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?

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.

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

I study, teach and practice human-centered design and have been fortunate to conduct my doctoral studies under Richard Buchanan, who in turn has been influenced by John Dewey and Richard McKeon. My own work focuses on the ways in which design, designers and designing have a role within the organization. This means, I constantly enter into what has traditionally been the ground of management and organization studies. Design weaves like a thread through these fields, yet when it comes to design practice and design theory, they tend to be boxed in a product or, perhaps assigned to a functional department. Only recently have human-centered design thinking and design methods been recognized as potent tools in themselves that can be used to inquire into organizations–this is my bridge to service design. Every service is linked with one or more products, in one form or another. A service, itself, as service design aptly describes, is a product of design. As many service designers now discover, one cannot change a service without reaching into the organization itself. If one wants to change a service experience, one has to be able to connect all the loose dots of the service experience from the conceptualization of the service (as in the design of a policy) to the actual delivery and back. If product development can be a vehicle for organizational change, then the same applies to service design. Our teaching and research at ImaginationLancaster highlights this connection.

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

Initially, in my view, service design took a rather transactional perspective. It took some time for it to connect with existing theories on interaction design (and I do not mean human-computer interaction design, though aspects of this apply as well), experience design, interface design, for example. Because of this, it was not clear to me how encompassing the theories of service design would become. The original models, while always with an eye to systems, still took a rather mechanistic approach. My biggest problem initially was that it seemed to slight people in the organization. In many ways, this is comparable with some of the user research and “user-centered” design which, because of their explicit focus on “consumers,” plays down the fact that people in organizational systems are users as well. If we want to effect change in an organizational system, people inside need to be part of the change efforts and involved in the design of services.

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

The largest service design project I was involved in was the Domestic Mail Manual Transformation Project, which was conducted by the School of design at Carnegie Mellon and the United States Postal Service. The outcome concerned every single mailer in the United States: the grandma shipping a cake to her grandson in college, the small business owner trying to maintain their current business but use the postal services to grow over the years, the large mailing business and the bee keeper who needs to send live bees to a colleague. We helped the USPS to make it easier for any of these mailers to identify the services they could use, understand their choices and know what steps they needed to take in order to comply with the rules and regulations. We shifted the perspective from an engineering driven organization to one that looks at and develops its services from the perspective of the people they serve. I have been involved with Daniela Sangiorgi in a small educational project in the UK and am also working with her and a team on a healthcare project.

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

I am very interested in the ways in which we can bring design thinking and design methods into the minds, hands and hearts of people who will shape our public institutions. I am delighted to see work on human-centered design emerge in places like the UK Sunningdale Institute at the National School of Government (Engagement and Aspiration: Reconnecting Policy Making with Front Line Professionals). It is easy to see the connection here between service design and human-centered design. I am developing a course for MA students in Public Management in Berlin, where this and other examples, like the Integrated Tax Design Project from the Australian Tax Office will be a focus. Questions in this context include: How can human-centered design assess public services? What role can human-centered design have in developing services that are useful, usable, and desirable both for the people intended to benefit from these services and the people who have to maintain, administer and deliver these services. I believe that questions to these answers will have implications for the business world as well.