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?

My research centres on the use of aesthetic design as an element of service innovation with a focus on technology-based enterprises. My focus is on the subset of service design which has to do with appealing to the human senses and creating symbolic, emotional and experiential value. My empirical context of technology-based firms is an interesting one, and also a somewhat unlikely one. Technology-based enterprises tend to focus mostly on technological innovation while neglecting opportunities for gaining competitive advantage through aesthetic design.

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

As discussed above, I find the issue of how services can be designed to appeal to the human senses and create symbolic, emotional and experiential value particularly interesting. It is becoming increasingly true that functionality and technological performance are baseline requirements for new products, while not constituting a basis for competitive advantage. Likewise, new services must compete based on more than well-designed service processes or service blueprints. Service processes or service blueprints can be regarded in a similar fashion as the engineering design that goes into developing a new product; absolutely vital, but not sufficient for competitive advantage.

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

I have been involved in a longitudinal panel study among new and young technology-based firms in Iceland – the predominant majority of which are service firms – for the past five years. The research is being conducted by the Reykjavik University Centre for Research on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CRIE). This longitudinal study provides a unique opportunity to follow new and young technology-based firms as they develop their first services, launch them on the market – successfully or not so successfully – and continue to refine these services. The use of aesthetic design seems to increase as services mature and as the use of aesthetic design becomes more prevalent in a firm’s sector. This suggests that aesthetic design may itself eventually become a baseline requirement for competition in such sectors.

I have also conduced in-depth case research in young technology-based firms to gain a deeper understanding on how and why they use aesthetic design.

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

Aesthetic design of services can be viewed as consisting of two dimensions. The first dimension is concerned with appealing to the human senses and this has strong similarities with the aesthetic design of products, which focuses on appearance, sounds, textures, smells and tastes. I would like to delve into the second dimension, which is the experiential dimension. How can firms that don’t belong to entertainment sectors stage experiences through their services? What benefits can be reaped from deliberate experience staging in non-entertainment firms and how?

I find collaborative research, especially across more than one country, particularly fruitful and enjoyable, and would welcome interesting opportunities for such collaboration.

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

My goal is to develop a scientific understanding of design. Most of my work has been devoted to product design, but services offer new challenges.  I co-direct an MBA / Engineering dual degree program focussed upon design and operations: services are almost pure operations, with a human interface. I find that many of the principles of interactive design apply directly to services. But what seems to be lacking is an attention to emotion and experience both on the part of the customer and also the internal people – the staff. That is where my work is moving.

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

Most interesting: The Service Blueprint provides a compelling way of illustrating the complex intermix of layers involved in services. But it is limited: it needs to cover more.

Second most interesting: Services are recursive. There is a front stage and a backstage, but the backstage consists of a front stage and a backstage.

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

Just published a paper in the MIT Sloan Management Review on The Psychology of Waiting Lines (updating the earlier work for the 21^st century) – except that SMR renamed the article “Designing waits that work.”  (For a copy of the paper — and a larger, more theoretical essay — email me at don at jnd.org.)

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

Emotions and user-experience in service design.