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

Society has moved towards a service economy and thus may require a different approach from both designers and leaders of service organizations. The role of design in business is broadening and moving towards a more strategic level in addition to the process of designing the multiplicity of touchpoints that in sum form a customer journey in a service context. To differentiate their offerings, service providers need to be innovative to meet conscious and unconscious user needs when designing or redesigning their services. As part of my PhD, I study how service designer’s user-centric attitude, their approach, methods and processes may inform organizational leaders when creating service innovation strategies. Organizational leaders are often not designers. However, they are part of the design and innovation process by creating visions and strategies, and by making design-related decisions to obtain the envisioned future. My aim is to introduce a Service Design Leadership framework at the intersection of design and organizational leadership intended to develop service innovations that are perceived as valuable by users, service organizations and other stakeholders.

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

The distinction between product and services may be vague as a tangible product is often part of an intangible service. In contrast to customers’ relation to manufactured products, the service experience may be influenced by the fact that services often require greater interactions between service provider and the customer, or the customer’s interaction with other customers while ‘consuming’ the service. Services are co-created and at times produced jointly by the service provider and the customer, and the interaction influences the experience on both sides. Both parties control only parts of the service production process. This is both a design and a leadership challenge. In my view, therefore, one of the most interesting aspects of Service Design is that designing successful, holistic services needs to be approached in an integrated, multi-disciplinary way that includes most design disciplines in addition to organizational leadership, including empowerment of service provider’s employees.

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

My PhD studies are part of an ongoing Service Design research project named AT-ONE. The project is based on collaboration between partners from the service industry, service designers (both professional and students) and academics (both within business and design) and headed by professor Simon Clatworthy at AHO – The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. All partners collaborate in the further development of the method. The AT-ONE project aims to improve the early stages of service innovation through the integration of design thinking and design attitude into a structured innovation process by use of service designers’ methods and processes in a workshop-based model. Each letter in AT-ONE represents a lens that provide a means to enable service innovations. The five lenses are: Actors, Touchpoints, Offerings, Needs and Experience. Actors refer to actors who together provide the service. Touchpoints focus on development of the various touch points between customer and service provider. Offering refers to the design of what the service actually offers. Needs relates to user needs that the service meets. Experience concerns the perceived experience that the service gives the customer.
This is an ongoing project, and the findings are now being analyzed and will be shared in articles that are in the process of being written.
The research project is funded by the Research Council of Norway together with the industry. For further information, please see: www.service-innovation.org

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

After finishing my PhD, I would like to do further research on how combining designers’ approach, methods, skills and processes with business strategies may enable service innovations. How may bridging the skill sets and approaches in business and design advance a Service Design Leadership approach that build capacity to innovate for services perceived to be valuable by users in the public service sector as well as in the private service sector?