Touchpoint Vol. 1 No. 3 - Beyond Basics

volume 1 | no. 3 | 12,80 euro

January 2010

Touchpoint the journal of service design

Beyond Basics •

Make yourself useful Joe Heapy

•

Do you really need that iPhone App? Mark Jones

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Service Design 2020: What does the future hold and (how) can we shape it?

Bruce S. Tether and Ileana Stigliani

service design network

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Touchpoint Touchpoint

Proof Reading

Volume 1, No. 3

Lektorat Rotstift (Kirsten Skacel)

January 2010

Engine (Julie McManus)

The Journal of Service Design

Judith Altenau

ISSN 1868-6052

Minka Rössner

Publisher

Printing

Service Design Network

Heider Druck GmbH, Bergisch Gladbach

Editor Birgit Mager

Fonts Mercury G3

Editorial Board

Whitney Pro

Jamin Hegeman Shelley Evenson

Service Design Network

Oliver King

Prof. Birgit Mager

Stefan Holmlid

Ubierring 40 50678 Cologne

Coordination

Germany

Judith Altenau

www. service-design-network.org

Design

Contact

Continuum

Judith Altenau

Johannes Schott

journal@ service-design-network.org

Cover Picture Joydeep Sengupta,

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copyrights of all images used for

Special Thanks to

illustration lie with the author(s)

Eugene Danilkis and Joydeep Sen-

of the respective article

gupta for all conference pictures

contents

January 2010

Beyond Basics Service Design Conference 2009

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06 From the editors 08 Service Design Methodologies Service Design specific theories, methods and perspectives.

10 Confessions of a Service Design researcher Tamsin Smith

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How sticky research drives Service Design Bas Raijmakers, Andreas Sommerwerk, Julia Leihener and Indri Tulusan

23 Service-dominant logic and design for service Lucy Kimbell

26 Deep co-creation – deep challenges?

Jari Halonen, Petra Turkama and Andrea Botero

28 Locative narratives as experience: A new perspective on location-aware multimedia stories

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Valentina Nisi and Ian Oakley

32 Service Design 2020: What does the future hold and (how) can we shape it?

Bruce S. Tether and Ileana Stigliani

38 Workshop: Learning from failure Stefan Holmlid and Jamin Hegeman

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contents

40 Service Design and Business The impact of Service Design on the success of businesses and its application to different business settings.

42 Make yourself useful Joe Heapy

50 Do you really need that iPhone App?

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Mark Jones

58 Mind your own business. Service Design in a B2B context

Ben Reason

62 Exploring healthcare Shelley Evenson and Maggie Breslin

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66 Service Design put to the test Miia Lammi and Kai Hämäläinen

68 Workshop: Selling Service Design Mike Culverwell and Oliver King

70 Service Design and Behavioural Change How can Service Design influence the behaviour of people within service systems?

72 Service Design and behavioural change Birgit Mager

76 Motivating Employees: Driving frontline behaviour Craig LaRosa and Jon Campbell

82 Creating tribal affiliation Adam Dole

84 Key principles of how to make Service Design stick in health

Julia Schaeper

88 Workshop: Design thinking | A Service Design workshop Craig LaRosa and Jon Campbell

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90 Interdisciplinarity in Service Design How can and does Service Design inspire other disciplines and how do such interdisciplinary cross-overs provide new opportunities for the Service Design field?

92 The rise of smart services in business Helmut Aschbacher and Ernst Kreutzer

94 Practice of Service Design for tourism initiative:

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The quality of interpersonal relationships as design requirements Ivan Bursztyn, Roberto Bartholo and Carla Cipolla

98 Performing Arts and Service Design Adrienne Schäfer and Markus Berg

102 Designing for the masses. Service Design for small and medium sized enterprises

Jürgen Faust and Thomas Schönweitz

104 Workshop: Interdisciplinarity in Co-Design Mary Rose Cook and Zoe Stanton

106 Service Design Snapshots 108 Enabling Service Design for the poor Priti Rao

108 Capturing moments

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Zoe Bridges

109 Knowledge management touchpoints Mauricio Manhaes

110 Service Design Competition An interview with Nuno Laginha, winner of the SDN Service Design competition 2009

114 Member Map

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from the editors

Letter from the Editor

Birgit Mager Editor Touchpoint

Shelley Evenson is a principal, User Experience Designer at Microsoft. She has been an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Design, where she was also the director of graduate studies. She teaches in the area of Interaction and Service Design.

In recent years, Service Design has established an amazing body of knowledge, a large variety of relevant methods and many case studies that show the application and the impact of Service Design. So far, the work of Service Design has been mainly visible in the field of exploration and innovation for front stage experiences. Several methods, the customer journey, touchpoints, design probes, exploration tools, co-creation, storyboarding, service enactments and prototypes, to mention only a few, have been established, adapted and integrated even beyond the Service Design practice.

The next step in the growth of Service Design is making it even more relevant, impactful and broadly implemented in business practice.

The second international Service Design Network Conference addressed such issues and tried to explore “beyond basics”. More then 100 practioners and academics from all over the world came to Madeira,

Jamin Hegeman is a Senior Designer at Nokia Design in San Francisco, where he works to define new services, experiences, and business opportunities. He has a Masters in design from Carnegie Mellon University, and a degree in poetry writing from the University of Pittsburgh.

Portugal to participate in an inspiring and fruitful exchange.

This issue of Touchpoint invites you to dive into the conference’s discussions and reflections. You will find a diverse collection of contributions that reflects the Service Design community and their different perspectives in its heterogenity: academics, companies, agencies – some of them really close to the Service Design world, others approaching in search of opportunities for synergies and inspiration.

We open this issue of Touchpoint with a cluster of articles that go deeper into Service Design specific theories, methods and perspectives. The second cluster of contributions expands the scope looking at business success and how Service Design can be applied to different business settings, for example in the B2B field. Service Design is about people and the interaction of people. How can Service Design influence behaviour of people within service systems? – This is the question that the third cluster of articles explores. Service Design has inspired other disciplines such as marketing, knowledge management and engineering. The forth cluster of articles gives insight into interdisciplinary crossovers, which might open new doors for the Service Design field.

What did we get out of the conference “beyond basics”? Design can, and necessarily has to, contribute to strategic and organisational change and to the development of a service culture. As a change agent and driver of innovation Service Design moves deeper into strategic and operational business issues. It will also have to face the challenge of measuring the impact of Service Design.

We asked the editorial board what they see “beyond basics”: “I'm curious about three lines of development; all of them asking new questions. One is towards the aesthetics of services. What are the aesthetics of action, interaction and participation? What is the

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aesthetics of viewing users as resourceful? Two is towards design processes. How will the long tail of design techniques develop and advance the toolbox of Service Designers? How will Service Design systematically improve and deal with industrialisation? Where will new emancipatory objectives emerge to drive participation and user involvement? The third is towards systemic thinking and action. What theories from complex systems and cognitive sciences can be applied in Service Design?” Stefan Holmlid "We aren't alone in the world of Service Design. Many disciplines and professionals contribute to, or do

Oliver King is a Co–founder and Director of Engine, one of the UK’s leading Service Design consultancies. Engine specializes in helping specialisations and organisations in the private and public sector identify and deliver service propositions to better connect with their customers.

what we do, but in a different way. To move beyond basics we need to understand our place in the world.

What can we learn from others, how do we fit together, what is our USP and what is theirs. Knowing this will help us develop the specialisms, credibility, evidence and relationships we need to develop and maintain a sustainable proposition and business case for what we do." Oliver King “Several presentations and articles discuss the systematising of practice into toolkits that, with a little training, enable Service Design novices to make an impact in designing for service experience in everything from healthcare to retail. Mark Jones illustrated the power of deeply integrating ideas of brand and value with Service Design. Add this to Lucy Kimball's suggestion that Service Design is a fundamental activity that underpins all other design activity, and my own assertion that the act of

Stefan Holmlid is Assistant Professor of Interaction and Service Design at Linköping University in Sweden. Since 2003 he has been running several Service Design research projects, with a focus on user involvement and design techniques in service development and innovation projects.

participating in a service is design; it's clear that practical applications and fertile areas of research are driving us beyond basics and toward Service Design as a growing profession.” Shelley Evenson “When we talk about Service Design basics, what do we mean? Process and methods? We have these.

But simply executing design process and methods does not guarantee effective Service Design practice.

As Service Design advances, we will need to look more closely at the role of individual designers and the culture of design firms in producing successful solutions. We will need to examine and understand the impact of forces outside of the design process, identify what knowledge we lack, and who we need to collaborate with to ensure both the success and sustainability of the services we design.” Jamin Hegeman

Birgit Mager Editor in Chief touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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chapter preview

Service Design Methodologies Service Design specific theories, methods and perspectives.

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Confessions of a Service Design researcher Tamsin Smith

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How sticky research drives Service Design Bas Raijmakers, Andreas Sommerwerk, Julia Leihener and Indri Tulusan

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Service-dominant logic and design for service Lucy Kimbell

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Deep co-creation – deep challenges?

Jari Halonen and Petra Turkama

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Service Design 2020: What does the future hold and (how) can we shape it?

Bruce S. Tether and Ileana Stigliani

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Workshop: Learning from failure Stefan Holmlid and Jamin Hegeman

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By Tamsin Smith

Confessions of a Service Design researcher Design research is an implicit and inseparable aspect of Service Design. But as ever, designers like to do things their own way and this includes the way they do research. Traditional research skills such as listening, observing, and investigating alone, are not effective enough for Service Design. Our approach needs to be collaborative, creative and inspirational. The roles of researcher and designer blur as both mindsets should be inherent in a generalist Service Designer. Service Design researchers need to be able to plan the research, design effective research activities, and synthesise insights systematically and meaningfully to create value.

At Engine we’ve developed an approach and point of view on the way we do design research for Service Design, presented here as four confessions.

Confession 1: Anyone can do research Design research is a creative and qualitative exercise – it should not be overloaded in theory. Anyone can have a conversation, listen, observe, read, and investigate. Design researchers need not be trained specialists. Service Designers at Engine are more generalists than specialists; it is they that do the research and the design. The advantage of being generalist is full involvement across

Tamsin Smith

Service Designer, Engine Service Design

projects. During research generalists can be goal-orientated and dig for insights that are meaningful to Service Design from the outset. After all, the outcomes of the research are ultimately to serve the creation of successful services.

As Service Design aims to create a symbiotic relationship between provider and user, research is designed to actively involve and investigate all significant people in the service ecosystem. In order to understand people, systems, strategy, and business models, Service Design borrows from, and is, a mash up of disciplines. Conducting design research is the foundation for building and developing any project. Research is touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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confessions of a service design researcher

By Tamsin Smith

»It is time to measure our work not only by degree of insight, but by degree of impact on services organisations and the services they deliver.«

a period of discovery and a process of realisation, formulation, and refinement.

Insights, ideas, and issues are uncovered at every stage of the design process.

Inspirational, actionable, and directional research is of most use to designers.

Insights need to provide a clear route towards service propositions. I believe the DASH (Designing Awesome Service Holistically) symbol neatly represents the Service Designer as a hybrid breed.

The new breed of Service Designers are well rounded, have a broad skill set, and don’t necessarily need specialism. They need the ability to be empathetic and work across disciplines like ethnography, interaction design, system thinking, and communication design.

Confession 2: Research is rigged Service Design research is not scientific.

Service Design decisions cannot be made on quantitative findings alone, as these tend not to be actionable or inspirational to designers. Ideally a project has a mix of both types of research, but it’s ultimately the qualitative work that inspires the experiential aspects of a service that will turn people from users into advocates. We are specialist at setting up and synthesizing research.

Rigging research means building an informed hypothesis of the project proposition and a set of parameters for the research. Parameters enable the planning of appropriate recruitment segmentation, samples, and methodologies. Market factors such as changing users’ needs and trends affecting the organisation or service are an example.

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#DRC09 @mrettig: You can’t research the future, but you can immerse yourself in the present...leading to understanding, reframing.

Because people choose services based on their needs, values, and behaviours, for user research we recruit a mix of people based on these criteria. To get a range of understanding we often look into pronounced behaviours or extremes, also known as the Goldilocks principle. The Goldilocks Principle derives from the children’s story Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Goldilocks, a little girl, found a house owned by three bears. Each bear had their own copy of things such as food and beds.

After testing each of the three, Goldilocks determined that one was too extreme (too hot, too large), one was the opposite (too cold, too small), and one was “just right”. The idea is that the way forward lies in finding a middle path between opposites. Setting tighter parameters provides a better environment for discovery, just like scientists set the conditions for discovery to take place.

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD properties by unintentionally ingesting it at his lab, wrote: “It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceuti-

cal, chemical research. It could better be described as serendipity.”

Confession 3: Research is designed Controlling the dynamics of a research engagement is important to navigate tensions and to get the most out of research. Tension may arise from research participants being unfamiliar with research, feeling uncomfortable disclosing personal information or uncomfort-

able with the company they are in. The use of gaming distracts participants and makes them more comfortable in their interactions. At Engine we’ve recently used games like Guess Who and Lego to provoke people to make decisions and understand challenges. It’s important to build trust with participants; one way we’ve done this at Engine is to craft carefully-considered cultural probes for design ethnographies. In research with vulnerable user groups, we’ve sent

»It’s important to build trust with participants; one way we’ve done this at Engine is to craft carefullyconsidered cultural probes for design ethnographies.«

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confessions of a service design researcher

By Tamsin Smith

ÂťService Design researchers need to be able to plan the research, design effective research activities, and synthesize insights systematically and meaningfully to create value.ÂŤ

simple identity cards and introduction packs in advance.

Design research activities and tools should be enjoyable, engaging experiences for both participant and design researcher. For example, journals we’ve designed at Engine have been interactive and playful for the participant. They are also designed to feel personal and encourage self-reflection and better articulation

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of thoughts, needs, and desires.

Confession 4: The secret is in the synthesis The synthesis of design research is often considered to be the magic part of the process. Analysis is where much of the value of our research is realized and a foundation for proposition development is built. This translation space is

the most creative part of the process, managing the simplification of complexity and guiding data to insights and then to propositions and principles. Making sense of service contexts occurs through playing with the research data in many ways, such as: deconstructing, re-arranging, filtering, aggregating, prioritizing, etc. It also involves constantly reframing shifting perspectives to see things in different ways, alternating from needs to propositions. Revisiting the initial hypothesis during synthesis helps to understand, validate, or disprove initial points of view and answer the questions set through parameters. A designer’s ability to visualize lends itself well to making sense of data and to quickly signify meaning. The broad experience of Service Design consultants helps in knowing what to look for. From our practise we’ve noted a wide variety of characteristics that make a service good, for example these include being usable: clear, simple, intuitive, assessable, and guided; useful: meaningful, practical, customisable, self-serviceable, and consistent; desirable: trustworthy, enriching, immersive, fulfilling, and caring.

Industry-wide, the synthesis space is poorly documented and shared. The panel at the Illinois Institute of Technology Design Research Conference in 2009 IITDRC09 are in agreement:

Conclusion The basic skills of a traditional researcher – having a conversation, listening, observing, reading, and investigating – are not enough for effective Service Design.

The roles of researcher and designer blur as both mindsets should be inherent in a generalist Service Designer. Service Design researchers need to be able to plan the research, design effective research activities, and synthesize insights systematically and meaningfully to create value. Service Design researchers need to be comfortable opening up their approach, sharing methods and processes in the spirit of co-creation. The role of a design researcher has shifted from being customer-centred to stakeholdercentred and from being a sole creator to a capability builder. As Service Design researchers, we should embrace these responsibilities and newfound abilities to collaborate, guide, and influence, playing a strategic and influential role in designing great services. It is time to measure our work not only by degree of insight, but by degree of impact on services organisations and the services they deliver.

Tamsin Smith has worked at Engine across projects for Vodafone, BBC, BAA, Transport for London, P&O and Eurostar. Tamsin has a background in design research and a first class degree in user-centered Product Design from The Glasgow School of Art. Prior to joining Engine, Tamsin worked in the UK Design Council’s Design Knowledge team.

RT @gbiller: #DRC09 panel mostly in unison about their weakest links: synthesis! making those tough linkages from research to solutions

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By Bas Raijmakers, Andreas Sommerwerk, Julia Leihener and Indri Tulusan

How sticky research drives Service Design »Anna has just arrived home. Her dogs lie flat-out on the floor, recovering from a few hours of running in the woods outside of Berlin, and Anna is getting ready to cook herself some dinner. “If someone rings me now, I wouldn’t pick up the phone,” she tells a small USB Video Camera, “but if one of my neighbours knocks on the door, I would invite them to have dinner with me.« The problem of lost shoes How can we create an experience that is enjoyable and valuable for the people for whom we design? We all know it is of great help if, at the beginning of our endeavour, we put ourselves in the shoes of our future users and walk around in them to explore their context from their perspective. This type of ethnographically-inspired design research, and the insights that result from it should be present through the design process so the design team can not only be inspired by it, but also check if the ideas that they have still make sense in the users’ world. This is where many practitioners in Service Design run into problems: the shoes that did such a great job allowing us to understand the future users’ context during research are lost or no longer fit when the design process progresses.

After a while, we miss a link to the initial research. So when the Deutsche Telekom Creation Center asked Spur

and STBY to embark on a joint project in spring 2008, the key question was: how can we keep walking in the shoes of our users throughout the entire design process?

Bas Raijmakers

Co-founder, STBY

Text-message-prompted video probes The Creation Centre in Berlin is a department of Deutsche Telekom that was set up almost two years ago to nudge service innovation projects inside the company to using stronger user involvement. It is at the Creation Centre where designers and company project managers step into users’ shoes to explore their worlds.

In this paper, we describe one example project aimed at designing services to enhance community interaction, especially on mobile phones. The Creation Center started with extensive ethnographic research in collaboration with STBY and Spur, two companies focused

Julia Leihener

Product Designer, Deutsche Telekom

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how sticky research drives service design

By Bas Raijmakers, Andreas Sommerwerk, Julia Leihener and Indri Tulusan

Andreas Sommerwerk

Product Designer, Deutsche Telekom

on creating strong connections between research and design by doing design research themselves. On the client side, six product managers were part of the entire process, from initial research to concept development.

In order to make our design research as inspiring as possible, we recruited six urban participants, ranging in age from 26 to 55. We were looking for a variety of users who were socially active, with either digital or analogue tools. We developed a package of ‘auto-ethnographic video probes’ that we gave to the participants during a workshop. The package included a small USB video camera, with which we asked participants to record film clips over a two-week period.

Indri Tulusan

Director and Service Designer, Spur

Auto-ethnographic video probes pack

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Most successful was a video probe we triggered by text messages. We gave the participants ‘tools’ to highlight and comment on their surroundings, e.g. an arrow, a heart and an exclamation mark to point at things or to express like and an ’X’ to indicate dislike. Over several days, we sent the participants text messages unexpectedly. Here is one message we sent: “Hi, we’re up to the last task: Suppose your friends could always see where you are and what you are doing, if you let them. Attach a tool to something you really don’t want them to see. Please film your 3 clips, and talk about what you don’t want to show your friends. Thanks a lot for all the films!.”

Bas Raijmakers co-founded design research company STBY (Standby) in London and Amsterdam with Dr. Geke van Dijk. STBY focuses on social research for design and innovation for clients in industry and the public sector. Bas has a background in cultural studies and the early days of the internet industry.

He holds a PhD in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art.

Tools to comment while recording the videos

The three clips mentioned in the message refer to a script we had developed beforehand and practiced in a workshop with the participants when we distributed the probes. The scripting was important because it limited our need to edit 250+ film clips into short films; one person spent only one day editing all of them. The script consisted of the user making two 360-degree shots, turning the camera first outwards and then to himself or herself, while explaining his or her surroundings. The third shot was a close-up of the object the participant chose in response to the text message prompt, with a voice-over explaining their choice.

What's nice about text messaging is that it is widely accepted as an "intimate" communication tool. The use of video and our request to talk directly into the

camera builds on that intimacy. Both support the self reflection we wanted to encourage and fit well with the more pervasive societal practice of confiding in a video camera. The approach allowed us to get very close to the private sphere of the users. The text message prompts also allowed participant to stay in control of the situation and pause for reflection before answering, a type of control that is lacking in a one-to-one interview. At the same time, the data was more focused on the research questions than data from an open video diary, which would have been much harder to edit. The resulting short films proved to be very useful throughout the project. We kept making connections to the films at all stages of the design process. For this reason we started to call them ‘sticky’: the design research remained with us for a long time, which touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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how sticky research drives service design

By Bas Raijmakers, Andreas Sommerwerk, Julia Leihener and Indri Tulusan

We asked this participant via textmessage what she would not want her friends to see at that moment. She was in the middle of the street, had to think about it, but then swung the camera around and took out her false teeth.

»How can we create an experience that is enjoyable and valuable for the people for whom we design?« 20

was important because we wanted to stay as close to our future users as possible.

Inspiration Equally important as making research part of design is the reverse: bringing design into research. Design was very present in the probes, e.g. the heart, exclamation mark and cross, and the film scripts were designed so we would get stories, not just videos. As design researchers, we were aware we would need to inspire and motivate the participants

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to make our approach work. The resulting films inspired the design team during subsequent stages of the design process.

Also important: the probes triggered a flow of ideas from people who were not trained as designers, namely the product managers on the project team. The movies inspired the creation of insights, opportunities, ideas, and concepts. ‘Being there’ with the people for whom we designed, through the films, was very valuable. We got access to our participants’ intimate moments, for instance when they were alone at home, too tired

Use of video probes to communicate research and ideas in workshops

to talk to anyone else, or right after they spent a relaxing hour in the bathtub.

One of the participants even took out her false teeth to show us what she did not want her friends to see. The movies gave us undigested reality and many surprises. The raw, first-hand quality spiced up our creative process and was the main reason the research remained "sticky" through the process. We could say inspiration flowed two ways: first from designer to participant through the probes and then back from participant to designer through the films.

Evidence Besides providing strong inspiration, the films played another role: they served as evidence for the insights, opportunities, ideas, and concepts we invented during the design process. This evidence was particularly strong because it came from the people for whom we were designing the services. Insights, opportunities, ideas and concepts always run the risk of being too bland if they are not firmly rooted in everyday life. The films offered these essential connections. Some films were quite emotional, e.g. the relaxation

Julia Leihener was originally trained as a Product & Process Designer, Julia has been active in the development of consumer oriented future visions for the mobile communications industry for more than five years. Her focus is on exploring and interpreting the impact of new technology on society in an academic as well as an industrial context.

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how sticky research drives service design

By Bas Raijmakers, Andreas Sommerwerk, Julia Leihener and Indri Tulusan

Sticky Research throughout the whole project process

Indri Tulusan is Director and Service Designer at Spur. Indri is an expert in transforming consumer insights, technology innovation and brand vision into desirable userexperiences. She has over eight years of experience in conducting design innovation projects. She is educated in Medical Science and Product Design and holds an MA from the Royal College of Art. Andreas Sommerwerk is a Designer at Deutsche Telekom, who works closely with customers and product managers to shape future Service Design concepts both for the mobile as well as the fixed line business.

For the past year he has been setting up a platform for consumer oriented innovation development at the T-Mobile Creation Center, Berlin. He holds an MA in Product Design from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.

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of someone at home alone, cooking dinner after a long and tiring day, and they created an emotional attachment with the ideas. These are moments when it suddenly becomes easy to step into the shoes of a future user; you see the situation in front of you, in the film, and you can imagine how your idea would work in that situation. Since we had many films, we never had to depend on a single example for support. The films not only helped us immerse ourselves in a specific context, but they also helped to immerse our ideas into these scenarios.

could generate revenue in the future.

The movies were sticky not only because of their intensity – but also because they provided an easy-to-understand language for people from different professional backgrounds with different perspectives on and interests in the same topic, here enhancing community interaction via mobile phones. With the films, anyone can step into the shoes of our users quite easily; even after the design process is finished. It is very valuable that the movies helped us reach not only the minds but also the hearts of the decision makers.

Communication Ideas only become valuable for the user and for a company if they are implemented. For implementation, innovators need to convince many people from other departments their ideas are worth expending time and effort on. This is difficult. We needed to interest these people in our process, our research, and our ideas. Here again, the movies helped. They showed how we started our process, they illustrated the opportunities we identified, and they showed why the ideas were relevant and served actual needs. At the end of the day, the films showed real business opportunities that

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We discovered video probes prompted by text message provided shoes we could wear through the entire design process and were easy for others to wear later when they sought evidence to support design proposals. The films helped us to keep our users’ daily lives, with all their idiosyncrasies and routines, stuck in our minds during the design process and in the communication of our results. Using video probes, we were better able to develop services that created value not only for our companies or clients but also for our eventual users.

By Lucy Kimbell

Service-dominant logic and design for service

Recent work on services in management provides an important resource for developing knowledge about design for service. Building on work in services marketing, economics, and sociology, Vargo and Lusch (2004; 2008a) identify a shift from a goods-centred model of exchange focused on tangibles towards a “service-dominant logic” focused on dynamic relationships and processes. This essay explores the implications for design for service.

Vargo and Lusch revisit early developments in economics and find that the emphasis on value-in-exchange obscured value-in-use, leading to the still-dominant idea that units of output are products (or services). In contrast, drawing on their reading of Adam Smith and others, Vargo and Lusch argue that the fundamental basis of economic activity is the exchange of service for service (cf Ramírez 1999). They define service as “the application of specialised competences (…) through deeds, processes, and performances for the benefit of another entity or the entity itself” (Vargo and Lusch 2008b: 26). While their work is rooted in marketing’s concept of the market, their definition does not assume services are exchanged for profit.

Instead of seeing services (in the plural) as what products are not, the concept of service (in the singular) foregrounds the application of one’s resources for the benefit of another.

This can be achieved with goods, which Vargo and Lusch see as a distribution mechanism for service provision (2008a), but the fundamental exchange is service for ser-

vice in a dynamic process. Instead of value being embedded in objects through a value chain, value is created through exchanges of service in value constellations (Norman and Ramírez 1993) or value-co-creation systems (Maglio and Spohrer 2008).

For Vargo and Lusch, the “service economy” is not new; all economies are service economies.

This definition highlights the role played by customers in co-creating value in the exchange of service.

Instead of the production/consumption dyad in which value is consumed (Ramírez 1999), servicedominant logic sees customers, end users, and other stakeholders as always involved in co-creating value. Customer value-creating processes are dynamic, interactive and non-linear (Payne et al 2008). Situated in day-to-day, often mundane experiences, services are co-created in practise through the embodied doings and sayings of end users (Schatzki 2001).

What do these concepts mean for the design for service? To open up this enquiry, we propose a definition: Designing for service is the

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service-dominant logic and design for service

By Lucy Kimbell

ÂťDesign for service is fundamental to all design activity, rather than being a specialist subfield.ÂŤ

conceiving, planning, and realizing of the dynamic systems and experiences in which one service is exchanged for another in an ongoing process, the value of which is constituted in practise. There are three consequences.

The first is that there is a necessary indeterminacy within design for service. Those, such as customers, who are involved in exchanging one service for another, within one system, will also be part of other processes and systems, making it impossible to define the boundaries

Inside the Little Chef Restaurant, Popham, UK. Re-design by Ab Rogers Design.

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of service. Defining the boundaries of service is necessarily impossible, since an actor who is involved in processes of exchanging one service for another, with one system, will also be part of other processes and systems. Another aspect of the indeterminacy is that service is part of a dynamic and interactive exchange process taking place over time. Designing for service is designing for incompleteness (Garud et al 2008).

Second, the value of service is co-created through the practises of stakeholders: what they do, what

they think, know and learn, what they say, the objects that are part of the service encounter, how it feels, and the structures that are enacted through practise (cf Payne et al 2008; Reckwitz 2002). Designing for service involves thinking of services-in-practise (cf Orlikowksi 2000) in which the value co-created is emergent, situated, and dynamic.

A key task is to identify, account for, and represent value co-created in practise, presenting theoretical and methodological challenges. An important way forward has been experience-based design approaches and methods, based in cultural anthropology’s attentiveness to making sense of how other people make sense (eg Bate and Robert 2007; Parker and Heapy 2006).

Third, design for service becomes an activity that underpins Buchanan’s (1992; 2001) four orders of design – symbols, things, actions, and thought – which he sees as “placements” for designers’ activities. The definition of design for service offered here foregrounds the exchange of one service for another within value co-creation, in which objects are mechanisms for the exchange of service. Symbols, things, actions, and thought are all placements for the exchange of service for service, topics for the discovery of what service means. Therefore design for service is fundamental to all design activity, rather than being a specialist subfield.

References • Bate, P. and Robert, G. (2007): Bringing user experience to healthcare improvement: The concepts, methods and practices of experience-based design. Oxford: Radcliffe.

• Buchanan, R. (1992): Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues, 8 (2): 5–21.

• Buchanan, R. (2001): Design research and the new learning.

Design Issues, 17 (4), 3–23.

• Garud, R., Jain, S. and Tuertscher, P. (2008): Incomplete by design and designing for incompleteness. Organization Studies, 29 (3), 351–371.

• Maglio, P. and Spohrer, J. (2008): Fundamentals of service science.

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36 (1): 18–20.

• Norman, R. and Ramírez, R. (1993): Designing interactive strategy: From value chain to value constellation. Harvard Business Review, 71 (4): 65–77.

• Orlikowski, W. (2000): Using technology and constituting structures: A practice lens for studying technology in organizations. Organization Science, 11 (4): 404–42.

• Payne, A., Storbacka, K. and Frow, P. (2008): Managing the co-creation of value. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36 (1): 83–96.

• Reckwitz, A. (2002): Towards a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing.

European Journal of Social Theory,

5 (2): 243–63.

• Ramírez, R. (1999): Value coproduction: Intellectual origins and implications for practice and research. Strategic Management Journal. 20: 49–65.

• Parker, S. and Heapy, J. (2006): The journey to the interface: How public Service Design can connect users to reform. London: Demos.

• Schatzki, T. R. (2001): Practice theory. In: T. R. Schatzki, K. Knorr Cetina, and E. von Savigny (Eds.): The practice turn in contemporary theory. London: Routledge.

• Vargo, S. and Lusch, R. (2004): Evolving to a new dominant logic in marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68 (1): 1–17.

• Vargo, S. and Lusch, R. (2008a): Service-dominant logic: Continuing the evolution. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36 (1): 1–10.

• Vargo, S. and Lusch, R. (2008b): Why “service”? Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36 (1): 25–38.

Lucy Kimbell, Clark Fellow in Design Leadership, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, UK

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By Petra Turkama, Jari Halonen and Andrea Botero

Deep co-creation – deep challenges?

A case study on real life co-creation challenges in designing services in a networked innovation environment.

This paper presents some of the experi-

Setting and challenges

ences and lessons learned in the User

The UDOI Booster project is a part of a large scale Finnish initiative to boost national innovation and knowledge-based renewal of industries through the concentration of national research initiatives.

The strategic centres of knowledge will help to achieve the critical mass required for global impact and a sustainable national research infrastructure.

Driven Open Innovation Booster research project (UDOI Booster) funded by the Finnish Agency for Technology and Innovation (Tekes). The main aim of this ongoing project is to bring together businesses, user communities and researchers all over Finland, to develop, pilot and deploy service innovations in a collaborative and open manner. A central concern of the initiative is to challenge current design and development practices beyond the view of services as bounded and discrete solutions, towards one which acknowledges the existence of complex service ecosystems. In this sense the project is particularly keen on researching if a user-driven mode of innovation is a viable alternative.

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The first of its kind in terms of partner configuration, UDOI Booster project presented the participants with exciting opportunities for deep co-creation and learning, but also encountered several challenges in the initial phases of the project.

These challenges could be classified in three categories: management challenges, coordination challenges and communication challenges.

The management challenges derived from an unclear distribution of roles, responsibilities and tasks within the project as well as other projects within the programme.

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Mitigation efforts taken included the establishment of regular workshops with other related projects in order to establish common ground and criteria for empirical cases.

Further clarity was achieved by a case brief and offering process with a dedicated case brief manager role.

The UDOI Booster project would have benefited from having a scientific manager who would take ownership for leading the project towards mutually shared targets, as well as to coordinate methodology and tool development work. Clarified coordination in programme level would also have enabled better dialogue with user communities and therefore access to user created innovations.

The strategic fit of the participants has also been identified among the root causes for the communication challenges. Various parties had significantly different motivations, expectations and perceptions of the project, which caused inefficiencies and duplication of effort. Special ef-

ÂťThe call for innovative methods of collaboration with all kinds of stakeholders, users included, is more urgent than ever.ÂŤ

Figure 1: From user-centric to user-driven innovation mode in UDOI project. [adapted from HLL project committee (2006)]

fort has now been placed on clarifying the communication channels, processes and rules of engagement.

Conclusion and next steps Despite the profound challenges, the spirit has remained high and the partners have learned a valuable lesson on how to effectively manage co-operative organisations and deep co-creation where there are different research standpoints and ambitions. Since some of the challenges encountered by the project in building our mutual capacity to understand how to tackle co-creation go well beyond the interaction of a single customer with a Service Design agency or provider, the call for innovative methods of collaboration with all kinds of stakeholders,

users included, is more urgent than ever. The lessons learned signal the potential and need for developing service ecosystems in more concerted ways. However, they also present limitations for current practices of organisational work and views about collaboration.

The next step is to further analyse the initial challenges, and develop the collaboration model and UDOI methodologies based on the findings of the first year. Together with international benchmarking this would provide us with a broad enough evidence base and competencies to build on our strategic research agenda. It will also fulfil the UDOI Booster promise of providing new systemic innovations and services, as well as a scientifically proven,

widely disseminated and deployed end-to-end concept for user driven co-creation in collaborative environments.

Dr. Petra Turkama, Head of research team, Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland Jari Halonen, Project Manager and Researcher, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland Andrea Botero, Researcher, Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland

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By Valentina Nisi and Ian Oakley

Locative narratives as experience: A new perspective on location—aware multimedia stories Location-aware narratives are becoming more commonplace, both in the form of artistic installations and commercial systems. They take diverse forms ranging from single person pieces that require an audience member to hold and aim a handheld video camera to experience linear content (Cardiff, 2001) to systems which require individuals to use a mobile phone to key in numeric codes distributed around a physical urban environment to access audio content ([murmur], 2003) to sophisticated applications on mobile devices which are capable of detecting an individual’s position and displaying personalised video to them in real time (Nisi, Oakley and Haahr, 2008).

However, despite this attention, there have been relatively few attempts to update artistic or narrative frameworks to encompass this new media format. We turn to this task and suggest that locationaware multimedia stories (LAMS) can be viewed as artistic as well as carefully designed experiences, an established position in aesthetic theory. We also link this concept to recent formal analyses of the experience economy and the notion of transformational experiences that are designed to steer their users through an active, engaging process of change. Viewing locative narratives from this perspective will lead to the creation of truly compelling art pieces functioning as services, capable of using the unique qualities of the format to best advantage.

Art is experience; it is not a passive process, nor a painting, sculpture or film but rather a perception, event, or interaction. In ‘Art as Experience’, John Dewey’s seminal lecture series on aesthetic theory at Harvard in 1932, he marks this

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point strongly. According to Dewey, art does not exist until it is observed (Dewey, 1932): “For to perceive, a beholder must create his own experience. And his creation must include relations comparable to those which the original producer underwent. Without an act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art.”

These are powerful statements on the structure and nature of art, which have compelling parallels with more recent literature explicitly addressing the concept of experience. Writing about what they call the Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore (1999) describe experiences as intangible goods conceived, designed, and offered to customers. They state experiences are co-produced by the people together with the service providers.

This concept of an experience has been extended to encompass transformations – experiences which are defined and staged to foster change in its users. Pine and Gilmore make

»Art is experience; it is not a passive process, nor a painting, sculpture or film but rather a perception, event, or interaction.«

Business owner engaged in conversation with LAMS audience members

the following concise distinction: • Experiences are memorable events that are staged for individuals. The event is the offering.

• Transformations are custom experiences designed to guide individuals through a process of change. The individual is the offering.

This article highlights the overlap between interactive art work, and in particular location-aware multimedia stories, and the experiences described by Pine and Gilmore. In particular it focuses on interactive location-aware multimedia stories as transformations. In transformational experiences, the users (or audience in the case of an interactive art work) are guided by an interaction designer or artist through an emotional and transformational journey that happens through the course of consuming the interactive artwork. By engaging with the artwork, the audience actively participates in the co-creation of the experience.

This concept is not entirely novel: interactive artworks have been described as mirrors reflecting the audience’s actions back on themselves, a process which fosters reflection and change (D. Rockeby, 1995). Indeed, the concept of designing and co-creating experiences in the domain of the arts is widely applicable.

For example, a film can be viewed as an artefact designed and produced

to lead its audience through a specific intentional emotional journey.

To fully engage, the audience must interpret and co-create the movie experience at the moment of fruition in the cinema. If the film has been successful, the audience will leave the cinema transformed by the film, although the film’s creators can only indirectly influence what kind of transformation and what kind of specific experiences the audience members will go through while watching the film. Moreover, we see clear parallels between designing and producing a location-aware multimedia story experience and designing and producing a transformational service. We based our parallel on a series of case studies selected from the body of work of FattoriaMediale (www.fattoriamediale.org), where location-aware multimedia story experiences were conceived and developed with local stakeholders early in the production process.

As we continue to develop our approach to LAMS as services and transformations, we would like to incorporate Service Design tools, such as stakeholders models, actor network mapping, and motivation matrices to help concept development and the design of the experience at the earliest possible stage.

Furthermore, we envisage applying ethnographic methods to better understand how the process of storytelling for LAMS projects affects

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locative narratives as experience:

By Valentina Nisi and Ian Oakley

Audience member experiencing TMS stories on location

awareness of both the individual and the community. We are also keen to explore the impact of LAMS experiences on an audience in terms of transformation and how we can capture this change in meaningful, actionable, and informative evaluation.

»Moreover, we see clear parallels between designing and producing a location-aware multimedia story experience and designing and producing a transformational service.« 30

Acknowledgments: We wish to thank all the Baarjes community and our audiences for participating in the project. A special thanks to Lesley Moore, Amsterdam based design firm for producing the graphic work and participating in the project concept. We also wish to acknowledge Digital Pioneers and AFK funding agencies for sponsoring FattoriaMediale non-profit culture and media organisation and making this project possible.

References • Cardiff, J.: Telephone Call (Website accessed July 2009) http:// www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/

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walks/telephonecall.html (2001) • Nisi, V., Oakley, I. & Haahr, M. (2008): “Location-Aware Multimedia Stories: Bringing Together Real and Virtual Spaces”. In: Proceedings of ArTech 2008, Porto, Portugal.

• Deweley, E., Art as Expereince, New York, Minton, Balch and Company, 1934 • Joseph Pine, James H Gilmore, The Experience Economy, Harvard Business School Press, 1 Jan 1999

Valentina Nisi, Assistant Professor Carnegie Mellon and University of Madeira, Funchal, Portugal Ian Oakley, Assistant Professor Carnegie Mellon and University of Madeira, Funchal, Portugal

join

why Service Design network?

The Service Design Network is an internationally aligned forum for practitioners and academics to advance the growing field of the young discipline Service Design. Our purpose is to develop and strengthen the knowledge and expertise in the science and practice of service innovation and to improve services generally. specifically, sdn exists to…

• offer Service Design as a tool to answer contemporary social, economic and environmental challenges.

• create demand for Service Design excellence among service organisations, customers and educators.

• identify research needs and key issues for the development of Service Design projects programs and research nationally as well as internationally.

• develop and share Service Design knowledge & practice.

• consolidate a common Service Design culture and language.

• establish and maintain a network of researchers and practitioners in the field of Service Design.

• integrate Service Design within design, technology & business education.

• promote good examples and best practices of applied Service Design The Service Design Network is rapidly growing – more than 80 full members from all over the world have joined, representing academics, agencies and industries. More than 600 private members have already signed in for Insider, the Service Design Newsletter, and a new community website provides an interactive platform for collaboration and communication among network members. what’s on offer?

To become a member, companies, private firms or institutions must work professionally in the area of Service Design. Membership benefits include: • web space to present your institution or company and its activities (employees/staff, events, projects, publications, job openings).

can establish interest and discussion groups, share events and news from the world of Service Design and post job offers, announcements and discussion topics.

• regular updates updates of the SDN website and member pages • free newsletter • free posting of job advertisements in the Service Design Journal, in the newsletter and on the website • free posting of professional papers in the Service Design Journal, in the newsletter and on the website • the periodical Service Design Journal »Touchpoint« as PDF download join now!

To learn more and to register, visit www.service-design-network.org or contact the Service Design Network Office.

• access to the interactive community platform of the Service Design Network – on the platform, members can meet and talk to leading professionals and experts from the field of Service Design; besides presenting your company and your work to other Service Design practitioners, you

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By Bruce S. Tether and Ileana Stigliani

Service Design 2020: What does the future hold, and (how) can we shape it?

You are a Service Designer. You are miraculously selected for the first manned space flight to Pluto, which is a 10 to 20 year round trip. What will the world be like when you return? More specifically, what will the world of Service Design be like in 2020 or 2030? You might be surprised, even shocked, to find that – in the UK alone – Service Design had grown into a substantial industry, employing hundreds of thousands of people, whilst tens of thousands were proud to call themselves ‘a service architect’, or ‘professional Service Designer’. There might even be half a million ‘service architects’ worldwide. You might think you had returned not to Earth but to another planet.

In this article we contemplate the future of Service Design as an industry or profession. The article is written from a UK perspective only because we have access to facts and figures for the UK; we would expect that the arguments hold for many other jurisdictions.

Although difficult to date precisely, Service Design is a young industry or profession.

Birgit Mager became the first professor of Service Design in 1995. And it was in 1999 that IDEO redesigned the Acela train service that runs between Boston and Wash-

ington DC. Rather than confine themselves to designing the train’s carriages, or ‘cars’ – a product or interior design task – IDEO redesigned the whole system of services associated with travelling this route. The project was an important step for IDEO, as it shifted from being a product design consultancy, into a wider space, including Service Design. Meanwhile, some of the most successful specialist Service Design consultancies – such as (in the UK) Engine and Live|Work – were established around the Millennium.

Bruce S. Tether

Professor of Design and Innovation, Imperial College London

Ileana Stigliani

Research Associate, Design London

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service design 2020

By Bruce S. Tether and Ileana Stigliani

»History also teaches us that there is another less obvious risk. This is that the industry or profession will become a fad or fashion.«

Yet it is no secret that, despite its energy and accomplishments, Service Design remains in its infancy. In 2005 the UK’s Design Council asked firms about the extent to which design and designers contributed to the development of new products and services. Amongst manufacturers, design and designers were usually recognised as playing an important or central role. In services it was a different story. In most cases designers played little or no role in firms’ new service development processes. And perhaps a hundred people would today identify themselves as ‘a professional Service Designer’. Without wishing to diminish their achievements,

who designs new services?

not least survival in a difficult climate, even the largest Service Design consultancies remain quite small.

Yet it seems to us that there is a tremendous ‘upside’ that one day might be realised. A comparison can be made with other design professions and industries, and architecture in particular. There are about 33,000 registered architects in the UK. Nearly 7,000 are employed by the UK’s Top 100 architectural practices, with several of the largest practices – such as BDP and Foster + Partners – employing several hundred architects. Many more work in smaller practices, and other large and small, and public and private organisa-

(Design Council´s National Survey 2005)

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Manufacturers

Finance & business services

¦ Design Manager/ design team leads and guides whole process ¦ Designers are used in all stages ¦ Designers are used in some specific stages ¦ Desiger are not included in the process

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Consumer services

tions. Meanwhile, the construction sector, which is the economic sector most closely associated with architects’ work, accounts for just 5 percent of the UK economy.

Services, by contrast, account for over 70 percent. Applying simple logic and crude arithmetic, a sector that accounts for 70 percent of the economy might just support almost half a million designers!

Of course, several objections might be made to this crude calculation, but it is not unrealistic that, in 10 or 20 years time, ‘Service Design’ may have grown into a substantial profession and industry, both in the UK and elsewhere. Other ‘new’ industries and professions, such as PR consulting, and project management have grown substantially in recent years. And it is notable that over 400,000 people in the UK are currently employed in the ‘architecture, engineering and related technical consultancy’ “industry”. Equally, however, it would not be surprising to find in a decade or two that ‘Service Design’ had not achieved ‘lift-off’.

This brings us to two questions: what does history tell us about the growth of new industries and professions; and what might we – a group of people from consultancies, industry and commerce, government, academia and elsewhere – do to enhance the likelihood that Service Design will prosper and grow? In other words, how can we coordinate our efforts to best effect?

History tells us there is no inevitable pattern of development of professions or industries, especially those that are based less on technologies than on concepts and methods. To survive and prosper, new professions and industries need to become widely accepted; they need to achieve

»What does history tell us about the growth of new industries and professions; and what might we – a group of people from consultancies, industry and commerce, government, academia and elsewhere – do to enhance the likelihood that Service Design will prosper and grow?« legitimacy. Legitimacy includes acceptance of the technical competence of the profession and the spread of knowledge about it, as well as the extent that it becomes ‘taken for granted’ by various stakeholders, such as industry and commerce, government and the general public. Achieving legititouc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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service design 2020

By Bruce S. Tether and Ileana Stigliani

Bruce Tether is Professor of Design and Innovation at Imperial College London and the leader of the designinnovation research team at Imperial College Business School. He is also the Research Director of Design London - a joint venture between Imperial College and the Royal College of Art (RCA) - and a Fellow of the UK's Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM).

Ileana Stigliani is a Research Associate in Design London and the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at Imperial College Business School. Ileana joined Design London and ICBS in March 2009, after completing her PhD thesis on “The Material Side of Creativity: Artifacts and Aesthetics in Product Design” at Bocconi University, Milano. Ileana’s current research project explores the emergence of Service Design.

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macy requires attendance to a variety of different kinds of work.

History also teaches us that, aside from the obvious risk that an industry or profession will fail to ‘take off’, there is another, less obvious risk. This is that the industry or profession will become a fad or fashion, growing quickly, and being widely and enthusiastically adopted, at least until the bubble bursts. The bubble bursts when, having been poorly or inappropriately adopted, disappointment and disenchantment sets in: the ideas associated with the new profession become tarnished. Just this pattern of boom then bust happened to the ‘quality profession’ and to Total Quality Management (TQM) in particular.

The experience of TQM shows how the pioneers of an industry or profession can lose control, to its subsequent detriment, such that it becomes much less impactful than it otherwise might.

The history of professions is replete with examples of competition between groups, and ‘Service Design’ does not have a monopoly on the service innovation space.

Many in the marketing profession, for example, are inspired by Vargo and Lusch’s call for a customer centred, ‘service-dominant logic’ to marketing and innovation.

And in consulting, general management consultants constantly seek opportunities to develop lucrative new practise areas.

They may be less interested in pioneering a new profession, but will not hesitate to jump on a bandwagon that is gaining momentum. But their participation may be detrimental for two reasons. First, the early pioneers of the industry may be crowded out, and second to scale up quickly they are likely to adopt a ‘light’ version of the

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knowledge base of the profession, which they then market heavily, often into inappropriate application domains. The damage done, the general management consultants move on to ‘the next big thing’, leaving the surviving specialists to pick up the pieces; this at least is what happened with TQM. An important issue, then, is the extent to which a new profession, such as ‘Service Design’, should, as a collective, seek to control its content and opportunities, much as architecture as a profession controls access to opportunities to design the built environment, and lawyer control access to opportunities to practise law. What is the jurisdiction of ‘Service Design’, and can and should access to this jurisdiction be controlled?

This in turn leads us to the second question, which is how we, as a group of people from different types of organisations – consultancies, client organisations, universities that may educate Service Designers, and government interested in, amongst other things, encouraging new industries – might coordinate our efforts to help build this new field. What is evident from history is the importance of coordinated efforts. Notwithstanding the obvious need to develop individual competences and competitiveness, there is value in reciprocal knowledge sharing; whilst there is competition within this field, there is also competition between this field and others that cover the same space. Thus entrepreneurs seeking to develop a new industry need to consider not only the reputation of their own venture, but also the reputation of the industry as a whole; for good or ill, all are likely to be tarred

design´s role in services?

(Design Council´s National Survey 2005)

100% 90%

24%

80% 70%

67%

60%

79%

50% 40%

76%

30% 20%

33%

10%

21%

0%

Manufacturers

Finance & business services

Consumer services

¦ It is integral ¦ Has signifcant role ¦ Has limited role ¦ Has no role to play

with the same brush. This is a space where industry associations and academia can play an important role. Is it any surprise that the successful professions are associated with strong bodies of knowledge: to which the impressive libraries of the Royal Institute of British Architects and Institute of Civil Engineers provide testimony. And universities also play an important role in consolidating knowledge and educating the next generation of professionals.

In conclusion, and to summarise, we can foresee that, in ten or twenty years time, ‘Service Design’ could become a substantial industry or profession. This is not a prediction, however. To achieve success, we consider that Service Design

must achieve legitimacy but at the same time take care to avoid becoming a fad or fashion. Serious consideration should be given to both defining and taking collective ownership over the jurisdiction of Service Design. The entrepreneurs of a new industry such as Service Design face a double challenge: to grow their own business, and to substantiate the industry as a whole. Serious consideration should also be given to how this can be achieved by coordinating the contribution of various stakeholders: perhaps we need to blueprint the future of Service Design.

»Perhaps we need to blueprint the future of Service Design.«

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workshop insights

By Stefan Holmlid and Jamin Hegeman

»A workshop based

Learning from failure

on personal experiences brought about a different, closer way to relate to each other.

The workshop started out with actual failed projects that workshop participants have experienced.

An ideal basis to work and create something together.«

Through a series of co-creative tasks they went from failure stories and strategies for dealing with failures to archetypical failures.

»Even though examples were diverse there were similarities in the patterns of the identified failures.«

»A journey map of project stages allows you to pinpoint detected failures and connect them to root causes and with breakdowns.«

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»Working towards a general framework to help us all, stories and particular examples are still the most powerful, sticky bit. How might we use them to communicate bigger opportunities and inspire ideas?«

»Some failures are in your control, some are out of your control, and failures occur mostly in the same stages of the process.«

»We should address failure more readily and be open to reflect better on project work, using our critical view on our own process.«

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chapter preview

Service Design and Business The impact of Service Design on the success of businesses and its application to different business settings.

42

Make yourself useful Joe Heapy

50

Do you really need that iPhone App? Mark Jones

58

Mind your own business. Service Design in a B2B context Ben Reason

62

Exploring healthcare Shelley Evenson and Maggie Breslin

66

Service Design put to the test Miia Lammi and Kai Hämäläinen

68

Workshop: Selling Service Design Mike Culverwell and Oliver King

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touc hp o in t | the jo u rn al of s ervice d es ign

By Joe Heapy

Make yourself useful Designers have a role to play in addressing business – and social challenges beyond the design of individual products and services. Organisations are under pressure to do more for customers and for society and as a result are having to question their own organisations, culture – and business models. Why are designers and the practice of Service Design becoming more relevant to a wide range of organisations now? How do we progress our own skills, our ways of working and our ethos to ensure that what we offer is understood to be distinct and of genuine use?

Those who call themselves Service Designers long to be useful. The practise of Service is both an ideology and tool for achieving usefulness. We have a belief in design and a belief that things can be better. So Service Design is not only about the craft, the science, and the creativity as all good design should be, it is even more so about catalysing change. The challenge for us is how to work our way into positions where we have, and are seen to have, something genuinely different and useful to offer alongside a range of professionals and tried and tested approaches to problem solving and innovation.

I am optimistic about the future greater usefulness of Service Design based on what I see happening around me. The

Joe Heapy

Director, Engine Service Design

kinds of people I meet, the commissioners of Engine, and the problems and opportunities in business and in the public realm make the conditions right for Service Designers and design thinking to be even more useful.

The conditions for our usefulness are taking shape The more complex the system the greater the need for guiding principles and a big idea The search for greater cost efficiency and for converged offers to customers has led to development of decentralised, networked systems of delivery. The complexity of these networks increases the need for a unifying big idea, a shareable understanding of the customer, principles, values, and clarity of design. touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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make yourself useful

By Joe Heapy

»Service Design is even more so about catalysing change.«

why now?

Designers have a history of understated usefulness. Around the turn of the 19th Century and in the early part of the 20th Century designers made tangible the ideas of artists and writers as a way to embrace or react against the harsh aesthetic of the industrial revolution. In the post war period designers were able to serve countries and economies by helping to drive mass consumerism through industrial design. Designers again stepped in to help when the desktop PC and consumer electronics were invented, and a whole new way of designing emerged to make the Internet useful, usable, and exciting. Design and designers have helped to make sense of the prevailing technology and of the world – at each stage bridging the gap between what’s possible and what’s needed.

Self-critical sector Everybody is serving everybody else. We are all both providers and consumers of services. As more of us work in the service sector and less of us make goods, the sector becomes increasingly self-critical.

Conventional business models are being challenged The agendas and methods of large corporations are slowly being challenged.

This not only means greater support for smaller, local providers but also a reassessment of conventional business models by large corporations. New kinds of enterprise are needed.

Paradox of fast, cheap, accessible, and personal Consumers now want it all. Many service providers work hard to provide high levels of access while keeping costs down and ensuring that customers feel as though they are getting a solution 44

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that matches their needs. For example, we are working with one of the UK’s top supermarket chains to understand how they deliver service to consumers who are now far better informed about food.

Hybrid people and professions are everywhere All forms of practical and academic study and disciplines are becoming more crossdisciplined: economics and sociology, economics and behavioural psychology, art and politics, design and business, business and eastern mysticism. There are fewer professionals in the traditional sense and a larger number of overlapping professional affiliations – like the Service Design Network.

Service sector innovation Innovation in services – not just products – is now much better understood, and is understood across sectors. However, innovation and user-centred design

methods are less well developed in the service sector.

Design for service organisations For Engine this year has been a year for exploring the role of Service Design in catalysing change within organisations that want to design and operate better services. We’re trying to make ourselves useful by offering a way of working and applying it. We’ve been lucky enough to be invited into some great organisations. We’ve learnt a lot and we’re still exploring. Beneath the design briefs are a set of latent needs

that our client organisations seem to share. Although these are acknowledged as likely barriers to success on a project there is nearly always nervousness about addressing them. In some cases however, clever clients use this kind of work to subtly highlight deficiencies by demonstrating an alternative approach.

(It’s interesting how often there are layered agendas woven into Service Design projects.) I do believe that the design process can address the need for a solution while subtly or blatantly addressing aspects of an organisation – great value for money I say.

Designing a service development capability within the Portuguese Airport Group, ANA. touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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make yourself useful

By Joe Heapy

Joe Heapy is Co-founder and Director of Engine Service Design. Engine believes that everyday services shape our relationships with people and organisations and therefore it's worth designing them well.

At Engine Joe leads the development of the public sector practice that continues to scope a role for designers in improving people's lives through the organisations of government, public service, social enterprise and the citizen sector.

beyond the explicit brief we often find:  There is a need for a vision or a big idea. But in many cases this need isn’t articulated at the start. The explicit need that is defined is very specific. It becomes apparent as we work that a barrier to moving forward is that there is no higherlevel sense of purpose and therefore no way of making decisions about how something should be.

 There is a hesitancy to acknowledge the wider system in which the specific problem sits for fear of not getting out alive. This can lead to new solutions within old systems that tend not to be sustainable.

 There is a need to get closer to the experiences of people. Many organisations can articulate this gap in their knowledge and many lack the capability to gather and connect such insight to a design process.

 Another common need of organisations is the need for permission to work in new ways – often despite the prevailing culture and constraints. Much of our work is about legitimising alternative approaches to getting things done.

 Clients need to develop the capacity to be more innovative. Specifically to find new solutions in a world where budgets are decreasing and there are more diverse and complex needs. Often, however, the push to innovate is from the centre. The requirement and responsibility to innovate is devolved downward – which is why many people become sceptical about the idea of innovation.

Service Design needs to be understood in this way – as an organisational challenge. Achieving great services through existing organisations goes beyond designing great services and starts to become about helping to articulate the purpose of that organisation. The need is to address the capabilities of

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organisations to design and provide services that are useful – at scale and in response to complex needs. For many of our clients these services are enabled by technology systems but are delivered through systems of people and things that need to be understood in their complexity.

Drawing service-commissioning models for disadvantage with the London Borough of Barnet

Visualisation of the version 1.0 commissioning model as part of the London Borough of Barnet’s Future Shape business planning programme

The cumulative cycles model of designled change or the Hoops model: Catalyzing organisational change through Service Design The model captures the proposition that user-centred Service Design projects coupled with ethnography and in the right organisation can catalyse change

within a service organisation. Our challenge is to get beyond the demonstration projects.

The Hoops model describes a development programme that begins by using ethnography to develop insights into existing services. It proceeds to create the conditions for a system-level plan-

ÂťThose who call themselves Service Designers long to be useful.ÂŤ

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make yourself useful

By Joe Heapy

the hoops model: Here’s how it works:

 The model shows work beginning BUILD

with small projects to demonstrate the impact of ethnographic work on

5

the way professionals view services

Levels of ambition

and the people who use them. This is

Levels of influence

4

powerful stuff in our experience.

therefore to develop a capability and capacity

 A suite of projects and new outcomes

MODEL

ct fun

tunities and an appetite for Service the need to do more projects and

Capability level

8

2

Service design level

9

Insight level

1

Copyright Engine 2009

SUSTAIN

c u m ula

ti v e

next. Insight projects create oppor-

s on

i

3

6 7

cumulative evidence

 Each project builds the case for the

Design. These projects identify

System level

10

Experiences & outcomes

demonstrates the value of new approaches at a higher level. And importantly such work begins to describe the gaps between what people want and the ability of the system to enable this to happen.

 Another common need of organisations is the need for permission to work in new ways – often despite the prevailing culture and constraints. Much of our work is about legitimizing alternative approaches to getting things done.

 Each level creates evidence and functions of the organisation.  It becomes possible to use new evidence and new capabilities to remodel the system.  New capabilities are then applied to change the system through the design of systems and services.

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ning process and vision, and uses new capabilities to propagate further development and organisational change.

Back to the challenge of being useful What the Hoops model proposes is a way in which the kind of work that we all do can be assembled into a more significant process. We can map many of our case studies on to this model but we still can’t demonstrate the impact of this model if you were to work it through from start to finish. However, this year we have all felt a little bit more useful and we are scoping several pieces of work that we hope will allow us to apply what we’ve learnt about design-led change.

Being useful is about creating great services but it could also be about supporting the organisations that deliver services at scale to get better at listening, responding, and adapting. Many of today’s businesses and organisations

won’t be around much longer if they can’t figure out how to make themselves useful to people. Providing usefulness is fundamental to good design. Getting beyond basics means getting beyond the assembly of the tools of the trade and learning how to apply them with conviction and creating the conditions within organisations to get beyond blue sky and demonstration projects.

Service Design has no superior view on what’s right for organisations, but at Engine we’ve had direct experience of catalyzing significant change through the work we’ve been part of. It’s these large organisations that influence quality of life the most both positively and negatively and therefore it feels like a worthwhile endeavour to help them out as best as we can.

»Service Design has no superior view on what’s right for organisations, but we’ve had direct experience of catalysing significant change through the work we’ve been part of.«

Download the full conference paper from Engine’s website soon.

Legitimising user-centred Service Design practice through the design of a toolkit for one of the BBC’s network touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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By Mark Jones

Do you really need that iPhone App? Ways to evolve services in a changing technology environment New platforms are driving change Right now, launching an iPhone app or getting a large group of followers on Twitter is a symbol of a company that is at the cutting edge of customer service.

Almost any company you can think of has launched new offerings on both platforms as well as others such as Facebook.

In fact, all kinds of service companies are racing to understand how to integrate these new technologies and make their offers more relevant to people who they are trying to serve – they feel the need to evolve with their customers or they will lose their competitive edge. While many of the most compelling use of these technologies are really new services, here I want to talk about how companies with an existing service are attempting to take advantage of new service platforms.

Let’s take an example from Whole foods, a natural foods retailer. It has launched an iPhone app that allows the user to find recipes based on what food you have on hand, find a Whole Foods store, and explore recipes. It is easy to use, but made me wonder why they did it.

Or perhaps the new touchpoint is a Twitter feed such as one from Walmart.

It mostly promotes merchandise such as new CDs or mentions that they are reducing prices on a whole category of

items. It feels very much like a new version of the newspaper insert that advertises weekly specials.

On the extreme end, Hardee’s has an app called Le Hardee that allows users to select phrases from menu that can be played with either a French accent or in French. The fun part is that when the phrases are played, they are “spoken” by a life-sized mouth that plays on the iPhone screen, allowing the user to hold the iPhone up to their mouth, appearing to speak with a French accent. It’s absolutely hilarious.

What do all of these new touchpoints have in common? They are all essentially using new technology to market to their customers in new ways, and they all increase the ways that a company can promote themselves to their customers.

For newer channels such as Twitter, most marketers admit that they feel compelled to get something out there just to see what happens. But this is not very strategic, merely a reaction to the technological milieu. It recalls the “brochure ware” populating corporate web sites in the early days of the web when companies had not yet understood what they could do to take real advantage of the Internet.

It may take some time before many companies adjust to the reality of an explosion of new touchpoints, but there are

Mark Jones

Lead for Service Innovation, IDEO Chicago

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do you really need that iphone app ?

By Mark Jones

some great examples of companies that do seem to understand how to use these technologies in ways that go beyond marketing.

How companies are introducing technology as a part of a multi-channel strategy While the vast majority of efforts I have observed might be considered marketing efforts, there are some patterns

emerging in how services companies are using these platforms to extend their core service offer. They are leveraging data that they possess and can be applied in new ways; they are using the platforms to extend their brands around their core customers; and they are taking advantage of nimble technology to go with the flow of their customers’ lives. Let’s look at some examples from each category.

»What do all of these new touchpoints have in common? They are all essentially using new technology to market to their customers in new ways and they all increase the ways that a company can promote themselves to their customers.« 52

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leveraging data that they already have

Data is being captured by services that we use all the time, whether we are conscious of it or not. Most of that data is captured for marketing analytics purposes, or for legal reasons. But often it is wasted. Here are examples of how a service can leverage data that has already been collected to extend services in powerful ways.

»Data is being captured by services that we use all the time.«

Food Flex: Food Flex is a service offered by Safeway Foods that allows customers to track the ingredients in the foods they purchase at a Safeway store.

It pulls the prior six months of shopping data culled from their loyalty card program and presents purchases in an interactive manner. It allows a user to select particular ingredients such as sodium content and it draws graphs that show whether you are trending in the right direction.

This takes readily available data and offers a new service extension that deepens the conversation about food at Safeway. And it sends the message that Safeway is interested in helping you maintain your health.

Outbreaks near me: A new iPhone application, created by Children’s Hospital Boston and researchers from MIT Media Lab, allows users to track and report outbreaks of infectious diseases such as N1H1 (also known as swine flu). The application pulls data in real time showing outbreaks that have been reported near the location of the user. In addition, the app allows users to find out more information about the outbreak or disease. The app also allows users to set alerts that notify a user if there is an outbreak that they are tracking near them.

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do you really need that iphone app ?

By Mark Jones

»These services recognize why customers are loyal to them and they are deepening their relationship to these customers.«

Supporting a core customer in rich ways Some of the best examples of new platform usage reinforce the commitment that the service has promised to a core constituency. These services recognize why customers are loyal to them and they are deepening their relationship to these customers, and they are likely to acquire new customers the process.

Dunkin Donuts: Dunkin Run extends how they serve group orders. They already had the “Box of Joe”, a box of coffee with enough to serve ten people, and easy-to-carry boxes of donuts that are easy ways for people to bring refreshments for large groups with little hassle. But it was hard to manage more complex orders for larger groups. This app allows a group of people to each make their own individual order in a distributed manner, and then the app aggregates them into a single order for the person picking up the food. It supports current behaviour but makes the experience significantly better for one of Dunkin’s core customer segments.

Zappos: Zappos, an online shoe- and apparel retailer, has a Twitter site that communicates honesty and real customer service. The brand has a tagline “Powered

by Service” and everything they do suggests that they live up to the promise. The 200 or so employees – as well as the CEO – who are on Twitter enthusiastically help customers take advantage of deals, fix problems, and generally cheer on the brand. But it goes further than that in ways that make it feel genuine. There is a link that aggregates all the public mentions of Zappos from public Twitter users. They are being completely open and transparent about how their customers feel about them – and no surprise, their customers are incredibly loyal.

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ÂťLooking at an existing service through these lenses will help ground the strategic value of a new service touchpoint.ÂŤ An evolving service rhythm There is something profound that this explosion of touchpoints represents.

We are observing the maturing of a new service rhythm that is based on a more continuous dialog and a deeper relationship with customers. This is an acceleration of a trend that has been emerging for several years: offering more channels and more choices for customers to engage with a service.

Think about the evolution of banking.

Once there were just branches, then the industry added ATMS, drive-through banking, online banking and then mobile

banking. The addition of new channels did not eliminate, or in some cases, even marginally reduce the use of the other channels. Conversely, overall use of all channels together increased significantly.

When branches were the only touchpoint, people might have gone to a bank once a week. Now they go online, check their mobile balance, stop at an ATM and get an e-mail balance update all in one day. More choices and easier access leads to more usage overall.

Contributing to the explosion of touchpoints is the well-known phenomenon in service for customers’ expectations to touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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do you really need that iphone app ?

By Mark Jones

Mark Jones is the Lead for Service Innovation at IDEO Chicago and he works closely with service companies seeking to reinvent how they serve their customers.

Mark has an extensive design background and broad experience in qualitative and quantitative research methodologies.

Recent projects include retail banking, disease management and rethinking how a major internet presence serves its customers.

going where their customers are

Being where your customers are is a natural way to extend your relationship with them. Mobile platforms allow highly-tailored services that can support loyalty and flexible interactions.

Choice Hotels: Choice Hotels Comfort Inn, Clarion (MainStay brands), has a global hotelbooking iPhone app that allows users to find and reserve rooms at any of the 5,800 Choice hotels in the world. The app allows you to find hotels on a map based on your current position, change or cancel existing reservations, and get door-to-door directions to and from any Choice hotel. The budget brands that Choice hotels have are the kinds of hotels that people tend to book at the last minute. But if a customer is enrolled in a loyalty program, they could well be willing to drive a couple of extra miles to stay at their preferred brand.

Airlines: While airlines have relatively low overall customer satisfaction compared with other industries – they are in the low 60’s according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index – they have learned how to move with the rhythm of their customers. They have allowed myriad options for checking in, including sending a SMS barcode to a mobile phone that can be read at security checkpoints as well as at the gate. In addition, alerts on flight delays can be channelled to voice, e-mail or text, giving users a great deal of flexibility.

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cross from one industry to another, or from one part of their lives to another.

For example, the ability to self-book a hotel stay makes people think they should be able to self-book an appointment with their lawyer. Or seeing realtime updates from their airline suggests to people that they should get updates when their doctor is behind schedule.

The addition of social networking touchpoints and better-designed mobile applications such as those designed for the iPhone has significantly increased the potential ways to engage customers. Further, that engagement is more of a dialog then ever before; it’s more dynamic and

it is a true two-way conversation. But at the same time it has made it difficult for companies to understand which conversations will truly add value to both customers and their own company.

Smart service companies extend their offer in ways that focus on their core offer in ways that focus on their core value proposition. The examples above all deepen the relationship with either current or new customers in ways that reinforce that value that they have promised to their customers. Looking at an existing service through these lenses will help ground the strategic value of a new service touchpoint.

ÂťIt has made it difficult for companies to understand which conversations will truly add value to both customers and their own company.ÂŤ

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By Ben Reason

Mind your own business.

Service Design in a B2B context.

Data is the new oil and the money is in refining it to create valuable services that customers cannot live without. In this article, Ben Reason from live|work shows how creating service that meet the real needs of business customers can help you get the most from your data.

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Data is hot property. Google are setting the bar high with their goal of ‘organising the world’s information’ and many businesses are following by adopting strategies of data acquisition for its own sake. At live|work we have coined the phrase ‘data is the new oil’ to describe this ‘data rush’ and the accompanying belief that data can have as great an impact on this century as oil had during the twentieth century.

Oil has fuelled our economies to a greater and greater extent as the raw material from the ground has been refined into a wider range of products. From aviation fuel to complex plastics, it is the range of applications that makes oil so valuable. The same applies to data. Properly refined, our relatively recent ability to share, store, compute, and analyze huge amounts of information can transform the way we live and work. However, we believe that in the case of data it will be services, not products that are developed using these rich sources of data that will create new value in the future.

What we have seen at live|work as a

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result of our work with a number of data-rich organisations, is that blind faith in data does not always reap dividends. Data, whilst valuable, is a commodity, and an easily replicated one at that. Therefore as it becomes more widely available its value will drop. Businesses with data products often prop up the price with additional fields of infomation but this is simply another type of devaluation as the customer is getting more for the same price. We have helped our clients achieve the opposite – more revenue for less data by developing services around the information.

These services provide additional value to customers by understanding how the data fits their business.

They also help to avoid the commodification process.

This is where the process of refinement comes in. We need to refine the data into services. And these services need to meet the needs and issues of the businesses that information providers hope to sell. The issue is that, whilst the geek in all of us gets very excited about raw data, business customers are more inter-

ested in their business challenges.

These challenges will be things like effective marketing campaigns, back office productivity, or asset management (among many more). Data owners need to think about helping to fix to their customer’s challenges rather than the number of data sets they can sell.

This issue is pressing because as we are now all users of information technologies – on the web or over our mobile phones – we are getting used to data-based services resolving issues for us on a day-to-day basis. We use information about location-, weather-, and traffic conditions in ways that help us make decisions and fit well into our lives.

We all know that information can be live, dynamic and personal to our life context. Business users deserve the same refinement of information and the accompanying value that it adds. If data providers do not adopt this kind of Service Thinking then they will be superceeded by more agile providers or by Google themselves. The opportunity is there for information businesses to significantly add value to their data assets by treating the provision of information as a service.

How much additional service provision is required to sufficiently refine data and deliver added value to customers varies, depending on the end user. Below we explore three types of refinement that we have developed for data-rich businesses into successful value-added new services:

1. Personalise.

In some cases sophisticated customers are used to buying data and the service opportunity is to help them personalise their use. This means enabling them to transform the data into their data with dynamic tools that help them get exactly what they need. This can make a service less dispensible to customers, as the act of personalisation is an investment by the customer in the service. As they personalise they are adding value to the data both for themselves and for the data owner. They get better results from their information and the data provider can develop a deeper understanding of customer requirements that help further refine the service. live|work recently helped Experian launch its marketing information service Prospect Locator replacing older marketing list provision.

Prospect Locator simply enables marketers to compile a list of prospective customers (and the information they need about each of them) and buy the list for a campaign. It is unique in the way that it enables users to easily adjust their search terms and refine their list dynamically before buying. This simple personalisation empowers the user to get exactly what they want extremely quickly. It also allows them to explore the range of data available. As the customer uses they build value through the repeated exchange of information.

»We believe that in the case of data it will be services, not products that are developed using these rich sources of data that will create new value in the future.«

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mind your own business. service design in a b2b context

By Ben Reason

Prospect Locator has achieved a 30% increase in average revenue per user for Experian.

»If data providers do not adopt this kind of Service Thinking then they will be superceeded by more agile providers or by Google themselves.« 60

2. Augment.

A second set of users have their own information that is of paramount importance to them. This may be their customer database, stock list, or price index. The approach in this case is to augment that information with additional data that makes them more effective in their job. The key words here are ‘their job’ as this kind of service is often about aiding decision-making or enabling customers to be more productive.

If you can do this, then your data is core to their business processes and therefore is of high value.

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Euro Tax Glass are the market leader in used car price information – traditionally provided as a printed book. Glassnet, developed with livework in 2008, is a new service that transformed Glass’s proposition from a data product to a service offering. Glassnet augments a dealers’ stocklist with live used car price data providing the dealer with an end-to-end stock management service covering purchases, valuation, and sales on a day-to-day basis informed by market conditions.

Another Experian service Ledger 360 also augments customer data – in this case their sales ledger.

Experian collect and aggregate large numbers of company sales ledgers, analyze the information and feed back to individual customers a risk analysis that augments their own ledger with a view of the exposure- and payment performance of each account holder. This service fits directly into the debt collection department’s workflow enabling them to prioritize collections and withhold or extend credit based on the Experian information.

Pertinent and well-presented data enables business critical decisions to be made more quickly and with less risk.

3. Empower.

A third set of users are not so data-savvy. They know they want to achieve something but do not have

»The trick is to work out the customer need and then build services around the information to meet that need in a way that helps them address their business challenges.«

the knowledge or skills to use raw data and need an ‘out of the box’ solution. This type of service builds a more comprehensive package on top of the data to enable a new group of customers to do something that was previously out of their reach. The value in this case is to access new markets for information that were previously untapped.

Yellow pages has always been a repository of small business information, and like Glass’s guide, traditionally came in paper form.

Yell have taken this information online as a service that, like the directories, provides an advertising channel for businesses. Live|work helped Yell take this a step further to enable smaller businesses to run targeted marketing campaigns. For Yell customers we realized that we needed to take sophisticated marketing data – like that sold through Prospect Locator – and refines it further by not only improving the access to the information but also helping customers employ it is a marketing campaign.

Yell Direct Marketing Service is a simple way for smaller businesses to create and run a marketing campaign. It gives them tools to hone their message, similar to the yellow pages ads, but then enables them to target high-potential customers and track the effectiveness of their campaign. Yell have leveled the playing field for small businesses giving them access to a level

of sophistication previously only available to larger firms.

What all of these examples have in common is a focus on identifying how the data can resolve the issues of the end user and business customer. They all add value to the data by making it personal to the user, ensuring it augments the core business processes of the customer and if necessary enabling them to do things that they couldn’t previously achieve. The data is key – for without accurate, high-quality information the services would fail – but the service adds value to the data by making sure that it is of value to the customer.

Data, like oil, can be refined in different ways for different applications. The trick is to work out the customer need and then build services around the information to meet that need in a way that helps them address their business challenges.

Ben Reason, Director and Co-founder, live|work, London, UK

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By Maggie Breslin and Shelley Evenson

Exploring healthcare A project among Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design, Continuum, and Mayo Clinic.

In August 2008, three different groups came together to undertake an experiment. Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) School of Design brought experience researching and teaching about Service Design, as well as a group of students looking to get their feet wet.

Continuum, a design and innovation consultancy, brought experts in design strategy, brand experience, and product innovation, as well as a history of supporting design education. And Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation (CFI) brought the challenge problem along with an infrastructure to support the effort: its SPARC Design Studio, an embedded design- and research lab focused on healthcare service issues and concepts. The purpose of the experiment was: 1) to experiment with how to successfully engage students around a problem as complex and systemic as healthcare delivery; and 2) to understand how the results might inform all three partners’ evolving ideas about Service Design.

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Mayo Clinic’s challenge problem was focused on the coordination of primary-level care, one of the greatest issues facing American healthcare today. Patients interact with an increasing number of physicians and providers, each focused on only one component of patient care.

The result is that the patient is the only information vessel holistically tracking health state and process, which makes for a fertile ground for medical error and miscommunication. One vision for improving information maintenance and sharing – and moving the full responsibility out of the patient’s hands – is what has come to be called the “patientcentred medical home,” a term associated with some technical guidelines, requirements, and the use of electronic medical records and supporting technology. To push this vision further, Mayo’s CFI challenged the CMU design class – students far outside the healthcare sphere – to imagine a new model of integrated and coordinated primary care services that better met the needs of patients, providers, and payers. Continuum served as men-

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tors to the students and contributed some of their knowledge about the design of healthcare services.

Executing the service innovation design process The service innovation design process can be loosely summarized in the following steps: 1. conduct immersive humancentred research; 2. identify service opportunity areas; 3. generate concepts to respond to the opportunities and get expert feedback; 4. prototype scenarios of service delivery; 5. get feedback, refine, and present your final service concepts.

Because of the geographic separation from the “field” at the Mayo in Rochester, MN, and the centre of the analysis/design/prototyping effort at CMU in Pittsburgh, a number of logistics issues had to be overcome. To accomplish step 1, it was clear that the full design team could not conduct the

The myLife team developed a service concept that addresses the needs of patients, providers, and care givers, with the creation of new roles (a health maven and buddy)

»Service Designers create the resources for interaction among all the components – the tools, languages, spaces, etc.«

needed human-centred research.

The solution was to put in place a graduate design student to serve as an interviewer/observer to generate a rich dataset over the course of a ten-week field study, working with CFI’s research coordinator, supported by research capture tools generated by the whole design team, and augmented by insights from the SPARC and Continuum teams. To accomplish the first part of step 5, getting feedback on the initial service prototype, one member of each of the five design teams (nominated by their team mates) travelled back to Rochester in mid-term, and presented their team’s concepts to a small group built from invitations to clinic staff

and administrators, along with representatives from SPARC, CFI, information technology, finance, and global products and services.

The students returned to CMU with the feedback and began their final iterations on their concepts.

To accomplish the last part of step 5, the teams presented first to members of the CFI team who came to Pittsburgh for the class’s final presentations, and then with representatives from each of the teams travelling to Rochester for a presentation to a packed house at Mayo Clinic.

The Concepts The students’ work was everything you hope for in a sponsored project,

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exploring healthcare

By Maggie Breslin and Shelley Evenson

which means it was thoughtful, provocative, and inspired. Within the service sets that they offered, each team brought forward at least one idea or insight that had been previously undiscovered or unarticulated. Some of those ideas included: • The myLife team developed a service concept that addresses the needs of patients, providers, and care givers, with the creation of new roles (a health maven and buddy), introduction of mobile web-based technologies incorporating friendly UIs for all constituents, and integration of back-end tracking systems with electronic medical records.

»The hope of the Service Designer is that the resources empower people to make the service experience what it needs to be at that moment in time for the people who are engaged.« 64

• The “Connected to me” team addressed chronic care by leveraging technology (both video and sensorbased) to enable “eavesdropping” on people’s lives. Giving the patient full access to a “digested” form of the collected data helps them see behaviours they need to change, and communicate with others (providers, support groups, etc.) to get support in maintaining those changes.

• The LiveWell team re-imagined every element of a community (grocery, church, restaurants) as a place of healthcare interactions and change. Their concept provided resources for people where they were to support change.

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• The medSystem team developed a concept that distributed the responsibility for change and elements of the healthcare experience amongst a community of people.

• The “centralized collaborative care” team turned the friend/family/caregiver job into an explicit role with tools, duties, and expectations making them an extension of the patient’s care team.

In the end, the five diverse multidisciplinary (and multinational) teams produced a rich set of ideas and demonstration videos and five different pictures of a compelling future for coordinated care.

Lessons Learned As often happens in these types of sponsored projects, some of the most compelling lessons were unexpected. The mediated research process, conducted through others’ eyes taught that collaborations require creativity in terms of how you execute the design process, and that even that which seems odd can still be very successful. For Mayo Clinic’s CFI team, learning came in the form of shared experience for a new and growing group that had no shared innovation experience to draw from but a mandate to hit the ground running. This effort gave the CFI team a shared experience, a leaping-off point for discussions about what it means to innovate around health care delivery, and a

design language that the CFI continues to use and reference today.

New thinking about Service Design The project also offered a chance to reflect on new ideas for Service Design. Service Designers create the resources for interaction among all the components – the tools, languages, spaces, etc.

The hope of the Service Designer is that the resources empower people to make the service experience what it needs to be at that moment in time for the people who are engaged: patients and family, caregiver providers, etc., in the case of this healthcare design experiment. At each moment the constituents are creating the experience, in effect designing it. They use the system language elements provided by the designers to have the conversations and act in ways that cannot be formally scripted. This small but deeply meaningful shift in think-

ing, around the role of the designer, the participants, and the tools, grounded in real-world experience, was the primary take-away for each of the participating organisations.

It was a concept they could take and test on future projects and served as a true testament to how much learning can come from a sponsored project.

• States of wellbeing are defined by patients and providers through conversation • The language of healthcare becomes the language of everyone • More communication and openness takes advantage of social networks • Care becomes more effective and affordable

Design Shift From a service that is delivered: • Physician treats the sick patient • Physician drives patient health, and, with the third-party payment system in place, healthcare costs • Physician holds the information (as one of many stovepipes in the delivery system), limiting integration and dissemination • Delivery is less effective and more expensive To a service that is designed for co-production:

Maggie Breslin, Designer/ Researcher, SPARC Design Lab – Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation, Rochester, USA Shelley Evenson, principal, User– Experience Designer, Microsoft, Boston, USA

The “centralized collaborative care” team turned the friend/family/caregiver job into an explicit role with tools, duties, and expectations making them an extension of the patient’s care team touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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By Miia Lammi and Kai Hämäläinen

Service Design put to the test

Western Finland Design Centre MUOVA and Hanken School of Business put Service Design to the test in a two-year research project, Desire, which studied how market-oriented Service Design renews innovation processes. Four company cases and two social cases were carried out by an international student design team, coordinated by a professional designer. The process lasted for three to four months and during the process the students collected user information with ethnographic methods, generated new service ideas and produced alternative service concepts which were evaluated by companies. After the Service Design

The aim of the process was defined in the briefs generated in cooperation with the case companies, the research partners and the Service Design company, and it guided the process of the students. Although there was a structured four-phase model of the Service Design process, in a real life situation the process was a creative and problem-solving way of working. The phases of studies, new ideas, visualisations, problem identification and solving, and communication of ideas created a blend of sub-processes that were different for each situation.

process, customers in focus groups tested the concepts. The process was similar to concept development of product design (Keinonen et al.: 2004, Moritz: 2005). Service Design cases focused on developing a bank’s premium customer programme, the ecological, efficient and homelike laundry services, new receiving and delivery services, smart home services, and the new services for recycling. The cooperation with companies was regular and systemised in order to ensure the usefulness of the results. (Hämäläinen, Nyman, Björk & Lammi: 2009.)

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The students utilised ethnographic methods – sharing experiences with users and as a user – as a meaningful way of collecting user information, which supported their creativity.

The user-centred generation process was familiar and easy for the students with industrial or interaction design as a background. Several methods were used to analyse user information, user personas, figures and diagrams, and also to visualise new service ideas: user scenarios, modelling service journeys and visualisations of user interfaces, environments and products related to

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service. The companies valued the students’ visualisation and problemsolving skills as well as the futureorientation of service concepts. (See pictures 1 and 2.)

Challenges and new openings of Service Design Elaborating service experience and economical aspects of services were noticed to be challenging for the students in general and easiest for a student with a background in interaction design. The service experience could also have been developed further for the students concentrated mainly on the touchpoints of services. The produced concepts revealed the tradition of design competence, which has been designing concrete objects, as in products, environmental and communication design (Potter 1969 in Press and Cooper 2003). On the other hand, the designer’s ability to solidify abstract ideas is a vital skill.

Visualisations are useful and valuable communication tools.

The study supported the definition of design as creative planning with emphasis on problem-solving, aesthetics, meaning production, future-

Picture Maija Svavolainen

Picture Tommi Moilanen

orientation, user-centeredness and the definition of the designer as a professional in design with specialist knowledge based on their education, experience, talent and personality. It also supported the understanding of Service Design as a multidisciplinary approach, which requires multiple competences including several design competences (See Mager 2009).

»The role of a Service Designer could be the manager of the service experience and the Service Design team – a manager of meaning.«

When defining Service Design competence, it is important to understand design competence in general and the design competence needed in a multidisciplinary Service Design team. Service Design requires specific competence for planning meaningful service experiences produced by physical and abstract, functional and emotional, as well as spatial and temporal elements of services. It seems that Service Design lies at the nodal point of the development of design in general: design is becoming more strategic, abstract and diversified, which can be clearly seen in Service Design. The role of a Service Designer could be the manager of the service experience and the Service Design team – a manager of meaning.

In that case, Service Design requires competence in design management, business economics, and methods for decoding and encoding experiences.

References • Hämäläinen, K. & J. Nyman, P. Björk, M. Lammi (2009). Markkinalähtöinen palvelumuotoilu innovaatiotoiminnassa. Desire-pro-

jektin loppuraportti 2009 (The final report of Desire project). Available at: www.muova.fi • Keinonen, T. Ed (2000). Battarbee, K., Färm L., Hyppönen, H., Keinonen, T., Korhonen, P., Koskinen, I., Kuutti, K., Laitinen, P., Lehmusvaara, M., Mattelmäki, T., Säde, S. & Wikberg, H. Miten käytettävyys muotoillaan? Helsinki: Taideteollinen korkeakoulu.

• Mager, B. (2009). Service Design as an emerging field. In Designing Services with Innovative Methods.

Ed. S. Miettinen & M. Koivisto.

Keuruu: Otava Book Prionting Ltd. • Moritz, S. (2005). Service Design.

Practical Access to an Evolving Field. http://www.stefan-moritz. com • Press, M. & R. Cooper (2003).

The Design Experience. The Role of Design and Designers in the Twenty-First Century. Burlington: Aschgate Publishing Company

Miia Lammi, Development Manager, Western Finland Design Centre MUOVA, Helsinki, Finland Kai Hämäläinen, Designer and Researcher, University of Art and Design Helsinki and University of Vaasa, Finland

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workshop insights

By Mike Culverwell and Oliver King

»The session was fun and

Selling Service Design

engaging and has improved the way I think and approach my own particular challenges.«

This workshop was a facilitated session on selling Service Design to and within organisations. Rather than an explicit workshop on managing the sales process and becoming better sales person, the aim was to explore the different contexts, objectives, challenges,

»For organisations to make the leaps they need to make, to excite

viewpoints and cost justification in

& engage the people they

selling Service Design techniques,

need to engage, they need

processes and philosophy.

to adopt creative, abductive and open approaches from the start.«

»One of the overarching topics that popped up in many conversations throughout the conference was the need for greater exchange in order to build up and strengthen the notion of SD. In the end we are all sitting in the same boat and the more we practice an open exchange on the philosophy and practice of SD, the better for all of us.«

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»I took great interest in viewpoints that have reinforced some of my beliefs about how to develop sustainable client relationships.«

»Service Design represents an ideology and approach which can develop consensus and confidence within organisations that they are developing the right solutions for their customers and their business.«

»Be clear on differentiation. Be clear on language. Be clear you understand who you are talking to and what makes them tick. We’ve learnt how to talk the language of ‘business thinking’ and how some organisations traditionally analyse the problem and establish strategy so that we could highlight the benefits of adopting a different approach. Actually, when I say ‘adopt’ this was not about ‘replacing’ - rather highlighting what’s missing from their current practises.«

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chapter preview

Service Design and Behavioural Change How can Service Design influence the behaviour of people within service systems?

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Service Design and behavioural change Birgit Mager

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Motivating employees: Driving frontline behaviour Craig LaRosa and Jon Campbell

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Creating tribal affiliation Adam Dole

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Key principles of how to make Service Design stick in health Julia Schaeper

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Workshop: Design Thinking | A Service Design workshop Craig LaRosa and Jon Campbell

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By Birgit Mager

Service Design and behavioural change The academic activity relating to behaviour normally lies with psychologists, sociologists or pedagogues from various disciplines, each of whom represent different models of understanding behaviour and how to influence it. However, the pragmatic shaping and un-shaping of behaviour is also the domain of companies, media, marketing and advertising, churches, schools, nurseries, parents, love- and life partners, police, judges and the penal system. They, and many others, try to influence the behaviour of other people for a wide range of motives.

On the first look, the relationship between design and behaviour is not so obvious, but even in the most cursory thought it becomes clear that in many aspects design can intentionally become the agent or the tool to help influence the behaviour.

It starts with the design of a striking, behaviour-influencing communication that is eye-catching, clear and understandable, both on a cognitive level and an emotional level, touching and motivating.

Orientation and guide systems are laid out to channel behaviour into the right tracks, in the best case, avoiding deviance and confusion and supporting ease of being and movement.

So it continues with the design of a product. Products should not just awake desires in the consumers, but also influence

Birgit Mager

Professor for Service Design, KISD

their behaviour to such an extent that they are ready to give away their hard earned money to become the owner of such a product. However, Product Design should also guide the behaviour of the user in terms of usability in the most meaningful, coherent and clear way, and through this the enjoyment of use and ownership can be heightened. Product Design can also substantially influence our behaviour to be more or less ethically defensible, ecologically worthwhile, and socially acceptable.

Designers create environments, in both small and large contexts, which allow or restrict, support or hinder behaviours. In the most immediate sense, the environment is the clothes that encase us; the living space, the workspace, and the public space. All this is designed, and through its touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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design and behavioural change

By Birgit Mager

»Orientation and guide systems are laid out to channel behaviour into the right tracks, in the best case, avoiding deviance and confusion and supporting ease of being and movement.« design influences the behaviour of people.

A behavioural influence through design has a many-sided ecological relevance; it can influence buying behaviours and through this serves both the goods and services markets.

As design simplifies the dialogue between 74

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people and the environment (products, spaces, information) it can save time and confusion.

What until now has still not been adequately brought into focus, are the possibilities for designers to act as “behavior designers” in services. Services are systems

of interactions and actions. The behavior of people within these interactions and actions is part of the Service Design. How employees behave, how they interact with each other, how they behave towards customers - and how customer behave towards employees - how customers behave towards other customers and how they behave towards themselves… all these facets are crucial for the service experience and for the service outcome.

So how can we use design systematically

and successfully to enable behaviours within service systems? A new research focus in Service Design has emerged, which puts the possibility of influencing behaviour through design into the hands of systematic Service Designers. The next issue of Touchpoint will focus on this topic, so for now I will not go into more detail. I would like you to reflect on this attempt to summarise “rules” for Service Design and behavioural change – and please do comment and build on this!

»Designers create environments, in both small and large contexts, which allow or restrict, support or hinder behaviours.«

»rules« for Service Design and behavioural change 1.

Understand the current behaviour, the motives, gains and consequences.

Build on existing bodies of knowledgeI

2.

Create awareness: influence the conscious and the cognitive

3.

Create emotional impact

4.

Create desire and motivation

5.

Create support structures and networks

6.

Implement roles and role models

7.

Change the physical environment, create affordance

8.

Co-create the change process

9.

Make change visible

10. Introduce relevant rewards

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By Craig LaRosa and Jon Campbell

Motivating employees: Driving frontline behaviour Consumer-driven insights. On-point strategy. Impeccable execution. A rich brand experience. And millions of advertising dollars to drive customers to the business. This sounds like a winning combination, right?

Traditionally, the design world focused on the creation of objects and spaces.

With the advancement of Service Design as a practise, greater emphasis has been placed on designing for processes – the choreography by which employees complete tasks and interact with customers.

But with the collapse of well-crafted work at the hands of a misguided associate, the design of objects, spaces, and processes are simply not enough. As a human-centered design firm, people are at the core of Continuum’s process. That has led us to focus not only on customer needs, but also on those of the employee.

So the question becomes: How do successful companies guide and motivate employees to embody the brand, serve the customer and provide a compelling experience?

Frontline employees, those behind a counter, on the phone or walking the floor, serve as the tip of the “brand spear,” (Diagram on next page) controlling the experience and determining if a customer becomes a brand evangelist.

Understanding how best to motivate em-

ployees is core to delivering differentiated service. This article will explore four areas of interest we believe are crucial for facilitating the delivery of standout service by frontline employees, enhancing, rather than undermining, compelling brand experiences.

Craig LaRosa

Principal, Continuum

Hire for the soft skills. Train for the technical.

There is an old saying, “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.” Think of the total number of interactions frontline employees have with customers every day across an entire organisation. That’s a huge number of first impressions potentially left to chance. The odds dramatically improve if you have the right people. Companies have a choice when hiring, but frequently focus on hard skills or past experience. They should hire based on a more valuable criteria that can’t be taught – soft skills. A person with soft skills is also known as a “people person.” Their default facial expression is to smile. They enjoy interacting with others and display

Jon Campbell

Senior Brand Strategist, Continuum

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motivating employees: driving frontline behaviour

By Craig LaRosa and Jon Campbell

»The Brand Spear. Frontline employees serve as the »face« of a brand and make ore break the customer experience.«

pos would prefer to find out sooner than later. There is no lack of qualified candidates, especially in this economy. It’s a matter of reprioritizing hiring criteria.

Empower your frontline.

energy and enthusiasm.

The vast majority of frontline positions today have already been designed so a rookie employee can get trained and up-and-running relatively quickly. That makes the decision to hire the candidate with soft skills all the easier. For example, TD Bank, a large U.S. commercial bank, focuses on hiring people with traditional retail experience over banking veterans.

Zappos.com, the online shoe giant, places such a premium on employees with the right attitude they offer new hires $1,000 to quit. A hire that takes them up on this offer clearly doesn’t show the dedication or passion required, information Zap78

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Each of us has had an experience where an employee was unable to help solve our problem because they were not empowered to do so. And yet, these are the best opportunities to win a customer’s loyalty.

Providing a level of elasticity that affords employees the opportunity to react appropriately to unscripted moments is beneficial to everyone involved. We have found customers often enter into a service experience with neutral expectations. Enabling employees to address problem situations appropriately positions the organisation as empathetic and can translate into a positive customer experience in the end. (Diagram on next page) Empowering employees can benefit them as well as the customer. No one enjoys being on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing and it’s only natural for an employee’s attitude and job satisfaction to be impacted for the balance of the day, or beyond – especially when subjected to complaints that are out of their control. Minimizing these occurrences limits carry over effects to the next customer interaction. In addition, the ability to solve problems places the employee in the position of hero, a role that adds to their self-esteem and makes them feel valued.

A company simply cannot anticipate every potential situation and therefore cannot provide a corresponding script or

prescriptive rule for employees to follow.

Department store Nordstrom is famous for having only one rule for employees: “Use good judgment in all situations.”

That rule may be too loose for many organisations but some level of freedom is necessary to respond to everyday situations.

Make the manager set the tone.

How do you retain employees and get the best out of them? These concerns can be alleviated by the “M word.” Not money, but manager.

Managers keep operations running smoothly, handle scheduling and much more. However, their most important role should be ensuring that employees feel respected and valued. The manager can do this by setting the tone for customer service and reinforcing good behaviours.

Continuum worked with an international hotel chain to move the manager from the back office to a greeting station on the lobby floor as a “service conductor.” The manager’s continued presence was a persistent reminder to employees of the priority the organisation placed on positive, frequent customer interaction and served to set an example of customer service for the staff.

While changing the role of the manager may take time, the practise of reinforcing good employee behaviours can be quickly implemented. At Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Mass., managers are provided “Thank You” cards to send to their employees. If an employee goes above and beyond, a manager can write a Thank You card and drop it in the hos-

pital’s internal mail. Logistics are such that the card is sent by the hospital’s mail house to the employee’s home without the manager needing to worry about the address or stamps. To encourage this, managers’ performance is partially measured on the number of Thank You cards they send. According to Pat Jordan, the hospital’s COO, employee turnover has been reduced from 20 percent to 8 percent and employee satisfaction has risen into the 93rd percentile since the program’s inception.

Ultimately, measures that help managers act as role models and encourage good behaviours help to reduce employee churn, alleviate the associated recruitment and training costs and boost frontline employee job satisfaction.

»It’s a matter of reprioritizing hiring criteria.«

»Expectation-Experience map. Moving consumers from neutral to positive is tough, but by empowering employees to solve problems a negative experience can be turned into a positive one.« touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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motivating employees: driving frontline behaviour

By Craig LaRosa and Jon Campbell

Craig LaRosa is a Principal at Continuum, a global innovation consultancy.

He holds a Bachelors of Industrial Design from Syracuse University.

Craig has been creating compelling brand experiences for over 15 years. He understands how to translate the emotional needs of the user and the functional needs of the brand into a holistic, ownable experience that connects organisations and the people who rely on them.

Create a career trajectory In contrast to the numerous layers found at corporate headquarters, frontline service employees are often in fairly flat structures with little room for growth.

From supermarkets to cell phone stores, there’s frequently no position available between a regular associate and a shift manager. It is important to offer a career trajectory, ensuring skills are matched to positions and applicants can see career potential, not just daily jobs.

Designing for skill sets and career advancement can help motivate employees and improve retention. Defining explicit roles, even if cross-training is necessary, allows managers to put employees primarily in positions that play to their strengths, from customer interaction to technical knowledge. This can create

efficiencies in task completion, improve employee morale and enhance the customer experience.

Importantly, the development of discretely defined positions also offers options for advancement. Clear expectations for each role can encourage the appropriate behaviours within a particular position while providing a path for promotion to which employees can aspire.

In-N-Out Burger has done an excellent job of providing a roadmap for their employees that offers opportunities for advancement and encourages greater loyalty to the organisation. In Stacy Perlman’s book on the burger chain “InN-Out Burger: A Behind-the-Counter Look at the Fast-Food Chain that Breaks All the Rules”, she notes that 80 percent of store managers started on the bottom

Developing a common language and codifying principles to maximize employee effort and satisfaction will help lead to the next great service differentiator of brands

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Jon Campbell has ten years of experience defining and building brands. As a senior brand strategist at Contimuum, with one foot firmly planted in the world of business and the other in the world of design, he strives to bridge the two to help develop products and services that are valued by the user and profitable to the organisation. Jon holds a Master of Design Methods degree from Chicago’s Institute of Design and a BA in journalism from the University of Wisconsin.

Experiential Modeling is about bringing ideas to life by any means necessary: creating rough objects, storyboarding out a communication on post-it’s, acting out a service experience

rung and In-N-Out Burger has one of the lowest levels of turnover in the fastfood industry.

Within the broader discipline of design, the focus on service is still nascent. A holistic approach to object, environment, and process design is creating defensible, branded experiences that are unlocking additional value for organisations and delighting customers. However, these elements alone are rapidly becoming table-stakes in the competitive service arena. Recent reports of Microsoft poaching Apple retail staff for their own soon-to-beopened retail stores are evidence of the differentiating factor of good frontline employees.

In conjunction with professional trainers, efficiency experts and the like, designers can help advance employee

motivation as a critical element of the service experience. Developing a common language and codifying principles to maximize employee effort and satisfaction will help lead to the next great service differentiator of brands.

Its importance cannot be understated.

To focus only on the customer is to ignore half of the human-centred experience of any service situation. And this ensures a race to the bottom of the talent pool, and an underutilization of the most vital brand touchpoint.

In a recent discussion on priorities with a large retail client, we provided the following advice: “You can worry about the reach and frequency of your ad dollars, but they will never rival your tens of thousands of employees as the most pervasive and valuable asset for your brand.

Or the single greatest liability.” touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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By Adam Dole and Josh Levine

Creating tribal affiliation

As humans, the drive to connect with

The hungry tribe

others is a powerful force. Of all the years

Author Seth Godin has published on the importance of leadership in forming strong tribal communities and brand guru, Marty Neumeier explains it this way: “Selling is pushing products at people, but brands pull people into tribes.” Traditional marketers have started to take note, but from the looks of it, appears to be no more than a latent response to an educated consumer who is looking for more. Not more advertising, not more spam, and certainly not more clutter – consumers today are hungry for more meaning.

spent on research to understanding tribal affiliation, inclusion, identity, and shared cohesion, it’s only recently that businesses have taken notice. That’s not to say commerce-based tribes haven’t been around forever – they have – but until now they’ve formed organically, without the help of brand managers.

quo for organisations that believe indefensible products, inevitable commoditization and low levels of consumer engagement are the only market reality.

Organisations that create value for the future customer first create a much more formidable barrier to competition. In this instance we’re talking about a considered effort to create ways to connect communities and facilitate the creation of a tribe. By re-framing our relationship with customers we can start to see a world where brand advocates create platforms for meaning.

Don’t shoot the customer Like firing a shotgun into a flock of geese, many marketers assume that if they interrupt enough people, some may pay attention. Yes that'll work, but only until another product comes along that is better, sleeker, or less expensive. When companies compete on features, functions, and price they might as well just say it: “We don’t care enough to understand what you find meaningful.” This mindset is the status

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A business is born What started as a small Summer ritual amongst a community of artists in Northern California has grown into a multi-million dollar festival. Burning Man now attracts nearly 50,000 people ranging from geeked-out yuppies to middle-aged hippies and every technophile in between. This diverse group of eclectic revelers share a desire to contribute to the creation of a pop-

Features

Benefits

Low Engagement

Experiences

flight of stairs into a larger-than-life piano. The ad has nothing to do with cars, yet enables VW to sell more of them by accessing a core emotional truth held by nearly all the VW tribe: fun makes the world better.

Volkswagen sells a lifestyle, and their tribe happily sees its value.

Tribal

High Engagement

Transact

Relate

Engagement Framework: Moving from features and benefits, to experiences and tribes. As consumers move away from features and benefits and into experiences and tribes, the level of engagement increases exponentially.

up city for radical self-expression and communal bonding every August in the California desert. Today Burning Man charges $ 200 a head and earned $ 10+ million in 2008 alone. Burning Man didn’t start as a business, but slow and steady cultivation of this Tribe has certainly made it one.

world, “I support Lance Armstrong in his fight against Cancer, because I understand the importance of staying active.” Lance created a platform using these bracelets as a way of connecting people, with the ultimate goal of raising not only cancer awareness but money, and lots of it.

In a world where consumers own the brand, brand managers need to think more like brand advocates.

They must do more than manage wordmarks, they must become leaders by creating platforms for people to connect with one another. To succeed in today’s marketplace, organisations need to create tribes – not for the money (though that’ll come), but for a purpose. Connecting with others over shared interests, values, and meaningful experiences is what people do, and they will find each other with or without you, why not help? They’ll love you for it.

Selling a lifestyle More than a cause Yellow Livestrong bracelets can be seen on everybody from neighbourhood kids to pro athletes. What is it about this one-dollar rubber band that generates brand awareness and unprecedented amounts of money for cancer research and Nike? Livestrong bracelets are more than just a receipt for your dollar, they have become a way for people to identify themselves as part of the club.

They are a low stakes way to tell the

From the first Beetle to the most recent GTI, Volkswagen has always built and sold great cars, but more impressive is its ability to continue to build its tribe. A recent viral video sponsored by VW claimed almost 4 million hits on YouTube in one week. The video is meant to prove people will change their behaviour if given a fun option as an alternative. In this instance almost everyone choose not to take the escalator when a group of artists turns a steep

Adam Dole, Design Researcher, Method Inc., San Francisco, California, USA Josh Levine, Director of Strategy, Great Monday, San Francisco, USA

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By Julia Schaeper

Key principles of how to make Service Design stick in health

With predictions of a £20 billion funding gap in the NHS’s annual spending from 2011, it is argued that at no other time in its history has the NHS needed innovation for service delivery as much as it does now. Without innovation, the pressure to contain costs might result in cutting services or forcing overstretched staff to work even harder.

David Nicholson, NHS Chief Executive, recently said: “Innovation is no longer one of those ‘nice things to do’ if we have time to spare. It’s business-critical and everyone in the NHS need to be looking for improved ways of using resources to deliver the best service every day.” If we continue to increase healthcare quality and yet reduce service delivery costs, it is clear that we need to redesign the current system to be more productive and more responsive to our prevailing health challenges. Service Design as an ‘improvement methodology’ can therefore add real value.

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Where Service Design methods have been introduced in the context of healthcare innovation, they have resulted in many improvements not to mention increased safety and dignity for patients. In addition, a number of toolkits have been developed, enabling NHS staff to build their internal innovation capabilities. But, despite these successful Service Design projects, Service Design has still not achieved a level of widespread use, and therefore we cannot show any economic impact at the scale that will be needed to help address the current healthcare challenges. It raises questions around the barriers of spreading Service Design and how to demonstrate that design can help the NHS to increase quality and enhance patient experience for less money.

We would like to hear your views on how Service Design can contribute to this challenge. To start the debate we have identified a few thoughts on what Service Designers might do to increase the spread of their discipline in the NHS:

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1. Connect with the health audience In our work, we are often challenged with the notion that Service Design is a somewhat ‘soft and fluffy’ discipline, unable to clearly communicate its true value and benefits to the healthcare audience.

It is important for designers to understand the healthcare context and the language used in the NHS. We need to frame our offers in a way that they resonate with current healthcare professionals’ needs, values, policies, and experiences so that the likelihood of engagement is high.

2. Segment the message While it might be essential to resonate with the overall healthcare context, it is also important to accommodate different stakeholders and their diverse needs. What might seem relevant for a hospital ward nurse may require a different framework for a healthcare commissioner in a Primary Care Trust. Segmenting our messages so that they are

relevant at a variety of different levels can help create a genuine pull for design skills and expertise.

3. Demonstrate that quality can cost less Whilst designers are very good at focusing on the qualitative aspects of the service, they sometimes lack the skill to articulate both qualitative and quantitative aspects of any intervention. Existing case studies have produced some inspiring impact; however, design is still not widely considered as an effective

lever for change. There is a need to create an evidence base about how design can provide both quality improvements and a return on investment.

4. Aim to move rather than motivate people Evidence suggests that in the long term we will need ‘inside out’ change (the capacity and capability of the NHS system to change itself ) to create the required level of sustainable improvements in cost and quality. To achieve this, ‘outside in’

»Service Design has still not achieved a level of widespread use, and therefore we cannot show any economic impact at the scale that will be needed to help address the current healthcare challenges.«

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key principles of how to make service design stick in health

By Julia Schaeper

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change capability, in other words support from external experts including Service Design consultancies, can add momentum and bring new perspectives. We need to think about how design could help build internal capabilities to innovate, perhaps by connecting with other improvement methods currently employed in the NHS. 5 Show collective benefit We need to demonstrate tangibly the collective benefits that can be gained for the variety of stakeholders through the use of co-design.

Thus far, the use of Service Design in health seems to be predominantly focused on patient-led service improvements. There is untapped design potential to demonstrate the value that can be created on various levels.

6 Prevent rather than cure One sustainable investment strategy in healthcare lies within prevention – changing mindsets towards health rather than sickness.

Currently, the majority of health expenditure focuses on tackling the causes of ill-health and treating illness.

We need to develop more systematic approaches to care for people with, or at risk of chronic longterm disease, such as diabetes.

Designers can focus on the role of the NHS in promoting public

health and reducing healthcare inequalities – re-thinking how to enable more people to achieving better health by adopting a healthier lifestyle.

7 Design-out waste An important aspect of becoming more productive and efficient is to eliminate waste in the existing system. Activities that are not completed correctly the first time or patients being moved unnecessarily from ward to ward are examples of waste that require more resources to fix. Better design can increase productivity by demonstrating how it can reduce injuries, defects, waiting, and movements.

»Where Service Design methods have been introduced in the context of healthcare innovation, they have resulted in many improvements not to mention increased safety and dignity for patients.«

8 Change a little: Change a lot The UK healthcare system is complex, and achieving change may be limited by economic and cultural realities. It is important to recognize that we can innovate within our existing streams as improvements on existing services can still have a huge impact on the wider system. By planting many seeds we will eventually see changes growing on a much larger scale.

We would welcome new thoughts, challenges to our assumptions, or even agreement! Please get in touch at julia.schaeper@institute.nhs.uk or use the Twitter hashtag #howtomakeSDstick

Julia Schaeper, Service Designer, NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, Warwick, UK

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workshop insights

By Craig LaRosa and Jon Campbell

Design Thinking | A Service Design Workshop Hands on Service Design challenge using Design Thinking principles as a point of view.

»We have found that these workshops help organisations experience the key principles of design thinking, learn how to unpack and analyse touchpoints across a service, and design new solutions that are right for the consumer.«

»While each team had the same Service Design challenge, each of you observed different issues and solved them in unique ways. That shows the huge amount of opportunity.«

»Getting ideas out of your head and up on the wall allows everyone on the team to access your insights and build upon them.«

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»This is a great way to introduce clients to design thinking and share with them an approach to designing for services.«

»Break down the consumer’s journey into its constituent parts and then explore how each part can be eliminated, improved or redesigned as appropriate«

»We use experiential modeling of services to bring our concepts to life, test them and improve them.

Remember, anything can be modeled and tested.«

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chapter preview

Interdisciplinarity in Service Design How can and does Service Design inspire other disciplines and how do such interdisciplinary cross-overs provide new opportunities for the Service Design field?

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The rise of smart services in business Helmut Aschbacher and Ernst Kreutzer

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Practice of Service Design for tourism initiative Ivan Bursztyn, Roberto Bartholo and Carla Cipolla

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Performing Arts and Service Design Adrienne Schäfer and Markus Berg

102 Designing for the masses. Service Design for small and medium sized enterprises JĂźrgen Faust and Thomas SchĂśnweitz

104 Workshop: Interdisciplinarity in Co-Design Mary Rose Cook and Zoe Stanton

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By Helmut Aschbacher and Ernst Kreuzer

The rise of smart services in business How to build an intelligent business with the co-design of Service Design and Service Engineering

Know your customer – but how do we gain that knowledge?

Owing to economic tertiarisation, customers expect a high level of quality in the service industry. The outlook when failing to deliver quality services is bleak : only 14% of customers quit due to deficits in product quality, whereas 63% quit due to bad service quality.

The goal of every company must be to satisfy customer needs by identifying, or ideally by anticipating, these needs. Bearing this in mind one is able to develop service attributes that lead to customer satisfaction and customer delight.

Tools like the “Kano-analysis” or the “quality-function-deployment” (QFD) help to identify customer needs. There are a lot of efforts to apply technology-driven methods, yet the disadvantage is that they are not real-time based. Service Design methods like the creation of personas or “thinking aloud tests,” on the other hand, are

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customer-oriented approaches and provide deep insight into customer minds when a service is newly developed. However, these methods lack the possibility to collect and process data of customers in the long run.

Service Design vs. Service Engineering The focus of our research is IT-based services, since they are frequently catalysts for new and innovative services (e.g. the iphone). The development and design of IT-based services needs a special approach in which both Service Design and Software Engineering aspects need to be considered. Service Engineering is essential in this process since its various methods (e.g. process design with standardised process modeling tools like Event-Driven Process Chain (EPC)) fill the gap between Service Design and Software Engineering.

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From IT-Based Service to Smart Service IT-based Services offer more than merely automated services. It is possible to create a “smart service” by combining connectivity aspects, data collection methods, data mining techniques and decision intelligence which makes it possible to transform collected data into information, and information into knowledge. With this technology-driven approach one is able to build a bridge between the initial creation of a service, which is effectively supported by Service Design methods, and the long-term development of services, which is based on Service Engineering methods using Smart Service applications. When an IT-based service assesses customer acceptance of a new service (data collection) and then “communicates” with a data collection tool (database), the first step in the creation of a Smart Service is done.

Noticed as performance and charged

Sold Service

Noticed as performance but partly charged

Subsidized Service

Noticed as performance but not charged

Donated Service

Not noticed as performance

Hidden Service

The development and design of IT-based services need a special approach in which both Service Design and Software Engineering aspects need to be considered.

Smart Services offer the following service possibilities : •Diagnostics: the application enables a device to self-optimise and allows troubleshooting, monitoring and repair.

• Replenishment and Commerce: the application monitors consumption of a device and consumer behaviour.

• Status: the application reports on performance and usage of the product or the service.

• Upgrades: the application optimises the performance of a given device.

• Profiling and behaviour tracking: this application monitors variations in location, culture, performance, usage and sales of the device.

Aspects of Smart Services One strength of Smart Services is the ability to offer pre-emptive services. This means that services are offered before the customer knows or expects them by collecting and interpreting data of usage of a service (e.g. delivering replenishment material for a printer before the customer knows that a new toner is needed). There are, however, also weaknesses when applying the Smart Service approach. In many companies there is a lack of expert knowledge on how to process and interpret achieved data. For these reasons, training on data mining and business intelligence are indispensable for companies using Smart Services. A permanent risk involved is that the use of Smart Services requires a company’s trust in the provider of this service. Therefore it is necessary that the service provider offers transparent information on the data to be collected and emphasises the benefits for customers and business.

An opportunity that lies in Smart Services is the visualisation of services, since only service performance that is noticed by the customer can be charged . With the gained data, the full visualization of all offered services, including the hidden ones, is possible (e.g. diagrams, statistics, etc.).

Helmut Aschbacher, Lecturer, Campus 02, University of Applied Sciences Graz, Austria

Conclusion Smart Services enable service pro-

Ernst Kreuzer, Professor, Campus 02, University of Applied Sciences Graz, Austria

viders to establish closer ties with customers by identifying customer needs in an intelligent way using ICT. Also, it is possible to analyse this data and to gain knowledge about customers and their needs with Business Intelligence. As a consequence, intelligent service businesses based on this knowledge can be established.

It has been shown that Service Design and its methods in understanding customer needs are essential in the initial development phase of a service. Once the service is operating, implemented “sensors” efficiently help the company to understand the customer in its use of the service. Finally, the combined knowledge enables a company to offer Smart Services including the potential of pre-emptive services.

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By Roberto Bartholo, Carla Cipolla and Ivan Bursztyn

Practice of Service Design for tourism initiative The quality of interpersonal relationships as design requirements

This article aims at bringing the approach of Service Design to the practices of tourism services in order to highlight the potential of the dialogue between these two fields of knowledge. We particularly consider services on which intensive interpersonal relations between participants are a requirement for a satisfactory service performance. To this end, based on a conceptual framework of reference, we will present one project that, in the Brazilian context, illustrates the interrelations between the two sectors.

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Community-Based Tourism.

Community-based tourism (CBT) is an emerging tourism activity that intends to promote the proximity between travelers and local host communities (Bartholo et al., 2008; Cipolla, 2004). It started in Brazil in the 90’s as an answer to the negative social, environmental and economic impacts caused by the implementation of mega-hospitality complexes, such as resorts and villages, in local communities.

Nowadays, CBT initiatives represent a new opportunity to promote sustainable development through the strengthening of local culture and identity.

Beyond environmental sustainability, or the increase of economic benefits for local communities, this kind of tourism aims at establishing new intercultural exchanges between hosts and guests: on the one hand, visitors interested in learning more about the context and the history of the visited place, and, on the other hand, communities open to sharing their way of life.

The relationship between these

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two protagonists, client-agent or host-guest, needs to be promoted in a direct and authentic way. The conventional mass tourism industry is not designed to do so: its services are designed to guarantee the privacy and the anonymity of visitors. If we intend to promote closer encounters and relationships among the participants of CBT initiatives we need to consolidate a Service Design approach able to deal with this particular kind of interpersonal interactions.

Example: the Casa Grande initiative.

The small town of Nova Olinda is situated in the remote countryside of the state of CearĂĄ, Brazil, about 600 km from the capital Fortaleza.

With about 12, 000 inhabitants, Nova Olinda represented the reality of most cities in the Brazilian interior: the isolation due to distance from regional centers and the abundant unexplored cultural and environmental resources. However, this condition has changed in recent years thanks to the performance of

the non-governmental organization Casa Grande Foundation.

The Foundation was founded by Francisco Alemberg de Souza Lima (born locally) to give interdisciplinary educational to children and young people through actions of cultural strengthening, communication and arts. The original scope of the Foundation has been enlarged since they started to receive visitors interested in their cultural activities as well as in the local

environment. From this point a solution was developed to be delivered by the Cooperative of Parents and Friends of the Casa Grande (COOPAGRAN), formed by parents of boys and girls from the Foundation. The cooperative delivers the hospitality services demanded by the visitors. Each parent has a role: some offer hospitality in their own homes, others work as guides and others offer transfer services as well as local restaurants. The local

ÂťThe whole solution was designed, and still is, by the locals, who manage each detail.ÂŤ

The Casa Grande initiative shows us a way to promote closer interactions among visitors and the locals, as required by CBT initiatives. touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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practice of service design for tourism initiative

By Roberto Bartholo, Carla Cipolla and Ivan Bursztyn

arts and crafts were also involved: partnerships were established with local artisans, who opened their workshops for visitors and commercialised their products.

The whole solution was designed, and still is, by the locals, who manage each detail. Participative planning meetings are regularly promoted by the Foundation and

COOPAGRAN members to evaluate and design or redesign their services, crossing their individual skills with the local resources.

These informal Service Designers, and the co-design processes they promote, are being effective. As a result, in 2006, 28,000 visitors were registered and the number is continuously increasing. The services

are strongly based on intensive and personalised relationships between the locals and the visitors, and they run using personal resources (such as loca’ls own houses and cars).

These services deserve particular attention, since they promote the integration of visitors with the daily lives of residents, especially children and youths of the Foundation.

With about 12, 000 inhabitants, Nova Olinda represented the reality of most cities in the Brazilian interior: the isolation due to distance from regional centers and the abundant unexplored cultural and environmental resources.

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Relational services and Service Design.

The Casa Grande initiative shows us a way to promote closer interactions among visitors and the locals, as required by CBT initiatives. This case was selected since it illustrates one of the fruitful – and still underdeveloped interrelations – between tourism and a Service Design approach, particularly around the concept of relational services.

Some international research activities (Meroni, 2007; Jegou, Manzini, 2008) have identified an emerging service model deeply based on the quality of interpersonal relations among participants. It was called “relational service” (Cipolla, Manzini, 2009). The term relational indicates that these services are based on face-to-face and nonanonymous interactions. In all the offered services, the visitor has the opportunity to participate in the local ways of everyday life, and at the same time, visitors reveal themselves, as they are not taking part in well-formalised service interactions. These under-mediated – or under designed – service meetings are the way by which spontaneous interpersonal relations take place, a way of interaction that characterizes, by definition, the concept of relational services.

The Casa Grande initiative is a local system of relational services developed by a co-design process where the local community promotes at the same time – and by

this same process - the reinforcement of their local social fabric.

The workshops they promote could be supported by diffused Service Design skills and tools, for example, to define and describe the itineraries/service journeys, to define the profiles, skills and interests of local providers and visitors; to support the discussion using visualisation formats, to map the systems of local relationships between people, places and things, to prototype, to generate service specifications and so on. Learning the way that Casa Grande and COOPAGRAN promote a Service Design process (the knowledge they actually use and/or specifically developed) could help professional designers to facilitate and support similar initiatives and investigate new tools and approaches to consolidate CBT. Everything seems to indicate that the further investigation of the convergence of the fields of Service Design and tourism, particularly around the concepts of relational services and CBT, has a high potential of development in the Brazilian context since many initiatives have similar characteristics as the one of Casa Grande.

References • Bartholo, R.; Delamaro, M. C.; Bursztyn, I. (2008). Tourism for Whom?: Different Paths to Development and Alternative Experiments in Brazil. Latin American

Perspectives, Issue 160, Vol. 35 No. 3, May 2008 103-119.

• Cipolla, C. (2004). “Tourist or Guest - Designing Tourism Experiences or Hospitality Relations?”, In: Willis, Anne-Marie (edited by), Design Philosophy Papers: Collection Two, Team D/E/S Publications, Ravensbourne, Australia.

• Cipolla, C.; Manzini, E. (2009).

“Relational Services”. In: Knowledge, Technology & Policy (Springer), v. 22, p. 45-50 • Jegou. F., Manzini E. (2008) Collaborative Services. Social innovation and design for sustainability.

Milano: POLI.Design.

• Meroni, A. (2007). Creative Communities. People inventing new ways of living. Milano: POLI. Design.

Roberto Bartholo, Professor, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Carla Cipolla, PHD and research consultant , Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Ivan Bursztyn, PHD Candidate, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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By Adrienne Schäfer and Markus Berg

Performing Arts and Service Design

The relationship between performing arts and services is not a new topic in academic discussions. Grove and Fisk (1983) pointed out the theatrical nature of services in their services theatre framework. A stage production and a service compromise the same elements (for illustration see Picture 1): actors, an audience, a setting, a frontstage, a backstage and a performance. The actors (employees) are those who work together to produce the service for the audience (customers). The setting

In the business world the theatre, the so-called “business theatre”, has been winning recognition in the last few years, especially in the context of change management, learning and development processes in companies. Special business actors with skills in business and improvisation theatre take on the roles of either employees or customers or both. There are six functions of the theatre which can be identified in this context:

(service environment) is where the service performance unfolds. The actions visible to the audience on the frontstage usually rely on significant support from the backstage, away from the audience’s inspection, where much of the planning and execution of the service experience occurs. The setting’s design and signage help to define the service experience for both the actors and the audience. The setting can offer either face-to-face or long-distance interaction, by such means as postal mail, telephone, radio, television, or Internet (Fisk et al. 2000).

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1. Mirroring/Reflection: Employees are enabled to reflect on their daily business from a bird’s eye view to recognize the necessity for changing an attitude or behaviour.

2. Materialization: Intangible factors, such as emotions that influence behaviour, are shifted from the unconscious to the conscious level – and thus become changeable.

3. Creative impulse: Theatre methods stimulate the idea-generating potential and the ability to develop empathy and perspective change.

4. Storytelling: The theatre transforms content into stories that create attention and present complex

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relationships in a simple manner.

5. Laboratory: Processes can be optimized and tested immediately, as in rapid prototyping.

6. Simulation: Employees can also ‘play’ a very active role and can train new behaviours as in a flight simulator.

Business theatre can also make a significant contribution in the new service development process. A systematic new service development process – as proposed in the academic discipline of Service Engineering (e.g. Bullinger 1995; Meiren/Barth 2002) – can be divided into the following steps: idea generation, selection and examination of ideas, description of the service concept (including a description of the new service offering, of the processes to be installed, the necessary resources, and the ideas for marketing the new service), implementation of the service innovation, market testing, and market introduction.

The figure on the following page shows the application of business

Service setting = Service environment with face-to-face or long distance interaction Backstage = Planning and Execution of the service interaction Actors = Employees

Frontstage = visible actions Audience = Customers

Picture1: Elements of a typical service theatre framework

theatre in each stage of the new service-development process: When business theatre was applied in new service development the following benefits were identified and are illustrated in Picture 2: Rapid prototyping can be applied also for immaterial goods: Services are often characterised by intangibility, heterogeneity, simultaneous production, consumption, and perishability (Parasuraman et al.

1985). Companies therefore face distinctive challenges, for example how does a firm communicate content, quality, and value to customers when the offering is intangible and cannot be readily tried or displayed?

Rapid prototyping helps in an early stage of the innovation process to

describe the outcome dimensions (material and immaterial impacts of a new service), as well as the process dimension (which describes how the service is performed).

Out-of-the box thinking is facilitated through the visualization of difficult-to-place ideas: Creative ideas can more easily be exchanged in the opportunity-identification phase because they can be visualized by performing them instead of describing them in words. This helps to create a common understanding of what the new service is about.

Employee and customer perspective is integrated right from the start of the new service- development process: The business actors com-

ÂťHow does a firm communicate content, quality, and value to customers when the offering is intangible and cannot be readily tried or displayed?ÂŤ

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performing arts and service design

By Adrienne Schäfer and Markus Berg

ment on their service experience after each simulation. This can be looked on as an instant customer and/or employee survey. Necessary adaptations are discovered and implemented at an earlier stage than customer focus groups or customer surveys would allow.

»Testing new services should become as “normal” as it is for new products, because it is much more efficient.«

Cost-efficient development with few test persons is facilitated: Two business actors are usually enough to cover a wide range of different customer- and employee profiles and characters, and thus a wide range of service scenarios.

Confidentiality of the new service offering is guaranteed due to the few test persons involved.

Individual professional skills of the employees are enhanced faster: employees can train their skills at a very early stage as in a flight simulator. Also training of multiple disruptions and recovery strategies is possible.

All the benefits listed help to support a mind-change for the whole organization towards an innovative service culture. Business theatre is also a very powerful tool when it

Rapid Prototyping: Automatic check-in for business customers and individual check-in for leisure customers.

Out-of-the-box thinking through visualisation. Employee and customer integration right from the start with two business actors in different roles.

Cost-efficient development and confidentiality with two test persons.

Picture 2: New service development scenario: alternative reception concept in a hotel without a regular reception desk

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comes to testing a new service. Testing new services should become as “normal” as it is for new products, because it is much more efficient.

Service failure can be erased in the development phase and not only when the service innovation is already launched. During the test phase front-line employees prototype “critical” situations and service recovery strategies can be tested.

»Business theatre offers a lot of possibilities. Further research should exploit the use of service theatre in the Service Design process.«

Business theatre offers a lot of possibilities. Further research should exploit the use of service theatre in the Service Design process.

Adrienne Schäfer, Lecturer and Director of Competence Center Services Management, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland Markus Berg, Head of Vitamin T — Transformation and Training for Change, Munich, Germany

Figure 1: Application of business theatre in the new service development process

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By Jürgen Faust and Thomas Schönweitz

Designing for the masses Service Design for small and medium sized enterprises

Recent statistics show that 99% of all enterprises in the EU are Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs). These firms generate more than 57% of the GDP and account for more than 75 million jobs, yet most strategic frameworks, such as Service Design were developed for the other types of enterprises—large manufacturing companies. Service Design may be an untapped resource for

How can SMEs tap into Service Design to contribute to their profits and innovation? With limited market share and limited capital, and research capabilities, SMEs are often subject to market-deficiencies.

However if Service Design is to have an impact in these companies, the following challenges need to be addressed:

competitive advantages and increasing revenue for SMEs.

• Lack of commitment to design • Insufficient allocation of funds and resources • Lack of Design Thinking skills.

Several strategies have been developed to propose solutions towards these issues: Commitment Hollins and Hollins point out that by using a design process rather than creating products and services out of pure feeling, the risk and costs of a failure are greatly reduced, saving scarce resources for SMEs. The steps of a simple design process are analyze - design - develop - implement – evaluate. Applying

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a simple five step design process and actively prototyping service elements, the complexity of design can be reduced, results can be improved and resources are saved, which increases senior management buy in and commitment.

Funds and resources By identifying readily available stakeholders such as customers, employees, competitors and CEOs, the steps of the process can be executed with minimal investment, while still receiving valuable insight and options.

Design thinking There are many ways SMEs can apply Design Thinking across the design process.

To gain broad insight in the analysis phase, observation of competitors and customers, as well as interviews with employees, serve as a starting point to help connect the company to their customers In the design phase, storyboards and character profiles are powerful tools to expand the scope of options, understand what needs to be involved

in the service, and how all participants will perceive it. New approaches and innovations become apparent.

In the development phase, the pool of potential ideas and innovations can be reduced to a feasible, viable and desirable solution. Personas, Offering Maps and Mock-Ups in the prototyping process can support this goal.

To visualize and simplify the implementation phase, a Blueprint of the Service, Use Cases and Service Prototypes are created, which, through several cycles evolve into the finished service.

The evaluation phase is used to get a general feedback from stakeholders, identify skills and possible innovations usable for further projects, improving on the design skills and processes of the company and employees.

This approach has been tested in a case study with a retail optometrist with five branches in Munich, Germany. Over the course of 12 weeks, a new service was developed from initial concept phase to design and implementation. Various stakeholders such as customers, employees and company-internal data sources were engaged in the different steps

of the process. Many new ideas for further innovations were discovered in the analysis phase, and many solutions to challenges not related to the new product were found in the design phase.

In this short timeframe, with constrained resources, a viable new service was designed. At the same time, company awareness for design, and employee motivation and involvement were all increased through co-creation and their involvement in the Service Design process.

Jürgen Faust, Professor, Media and Communication MHMK Munich, Germany Thomas Schönweitz, Media and Communication MHMK Munich, Germany

»To gain broad insight in the analysis phase, observation of competitors and customers, as well as interviews with employees, serve as a starting point to help connect the company to their customers.« touc hpoint | the jour nal of se rvi ce desi gn

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workshop insights

By Zoe Stanton and Mary Rose Cook

Interdisciplinarity in Co-Design The workshop explored how different disciplines can collaborate to design successful solutions to social challenges. The workshop leaders shared their experiences in using collaborative approaches to improve public behaviours for a better society.

»It was interesting to have a different starting point to design from. Identifying a problematic public behaviour and then designing or tweaking existing services to address it worked well.«

»Exploring the ways in which Service Design could be used to change unsustainable behaviours produced interesting ideas for designing alternative travel options to overseas conferences and reducing the time spent in the shower!«

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»The workshop was well paced and we fitted in so much!

Effectively we worked through the ‘Exploration’ and ‘Creation’ phase of a project and now we (the participants) have to implement the ideas. Having a website page to update our progress will be useful – http://uscreatescomfortzone.wordpress.com«

»When considering Service Design for behaviour change, it is important to look to other disciplines such as behaviour change psychology.«

»It was really good to have a session which solely explored the potential of Service Design to address social challenges.«

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Service Design Snapshots from around the world

108 Enabling Service Design for the poor Priti Rao

108 Capturing moments Zoe Bridges

109 Knowledge management touchpoints Mauricio Manhaes

110 Service Design Competition An interview with Nuno Laginha, winner of the SDN Service Design Competition 2009

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service design snapshots

from around the world

#1.

enabling service design for the poor An ‘Enabling Service Design’ (ESD) is a service that is designed to enhance human ‘capabilities’ and fulfil desired ‘value’. ‘Capabilities’ is the freedom of choices of what a

»The research indicates that a ‘value’ analysis of a service can be useful to identify the underlying factors that shape decision-making and preferences in the context of services for the poor.« person can do or be (Sen, 1999) and ‘value’ signifies the ‘utility’, ‘social’, ‘emotional’ or ‘spiritual’ values (Boztepe, 2007) that a service may help to fulfil.

Enabling Service Design (ESD) model The ESD approach was used to compare artisan services in Bandhpali village in India, that were provided by public- (cooperative-) and private service providers.

The research found that the artisans held a more ‘long term’ view of services, that centred less around ‘specific interactions’. The ‘utility’ value-logic of service was dominant and primarily revolved around a calculus of ‘convenience’, ‘dependability’, and ‘financial gains propor108

#1

tionate to the effort involved.’

The ‘social-significance’ value was also important in deciding which service provider to work with.

While for some it was important to be ‘independent’ and exercise choice, for others there were network benefits of being part of a ‘cooperative’.

The research indicates that a ‘value’ analysis of a service can be useful to identify the underlying factors that shape decision-making and preferences in the context of services for the poor.

References: • Boztepe, S. (2007): Toward a framework of product development for global markets: A user-valuebased approach. Design studies 28, 513–533.

• Sen, A. (1999): Development as freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Priti Rao, PhD student, School of Design, Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK

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#2 #2.

capturing moments What is ASYV? The ASYV is a home, community, and high school for 500 orphans in Rwanda. This unique educational model provides traumatized youth with a comprehensive range of

»This unique educational model provides traumatised youths with a comprehensive range of services so they can go on to become leaders in society who will help transform their country.« services so they can go on to become leaders in society who will help transform their country.

What is the Service Design challenge?

To nurture the recovery process for the orphans, the village has a Health and Wellness Center. However the counselling services are not tapped by the students due to three misconceptions: • Students were not relating their physical pains to emotional trauma.

• Counselling in Rwanda has a strong connotation with HIV/AIDS and rape, a stigma that proves to be a barrier.

• Students are not aware of the benefits they could receive through counselling.

#3

We designed a system for students to connect to the counsellors by designing activities and materials: • To help the students understand their frequently occurring physical pains are associated with mental trauma, and that through counselling they can lead a more holistic and healthy life.

• We designed a phototherapy activity to integrate counsellors into the student’s lives to strengthen the relationship between them and destigmatize the concept of counselling.

• We also helped the counsellors and “House mothers” (students live in 16-person group homes, led by a House Mother) to work together to support the kids by designing a counselling workbook for House Mothers.

Zoe Bridges, Experience Strategist and Service Designer at Liquidnet, New York City, USA www.agahozo-shalom.org

#3.

knowledge management touchpoints: a service design contribution to the innovation processes of services »KM and SD are two relatively new fields of knowledge and offer methods and tools that, once intertwined, can inspire mutual contributions and advancements.« In a service-based economy, the creation of knowledge and the creation of service are strongly connected. The urge to cope “with complex demands, which requires a substantial shift from the production of goods to the provision of knowledge-intensive systemic solutions” (Morelli, 2002) presents a harsh challenge to organisations. Moreover, there is little scientific knowledge about the innovation process inherent to the development of new services (Droege, 2009). That challenge may be undertaken through the juxtaposition of Knowledge Management (KM) and Service Design (SD). Although KM may have mainly a functionalist paradigm and SD a radical humanist one (Johansson, 2008), both work with “interactions patterns” between people, technology, and techniques

(Bhatt, 2001). Or, as defined by Mager (2008), the “dynamic dance” between those elements. KM and SD are two relatively new fields of knowledge that, if intertwined, may collaborate significantly to the competitiveness of organisations.

References: • Bhatt, G. D.: Management strategies for individual knowledge and organizational knowledge. Journal of Knowledge Management, 6 (1), 31–39, 2002.

• Droege, H.; Hildebrand, D.; Forcada, M.: Innovation in services: present findings, and future pathways. Journal of Service Management, 20 (2), 131–155, 2009.

• Design Council: Eleven lessons: managing design in eleven global companies. Desk research report.

Design Council, London, 2007.

• Morelli, N.: Designing product/ service systems. A methodological exploration. Design Issues: Volume 18, Number 3, 3–17. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Summer 2002.

Mauricio Manhães, MA student of Knowledge Engineering and Management, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil Gregório Varvakis, Senior Lecturer, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil

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By Judith Altenau

Service Design Competition 2009 »Automotive mobility and future services« An interview with Nuno Laginha, winner of the sdn Service Design Competition 2009.

This year for the very first time, the Service Design Network announced a Service Design Competition entitled “automotive mobility and future services” in relation to the Service Design Conference. In cooperation with Volkswagen AG, Germany, the intention of this competition was to find new services to keep people (auto-) mobile. Modern life and new work realities change behaviour and mobility needs.

For many people vehicles have become an essential part of their daily lives as they use it for travel, work, and leisure activities. On the other hand, especially in urban environments, many people don’t use cars at all as they don’t comply with their needs, wishes, and lifestyles.

With his submission, „Envisioning a better driving experience. A Service Design approach“, Nuno Laghina convinced the competition committee. He and his project were introduced at this year’s Service Design Conference on Madeira. Some background material can be found on his website http://www.nunolaginha.com.

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Could you please briefly describe yourself and your work and education in the field of Service Design?

How did you approach the – admittedly quite open – task of the Service Design competition?

I earned a Bachelor of Science in Communications and Multimedia Design from Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra. I expect to earn a Master of Human-Computer Interaction dual degree from UMa and Carnegie Mellon University in December 2009. During my studies in Human-Computer Interaction, I was introduced to Service Design and I also had the opportunity to meet Shelley Evenson and see her work.

I took the Service Design course at University of Madeira and suddenly I started working in this field. My first project was for a Portuguese company “improving waiting experience” and thanks to its success other projects came up. The most recent project was designing “a sustainable water distribution and support” for an international company in Portugal, which we believe will have some impact in Portugal in the near future.

Before I actually started the project, I found out that many ongoing projects in this field are focusing on bringing extra elements and technology to cars. These extras are related to technology that we have and use on a daily basis but in different contexts, such as Internet, games, e-mail and TV. Before I started the project I asked myself if I would want to pursue a similar approach or focus my research on services that would really support the activity of driving. I thought it would be more engaging and exciting to focus on the driver and its main role, driving.

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Can you describe and explain your winning project briefly?

In summary, I designed four prototypes regarding different factors in the driving activity: socializing, safety, parking, and documentation.

For socializing, I wanted to create

solutions to enhance communication, but not disrupt driving. For safety, I wanted to inform drivers about their “driving status”. I also suggested a solution to save time and money when searching for parking. The last prototype refers to a solution to safely manage documentation related to the driving.

All these concepts were combined in a “single package” and strongly grounded on the research conducted during the design process.

In how far can your work be understood as a Service Design approach? Can you differentiate it from Interaction Design?

»I wanted to create solutions to enhance communication, but not disrupt driving.«

Interaction design studies the way users interact with the artefacts.

It is more focused on the users’ behaviours and how the systems respond and adapt to their inputs.

Although I considered some interaction constraints in my prototypes, my project as a whole went beyond an interaction design approach. I think Service Design and Interaction Design encounter each other at some point but both refer to different aspects of design. In my project I used a Service Design approach to understand the problem, investigate solutions, and identify opportunities and Interaction Design to develop the prototypes in a way they could be easily used.

Why, do you think, did your work convince the committee?

I believe the fact that my prototypes are really grounded on identified user needs was decisive for the jury.

This was possible because I followed a Service Design approach and that was clear in the proposal. Although the abstract was really short I think I was able to synthesize the design process and my final concepts. I also submitted high fidelity prototypes, which probably had some influence in the decision. In summary I want to believe that my Service Design approach was professional enough to capture the jury’s attention.

Are there any future projects planned with VW in order to integrate your ideas in their work?

It is important for me to give continuity to this project in which I believe very much. I hope we can work together to see these ideas implemented in a near future. Future projects are still being considered.

Thanks to Nuno for the interesting interview!

Nuno Laginha, Masters student, Carnegie Mellon University and University of Madeira, Funchal, Portugal

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conference impressions

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member map

service design network

Finland Culminatum Ltd Oy , Espoo Laurea University of Applied Sciences , Espoo KONE, Espoo Taivas, Helsinki Grey Direct & Digital, Helsinki University of Art and Design Helsinki, TaiK, Helsinki Palmu Inc., Helsinki Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences, Jyväskylä Kuopio University of Design, Kuopio Lahti University of Applied Sciences, Lahti Sweden Tieto Corporation, Älvsjö Business & Design Lab University of Gothenburg, Göteborg Linköping University, Linköping Doberman, Stockholm Design Västerbotten, Umeå Transformator, Stockholm Norway Designit, Oslo AHO University, Oslo United Kingdom Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd, Crawley Imagination Lancaster, Lancaster Engine, London IDEO, London live|work, London Prospect , London Seren Partners, London STBY, London thinkpublic, London Design London | Imperial College Business School, London NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, Warwick Naked Eye Research, London Ireland Centre for Design Innovation - Institute of Technology Sligo, Sligo Portugal University of Madeira–Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Funchal Novabase, Lisboa USA SCAD University, Savannah, GA Mc Donald´s Corporation, Oak Brook, IL Continuum, West Newton, MA Frontier Service Design, Malvern, PA Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburg, PA Paulvoglewede.com, San Francisco, CA Canada lvl studio, Montreal Ascent Group, Vancouver Brazil UFRJ/COPPE- Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - DESIS group, Rio de Janeiro Igorsaraiva.com, Brasilia

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Korea Creative Design Institute, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon Xener Systems, Seoul Taiwan Chili Consulting Corp., Taipei Institute for Information Industry, Taipei Australia Proto Partners, Sydney BT Financial Group, Sydney Huddle Design, VIC Melbourne Russel Baker, Canberra Austria ISN - Innovation Service Network GmbH, Graz MCI Management Center Innsbruck, Innsbruck Mobilkom Austria, Vienna Italy Domus Academy, Milano Politecnico di Milano - Facoltá del Design, Milano Experientia, Torino Germany Sturm & Drang, Hamburg Köln International School of Design, Cologne Macromedia Hochschule für Medien und Design, München Rudolf Haufe Verlag, Wolfsburg Volkswagen AG, Wolfsburg Denmark Aalborg University - School of Architecture and Design, Aalborg 1508 A/S, Copenhagen Copenhagen Living Lab, Copenhagen Switzerland Luzern Universtiy of Applied Sciences and Arts, Luzern Dimando AG, Zurich The Netherlands Delft University of Technology , Delft 31Volts, Utrecht Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht T+Huis, Eindhoven TietoEnator Netherlands, Amersfoort DesignThinkers, Amsterdam Edenspiekermann, Amsterdam Informaat, Baarn Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, Rotterdam Mixe - medical marketing, Zeist Spain FunkyProjects, Bilbao

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sdn

service design network

About Service Design Network The Service Design Network is a forum for practitioners to advance the nascent field of Service Design. Our purpose is to develop and strengthen the knowledge and expertise in the science and practise of innovation and improve services generally.

Service Design Network . Ubierring 40 . 50678 Cologne . Germany . www.service-design-network.org

Become part of an inspiring Network!

The Service Design Network is an internationally aligned forum for practitioners and academics to advance the growing field of the young discipline Service Design. Our purpose is to develop and strengthen the knowledge and expertise in the science and practise of service innovation and to improve services generally.

The Service Design Network is rapidly growing – More than 70 full members from all over the world have joined, representing academics, agencies and industries. More than 600 subscribers have already signed in for Insider, the Service Design Newsletter. Apart from that, the sdn community website provides a platform for collaboration and communication among network members.

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