Paul leads the Service Design Programme at Design Wales. Since graduating from Central St.Martins School of Art & Design, Paul has worked at a number of design, brand and advertising agencies in London. For the past five years Paul has been head of design at the social innovation agency, thinkpublic. Whilst at thinkpublic Paul worked on projects that improved patient, staff and management communications and brought about new services and products for the UK public sector.

Paul has continued to build expertise in the field of service design by lecturing at several universities, including The Royal College of Art, London College of Communication and Kingston University. As well as consulting for organisations such as NESTA, The NHS and The Alzheimer’s Society.

Recently Paul contributed his experience of public sector service design to the book ‘Designing Services Using Innovative Methods’ (Mittien/Koivisto 2009). He is currently focused on building a hub of service design activity in Wales and has a particular interest in the advanced manufacturing sector.

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

I’m the programme lead for an initiative by Design Wales called The Service Design Programme. Through the programme we work with manufacturing companies of all sizes from across Wales to support the use of service design as a tool to achieve innovation, growth and development.
Service design is a new discipline and has successfully established itself in organisations and industries where service innovation is prevalent; such as transportation, public services and hospitality. However, within more product focused sectors such as manufacturing, innovation is predominantly viewed as new product or material development, a trend that is even stronger within SME’s.
The Service Design Programme is working to change this situation and has been funded by The Welsh Government to work with manufacturers across Wales to establish a culture of service innovation. Design brings an established set of tools, methods and approaches that can be used to help companies shift their thinking from products to services and provide a clear path to service innovation.
Prior to establishing The Service Design Programme I worked at the service design agency thinkpublic in London as head of design. During my time at thinkpublic I led projects on service design and innovation for organisations such as the NHS, NESTA and the QCDA.

Check out www.testyourservice.co.uk for more information about the programme

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

I’m interested in service design because it brings creativity and business strategy together in new ways, moving design from production or marketing areas of a business and into the boardroom.
For me, the exciting bit about service design is the new stuff. The thing that makes service design unique is that it’s all about the future state and designing new offers that customers or users will buy into. Service design has been happening for years, but only recently has it become established within the design community. This surge in client interest within design agencies has occurred because the designer brings creativity, new ideas and an established and engaging process that ultimately results in better outcomes for the client.
In my view, service designers get too caught up establishing processes and methods of working, losing focus on the end goal and the design outcome. That’s why we started designing in the first place isn’t it? To create new and exciting things that are better than what exists already?

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

I’m currently using The Service Design Programme to research the return on investment (ROI) for businesses in service design. By using a robust evaluation process with companies new to service design we have been able to demonstrate the impact of ‘service thinking’, one company where this has been particularly evidentl is Aggrelek.

Aggrelek are an SME manufacturer based in Swansea, who after completing a collaborative service design project with Design Wales can identify some simple but powerful statistics. For example, after investing £50,000 in a new offer for customers, the company saw sales of £500,000 from the service within six months. The aim is to use this evaluation process with all companies engaged in The Service Design Programme to generate an evidence base for design-led service innovation.

My colleagues Anna Whicher and Gavin Cawood have also co-ordinated large amounts of research into service design at a European Policy level through the SEE project. There is an extensive archive of bulletins, case studies and reports available through: www.seeproject.org

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

The obvious answer here is return on investment (ROI); all design disciplines suffer from the inability to nail returns directly onto the investment in design. This has to change and if marketing and sales can do this why can’t design?
If you’re the director of an SME and you want to grow your business, how do you spend your money? You could spend it on a lean expert who can cut out waste within your production process, resulting in measurable cost savings. Perhaps you could spend your budget building a better sales team, resulting in increased sale? Or you could spend it with a service designer creating new customer experiences?
I believe that design offers the best solution and a well presented case study and persuasive presenter may be able to convince the company director too, but form their point of view it’s still a gamble and that’s all down to a lack of solid research into ROI.
It’s a tough sell when pitched like this but the message is clear, if I invest in service design what is my return on investment?

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Your suggestions for the blog:

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

John Sneddon (Systems Thinking)
He comes from the world of lean but his arguments and thinking is all about good service design. John established the concept of systems thinking and has written a large amount of material on this. He is also quite a character and a great speaker.
www.systemsthinking.co.uk

What is the question do you have about Service Design?
“What happens when everyone stops thinking service design is new?”

This publication describes phase 1 of a multi-disciplinary research project which aims to design and develop a ‘multi-level component system’ to enable the UK ambulance service to treat more people in the community, instead of taking them to hospital. It involved extensive research into the ambulance service with input from a full range of stakeholders. The research methodology and findings are described in a clear and visual format alongside design concepts for new vehicles systems which are currently being developed in Phase 2 of the project.

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

I work within a small team of researchers based at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) who are exploring how design can work together with other disciplines to solve problems with ageing populations and health.  This involves a holistic approach to the design of health services, using participative methodologies to identify problems/opportunities and exploit latent knowledge and ideas for service redesign.

My background is in product design engineering but I have been interested in service design since my final year of study in 2004 when I developed a service to simplify the flow of passengers through an airport.  I observed that the really interesting problems are rarely solved with a stand alone product.  This led me to a variety of interesting roles in innovations, human factors and design for a science and technology company and to my current role here at the GSA.

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

Most interesting for me is the potential for service designers to work with experts from traditional disciplines and bring a new perspective to research which explores some of society’s difficult problems. The research outputs of a people-centred design approach extend beyond identifying the problems and making recommendations, to provide policy makers with practical, holistic and evidence based solutions.  This in part relies on the abilities of designers to imagine a ‘better way’ and engage others including users in this process.

As this involves engaging non-designers in the design process I have realised how off-putting service design terminology can be.  Perhaps designers would have less difficulty explaining what we do if we avoided this.

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

Here at the GSA we are part of a multidisciplinary research project called mappmal http://www.newdynamics.group.shef.ac.uk/mappmal.html which aims to develop a new system prototype for food provision to older hospital patients to prevent malnutrition.

We work with sociologists, food scientists, nutritionists, medical professionals and the service users to develop a new service prototype which includes: new products, environments and interactions.

Following early work to map the existing service, major opportunities for service redesign were identified and developed by working closely with service providers, users and stakeholders at a series of participatory design workshops. The new service prototype is developing into a total nutrition provision system that facilitates increased engagement of all types and grades of staff in the process of providing adequate nutrition to older people in hospital thereby raising the profile of food provision as part of total patient care. The project is now in its final year and the new service prototype will be launched in Autumn 2011.

This project is led by Newcastle University and is funded by the cross research council New Dynamics of Ageing Programme.

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

I think the mappmal research model is highly transferrable and could be adapted to explore and develop solutions for a wide range of social issues. I enjoy collaborating with other disciplines therefore I would be keen to continue working in this way.  In particular I see the potential for collaboration with health economists to understand and evidence the financial implications and potential savings of service redesign alongside benefits to the patient/staff experience.

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Your suggestions for the blog:

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

Gayle Rice, who is exploring how design and innovation can improve Social Services through her role as Project Officer at IRISS and in her PhD studies here at GSA.

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

I have learnt a great deal from the sociologists in the mappmal team, in particular the need to reflect on the influence they have on the way research participants behave and respond to observation, activities and design solutions. What can designers learn from sociologists about how we account for our influence in a co-design process to create better, evidence based solutions?

Gemma Teal is a people centred designer and researcher. Since graduating with a masters in
product design engineering she has applied design thinking to interesting challenges in commercial consultancy and more recently in academic research.

Her current research is set in an acute healthcare environment and considers how the design
of the physical environment, the introduction of new technologies and the design of the service
can reduce malnutrition for older hospital patients. The output of this research will be a new food service concept which has been collaboratively designed and developed with healthcare staff, representative patients and stakeholders.

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

My background is in strategic management and marketing in the field of tourism. I work at the MCI – Management Center Innsbruck where I lecture service design and service innovation and do various research projects in this area. Besides, I consult companies and guest-lecture at various design and management schools on service design thinking.

Tourism is a service industry and depends on the creation of superior service experiences. Thus, over the past decades a lot of research has been done to interrogate how to generate customer satisfaction for tourism, travel, leisure activities and the like. In fact many of the basic concepts we use in service design can be found in service marketing and tourism management literature from the past 30 years, such as the extended service marketing mix (Bitner & Booms, 1981) or how to analyse services holistically as a sequence of points-of-encounter, i.e. customer journey consisting of a series of touchpoints (Kotler, Bowen & Makens, 1996). Therefore, some experts in this field struggle with service design as they do not see the value this approach can add to their well-researched discipline. Nevertheless, I am certain that service design thinking offers great value and potential also for these well-established disciplines because of its true interdisciplinary character. With my work I strive to establish service design thinking as a kind of common language, process and toolbox across different disciplines.

Bitner, J. & Booms, B. (1981) “Marketing strategies and organizational structures for service firms”, in Donnelly, J. en George, W. (Eds.) “Marketing of services”, American Marketing Association, Chicago.

Kotler, P., Bowen, J. & Makens, J.C. (1996). Marketing for hospitality and tourism, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River.

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

I agree with the answer from Alison Prendiville in the previous interview. One of the most interesting aspects of service design is its true interdisciplinarity. When it comes to the skill set required to design services, many people like to refer to the T-shaped person with a broad knowledge across disciplines and a deep knowledge in one discipline (See also Geke van Dijk, who introduced the idea of the “drippy T” during her closing keynote at the SDN conference 2010). To stay in this picture, I would refer to service design thinking as a broad and common approach people from various backgrounds can agree on when working in interdisciplinary teams. Service design thinking offers many tools and methods enabling effective co-designing of services in such teams.

Another appealing aspect of service design is the idea that this approach provides answers to the apparent change in society and economy as described in the experience economy (Pine & Gilmore, 2001), service dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) and the impact of increasing customer power through social media to name but a few buzzwords in this context.

Pine, B. J., II, & Gilmore, J. H. (1999). Experience economy: Work is theater and every business a stage, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Vargo, S. L. & Lusch, R. F. (2004). Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing. Journal of Marketing. 68(1), 1–17.

Vargo, S. L. & Lusch, R. F. (2006). Service Dominant Logic: Reactions, Reflections and Refinements. Marketing Theory. 6(3), 281–288.

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

My recent research projects concerned the application and potential of mobile ethnographic research for service design. During a first project, I developed a mobile ethnography application for mobile phones called “myServiceFellow” (http://www.myservicefellow.com). In a following international research project funded by the EU, we will further develop the technology and test it in different tourism destinations and events. Furthermore, we will establish a knowledge network on service design in tourism and develop a website and print media to communicate a kind of “do-it-yourself” manual for service design to the predominant small- and micro-sized companies in the European tourism sector.

Another recent project was the development of the “Customer Journey Canvas” (published in the recent textbook “This is Service Design Thinking” and available under cc license on the website http://www.thisisservicedesignthinking.com) as a model and template for service processes along the pre-service, service and post-service period and including the most important influencers of the decision making process such as advertisements, public relations, social media, word-of-mouth and past experiences of customers. The canvas can be used to quickly sketch a certain service from different perspectives or stakeholders and reveal different perceptions, e.g. between customers, front-line staff and management.

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

I am particularly interested in seeing more research and publications on introducing service design thinking into rather classic management approaches following the management saying “if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it”. I am myself working on a concept called “touchpoint portfolio”, an approach to include quantitative statistics into service design to observe, analyse and predict the impact of single touchpoints on the customer satisfaction and thus to report and justify service design activities to the management level of service providers. I know that colleagues are working on similar approaches, e.g. using the balanced scorecard, and I am very much looking forward to their findings and concepts.

Moreover, I am interested in any case study delivering evidences (a hat tip to all ServDes.10 participants and twitter followers at this point..) for the impact of service design on customer satisfaction, company revenues, cost structures, organisational structures or even strategic orientation of service firms through new service concepts.

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Your suggestions for the blog:

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

I would be very interested to hear more from practitioners what they would be interested in service design research and in particular which research questions and results they would find useful and interesting for their practise.

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

Will service design still exist in 5 or 10 years?

Marc Stickdorn graduated in Strategic Management and Marketing and worked in various tourism projects throughout Europe. Since 2008 Marc is full-time staff at the MCI – Management Center Innsbruck in Austria, where he lectures service design and service innovation. His main areas of interest are service design and strategic marketing management particularly in a tourism context. This involves research such as the development of a mobile ethnography application for mobile phones, the Customer Journey Canvas and various publications and presentations. Marc is co-founder and consultant of “Destinable – service design for tourism” and guest lecturer at different business and design schools.

I’ve always enjoyed and hugely respect the work of Christopher Lovelock who died in 2008. His service management work is extensive and insightful. I attribute his work on public transport as providing the eureka moment for my PhD. The article cited, challenges the paradigm of the four specific characteristics of services, intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability and perishability (IHIP). Instead Lovelock offers an alternative paradigm, one that proposes that services offer value and benefits through access or temporary possession instead of ownership. “This rental/access perspective offers a different lens through which to view services”. Consequently the change in perspective offers new opportunities to market goods in a service format and raises questions on how time is perceived, valued and consumed; this model provides possibilities for sharing resources and ultimately reducing our need for them

FRY, T. 2009. Design futuring: sustainability, ethics and new practice. New York: Berg

Hannah Arendt is often described as a philosopher and studied under Heidegger, but she rebuked this term describing herself as a political theorist. While Arendt wrote the Human Condition in 1958 I feel it is no less relevant today. It’s hard to define this book in a nutshell but Arendt describes a loss of understanding in the public sphere. She explains a need to create space for understanding, and that collective understanding should come before, “all formal constitutions of the public realm and the various forms of government, that is the various forms in which the public realm can be organised.” Arendt describes a form of collective existentialism.

The issues in understanding raised by Arendt from a broad sociological perspective, Tony Fry explores in the context of design philosophy. I think both of these books are relevant to design thinking and service design research because they explore the problems we face in realising new ways of living from within our existing current constructs. They offer valuable insights into how design and society as a whole may begin to effectively address this challenge.

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

My interest in service design stems from my industry-funded PhD with Thorn Transit Systems International (now part of Cubic). The doctoral research investigated public transport engineering specification of revenue systems (this involved 4 case study partners including 2 in the UK and 2 in Europe) and the need to incorporate them within a designed service framework. The thesis demonstrated that this would result in more effective public transport systems from an operator perspective and a more seamless journey for the passenger. I was also an active researcher in a European Union Framework IV research project MIMIC (Mobility, Inter-modality and Interchange) looking at the relative and absolute barriers to interchange across seven EU sites.

As Deputy Director of C4D, Centre for Competitive Creative Design, a Cox funded Centre for excellence in interdisciplinary working, between Cranfield University and LCC, I have been able to facilitate and extend the role of service design into areas such the visualisation of complex data for product service systems in the aerospace industry and introduce the value of service design tools in assisting the development of medical technology and devices in creating human-centred service systems within medical engineering research.

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

In my opinion the most interesting aspect of service design is its Interdisciplinarity. Services rely on an inter-connectedness of different components many of them intangible or open to unpredictable behaviours, temporary ownership and access, changes in capacity, limited shelf-life and co-production. To address the potential uncertainty of services their design requires the input of social scientists, designers, users, technical and management expertise; this makes them an incredibly exciting area to work in.

The potential of services to be drivers of change is also another valuable contributor of service design. Product service systems have huge potential for reducing consumption, extending end-of-life and upcycling in products. Service design offers opportunities for us not to live our lives on a trajectory of more ‘stuff’ but one that is focused on value being designed through a more sustainable agenda.

Simple and effective service design interventions may also change perceptions of a service. The count down London bus information is a case in point. The information changed passenger perceptions of service reliability, waiting times and increased levels of satisfaction and usage. The reality was that the bus timetables and service had not in-fact changed but the information removed the uncertainty of waiting and not knowing when a bus was due.

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

Through C4D, service design projects have been undertaken between masters students at LCC and medical engineers at Cranfield University. The scenario building and the mapping of the service experience around new technologies have fed into research projects and provided user insights for the development of the technology such as a febrile response indicator. These projects have frequently been used as a springboard to introducing service design to engineering research.

I recently produced a case study on the role of service design for public sector innovation relating to Lewisham Council’s LoveLewisham site. Through this relationship with Lewisham I have been in conversation with a major retailer, the Institute of Materials and UCL’s department of Anthropology looking at the disconnection between materials, artefacts, consumer behaviour and end-of-life product issues relating to waste; to ask ‘what are the opportunities for service design to create more holistic service systems that create and transfer value around the purchasing and disposing of goods’

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

I’m particularly interested in the role of service design and societal change whether at a local government level or on a personal basis through empowering individuals. There are two areas that are of personal interest: one relates to the above in terms of an interdisciplinary approach to public sector innovation and waste.

The second area of interest is in the development of medical devices and the design of relevant human centred services that are holistically integrated and not bolted on as an after-thought. In the West we are faced with spiralling health costs and an ageing population and the emphasis on stand alone technologies as drivers of medical services needs to give way to a more human-centred approach that designs and delivers services that have the potential to be more effective and less costly.

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Your suggestions for the blog:

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

I would like to see the forum opened up to non-designers, people involved in policy and government to debate the barriers to innovation within local government. Local government is risk averse and consequently this hampers innovation.

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

There appears to be a divide between service design and service management. Service management provides robust models for service delivery, whereas I see service design creating a ‘whole’ perspective of service experience and touch points but limited in how services will be delivered and the relationship with revenue yield management. I would like more discussion in this area.