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

I currently work on two related areas: designing for service, and managing as designing. The first foregrounds the importance of practices in the designing of service systems and encounters which constitute possibilities for the exchange of service for service, but is not restricted to those who are self-conscious designers, or those who have been to design school or bought a book on “design thinking”. The second area, inspired by Dick Boland and Fred Collopy’s 2002 workshop and 2004 book, explores the possibilities of thinking of managing as designing, and in particular what this might mean for managers and entrepreneurs.

Like several others, I have started using the term “designing for service” rather than service design. Rather than seeing service design as a subset of another design field eg interaction design, and as quite distinct from architecture or visual communication design (eg Buchanan’s (2001) four orders of design), I see designing for service as underpinning all design activities in which there is an intention to cocreate value, although that may be defined and enacted in different ways. In this I am influenced by Vargo and Lusch (2004) and others’ attention to value-in-use rather than value-in-exchange and theories of practice and consumption in sociology and anthropology (eg Shove et al 2007; Schatzki et al 2001; Reckwitz 2002; Holt 1995 etc). In short, a building offers service, as does a plastic bottle, as does a poster. Or they should.

Among other things I teach both of these within my MBA elective in Design Leadership which I have been offering at Said since 2005.

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

What I find interesting in “service design” is how undefined and open it is. I hope it remains so for some time. Design is hardly a unified field, and equally services are a huge category. So that means that those of us interested in designing for service are potentially interested in nearly everything. One approach to this messy indeterminacy is to seek to close down meanings, and seize ownership of particular domains of knowledge and practice. Another is to enjoy the ambiguity. Since I am based in a school of management (and therefore in the social sciences, at least officially), my approach to designing for service is tempered by many encounters with colleagues who are management or organization researchers with an interest in services management and innovation for whom something called service design is still new. But they do not, a priori, immediately think of going and looking for or indeed at a design-based field for knowledge or inspiration. Operations managers have been designing services for decades – so what, if anything, do designerly designers bring? Being on this boundary – as someone who is from design (in the sense of design-school design), but in dialogue with researchers who are not – is uncomfortable and generative.

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

I led a project called Designing for Services in Science- and Technology-based Enterprises, with my colleague Victor Seidel, which was supported by the UK AHRC-EPSRC’s Designing for the 21st Century initiative. We gathered around 30 mostly UK academics (from management fields such as operations, strategy, marketing, innovation studies) and design, along with several leading consultancies doing service design (livework, IDEO, Radarstation, IBM) and enterprises offering services based on recent scientific innovations. The aim of the project was to try to surface how each of these conceived of designing for service. We explored this by asking three consultancies to work for and with a paired enterprise and by hearing first-hand from them as they went through a (necessarily short) design process, and through in depth ethnographic study of two of these projects. A key question that emerged was – what do the designerly designers do that is significantly different to the ways that people who do not call themselves designers go about designing for service? Answers included: attending to the material artefacts that are involved in constituting service; foregrounding the human experience of the service (cf Bate and Robert 2007) as a way into designing it; conceiving of service as services-in-practice; and having an iterative design process based on contextual observation, visualisation and prototyping etc (what some people currently refer to as design thinking).

Other things I note are
- efforts to construct a ‘services science’ by large IT-based corporations including IBM rooted in a desire to (a) expand an area of knowledge and (b) have a long term sustainable business;
- ongoing efforts to link designing for service to sustainability in both environmental and social terms, but missing some links to social entrepreneurship that might be useful;
- lots of work on healthcare service innovation through design;
- a focus on ‘behaviour’, a term rooted in cognitive science which – if you are influenced by anthropology, social theory and pscyhoanalysis, as I am – then misses important questions about structure and agency in practices as we try to understand why and how people do and say the things they do;
- a continuing emphasis on Service Design framed in terms of design studies, interaction design, participatory design and HCI, rather than operations management, services marketing or organization design, for example, let alone science and technology studies, consumption theory, practice theory and so on.

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

The things I am currently exploring are:
(1) Trying to understand the developing ‘service-dominant logic’ articulated by Vargo and Lusch (2004; 2008) building on the work of many others especially in services marketing, and understand its implications for designing for service. Key issues here are understanding how the concept of value cocreation is mobilized in design.
(2) Strands of interpretive ethnography and science and technology studies which are concerned with the limits of representation, to understand the ways that designers and managers designing services do boundary work defining what is within and what is outside of a service and how designing services happens in practice. An example here is the possibilities and limitations of 2-d artefacts such as blueprints/customer journey maps and the extent to which they can represent a service experience or system.
(3) Trying to think about the ways that designers, managers and their designs design service users (cf Woolgar 1991). While I was very influenced by the claims of “user-centred” or “human-centred” design a decade ago (when I was a practitioner working in web/mobile/IT) I am now more cautious about the politics and ethics of speaking for and engaging with “stakeholders” and “users”, both actual people and a social imaginary.

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Your suggestions for the blog:

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

Steve Vargo
Steve Street
Chris Voss
Irene Ng
Kate Blackmon
Rafael Ramirez
Noortje Marres
Nina Wakeford
Harriet Harris
Inderpaul Johar
Paul Bate
Lynne Maher

What is the question do you have about Service Design?

I probably have more questions about the researchers, policymakers and practice communities who are using this term.

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?