Service Design is Jumping the Shark.

Design thinking and UX have had a hard time in the last 10 years. The minute IDEO and others started saying Design Thinking could solve world hunger, end wars and repair the planet, people started mocking them and the brand of D-Thinking. Similarly UX got bloated and ridiculous and more than not, just pretentious. What followed is mass layoffs, combining 4 critical roles into one very ineffectual and neutered one. Product and Service Design is doing the same thing.

Well, Service Design is becoming haughty and inauthentic too. The more we play with Legos, do ridiculous long winded workshops and talk about circular design and sustainability, push improv and acting classes, bloviate about colonization and all the other narcissistic virtue signaling, the more we seem completely out of touch with the realities of the mart of competitive commerce and business needs. We are screaming and begging for our marginalization and irrelevance and then crying when it becomes ours. Most of the people I read online are begging to be in the next round of RIF.

Design cannot be run by academics who have never been in the real world and do not know how to provide value to business. It cannot be dominated by delusional moral egalitarians. Take all the time you need and search the web for open and past job roles in design the last 2-3 years. SCOUR and show us all of the DEI, ESG, Saving the planet, sustainability, ending war and world hunger, Service Design roles and open jobs right now. They DO NOT exist. We are not setting up new grads for success by telling them those things. So why do we keep grand standing and puffing up and preening like arrogant peacocks, in love with our own reflections and engorged sense of self worth and importance?

Similarly the complexity science people are equally verbose, byzantine, inflated self-worth individuals who are mostly consultants and selling classes and coaching. Which is another word for unemployable. If you read their work and follow them, you will come to the same conclusion. Everyone behind the scenes, including people who attend their training and cohorts say the same thing. They do not understand the clunky material with massive barriers to entry. In my opinion, they're adding to the complexity, noise and NONsense. And it makes you wonder if all of these failed technicals, former developers, academics, biologists, physicists, verbose and convoluted interlopers were any good in their respective fields, why did they come over to design in droves? I'll tell you why.

It's because they wanted to be creative and/or wanted higher salaries. Not because they were any good at the work of design or problem solving in a business context. They're like a bunch of people who showed up to a finger painting party with a flame thrower and they're looking at the rest of us as if we don't understand how valuable, important and ingenious they are. The best word I can derive to describe them is superfluous.

The problem is if you listen to them, explore their sites and words, every facet of their delivery is poorly designed. Their frameworks, websites, goofy explainer videos are all poorly, visually and verbally communicated. So why do all of these people steal all of the oxygen from the room and social media? The answer is desperation, mental illness, narcissism and the dark ego vehicle principal. Systems are complex. Designers face unpredictable, dynamic systems, that require adaptability and acceptance of uncertainty and ambiguity. Okay so what? Why do we need common sense-making matrices for that? Why do we need clunky obtuse language, poorly designed surveys and sites and hideous frameworks and models that look like someone who is mentally ill or on meth created them?

It's impossible to predict outcomes with certainty due to the variability and interdependence of tethered parts of a broken system, that can only be understood when broken down systematically. So why do we need this constant waxing poetic and constant yammering about the work instead of just doing it? It's because convoluted and cluttered minds have no concept of Gestalt, Pragnanz, pithiness — SIMPLICITY.

Attempting to address Complex systems, that are irrational and unpredictable and cannot be solved with linear models OR MINDS is hard. The ability to navigate environments that lack order and predictability is critical to businesses. But what do you do, when you realize you're just making things clunkier, harder to reach, and more of a mess?

My favorite new buzzword is 'coherence' because the people using this term and telling us how incoherent business and life are, are quite literally, incoherent people who are introducing more complexity into already complex environments. These people do not understand creative tension, storytelling for consensus, conflict or social politics or the difference between how they're seen versus how they see themselves. They are quite literally aesthetically delusional. And almost always have bad taste and cannot discern the difference between 'quality' and banality. Therein lies our problem, business, organizational, venture, and service design have been overrun with people who think what I'm saying is subjective. Well you may be able to toil over whether or not beauty is subjective but you cannot toil over whether or not 'shitty' is.

They also don't understand how to market, brand or position their own ideas and content. Here's a giant newsflash for all of the arrogant, delusional complexity people, the people at the bottom of every value system or pyramid (and it is a pyramid much like a caste system) are the people who's job it is, to stay marred in the complexity weeds.

It's our job to unpack that complexity and solve smaller, defined chunks to affect the greater whole of the complex system. That is NOT the job of any leader. Leaders need to be managed upward and informed of our finds, analysis and insights and recommendations. That's it. So being insulting and pretending founders are dumb or other members of the business aren't as smart as you, because they simply don't care about your time down in the weeds or whiteboard and mental masturbating of the complexity you're wrangling is kind of a huge joke.

Jumping the shark refers to a moment when a once-popular quality TV show, product, service or concept reaches a turning point where it begins to decline in quality, relevance, or creativity. It often describes a desperate attempt to retain audience interest through an exaggerated or outlandish plot twist, gimmick, or major change that feels forced or absurd. After "jumping the shark," the show's decline tends to accelerate, and its original charm or appeal is lost.

The term comes from a specific scene in the television series Happy Days. In the 1977 episode "Hollywood: Part 3," one of the main characters, Fonzie (played by Henry Winkler), jumps over a shark while water skiing. While Fonzie was known for his cool demeanor, the scene felt ridiculous to many viewers and was seen as a sign that the show had run out of fresh ideas. Over time, the phrase "jumping the shark" became a metaphor for any show or product that crosses the line into absurdity, signaling creative decline. "Jumping the shark" has become a shorthand for calling out inauthentic, last-ditch efforts to recapture lost appeal—whether in media, products, or even leadership strategies.

Examples in TV and Pop Culture

1. The Simpsons – Many fans argue that the show "jumped the shark" after its golden years in the 1990s, when episodes began relying on more repetitive storylines.
2. The Office (U.S.) – Some fans felt that introducing new lead characters after Michael Scott’s departure in Season 7 marked the show’s shark-jumping moment.
3. Game of Thrones – Critics and fans often cite the rushed final season as a moment when the show sacrificed its complex storytelling for spectacle, alienating its audience.

Beyond Television: Other Uses

While the term began in the TV world, it is now widely used to describe businesses, brands, or products that attempt to reinvent themselves in ways that feel contrived or out of touch:

• Corporate Rebranding: When a well-established company makes an odd or unnecessary branding shift (e.g., New Coke in 1985).
• Technology Products: Some argue that Apple's touch bar on MacBook Pros or Meta's rebranding (pivot to the Metaverse) might fit the metaphor if they were seen as gimmicks to cover deeper issues.
• Music: A band might be said to "jump the shark" when it radically changes its style in a way that alienates its core fanbase.

Similar Concepts

• "Nuking the fridge": A similar phrase derived from the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull movie, where Indiana Jones survives a nuclear explosion by hiding inside a lead-lined refrigerator. This phrase refers to a similarly absurd or unrealistic plot development.
• Burning out: In a business or career context, it refers to the point where effort or creativity runs out, resulting in low-quality output.
• Enshitification: is the gradual degradation of an online platform or service's functionality, as part of a cycle in which the platform or service first offers benefits to users to attract them, then pursues more and more profits at the expense of users.

If no one knows how to pronounce your goofy processes and butthole matrixes and you are selling the notion of your particular brand of the, 'design is saving the planet' or what's really important is the drivel and hot air coming out of my mouth, even though we cannot get business to even respect us because of the idiotic things we/YOU say in public, then we have a serious problem.

You're transforming yourselves from Eagles to DoDo birds and crying as you go extinct. You hate layoffs and unemployment? Hate me instead, for telling you the truth. Business is having a great cleansing, purging, reset. And the Darwinian Design moment was brought to you by YOU.

Design should be led, managed and shaped by designers. REAL practitioners who do this work in or for organizations and get paid for it because they provide value to businesses. We have this enormous bubble of non-designers, non pros and fame obsessed talk show hosts and wanna-bes telling us how important they are to get clicks, likes, face time and rip off unassuming juniors and I'm sick of every one of them. You can discern what they know, the minute they start talking and posting and blasting their inane videos everywhere. It's time for most of you to go back to whatever it is you were doing before pretending to be something you're not.

~Fin

Hi, My names is Thomas and I don't care if you like, click, follow or repost my stuff or not. I write about things I care about. Mostly, I rage post and write about the disrespect of design and the people who do it.