Generic Archetype to Specified Character

This is where the distinction among persona, archetype, and character becomes essential. 2A persona is a generalized mask designed to represent a specific role. An archetype is a pattern, a recognizable template that recurs across stories and cultures. These patterns signal immediate recognizability for those who encounter them. But an archetype is still one-to-many. It describes a type that multiple characters can embody.

A character is specific. It has the qualities of purpose, constraint, disposition, and refusal. Its internal logic helps an actor-or a model-stay in character as the performance moves beyond the page. When organizations use personas loosely or name their AI assistants and agents after archetypes, they are stopping too early. They have created something branded, not embodied. Memorable, not governable. Codeable, not credible. They have not gone deep enough to specify how the agent must show up and reliably fulfill its role.

These four terms are worth defining precisely, because each one does different work, and together they move from familiar territory toward the design challenges organizations have not yet fully grappled with:

• Purpose: What the agent is designed to pursue with a specific orientation toward the people it serves. This concept is closest to what persona work already attempts when defining what the agent is for.
• Constraint: The boundaries within which the agent operates. What it will not do by design, not by technical limitation. Constraint is what keeps purpose from becoming unchecked.
• Disposition: The agent’s orientation toward the people it encounters. Not surface brand attributes, but the underlying logic from which all interactions flow. Adjacent to what prompt engineers call tone or personality, an approach that has too often produced overly sycophantic agents. Disposition is deeper and more difficult to specify without using tools from disciplines outside of design and engineering.
• Refusal: What the agent will not do regardless of instruction. This is where character becomes governance. This aspect is the least addressed by either persona work or engineering, and the most important to get right.

Defining a character this deeply doesn’t solve the probabilistic nature of the underlying technology. What it does is give every person in the organization-designers, engineers, product managers, and executives-a shared reference point for evaluating whether the agent is showing up the way it should. This approach provides a more effective and understandable foundation for governance.

In theater and film, the author with the script and the acting coach with the actor do the deep work before the performance. They define and hone the character, explore its purpose, and establish its behaviors and motivations. But the author and coach are not on stage. They cannot intervene in real time as the actor performs. They must do their jobs as best they can and then watch with the audience.

In products and services, the equivalent work is shaping the interplay of human agency and AI behavior. Anthropic has explored this dynamic from the technical side. In their paper on training Claude’s character and researcher Amanda Askell’s public remarks, they frame this work as an alignment mechanism, not a product feature. Responding well in unscripted situations requires intentionality and care. As engineering shapes at the model layer, the service designer shapes at the service layer. Ultimately, the holistic service system must grapple with the variability of humans and the desired constancy of AI actors.

Brugnoli’s checkpoints, mentioned earlier, provide one half of a solution. Real-time mechanisms keep humans meaningfully in the loop as the service unfolds. But checkpoints without well-defined characters that go beyond mere personas, imbued with the craft of storytelling, make human-agent collaboration open to misunderstandings and mistrust. Together, they connect story and system.

Four Principles of AI Agent Character Design

These are not proven methods. The field has not yet developed the practice. But the literary tradition that I’ve drawn from can inform an “author and acting coach” model for this challenge.

1. Define Character Before Deployment

Deep character definition-purpose, constraint, disposition, and refusal-must happen before the agent goes live, not after problems emerge. Organizations that skip this work and rely solely on technical specifications will find themselves governing by exception rather than by design, reacting to drift they have no framework to evaluate.

The interrogation:Who in your organization is responsible for defining who this agent is, not what it does, but who it is? What is it designed to pursue? What will it refuse? Whose interests does it serve?

2. Stewarded Characters Over Time

Defining a character once is not enough. Model updates, organizational change, and the accumulation of edge cases will all exert pressure on the agent’s identity over time. Someone needs to be responsible for evaluating whether the agent is still showing up as designed, and for making the call when it isn’t. The acting coach doesn’t disappear after opening night.

The stewardship:Who owns this character over time? How will you know when a model update has changed something that matters? What is your basis for evaluating drift?

3. Systems Must Reinforce Character

The character manifests as intended only if backstage operations, technical capabilities, and organizational processes support it. Frontstage and backstage must tell the same story. The author writes the character, but the production must deliver it.

In Orchestrating Experiences: Collaborative Design for Complexity, Chris Risdon and I argued that coherent service experiences emerge from the collaboration of people across an organization, not from any single designer or team. The agentic era makes that argument more consequential.

The systemic lens: Does the system behind this agent reinforce who it is supposed to be, or undermine it? Where are the points of misalignment between the character you have defined and the capabilities you have built?

4. Ensembles Require Shared Conventions

As organizations deploy multiple agents, the question of how they relate to one another becomes urgent. Two performance traditions point in useful directions. Jazz ensembles give each player room to improvise, but the performance works because every member knows the genre deeply enough to listen and respond to one another. Improvisational theater works almost the opposite way, with performers trained to respond to whatever emerges. Most multi-agent systems will need both: a prespecified shared grammar and characters trained sufficiently to produce coherent behavior in real time.

The ensemble: How will your agents relate to one another? What shared conventions will allow them to perform coherently?

The author and the acting coach cannot guarantee a perfect performance. But they can increase the odds that when the actor encounters something novel, it can draw on a foundation deep enough to respond in a way that feels right.

This is not a solved problem. The craft required lives in storytelling traditions that organizations rarely intentionally apply to products and services. Whether they develop it deliberately or default to shallower work will shape the experiences that follow.

My practice, and that of many in service design, has always lived at the intersection of story and system. This transitional period in how we work and live requires these approaches more than ever.

Footnotes

1. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1957). Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961). This stripped-down specificity (a character without backstory and an identity without interiority) should inspire the design of AI agents.
2. As creative writing theory makes clear, all characters begin as archetypes and are fleshed out only as far as needed. The progression is archetype to character. See Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928; English translation, University of Texas Press, 1958) and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957).

Originally published at https://thisisharmonic.com on April 23, 2026.

By Leah Berg, Service Design Lead

My whole life I have been surrounded by teachers, some good, some great, and some not so great, but the best one was my mother. She modeled for me what patience, kindness and guidance looks like. Though I never wanted to become a teacher myself, I seem to have found my way in through coaching, whether informally with friends or professionally with clients. It started when I was a teenager, helping students practice a foreign language, then mentoring new hires at the Apple store, eventually doing one on one training sessions and ultimately coaching in service design at Harmonic.

From family members, to best friends, teachers to gym coaches, we’ve all probably experienced some kind of mentorship or coaching relationship. In fact, one of the first questions I ask a new coachee is, have you ever been coached before? What are you expecting from coaching? We’ve all had similar experiences that we can reflect on, and it’s helpful to share what you have and have not liked, what coaching styles have been effective, and which have not.

Coaching Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All

Coaching isn’t one-size-fits-all-neither is service design, some coachees like to prepare questions ahead of a session, others want to address something that just came up, while others learn by doing together, some like to be challenged to navigate on their own and then follow up with feedback on their designed approach. How one learns and works, likes to give and receive feedback, etc. is all very important in how I show up for each coachee in a way that aligns our styles together. The first coaching session is crucial to creating alignment, setting expectations and simply getting to know one another. We like to use a framework that does just that, from sharing how you like to be recognized, to whether you’re a morning person, or not.

Coaching has become a very important focus in my career, helping me show up better for my colleagues, my clients, and myself. It requires active listening and a collaborative partnership where both the coach and coachee align on where, when, and how they show up for and with one another. It creates space for real human-to-human connection.

Embedding Coaching into The Real Work of Public Libraries

When the Program and Project Management team at Richland Library, a long-standing Harmonic client, reached out to work with us, they were looking to build their service design capabilities and cultivate a community of practice. Through a carefully curated and customized scope of work, Harmonic proposed embedding coaching into the rhythm of the team’s work.

In our engagement with Richland Library, every coaching moment is grounded in the team’s real work and adapts to each practitioner’s needs, energy, and readiness. After helping the team define their purpose, we co-created methods to integrate service design with project management and impact frameworks. Through one on one and small team sessions, we coach the practitioners as they apply those methods to messy, ambiguous projects where service design can make the greatest difference.

There are many styles, modes, and environments of coaching. This can look like asking for feedback on a research approach, best practices for facilitating a workshop, or sharing an example of a customized design framework. As coaches, we don’t give answers-we guide, teach, advise, and model. The coachees develop the solutions themselves.

From Guidance to Growth: What Coaching Looks Like in Practice

At Richland Library, I have been lucky enough to build a long standing relationship with my coachees, meeting every other week for an hour, and checking in through chat and email in between. I look forward to my one-on-ones, as I know my coachees will bring a new challenge or share a win, or even a challenge with me. We have become true thought partners and I know I have become a better coach and designer because of our work together.

When one of my coachees asked about best practices for facilitating a retro, we focused less on the “right” format and more on context-where the work sat in its cycle and who needed to be in the room.

As he facilitated more sessions, his confidence grew. So did his curiosity.

At one point, he asked: What do we actually do with the outcomes of a retro? Too often, they sit untouched. Together, we explored how to turn those insights into action-how retros can surface not just reflections, but direction.

Now, he’s implementing retros on one of his projects as a repeatable way to identify new work and uncover opportunities. It shifted my perspective too. Something that once felt routine revealed a deeper level of impact.

Another coachee took a completely different approach-one that was just as powerful.

Mid-session, she asked me to wait, then turned her camera to a slew of sticky notes and scraps of paper taped up on her wall. That physical act-writing, moving, rearranging-helped her think more clearly. It also gave us something tangible to react to as she walked me through her process.

It was a reminder that effective practice doesn’t always come from polished tools or perfect frameworks. Sometimes, it comes from making the work visible-whatever that looks like.

Curiosity as the Catalyst

As we get ready to continue into another year-long coaching engagement with the P&P team, we’re excited to continue to help them foster a community of practice of service design at the Richland Library. What makes this team so unique is how they consistently show up with intention, applying their ideas in thoughtful and practical ways. Their questions are sharp, and their curiosity pushes the work forward. Curiosity is really all you need!

Originally published at https://thisisharmonic.com on April 16, 2026.

by: Patrick Quattlebaum, Harmonic Design CEO and co-founder

Fifteen years ago, I stood in a room with a major retailer looking at printouts of hundreds of touchpoints plastered on the walls. This very manual effort visualized a complex omnichannel experience shaped by the decisions and efforts of thousands of stakeholders. Our team brought these stakeholders together to walk through the customer journey, develop a shared perspective on its performance, and identify opportunities for change. This gathering honored everyone’s individual work. More importantly, it helped stakeholders understand their collective ownership of the journey.

Today, we call this type of gathering the practice of journey management. The lift of modeling journeys, organizing and connecting maps, and tying them to data has become a little easier thanks to new platforms. Product has rediscovered discovery. More data exists than ever before to understand customer needs. Service design has exposed many, many stakeholders to best practices for using journeys to identify opportunities and drive change.

Yet, despite this progress, I still hear the same frustrations from leaders and practitioners across industries. Introducing, maturing, and scaling journey management as a practice faces internal friction. Functional OKRs weaken tenuous stakeholder alignment on the trade-offs required to deliver end-to-end experience improvements. Instead of managing journeys, journey management gets watered down to managing maps. It is easy to feel defeated, but we must recognize that this resistance is not a personal failure; it is a structural reality of the complex systems we work within.

To understand this friction, one must view the organization as a “ performance engine”. ¹ Much like a garden planned and nurtured to produce specific crops, a company runs day to day to achieve its outcomes predictably. Consequently, it resists change by design. When we introduce journey management, we don’t deploy a software platform, much less a nice-to-have process. We invite others to take part in a disruptive organizational innovation in how we manage decisions. Like the early days of Agile challenging project management norms or the data analytics revolution forcing marketers to move beyond “gut feelings,” journey management asks the organization to walk the talk of customer-centricity. The organization, as designed, pushes back.

When we introduce journey management, we don’t deploy a software platform, much less a nice-to-have process. We invite others to take part in a disruptive organizational innovation in how we manage decisions.

As journey management challenges the status quo logic of decision-making, it inevitably triggers the organization’s “antibodies”. Whether it is the product team protecting their roadmap or finance resisting business cases that span traditional accounting structures, these functional areas push back because the performance engine does its job-it protects the core operation from the chaos of change. Regardless of the intention or logic of our innovation, we must accept that the promise of experience orchestration through journey management disrupts the management practices that hold the organization together today.

These dynamics cannot be ignored, nor do they mean giving up the vision. They require more intentional actions to intervene in the organizational system, tacking towards larger transformation through smaller changes. One cannot simply force journey management to be accepted as is; we must integrate this new practice into the existing machinery.

Service Design provides the key. As a participatory change approach, service design turned inward on the organization can reveal the objectives, drivers, power dynamics, and relationships that must evolve to move from managing maps to managing journeys. Making these dynamics more visible provides a tool for creating strategies, experimenting, and learning (see Fig. 2). For example, if we need data and stakeholder participation to scale journey management, we must first show them how journey management helps them win in their specific decision-making moments. One can use a powerful concept from service design-value exchanges-to design how these stakeholders can see “what’s in it for me” while setting the stage for journey management to scale and thrive.

Ultimately, this is a long game. Every organization has a graveyard of transformational tombstones and change agents who left in frustration, seeking greener pastures. Journey management and customer-centricity are not inevitabilities. Don’t take resistance personally; it’s by design and deeply human. View your work as “good trouble,” and approach it with patience, empathy, and resilience as you harmonize with the performance engine in the short term on the way to re-engineering it with a new logic. If you do this-integrate smartly rather than impose aggressively-there will come a day when we won’t even call it “journey management” anymore. It will simply be how the organization works, naturally and intuitively.

Keep up the good trouble. Harmonic and I are here to help.

¹ Govindarajan, Vijay, & Trimble, Chris. (2010). The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Problem.

Originally published at https://thisisharmonic.com on April 6, 2026.

Creativity, Craft, and the Power of Making — Harmonic Design

By: Becky Scheel, Creative and Community Lead

This year, I had the joy of curating Harmonic’s Practice Week, and we centered it around something that felt more important than ever: creativity and craft. The focus is on balancing bold, imaginative play with internal reflection and engagement within our communities. We participated in a range of activities, including creative writing, flag design, letterpress, storytelling, and a discussion on civic design.

I found myself wanting to return to craft to stay creatively grounded in an uncertain world, and to reconnect with the tactile and actionable joy of design. And we’re not alone; it seems that everywhere I look, creativity is on the rise. Gen Z is rediscovering “ grandma hobbies” like quilting, knitting, and scrapbooking. Libraries and maker spaces are buzzing, and physical books are suddenly “ sexy” once more. My friends and I, who mostly work in tech, have even started an art night, where we draw together. In a world dominated by algorithms and AI- everything, people are finding balance in craft-tactile, embodied ways of making.

This isn’t just nostalgia. It’s a reminder that creativity isn’t only about output; it’s about process, practice, and presence. And to quote from one of my favorite artists, Mark Rothko, “a painting is not a picture of an experience, but it is the experience.” To echo Rothko (which sounds ridiculous, I know), we say this time and time again with our clients-it’s the act of making the journey map, the discussion when we’re blueprinting together, and the decisions made in workshops where the real work lies.

Durability and Creativity Through Constraint

Service designers, much like quilters, work with the organizational systems available to them. Just as a jazz musician improvises within a scale, we navigate within the boundaries set by policy and governance. At Harmonic, we frequently use these two metaphors, often discussing orchestration, jazz, and remixing in the context of our work, and weaving is likened to connecting stories. Craft is not about limitless possibilities; even improvisation has its own set of rules. Instead, it involves skillful creation within constraints, which is what gives it its backbone.

One of our Practice Week activities was letterpress printing, which rekindled my love for typography. I first got into type years ago when I was working as a graphic and exhibit designer at the zoo. A friend gave me a free ticket to TypeCon (yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like)

I ended up at a talk on typography in Midwestern gravestones-something I’d never thought of as a hotbed of creativity. But those carvings were full of craft, shaped by constraints: the tools, the stone, the shapes of the alphabets themselves. Imagine trying to carve a serif font like Times New Roman in the curves of the Armenian or Korean alphabet. It just doesn’t quite work-and that’s the point.

And maybe that’s why this cultural turn back to making, whether it’s pottery, zines, or hand-bound books, resonates so much. Craft reminds us that constraint is not the enemy of creativity; it’s the medium.

Toward a Culture of Craft in Organizations

If younger generations are rediscovering the joy of craft, organizations can too. One of the methods I want to try with a client is one my colleague, Mariah Mills, suggested in working with collage. The thought of cutting paper, instead of moving virtual sticky notes, which now consumes my day, sounds liberating and presents itself with so many more affordances that the efficiency of digital tools simply can’t offer - texture, tool variety, and those happy accidents that make making fun. There’s something grounding about working with your hands that brings out quieter voices and unlocks new metaphors. I imagine that collage helps teams see patterns, contradictions, or even shared aspirations they couldn’t identify in a spreadsheet.

Maybe our role as service designers is to help institutions find their “craft” again, to ground lofty strategies in the very human, sometimes messy work of making things real.

Craft is not opposed to technology (technology can be a tool for craft!). It’s a way of orienting ourselves within it-slowing down, practicing care, and building something lasting. Maybe this new arts & crafts moment is reminding us of something essential: the future of design isn’t just digital or AI-driven - it’s deeply, stubbornly human.

Originally published at https://thisisharmonic.com on September 24, 2025.