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

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

I’ve added a new paper to my Service Design Research collection. It’s called The Four Service Marketing Myths from 2004 by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch.
The authors challenge the prototypical characteristics that have been identified as distinguishing services from goods — intangibility, inseparability, heterogeneity, and perishability. The authors argue that these characteristics (a) do not [...]

From the New York Times:
For the first time, American corporations are acknowledging “customer service as something worth paying for rather than just red ink,” said [Jon] Anton, who looks at call centers worldwide and, using a number of criteria, compares how well they work. “If you can satisfy customers and keep them buying, it’s as [...]

Over on the Work Play Experience blog, Adam Lawrence makes a great observation about sequence in service delivery. He recounts an example from his commute. The train attendant walks down the aisle offering coffee to the passengers, but they generally ignore him until it’s too late:

But if you watch the rows behind him, you will [...]

Chris Noessel explores the synergies between Service Design and Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design.

Most people think of Goal-Directed Design techniques as focused on product design, but they work equally well for services. A service is comprised of the various “touchpoints” between a customer and a business. Touchpoints include public-facing systems such as web sites and web-enabled [...]

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. [...]

Robert J. Glushko and Lindsay Tabas from UC Berkeley wrote a paper last summer exploring the tension between front stage service design and back stage system design.

Service designers with a “front stage mindset” strive to create service experiences that people find enjoyable, unique, and responsive to their needs and preferences. Front stage designers use [...]

Adam Lawrence reports on a new type of car dealership over on the Work Play Experience blog. Rather than selling cars from a particular manufacturer (Mersedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen), they focus on a particular segment of the market:

At familycars.de the concept is far smarter. They sell only family cars — from a bunch of different manufacturers, [...]