Design for Service

Earlier this spring the Köln International School of Design offered a three month service design course addressing the subject of prostitution. They chronicled their research and design progress though a weblog called On The Road.
Project brief from the city of Eindhoven: Finding Innovative Solutions for Street Prostitution [PDF 204K]

On November 1, 2003, the so-called “Tippelzone,” [...]

Kip Lee and Jamin Hegeman are recent graduates of the Masters program at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. As part of a team of graduate students, they collaborated on a service design project for the neurosurgery clinic at UPMC in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
I interviewed Kip and Jamin at CMU on May 13th, 2008.
Read Interview

The March issue of Fast Company has a feature about Alaska Airline’s efforts to redesign its check-in process at the Seattle airport. Despite the earnest “world of tomorrow” vibe in the project name, it’s a pretty good example of service design.

Ed White, [Alaska's VP of corporate real estate] assembled a team of employees from across [...]

Nick’s post about a recent Live|Work presentation [PDF 1.4MB] of case studies prompted me to dig out a few of the links I’ve bookmarked over the past year or so.
Here’s a 2007 variation on the presentation Nick posted. Lots of the same content, but this one focuses on Service Envy [PDF 7.6MB] and the case [...]

Carrie Chan is a recent graduate of the Masters program at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. Her thesis project focused on the Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
I interviewed Carrie during a break in the thesis presentations at CMU on May 12th, 2008.
Read Interview

Nick Marsh points to a report on The Service Revolution [PDF 488K] from Deloitte. It’s written more as a wakeup call to business than a guide to the particulars of service innovation — they’re a business consultancy, after all — but they do mention the importance of a collaborative process with customers and adequate IT [...]

Here’s an interesting example of the honor system applied to payment. Customers add up how much they owe themselves and drop their money into a fare box:

The thought was, someone can pour his own coffee, grab his own bagel, cut it himself, throw the money in, and walk out. We don’t touch 60 per cent [...]

Jason Weisberger reports on an unfortunate attempt at service recovery. Weisberger bought a $5000 camera through Amazon and was disappointed at how the camera was shipped. He complained to the camera store directly and they blew him off. So he gave them negative feedback:

Rude on the phone. Really, Really, poorly packaged. I think they could [...]

Casual carpooling is an ad hoc service in the Bay Area that involves drivers picking up random strangers at BART stops in the East Bay and giving them a lift into the city. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. The passengers get a free ride into work and the drivers get to take advantage of the [...]

Some nice observations about service recovery:
Customers were routinely far more impressed with a well-handled mistake (which they actively noticed) than with trouble-free service (which they took for granted).
In this case, it wouldn’t have been enough for Netflix simply to apologize. Because this was an outcome-based error (delayed shipment), they correctly tacked on a discount.
[via Daring [...]