Design for Service

Stefan Moritz’s 2005 thesis Practical Access to Service Design [PDF 2.5MB] from Köln International School of Design is by far the most comprehensive overview of the discipline I’ve encountered. Weighing in at over 200 pages plus appendices, Moritz digs up 16 different models for understanding service design and a collection of memorable quotes from luminaries [...]

A while back Rosenfeld Media surveyed business magazines and analyst firms to get a sense of their “UX consciousness,” inferred by how often terms like “usability” or “user experience” came up in their literature or on their websites.
Bain & Company’s Management Tools and Trends Survey [PDF 448K] provides a similar view into the world of [...]

Pine and Gilmore’s book The Experience Economy is chock full of helpful frameworks for understanding the concept of experience. Last week I wrote about how they distinguish experiences from other economic offerings. Today I want to focus on their framework for understanding experience itself.
Their Experience Realm framework organizes experiences on two axes according to [...]

Design 21: The Social Design Network showcases some inspirational projects worth checking out. Some, like the One Laptop per Child project have been on the public radar for a while now, but many are more obscure. The site asks, “are you a socially conscious designer, non-profit, individual or organization who believes social change can happen [...]

Bank of America recently installed some new streetside ATMs at their Van Ness location here in San Francisco. Today, on my way home I noticed a man hovering around the ATMs with a nametag that read ATM Ambassador. After I finished my transaction I walked over and asked him why he was there. He explained [...]

Researchers have been working to quantify the concept of service quality for nearly twenty years. A. Parasuraman’s perennially debated SERVQUAL scale is probably the best known example. It measures the reliability of the service, the responsiveness, assurance and empathy of its frontline personnel and the quality of its tangibles (i.e. touchpoints).
Live|Work has a similar index [...]

For the culmination of the 2007 Design of the Times in Newcastle, several students from Köln International School of Design have launched an unofficial service design blog to share their photos and observations. They’ve also posted interviews with service designers Alex Webb Allen from live|work and Julia Schaeper from Engine.
Update: John Thackara’s overview [...]

Disney is generally held as an exemplar of experience design. For an example of how experiences build on services which build on systems, dig into the Wired archives and read Hack the Magic, the exclusive underground tour of Disney World.
From a system point of view, it makes sense for most cities to place trash [...]

Service designers are pretty good at explaining the difference between products and services. We’ve had 30 years to articulate the distinction to the point where it’s become boilerplate for the first five minutes of any service design pitch. But we’re not as good at articulating the difference between services, experiences and transformations. Chris Downs talked [...]

I missed this report last month while I was on the road, but the Fora Concept Design [PDF 17.9MB] study out of Denmark is worth taking a look at as long as you’re not completely burnt out on neologisms. “Concept design” is essentially an umbrella term that they’ve invented to describe elements from service design, [...]