Publication from the Designing for Services in Science and Technology-Based Enterprises interdisciplinary research project initiated by Saïd Business School (SBS) at the University of Oxford. This one-year study (2006-2007) explored how academics from management and design disciplines, service designers, and science and technology entrepreneurs understand the designing of services in science and technology-based enterprises.

The publication includes short essays from several of the participants in the project including perspectives from operations management, strategy, innovation studies and design.

Edited by Lucy Kimbell and Victor Seidel. Funded by the AHRC-EPRSC Designing for the 21st Century initiative.

Link to publication (PDF format. 1.4MB)

See also the short film ‘What do service designers do?’ which follows London-based service innovation and design consultancy live|work in the early stages of a project with  g-Nostics, a company offering personalised medicine.

A short film focussing on the practices of professional service designers. Using an ethnographic perspective drawing on research at Said Business School, this film show that service designers do three things that distinguish their work from that of others. Firstly, the designers look at the human experience as a whole and in detail. Secondly, they make the service tangible and visible. Finally, they create new service concepts. The film follows service designers from consultancy livework as they engaged in the early stages of a project with a trial smoking cessation service in the UK.

What do service designers do? (2008)
Duration 7:16

Directed by Lucy Kimbell
Edited by Maarten Roos

Link to low and high res versions

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

On my opinion Service Design is an evidence of the evolution of designer’s roles. Instead of dealing only with tangible materials, designers nowadays found a new path in services, systems and communities, which demands new skills and new levels of involvement. Design approaches these new areas with a systemic and holistic perspective, a multi and interdisciplinary way of working and a better consideration over sustainability.
Among all the specialties of services (such as financial, communicational, transportation, education, governmental, commercial and leisure), my research concentrates on the tourism sector, focusing on the hostelling segment. This choice is due to the importance and growth of this kind of service in my country (Brazil) and the lack of studies connecting this sector to design and sustainability.
So, in synthesis, the research aims to propose a model to assist designers in the project of tourist services considering sustainable aspects. It started in 2009 and will develop into practical experimentation in 2010; the PhD thesis is also supported by other models and methods like those proposed by Service Design Tools (www.servicedesigntools.org/) and the LOLA Project (www.sustainable-everyday.net/lolaimplementation/lola_brazil/), which engage communities in a co-design process for social innovation.
Important to say is that tourism activity should consider, besides the qualities and goods offered by local communities, the solutions people develop for their daily problems, according to their context and resources. This aspect emphasizes community participation in the process of service design.

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

I think that the most interesting aspect of Service Design is the great variety and complexity of variables that influence each project; above all the improbability to obtain all the planned results, mainly because the key resource of services is people, which is of course impossible to control or predict.
In the same way, this heterogeneity of services brings a further difficulty to the profession of Service Design: how designers can participate in developing platforms to enable the desired behavior and interactions to emerge?
This is in fact a good and long discussion. Despite that, designers, nowadays, have an important and peculiar role in the society, that is leading projects, services and people to better respond to the needs of the society and of the environment. It’s not only necessary to be economically efficient but also ethic, fair and sustainable. Designers need to get along with this change and contribute to the achievement of a better way of living, for everyone.

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

I read about Service Design mainly thought writings by Morelli, Sangiorgi, Cipolla and Koskinen. In particular Dougherty and Manzini, with their focus on sustainability and design, introduced me to an interesting approach. Their visions about designer’s role led me to see what design can embrace as a profession, not only in the operational field but also at a more strategic level. The challenges of design are increasing every day; moving from a production line to a systemic and interconnected net of problems and solutions, which change rapidly and dynamically in a way that it’s difficult to measure or control.
So, in this scenario, my research tries to find ways designers can contribute to a dynamic equilibrium for the planet and to people’s well-being. For example, in Brazil, where I live, some organizations are being certified and recognized due to their work embracing sustainability. Also, designers are acting inside communities to find out solutions to cooperate to their daily life and working with them to help generating new opportunities of work and employment. Some examples of designer’s activity and sustainability are presented in the following sites:
www.ufpe.br/sendes
www.closchiavo.pro.br/
www.centropedesign.com.br/projetos_design_social.php
www.prainhadocantoverde.org
www.ltds.ufrj.br/desis/des-serv.htm

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

Well, I’d like to see and read more about cases and models of Service Design applied to the tourism sector, and also about Service Design and Sustainability. It’s important to my research and to its development to see models and methods working in reality – even if, adapted to each particular reality. At the moment, I’m looking for ways to continue the research and to discover solutions and new ideas amongst Brazilian cases, mainly in my state, Pernambuco. (Pernambuco is located in the North East of Brazil, that is well known for it’s natural beauties and cultural icons such as: Porto de Galinhas, Fernando de Noronha, Olinda, J. Borges, Mestre Vitalino and rhythms as Frevo and Maracatu ).

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Susiane Santos is a graphic designer graduated in 2007, post-graduated in marketing and mastering in Design. Her research is about Service Design for Sustainability. She aims to develop a tool to help designers to include sustainable criteria in their service projects.

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