Service Design Thinking is an emerging field that recognizes that the product design principles need counterparts in designing services for customers that are user centric; that are delightful, pleasurable, usable all the while serving utility to the customer.Understanding the value and the nature of relationships between people, organizations is central to designing services. Viewing your service through the customers’ eyes, and designing the experience to be consistent for the customer is the essence of service design thinking.Service Design methods and tools are ways for a business to gain a comprehensive, empathic understanding of customer needs. Service Design as a practice at consulting firms results in design of systems and processes aimed at providing a holistic service to the user.The best part of this book I liked is the set of cases discussed in the last section of the book. Includes service design projects in Europe by consulting firms of government institutions, a hospital, a bank among others. The cases explain the client’s context, the specific service design problem being tackled, and make references to the methods and tools that were used in solving the problem. For example:- using a emotional customer journey map while designing for a new service offering at a bank, to understand what are people really trying to achieve, how, and what do they use. What are they experiencing and feeling while trying to reach the desired outcomes.- using priority grids to identify issues that can be solved quickly with little effort and highest impact on customer creation at a hospitalThe other sections of the book cover the principles of Service Design, the participants (product designers, interaction designers, graphic designers, social designers, strategists, operational managers, design ethnographers ) and the principles of service design.The section on the tools for service design falls short. It lists all the popular design techniques – stakeholder maps, customer journey maps, personas, storyboards etc and few I haven’t been exposed to before. The explanations and examples are not adequate though. I have seen other books cover the methods and tools much more comprehensively.