Is the goal of service design communication and education to make service design a part of the working culture of all organisations and decision-making and to incorporate it as a part of all competences acquired through education? Should we understand that service design is adequately circulated only once it has made itself obsolete? Or should service design be considered an umbrella that overshadows all marketing communication, other fields of design, planning of business operations, and service development? Should service design define the division of work between the abovementioned fields? Should service design become the ultimate solution with an advert slogan of "do not buy interior architecture, buy service design!" Or should service design form its own profession with identifiable professional boundaries and related education-based competence requirements and university degrees? Or should service design be considered an easily applicable toolbox for all service-related planning? Should competent designers be employed to design companies' business operations, strategies and management because they are good in designing and customizing?

 
Such exaggerations came up in research interviews with many experts. Service designer Esa Rauhala stressed that even though an individual may be a magnificent and talented in furniture design or in service design, it does not mean that the same individual would be competent in any other field of design. There are numerous ways of being a good designer. Perhaps the common denominator for all design competences is the ability to reify and prototype. It is important to note that design competences do not constitute good business skills or strategic expertise.

A good designer is not necessarily good at anything else but designing. In this respect it is not too wise to give design education to everybody. Neither is it justified to state that CEOs should be designers or that designers should find their way to boardrooms. Of course it would be good that company management and the individuals responsible for the purchase of services had experience in or understanding of service design. In praxis, good designers may become business partners or become members of company boards if their personal characteristics and skills allow. Such career development is never going to be dependent on design education. Design or service design is not everything between the earth and the sky; it is not the ultimate answer to everything even though some wish to argue so. Marketing and many other fields already attempt to explain everything through and by itself. This is most likely not a path service design should aspire to take. From engineering or business management viewpoints, service design constitutes a tiny fraction of a business and companies work well even without service design.

Service designer Reima Rönnholm followed the same lines as his colleague. Rönnholm underlined that service design should under no circumstances become an island of its own with its own gatekeepers or a new silo that attempts to do everything. Service design should be a background philosophy for work, one that includes a toolbox that is applicable in many different cases and different problems. Service design cannot take the place of any other design field nor become a competing solution to any given problem. Service design should be a means to find out clients' needs, to break existing silos, and to customise services in ways that suit the situation at hand. Service design should make good use of all relevant cooperative instances in service development. A service designer is not necessarily the correct person to reify and realise a new service strategy or plan for practical customer service. A whole competence field of its own is responsible for that.

Further, a service designer is not necessarily the right person to develop the appropriate system of compensation connected to a service concept. Again, appropriate experts already exist. In other words, service design should promote a new kind of service development in an organisation without aspiring to dominate business operations or activities. Thus, in a way it should aim to make itself useless or obsolete.