Service design

Service Design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service, in order to improve its quality, the interaction between service provider and customers and the customer's experience. For example, a restaurant may choose to have a Service Design agency change the way its menu is set out, or change the layout of the restaurant to improve the customer's experience. Customers can mean paying patrons, but also can be within an organization, so long as they are the direct recipients of a service e.g. an organization implements a new payroll interface for its staff - therefore the staff are effectively 'customers' of the payroll interface. To do this, Service Design methodologies are used to plan and organize people, infrastructure, communication and material components used in a service. The increasing importance and size of the service sector, both in terms of people employed and economic importance, requires services to be accurately designed in order for service providers to remain competitive and to continue to attract customers.

The design (or redesign) of a service may involve re-organizing the activities performed by the service provider (Back office), e.g. how letters from customers are processed internally; and/or the redesign of interfaces and interactions that customers use to contact the service provider (Front office) e.g. website, in person, telephone, blog etc.

Service Design is increasingly used by blue-chip private and public sector organizations as a means of creating the step change their customers require in terms of service experience. Service Design agencies apply design tools, techniques and thinking to service challenges, either to improve existing services or to create new ones. Typically, the work is based upon deep insights gathered by shadowing service users. This technique produces more accurate insights into the usability of a service than traditional remote surveys because what people say they do is frequently different to what they actually do. Concepts and ideas generated are captured in sketches or in service prototypes. The strong visual element, combined with the opportunity to test and rapidly change services and interfaces, delivers real value in today's competitive markets.

The History of Service Design

In the earliest contributions on service design (Shostack 1982; Shostack 1984), the activity of designing service was considered as part of the domain of marketing and management disciplines. Shostack (Shostack 1982), for instance proposed the integrated design of material components (products) and immaterial components (services). This design process, according to Shostack, can be documented and codified using a “service blueprint” to map the sequence of events in a service and its essential functions in an objective and explicit manner.

In 1991, Service Design was first introduced as a design discipline by Prof. Dr. Michael Erlhoff at Köln International School of Design (KISD), and Prof. Birgit Mager has played an integral role for developing the study of Service Design at KISD in later days. In 2001, live|work, the first Service Design consultancy opened for business in London. In 2004, the Service Design Network was launched by Köln International School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Linköpings Universitet, Politecnico di Milano and Domus Academy in order to create an international network for Service Design academics and professionals; now the network extends to service design professionals worldwide as well as design consultancies who have started offering service design. In 2010, 23 service design professionals published the first comprehensive textbook This is Service Design Thinking, edited by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider.

Characteristics of Service Design

Service design is the specification and construction of technologically networked social practices that deliver valuable capacities for action to a particular customer. Capacity for action in Information Services has the basic form of assertions. In Health Services, it has the basic form of diagnostic assessments and prescriptions (commands). In Educational Services, it has the form of a promise to produce a new capacity for the customer to make new promises. In a fundamental way, services are unambiguously tangible. Companies such as eBay, or collectives such as Wikipedia or Sourceforge are rich and sophisticated combinations of basic linguistic deliverables that expand customers' capacities to act and produce value for themselves and for others. In an abstract sense, services are networked intelligence. Service design can be both tangible and intangible. It can involve artifacts and other things including communication, environment and behaviours. Several authors (Eiglier 1977; Normann 2000; Morelli 2002), though, emphasize that, unlike products, which are created and “exist” before being purchased and used, service come to existence at the same moment they are being provided and used. While a designer can prescribe the exact configuration of a product, s/he cannot prescribe in the same way the result of the interaction between customers and service providers, nor can s/he prescribe the form and characteristics of any emotional value produced by the service. Consequently, service design is an activity that suggests behavioural patterns or “scripts” to the actors interacting in the service, leaving a higher level of freedom to the customers’ behaviour.

Service Design Methodology

Together with the most traditional methods used for product design, service design requires methods and tools to control new elements of the design process, such as the time and the interaction between actors. An overview of the methodologies for designing services is proposed by (Morelli 2006), who proposes three main directions:

• Identification of the actors involved in the definition of the service, using appropriate analytical tools

• Definition of possible service scenarios, verifying use cases, sequences of actions and actors’ role, in order to define the requirements for the service and its logical and organisational structure

• Representation of the service, using techniques that illustrate all the components of the service, including physical elements, interactions, logical links and temporal sequences

Analytical tools refer to anthropology, social studies, ethnography and social construction of technology. Appropriate elaborations of those tools have been proposed with video-ethnography (Buur, Binder et al. 2000; Buur and Soendergaard 2000), and different observation techniques to gather data about users’ behaviour (Kumar 2004) . Other methods, such as cultural probes, have been developed in the design discipline, which aim at capturing information on customers in their context of use (Gaver, Dunne et al. 1999; Lindsay and Rocchi 2003).

Design tools aim at producing a blueprint of the service, which describes the nature and characteristics of the interaction in the service. Design tools include service scenarios (which describe the interaction) and use cases (which illustrate the detail of time sequences in a service encounter). Both techniques are already used in software and systems engineering to capture the functional requirements of a system. However, when used in service design, they have been adequately adapted, in order to include more information, concerning material and immaterial component of a service, time sequences and physical flows (Morelli 2006). Other techniques, such as IDEF0 , just in time and Total quality management are used to produce functional models of the service system and to control its processes. Such tools, though, may prove too rigid to describe services in which customers are supposed to have an active role, because of the high level of uncertainty related to the customer’s behaviour.

Representation techniques are critical in service design, because of the need to communicate the inner mechanisms of services to actors, such as final users, which are not supposed to be familiar with any technical language or representation technique. For this reason storyboards are often used to illustrate the interaction on the front office.^[1] Other representation techniques have been used to illustrate the system of interactions or a “platform” in a service (Manzini, Collina et al. 2004). Recently, video sketching and video prototypes have also been used to produce quick and effective tools to stimulate customers’ participation in the development of the service and their involvement in the value production process.

Service Design in Marketing and Management

The active participation of customers and other actors traditionally considered as external to a firm’s boundary emphasize the need for a proper design activity that organizes the interaction among those actors, thus planning sequences of events, material and information flows. Furthermore the involvement of “non technical “ actors, such as customers, implies that the activity of service design be analyzed not only from a functional perspective (with the aim of optimizing flows and resources and reducing time of operations) but also from the emotional perspective (creating meaningful events, motivating customers, communicating the service). Because of those considerations service design became the focus of studies and research in the discipline of design, initially as part of the activities related to web design and Interaction Design, and later as an autonomous professional and research area.

Service Design in the Public Sector

In the last few years, the public sector has expanded, with new investments in hospitals, schools, cultural institutions and security infrastructures. The number of jobs in public services has also grown. Such growth is also associated to a large and rapid social change, that is calling for a re-organization of the welfare state. In this context governments are explicitly considering service design for the re-organisation of public services.

Some recent documents of the British government (United Kingdom Prime Minister Strategy Unit 2007; Public Administration Select Committee, 2008) explore the concept of "user-driven public services" and scenarios of highly personalized public services. The documents propose a new view on the role of service providers and users in the development of new and highly customised public services.

This view has been explored by recent works of the and in the initiative in UK. In those works and in of redesign of public services, the approach has been based on users’ participation and active interaction with the service. The new approach has been illustrated by several authors.^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]

Clinical service redesign is an approach to improving quality and productivity in health. A redesign is clinically led and involves all stakeholders (e.g. Primary and secondary care clinicians, senior management, patients, commissioners etc) to ensure national and local clinical standards are set and communicated across the care settings. By following the patient's journey or pathway, the team can focus on improving the patient experience and outcomes of care.

By The New Zealand Inland Revenue Department has a dedicated Design & Project Management group, with separate streams focusing on Government, Customers and Specialist Policy Design. Specific design methodologies have been adopted and are being continuously developed.

Service Design Cases

In the creative sector, as Geke van Dijk mentions “cross-disciplinary collaboration and knowledge sharing are powerful catalysts of innovation”. She also explains a new notion defined as “service design’ that expresses that current products are no longer isolated elements, but a network of different experiences and combinations, such as the case of the iPod and iTunes online music store. In this case the concept plays with the idea of tangible and intangible objects that allow consumers maximum flexibility to make their own decision about how and when they want to use the service. In this case, though the example is very interesting, we must also understand that Apple as a company is perhaps one of the most closed and hermetic company, so though the concept is useful to explain how to understand products today, it is also quite ambiguous how companies really deploy them.

Other successful and evident examples are in the cases of augmenting the museum experience with mobile devices that explain to you a bit more about each work. We must say however that many of those interfaces are just speakers and that the content is very very poor.

For all this reasons we can say that any type of design today, particularly the ones using technology is very much to do with content.

It is true however that the consumer perspective needs to be integrated since the early stages of the design process. To achieve new processes of multidisciplinary and participatory work may be used, through prototype testing or performance analysis.

Service Design Education

The first Service Design education was introduced in 1991 at Köln International School of Design. Several other schools are now proposing service design as the main subject of master studies or as part of the academic curriculum in Interaction Design or Industrial Design.

Notes

^ E.g. Albinsson, L., M. Lind, et al. (2007). Co-Design: An approach to border crossing, Network Innovation. eChallenges 2007, The Hague, The Netherlands. http://echallenges.org/e2010/outbox/eChallenges_e2007_ref_195_doc_3562.pdf
^ Cottam & Leadbeater 2004
^ Leadbeater 2008
^ Leadbeater and Cottam 2008
^ Parker and Heapy 2006
^ Thackara 2007

References

Cottam, Hilary; Leadbeater, Charles (2004), Red: Health: Co-Creating Services (PDF), Design Council Books, ISBN 9781904335115
Leadbeater, Charles (2008), We-think, Profile, ISBN 9781861978929

External links

Service Design Network Service Design Network: International Service Design Network
Sedes Research Sedes Research: Center for Service Design Research
Interaction and Service design research group Service design research projects at Linköpings universitet.
Design Council on Service Design Design Council one stop shop information resource on Service Design.
Service Design at KISD Service Design Program at Köln International School of Design
sustainable everyday examples on the use of scenario and video prototypes in service design.
Product / Service Design at Glasgow School of Art
Politecnico di Milano
Service Design Program at Savannah College of Art and Design