Service design
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject. Please help improve the article with a good introductory style. |
 |
This article does not cite any references or sources. (September 2006) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
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. The increasing relevance of the service sector, both in terms of people employed and economic importance, requires services to be accurately designed. The design of the service may involve a re-organization of the activities performed by the service provider (Back office) and/or the redesign of time and place in which customers come in contact with the service (Front office). The term Service Design was coined by Prof. Dr. Michael Erlhoff at Köln International School of Design (KISD) in the early 1990s, and later the study has been intensively developed by Prof. Birgit Mager.
Contents |
[edit] 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 2004, the Service Design Network was launched by Köln International School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Linköpings Universitet, Politecnico de Milano, Domus Academy and the agency Spirit of Creation, in order to create an international network for Service Design academics and professionals; now the network extends to service designers around the world, as well as professional service design agencies such as Livework and IDEO.
[edit] 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 artefacts and other things including communication, environment and behaviours. Several authors (Eiglier 1977; Normann 2000; Morelli 2002), though, emphasise 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.
[edit] 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. For this reason the blueprint of a service is often based on use scenarios represented through storyboard or use cases.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Service Design in Non-Profit Sectors
[edit] Service Design Cases
In the creative sector, as Geke vanDijk mentions “cross-disciplinary collaboration and knowledge sharing are powerful catalysts of innovation”. He 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.
[edit] 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 (such as [1]Politecnico di Milano or as part of the academic curriculum in Industrial Design, such as Carnegie Mellon University, Linköpings Universitet, Domus Academy;[2]
[edit] External links
- Service Design Network Service Design Network: International Service Design Network
- Sedes Research Sedes Research: Center for Service Design Research
- Service-Design.de Service-Design.de by Prof. Birgit Mager
- Design Council on Service Design Design Council one stop shop information resource on Service Design by Bill Hollins.
- Service Design and why it matters to business An interesting article / interview on service design at Danish Design Center website.
- Can Service Design Save the World? Gill Wildman, Chris Downs, GK VanPatter, NextDesign Leadership Institute Journal, 2006
- Servicedesign.wikispaces.com methodologies, definitions, examples, schools and events on service design
- Service Design at KISD Service Design Program at Köln International School of Design
[edit] References
Eiglier, P., Langeard,P (1977). Marketing Consumer Services: New Insights. Cambridge, Mass. Marketing Science Institute, 1977. 128 P.
Hollins, G., Hollins, Bill (1993). Total Design : Managing the design process in the service sector. London, Pitman.
Morelli, N. (2002). "Designing product/service systems. A methodological exploration." Design Issues 18(3): 3-17.
Normann, R. (2000). Service management : strategy and leadership in service business. Chichester ; New York, Wiley.
Normann, R. and R. Ramirez (1994). Desiging Interactive Strategy. From Value Chain to Value Constellation. New York, John Wiley and Sons.
Ramaswamy, R. (1996). Design and management of service processes. Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.
Shostack, L. G. (1982). "How to Design a Service." European Journal of Marketing 16(1): 49-63.
Shostack, L. G. (1984). "Design Services that Deliver." Harvard Business Review(84115): 133-139.
