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

In the last few years I’ve been mainly working on methodological aspects of service design.
I think the tools and methods used by designers in product design are not always adequate to design services. Service design includes the definition of some aspects, such as time and interaction, that have not been part of the traditional design domain. For this reason new methods and tools need to be developed.
I’ve been working on tools and methods in three main areas:
1. Tools and methods to analyse users behaviour and contextual conditions;
2. Design tools to design new services, with particular attention to the development of modular and systemic service solutions;
3. Techniques and methods to represent services, especially in regard to those aspects that are not traditionally included in the design activity, such as time and interaction.

I’ve developed some of those tools by adapting them from other disciplines, such as information architecture, interaction design and engineering.

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

For many years the attention to services was mainly focused on the development and management phases of services. Because of their lack of material consistency, services had not been considered by designers as part of their competences. Finally, after many years, designers are realising that they have a role in designing services. The most interesting thing, though is to understand which role they can have.
Several designers point at the emotional or aesthetic aspects of service design; in order to support users’ participation services have involved users’ emotions and feelings.
Interaction designers pointed at the front office component of services: the point in which the service production system meets the users.
Engineers, and I’m mainly working with them, are emphasising the need for a systemic view of services. In this case designing services means making sure that the front office part, with the interaction and emotional components they imply, match with an appropriate organisation in the back office. This last area is the one on which I’m investing more time on.

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

In the last few months I read several interesting project on service design, mainly located in UK, where there seems to be a very favourable environment for the development of new knowledge in this area. However I still think that one of the most interesting contributions to service design has been provided by a project that is now a bit dated, the EU-Funded HiCS project. The reason why I see that project as a sort of milestone in service design is that the project was pointing at a second phase of service design. The first phase has been to develop good cases of service design. Those cases were developed as individual cases, they were related to specific contexts and specific users. At this stage service design was quite similar to a sort of craftsmanship, because each solution was individual and each project was very much dependent on the sensitivity of the service designer. The second phase, I think, is in the need to lift services design at the level of an industrial activity. As such, service design should consider how the actors in a service design system could transfer solutions, knowledge, capabilities, products and services across different local contexts and for different individual users. This phase also introduced the concept of Solution Architecture and Modular Platforms, that inspired my recent work.

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

After the HiCS project, I haven’t seen too much work focusing on this second phase of service design. The industrialisation of services is an important passage to evolve service design from the craftsmanship domain.

The whole area of service design as an experience is also interesting, there are several contributions in this area, but I would like to see more of that.

An interesting research area that is being developed now is the area of representation of services. I proposed this theme long time ago and designers seemed to be not interested in this. The assumption was that traditional product designers are already very good in representing any kind of solution, but in fact services include factors, such as time, experience, interaction, that designers do not know how to represent. Furthermore the need to involve users, any kind of users, even those who are not used to read drawings, calls for a wider investigation on how service design could be represented.
Finally I believe that the area in which service design is having more interesting development is Public Services. Here I would definitely see research on how designers fit in the picture and how can service design contribute to improve the quality of public services and the level of citizens’ participation.

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Your suggestions for the blog:

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

In this blog several interesting contributions have been offered by designers, but I would like to involve some politician, too. E.g. some member of the UK parliament that has worked on service design, or some politician that can see the need to properly design services.

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

Is service design boring? I was asked this question when I argued for service design to pay attention not just to the front office/emotional part of the service interaction, but also to the back office/organisational part.

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.

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

For the past 10 years I have been working  in different social design projects: developing craft production in Lapland, Namibia, Caucasus area with EU and World Bank funding. Lately I have been working to innovate service based products related to tourism industry linking tourism with the creative industries.

My research work took a new direction when I started to work in autumn 2007 in a new research project called “Experiencing Wellbeing – New Service Platforms and Mobile User Interfaces for Leisure” funded by Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. During this project  I have been focusing my research on developing service design methods to be applied  with technology-based and service businesses. This research project has been extremely interesting, allowing me to  go deeper in the world of service design and opening up soon new possibilities for research as the project progresses.

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

I think that the most interesting aspect of Service Design is its user orientation and the possibility to innovate both through the development of new kind of service products and service models; exploring for example how services can be co-produced within the user community. As a researcher and as a designer, I’m enjoying the possibility to develop and reflect on new methods to work with users and to visualize and reflect on the design process itself. This user orientation is a key ingredient for Service Design to deal with relevant contemporary social issues.

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

I’m currently working in a two year research project called “Experiencing Wellbeing – New Service Platforms and Mobile User Interfaces for Leisure”. The aim of the project is to develop service design methods to generate new solutions to enhance wellbeing, developing product applications with companies such as Hudle Oyj, Nokia Oyj, Kunnonpaikka and Kuopio Tourism, and developing Service Design capabilities for the Region. We have developed four product applications and tested prototypes of the services. You can learn more about these cases reading the publication: Designing Services with Innovative Methods. The business cases outcome are still confidential but we have developed new tools and knowledge that revealed to be critical for our Region and SMEs. Our next task is to produce a working book on Service Design in Finnish language to be used by SMEs and public instititions.

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

I’m working on a research proposal on service design to generate new models for Public Services in our Region. In this research area I would like to co-operate with organizations and researchers that have been already involved in these kind of projects. My main interest is on how to develop new ways to produce services that can benefit the society while enhancing personal wellbeing. For this reason I am interested to connect Service Design with the existing area of Social Design.

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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 invite  Aare van Oosterom from Designthinkers. I think it’s good to include doers from the field to the academic discussions.

I recommend also to link with REDJOTTER

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

My concern is that we recognize our common roots in Design Research and have enough space for free thinking instead of relying on very specific definitions. How do we manage to maintain this openness?