1. In your view, how is your research/work related to Service Design?

In the last few years I’ve been mainly working on methodological aspects of service design.
I think the tools and methods used by designers in product design are not always adequate to design services. Service design includes the definition of some aspects, such as time and interaction, that have not been part of the traditional design domain. For this reason new methods and tools need to be developed.
I’ve been working on tools and methods in three main areas:
1. Tools and methods to analyse users behaviour and contextual conditions;
2. Design tools to design new services, with particular attention to the development of modular and systemic service solutions;
3. Techniques and methods to represent services, especially in regard to those aspects that are not traditionally included in the design activity, such as time and interaction.

I’ve developed some of those tools by adapting them from other disciplines, such as information architecture, interaction design and engineering.

2. In your view, what is the most/less interesting aspect of Service Design?

For many years the attention to services was mainly focused on the development and management phases of services. Because of their lack of material consistency, services had not been considered by designers as part of their competences. Finally, after many years, designers are realising that they have a role in designing services. The most interesting thing, though is to understand which role they can have.
Several designers point at the emotional or aesthetic aspects of service design; in order to support users’ participation services have involved users’ emotions and feelings.
Interaction designers pointed at the front office component of services: the point in which the service production system meets the users.
Engineers, and I’m mainly working with them, are emphasising the need for a systemic view of services. In this case designing services means making sure that the front office part, with the interaction and emotional components they imply, match with an appropriate organisation in the back office. This last area is the one on which I’m investing more time on.

3. Can you tell us about a Service Design research project(s) you did or read about?

In the last few months I read several interesting project on service design, mainly located in UK, where there seems to be a very favourable environment for the development of new knowledge in this area. However I still think that one of the most interesting contributions to service design has been provided by a project that is now a bit dated, the EU-Funded HiCS project. The reason why I see that project as a sort of milestone in service design is that the project was pointing at a second phase of service design. The first phase has been to develop good cases of service design. Those cases were developed as individual cases, they were related to specific contexts and specific users. At this stage service design was quite similar to a sort of craftsmanship, because each solution was individual and each project was very much dependent on the sensitivity of the service designer. The second phase, I think, is in the need to lift services design at the level of an industrial activity. As such, service design should consider how the actors in a service design system could transfer solutions, knowledge, capabilities, products and services across different local contexts and for different individual users. This phase also introduced the concept of Solution Architecture and Modular Platforms, that inspired my recent work.

4. Are there area(s) that you would like to do or see research on?

After the HiCS project, I haven’t seen too much work focusing on this second phase of service design. The industrialisation of services is an important passage to evolve service design from the craftsmanship domain.

The whole area of service design as an experience is also interesting, there are several contributions in this area, but I would like to see more of that.

An interesting research area that is being developed now is the area of representation of services. I proposed this theme long time ago and designers seemed to be not interested in this. The assumption was that traditional product designers are already very good in representing any kind of solution, but in fact services include factors, such as time, experience, interaction, that designers do not know how to represent. Furthermore the need to involve users, any kind of users, even those who are not used to read drawings, calls for a wider investigation on how service design could be represented.
Finally I believe that the area in which service design is having more interesting development is Public Services. Here I would definitely see research on how designers fit in the picture and how can service design contribute to improve the quality of public services and the level of citizens’ participation.

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Your suggestions for the blog:

Who would you like to invite in this conversation about Service Design Research?

In this blog several interesting contributions have been offered by designers, but I would like to involve some politician, too. E.g. some member of the UK parliament that has worked on service design, or some politician that can see the need to properly design services.

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

Is service design boring? I was asked this question when I argued for service design to pay attention not just to the front office/emotional part of the service interaction, but also to the back office/organisational part.

Anderson, R. (1994) Representations and requirements: The value of ethnography in system design. Human-Computer Interaction, 9, 151-182.
Bate, P. and Robert, G. (2007) Bringing user experience to healthcare improvement: The concepts, methods and practices of experience based design. Oxford: Radcliffe.
Bitner, M.J., Ostrom, A. and Morgan, F. (2008) Service Blueprinting: A Practical Technique for Service Innovation. California Management Review, Spring 2008, 50 (3), 66-94
Bitner, M.J. (1992), Servicescapes: The Impact of Physical Surroundings on customers and employees, Journal of Marketing. 56 (2): 57-71.
Bitner, M.J., Boons, B. and Tereault, M.S. (1990) The service encounter: Diagnosing favourable and unfavourable incidents. Journal of Marketing, 54, 71-84.
Boland, R. and Collopy, F. (Eds.) (2004) Managing as designing, Stanford Business Books, Palo Alto.
Fitzsimmons, J. and Fitzsimmons, M. (2000), New Service Development: Creating Memorable Experiences, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Goldstein, S., Johnston, R., Duffy, J. and Rao, J. (2002), ‘The Service Concept: The Missing Link in Service Design Research?’, Journal of Operations Management, 20, 2: 121-134.
Grönroos, C. (1990) Service management and marketing, Lexington Books, Lexington.
Kimbell, L. and Seidel, V.P. (eds) (2008), Designing for Services in Science and Technology-based Enterprises, Oxford: Saïd Business School.
Kimbell, L. (2009) The turn to service design. In Julier, G. and Moor, L. (eds) Design and Creativity Policy, Management and Practice. Oxford: Berg. 157-173.
Kimbell, L. (2008) What do service designers do? (Dur 7:16) Accessible at http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/d4s, accessed 25 November 2009.
Norman, R. and Ramírez, R. (1993) Designing interactive strategy: From value chain to value constellation. Harvard Business Review, 71 (4): 65-77.
Normann, R. (1991), Service Management: Strategy and Leadership in Service Business. Chichester: Wiley.
Reckwitz, A. (2002). Towards a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243–63.
Schatzki, T.R. (2001) Practice theory, in Schatzki, T. R., Cetina, K. K., and von Savigny, E. (Eds.) The practice turn in contemporary theory, Routledge, London.
Squires, S., & Byrne, B. (Eds.) (2002). Creating breakthrough ideas: The collaboration of anthropologists and designers in the product development industry. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.
Vargo, S. and Lusch, R. (2004a) Evolving to a new dominant logic in marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68 (1): 1-17.
Vargo, S.L and Lusch, R.F. (2004b) The four service marketing myths: Remnants of a goods-based manufacturing model’, Journal of Service Research, 6, 4, 324-335.
Vargo, S. and Lusch, R. (2008a) Service-dominant logic: Continuing the evolution. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36 (1): 1-10.
Vargo, S. and Lusch, R. (2008b) Why “service”? Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36 (1): 25-38.
Voss, C. and Zomerdijk, L. (2007) Innovation in experiential services – An empirical view, in DTI (Ed.) Innovation in Services, DIT, London, 97-134.

1. In your view, how is your research/work related to Service Design?

I currently work on two related areas: designing for service, and managing as designing. The first foregrounds the importance of practices in the designing of service systems and encounters which constitute possibilities for the exchange of service for service, but is not restricted to those who are self-conscious designers, or those who have been to design school or bought a book on “design thinking”. The second area, inspired by Dick Boland and Fred Collopy’s 2002 workshop and 2004 book, explores the possibilities of thinking of managing as designing, and in particular what this might mean for managers and entrepreneurs.

Like several others, I have started using the term “designing for service” rather than service design. Rather than seeing service design as a subset of another design field eg interaction design, and as quite distinct from architecture or visual communication design (eg Buchanan’s (2001) four orders of design), I see designing for service as underpinning all design activities in which there is an intention to cocreate value, although that may be defined and enacted in different ways. In this I am influenced by Vargo and Lusch (2004) and others’ attention to value-in-use rather than value-in-exchange and theories of practice and consumption in sociology and anthropology (eg Shove et al 2007; Schatzki et al 2001; Reckwitz 2002; Holt 1995 etc). In short, a building offers service, as does a plastic bottle, as does a poster. Or they should.

Among other things I teach both of these within my MBA elective in Design Leadership which I have been offering at Said since 2005.

2. In your view, what is the most/less interesting aspect of Service Design?

What I find interesting in “service design” is how undefined and open it is. I hope it remains so for some time. Design is hardly a unified field, and equally services are a huge category. So that means that those of us interested in designing for service are potentially interested in nearly everything. One approach to this messy indeterminacy is to seek to close down meanings, and seize ownership of particular domains of knowledge and practice. Another is to enjoy the ambiguity. Since I am based in a school of management (and therefore in the social sciences, at least officially), my approach to designing for service is tempered by many encounters with colleagues who are management or organization researchers with an interest in services management and innovation for whom something called service design is still new. But they do not, a priori, immediately think of going and looking for or indeed at a design-based field for knowledge or inspiration. Operations managers have been designing services for decades – so what, if anything, do designerly designers bring? Being on this boundary – as someone who is from design (in the sense of design-school design), but in dialogue with researchers who are not – is uncomfortable and generative.

3. Can you tell us about a Service Design research project(s) you did or read about?

I led a project called Designing for Services in Science- and Technology-based Enterprises, with my colleague Victor Seidel, which was supported by the UK AHRC-EPSRC’s Designing for the 21st Century initiative. We gathered around 30 mostly UK academics (from management fields such as operations, strategy, marketing, innovation studies) and design, along with several leading consultancies doing service design (livework, IDEO, Radarstation, IBM) and enterprises offering services based on recent scientific innovations. The aim of the project was to try to surface how each of these conceived of designing for service. We explored this by asking three consultancies to work for and with a paired enterprise and by hearing first-hand from them as they went through a (necessarily short) design process, and through in depth ethnographic study of two of these projects. A key question that emerged was – what do the designerly designers do that is significantly different to the ways that people who do not call themselves designers go about designing for service? Answers included: attending to the material artefacts that are involved in constituting service; foregrounding the human experience of the service (cf Bate and Robert 2007) as a way into designing it; conceiving of service as services-in-practice; and having an iterative design process based on contextual observation, visualisation and prototyping etc (what some people currently refer to as design thinking).

Other things I note are
- efforts to construct a ‘services science’ by large IT-based corporations including IBM rooted in a desire to (a) expand an area of knowledge and (b) have a long term sustainable business;
- ongoing efforts to link designing for service to sustainability in both environmental and social terms, but missing some links to social entrepreneurship that might be useful;
- lots of work on healthcare service innovation through design;
- a focus on ‘behaviour’, a term rooted in cognitive science which – if you are influenced by anthropology, social theory and pscyhoanalysis, as I am – then misses important questions about structure and agency in practices as we try to understand why and how people do and say the things they do;
- a continuing emphasis on Service Design framed in terms of design studies, interaction design, participatory design and HCI, rather than operations management, services marketing or organization design, for example, let alone science and technology studies, consumption theory, practice theory and so on.

4. Are there area(s) that you would like to do or see research on?

The things I am currently exploring are:
(1) Trying to understand the developing ‘service-dominant logic’ articulated by Vargo and Lusch (2004; 2008) building on the work of many others especially in services marketing, and understand its implications for designing for service. Key issues here are understanding how the concept of value cocreation is mobilized in design.
(2) Strands of interpretive ethnography and science and technology studies which are concerned with the limits of representation, to understand the ways that designers and managers designing services do boundary work defining what is within and what is outside of a service and how designing services happens in practice. An example here is the possibilities and limitations of 2-d artefacts such as blueprints/customer journey maps and the extent to which they can represent a service experience or system.
(3) Trying to think about the ways that designers, managers and their designs design service users (cf Woolgar 1991). While I was very influenced by the claims of “user-centred” or “human-centred” design a decade ago (when I was a practitioner working in web/mobile/IT) I am now more cautious about the politics and ethics of speaking for and engaging with “stakeholders” and “users”, both actual people and a social imaginary.

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Your suggestions for the blog:

Who would you like to invite in this conversation about Service Design Research?

Steve Vargo
Steve Street
Chris Voss
Irene Ng
Kate Blackmon
Rafael Ramirez
Noortje Marres
Nina Wakeford
Harriet Harris
Inderpaul Johar
Paul Bate
Lynne Maher

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

I probably have more questions about the researchers, policymakers and practice communities who are using this term.

Lucy Kimbell comes from an art and design background and is currently masquerading as a social scientist in a school of management. Among other things, she teaches Design Leadership on the MBA at Said Business School and researches design for service. Lucy also works as an artist and interaction designer. Before joining the faculty at Said Business School at the University of Oxford, Lucy was an Arts and Humanities Research Council creative and performing arts research fellow at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and a tutor on the MA Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art, London. Lucy has over 10 years experience as a technology innovation consultant and design manager and previously worked as a BBC radio journalist. In 1996 she co-founded and was until 1999 a director of the art and digital design practice Soda.

Although the relevance of Service Design practice and research is widely acknowledged, as shown by the growth of initiatives, projects and courses on the subject, the theoretical underpinnings remain unclear. The research area thus runs the risk of developing a lack in rigor. Furthermore, because of the growing complexity and collaborative nature of service projects and society demands, service design practice is quickly evolving – already stretching the borders and questioning the underlying bases of this emerging specialization.
This special session aimed to explore the role and potential benefits of adopting other disciplines’ theoretical frameworks as a way to provide orienting concepts and rigor to practice and research, as well as to make sense of the changes of the scenario in which designers act. Interesting contributions are exploring the insights coming from Organizational theory, Ethnography, Drama, Service Management, etc.

Coordinators: Stefan Holmlid and Daniela Sangiorgi
Authors of the papers: Benedict SIngleton, Cabirio Cautela, Francesca Rizzo, Francesco Zurlo, Lara Penin, Cameron Tonkinwise, Sabine Junginger, Daniela Sangiorgi, Fabian Segelstrom, Stefan Holmlid, Bas Raijmakers

Link to the proceedings

“Service design is concerned with finding new ways of empowering people to take action themselves – designing people in to solutions, rather than ignoring their significance and designing them out; it is about seeing the social fabric of local communities as the site and source of solutions rather than the destination to which public services are delivered.”
-Sophia Parker

This publication fantastically highlights and recognises the explosion in service design and what it might mean for young, inexperienced practitioners. Importantly the publication asks about broadening students understanding of service design and design thinking to improve their understanding and ability to become involved in projects that move away from traditional ‘product’ design. I think service design and its methods hold great ways of teaching students what design can be about, rather than just material product and adds an emphasis on users and ‘getting out there’. When I taught service design to visiting students from America, they left with a feeling that they had learnt valuable tools and processes, even though they were engineering students. This publication runs through many of these themes in a concise and original manner.

Link to the report

1. In your view, how is your research/work related to Service Design?

I studied product design for four years at the Glasgow School of Art, the course had a strong emphasis on designing experiences for people and a focus on sociologically understanding people. Most of my work produced a service outcome, my route to this result involved using participatory tools and techniques affiliated with the service design process and working closely with a range of users. I am currently studying a Masters in Design Innovation, working for the public sector organisation, Skills Development Scotland. I’m exploring how the skills/process/tools and most importantly the mindset of a (service) designer can be put into the hands of frontline staff to see and think differently. I’m pushing for much more user focused service delivery within the public sector and a power shift to the bottom of the pyramid. For me, service design naturally lends itself to this idea due to its participatory nature and user driven approach as a catalyst for more co-produced services.

2. In your view, what is the most/less interesting aspect of Service Design?

The most interesting and rewarding part of service design is watching non-designers become part of the process. I’m conscious when holding a co-design event that participants can walk away with a new skill, or perhaps even a slightly different way of thinking and transfer it into their own lives. It is interesting when people recognise the value in visually communicating information, or changing their opinion from designers as ‘felt tip fairies’ to ‘this lego really helped me to communicate and spot opportunities to make this system better, I’d never thought or had the opportunity to look at it this way before’. The least interesting aspect is the constant talk and buzz word nature around service design. I think as an industry we need to be aware of what each of us are doing and really help to push a clear understanding of what service design is. I fear the practice could be tokenised and simplified. The most important thing we can be doing is open up our case studies in a transparent fashion, showing what worked, and what didn’t. This doesn’t happen often enough.

3. Can you tell us about a Service Design research project(s) you did or read about?

I am the founding director of a company called Mypolice which won Scotland’s first Social Innovation Camp. The development for this idea has been a reversal of the way I would normally conduct a typical service design (research) project. I saw several opportunities in the use of web2.0 tools to collaboratively build a better police service between service provider, relevant stakeholders and the public by creating an online platform. Winning SI Camp gave me the opportunity to take it forward. What the idea wasn’t at this stage was fully developed or based on concrete research. What it needed was an intense period of research. I built relationships with police by shadowing them at work, immersing myself in their culture, mapping out the police landscape and the relationships they have with other organisations. I built personas based on user interviews and experience prototyping the site in different locations, building a bank of stories which would inform me how the site could potentially be used. The most interesting part of this period was ‘customer journey mapping’ victims of crime experiences and system mapping large organisations to discover where public/police interaction points were to spot opportunities for where Mypolice would work well. (more at http://mypolice.org)

4. Are there area(s) that you would like to do or see research on?

MyPolice lives underneath Snook. Myself and Lauren Currie set up Snook (http://wearesnook.com). We both see a need for service design to be developed and incorporate a more transformative and social agenda to start challenging the way the country is run, the services we use are developed and how our skills as service designers are valuable within the public sector. For this to happen there needs to be more research into how we are educating young designers and new teaching models developed so they are prepared for new environments. Places are often entrenched in old systems and governance, so designers must ethically understand the implications of their work. I’d like to see more coproduction work by designers and this communicated through education. I think service designers are fantastic facilitators of a creative and collaborative process and should really be pushing for sustainable service outcomes, where working with users isn’t just a codesign workshop to create new ideas, but is about building networks within communities, passing over new skills and creating lasting initiatives that can be maintained by communities or organisations. I’d like to see how service design will become more transformative and how this movement might evolve.

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Your suggestions for the blog:

Who would you like to invite in this conversation about Service Design Research?

If you haven’t already asked, I’ve always appreciated Nick Marsh’s (ex Engine and writer of choosenick.com) thoughts on service design and his thinking about the public sector and the bigger picture.

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

My question is should we be defining service design so that it is easily communicated and understood to prospective clients and members of the public? Or by defining it, are we cutting its potential short? Is the potential of service design to become something new, like transformation design and has service design really been mostly about the participatory method and approach that has made it so appealing to designers and both private and public sectors in the UK?

I’m a passionate service designer about to begin a masters focusing on the role of service designers in the public sector and how to skill swap.  I won Social Innovation Camp this year with mypolice.org which I hope to use as a case study of how designers can tackle complex problems in a community and work with local public services.  I’m also the winner of the first medici service design medal for my PO box project.  I’m also an avid blogger about service design and fascinated by the network of designers online. http://sarahdrummond.wordpress.com

I once called for all service designers to suggest books or magazine that they are reading. It was initially for creating a purchase list for the college librarian. Then, thanks to the active response from designers, it turned out to be a really good literature collection as a starting point for anyone who is interested in Service Design.

The list is presented online: http://designgeneralist.blogspot.com/2009/07/service-design-reading-list.html

1. In your view, how is your research/work related to Service Design?

I am undertaking a PhD research project that focus on Service Design Management, mainly looking at how designers work with multiple stakeholders at project level environment. My research questions include ‘who are important stakeholders to service designers?’, ‘What are the design stages these stakeholder take part?’, and ‘how to maximize the result of stakeholder involvement within the limited resources and time?’

I also worked as a teaching fellow at the University of Dundee on the Master of Design programme for the past three years. The Master’s programme has a strong interest in interdisciplinary design practice and people-centred design approach, thus, Service Design naturally became an interesting topic of my research and always the emphasis of my teaching.

2. In your view, what is the most/less interesting aspect of Service Design?

I am fascinated by the dynamic interactions among people (and some really clever machines) in service systems, as well as its development. Furthermore, the creativity and openness that designers could potentially bring into a project is another very interesting aspect to me. The designers who practice Service Design are keen on being out there with service users and also with other stakeholders in the service system, which is very different from the traditional way of design where designers stay in a studio and craft their piece of work to perfection, alone. In this process, designers learn from their stakeholders for inspiration, and many stakeholders also learn how to develop and delivery services with new techniques and even new ways of thinking. The design process involves complex learning for all. Not only designers, but also many other stakeholders, directly or indirectly, learn to create some new understanding of the service they developed in the process. Thus, my motivation is to understand how the new knowledge of services created by Service Design can find its way into the implementation, and perhaps even lead to organisational change.

The less interesting aspect to me, personally, might be the actually details of specific touch points. I am not saying it is not important aspect, it is very important because it embedded ideas, and draws stakeholders’ attention because it might be valuable to some of them. However, I am more interested in the people interactions happened among different phases of design and how people share and learn from this process. By the end of the day, the designers are not going to deliver the service. The touch point can go out-of-date fairly quickly when new technologies come along, but what people have learned from working in a design-led approach might have a longer legacy and bigger impact in the long run.

3. Can you tell us about a Service Design research project(s) you did or read about?

My PhD project is mainly situated in the domain of Service Design, although I did reach out to literatures of Service Management, Design Management and, more recently, project level Knowledge Management domain in the context of innovation. The research question is, ‘how service designers manage multiple stakeholder involvement in a project environment?’ I collected Service Design stories form British service designers and focused on four in details as my case studies. All case studies involved complex stakeholder relationships and illustrated how designers navigate their path working with various stakeholder groups. The studies acknowledged the importance of involving a wide range of stakeholder groups in Service Design practice, as well as the challenge brought about by it. It suggested that designer decide different approaches for involving stakeholder groups at different stage of the design process. One important element that influenced this decision-making was the knowledge generation and diffusion environment. Mindfully or intuitively, designers assessed their position in this environment and adopted suitable approach(s) to generate new tools or understanding with key stakeholders in the process.

4. Are there area(s) that you would like to do or see research on?

The legacy of my PhD study indicated interesting but often overlooked links between Service Design, Knowledge Generation/diffusion, and Change Management. I believe that, to sustain a service as a self-organise system, it is crucial that service designers understand how their design legacy could embody the new knowledge and evolve new practices that respond to emerging changes in the environment.

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Your suggestions for the blog:

Who would you like to invite in this conversation about Service Design Research?

Lauren Tan, PhD research student at Northumbria University, her research is based on case studies from DOTT07 projects.

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

What are the limits of Service Design?