US Service Design Education

February 5, 2009 in education, people

A while back, Lauren Tan from the Letters to Australia weblog rounded up a terrific summary of service design education from around the world. There have been a few developments on the home front since then so I thought I’d put together an expanded list of US service design education.

• Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa.
  Designing for Service [PDF 64k] studio course taught by Shelley Evenson. Started in 2004, I believe this was the first service design studio course in the United States.

  Also, a new lecture course Selected Topics on Service Design Theories [PDF 56k] taught by Ph.D candidate Miso Kim.

• Institute of Design, IIT, Chicago, Illinois
  Service Design Studio. From 2005-2008 this course has been taught in various forms by Mark Jones of IDEO.

  New for Spring 2009, Service Design Seminar taught by ID alum Denis Weil of McDonalds.

• Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU
  Service Design for Public Space, Spring 2009 lecture taught by Rachel Abrams. She put together a fantastic 2008 reading list [PDF 84K]; also check out the course weblog.

• Rhode Island School of Design, Providence
  Service Design Studio [PDF 76k] taught last Fall 2008 by Matt Cottam and Maia Garau. Unfortunately, it isn’t scheduled to be repeated. See their archived course weblog.

• iSchool: University of California, Berkeley
  Information System & Service Design lecture taught last Fall 2008 by Robert Glushko. The course materials and lecture notes are still available online.

• Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
  Service Design course at the Segal Design Institute to be taught by Don Norman and Liz Gerber scheduled for April 2009 (Spring trimester).

• School of Visual Arts, New York
  Design and the Service Experience studio course to be taught by Phi-Hong Ha scheduled for Fall 2010.

• Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia
  MFA in Service Design [PDF 116k] lead by Peter Fossick scheduled for Fall 2009.

  Proposed courses include Service Design Principles and Practice, Prototyping Services and Experiences, Service Design Studio I & II, and an MFA Thesis.

It seems like both CMU and the Institute of Design could do more to promote their service design programs. The Interaction Design Institute Ivrea was a master at this. Virtually every aspect of their Zoom In Zoom Out service design course was published online, and supplemented by student weblogs. Carnegie Mellon maintains course documents on a protected intranet and I have no idea whether ID archives anything at all.

The newer programs are taking advantage of this vacuum to evangelize their offerings. ITP and RISD both maintain public weblogs and reading lists, and the iSchool at Berkeley puts most of their course documents online. The Savannah College of Art and Design is another matter entirely. For a program that’s launching in less than six months their service design MFA is the most covert undertaking I’ve ever seen.

Any other service design courses or universities I’m overlooking? Add them to the comments and I’ll update the post.