Service-dominant logic is one of those topics that’s been on my radar for a while. I feel like I should care about it, but for some reason I could never quite muster the will to investigate. Fortunately I stumbled across an old post on Lucy Kimbell’s blog that summarizes service-dominant logic and makes the concept a little more accessible. Now I feel like I’ve got enough of a toe-hold to dig a bit deeper on my own.

Earlier this week I received an e-mail about the 2010 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) sponsored by the Industrial Designers Society of America. Apparently they’ve added a service design category to the mix this year.

Service design comprises three distinct interactions: person to person; person to machine; and machine to machine. There are three categories of revenue-generating services, non-profit services, and government services.

I’m not wild about focusing on person to machine interactions for a service design competition — and machine to machine interactions make me despair.

But looking through the entry process I’m struck by the obvious disconnect between product design and service design. The entry form asks for dimensions, weight, materials, software and technical specifications. It goes on to request a “glamour shot” that is “attention-grabbing, visually compelling or sexy.” Not the best strategy for dealing with the intangible.

They also ask for a short document or video to explain the project, but it’s pretty clear that they’re framing service design as a second-order discipline. That’s disappointing.

Based on the submission guidelines I can’t imagine how the judges could possibly evaluate a service. A quick scan through the archives uncovers a few projects that are in the ballpark and demonstrate the shortcomings of the form. Projects for Umpqua Bank, American Red Cross and the Transportation Security Administration. Is a glamour shot and a 900 character overview enough to capture a service?

To be honest it doesn’t even seem adequate for graphic design and industrial design. What’s the baseline for a legitimate service design competition?

In my quest for large-group participatory techniques one of the most promising by far has been Future Search.

Future Search is a planning method designed by Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff and first published in the mid-nineties. It involves groups of 60-80 stakeholders working together and in small teams across various sessions over the course of three days. For larger groups it can potentially accommodate as many as 300 people working in parallel conferences.

As collaborative methods go this one is on the far end of the co-creation spectrum. Weisbord and Janoff advocate a particular structure with a hands-off approach to facilitation.

Service designers can learn quite a bit from these techniques but the method itself isn’t a design tool and despite occasional forays into that area its founders contend that their approach is not appropriate for short-term problem solving. Instead, they frame Future Search as a way for groups to find common ground on a vision and roadmap five to 20 years out.

They’ve published a number of case studies that are worth skimming through to get an idea about how Future Search might be adapted to the types of problems service designers face. Their work with the Federal Aviation Administration [PDF 212k] and IKEA [PDF 876k] are good examples.

Whether the techniques are used for acute or chronic problems the principles remain largely the same. Here’s an excellent overview from Future Search in Education [PDF 68k] from the book Future Search in School District Change:

• “Get the whole system in the room. By whole system we mean diverse stakeholders who have the authority, resources, expertise, information, and need to act right away if they choose.
• “Explore the whole before seeking to fix any part. When people put in what they know, all will gain an understanding of the whole that none had coming in, making possible actions built on a shared frame of reference.
• “Put the future and common ground front and center. Problems and conflicts become information to be shared, not action items. The agenda is a search for shared goals and mutually supported plans.
• “Invite self-management and responsibility for action. Groups can do much more than what is customarily asked of them. Each time leaders or consultants do something for a group they deprive everyone else of ownership.”

The Future Search Network has a good overview of the techniques involved with a typical conference. It’s a rigid structure with an established time-table but Weisbord and Janoff encourage participants to “trust the process.”

The timelines and mind maps should seem familiar to most service designers but some exercises like “prouds and sorries” are further afield. Working in stakeholder groups and in mixed groups attendees form a collective understanding of the system and begin to imagine future scenarios. The conference culminates in a reality dialog where participants confirm common ground while acknowledging disagreements. Attendees form voluntary groups to discuss action plans and follow up after the conference.

The goals for a Future Search are four-fold:

• A new understanding of the whole by all present
• Shared vision based on common ground
• Joint implementation plan with authority and commitment
• New networks and projects beyond the conference

Facilitating a holistic understanding of the system is a key area of interest for service designers and any techniques that can bring about that understanding should be in our arsenal. The principle of having the “whole system” in the room is something that seems particularly important and shows up again and again in participatory literature.

Future Search also draws a fair amount of criticism. Angela Oels addresses some of the friction arising from the rigid structure of the conference in her chapter of the book Public Participation and Better Environmental Decisions:

Participants are expected to follow the instructions of the facilitators in an unquestioning way, often without understanding the overall purpose of a conference task. This has made a number of conference participants feel as if they were subjected to a large “social experiment.” Also, the procedure prescribed for the identification of the common ground (aggregation rule) was regarded as unfair by a majority of conference participants, as key issues were filed away as “unresolved differences” without further discussion.

The conference only addresses those issues on which everyone agrees. It isn’t a forum for debate or coercion. Any conflict that isn’t immediately resolved is tabled in the interest of moving forward. Oels points out that this results in a lowest common denominator outcome, but Weisbord and Janoff counter that the design results in real rather than reluctant alignment and demonstrates a preference for action.

Future Search isn’t a panacea and the authors readily concede that it isn’t a design tool. But designers can gain insight from these techniques and those of similar large group planning methods. Robert Jungk’s Future Workshop method predates Future Search by twenty years and his book (published in 1987) draws on some of the same principles. For working with large groups this literature should be on our radar.

I’ve been following a few recaps of the Nordic service design conference last week in Oslo. Tom Halsør, Nina Lysbakken, Qin Han and Matt Cottam each have interesting photosets on Flickr, including quite a few photos about a co-created supper held during the conference.

Joyce Yee has written a nice overview at Design Dictator but if you really want to wade into the thick of things check out the Oslo School of Architecture and Design for a couple dozen papers and abstracts from the proceedings.

Looks like next year’s conference will be in Sweden at Linköping University. No word yet on the date but I’m happy to see the organizers translate this into an annual affair [the conference will be bi-annual starting next year — thanks Fabian].

Update: A video of Marc Stickdorn’s presentation from the conference is available on Vimeo.

The folks behind This is Service Design Thinking have uploaded a glimpse of their book design in progress.

They caution that it’s a dummy copy, meaning that the text is only a placeholder. The graphic design looks like it’s coming along nicely but I’m intrigued by the use of The Sorrows of Young Werther as a placeholder text. The copy is legible in a few of the photos and it took a moment to interpret Goethe’s prose as filler. I’ve never encountered such a use, but apparently the new book isn’t a tribute to Romanticism.

Qin has a couple interesting questions on her Design Generalist weblog. One is about how far service designers should go in terms of service implementation.

I’ve written about this topic before, in Service Design Isn’t in the Touchpoints. In my experience, the US consultancies who embrace service design typically bring together designers from a pool of disciplines, none of whom function as an actual service designer. They might be interaction, environmental or graphic designers, working under the direction of a service design lead to craft discrete touchpoints. But I don’t recognize what they’re doing as service design on an individual level.

Head over to Qin’s blog and add your perspective.

UX guru Jess McMullin presented a technique called “Business Origami” at CanUX 2009 today in Alberta. Details are a little sketchy but it seems to be a paper prototyping technique for services. Participants at the workshop described it as an early planning method with paper dolls and pop-up books.

At first blush it reminds me a bit of Jo Reid’s “Model Storming” as well as the “Envisioner” toolkit described by Jeanette Blomberg in Participatory Design Principles. But at a macro-level.

Here are a few more photos. Rawwr!

The Service Design Network has posted photos and presentations from last month’s conference in Madeira. The best overview I’ve seen so far is Jamin Hegeman’s recap of the festivities.

A few of the presentations seem to have been omitted from the SDN archive so I’ve done some sleuthing around the internet to bring them back into the fold. The easiest to find was Asier Perez’ presentation on co-design. He uploaded it to slideshare right after the conference: Co-creation sucks.

The presentations from the larger design firms like Continuum, IDEO and Engine were a bit harder to track down. For those, I’ve cobbled together recaps from Twitter along with images from Flickr. Andy Polaine and Thomas Schönweitz both did an extraordinary job documenting the conference and between the two of them I’ve reconstructed the following three talks:

• Tamsin Smith: Confessions of a Service Design Researcher
• Craig LaRosa and Jon Campbell: Employee Motivation: Driving Front-Line Behaviors
• Mark Jones: Do you really need that iPhone App?

Four other presentations continue to elude me, including Jesse James Garrett’s presentation on Design for Engagement, Julia Schaeper’s talk on the NHS and Joe Heapy’s keynote presentation, but I’m sure they’ll be covered by the videos due next week on the SDN website. Stay tuned.

Update: They’ve added the videos.

Looks like another service design publication is in the works, this time with a healthy dose of co-creation. Marc Stickdorn, Jakob Schneider and Fergus Bisset have set up a website called This is Service Design Thinking for members of the community to suggest tools and techniques for the core of the book.

If you are into service design or design thinking or however you call our field of work, you are most probably dealing with a set of methods and tools every day — share these with us! Make your ideas of service design thinking valuable for a larger audience. Establish your approach by putting it down to printed paper and help us building a conceptual base for our discipline.

Like the recent Designing Services with Innovative Methods the initial section of this book will introduce the discipline with contributions from various authors while the end will focus on a handful of service design case studies.

I keep hoping that someone will write a book with about ten pages of 18-point type introducing the idea of service design with the rest of the book devoted entirely to presenting highly visual service design vignettes. A picture-book written for non-designers to grasp the discipline and its potential.

That’s not what this is, but there’s still plenty of evangelization yet to do inside our ranks. Hence the focus on tools and techniques. The project is still in the early stages but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on as it develops.

Now that folks have recovered from jet lag following last week’s service design network conference in Madeira there’s a fair bit of conversation brewing about how future service design conferences might shape up differently. Joel Bailey has put together a quick forum to discuss and vote on ideas.

The Service Design Network has never really struck me as a democracy per se but even though they don’t seem to be active in any of the threads it’s good to see the community thinking ahead to 2010 while the events are still fresh.