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,” [...]

Demos and Price Waterhouse Coopers have a report out on public sector codesign efforts in the UK, USA, Europe, Latin America and Asia-Pacific. Making the Most of Collaboration: An International Survey of Public Service Co-design. [PDF 1.1MB]
Key observations:

Public services and governments around the world face pressures from a more demanding public, increasing social complexity and [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Naomi Epel’s Observation Deck is a collection of 50 catalysts for inspiration contributed by authors from around the world. It takes the form of a 160-page book describing the tactics and a deck of 50 cards for randomly selecting a direction. The Observation Deck was conceived as a tool for writers but the techniques can [...]

From the Wall Street Journal:
In the past few years, more than a half-dozen small hotel groups have been cropping up in Britain and across Europe, offering cost-conscious accommodation. Though their rates and services vary, all are shrinking costs by cutting unessential amenities, which, depending on the property, can mean space, check-in staff, or natural light.
Describing [...]

The Profitable Art of Service Recovery by Christopher Hart, James Heskett and W. Earl Sasser is the newest addition to my service design research collection. The 1990 HBR article is a terrific overview of service recovery.
Mistakes are a critical part of every service. Hard as they try, even the best service companies can’t prevent the [...]

Robert Sommer’s 1969 book Personal Space: the Behavioral Basis of Design should be on every service designer’s bookshelf. Sommer was a student of Dr. Humphrey Osmond and continued Osmond’s research into sociofugal and sociopetal patterns.
What is needed is a middleman who is acquainted with the design field as well as the social sciences to translate [...]