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,” [...]

For the past four years, Carnegie Mellon has been at the forefront of service design here in the United States.
The discipline has been slowly filtering up into the thesis project level, so last month I visited the CMU campus to attend the School of Design thesis presentations and get a first hand view of some [...]

Service Innovation Design: Dongseo University Korea
October 20-22, 2008
Call for Papers:
The term “service” does not merely indicate working for the benefit of others in the spirit of self-sacrifice. It is in fact a concept that describes shouldering the burden of time or effort for someone else, and is a valid economic action.
The service industry occupies a [...]

The folks over at the Institute of Design run a blog called The New Idiom. They’ve posted a nice overview of service design. Service blueprints, commoditization, experience and the obligatory Starbucks example.

It looks like Don Norman’s got himself a little of that Service Design religion. He recently gave a lecture on the subject at the Institute of Design in Chicago:

The overarching topic was that service design is the same as what the business world calls “operations” and that there is so much opportunity in this area. [...]

There are a couple reports trickling in from the third annual International Service Design conference in Northumbria.

Over the last two years, the ISDN series of events has formed an exciting platform to explore the emerging field of Service Design. The very first ISDN, in March 2006, looked at Service Designers - who were these [...]

Marc from 31Volts is running an experiment to compile elevator pitches for service design. It’s called One Line of Service Design. He’s not really looking for definitions so much as examples that help focus in on the discipline:
I thought it might be a good idea to create an list of simple and easy to use [...]

I’ve been biding my time, waiting for the folks at CIID to post content from their recent Service Design Symposium, but it looks like Nick Marsh has scooped them somehow, so I recommend following the symposium videos he’s ferreting out.

This is coming across my radar a little late, but if you happen to be in Copenhagen next month the Institute of Interaction Design is holding a Service Design Symposium on March 6th and 7th, 2008. Scheduled speakers include Bill Moggridge from IDEO, Lavrans Løvlie from Live|Work, Oliver King from Engine and Shelley Evenson from [...]

Demos, the “think tank for everyday democracy” responsible for last year’s excellent Journey to the Interface, has published a new report called Making it Personal [PDF 504K] about self-directed services in the UK:

This report advocates a simple yet transformational approach to public services — self-directed services — which allocate people budgets so they can [...]