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

The projects I’m currently involved in are revolving around practicing service designers involved in development or innovation projects with service organizations. The overarching interests that direct my work are methods and techniques for design of dynamic design material, user involvement and user-driven methods, conceptions of value-in-use, the expressiveness of design visualizations, investing in design and innovation, and strategic management issues relating to design of services.

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

It’s quite a challenge to think of the least interesting aspect of Service Design. I was first thinking of tourism – but it is a large area and sometimes in great need of design. Then I was thinking of the transition from products to services – but functional sales and after-markets are so important concepts for businesses that putting these aside seems impossible.

So, let’s talk about the interesting parts. After doing research in interaction design focused on how interaction design can be integrated into IT-system acquisition processes, the figure of thought brought forward by service design introduced a means for connecting design with business. The way that service design connects with business thinking is attractive.

It is also exciting that the design of services is all about the design of value-in-use. It has been one line of thinking in interaction design, but in service design it becomes an even more absolute perspective.

And then there is all the visuals and models used. Even though there are the ordinary ones, like blueprints or journeys, I’m fascinated by the odd ones, and by the ones that makes you go “yes, I see!”

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

We are running two larger projects at the moment, one with service innovations, and one with service development. In both projects we have set up a co-production team, with designers, service organizations and researchers.

In the ICE project, http://www.ida.liu.se/divisions/hcs/ixs/research/ICE/, we have been working with distributed home-health care and future mobile communication. We have been using theories and methods from Cognitive Systems Engineering to expand and understand how blueprinting and journeys could support innovation in hone health-care situations. We have also explored how expressive design techniques in different media support each other when describing future services.

In the SERV project, http://www.ida.liu.se/divisions/hcs/ixs/research/SERV/, we have been working with more traditional service development projects, developing knowledge about user research techniques, use of ethnographic methods, and constructs that help describe what the design object of service design can be.

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

Definitely. There is a fantastic opportunity, when the large western economies turn around at the bottom, to gain understanding of how service and design thinking contributes to sustainable growth, or maybe even slow growth. Then, of course, one should look into informal service economies, and the role of design, individualization, innovation, sensemaking, etc.

And last, for now, there is a need for extending our understanding of service phenomena by establishing firm grounding in relevant theoretical concepts and philosophy.

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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 invite Tuuli Mattelmäki, Kirsikka Vaajakallio, Shelley Evenson and Johan Redström

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

How does service design co-evolve with the service sciences?

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.

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

I started to deal with service design more than 15 years ago. The main driver of this interest, at that time, was my research on design for sustainability. In particular, the hypothesis was that the shift form products to services could result in (more) sustainable ways of producing and consuming.

Today, after many years of experiences, we are far less naïve and we know that the shift towards services is not, per se, a guarantee of moving in the “right direction”. Never the less, it remains, and now it has been proved, that service design is, or could be, a powerful tool to promote sustainable changes.

In parallel with these experiences on the crossroad between services and sustainability, I collaborate to promote the research on Service Design in my Department and, in particular, in its Doctorate. This long story has a main line of research on the same Service Design nature, that started with the Elena Pacenti’s thesis (more than 10 years ago) and continued with the Daniela Sangiorgi’s and Carla Cipolla’s ones. Other important contributions came form several other researchers crossing service design with other topics (as Nicola Morelli and Simona Maschi, at the intersection with strategic design, Beatrice Villari and Giulia Gerosa, at the one with local development, and Miaosen Gong and Joon Sang Baek, at the one with digital and mobile platforms).

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

Service Design deals with “interactions”: interactions between different actors who collaborate in generating a commonly recognized value. Interactions between human beings, and between them and a variety of objects and places. For this reason, Service Design situates itself at the core of a new, emerging paradigm: a way to consider wellbeing and production, where interactions substitute objects (not because objects disappear, but because they take the status of “material evidences” of interaction systems).

The shift form products to services is not a new phenomenon. But in the most recent period, the diffusion of networked systems of production, consumption and social organisation makes this phenomenon even more important: in the networked systems all the links between different actors are “service relationships”. At the same time, the networked systems diffusion asks us to up-date our ideas on services, moving form the traditional one (asymmetrical interactions between service providers and service users) towards a new one (more symmetrical, networked relationships between service co-producers)..

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

In the past 10 years I have been directly or indirectly involved in several projects dealing with Service Design. Given that I work in the university they were mainly design research activities based on concrete projects (i.e. they were “action researches” on service design and sustainability). Here I will outline two recent ones that for me are particularly meaningful:

1. Enabling solution for a co-housing program. The aim of this project has been to facilitate the community building and the co-design of shared spaces and services in residential developments. The initiative, developed with a social entrepreneur, has been successful and generated a social enterprise that now is active in the co-housing promotion in the Milanese area.

2. Digital services for social innovation. The aim of this project has been to verify the potentialities of digital services in supporting creative communities and collaborative services. The project has been articulated in two parts with two main interlocutors: Telecom Italia, for mobile-based services, and Ethical Bank Foundation, for services to be hosted by a digital platform. 

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

There are several lines of research that could be interesting and promising. I will outline here only three possible themes:

Relational quality. It is the quality that makes services living entities: systems where human being can interact in a lively way (as oppose to what happens in those “designed services” where everything is planned and human relationships disappear). This kind of quality is challenging because it cannot be designed. But nevertheless, the hypothesis of work of this research program is that, through a good design, the relational quality conditions of existence can be made more probable.

Collaborative quality. It is the organisational quality that makes services social entities: organisations where the involved actors collaborate in order to get a desired result and, doing so, to generate socialisation (as a kind of positive side-effect).  This service quality is important because it characterises flexible, effective, customised and economically cheaper services (offering viable solutions to present, huge social problems) and, as I wrote in a previous paragraph, because it generates the precious side-effect of strengthening the social fabric.

Social network and everyday life. Collaborative organisation, supported by digital services, can bridge the immaterial world (of the social networks) and physical one (of the everyday life problems). In this perspective, information and communication technologies are the enabling technologies for brand forms of organisation and Service design can do a lot to make it happen. And to make it happen in the best way (i.e. promoting social and environmental sustainability). 

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Your suggestions for the blog:

Who would you like to invite in this conversation about Service Design Research?
Michel Bauwens, p2p foundation

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

If we agree that the contemporary society is generating a growing demand of services, in order to avoid to transform the world in a huge, unsustaianble theme park, the resulting service-oriented environments have to be endowed with a high degree of living relational and collaborative qualities. How to design these living relationships? That is: how to design for a quality that, per se, cannot be planned?