Tonight we kicked off service design drinks 2012 strong with Brandon Schauer doing a repeat performance of his keynote talk from the Service Design Network Conference: The Business Case for (or Against) Service Design (PDF 19.7 MB).

His provoking talk identifies a huge imbalance of spending, where many more billions go to advertising (telling people how great the service is) and much less goes to actually making the service great. This leads to what he calls the service anticipation gap, or SAG.

He also taks a stab at identifying who is actually designing services in the US. The most likely answer: they’re being designed ad hoc by “the organization.”

Looking at this slide, my theory is that future service design teams will be working closely with the folks above.