“Your experience of that object starts at home. You look up the airline's measurements, you find the tape measure, you try to measure your soft, squishy bag into cubic dimensions, which doesn't really work. You get to the airport and you see your fellow passenger on the floor, taking their hoodie and their book out, trying to make it fit… It places that moment where it's too late for the user to make any changes.”
Service Design Show · User Experience · November 2026
Context
Asked what service designers add when product designers already design objects, Rachel uses airport baggage sizers as her example. An object designed in isolation meets its narrow purpose but fails the whole service, because the check comes when the traveller can no longer fix anything.
Transcript
…recording details or it's signaling to someone what to do or where to go or to carry something or to take an action as part of a service, but also designing mindfully in a way that then can shape the behaviors or make them feel the way that we want them to feel when they're engaging with a service.
What is the role as service design professionals here? Because somebody might say, you know, we don't already have product designers. We already have industrial designers. Like, isn't this something that they are concerned with? Like, how do you see that?
Yeah, I think we definitely need to be in those spaces. I think when those things are maybe designed in isolation or without consideration of the whole service, they become, well, they can work, but they can also become objects of friction or ones that maybe don't align with how we want people to make people feel. And thinking about how we can maybe make that easier or sometimes the object itself, is there another way, the function it's trying to fulfill it? Would there be another way to do that? An example that's come to my mind is around the, I didn't actually know what these were called again until I did we started this project, but the bag sizers or baggage sizers at airports. So they're the kind of physical, like the kind of tubular objects at airports where you check the size of your bag. Now, I would love to hear from anyone who thinks differently for me, but these objects I feel are a nightmare. Particularly, you know, for budget airlines, there's multiple of them. The airlines themselves all have completely different regulations in terms of the sizes of bags, the, you know, the requirements for all of these things. So that's an example of an object that lives in a particular place. It's…
Yeah, it's disconnected from the experience that you want to create. Unless, I don't know, about the experience these airlines want to create. But there's, yeah. And I think this is something that we see a lot around us: the disconnect between the promise of the service of the experience versus the…
they don't work for the people delivering the services either. They're hearing, like they get people through to the wrong place. They don't work. I think that, yeah, so interactive voice, like recognition is part of that. That would be quite interesting. We haven't maybe explored kind of audio, I…
Then we're sort of really entering a rabbit hole because you'll ask what are materials of services. Apparently, there is a pretty good book on that. Yeah, but it would be interesting to see non-physical objects, intangible objects in the museum. Maybe part two. Nice. This really sort of sparks my…