The History of Service Design
In the earliest contributions on service design (Shostack 1982; Shostack 1984)the
activity of designing service was considered as part of the domain of marketing
and management disciplines. Shostack (Shostack 1982), for instance proposed the
integrated design of material components (products) and immaterial components (services).
This design process, according to Shostack, can be documented and codified using
a “service blueprint” to map the sequence of events in a service and its essential
functions in an objective and explicit manner. In 1991, Service Design was first
introduced as a design discipline by Prof. Dr. Michael Erlhoff at Köln International
School of Design (KISD), and Prof. Birgit Mager has played an integral role for
developing the study of Service Design at KISD in later days. In 2004, the Service
Design Network was launched by Köln International School of Design, Carnegie Mellon
University, Linköpings Universitet, Politecnico de Milano, Domus Academy and the
agency Spirit of Creation, in order to create an international network for Service
Design academics and professionals; now the network extends to service designers
around the world, as well as professional service design agencies such as Livework
and IDEO.
Characteristics of Service Design
Service design is the specification and construction of technologically networked
social practices that deliver valuable capacities for action to a particular customer.
Capacity for action in Information Services has the basic form of assertions. In
Health Services, it has the basic form of diagnostic assessments and prescriptions
(commands). In Educational Services, it has the form of a promise to produce a new
capacity for the customer to make new promises. In a fundamental way, services are
unambiguously tangible. Companies such as eBay, or collectives such as Wikipedia
or Sourceforge are rich and sophisticated combinations of basic linguistic deliverables
that expand customers' capacities to act and produce value for themselves and for
others. In an abstract sense, services are networked intelligence. Service design
can be both tangible and intangible. It can involve artefacts and other things including
communication, environment and behaviours. Several authors (Eiglier 1977; Normann
2000; Morelli 2002), though, emphasise that, unlike products, which are created
and “exist” before being purchased and used, service come to existence at the same
moment they are being provided and used. While a designer can prescribe the exact
configuration of a product, s/he cannot prescribe in the same way the result of
the interaction between customers and service providers, nor can s/he prescribe
the form and characteristics of any emotional value produced by the service. Consequently,
service design is an activity that suggests behavioural patterns or “scripts” to
the actors interacting in the service, leaving a higher level of freedom to the
customers’ behaviour.
Service Design Methodology
Together with the most traditional methods used for product design, service design
requires methods and tools to control new elements of the design process, such as
the time and the interaction between actors. For this reason the blueprint of a
service is often based on use scenarios represented through storyboard or use cases.
Service Design in Marketing and Management
The active participation of customers and other actors traditionally considered
as external to a firm’s boundary emphasize the need for a proper design activity
that organizes the interaction among those actors, thus planning sequences of events,
material and information flows. Furthermore the involvement of “non technical “
actors, such as customers, implies that the activity of service design be analyzed
not only from a functional perspective (with the aim of optimizing flows and resources
and reducing time of operations) but also from the emotional perspective (creating
meaningful events, motivating customers, communicating the service). Because of
those considerations service design became the focus of studies and research in
the discipline of design, initially as part of the activities related to web design
and Interaction Design, and later as an autonomous professional and research area.
Service Design in Non-Profit Sectors
Service Design Cases
In the creative sector, as Geke vanDijk mentions “cross-disciplinary collaboration
and knowledge sharing are powerful catalysts of innovation”. He also explains a
new notion defined as “service design’ that expresses that current products are
no longer isolated elements, but a network of different experiences and combinations,
such as the case of the iPod and iTunes online music store. In this case the concept
plays with the idea of tangible and intangible objects that allow consumers maximum
flexibility to make their own decision about how and when they want to use the service.
In this case, though the example is very interesting, we must also understand that
Apple as a company is perhaps one of the most closed and hermetic company, so though
the concept is useful to explain how to understand products today, it is also quite
ambiguous how companies really deploy them. Other successful and evident examples
are in the cases of augmenting the museum experience with mobile devices that explain
to you a bit more about each work. We must say however that many of those interfaces
are just speakers and that the content is very very poor. For all this reasons we
can say that any type of design today, particularly the ones using technology is
very much to do with content. It is true however that the consumer perspective needs
to be integrated since the early stages of the design process. To achieve new processes
of multidisciplinary and participatory work may be used, through prototype testing
or performance analysis.
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