Service Design in Romania, an interview with Alexandra Coscovelnita

We asked Alexandra Coscovelnita, a Service Designer working in Romania, her thoughts about the evolution of Service Design in her country. A big thank you to Alexandra for her insights.

How would you describe the state of service design today? How's the maturity level of service design in Romania? Is the term known, used?

It is really low. There is still a boom in design thinking and companies are doing their best to adopt it.

However, because there are "designers" that read a couple of books and saw a couple of videos, the practice is blocked in a beginner stage. The information spread by the "design thinkers" is not always right.

I actually found myself in my current job cleaning after a "design thinker". The tools were all messed up, the team didn't understand why we were doing certain things, the feedback was not valued properly...

What was the state of service design a few years ago?

Service Design did not exist at all a few years ago. And people are not talking about it right now either. They are rather focused on agile and design thinking.

What are the big changes that you see for the future?

I think that Lean Startup will become really popular, OKRs will become the main way of measurement and Agile will be adopted as a way of working in most of the domains.

Should people look for service design jobs rather than in big agencies, small studios, or in the house? Or maybe in specific industries? Where do you feel there are more opportunities?

I think starting something in the house is always a great idea, especially if you have the right support. The most predisposed industries to find some traces of Service Design in Romania are telecommunication, banking, and software development.

Personally, I would not recommend Romania as a Service Design destination for a job hunt. It still has to develop an understanding of what we do and how we integrate into the business ecosystem.

What are great opportunities to learn Service Design in Romania?

Romania does not recognize Service Design as a profession. I finished my studies in Milan, Masters in Service Design and I had to wait one year to have my studies recognized as I was being paid as a professional with a high school diploma, not higher education professional.

So traditional education does not know about Service Design here.

However, I understood that some people take Design Thinking courses online on different platforms. They are not aware of Service Design.

If I'm looking for a job opportunity as a service designer, what are the key cities that offer such opportunities in Romania?

You can find traces of Service Design in Bucharest and Cluj. Especially in big companies that have Service Designers in other countries in the group they activate. They adopt some practices locally.

Most of them are aware and use Customer Journeys, Personas, and Empathy Maps as you can find them in other design practices as well. However, they are a bit reserved when it comes to testing with real customers.

What are the leading companies that use Service Design in Romania?

Companies in Romania are not actively hiring Service Designers as they are defined. Each of them has a different understanding of Service Design.

However, you can find morphed jobs in telecommunication (Vodafone and Orange), banking (BCR, Raiffeisen, ING), and energy (E.ON).

These jobs are most of the time a combination of UX [User Experience Design], Product Design, or CX [Customer Experience].

What are the local Service Design communities in Romania?

Today, and to my knowledge, there are no Service Design communities in Romania. There are only Design thinking meetups, Agile meetups and UX [User Experience Design] meetups.

If I'm looking for a service design job position what local terms should I use?

I would translate the term "Service design" into "designer de servicii" and the term "Hiring service designer" into "angajare service designer".

But people mostly use the following terms: Service Design, UX, CX, Innovation Lead, Product Designer, Design Thinking Expert.

Check them all out and read the description as you might be surprised. Some of them are looking for Service Designers, many companies do not know how to name their job listings properly.

Lastly, do you have some links you recommend for people interested in Service Design in Romania?

As said before there aren't communities focused on Service Design, but there are still some very interesting meetups in Bucharest like the Bucharest Design Meetup, an Agile Meetup, and a UX Meetup.