The previous post in this series examined the product management ontology of design value - the causal chain from strategy through objectives to measurable behaviour changes - and asked what it illuminates and what it struggles with in programme governance contexts. The complications it identified were structural: contested strategy, long attribution horizons, and the unverifiability of coordination value. This post examines a different category of limitation: what the ontology structurally cannot see, even when the conditions for its application are met.
The aesthetic blind spot
There is a dimension of design value that the product ontology cannot represent, and that coherently enough for it to register as a programme level metric or provide a coherent definition of design's value: the aesthetic. The Service Aesthetics series in this blog explored how design structures experience across what Folkmann (2013) calls sensual-phenomenal, conceptual-hermeneutical, and contextual-discursive registers - how a service feels to encounter, what it means, and how it positions the participant within a wider institutional and political context. These are not decorative qualities layered onto a functionally complete service; they are constitutive of what the service is and how it is experienced. Rancière's (2013) conception of aesthetics as the distribution of the sensible - the system that determines what is perceptible, by whom, and under what conditions - makes the point politically: every service blueprint, every interface specification, every touchpoint decision is an act of delimiting what can be sensed and by whom. The aesthetic choices embedded in service design are simultaneously political choices about whose experience is recognised and whose is rendered invisible.
The earlier post on what the designer brings extended this argument from the aesthetic into the embodied and normative: the care labour and emotional work that constitute service encounters (Akama and Tonkinwise, 2023), the relational entanglement that Vink, Hay and Duan (2025) identify as constitutive of service, and the norm-critical question of whose bodies, whose conventions, and whose definitions of adequate experience are built into the design at every level. These are not separate from the aesthetic dimension; they are its material and political substance. Tinkering - the small, situated, relational repair work that Vink and colleagues propose as a more honest description of what design does in institutional settings - is aesthetic practice in Rancière's sense: it redistributes what is sensible, reconfiguring whose experience counts as evidence and whose needs count as requirements.
The product ontology discussed in the previous post has no component for any of this. Its value chain runs from strategy through objectives to measurable behaviour changes; aesthetic quality - whether the service is coherent, legible, dignified, experientially appropriate to the situation it addresses - does not appear anywhere in the chain unless it can be operationalised as a behaviour change. Yet this is precisely where much of design's distinctive contribution lies: not in producing a measurably different click-through rate, but in making the service sensible - perceivable, comprehensible, appropriate to the embodied situation of the person encountering it. Cooper and Junginger (2011, p. 43) are direct about the difficulty: "aesthetic judgements cannot be measured", and the benefits of design's aesthetic contribution resist the audit frameworks through which organisations assess value. Wetter-Edman (2014, p. 39) observes that "aesthetic qualities beyond visualization skills are rarely discussed in terms of contribution and are also difficult to relate" to the frameworks through which design's value is assessed.
What makes this a blind spot rather than merely a gap is that designers themselves often take the aesthetic dimension as given - as so obviously part of what design does that it does not need to be articulated within the value frameworks that govern programme decisions. Jackson (2018, p. 81) finds that "many designers find it difficult to articulate why they make certain aesthetic choices"; Jahnke (2013, p. 139) shows that aesthetic preferences in organisations are typically "tacit and un-reflected". The aesthetic knowledge that designers bring - the capacity to perceive what Folkmann describes across sensual, conceptual, and contextual registers, to judge that this interaction is too abrupt or that notification is tonally wrong for the clinical context it addresses - remains implicit precisely because it feels, to designers, like a basic designer competence or sensibility rather than a distinctive contribution that needs justification in terms of its impact on the wider behaviour change or programme logic such design change could support.
The organisational reception of aesthetic value mirrors this silence from the other side. Tonkinwise (2011) argues that the managerial appropriation of "design thinking" systematically strips out aesthetics - anything to do with form-giving, appearance, and feel - because it is regarded as too subjective, too incalculable, and too political to be incorporated into rational decision-making frameworks. Cooper and Junginger (2011, p. 36) observe that "highlighting design, aesthetics and semantics as the driving forces for development is not obvious in an economic context", requiring managers who have "the courage to prioritize criteria that are not always justified economically". The result is a familiar pattern: aesthetic decisions are either delegated entirely to designers - treated as a specialist concern that need not be understood or governed - or they become the prerogative of the most senior person in the room, decided by personal preference rather than by any shared evaluative framework. In either case, the aesthetic dimension is positioned outside the business logic rather than within it; it is treated as a matter of individual taste rather than as a structural contribution to how a service is experienced. What Tonkinwise identifies in the "design thinking" discourse - that aesthetics must be repressed to make design legible to management - operates more broadly in programme governance: the value ontology can accommodate behaviour changes and measurable outcomes, but it has no vocabulary for the aesthetic coherence that shapes whether those outcomes are experienced as adequate, dignified, or comprehensible by the people the service addresses.
The consequence is that the aesthetic dimension of design work is either invisible to governance structures or reduced to compliance. Accessibility requirements and WCAG standards represent a bureaucratised, legally mandated version of one part of what design's aesthetic contribution involves: making things perceivable. They are important - but they address the minimum threshold of sensory access without touching the broader question of whether the service is experientially coherent, emotionally appropriate, or aesthetically adequate to the situation it addresses. A letter telling someone their disability benefit has been reassessed can meet every WCAG criterion - correct contrast ratios, readable font size, logical heading structure - and still be frightening, incomprehensible, or demeaning in its tone, sequencing, and framing; a clinical dashboard can pass accessibility audit and still be cluttered, misleading, or tonally inappropriate for the decisions it is supposed to support. The aesthetic contribution that design makes to these artefacts - the judgement that shapes their experiential quality - operates above and beyond what compliance frameworks can capture, and it is a contribution that designers need to learn to articulate within the value frameworks that programme governance understands. Clatworthy (2023, p. 12) identifies the problem precisely: "aesthetics is central to how we experience services and is poorly understood as part of service design". If it is poorly understood within the field's own discourse, it will be invisible within the programme governance structures that the value ontology addresses.
A different ontology of value
The structural complications identified in the previous post - contested strategy, the attribution horizon, and unverifiable coordination value - concern the application of the product ontology to programme governance contexts where its assumptions about clear strategy, short feedback loops, and direct attribution do not hold. But there is a more fundamental challenge, one that questions the ontology's assumptions about what value is and where it originates, and it comes from the service marketing literature that service design itself emerged from.
Vargo and Lusch's (2004, 2008) service-dominant logic (S-D logic) proposes that value is not something a provider creates and delivers to a customer but something that is always co-created in use. The firm can only offer a value proposition; value itself is realised - or not - when the customer integrates that proposition into their own life and practices. This is not a minor adjustment to the commercial value chain; it inverts it. The product ontology described in the previous post assumes a directional flow: strategy defines what the organisation values, objectives operationalise it, outputs are shipped, and outcomes are measured as behaviour changes in users. Value, in this framing, is defined by the organisation and produced by the organisation; the user's role is to change their behaviour in ways the organisation can measure. S-D logic says this gets the direction wrong. The customer, not the provider, determines whether value was created, and they do so through the experience of use rather than through the act of purchase or adoption.
Grönroos (2011) pushes this further, arguing that S-D logic, despite its rhetoric of co-creation, retains an organisation-driven perspective. Value creation, on his reading, should be understood from the user's vantage: value-in-use is what the user experiences when they integrate the service into their life, and the provider's role is to facilitate that process rather than to control it. If value is determined in use rather than in production, then the causal chain from output through behaviour change to outcome is not a description of how value works but a managerial simplification of it - a way of making value legible to governance structures that need measurable indicators, at the cost of obscuring the relational and experiential dimensions through which value is actually constituted.
Secomandi (2024) complicates the S-D logic corrective from a different direction. While Grönroos challenges the product ontology's assumption about who determines value, Secomandi challenges S-D logic's own assumption about what mediates it. S-D logic subordinates materiality to immateriality: goods are operand resources - passive matter acted upon by the operant resources of human knowledge and skills - and their role in service exchange is reduced to "distribution mechanisms for service provision" (Vargo and Lusch, 2004). Secomandi argues that this is phenomenologically inaccurate; material interfaces actively shape how value-in-use is experienced, and the force that drives service exchange is "shared with nonhumans as well" (Secomandi, 2024, p. 10) - the forms, layouts, sequences, and material configurations through which services become present to their participants. This returns the argument to the aesthetic blind spot identified above. The product ontology cannot represent aesthetic value because its causal chain runs through behaviour changes, not experiential qualities. But S-D logic, which corrects the directionality, introduces its own subordination: by treating materiality as passive distribution, it renders invisible precisely the formgiving work through which designers shape the experiential conditions under which value-in-use is determined. Secomandi proposes returning to Maldonado's definition of design as formgiving - "to coordinate, integrate, and articulate all those factors that, in one way or another, take part in the process of constituting the product form" (Secomandi, 2024, p. 2) - as an epistemological frame that takes the materiality of service seriously. Neither the product ontology nor the service marketing literature it draws on has a vocabulary for this contribution; it falls into the gap between a governance framework that measures behaviour changes and a value theory that locates value in use but not in the material forms through which use is structured.
Osborne (2018) extends the value-in-use critique specifically to public services, arguing for what he calls "public service logic" (PSL). The distinction matters because public services have structural properties that even S-D logic does not fully accommodate. Users of public services may have no meaningful choice about whether to engage; "repeat business" may indicate service failure rather than satisfaction; outcomes are contested across multiple stakeholders with incompatible interests; and what counts as "value" is not a market signal but a political determination. Moore's (1995) concept of public value - "what a society values and aims to create through its public institutions" - names the gap. The product ontology assumes that value can be operationally defined through business objectives; public value is collectively determined through democratic and institutional processes that no individual team's OKRs can capture.
The service grammar proposed in the Planning and Design series encounters the same difficulty from a different direction. The grammar's PROMISES component specifies what commitments actors make to each other - outcome promises, experience promises, performance promises. But if value is co-created in use rather than delivered through promises, then the grammar's structural specification captures what the service intends without capturing what it achieves for participants. A grammatically valid specification can enumerate every promise without establishing whether any of them produced value-in-use. The co-creation literature suggests that value emerges from the interaction between the service's structure and the participant's context, capabilities, and practices - and neither the grammar nor the product ontology has a component for specifying this relational dimension.
None of this invalidates the product ontology's contribution. The output/outcome distinction, the value hypothesis discipline, the insistence on specifying success criteria before work begins - these remain practically useful tools for connecting design work to organisational objectives, even in programme governance contexts where the ontology's deeper assumptions about value do not hold. But the service marketing literature serves as a corrective to one particular risk: that the product ontology's directional, organisation-defined model of value might be mistaken for a complete account of how services create value, rather than being understood as a governance-legible simplification of a more complex relational process. In public-sector programme contexts, where the governance-as-design-material argument identifies trust as constitutive of the service itself, this distinction is not academic. A consent architecture that participants trust, a data governance framework that clinicians have confidence in, a pathway that accommodates the complexity of lived experience - these produce value-in-use that no output/outcome chain can fully specify, and they do so through the relational and institutional dimensions that the product ontology renders invisible.
Relation to the service grammar
The value ontology and the service grammar proposed in the Planning and Design series address different aspects of service specification, and the gap between them is instructive. The grammar specifies what a service is - its actors, promises, states, transitions, channels, and evidence - without specifying what it achieves. A grammatically valid specification can describe a service that produces no valued outcome; validity, as that post acknowledges, is not quality. The value ontology specifies what a service achieves - how outputs produce behaviour changes that advance objectives - without specifying the structural composition of the service itself. Each framework is silent where the other speaks.
Two terms appear in both frameworks but with different meanings, and the divergence reveals something about what each framework prioritises. ACTORS in the grammar are structural role-holders drawn from Iqbal's (2018) decomposition: customer, user, agent, provider. These roles persist throughout the service's operation; they define who participates and in what capacity. Actors in the value ontology, following Adzic (2012), are specifically people whose behaviour must change for an output to produce an outcome. The grammar's actors occupy roles; the value ontology's actors are targets of intervention. A service grammar specification might identify "GP practice receptionist" as an agent; the value ontology would ask what behaviour change in that receptionist the design intervention is intended to produce, and how that change would advance the programme's objectives.
EVIDENCE diverges similarly. In the grammar, evidence means the tangible artefacts a service produces - confirmation emails, appointment cards, reminder messages - following Secomandi and Snelders's (2011) account of how services become materially present to participants. In the value ontology, evidence means measurable behaviour change against a baseline: the data that confirms or disconfirms the value hypothesis. The grammar's evidence is phenomenological (how the service manifests); the value ontology's evidence is epistemic (how impact is known). A grammar-compliant specification might enumerate every artefact a service produces without establishing whether any of them contributed to a valued outcome.
The most significant absence from the grammar, which the value ontology makes concrete, is purpose. The grammar has no component for specifying why the service exists, what outcomes it is intended to produce, or how changes to its structure would affect the behaviour of its participants. PROMISES gesture toward this - the provider promises a consultation, the booking system promises a process taking less than five minutes - but promises are commitments about the service's operation, not hypotheses about its impact. The value ontology's causal chain - strategy, objective, outcome, actor, output - is precisely the kind of teleological structure that the grammar cannot express.
There is a further connection worth noting. The critique of the grammar's internal coherence identified the absence of composition rules - the logic specifying how components relate to each other - as the grammar's deepest structural gap. The value hypothesis is, in one reading, exactly such a composition rule: it specifies how a change to the service's structure (an output) connects through an actor's behaviour change (an outcome) to an organisational objective. It composes outputs and outcomes into a causal chain with testable predictions. What the grammar lacks in compositional logic, the value ontology supplies in causal logic; whether these could be integrated - whether the grammar could incorporate value hypotheses as a composition mechanism linking structural specification to intended effect - is an open question, but the complementarity suggests that neither framework is complete without something the other provides.
The three limitations described here - the aesthetic dimension the ontology cannot represent, the relational model of value it does not accommodate, and the compositional structure it does not provide - are not reasons to abandon the product ontology, and sadly for many designers working in product-management dominated contexts or NPM public sector governance imbued programmes, they have no choice anyway. The contribution of the product ontology and, as the previous post argued, is helping designers and design teams to consider: the output/outcome distinction, the value hypothesis discipline, and the insistence on specifying success criteria before work begins remain practically useful in programme governance contexts.
There is, however, a fourth structural limitation worth naming: the ontology cannot represent the counterfactual. Demonstrating that a design intervention created value requires imagining the world in which it did not occur - what Pearl (2018) describes as the third rung of his Ladder of Causation, imagining, which is categorically different from seeing (observing patterns) or doing (predicting intervention effects). The product ontology can specify that an output produced a measured outcome; it cannot, from that observation alone, establish that the outcome would not have occurred without the design intervention. Pearl’s point - that “no machine can derive explanations from raw data; it needs a push” - is that answering counterfactual questions requires a causal model external to the data, not more data. The value hypothesis, when properly specified with a mechanism and contextual conditions, is that causal model. But the product ontology does not require the mechanism to be stated - only the outcome to be measured - which means a well-formed OKR can satisfy its criteria while remaining counterfactually uninformative. In public-sector programme contexts, where multiple concurrent interventions make attribution structurally intractable, the realist design theory of change provides the mechanism-specification apparatus the ontology lacks. The counterfactual blind spot matters as much as the first three, because it is the one that allows compliance with the product ontology’s requirements to substitute for genuine evaluation rather than enabling it.
But designers who adopt its vocabulary without recognising its blind spots risk accepting a partial account of their own contribution as a complete one - articulating value only in the terms the ontology can see, and leaving the aesthetic, relational, structural, and counterfactual dimensions of their work unarticulated and therefore invisible to the governance structures they work within.
References
Akama, Y. and Tonkinwise, C. (2023) 'Cultural bodies empowered to perform services: a critical perspective', in Blomkvist, J., Clatworthy, S. and Holmlid, S. (eds.) The Materials of Service Design. Edward Elgar.
Adzic, G. (2012) Impact Mapping: Making a Big Impact with Software Products and Projects. Provoking Thoughts.
Clatworthy, S. (2023) 'Aesthetics as a Service Design Material', in Blomkvist, J., Clatworthy, S. and Holmlid, S. (eds.) Service Design Capabilities. Edward Elgar.
Cooper, R., Junginger, S. and Lockwood, T. (Eds.) (2011) The Handbook of Design Management. Berg.
Folkmann, M.N. (2013) The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design. MIT Press.
Grönroos, C. (2011) 'Value Co-creation in Service Logic: A Critical Analysis', Marketing Theory, 11(3), pp. 279-301.
Iqbal, M. (2018) Thinking in Services. BIS Publishers.
Jackson, S. (2018) 'Disrupting the Designer', in Resnick, E. (ed.) The Social Design Reader. Bloomsbury.
Jahnke, M. (2013) Meaning in the Making: Introducing a Hermeneutic Perspective on the Contribution of Design Practice to Innovation. PhD thesis, University of Gothenburg.
Moore, M.H. (1995) Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pearl, J. and Mackenzie, D. (2018) The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. Basic Books.
Osborne, S.P. (2018) 'From Public Service-Dominant Logic to Public Service Logic: Are Public Service Organizations Capable of Co-Production and Value Co-Creation?', Public Management Review, 20(2), pp. 225-231.
Rancière, J. (2013) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by G. Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury.
Secomandi, F. (2024) 'Service Design as Formgiving: Breaking Free from the Marketing-Dominant Logic', Design Issues, 40(1), pp. 4-19.
Secomandi, F. and Snelders, D. (2011) 'The Object of Service Design', Design Issues, 27(3), pp. 20-34.
Tonkinwise, C. (2011) 'A Taste for Practices: Unrepressing Style in Design Thinking', Design Studies, 32(6), pp. 533-545.
Vargo, S.L. and Lusch, R.F. (2004) 'Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing', Journal of Marketing, 68(1), pp. 1-17.
Vink, J., Hay, A.F. and Duan, Z. (2025) 'Reimagining service design through relational perspectives', Journal of Service Management.
Vargo, S.L. and Lusch, R.F. (2008) 'Service-Dominant Logic: Continuing the Evolution', Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36(1), pp. 1-10.
Wetter-Edman, K. (2014) Design for Service: A Framework for Articulating Designers' Contribution as Interpreter of Users' Experience. PhD thesis, University of Gothenburg.