Anna-Sophie Oertzen Meet the service designer
For this edition of the Touchpoint Profile, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes followed up with Anna-Sophie Oertzen after meeting at an event in Amsterdam, to learn more about how her research into the value of co-creation can enlighten service designers. AnnaSophie is currently employed by the Köln International School of Anna-Sophie Oertzen is a PhD Candidate exploring how co-creation with different actors may be used to design and deliver profitable, user-centric services. For that, Anna-Sophie uses her business background specialised in marketing, strategy and innovation, her experience in conducting user research, and her practical service design knowledge. anna-sophie.oertzen@ th-koeln.de
Design (KISD) at the TH Köln and enrolled as a PhD Candidate at the School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University. She is also a Research Fellow with the Service Design for Innovation Network (SDIN), a Marie Curie training project of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme. Jesse Grimes: You've chosen to dive deeply into one of the main techniques of service design for your thesis: cocreating services. What interests you about this topic?
Anna-Sophie Oertzen: Let me start with a brief look into the past. The participation of users in provider activities has been around for decades; for instance, people going to the supermarkets, collecting their food, paying at the check-out counter, and taking their food home, is a form of participation in the provider’s activities. During this time, users were regarded as “partial employees”, improving the productivity of providers. With the start of the twenty-first century, the mindset around user-provider collabora86 Touchpoint 10-3
tion began to change. Instead of instrumentalising users for productivity gains during service delivery, they became more active collaborators during earlier and later phases of the service process. Today, this active collaboration is often termed co-creation and is recognised as the next frontier of competitive strategy. I find it really interesting that an industrial practice confined to the service delivery and steered by providers, has transformed into a much broader application that includes innovation activities to conceptualise and design services and is increasingly demanded by users. We have witnessed the changing role of users from passive and isolated to active, informed, and connected. To satisfy the changing requirements of users, providers are
