Roberta Tassi’s 2008 thesis on Service Design Tools presents a grammar of the practice. As a student at Politecnico di Milano she investigated how communication design techniques are typically used within a service design framework.
Her thesis organizes 45 different tools (such as storyboards, affinity diagrams and role playing) into a taxonomy arranged by design activities, representations, recipients and contents. For example, which tools feature narrative, or which might be used for co-design? Which activities are appropriate for stakeholders as opposed to designers? Each tool includes an overview, references and in many cases a brief case study. This is an extremely well-designed resource with deep content.
She’s also enabled a bit of feedback. If you’ve got a case study to suggest for any of the tools, send an e-mail her way.
Update: Looks like I miscounted. I was playing around with the page URLs to see how high the numbering scheme went, but it turns out that there are no tools one through five. I’d love to see a comprehensive index of all the tools on a single page so I could go through them one by one.
The online journal Re-public has published a special issue on service design entitled Innovative Service Design for All. The journal focuses on innovative developments in contemporary political theory and practice.
This issue includes the following essays:
- Beyond the Experience: In Search of an Operative Paradigm for the Industrialisation of Services by Nicola Morelli
- Mind the Gap: Theories and Practices in Managing Stakeholders in the Service Design Process by Qin Han
- Applicable Culture: Towards Future Services for the City of Milan by Walter Aprile, Henrik den Ouden Runshaug and Eyal Fried
- Reflections on How Service Experiences Arise: by Mikael Runonen, Sakari Tamminen, and Petri Mannonen
- Service Design for India: The Thinking Behind the Design of a Local Curriculum by Soumitri Varadarajan
Also of interest to service designers are several case studies regarding Dyslexia, Cohousing, Khulna City Corporation, Architectural Education and the Olympics.
Over at her Design Generalist blog Qin Han asks what service designers are reading. Several people have chimed in with suggestions that were new to me or that I hadn’t previously connected with service design. If you have a moment head over and contribute a book or journal article to the list.
The point of my Abandoning Service Design post earlier this week was to rebut the assertion that “service design” isn’t gaining enough ground in the US. My argument wasn’t focused on terminology, but Joel Bailey made a great observation in the comments that I want to highlight.
To paraphrase, the term “customer experience” focuses attention on the customer. And while that’s a necessary component of service design, it isn’t sufficient:
…it’s just as much about employee engagement and co-design for the benefit of the service provider. Clients have to recognise that increasingly both customers and staff operate in a service ecology. This needs integrated, holistic thinking, involving the community of players, not just a single strand.
Well said. I have the same problem with the term “user experience design” because it suggests a similar one-way value proposition. It really helps to articulate the distinction.
Sophia Parker’s new pamphlet entitled Social Animals: Tomorrow’s Designers in Today’s World [PDF 276K] uses a recent collaboration between the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and Engine (to examine the prison system) as a lens for critiquing the state of design education in the UK.
Lauren Tan from the Letters to Australia weblog succinctly paraphrases six areas of focus from the report:
- Turning insights into action;
- Co-design and the participation of people (also considering ethical codes of conduct);
- Prototyping services;
- Seeing the ‘bigger picture’ meaning taking into account the wider context projects operate in;
- Communicating well both visually and verbally, including the ability to pitch ideas for investment;
- Being not just problem solvers, but also ‘problem finders.’
Obviously this report is targeted toward design education overseas, but many of the findings resonate with my view of the landscape here in America as well. The lone criticism of the report itself (from a graphic design educator in Virginia) is “jargon, buzzwords, wild generalizations and the obvious restated.” Honestly, I’ve read the report twice and this seems like a breathtakingly misguided characterization.
[via Redjotter]
After a month in the wild eighty-five people have added their city to the service design worldwide map. I’ve also added a second and third layer of markers representing industry and education.
This map helps reify well-known patterns of service design practice throughout Europe but it also exposes a few surprising pockets of activity in Mexico City and Taipei and demonstrates some emerging interest in New Zealand and Australia.
Looking at the distribution it’s pretty clear that I’m living in the wrong part of the world. Based on this map I’m making immediate plans to move to that tiny island someone marked in the middle of the Caribbean where more appears to be going on. Even by US standards, San Francisco seems awfully isolated when it comes to service design. That’s a little sobering but it’s not altogether surprising given the long-standing dominance of Silicon Valley on the design landscape out here.
If you haven’t participated yet, take a moment to head over and add your city to the growing service design map.
I was going to ignore this when it was just random concern trolling on Twitter, but Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path seems to be casting some doubt about whether the term “service design” is gaining enough ground in the United States. We’re still miles behind the UK, Scandinavia and the Netherlands in developing the practice and the public sector may never embrace it here, but there’s no doubt that the term is getting more attention.
Service design is an established force in academia. There are courses at CMU, ID, RISD, ITP, SVA, ASU, Berkeley, Northwestern and an entire graduate program at SCAD but service design isn’t confined to the academic realm by any means.
The Harvard Business Review adopted the term back in 1984 when Citigroup’s Lynn Shostack wrote her widely influential article Designing Services that Deliver, following up on “How to Design a Service” two years earlier. Since then the Harvard Business Review has become perhaps the strongest source for service design literature. Their most recent example to mention service design as a term was last year’s “Four Things a Service Business Must Get Right” by Frances Frei.
Just off the top of my head, service design has made its way into business publications like Fast Company and Inc. as well as design publications like Interactions.
Since 2003 the most fervent evangelist in the US for service design and innovation has been Peer Insight in Washington D.C. With strong ties to both business and design they’ve done a phenomenal job in spreading the word through presentations, seminars and white papers. Bob Cooper from Frontier Service Design in Pennsylvania has been doing his part more recently in business circles with a seminar on service design last February in New York and a workshop at last month’s Art and Science of Service conference. The Service Innovation Design and Development conference in Chicago just last week drew the likes of McDonalds, Ebay, IBM, and Allstate.
In the US, service design is perhaps strongest in the healthcare industry. Kaiser Permanente, the Mayo Clinic and UPMC in Pittsburgh have all embraced elements of service design and innovation within their practices.
On the traditional design front IDEO and Design Continuum are both behind service design 100%. IDEO’s service design practice in Chicago is well established and Continuum’s more recent foray in Boston has involved evangelization at business conferences and in collaboration with business groups. In May they held a half-day workshop on service design in Rhode Island sponsored by the Business Innovation Factory. They even carried the flag back to Europe last year, presenting a case study at the Service Design Network conference in Amsterdam.
Adaptive Path itself has hosted design panels on service design and workshops at UX Week. Designers from the firm have lectured on the topic at conferences and they frequently blog about the practice of service design.
At some point it’s reasonable to ask whether it matters what we call service design. Merholz makes the argument that he’s actually writing about service design over at Harvard Business — he just isn’t calling it that. As a term, “customer experience” may be a better fit with Adaptive Path’s focus on “user experience” but overall he’s doing a disservice to the community, on all sides. There’s nothing magical about the term “service design,” but at this point it’s a defacto boundary object between academia, design and business. A vibrant worldwide network has identified with the term “service design” and a deep pool of knowledge is developing to support the practice. An emerging generation of service design students will become tomorrow’s service design practitioners with alumni from CMU, ID and the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea leading the charge.
Service design faces an uphill battle here in the states. There’s plenty of interest on the design side but we need more voices speaking to the business side of the equation. For better or worse Merholz is one of the few people with access to a platform for making that argument.
One important distinction between service design and experience design involves the theme of control. This interview with the lead designer of the upcoming video game God of War III struck me as a perfect example (emphasis mine):
The idea is that the game is crafted to be a cinematic experience. Expertly and lovingly pieced together. “Directed” the way a film is. You won’t find any Grand Theft Auto style open-world elements in God of War III, because the fun you find on your own might not be as great as the fun the team can make for you. And they’re not willing to take that risk.
Video games are one of the few examples of digital interaction that rise to the level of an experience. Emotionally engaging and multi-sensory in a way most software can’t match.
But crafting such an immersive experience comes at a price. Control is pretty much baked into the discipline.
Playstation Magazine [PDF 4.6MB]
Tim Ogilvie from Peer Insight shares a brief recap of last week’s Service Innovation Design and Development conference in Chicago, a massive industry-focused event that somehow flew completely beneath my radar.
The Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation is hosting a Transform symposium this fall on innovation in healthcare. Maggie Breslin, Tim Brown, Christi Zuber, Larry Keeley and Clayton Christensen are among the scheduled speakers.
You won’t find the term “service design” in the program, but Mayo, Kaiser Permanente and UPMC have all embraced the discipline and healthcare represents one of the most promising areas for service design to grow. I think there’s a danger in becoming pigeon-holed within a single industry, but this still strikes me as the most relevant conference this year for US-based service designers to attend.
The symposium is scheduled for September 13-15, 2009 in Rochester, Minnesota. Registration is $800.
