In this paper, we discuss what it means to practice service design in an academic research setting. For a long time, the primary focal point of design research has been the users-of their experiences, needs, desires, and values. By contrast, designers have been relatively anonymous and unlocatable. In shift to the service-centric design paradigm, we argue that it is important to recognize design researchers as distinct stakeholders, who actively interact with systems and services with a goal to fulfill their own values and achieve desired outcomes. In practice, typically the role of designer is that of a design consultant working for (or rather on behalf of) the client. By contrast, in academic research settings, the role of designer is that of a design researcher working with their own research agenda. We provide a case study of a service design research project aimed at developing new digital services for public libraries. We encountered a series of issues with a complex set of values at play, in which design researchers emerged as distinct stakeholders with specific sets of research questions, goals, and visions. The main contribution of this paper is a model that (a) clarifies the position of design researchers within the sociocultural context in which they practice design, and (b) visualize how their positions impact the value co-creation, and in turn, the design outcome. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI).