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

I’m the programme lead for an initiative by Design Wales called The Service Design Programme. Through the programme we work with manufacturing companies of all sizes from across Wales to support the use of service design as a tool to achieve innovation, growth and development.
Service design is a new discipline and has successfully established itself in organisations and industries where service innovation is prevalent; such as transportation, public services and hospitality. However, within more product focused sectors such as manufacturing, innovation is predominantly viewed as new product or material development, a trend that is even stronger within SME’s.
The Service Design Programme is working to change this situation and has been funded by The Welsh Government to work with manufacturers across Wales to establish a culture of service innovation. Design brings an established set of tools, methods and approaches that can be used to help companies shift their thinking from products to services and provide a clear path to service innovation.
Prior to establishing The Service Design Programme I worked at the service design agency thinkpublic in London as head of design. During my time at thinkpublic I led projects on service design and innovation for organisations such as the NHS, NESTA and the QCDA.

Check out www.testyourservice.co.uk for more information about the programme

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

I’m interested in service design because it brings creativity and business strategy together in new ways, moving design from production or marketing areas of a business and into the boardroom.
For me, the exciting bit about service design is the new stuff. The thing that makes service design unique is that it’s all about the future state and designing new offers that customers or users will buy into. Service design has been happening for years, but only recently has it become established within the design community. This surge in client interest within design agencies has occurred because the designer brings creativity, new ideas and an established and engaging process that ultimately results in better outcomes for the client.
In my view, service designers get too caught up establishing processes and methods of working, losing focus on the end goal and the design outcome. That’s why we started designing in the first place isn’t it? To create new and exciting things that are better than what exists already?

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

I’m currently using The Service Design Programme to research the return on investment (ROI) for businesses in service design. By using a robust evaluation process with companies new to service design we have been able to demonstrate the impact of ‘service thinking’, one company where this has been particularly evidentl is Aggrelek.

Aggrelek are an SME manufacturer based in Swansea, who after completing a collaborative service design project with Design Wales can identify some simple but powerful statistics. For example, after investing £50,000 in a new offer for customers, the company saw sales of £500,000 from the service within six months. The aim is to use this evaluation process with all companies engaged in The Service Design Programme to generate an evidence base for design-led service innovation.

My colleagues Anna Whicher and Gavin Cawood have also co-ordinated large amounts of research into service design at a European Policy level through the SEE project. There is an extensive archive of bulletins, case studies and reports available through: www.seeproject.org

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

The obvious answer here is return on investment (ROI); all design disciplines suffer from the inability to nail returns directly onto the investment in design. This has to change and if marketing and sales can do this why can’t design?
If you’re the director of an SME and you want to grow your business, how do you spend your money? You could spend it on a lean expert who can cut out waste within your production process, resulting in measurable cost savings. Perhaps you could spend your budget building a better sales team, resulting in increased sale? Or you could spend it with a service designer creating new customer experiences?
I believe that design offers the best solution and a well presented case study and persuasive presenter may be able to convince the company director too, but form their point of view it’s still a gamble and that’s all down to a lack of solid research into ROI.
It’s a tough sell when pitched like this but the message is clear, if I invest in service design what is my return on investment?

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Your suggestions for the blog:

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

John Sneddon (Systems Thinking)
He comes from the world of lean but his arguments and thinking is all about good service design. John established the concept of systems thinking and has written a large amount of material on this. He is also quite a character and a great speaker.
www.systemsthinking.co.uk

What is the question do you have about Service Design?
“What happens when everyone stops thinking service design is new?”

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?

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?

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

My research centres on the use of aesthetic design as an element of service innovation with a focus on technology-based enterprises. My focus is on the subset of service design which has to do with appealing to the human senses and creating symbolic, emotional and experiential value. My empirical context of technology-based firms is an interesting one, and also a somewhat unlikely one. Technology-based enterprises tend to focus mostly on technological innovation while neglecting opportunities for gaining competitive advantage through aesthetic design.

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

As discussed above, I find the issue of how services can be designed to appeal to the human senses and create symbolic, emotional and experiential value particularly interesting. It is becoming increasingly true that functionality and technological performance are baseline requirements for new products, while not constituting a basis for competitive advantage. Likewise, new services must compete based on more than well-designed service processes or service blueprints. Service processes or service blueprints can be regarded in a similar fashion as the engineering design that goes into developing a new product; absolutely vital, but not sufficient for competitive advantage.

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

I have been involved in a longitudinal panel study among new and young technology-based firms in Iceland – the predominant majority of which are service firms – for the past five years. The research is being conducted by the Reykjavik University Centre for Research on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CRIE). This longitudinal study provides a unique opportunity to follow new and young technology-based firms as they develop their first services, launch them on the market – successfully or not so successfully – and continue to refine these services. The use of aesthetic design seems to increase as services mature and as the use of aesthetic design becomes more prevalent in a firm’s sector. This suggests that aesthetic design may itself eventually become a baseline requirement for competition in such sectors.

I have also conduced in-depth case research in young technology-based firms to gain a deeper understanding on how and why they use aesthetic design.

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

Aesthetic design of services can be viewed as consisting of two dimensions. The first dimension is concerned with appealing to the human senses and this has strong similarities with the aesthetic design of products, which focuses on appearance, sounds, textures, smells and tastes. I would like to delve into the second dimension, which is the experiential dimension. How can firms that don’t belong to entertainment sectors stage experiences through their services? What benefits can be reaped from deliberate experience staging in non-entertainment firms and how?

I find collaborative research, especially across more than one country, particularly fruitful and enjoyable, and would welcome interesting opportunities for such collaboration.