Design for Service

The New York Times has an article about Whole Foods grocery experimenting with a new arrangement for checkout at their Manhattan location. A Long Line for a Shorter Wait at the Supermarket details a move toward a single long line that feeds into individual checkout lines as they open, a little like a river delta. [...]

Flipbook #8 [PDF 4.2MB] from an Interaction Design Fundamentals course at ITP focuses on Service Design, particularly the interplay between products and services. Lots of examples, including a diagram of the Jet Blue customer journey at JFK that I hadn’t seen before (pg 19).

There’s a nascent service design group over at Flickr started by San Francisco designer Aram Armstrong. The goal is to document tangible embodiments of services (touchpoints) and visual expressions of service design (service blueprints, stakeholder maps, customer journeys).
Aram was also apparently responsible for the fantastic bootlegs unofficial recordings of last year’s Emergence conference posted on [...]

Bill Moggridge’s 2006 book Designing Interactions includes a chapter on service design with some background on London service design consultancy Live|Work and their process. There’s a short interview [Quicktime 27MB] with founders Chris Downs, Lavrans Løvlie and Ben Reason still available online.

Peer Insight has another set of case studies out. This time for the Helsinki-based Tekes Serve Program. The 86-page report is titled Seizing the White Space: Innovative Service Concepts in the United States [PDF 3.8MB].
It’s a series of twelve service innovation case studies pulled from four industries: Insurance and Financial Services, Professional Services, Wholesale and [...]