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

I am undertaking a PhD research project that focus on Service Design Management, mainly looking at how designers work with multiple stakeholders at project level environment. My research questions include ‘who are important stakeholders to service designers?’, ‘What are the design stages these stakeholder take part?’, and ‘how to maximize the result of stakeholder involvement within the limited resources and time?’

I also worked as a teaching fellow at the University of Dundee on the Master of Design programme for the past three years. The Master’s programme has a strong interest in interdisciplinary design practice and people-centred design approach, thus, Service Design naturally became an interesting topic of my research and always the emphasis of my teaching.

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

I am fascinated by the dynamic interactions among people (and some really clever machines) in service systems, as well as its development. Furthermore, the creativity and openness that designers could potentially bring into a project is another very interesting aspect to me. The designers who practice Service Design are keen on being out there with service users and also with other stakeholders in the service system, which is very different from the traditional way of design where designers stay in a studio and craft their piece of work to perfection, alone. In this process, designers learn from their stakeholders for inspiration, and many stakeholders also learn how to develop and delivery services with new techniques and even new ways of thinking. The design process involves complex learning for all. Not only designers, but also many other stakeholders, directly or indirectly, learn to create some new understanding of the service they developed in the process. Thus, my motivation is to understand how the new knowledge of services created by Service Design can find its way into the implementation, and perhaps even lead to organisational change.

The less interesting aspect to me, personally, might be the actually details of specific touch points. I am not saying it is not important aspect, it is very important because it embedded ideas, and draws stakeholders’ attention because it might be valuable to some of them. However, I am more interested in the people interactions happened among different phases of design and how people share and learn from this process. By the end of the day, the designers are not going to deliver the service. The touch point can go out-of-date fairly quickly when new technologies come along, but what people have learned from working in a design-led approach might have a longer legacy and bigger impact in the long run.

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

My PhD project is mainly situated in the domain of Service Design, although I did reach out to literatures of Service Management, Design Management and, more recently, project level Knowledge Management domain in the context of innovation. The research question is, ‘how service designers manage multiple stakeholder involvement in a project environment?’ I collected Service Design stories form British service designers and focused on four in details as my case studies. All case studies involved complex stakeholder relationships and illustrated how designers navigate their path working with various stakeholder groups. The studies acknowledged the importance of involving a wide range of stakeholder groups in Service Design practice, as well as the challenge brought about by it. It suggested that designer decide different approaches for involving stakeholder groups at different stage of the design process. One important element that influenced this decision-making was the knowledge generation and diffusion environment. Mindfully or intuitively, designers assessed their position in this environment and adopted suitable approach(s) to generate new tools or understanding with key stakeholders in the process.

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

The legacy of my PhD study indicated interesting but often overlooked links between Service Design, Knowledge Generation/diffusion, and Change Management. I believe that, to sustain a service as a self-organise system, it is crucial that service designers understand how their design legacy could embody the new knowledge and evolve new practices that respond to emerging changes in the environment.

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Your suggestions for the blog:

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

Lauren Tan, PhD research student at Northumbria University, her research is based on case studies from DOTT07 projects.

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

What are the limits of Service Design?

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.